Recent Research

Since publication of Anatomy of a lie in April 2019, two further research essays have been completed and are now available on this site. Both essays expose further ‘manufactured evidence’. The Philadelphia Exercise deals with a false report in 1916 by the Metropolitan Police; this report was submitted to the Director of Public Prosecutions in June 1916 and later a version was sent to Major Frank Hall of MI5. The second essay, The Bigger Mystery, deals with events in 1937 and then in 1954-56 when leading journalist René MacColl published his biography Roger Casement: a new judgment. MacColl’s book reports a ‘secret’ allegedly told to him in 1954 by an anonymous ‘well-known resident of Cork’. That ‘secret’, reinvented by MacColl, concerned further scandalous diaries allegedly found in 1916 and at once destroyed.

Both pieces of manufactured evidence are systematically dismantled in order to discover the faults in their manufacture which expose them as lies.  That such fabricated evidence was published as late as 1956 indicates the Casement story was still being controlled and manipulated for public consumption. That control continues today but there are signs that the consensus consolidated by decades of misinformation and propaganda is beginning to change at last. Abundant demonstration of the duplicity and lies producing that consensus will gradually erode it. In the meantime, people believe what they choose to believe and as Swift observed ‘It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into’.

Since the book was published, the following things have not happened;

• No-one has produced evidence demonstrating the material existence of the diaries in 1916.
• No-one has refuted the evidence or the arguments set out in Anatomy of a lie.
• No-one has defended the misinformation published in a number of Casement studies.
• No-one has credibly explained the contradictory accounts of CID custody of Casement’s luggage.
• No-one has explained why police typescripts were made and shown rather than photographs.

Anatomy of a lie remains the most detailed and penetrating exposé of the Black Diaries ever published.