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http://theunhivedmind.com/wordpress/the-port-arthur-massacre-conspiracy/
by Joe Vialls
[The Port Arthur Massacre]
[Sourced]
1. MARTIN BRYANT – THE OTHER STORY
2. MARTIN BRYANT – THE OTHER STORY PART 2
3. PORT ARTHUR – WHAT NEXT?
4. GOVERNMENT COVER-UP AT PORT ARTHUR
5. POLITICIANS SHIRK RESPONSIBILITY ON PORT ARTHUR
6. SPRINGFIELD “SIMULATOR” PROVES PORT ARTHUR A FAKE
7. PROOF OF INNOCENCE
8. PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE
9. BRYANT’S MOTHER SPEAKS OUT
10. OFFICIAL MARTIN BRYANT’S STORY PROVED AN OFFICIAL LIE
11. LACK OF FORENSIC EVIDENCE AT PORT ARTHUR
12. BRYANT GETS A VISITOR
13. HARD SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE AT PORT ARTHUR
14. REINFORCING MARTIN BRYANT’S “GUILT”
15. MARTIN BRYANT SORRY DAY
1. MARTIN BRYANT – THE OTHER STORY
NY SHOOTINGS ADD WEIGHT TO VIALLS INVESTIGATIONS
At 12.40AM on the 4th Feb 1999 in New York City, four plain clothes police officers accidently shot an unarmed black man on the stoop of his building as he reached for his wallet. The police mistook the man’s action as reaching for a gun and fired 41 shots from a distance of about 12 ft (3 meters) with 9mm semiautomatic pistols each holding 16 bullets in the magazine. The man, Amadou Diallo, died from gunshot wounds after being hit only 19 times.
If the NY Police are such lousy shots perhaps they should try to find the real Port Arthur shooter to give them some lessons. Read why Martin Bryant couldn’t have been the shooter at Port Arthur.
“Throughout history – it has been true that the lone assassin has been behind many mass killings. But in recent times he has also been not so alone…….governments and intelligence agencies have been known to prey on and use simple and sometimes ill people to massacre innocent victims in order to gain greater control of the masses. Investigative journalist Joe Vaills has painstakingly put together the evidence that the young man, Martin Bryant, did not, if at all, act alone during the murderous rampage at Tasmania’s Port Arthur……in fact according to the video evidence, this was physically impossible.”The Strategy
The following is the entire works of Joe Vialls, an independent investigator with thirty years direct experience of international military and oil field operations. I have been given written permission by Mr Vialls to publish this unedited information on this site in the interests of justice. However if you are not a fair minded person and refuse to believe anything but what you have already read in the pulp fiction tabloids then my advice is to click onto another page now because what follows is not a fiction story, these are facts based on scientific investigations from which you can draw your own conclusions, as I have. If you have any further queries on this investigation please contact the author direct –
Joe Vialls
45 Merlin Drive,
Carine,
Western Australia, 6062
BRYANT – PROFESSIONAL OR PATSY
In early 1984, policewoman Yvonne Fletcher was murdered while on duty outside the Libyan Embassy in London. From the moment she was shot, the media misled the British public into believing that Fletcher had been shot by the Libyans, who were subsequently expelled from the country in a fanfare of negative publicity.
It was not until 1995 that this author managed to prove by entirely scientific means that WPC Fletcher could not have been shot from the Libyan Embassy at all, but was shot from the top floor of a nearby building staffed by American multinational personnel.
Was the massacre in Port Arthur a completely spontaneous act carried out by a single nut-case with unbelievable efficiency, or was it a repeat of Yvonne Fletcher’s callous murder, deliberately designed to distort public perception and direct maximum hatred against a particular group of people? All of the available hard scientific evidence suggests that it was.
When investigating cases like Yvonne Fletcher’s murder or the massacre at Port Arthur it is critically important to adhere to scientific proof and avoid eyewitness accounts and media hype like the Black Plague. Eyewitnesses do not lie intentionally, but as any honest psychologist will tell you the accuracy of their testimony is limited by many factors including stress, suggestive police interrogators, and peer pressure.
The more controversial the case the higher the need for absolute scientific proof, because if the investigation reaches a conclusion which conflicts with the officially accepted story, the media will attempt to trash the credibility of the investigator himself, who in these two cases happens to be me. For four years while investigating the murder of Yvonne Fletcher I was gently harassed, visited by members of British Intelligence from London, cordially invited to sign the Official Secrets Act, then threatened when I refused to comply.
Some readers might wonder why I am including so much detail about a murder in London when this story is supposed to be about Port Arthur. Well, it is about Port Arthur, but there are a number of disturbing similarities between the two cases, especially in terms of media behavior at the time of each atrocity, and the use of faked video footage to reinforce the official story of the day. So please bear with me for a few paragraphs.
In 1992 when I first decided to investigate WPC Fletcher’s murder, the most serious obstacle I encountered was the British media, who for nearly a decade had knowingly nurtured a lie so horrific that it almost defeats the imagination. Yvonne Fletcher, they claimed, was murdered by a low velocity bullet fired from the Libyan Embassy located behind her on her left-hand side, with the gunman firing downwards from a first floor window at an angle of fifteen degrees. As any amateur can confirm, that means the bullet entered the left side of WPC Fletcher’s back at a shallow angle of fifteen degrees and then continued through her body tissue towards the right- hand side of her body. Right? Wrong… The bullet entered WPC Fletcher’s upper right back at sixty degrees then sliced down through her rib cage, turning her vital organs into a bloody pulp before exiting her body below the left rib cage.
With Yvonne Fletcher’s exact position recorded by a television camera when the shots were fired there was no room for doubt. It was an absolute scientific impossibility for that shot to have been fired from the Libyan Embassy, and the steep angle of entry of the bullet limited the firing point to one floor of only one building: the top floor of Enserch House, an American multinational building staffed by personnel with documented links to the American CIA. Without the critical video footage from the television camera I would never have been able to prove how she was killed or by who, but fortunately for me the footage still existed in 1992, and television cameras are inanimate objects incapable of lying. If proof appears to exist on video there are only two possibilities: the scientific truth, or deliberately faked video footage shown to the public for special effects or in an attempt to pervert the course of justice.
Interestingly and with profound implications for Port Arthur, fake video footage was put to air by the BBC “for the first time ever” many months after Yvonne Fletcher’s murder, in what appeared to be an attempt to cement the lies and calculated deceptions about her death forever in the minds of the British public. The public failed to ask why this apparently critical footage had not been presented at the coronial inquest into Yvonne Fletcher’s death: which it was not, but fell hook, line and sinker for the blurred images and sound track, which apparently recorded eleven sub-machine gun shots being fired from the Libyan Embassy. The amateur footage run by the BBC in 1985 was given to one of its reporters by a member of the Metropolitan police force.
During 1995 I used the immutable laws of astronomy and physics to prove the amateur footage a total fake. Analysis of the angle and position of the sun’s shadow falling across the front of the Libyan Embassy was checked using astro-navigation techniques and direct reference to the Greenwich Observatory, Britain’s foremost authority on times and dates derived from the sun- line, a technique used for centuries to tell the time with great accuracy using garden sun-dials. Unfortunately for the BBC who broadcast the amateur footage “for the first time ever”, absolute science proved the sun-line on the amateur footage incorrect for 10.19 am on the 17th April 1984, the time and date on which Yvonne Fletcher was murdered. Indeed, the scientific evaluation proved the amateur footage was not even filmed on the same day Yvonne Fletcher was shot. Those who created that fake footage and then broadcast it were not engaged in a mere media re-interpretation of events, but were accessories after the fact to the murder of an unarmed English policewoman doing her duty on a London street.
After four long years of research and investigation designed to expose the real truth of what happened that day, and after as consultant to the responsible film-maker, Britain’s Channel Four aired part of my scientific proof in a special edition of “Dispatches” , its flagship current affairs program, on the 10th April 1996. Unfortunately, three months earlier the film-maker became incredibly agitated about my absolute scientific proof from Greenwich that the amateur footage was faked, removed me from the production process of a film based on my own copyright story, barred me from the film credits and then incorporated the fake footage as a legitimate part of the film, minus the incriminating sun-line, which proved in absolute scientific terms that what British television was putting to air for a second time since 1985 was totally false and deliberately misleading!
It became swiftly apparent, that although the media was prepared to throw tiny scraps of truth to the public, gross deceptions, especially those generated by erstwhile colleagues in the form of fake video footage designed to manipulate public opinion, were strictly off limits. So it is on the subject of fake video footage and its potential for incredible impact on the viewing public that we finally turn to Port Arthur. Some readers may by now be shifting uneasily in their seats, racking their brains and wondering exactly when and where it was that they were also suddenly shown amateur footage “for the first time ever” on television in Australia. It was on a Wednesday in October 1996, the night before Martin Bryant was due to be sentenced for his alleged role in the Port Arthur massacre.
Many months after the massacre took place, but only hours before the Tasmanian judge was due to make a decision that would effect Martin Bryant for the rest of his life, an Australian TV network suddenly presented the public (and of course the judge) with dramatic amateur video footage shown “for the first time ever”. The reporter told us the man on the video was Martin Bryant on the day of the massacre, going about his business of slaughtering the good people of Tasmania, caught on camera by interested amateur photographers who seemed unmoved by the dangers of high-velocity bullets. Unlike most of the other survivors, these folk did not run away, but hunkered down like battle-hardened war correspondents coverings the end of World War II from an unprotected thoroughfare in the middle of Berlin. They were also very discreet the day after the massacre, when the world’s tabloid media descended on Port Arthur like a pack of ravenous dogs, snapping and growling for any picture they could get hold of in order to meet their respective deadlines in London and New York.
At that point in time the “amateur footage” was worth half a million bucks no questions asked, for this was a world media event and no-one had any pictures. Perhaps the amateur photographers had no need for huge amounts of cash, or perhaps at that early stage their footage had not yet been fully prepared, which was certainly the case after Yvonne Fletcher’s murder in London. The amateur footage run by the Australian network in October 1996 was given to one of its reporters by a member of the Tasmanian police force.
There are so many irregularities on this supposedly genuine video footage, which was accepted as evidence against Martin Bryant in the Tasmanian court, that only a few of the more obvious will be included in this story to help drive the message home. The rest have been carefully collated, and it will give me considerable pleasure to detail each and every one of them personally before a properly convened Royal Commission. If a Royal Commission is not called to fully investigate the methodology used in the massacre, and if Martin Bryant is not called to give evidence, then the people of Australia had best get used to the fact that what little remains of our representative democracy died with the thirty five innocent civilians who were ruthlessly and needlessly murdered at Port Arthur on 28 April 1996.
Most readers will remember that at the time of the massacre there were a few clouds in the sky but the sun was shining and casting shadows on the buildings, as shown by the footage from some of the genuine video cameras recording at the correct time, indicated by the timing clocks displayed in the corner of the video footage itself. One or two of these genuine amateur video cameras recorded the sounds of several shots, complete with multiple echoes, proving that the shots in question were being fired outside rather than in an enclosed space such as the Broad Arrow Cafe. But the video footage allegedly showing Martin Bryant running down the road was filmed under an overcast sky, which was the first indicator that something was terribly wrong with this so-called evidence. Who the hell changed the weather at point-blank notice?
Because he is running directly away from the Broad Arrow Cafe with a bulky package under his arm the assumption is that the package contains a Colt AR15, the weapon known to have killed 20 victims in the cafe at a rate of one every five seconds. Problem! Scaled against the man’s height and surrounding objects the package he is carrying is a maximum of 22inches long, a full ten inches too short for the Colt AR15 which measures 32 inches with its butt fully retracted, and more than ten inches too short for either of the other two weapons claimed to have been found in his car; a Belgian FN 7.62-mm Paratrooper and a combat shotgun. So who is this man running down the road, and why is he not carrying any of the weapons allegedly used in the massacre?
At this stage it would be nice to be able to determine whether or not the man really is Bryant, by comparing an accurate right hand profile of Bryant with the video itself. Unfortunately Bryant is the least photographed man in the world today and all attempts to get hold of a photograph of him have failed. For a while I toyed with the idea of asking Martin Bryant’s lawyer to get one for me, but then he too had his camera and film confiscated by prison officials. One wonders why the Australian authorities are so anxious that no pictures of Bryant be allowed outside (or even in) the prison. They would do no obvious harm, whether the man is Bryant or not, a few frames on this sequence make a mockery of any suggestion the prized footage presented to the Tasmanian court was meaningful evidence against Martin Bryant. What they show is a blonde man still running down the road towards the coach park clutching his package, while in the upper left corner of the same frames three men can be clearly seen standing directly outside the entrance of the Broad Arrow Cafe, out of which the blonde man has just run after murdering 20 citizens. One man is standing to the left of the entrance casually leaning on the balustrade with one hand; the second is standing casually on the right smoking a cigarette, and the third is standing directly in front of the door filming the running blonde man with a video camera. To suggest this in any way incriminates Bryant is not only ridiculous, but also quite impossible with the blonde man allegedly in the middle of a massive killing spree.
Just these points alone prove in scientific terms one of two entirely critical scenarios. If the blonde man is Martin Bryant but unarmed, what is he doing role-playing with three men directly in front of the Broad Arrow Cafe?
It is scientifically impossible for the three men not to be involved, so this option proves beyond doubt that Martin Bryant did not act alone, but was manipulated or directed at the crime scene by others whose identities are not yet known. If the blonde man is not Martin Bryant then the only alternative is that a team of unknown men carried out the massacres and then set up a reconstruction on film using a blonde look-alike, to ensure that Martin Bryant would later be convicted. In absolute scientific terms there are no other explanations at all, no matter how much the media might wriggle and squirm in its attempts to ensure the pathetic “Lone Nut” legend remains intact.
If sufficiently panicked, the police might claim that Martin Bryant was merely helping them with a reconstruction to assist with their future inquiries, which was filmed and then accidentally released to the Australian television network. But he couldn’t have, could he? Martin Bryant was badly burnt at Seascape and spent weeks afterwards heavily sedated in Hobart Hospital under armed guard. Of course he may have been induced to help with a reconstruction before the massacre started, but it seems unlikely the police would be prepared to discuss such a blood curdling possibility. Science can be frighteningly efficient at times because, believe it or believe it not, science has just proved in absolute terms right in front of your startled eyes using court evidence that Martin Bryant could not, under any circumstances have acted alone, and may possibly not have acted at all, other than in an orchestrated ‘Patsy’ role.
Which one is true depends on which of the two alternative scenarios detailed above are correct, but there are absolutely no other scientific life-rafts for the sinking media to grab hold of. Remember this is not unsubstantiated hearsay evidence from frightened eyewitnesses used by the media to hype up its mythical version of events. It is absolute scientific proof which cannot be questioned or refuted. Most readers like a story to have a beginning, a middle, and a coherent end. Science can and has provided an accurate outline of the first two but it cannot provide the third.
As an investigator I insist on dealing only with hard facts because it is the only way to avoid being swept along by the avalanche of compulsive lies put out by the media on a daily basis, and there are no hard facts available to answer the question “For God’s sake why?” In any criminal investigation it is opportunity, motive and method. Just about anyone had the opportunity to attack those civilians in a remote spot like Port Arthur on a Sunday without fear of being caught or punished in any way. Where method is concerned any expert combat shooter could have killed 20 unarmed civilians at five second spacings and wrought havoc in the general area, although the words “expert combat shooter” should be noted with care.
Though Australia has tens of thousands of skilled sporting shooters it has very few combat veterans, and even fewer special forces personnel trained to kill large numbers of people quickly in an enclosed space like the Broad Arrow Cafe, which is roughly the same size as mock-up rooms used for practicing the rescue of hostages being held in confined spaces by armed terrorists. It is hard to kill quickly under such circumstances for a number of unpleasant reasons, including the fact that shot people tend to fall against other people, shielding the latter from subsequent bullets. Targets therefore have to be shot in a careful sequence with split-second timing to maximise kill rates. Whoever was on the trigger in Tasmania managed a kill rate well above that required of a fully trained soldier, an impossible task for a man with Martin Bryant’s mid-sixties IQ and his total lack of military training, which is an interesting but largely unimportant observation because we have already proved in absolute scientific terms that Bryant could not have acted alone. That leaves us looking for the motive, which is impossible to determine with any certainty, though it is reasonable to cross link this to Yvonne Fletcher’s pre-meditated murder in London purely in terms of cause and effect.
The effect of Yvonne Fletcher’s savage and very public murder caused public hatred to be directed against the Libyans, who were subsequently deported en-masse from Britain despite the fact they were in no way responsible for her death. The only visible cause and effect that can be laid at the door of the Port Arthur massacre is that the effect of the obscene action caused public hatred to be directed against Australian sporting shooters, who like the Libyans were innocent of any crime at all. Directly linked to this was a massive funded campaign to disarm the Australian people in spite of significant external threats to our national security. If this was indeed the motive, Australia and its people have been violated in the worst possible way by sworn enemies of our great nation, with likely long term consequences too awesome to contemplate.
It is just not right to simply accept the status quo as it exists today in Port Arthur, because to do so implies that Australians have thrown in the towel and admitted defeat on the strength of a single savage action in our smallest State.
The only way to avenge our dead in Port Arthur is to force a Royal Commission on the matter and drag witnesses kicking and screaming into the dock, including certain members of the Tasmanian police force. Failing that, funding should be sought for an independent investigation leading in turn to a book providing the real facts about the chain of events at Port Arthur, a copy of which should be provided for every home across the land.
All Australians must be made aware of the real and shocking circumstances in which their fellow citizens died, because knowledge is the only weapon we can use to guard against future lethal charades on Australian territory. Realistically it would probably take years to find the massive sum needed for such a wide-ranging initiative but there is a positive need for action now, if only to put the Prime Minister on the back foot and convince him there is no longer any need to wear ‘boron carbide body armour’ when attending public meetings. Perhaps the independent Honourable Member for Oxley could find the time to ask the Prime Minister a few meaningful questions in Parliament?
2. MARTIN BRYANT – THE OTHER STORY – PART TWO
MARTIN BRYANT
“In this his ultimate demonstration of combat shooting skill the shooter fired one sighting shot at a fast-moving target of unknown speed from an unsupported free- standing firing position, the most difficult of all; instantly and accurately compensated for vehicle speed and weapon recoil with the same blinding speed as the computer gunsight of an F14 Tomcat, then disabled both driver and vehicle with shots two and three. This man might have been an indispensable asset stopping speeding car-bombers in Beirut, but his professional skills were far too conspicuous for Port Arthur.”
Part one of this report proved in absolute scientific terms that Martin Bryant could not have acted alone at Port Arthur and hinted strongly that he may not have acted at all, other than in an orchestrated ‘patsy role’. Part two uses military science to prove that Bryant could not have been responsible for the murders at Port Arthur or on the Arthur Highway, though he may have fired 250 wild shots from Seascape during the siege, every one of which failed to hit a target; a dramatic and strikingly obvious reversal? of the real shooter’s devastating performance at Port Arthur during the afternoon of 28 April 1996.
The initial reaction of most readers to the reality that Martin Bryant killed no- one at Port Arthur but was deliberately set up as a patsy is a combination of horror and complete disbelief. Are we to believe that a bunch of planners sat round a table and arranged the premeditated murders of 35 Australians? Unfortunately the answer is yes. All of the hard evidence at Port Arthur bears the distinctive trademark of a planned “psyop”, meaning an operation designed to psychologically manipulate the belief mechanisms of a group of people or a nation for geopolitical or military reasons.
Because of their illegal nature, psyops are never formally ordered by governments, but are discreetly arranged through multinational corporations and others. Some psyops ordered during the last forty years are known to have been carried out by independent contractors hired from a small specialist group, staffed mostly by retired members of American and Israeli special forces.
Patsies are normally used as decoys, deliberately inserted into the psyop to deflect attention away from the specialist group, allowing the latter time to extract safely from the operational area while the patsy takes the blame, But the planners leave tell-tale signs and occasionally make critical mistakes. It is a little-known fact that Lee Harvey Oswald was proved a patsy when a New Zealand newspaper printed a story about his guilt several hours before he was accused of the crime in Dallas. The planners put the decoy story on the news wires too early, forgetting the crucial time difference would allow the New Zealand paper to print the story long before Oswald was even accused. It was a single planning error, but one that proved in absolute scientific terms that Lee Harvey Oswald was deliberately set up as a patsy.
As part one of this report proved, policewoman Yvonne Fletcher’s murder in London during 1984 was a psyop where the intended patsies were four million Libyans. The operation was successful and resulted in Tripoli being bombed by an ‘outraged’ President Reagan in 1986. The next blatant psyop was Lockerbie, when on 21 December 1988 Pan American flight 103 exploded in mid-air killing all 259 passengers and crew. Although very recent scientific evidence not yet in the public domain proves conclusively that the Libyans could not have been responsible, they were nonetheless blamed for the atrocity. The principal affect of those two psyops on the Libyans were sanctions designed to prevent them updating defensive weapon systems capable of protecting their resource-rich nation. Since 1984 Libyan defense capabilities have steadily declined, leaving its people and resources increasingly vulnerable to external attack and thus possible conquest.
By a strange coincidence Australia is also a resource-rich nation, with overall reserves more than twenty times as valuable as those in Libya, but with only half the defense capability. In some ways this was not an insurmountable problem until 1996 because unlike Libya this nation has always had huge numbers of sporting shooters traditionally used in time of war to both train and supplement our miniscule armed forces. Not any more. Since the psyop at Port Arthur more than 400,000 reserve forearms have been pulped instead of stored by the Federal Government, leaving our nation and people terribly exposed to just about anyone interested in taking over the natural resources jewel in the southern hemisphere crown.
To hell with multinational global ambitions. This is Australia and we need to restore our reserve capability in order to keep this country the way it is. The first thing we have to do is prove once and for all time that Martin Bryant was used as a patsy to cover the objective of the Port Arthur psyop, which effectively undermined our national security. In fact I am going to prove that now but doubt the Federal Government will be interested in the hard scientific facts, or in correcting the multiple gross errors made immediately after the massacre tool place. The harsh and unpalatable truth about Port Arthur will have to be forced on the Australian Government by the Australian People.
Martin Bryant, an intellectually impaired registered invalid with no training in the use of high powered assault weapons, could not under any circumstances have achieved or maintained the incredibly high and consistent killed-to-injured ratio and kill-rate which were bench marks of the port Arthur massacre. Whoever was on the trigger that fateful day demonstrated professional skills equal to some of the best special forces shooters in the world, His critical error lay in killing too many people too quickly while injuring far too few, thereby exposing himself for what he was: a highly trained combat shooter probably ranked among the top twenty such specialists in the western world.
Over the years television viewers have been subjected to such a barrage of Rambo-style television programs that most now believe every time Sylvester Stallone points a gun and pulls the trigger, twenty bad guys immediately fall down dead from lethal shots to the head or heart. Unfortunately this Hollywood media rubbish is hopelessly misleading and in no way reflects the difficulties involved in killing large numbers of people quickly, regardless of whether those people are armed or not, and regardless of the ranges involved. For a number of reasons explained later, killing efficiently at close range in crowded and confined spaces presents the shooter with far more complex targeting problems than those associated with conventional open-air combat scenarios.
Media claims that those killed in the Broad Arrow Cafe were shot at point- blank range where ‘Bryant’ could not possibly have missed are complete rubbish. Point- blank range is where the muzzle of the weapon is held against the body of the target, In the Broad Arrow Cafe the shooter fired at an average range of twelve feet, where a tiny aim-off error of three degrees is enough to ensure that a bullet completely misses a target the size of a human head.
Readers are invited to prove to themselves just how small an error that is, by laying two twelve-foot long pieces of string flat on the floor alongside of each other, with the far ends four inches apart. That helps put things into perspective, doesn’t it?
Scientific terms such as killed- to-injured ratio and kill-rate are enough to bore most readers to death, but in order to fully comprehend the enormity of the media lies about the massacre, and expose the planned nature of the operation it is essential information. The killed-to-injured ratio is used to calculate reliably how many injured survivors should be expected for every person killed for a given number of rounds fired. Even assault rounds as powerful as those fired by the Colt AR15 can only ensure a one-shot kill if the target is hit in the head, a six by six inch target: or in the heart, a ten by ten inch target. Together these areas form between one fifth and one seventh of the over-all body target areas, so for every person killed there will be between five and seven injured, expressed as “1 to 5” and “1 to 7”.
The records show that a total of 32 people were shot in the Broad Arrow Cafe, so at best we would expect 4 dead and 28 injured, or at worst 6 dead and 26 injured. These are very reliable military figures based on hard science, but the actual figures in the Broad Arrow Cafe were 20 dead and 12 injured – an incredible inverted ratio of 1.66 to 1, or nearly two dead for every one injured.
Special forces train continuously for months on end to achieve a ratio as high as this, which lies far beyond the abilities of regular soldiers, and is an absolute scientific impossibility for an intellectually impaired registered invalid.
Media apologists desperately trying to protect their obscene “lone nut” legend will scream foul at this point and claim that flukes happen. No they do not. About seven months ago a trained Israeli soldier went beserk in Hebron and fired a complete thirty-shot magazine of ammunition from an identical Colt AR15 into a crowd of Palestinians at the same range. His thirty high velocity bullets injured nine and killed no-one at all. This Israeli example helps to drive home the absolute lunacy of crafted media insinuations that Martin Bryant was a registered invalid who suddenly metamorphasized into the lethal equivalent of a fully trained and highly disciplined US Navy ‘SEAL’.
Next we come to the kill-rate which refers to the speed at which people are killed, thereby reflecting the skill, co-ordination, and accuracy of the shooter. It is accepted by all the authorities in Tasmania that immediately after the shooter entered the Broad Arrow Cafe he killed his first 12 victims in 15 seconds, a claim apparently opposed by some sporting shooters in Tasmania because of the seemingly impossible speed and lethal efficiency. This is a very reasonable objection so long as those shooters remain media-fixated on Martin Bryant, but there is nothing impossible about such a high kill-rate at the hands of a top special forces shooter operating at peak efficiency.
The first thing special forces do when entering an enclosed area containing superior numbers is lay down very fast accurate fire designed to kill as many hostiles as possible, thus gaining absolute control of the area in record time and minimizing the risk of injury to themselves; and because hostiles frequently wear body armour protecting the heart area, special forces are trained to aim instinctively for the smaller head target. Following these unpublished protocols precisely, the shooter at Port Arthur gained absolute control of the Broad Arrow Cafe in fifteen seconds flat, killing most of his victims with a single shot to the head.
To even suggest that Martin Bryant, whose proven weapons handling experience was limited to a single-shot Webley Osprey air rifle could have caused this carnage is absurd. When the shooter entered the Broad Arrow Cafe full of people sitting at tables and fired the first shot, everyone inside reacted instinctively to the huge muzzle blast (noise) of the AR15, but each reacted in a different way, some just turning their heads while others moved physically, temporarily obscuring yet more diners and shielding them from the line of fire. At the same time the barrel of the AR15 was recoiling upwards through about five degrees of arc as it cycled another round into the breech, throwing the muzzle off target.
In a millisecond the cage was full of targets moving in at least ten different directions while the muzzle of the AR15 was still recoiling upwards from the first shot. But despite the enormous difficulties and the complex target trigonometry involved, the shooter controlled the recoil and shot 12 moving and partially obscured targets at the rate of one every 1.25 seconds. Nor did he trip over any obstructions, indicating that this professional shooter’s face was seen in the Broad Arrow Cafe by staff some time earlier, during his final reconnaissance when he studied the layout to ensure no hiccups occurred during the operation. There were no hiccups. Ninety seconds after entering the Broad Arrow Cafe the shooter departed, leaving thirty two Australians and others lying on the floor, twenty of them dead.
All of these hard scientific facts were deliberately excluded by the frenzied media pack and not one attempt was made to establish the real identity of the shooter. Long blonde hair did not prove that the shooter was Martin Bryant, and the media somehow forgot to remind the Australian public that long wigs are the most common form of basic disguise ever used. In the Broad Arrow Cafe a long wig would also have been necessary to conceal the ear protection worn by the shooter. Firing more than thirty high velocity AR15 rounds in that hollow confined space produced as much concussive blast as a pair of stun grenades; sufficient concussion to severely impair the shooter’s spatial orientation (and thus aim) unless wearing ear protectors or combat communications headphones. Readers are cautioned not to try proving this point themselves if they value their ear-drums and long-term hearing ability.
Official accounts are hazy about what happened next, but it is confirmed that most of those killed thereafter were shot with the Belgian FN, a heavier assault weapon which has a completely different weight and balance from the Colt AR15 and fires a round producing more than twice the recoil.
But despite switching between weapons with very different handling characteristics, and shifting from close to intermediate range, the shooter constantly maintained an awesome inverted killed-to-wounded ratio. Overall the massacre produced 35 dead and 22 injured for a final killed-to-wounded ratio of 1.60 to 1, almost identical to the 1.66 to 1 ratio in the Broad Arrow Cafe. To say the shooter was consistent would be the understatement of the year.
In layman terms, in an average shooting the 35 people who were killed at Port Arthur should have been accompanied by between 175 and 245 injured survivors; very similar ratios to the American McDonalds and other random massacres. Instead there were only 22, the trademark of a highly trained combat shooter. It is only when accurately analyzed in this cold scientific way that the monstrous nature of the media story can be exposed for what it really is: a creative lie every bit as loathsome as that fashioned by the British media when WPC Yvonne Fletcher was shot in the back from an American multinational building during 1984, but where the media grovelled obsequiously in front of powerful international patrons and lobbies and conspired to pervert the course of justice by blaming the Libyans instead of the Americans.
The professional shooter in Tasmania presented us with a final display of his unquestioned prowess when tourist Linda White and her boyfriend Mick approached Seascape Cottage on the Port Arthur road in a small four-wheel drive vehicle, shortly after the massacre in the Broad Arrow Cafe. Both saw the shooter aim and Linda White felt the wind of the first round as it passed her cheek and shattered the driver’s window next to her head. The shooter corrected his aim and the second round hit Linda White in the arm, just to the right of the heart target area, The third round killed the engine and stopped the vehicle.
In this his ultimate demonstration of combat shooting skill the shooter fired one sighting shot at a fast-moving target of unknown speed from an unsupported free- standing firing position, the most difficult of all; instantly and accurately compensated for vehicle speed and weapon recoil with the same blinding speed as the computer gunsight of an F14 Tomcat, then disabled both driver and vehicle with shots two and three. This man might have been an indispensable asset stopping speeding car-bombers in Beirut, but his professional skills were far too conspicuous for Port Arthur.
In the view of this author these were the last shots fired by the professional before he (or they) smoothly extracted from the Tasman Peninsula and then from Australia, leaving the patsy Martin Bryant down the track at Seascape holding the baby.
The trail to Seascape Cottage had been meticulously laid. In Martin Bryant’s car at the tollbooth was a combat shotgun, a bag of ammo for the Belgian FN and, very conveniently, Martin Bryant’s passport. Then there was Linda White’s disabled four wheel drive on the Arthur Highway and a stolen BMW burning in the grounds of Seascape to mark the way, and just in case all these clues were not enough for the Tasmanian Police, an anonymous caller to police headquarters in Hobart advised the authorities that the man holed up in Seascape was probably Martin Bryant. Short of erecting a pink neon sign reading “THIS WAY TO PATSY” the professional or professionals seem to have thought of everything.
There were no eyewitnesses who could positively identify Martin Bryant at Port Arthur because an Australian newspaper circulated his photograph nationwide, thereby totally corrupting any and all police lineups, photo boards, or controlled shopping mall parades.
All the eyewitnesses could legally claim was a “tall man with long blonde hair”, which was no impediment to the media who tried and convicted Martin Bryant in less than two days, in one of the most blatant and disgusting displays of media abuse ever seen.
So Bryant the patsy was firmly in place and Seascape was swiftly surrounded by armed police from Tasmania and Victoria, most of whom must have been very puzzled as the siege continued through the night, If we are to believe media reports (difficult, I know) Martin Bryant fired 250 rounds during the siege period but hit nothing at all, which is exactly what one would expect of someone whose prior experience was limited to a Webley Osprey air rifle.
If the professional shooter had fired 250 rounds from Seascape Cottage during the siege, his awesome killed-to-wounded ratio would have resulted in a police funeral cortege stretching from the Tasman Peninsula to Hobart.
It is beyond doubt that many of the armed police noticed Bryant’s wild undisciplined performance at Seascape bore absolutely no resemblance at all to that of the deadly shooter at port Arthur and some must have told their senior officers about it, though it seems they were ignored or simply told to shut up. The media had its man, the feeding frenzy was in full swing and the police were not going to be allowed to spoil a lucrative politically-correct story by telling the truth.
Unfortunately media versions of events had some flaws so basic that to mention them on national television was an insult to the intelligence of every Australian citizen. We were told in most reports that Bryant had three weapons, one of which, the Daewoo combat shotgun, was left in the boot of his Volvo near the tollbooth. The reports tell us that Martin Bryant then took the Colt AR15 and Belgian FN assault rifles down to Seascape with him and used them along with other weapons found in the house to fire those 250 shots at the police during the siege. Oh, really?
Bryant’s last telephone conversation with the police was around 9 pm on 28 April and his next contact was when he stumbled out of a fiercely burning Seascape Cottage unarmed and with his back on fire at 8.37 am the following morning. Police confirmed that Bryant came out unarmed, and also confirmed that by then the fire, exacerbated by exploding ammunition, was burning so fiercely that they were completely incapable of approaching the building to see if anyone else was still alive. Seascape rapidly became an inferno as the entire structure collapsed on the ground in a pole of white-hot debris, which of course included the charred and twisted remains of the Cold AR15 and Belgian FN assault rifles allegedly fired from inside the building by Martin Bryant, destroyed not only by the searing heat but also by the exploding ammunition.
So how can it be that on a Channel 9 programme shown in November 1996 a Tasmanian police officer was able to show all Australians two immaculate assault weapons allegedly used by Bryant at Port Arthur. Where did the police obtain those pristine weapons we were shown on national television? The real shooter probably left them lying neatly on the ground near Seascape and the patsy, before departing at speed for the Devonport ferry terminal.
In order to present even a shell of a case against Martin Bryant the prosecution needed valid identification by witnesses, but all eyewitness statements were corrupt. In addition they needed the weapons used in the massacre ballistically, cross-matched to bullets found in the victims at Port Arthur, either in Martin Bryant’s possession or bearing his fingerprints. They had neither.
Nor were Bryant’s fingerprints found at the Broad Arrow Cafe where he is alleged to have eaten lunch immediately before the massacre.
In an unprecedented move, fully-edited fake video footage obtained direct from America was entered as evidence in an Australian court against an Australian citizen Martin Bryant. In short there is no case for Bryant to answer with regard to Port Arthur, though he must still explain why he was at Seascape or, more to the point perhaps, tell us who talked him into going there when he did.
Bryant did admit to taking the BMW but from a different location, and without knowing why, and possibly setting fire to it later at Seascape, but vehemently denied any involvement at Port Arthur.
His limited confession fits the known hard scientific facts exactly, and for many months after his arrest despite the severe disadvantage of his intellectual impairment, Bryant kept to his story in the face of tremendous pressure from police interrogators and psychiatrists to admit the enormity of his alleged crimes. He continued to refuse to do so and at the formal hearing on 30th September 1996 pleaded not guilty to all seventy two charges.
At that precise point in time the prosecution knew it had a very serious problem. Martin Bryant was refusing to roll over and there was absolutely no hard evidence at all linking him to the murders at Port Arthur, a fact that would very quickly become obvious if the case was allowed to proceed to trial in front of twelve alert Tasmanian jurors. About the only thing that might save the day was a false confession of the kind beaten out of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four by the British police, but by then Bryant was in prison where his screams might attract attention. With the media pack outside its doors baying for blood, government had to do something but had few options. Perhaps heavy pressure could be exerted on a third party to extract a confession from Bryant?
Shortly afterwards, according to Tasmanian reporter Mike Bingham, Martin Bryant’s mother Carleen, unable to face the stress of a public trial, paid a visit to Bryant at Risdon Prison and told him that if he did not plead guilty, she and his (Bryant’s) younger sister Lindy would commit suicide and he would never see them again. Bingham later wrote that he doubted this was the reason for Martin Bryant then changing his plea to guilty on all charges, but who does Bingham think he is kidding apart from himself?
Bryant’s mum and sister were probably the only people in the world who would still talk to him, and he had just been told that if he didn’t plead guilty they wouldn’t be talking to him ever again, and furthermore he would also be directly responsible for their deaths, Carleen Bryant’s threat achieved in days what the police interrogators and psychiatrists had failed to achieve in months. Martin Bryant love his mum and sister and wanted to see both of them again, something that would only happen if he could stop them committing suicide. Clearly Martin Bryant pleaded guilty to save the lives of his mum and sister.
If Bingham’s claim is correct applying such enormous psychological pressure was mental cruelty, every bit as coercive as the physical abuse handed out to the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four by the British Police. But because Martin Bryant was a registered invalid with impaired intellectual functions, the way that psychological blackmail was used to force a false confession out of him was almost certainly as illegal as the physical methods used by the British police, leaving the way open for Bryant to withdraw his false confession and lodge an appeal.
Just like Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, Martin Bryant was a perfect patsy. Both had lively imaginations but few friends, and to a large degree both lacked credibility because of their inability to defend themselves eloquently in front of the media. Lee Harvey Oswald very quickly became a dead patsy incapable of saying anything at all, and it is highly likely the same fate was planned for Martin Bryant. If Seascape had been located in California or Texas, Martin Bryant would unquestionably have been shot dead the split-second he left the building. It was only the iron discipline exercised by the Tasmanian and Victorian police special operations groups at the scene which allowed Martin Bryant to be taken into custody alive. All of those armed officers deserve the highest praise for their restraint in what must have been perceived as an extremely dangerous situation.
It is beyond doubt that those who planned the psyop are uneasy about Martin Bryant’s continued existence and would sleep better at night if he should suddenly drop down dead. With this in mind, any good-natured crims enjoying an extended sabbatical in Risdon prison who read this report are asked to keep an eye on Martin Bryant and do what they can to ensure that he doesn’t accidentally commit ‘suicide’ or slip on a bar of soap and break his neck. No need to go over the top by ordering huge buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken, but a cheerful wave or a friendly smile now and then might be enough to let him know that you know he didn’t kill those women and children at Port Arthur, and that at some time soon all Australians are going to need whatever help he can provide in tracking down the ruthless professionals who cold-bloodedly murdered 35 unarmed Australian citizens, in what will eventually be recorded by historians as one of the most obscene psyops conducted anywhere in the world.
Reversing the psyop illusion will not be a walk in the park, but a battle for truth in broadcasting, where another creative media illusion like that put to air after the massacre at Port Arthur will immediately result in equally creative prison sentences for the magicians who reverse the truth on television for eighteen million Australians. It is a battle we must win for the sake of our children and for their children in turn, and if in the end we are forced to take legal action against government in order to obtain justice, then we must find the funds to do so.
Logic indicates that a limited number of Australian citizens or residents colluded in the massacre, if only in terms of forward reconnaissance and setting Martin Bryant up for the professionals.
We need to find out who they were and we need to find out who funded the psyop. The Federal Police must be asked to investigate the subversive groups who used huge lobby power immediately after the psyop to undermine our national security. The 400,000 reserve weapons pulped were fully-funded by the taxpayer and should at the very least have been placed in military reserve stock for use in time of national emergency. Once greased, such weapons need no maintenance and we had plenty of secure storage space for them. There are no excuses for lobbyists and politicians who wittingly undermine Australian national security.
This is far from the end of the story but it is all that I will be publishing until an intensive independent investigation into the massacre is carried out in Tasmania. There are at least eight other gross errors surrounding the mass murder, any one of which has the potential to savagely damage government, and another thirty lesser points, but each and every one must be verified in absolute privacy. If my investigation into Yvonne Fletcher’s murder in London taught me anything at all, it was simply that the premature release of critical information serves only to allow time for media apologists to think up highly creative ways of minimizing its impact on the public.
If the Federal Government is to be forced into action, it must be presented with a case so complete and so utterly damning that immediate action will be its only recourse short of being thrown out of office by a large bunch of very angry Australians. Anyone wishing to pursue the matter beyond this point should read the item “Port Arthur – What Next?” printed alongside this report.
Many years ago Oscar Wilds said “Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.” In 1988 Australian newspapers reported New South Wales politician Barry Unsworth’s claim that there would be no effective gun control in Australia until there was a massacre in Tasmania.
3. PORT ARTHUR – WHAT NEXT
Since part one of the story was published I have received a number of letters from the public, mostly sporting shooters, correctly sensing they were set-up and asking what to do next. It is a very good question. Forget appeals to media and forget judicial reviews of events. The media will ignore you, and any judicial review controlled by government will be manipulated into an orchestrated whitewash closely akin to the Warren Commission in Dallas.
As a first step, pressure should be exerted on your federal and state representatives to ask formal questions in Parliament. This will result in your demands for action being recorded in Hansard, which is important because recalcitrant politicians hate unwanted matters recorded in official documents. Include copies of parts one and two of my report, and refer to them in writing, thereby removing your elected representative’s ability to later argue that he or she had no idea what you were talking about. Ram the harsh reality of Port Arthur down the gullets of every fat-cat in Canberra until they start gagging on the facts.
If Australian sporting shooters wish to clear their collective names they will have to agree to a strategy which reverses the psyop illusion at Port Arthur. Ultimately civil legal action will almost certainly be needed to shake Canberra out of its terminal apathy and its blatant subservience to minority lobby groups.
Time is the biggest enemy. If the Libyans had known about the American PSYOP shortly after WPC Fletcher’s murder in London and had swiftly mounted a civil action against the British Government, considerable embarrassment would have ensued, perhaps enough to stall the attack on Tripoli and the downing of Pan Am 103. But they took no aggressive legal action, and twelve years of subtle media reinforcement later, are nowadays viewed in the west as a nation populated entirely by terrorists. Always remember the media turns fiction into fact as readily as it turns fact into fiction.
Riding piggyback on the atrocity at Port Arthur, the lobbies and politicians are currently setting up Australian sporting shooters as internal redneck terrorists, and if no aggressive defensive legal action is taken I can confidently predict that within months or years another psyop will be executed in Australia; this time using semiautomatic handguns and revolvers aimed at introducing legislation that will outlaw all such weapons for ever. Do you really want that? No, you do not, and there are four million other sporting shooters like you with more than enough collective voting power and funding to stop it happening.
As par tow of the report suggested the first objective must be that of proving Martin Bryant was innocent of the murders at Port Arthur, This is critically important because until that is achieved his presence in prison will be used as “proof” that firearms are too dangerous to be held by those members of the public who in time of war train and supplement our defense forces.
How you feel about Martin Bryant personally is not an issue. Like him or not, Bryant is currently being held aloft by politicians and lobbies as a psyop ‘flag’ proving the legitimacy of their legislation, which undermined Australian national security.
Proving Bryant innocent will remove that flag completely, and with it the justification for introducing the illegal legislation in the first place. Critically, at the same time it will prove by default that Australia was attacked by an armed external interest group, opening the way to repeal the legislation on the legitimate grounds that Australia needs more rather than less defensive weapons in the community to withstand future attacks on our nation and people. The Swiss defense model is an excellent example of what all sporting shooters should strive to achieve.
Before that, an independent investigation must be carried out in Tasmania to prepare the legal bullets for the lawyers to fire at the Federal Government in Canberra. If you want to win, those bullets are going to have to be solid silver and obtaining them will be expensive. Investigating matters that government does not want investigated can be extremely difficult and expensive as I found out with Yvonne Fletcher’s murder in London. In the end the cost of that investigation alone ran to many hundred thousand dollars, and similar costs can be anticipated if the mass murder at Port Arthur is to be investigated properly.
Somehow or other funds will have to be raised, and though I am a more than adequate investigator I wouldn’t have a clue where to start raising finds of this magnitude. Logic suggests that a 200,000 strong demonstration in Sydney or Brisbane where everyone throws two dollars in the pot would be a good place to start but, again, I am no expert. Whoever organized the 120,000 strong demonstration in Melbourne last year is invited to contact me if he has the time; and if any philanthropic multi- millionaires reading this item wish to short-circuit the process by chucking in a few semi-trailer loads of banknotes, that’s OK as well.
Finally, I must point out that so far as I have personally funded the investigation work into Port Arthur and have received no payments for the publication of copyright report or from any other source.
This was done willingly, because every Australian has the right to know that government and media alike have conspired to pervert the course of justice in the case of the mass murder of thirty five Australian citizens on Australian sovereign territory, but I cannot justify spending any more of our limited family finds on the matter. Therefore anyone writing to me in future who would like to receive a reply is asked to enclose a post office money order made out to “J. Vialls”, sufficient to cover the cost of computer disposables, stationary, and postage.
4. GOVERNMENT COVER-UP AT PORT ARTHUR
In the aftermath of the Port Arthur massacre, government went to great lengths to ignore or suppress all evidence suggesting that the official story of the day was unsubstantiated rubbish. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of Wendy Scurr and husband Graeme, residents of the Tasman Peninsula. who with others fought to bring very serious distortions of the massacre to the attention of government and media, but were ignored. This report includes information Wendy, Greame, and several of their colleagues are determined that all Australians should know about: Critical information the Tasmanian Government, and several bureaucrats, are equally determined will never see the light of day.
MARTIN BRYANT
Wendy Scurr is a forthright lady with a sound track record of helping others at the “sharp end” of ambulance operations. During her twenty years with the St Johns Ambulance, and ten years with the Tasman Ambulance Service, as a volunteer ambulance officer, Wendy has seen and done just about everything, attending accidents and incidents so gruesome most people would prefer not to be given full details. As one of the first Port Arthur staff members to enter the Broad Arrow Cafe after the massacre, the carnage came as a shock, but Wendy’s extensive prior experience enabled her to cope admirably with the injured and the dead.
Wendy Scurr also thinks and reacts like lightning. Within minutes of hearing the shooting start in the Broad Arrow Cafe, she rushed into the nearby information office and placed a call to police headquarters in Hobart. Not amused by the initial police reluctance to believe she was telling the truth, Wendy simply shoved the handset outside the door- way and told them to listen to the shots over the phone. Police logged her call at 1.32 pm, a point of considerable importance later on in this report.
It is obvious that anyone with the ability to react so quickly and pass information so accurately would be a prime asset to the police who swarmed over Port Arthur later in the day. Knowing that Wendy made that first critical telephone call and then entered the Broad Arrow Cafe to help the injured should have drawn the police to her like a magnet, but curiously did not do so. She offered the police additional information about the sequence of events but says her interview was abruptly terminated. On 15th October 1996 Wendy received a letter from the Director of Public Prosecutions stating she would not be required to give evidence at the trial of Martin Bryant, though it is hard to imagine anyone better placed to provide an accurate account of events that day.
It was the start of a long frustrating battle to get some of the more controversial aspects of the massacre out into the open, a battle Wendy, Greame, and several others initially lost because of government determination to adhere to the “official line” agreed with the media. That official line included the gunman being inside the Broad Arrow Cafe for 90 seconds rather than the four to five minutes Wendy and her colleagues counted, but excluded the fact that several people were shot dead behind a door that would not open. The official line also excluded the fact that the only two policemen on the Tasman Peninsula were decoyed to a remote location just before the massacre started, And what about the startling news that out of the 20 fatalities in the Broad Arrow Cafe, 19 died from the effects of a shot to the head, fired from the gunman’s hip without the benefit of a laser sight? Excluded of course, because the government would be unable to stop the avalanche of public comment on this impossible performance by an untrained left-handed novice like Martin Bryant.
The only personnel available to stop or interrupt the slaughter were two policemen, one stationed in Nubeena 11 kilometers from the Port Arthur site, and the other at Dunalley, a small town to the north with a swing bridge capable of isolating the Tasman Peninsula from the rest of Tasmania. Shortly before the massacre both policemen were sent to the coal mines near Saltwater River, an isolated location on the extreme western side of the Tasman Peninsula, in response to an anonymous caller reporting a large stash of heroin, On arrival they found only glass jars full of soap powder, and reported this via the police radio net.
A harmless time consuming prank perhaps? No. Reliable sources in Hobart state that this was the only drugs decoy ever attempted on the Tasman Peninsula since police records began, and meaningfully point out that leaving glass jars of fresh soap powder was a very professional touch that backfired. Why would anyone assume the soap powder was heroin and place an emergency call to the police without checking the contents first? And why did the caller insist on anonymity? Greame Scurr makes a valid point that it would be hard to select a more suitable remote location if specifically decoying the two policemen away from the Port Arthur historic site and Dunalley. A single glance at a map of the Tasman Peninsula proves his observation to be absolutely correct.
Within minutes of the two policemen reporting their position at the coal mines, the shooting began in the Broad Arrow Cafe. Wendy Scurr made her call to police headquarters at 1.32 pm, and there was then a short but understandable time lag before the police comprehended the sheer magnitude of the situation at Port Arthur and ordered their Tasman colleagues to proceed to the crime scene.
It is unlikely they left the coal mines before 1.36 pm and were then faced with a 30 minute drive to Port Arthur. By the time the officers arrived the operation was over, and both men were then pinned down by erratic gunfire from Seascape.
There was another sound operational reason for the decoy. Wendy Scurr is familiar with the emergency plan for the area and says that in the event of a major incident, the swing bridge at Dunalley would be closed to traffic, to prevent more vehicles straying onto the Peninsula and causing complications. It is a sensible plan, and the command to operate the swing bridge and isolate the Peninsula would normally first be directed through the police officer at Dunalley. But once the bridge was closed to traffic, it would also prevent anyone from leaving the Peninsula, including those involved in executing the massacre at Port Arthur. However, with the Dunalley policeman pinned down by erratic gunfire at Seascape, the bridge remained open to traffic after the massacre, and several people are known to have left Port Arthur and escaped across that swing bridge before the police could stop them. To this day their identities remain a mystery.
One of the most serious disputes centered on how long the gunman stayed in the Broad Arrow Cafe. Wendy Scurr and several colleagues were the best placed to make an accurate time estimate but they were repeatedly rebuffed. Why? Would it really matter if the gunman was there for four or five minutes rather than 90 seconds?
Well, yes it would if trying to reinforce the absurd “official line” that an intellectually-impaired invalid with a tested IQ of 66 and severely limited cognitive functions was the man on the trigger. People with intellectual disabilities are not known for their tactical skills, tending instead to move from one task to the next in an unbroken sequence, Only a professional would wait until the coast was clear before leaving the Cafe.
About the last thing that any professional would do is risk being tripped over outside the Broad Arrow Cafe by a large crowd of nervous tourists blocking his escape route. We know that the gunman was traveling light with only two 30-round magazines for the Cold AR15. He had already fired 29 rounds in the Broad Arrow Cafe, leaving only 31, far too few rounds to reliably carve a path through a large undisciplined mob of unpredictable panic-stricken tourists. A professional gunman would also calculate that if he left the cage too soon, he might accidentally be filmed by one of the many amateur video cameras in use at Port Arthur that day.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL SIZED MAP
The risks were too high and so the gunman waited for the right moment to leave the cafe, with the Tasmanian Government and media later helping to cover up this embarrassing time lag by repeatedly ignoring Wendy Scurr and her colleagues, and by deciding they were not required to appear in the Supreme Court as witnesses.
Was Wendy Scurr taking a wild stab in the dark with her time estimate? No she was not. Everything at Port Arthur ran like clockwork, especially the guided tours. The staff were punctual to the point of obsession and never left the assembly point outside the information office and cafe after the precise departure time.
When the shooting started there were about 70 tourists still waiting for their tour, which made the time 1.29 pm at the latest.
Wendy’s call to the police was logged three minutes later at 1.32 pm. Then she went outside to look for cover in the bush behind the buildings, This took at least another minute, giving a minimum total elapsed time of four minutes and more likely five. As several other colleagues present on the day also attest, the elapsed time was much longer than the “official” 90 seconds.
It was not until most of the milling tourists had dispersed from the area that the gunman emerged from the cafe, firing snap shots to keep the few remaining tourist’s heads (and video cameras) down while he ran towards his next targets in the coach part. The gunman’s professional tactics worked exactly as intended, and the only amateur video claiming to show “Bryant” at Port Arthur that day, has been scientifically proven a deliberate forgery.
Similar vague photos and video convicted an innocent man
Unfortunately, Wendy and her colleagues’ determined stance did not sit well with the official line being promoted by the Tasmanian Government and media, and steps were taken to include the matter in: “An Inquiry by the Director of Public Prosecutions into The Door at the Broad Arrow Cafe and Related Matters.” Where the critical elapsed time is concerned the DPP addresses the time the gunman was in the cafe shooting (based on amateur video audio), but does not address the possibility that the gunman may have lingered for other reasons. Though part of Wendy’s claims in particular are included verbatim in the body of the report, she is not mentioned by name, although other witnesses favouring the official line are. No doubt such a pointed omission is quite legal, but nonetheless seems most discourteous.
The locked door behind which many people died is the main topic of the report, which fails to reach any convincing conclusions due to an over whelming mass of conflicting data. On the balance of probability it seems likely the door failed to open because it was in poor condition, but unfortunately no-one can prove in absolute scientific terms that the door was not deliberately tampered with on the day of the massacre. The expert locksmith employed by the Inquiry to examine the door lock was unable to do so with the lock correctly in place, because someone unfortunately ordered the partial demolition of the Broad Arrow Cafe, including removal of the suspect door, before the Inquiry commenced.
There is one ambiguity in the report where the DPP states: “I was briefed by the police about the status of the doorway on the afternoon of the 28th April 1996 and informed that the door was locked for security purposes against petty theft.” This sentence either means that the DPP was briefed by the police during the afternoon of the massacre itself, or that the DPP received a briefing at a later date referring to events on the 26th April. In an attempt to exclude the possibility of direct political contact with the police on the afternoon of the massacre, I called the office of the DPP at 11.05 am on 13th November 1997 and asked for clarification of this single point. His staff said the DPP was out to lunch, repeated my telephone number back to me, and promised to pass my request to him when he got back. For whatever reason, the Director of Public Prosecutions did not return my call.
A copy of his report was forwarded to Wendy and Greame Scurr with a covering letter including the request: “It would be appreciated if you would treat the report as confidential.” Why? The Inquiry was conducted in order to clarify matters for anyone concerned about events at Port Arthur. Much the same thing happened to the court transcripts of Bryant’s pre-sentencing hearing in the Tasmanian Supreme Court, which are extremely hard to obtain.
Despite Federal Members assuring their constituents that the information is freely available in Hobart, that is not the case. New South Wales farmer David Barton wrote to the Tasmanian Supreme Court asking for a copy of the transcripts, and was told in part:- “The information provided to you by Mr Truss [A Federal MP] is not correct….a transcript may only be provided to a person who, not being a party, has ‘sufficient interest’. Should you wish to correspond further I ask you to explain to me why you contend you have ‘sufficient interest’….”
This is not encouraging for those who wish to know what happened at Bryant’s pre-sentencing hearing in November 1996. The events at Port Arthur had a run-on affect on the injured, on the relatives of the dead, and on hundreds of thousands of sporting shooters, most of whom would much prefer full disclosure.
As a direct result of this excessive secrecy there are very few Australians aware of the awesome performance demonstrated by the gunman in the Broad Arrow Cafe, with the normal excuse being the politically-correct line that disclosing full details would lead to more distress on the part of the relatives of the dead. Unfortunately, this is also an extremely effective way of silencing dissent on the part of those who might take a very different view of events in the Broad Arrow Cafe. All Australians have the right to know what happened that day, and a brief summery follows, It is a very unpleasant matter and those readers with a weak stomach or a nervous disposition are advised not to read beyond this point.
“SEQUENCE OF EVENTS
IN THE BROAD ARROW CAFE”
The gunman rose from his chair at one of the tables in the Broad Arrow Cafe, removed the AR15 and spare magazine from a sports bag, immediately killing Mr Yee Ng with a shot to the upper neck, and Miss Chung with a shot to the head. Swivelling on the spot and firing from the right hip, the gunman fired at Mr Sargent who was wounded in the head, then killed Miss Scott with a shot to the head. The gunman continues through the Broad Arrow, next killing Mr Nightingale with a shot to the upper neck and Mr Bennet with a shot to the upper neck, with the latter bullet passing straight through and hitting Mr Ray Sharpe in the head with fatal results. Next Mr Kevin Sharpe was killed by a shot to the head and was also hit in the arm, with shrapnel and bone fragments from the second intermediate strike on Mr Kevin Sharpe then apparently wounding Mr Broome, and possibly Mr and Mrs Fidler.
Still firing from the hip the gunman swivelled and killed Mr Mills and Mr Kistan with single shots to the head, with shrapnel and skull fragments from those shots apparently wounding Mrs Walker, Mrs Law, and Mrs Barker. Again the gunman turned, shooting and wounding Mr Colyer in the neck, before swiveling and killing Mr Howard with a shot to the head. Next he shot Mrs Howard in the neck and head with fatal effect. The gunman turned back, killing Miss Loughton in the back. Moving towards the rear of the building the gunman shot Mr Elliot in the head, causing serious injuries.
ELAPSED TIME 15 SECONDS………
The above sequence is the best the forensic scientists could deduce from the crime scene and there may be small variations, but in the final analysis they matter little, What does matter is that at this precise juncture the gunman had killed twelve victims and wounded a further ten in 15 seconds flat, using only 17 rounds fired from the right hip. Such a staggering performance is on a par with the best combat shooters in the world, and two retired counter-terrorist marksmen ruefully admitted they would be hard pressed to equal such awesome speed and accuracy. Both agreed that attributing such a performance to an intellectually-impaired invalid with an IQ of 66 and severely limited cognitive functions, amounts to nothing less than certifiable insanity on the part of Bryant’s accusers. In military terms a fatal shot to the upper neck counts as a head shot, so for all practical purposes those who died during the first 15 seconds were killed by head shots fired with lethal accuracy from the gunman’s hip.
Next the very professional gunman moved towards the area of the souvenir shop and killed Nicole Burgess with a shot to the head, then shot Mrs Elizabeth Howard through the chest and arm with fatal consequences. Swiveling around, the gunman killed Mr Lever with a shot to the head, and killed Mrs Neander with another shot to the head, Temporarily distracted, he fired back into the cafe area and wounded Mr Crosswell. Turning again he shot Mr Winter twice, killing him with a shot to the head. On his way back to the souvenir area the gunman wounded Mr Olson, then proceeded to the kill-zone near the locked door where he killed Mr Jary, Pauline masters, and Mr Nash, all of them with single shots to the head.
At this stage the gunman had killed twenty and wounded another twelve with a total of 29 rounds. He then stopped firing and changed magazines in a most professional way. The magazine fitted to the AR15 held 30 rounds total, so by changing magazines after firing only 29 shots the gunman ensured that he still had a live round in the breech in case anyone moved, enabling him to kill that person instantly if caught unawares. Such professionalism is well kown to counter-terrorist personnel. Critically, the gunman then waited motionless in the Broad Arrow Cafe with a fully loaded magazine, which brings us back to the differential between the verified time estimate of four to five minutes, and the inaccurate official claim of 90 seconds.
It is easy to see why government and media continued to rebut Wendy Scurr and her colleagues’ insistent claims about the elapsed time and the door that refused to open. Either or both had the potential to open a Pandora’s Box with catastrophic results, for there was no way the Tasmanian Government could openly and honestly investigate these matters without running the risk of “accidentally” proving that its villain of choice, Martin Bryant, was innocent of all charges. In addition, the drugs decoy and the stunning accuracy of the gunman in the Broad Arrow Cafe had to be swept under the carpet, before informed members of the public had the chance to realise the “lone nut” massacre was in reality a highly planned paramilitary operation with geopolitical motives, designed from the outset to undermine Australian national security.
Typical vague images that convicted an innocent man.
In the view of this author, and others, the 5,56-mm Colt AR15 was deliberately selected for three specific reasons, one of which was its known ability to inflict horrific and highly visual injuries at close range, caused by its low-mass bullets travelling at extreme velocity. The nature of those wounds caused revulsion among police, emergency service workers and medical staff, thereby assisting the immediate drive by anti-gun lobbyists to have all semi-automatic weapons outlawed. As the leader of the National Embalming Team wrote: “Approximately 90% of all deceased persons had severe head trauma. The bullet wound was normally inflicted to the head with the resultant smaller entry wound and larger exit wound. Some of the deceased persons had an entry wound with no exit wound, the result of this was an explosion of the skull…..” Despite her thirty years of ambulance experience, Wendy Scurr still remembers being shocked when she accidentally trod on shattered skull fragments, before being confronted with a human brain lying in a bowl of chips.
In the medium to long term the lobbyists and international power brokers will be unable to sustain their claim that Martrin Bryant was the villain, because there is simply too much hard evidence proving the “official line” to be a criminal scam. Some American video evidence submitted to the Supreme Court has already been scientifically proven a forgery; deliberately submitted to the court in order to secure the conviction of Martin Bryant on all counts, in the event that he continued to plead “Not Guilty”. Due to the seriousness of this offence, copies of the scientific proof have been sent by registered mail to departments which should take active steps to have the material reviewed and struck out of evidence, and then urgently implement strategies to ensure the future integrity of Australian national security.
If steps are not taken, more registered mail copies will be sent to more departments, allowing the author to compile a list of those government departments determined not to take steps to protect Australian national security and the lives of Australian citizens, even when provided with absolute scientific proof that they must do so. Details of the scientific proof itself, and a full list of those Government departments which refuse to take adequate steps to secure the future defence of Australia, will be published in full during late 1998.
Anyone willing to help with the expensive printing and registered mail costs, should send a post office money order to me at 45 Merlin Drive, Carine, Western Australia 6020, made out to “J.Vialls”.
All of this is unlikely to worry those lobbyists, public servants, and members of the media who nowadays believe their own propaganda that the police have literally hundreds of eyewitnesses who will step forward in a flash to positively identify Bryant at Port Arthur. Unfortunately for all of the above, Wendy and Greame Scurr have contacted dozens of key witnesses present at Port Arthur on the day. At the time of going to press, neither had managed to find a single witness prepared to state that he or she could positively identify Martin Bryant either carrying or firing a weapon of any kind at Port Arthur on the 28th April 1996.
Oh dear…. The only video positive identification was forged, and all of those eyewitnesses we were told about failed to positively identify Martin Bryant at Port Arthur after all. How can this be?
Basically by means of the Tasmanian Government sitting on the real evidence, while pumping vast quantities of misinformation to an eager but thoroughly inept media. There is now also convincing hard evidence that the gun control proposals accepted by Police Ministers in May 1996 were prepared before the massacre, by an ideological senior bureaucrat with United Nations connections. As the truth about the massacre and the pre- determined gun controls slowly but surely percolates through the Australian community, the backlash against both coalition and Labor MPs will be savage. The Australian people will not tolerate being deliberately misled by their own elected representatives, especially on a matter of such overwhelming importance to national security.
Detective writer Arthur Conan-Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes series, once wrote: “When you have ruled out the impossible, then whatever remains, no matter how improbable, is the truth.” We know that it was impossible for intellectually-impaired Martin Bryant to suddenly metamorphosize into the lethal equivalent of a highly trained counter-terrorist marksman, so we also know that Martin Bryant was not responsible for the mass murder at Port Arthur.
Though improbable, the truth is that a pre-meditated operation was launched at Port Arthur with the express intent of murdering sufficient innocent citizens to set a new world record. The motive should be obvious, at least to anyone who has recently watched more than $300 million of tax-payers funds being spent on removing defensive weapons from the hands of Australian citizens.
The author is an independent investigator with thirty years direct experience of international military and oilfield operations.
Footnote: My thanks to Greame Scurr, who used his full power of attorney to relay Wendy’s evidence and supporting documents to me. Greame is still striving, as he always has, to achieve justice for the staff at the Port Arthur historic site, now that the fickle media caravan has moved on and forgotten them.
5. POLITICIANS SHIRK RESPONSIBILITY ON PORT ARTHUR
Readers will remember that in the immediate aftermath of the Port Arthur massacre, politicians developed collective verbal diarrhoea in the House of Representatives as they joined the feeding frenzy designed to undermine Australian national security by removing defensive weapons from the hands of the public. Nowadays all that has changed, and despite serious questions about the mass murder and the murderers remaining unanswered, the collective verbal sphincter has locked tight, presumably on government orders.
Recently the Federal Member of Wide Bay, Warren Truss, used the letters column of the South Burnett Times to attack my independent investigation into the Port Arthur massacre, which used military science to prove that Martin Bryant was incapable of killing the victims in the Broad Arrow Cafe. In his letter, Mr Truss tried to explain his reasons for refusing to ask questions in the House of Representatives on behalf of his constituents.
So that Truss and other Federal Members can be better informed, and thus able to do their duty to their constituents by asking meaningful questions in the House about the sequence of events at Port Arthur, I am providing these additional critical points:-
On the day of the massacre, the only two policemen on the Tasman Peninsula were decoyed to a remote location at Saltwater River by an anonymous caller reporting a big stash of heroin. There was no heroin, and four minutes after the two policemen reported their arrival at Saltwater River by radio, the shooting started in the Broad Arrow Cafe. Alas, the drive from Saltwater River to Port Arthur is a minimum of thirty minutes, rendering local armed police assistance impossible in a mass murder that lasted only seventeen minutes from start to finish. Research shows this to be the only drugs decoy ever used on the Tasman Peninsula.
Of the twenty murdered on the Broad Arrow Cafe, nineteen died from the effects of a fatal shot to the head by the Colt AR15, which the shooter fired from his right-hip at an average range of 12 feet without the benefit of a laser sight. Overall, only 29 rounds were used to kill or injure a total of 32 people. Such accuracy and speed is appropriate to the top 1% of expert counter-terrorist marksmen, but is an absolute scientific impossibility for an intellectually-impaired registered invalid. Alas, Martin Bryant always fired his Webley Osprey air rifle from the left shoulder, because he is and has always been a left handed shooter.
Bryant was evaluated using a range of clinical psychology tests, the result of which were tendered to the Court. Those results are enough to convince any first-year psychology student that Bryant was so intellectually and cognitively impaired that he completely lacked the neuro-phsysiological ability to carry out the complex high-speed Port Arthur operation. Alas, the psychiatrists ignored their own definitive scientific test results, choosing instead to ramble off into a misleading surrealistic twilight world of entirely unproven psychoanalytical mumbo-jumbo.
Examining whether Bryant might or might not have disliked his class mates at school, or whether he might or might not have had a desire to shoot people during his formative years, become red herrings when faced with the harsh reality that the definitive scientific tests prove Bryant neuro-physiologically incapable of meaningfully participating in the massacre. The real shooter is still very much at large and must be brought to justice as swiftly as possible. Clearly this will not happen until the public finally discard the absurd psychiatric fairy tale that an intellectually-impaired young man with a tested IQ of 66 and severe cognitive limitations, suddenly and entirely magically metamorphosized into the lethal equivalent of one of the world’s most highly trained counter-terrorist marksman.
In sworn statements to police, eyewitnesses Roganovic and Horrocks confirmed that the shooter exited through the front door of the Broad Arrow Cafe carrying a weapon, while a third witness confirmed the weapon was held in the shooter’s right hand. Alas, this testimony is in direct conflict with forged video footage obtained direct from America by the Tasmanian Police Service, who entered it as evidence in the Supreme Court against Martin Bryant.
The American footage was clearly designed to give the false impression that Martin Bryant was responsible for the massacre, but that footage has been proven a forgery scientifically, using a standard TV editing suite, available to anyone in the television industry or to any forensic scientist.
Just how much hard scientific proof is required to move a Federal Member into asking questions in the House of Representatives on behalf of his constituents I do not know, but Mr Truss might do well to focus on the last point which deals with tendering false evidence to the courts for the express purpose of securing a conviction. This is an extremely grave offense which (in Western Australia) carries the penalty of strict life imprisonment. Truss and his colleagues have it in their power as MPs to raise the matter in the House of Representatives, and to demand that it be formally investigated by the Australian Federal Police and ASIO. The inevitable result would be a mistrial because of the false evidence tendered, allowing Martin Bryant to finally have his day in court before his peers, as the law provides.
6. SPRINGFIELD “SIMULATOR” PROVES PORT ARTHUR A FAKE
In this series of reports the author has continually claimed that military science proves intellectually-impaired Martin Bryant was incapable of conducting the incredibly efficient massacre at Port Arthur, though some details of military science are classified and have not been released to the public.
The recent mass shooting in the Thurston School Cafe in Springfield, Oregon USA, makes the release of sensitive information unnecessary. A direct comparison between Springfield and Port Arthur proves once and for all time that the shooter in the Broad Arrow Cafe on 28th April 1996, was not Martin Bryant, but a highly trained professional marksman.
When the military needs to prove a scientific point one way or the other, it invariably tests that point for real, either in combat or by artificial simulation. A good example of this was the recent reaction of the US military to Federal Government claims that the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City was blown up by a 2000 pound low- explosive ammonium nitrate weapon, allegedly parked outside the front door of the building by young Timothy McVeigh.
Knowing the ammonium nitrate claim was impossible rubbish, United States Air Force explosives experts at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, promptly constructed a three story test building out of the same materials used in the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma. Then they placed the correct equivalent explosive charge at precisely the same distance from their test building and stood back briefly to admire their “simulator”. And what a simulator it was! When the massive charge was detonated on camera the results were exactly as the explosives experts had forecast: the huge open-air blast barely scratched the front face of the building, proving for all time that the White House, FBI, and others in Washington, had deliberately and continually lied about the explosion in Oklahoma City, and of course about “patsy” Timothy McVeigh as well, for political reasons.
The comprehensive results of these scientific tests were printed in a report titled the “Eglin Blast Effects Study” (EBES), a copy of which was forwarded by the commanding general to Senator Trent Lott, majority leader of the US Senate. In a covering letter the general urged Senator Lott to resist White House calls to bring in new counter- terrorist legislation, which if passed would have given federal agencies such as the FBI and BATF new draconian powers over American citizens.
You didn’t read about the EBES in your newspaper? This is not surprising, because Eglin’s scientific work would have destroyed the Government’s lying hype about Oklahoma at a single stroke. And so it is with Port Arthur. The military, this time special forces, could easily prove that Martin Bryant was incapable of achieving the stunning kill rates exhibited in the Broad Arrow Cafe, but are unable to do so because the required facilities i.e. simulators used to train counter-terrorist marksmen in enclosed space operations, are shrouded in secrecy for obvious reasons.
The SAS, GSG9, and others are not enthusiastic about public demonstrations. But a recent mass shooting in Springfield, USA, provided a chillingly live simulation of enclosed space operations in a cage very similar to the Broad Arrow. In order to understand how a simulation on the other side of the world proves Port Arthur a pre- meditated covert action conducted by experts, it is first necessary to gain a basic knowledge of enclosed space simulators. Special forces simulators are normally used to literally simulate an environment in which counter-terrorist marksmen might be required to operate, usually a room or rooms of known dimensions, containing both terrorists and hostages. Immediately on entry the special forces marksmen must kill or disable the terrorists but leave the hostages unharmed: a task calling for split-second timing and accurate point shooting. In a murky simulator where the difference between life and death can be as little as 1/10th of a second there is no time to use gun sights.
Point and shoot, point and shoot. With luck the terrorists will die from bullet wounds to the head, but if the counter-terrorist marksman makes a single split-second error of judgment he will surely die instead. To evaluate scientifically whether an amateur like Bryant could equal the very high killed-to-wounded ratio (KTIR) achieved in the Broad Arrow Cafe, the instructors would arrange dummies inside the simulator in the same configuration as the victims on the day. Next an unskilled amateur would be equipped with a Colt AR15, two clips of ammunition and other essential items, before being told he had “X” seconds from point of entry to shoot dead twenty of the victim dummies with single shots to the head, and wounds twelve more, with only 29 rounds. This would be quite impossible for the amateur, as the simulation would prove scientifically.
The biggest drawback would be the amateur’s complete inability to point shoot instinctively, essential in this enclosed environment. The shooter in the Broad Arrow Cafe at Port Arthur demonstrated all of the qualities of a trained counter-terrorist marksman but made no amateur mistakes. Always in motion and point shooting from the right hip with devastating accuracy, he killed twenty of the occupants with single shots to the head and wounded twelve more, firing a total of only 29 rounds. Using known techniques reported by witnesses, he ensured his own safety from attack by turning on the spot and staying outside grappling range. It was an awesome display of expertise, even by special forces standards. That he was point shooting from the hip is beyond question. The Colt AR15 allegedly used in the massacre was fitted with a wide-angle telescope sight designed for the Armalite AR180, mounted on the AR15 so crudely that it completely obscured the “iron” sights on top of the weapon. Thus the iron sights could not be used at all, and the range was much too short to use the telescopic sight. Remember that the shooter knew this before he entered the Broad Arrow Cafe, so must have been supremely confident in his point shooting ability. Sadly, his confidence was more than justified. To accuse intellectually-impaired Martin Bryant of this stunning performance was quite absurd, a point clearly shared by police interrogators on the 4th July 1996, who openly queried Bryant’s shooting skills, with special reference to point shooting i.e. firing the Colt AR15 from the hip:-
Police: “And ahh, did you ever practice shooting from the hip?”
Bryant: “No never.”
Police: “Did you get pretty accurate?”
Bryant: “No not really.”
Naturally enough the police had no access to counter-terrorist simulators and probably lacked the firearms experience to work out that Martin Bryant was completely incapable of executing the gross crimes of which he stood accused.
But unknown to police at that time, two years later 15 year-old Kip Kinkel was to stage a mass shooting in an identical environment, firing a semi-automatic weapon of the same calibre (5.56-mm). Kinkel’s performance in the Thurston High School Cafe was exactly what any expert would expect from a random shooting event, and proves that Bryant could not have caused the terrible carnage in the Broad Arrow Cafe. Again sadly, Kip Kinkel provided the perfect “live” cafe simulation needed to prove Martin Bryant’s innocence at Port Arthur.
Kinkel’s choice of a cafe for his mass shooting may well have been influenced by the massive international publicity about the Broad Arrow Cafe at Port Arthur in Tasmania, and he may have expected to achieve the same spectacular results. His extensive weaponry further indicates a possible “copy cat” event.
Kip Kinkel was carrying a 5.56-mm Ruger semi-automatic rifle with several full clips of ammunition, plus two loaded handguns and a large hunting knife. In addition police found a sizable quantity of loose 5.56-mm rounds in his haversack. Multiple weapons and bags of loose ammo were notable media “features” at Port Arthur. Within seconds of entering the school cafe and opening fire on his fellow students, Kinkel must have realised that he was simply not in the same class as the professional shooter at Port Arthur.
Despite firing fifty one rounds, nearly twice as many as those fired in the Broad Arrow Cafe, Kinkel killed only two and wounded another twenty one. Of the two dead, only one was hit in the head. Nor did he have the expertise to keep his fellow students at bay. While fumbling a clip-change on the 5.56-mm Ruger he was overpowered and brought to the ground. Killer Kinkel had done his murderous best, but it was a best that fell far short of the very professional massacre in the Broad Arrow cafe two years before. In the Broad Arrow Cafe twenty were killed and twelve wounded, while in the Thurston School Cafe two were killed and twenty-one: wounded. So in the Broad Arrow Cafe the shooter scored an incredible inverted killed-to-injured ratio (KTIR) of 1.66 to 1, on a par with the best special forces counter-terrorist marksmen in the world.
In the Thurston School Cafe, Kinkel scored a KTIR? of 1 to 10, entirely in accord with random shootings worldwide. Remember once again that every one of the twenty dead in the Broad Arrow Cafe was killed with an accurate single shot to the head, an almost impossible achievement. No doubt psychiatrists and other government apologists will cry “foul” at this point and trot out all kinds of inane academic excuses for the differential in performance between Springfield and Port Arthur. In reality no excuses exist. Kinkel was bought firearms and encouraged to use them by his parents. Bryant was denied firearms and discouraged to use them by his parents. Kinkel was thus a proven experienced shot while Bryant was not.
Kinkel was 15 years old and Bryant had an assessed mental age of 13 years at the time of the Port Arthur massacre, giving Kinkel a two year intellectual edge over Bryant. Any academic or politician still willing to believe that Martrin Bryant executed the massacre in the Broad Arrow Cafe, should as a matter of urgency visit his or her nearest hospital for immediate psychological assessment. A side issue that has raised its head from time to time since the author started writing reports on Port Arthur, is that Martin Bryant was taking the anti-depressant drug “Prozac”, which in some magical way managed to convert him from an intellectually-impaired invalid into the crack-shot equivalent of a US Navy SEAL. While there is some evidence available that Bryant was prescribed tranquilizers long before the massacre, no evidence has emerged on Prozac, though interestingly, the Murdoch press announced that Kip Kinkel was subjected to the drug by his parents: “They were coping with his bouts of anger by giving him Prozac.”
There is no doubt that Prozac is a highly controversial drug, with more adverse reactions reported to the FDA than any other drug since that regulatory agency was formed. It is also known that one of the reported adverse reactions is “rage”, but rage alone cannot turn an average citizen into special forces marksman material. So while Prozac and others drugs capable of inducing acute adverse reactions may alter brain chemistry to the point where the recipient wants to kill people, no drug on earth can teach the recipient how to kill people. Prozac may or may not have played a part in triggering Kip Kinkel’s killing spree, but it is a red herring in the case of “patsy” Martin Bryant, who was completely incapable of conducting the Port Arthur massacre. Horrific though it was, Kip Kinkel’s performance in Springfield proved Bryant’s innocence completely, but this is unlikely to kick-start Australia’s politicians into action. Most in Canberra stopped worrying about our national security decades ago, deciding instead to sign multiple United Nations “conventions” on behalf of all Australians, without bothering to explain to the voters that 99% of these conventions violate Australian sovereignty. To the average politician in Canberra nowadays, Bryant and Port Arthur are of no importance as he or she grovels before yet another lobby group holding the international purse strings.
SPRINGFIELD SIMULATOR
DIRECT COMPARISONSCATEGORY,
SCHOOL,
OR STATUS BROAD
ARROW
CAFE THURSTON
CAFE
Weapon class: Semi-auto Semi-auto
Weapon calibre: 5.56-mm 5.56-mm
Spare ammo clips: Yes Yes
Extra weapons: Yes Yes
Total rounds fired: 29 51
Total fatalities: 20 2
Total head shots: 20 1
Total injured: 12 21
Shooter disabled: No Yes
Killed-to-injured: 1.66 to 1 1 to 10
Now might be the time for a gently warning. Even the most friendly media polls indicate that a significant minority of Australians are fed up to the back teeth with fat-cats in Canberra feathering their own nests while ignoring Australian national security. When the truth about the Port Arthur operation finally fights its way up to greater public consciousness, as it most surely will, many of those complacent fat-cats will find themselves at the back of a very long dole queue. The only way to delay the inevitable is to order a Royal Commission into Port Arthur. Quickly.
7. PROOF OF INNOCENCE
New evidence proves Martin Bryant innocent
The new photographic evidence to hand proves Martin Bryant is innocent and increases the demand for a properly constituted Royal Commission.
SEND FOR YOUR OWN A4 PHOTOGRAPHIC COLLAGE
As seen on next page
The fresh evidence coming to light in these photographs prove beyond doubt that the evidence submitted by the Tasmanian Police to support the conviction of Martin Bryant on the charges of murder at the Broad Arrow Cafe was false, and in fact prove Martin Bryant could not have been the blonde man in their photographic evidence.
The police evidence is so blatantly incorrect that, as a result of my investigations and with copies of these photos, I have sent the letter below to the Commissioner of the Tasmanian Police Service.
22nd September 1998
Richard McCreadie
Commissioner Tasmanian Police Service
GPO Box 308C
Hobart, Tasmania 7001
Dear Mr McCreadie,
PORT ARTHUR MASS MURDER 28 APRIL 1998 — FRESH EVIDENCE
During the last year I have examined the evidence in the case of The Queen v. Martin Bryant, and am writing to advise you that irrefutable hard scientific evidence exists proving that Bryant was not the famous ‘blonde man’ on the video footage tendered to the Supreme Court by the Tasmanian Police Service. Obviously the true identity of the blonde man must now be swiftly established, following which he must either be charged with 36 counts of murder, or conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, or perhaps both.
You may find this scientific evidence difficult to believe after the hysterical media conviction of Martin Bryant in 1996, but the Port Arthur case is no more extraordinary than that of British policewoman Fletcher, which I investigated for four years starting in 1992. WPC Yvonne Fletcher was murdered outside the Libyan Embassy in London on the 17th April 1984, and for twelve years 80 million Britons sincerely believed the media myth that Fletcher was killed by a single shot fired by a “Libyan Assassin” located within the Embassy itself.
The hard scientific evidence proved otherwise. WPC Fletcher was killed by a shot fired from an American multinational building located further to the west, and her case is now the subject of an official review by the Metropolitan Police Service. That review is based on fresh scientific evidence uncovered by my independent investigation.
The attached photographic evidence shows a blonde man standing by a yellow car in the bus park at Port Arthur, allegedly Bryant changing weapons after killing twenty civilians in the Broad Arrow Cafe, and two more in the vicinity of the Trans Otway bus. Immediately beyond the blonde man is a large white boat, but as the two photographs on the right prove scientifically, the white boat was not anchored or moored in or near that position at any time on the afternoon of 28th April. In turn this proves in irrefutable scientific terms that the amateur video of the blonde man could not possibly have been filmed on the same afternoon as the crime, but on another date entirely, most probably the 27th or 29th April. It matters not if a dozen boat owners now come forward and swear their boats were present on that particular mooring at Port Arthur on the afternoon of 28th April 1996, hard science will prove every one of them a liar.
Because it is a matter of documented record that Martin Bryant was in Richmond with girlfriend Petra Wilmott on the 27th, and in Hobart Hospital with third-degree burns on the 29th, it is proven in irrefutable terms that he (Bryant) cannot be the blonde man standing by the yellow car with a surfboard on its roof rack. Also, as the car the unidentified blonde man is standing next to was verified by your officers as having been driven by the murderer, Martin Bryant clearly cannot be the guilty party. Having monitored the recent media performance of some of your commissioned officers, it seems possible that you might also be tempted to deflect attention away from this seminal scientific evidence by use of misleading references to “hundreds of eyewitnesses”, “forensic evidence linking Bryant to Port Arthur”, and last but not least Martin Bryant’s “confession”. In my view any such move would be a significant error.
It is already public knowledge that the Tasmanian Police Service does not have a single valid positive identification of Bryant at the Port Arthur historic site provided by a witness in a manner required by low i.e. from a line-up or from a Rogues Gallery of photographs. It is also known there is no fingerprint or DNA evidence available which links Bryant directly to the Port Arthur site, or to either of the two weapons alleged to have been used in the mass murder. The motor vehicle and sports bag owned by Bryant and allegedly found at or near the crime scenes are not valid evidence because both are highly portable items which were not in Bryant’s possession when arrested. Both items may well have been stolen for the express purpose of incriminating him. This is not a new technique, but one that has been used around the world on hundreds of occasions.
Where Bryant himself is concerned, there seems little doubt we are looking at the most gross abuse of human rights in recent Australian history. After this intellectually-impaired young man pleaded ‘not guilty’ in the Royal Hobart Hospital to the initial holding charge of one murder, he was denied remand prisoner rights and effectively held in solitary confinement without access to media reportage until his police interrogation on 4th July 1996. Despite his intellectual impairment, Bryant was not provided with independent advice by the Office of Public Guardians, but was left alone to defend himself against a team of highly trained experts including your own interrogators. Worse, Bryant’s designated “defence” lawyer was denied access to his client during the interrogation. Although Martin Bryant managed to plead not guilty for months on end, it is not hard to comprehend the confusion and fear he must have felt because of these cruel and inhumane practices.
At no time has Bryant confessed to the crimes at Port Arthur, which is not surprising bearing in mind the irrefutable fresh scientific evidence which proves he was not the blonde man on the video tendered to the Supreme Court. No man can provide a detailed confession about a series of crimes in which he played no active part. The fact that Bryant eventually said “guilty” seventy two times at the pre-sentencing hearing on 6th November 1996 has no real meaning, because we have no way of knowing his state of mind after being so cruelly treated for a period of 192 days. What we do know with certainty is that after being similarly harassed and abused in England, the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four were eventually freed on appeal.
As Commissioner, I believe it is now your duty to open an investigation with the express objectives of identifying, arresting and charging the unknown blonde man on the amateur video footage. Indeed, the future credibility of the Tasmanian Police Service may depend on your prompt action in this matter.
Yours faithfully,
JOE VIALLS
“Deadly Deception at Port Arthur”
A limited number of A4 copies of this composite photographic evidence are available at cost, each custom-printed at high resolution in full photo colour on high gloss paper. Price includes stiff packaging and express mail costs anywhere on the Australian continent.
Send $15.00 to:
Joe Vialls
45 Merlin Drive
Carine, Perth
Western Australia 6020
Any extra funds derived from the sale of these composites will be ploughed straight back into the ongoing expense of the Port Arthur investigation i.e. stationary, postage, computer disposables and so on.
REMEMBER TO INCLUDE YOUR NAME & ADDRESS
8. PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE
Alleged Port Arthur gunman Martin Bryant. Photo on the left was used by the media to convince you of Martin Bryant’s “guilt”. Photo on right taken from a different angle, shows identical three men on balcony of the Broad Arrow Cafe, and the man alleged to be Martin Bryant running down towards the bus park at Port Arthur in the presence of a police helicopter. This frame was shot at 2.45 p.m., one hour and fifteen minutes after the mass murder was over! This damning photographic evidence by itself proves Martin Bryant was deliberately set-up, wrongly accused and wrongly convicted. Remember, a camera cannot lie.
DEADLY DECEPTION AT PORT ARTHUR
Notes on fresh photographic evidence
For many years specialized computer software has existed which is quite capable of altering electronic image data so accurately, that in the hands of an expert, video footage can be altered so subtly that evidence of the resulting forgery is difficult and sometimes impossible to detect. Fortunately for law enforcement and justice, expert forgers can be careless, as was the case with the forged video footage tendered to the Supreme Court of Tasmania in R v Martin Bryant, some of which is shown on the above collage.
The eight small frames across the top of the collage were claimed by the Tasmanian Director of Public Prosecutions to show “Bryant” running away from the Broad Arrow Cafe immediately after the mass murder. This claim was later reinforced by the former head of the Port Arthur taskforce, Deputy Commissioner Jack Johnson, who was quoted verbatim in the Melbourne Sunday Age on 28th August 1998 stating: “The tourist video showing Bryant fleeing the cafe has been authenticated.” Both men were wrong.
Under magnification, each frame of the video shows that the face of the running blonde man at all times points towards the camera, with no horizontal, vertical, or twisting motion of the head, and no change in facial expression. All these factors are anatomical and physiological impossibilities for a fast-running human figure, proving that the single “still” photograph of Martin Bryant’s head was electronically superimposed on the torso of a different running man, sequentially on each individual video frame. At higher magnification, pixel distortion between the superimposed head and the original torso confirms this analysis scientifically.
The author recently secured authentic tourist video footage of this same running man taken from a different angle, which provides a fingerprint-exact match with every item of his clothes, with every step he takes as he runs down the road towards the bus park, and with every aspect of the three men standing on the balcony of the Broad Arrow Cafe behind him. The real owner of the running torso has black hair and has already been identified. With the exact date and time of the authentic tourist video known, this evidence will be reserved for Bryant’s appeal before the Supreme Court of Tasmania, or a properly convened Royal Commission, whichever comes first.
The large and inset frames on the collage are explained in detail in the text blocks below them, which provide irrefutable scientific proof this man is not Martin Bryant. There are further significant scientific errors which may be of interest to readers.
Alleged Port Arthur gunman Martin Bryant. Photo on the left was used by the media to convince you of Martin Bryant’s “guilt”. Photo on right taken from a different angle, shows identical three men on balcony of the Broad Arrow Cafe, and the man alleged to be Martin Bryant running down towards the bus park at Port Arthur in the presence of a police helicopter. This frame was shot at 2.45 p.m., one hour and fifteen minutes after the mass murder was over! This damning photographic evidence by itself proves Martin Bryant was deliberately set-up, wrongly accused and wrongly convicted. Remember, a camera cannot lie.
The blonde man standing by the yellow Volvo in the bus park is wearing a dark-blue donkey jacket, in stark contrast with the running man, who is dressed only in a shirt. Other frames of this blonde man by the yellow Volvo prove he is wearing shoes of a completely different colour to those of the man running away from the Broad Arrow Cafe, as shown in the eight small frames on the collage.
It is an established fact that immediately after exiting the Broad Arrow Cafe, the shooter fired a minimum of five 5.56-mm NATO rounds directly towards the Trans Otway coach shown in both left frames. Despite the five 166 decibel muzzle blasts, each the awesome audio equivalent of a gas gun used to clear entire airfield perimeters of birds, a large flock of seabirds remained sitting apparently undisturbed on the wheelhouse and foredeck of the large white boat in the background during the period when the shooter transited between the cafe and the Volvo. This is impossible if the footage was filmed at the time of the mass murder on 28 April 1996, because these birds would have taken fright at the first muzzle blast, flying directly away from the camera, which is filming from the general position of the Broad Arrow Cafe i.e. from the same direction the five rounds were fired.
As shown on the two frames provided from this sequence, the flock of seabirds are only frightened later by the sound of a single shot fired from the right-hand side of the video camera, and immediately respond by flying off sharply to the left. If backtracked to its only credible source, this single shot must have been fired from the vicinity of the penitentiary ruins: the large building in the centre of the aerial photo shown on the right. At no time on 28 April 1966 did the shooter venture any further south-east than the bus park immediately below the Broad Arrow Cafe, a fact borne out by the forensic evidence, proving this single shot must have been fired by another man on a different day.
Though further evidence is not needed, more forgery and thus deliberate deception can be seen on the frames of the blonde man by the Volvo. If you look carefully you will see a thin white “halo” running from the left of the frame across the top of the parked cars, around and above the head of the blonde man, then across the top of the parked cars to the right, before turning upwards and following the exact line of the edge of the triangular camper roof in the upper right foreground. This “halo” contains no pixels at all, proving scientifically that the still foreground including the blonde man and the cars has been “cut and pasted” into the background showing the moving birds, boat, and distant hills. In other words two entirely different videos were merged together to create a special effect. The obvious question is why would the forgers go to all this trouble?
At the time of the mass murder the Port Arthur ferry “Bundeena” (shown at top centre of the large frame of the right) was lying alongside the jetty next to the bus park. But at 1530 hrs that afternoon the Bundeena was moved out to her mooring and left there unused for at least a week. So if the forgers filmed their blonde man on (say) 29 April, the Bundeena would have been clearly visible on her mooring in the background, instantly proving that the footage was not filmed at the time of the mass murder. So the forgers filmed the white boat (an Alaskan sport fisherman) at a different location and then “merged” it into their custom still foreground of the unknown blonde man. Unfortunately for them their work was technically incompetent, and forgery can easily be proven in any court of law by state-of-the-art image manipulation computer software of the kind used by the author.
As of this date the Tasmanian Attorney General and others have put up spirited resistance to any formal inquiry into this fresh scientific evidence, but it is unlikely they will be able to maintain this undignified posture for very much longer. When fresh scientific evidence is submitted there is a legal requirement that it be properly investigated.
“Experts have deluded themselves into believing that science has grown much too complicated to be understood by anyone but a fellow expert. They also believe that progress can only be made by one of their own – a scholar who carries the proper credentials. However, to believe this, they are very ignorant of the history of their own religion. When any group fails to supply its own criticism, there will inevitably be some nasty outsider, like me, willing to do it for them.”
Rene, Mensa Lectures 1990
9. MARTIN BRYANT’S MOTHER SPEAKS OUT
FORWARD by Ned Wood
This was the missing link that puzzled me. Bryant’s mother, Carleen, didn’t come to the rescue of her son. Was it because she too was convinced that he was guilty?
The media even tried to make out like his family had deserted him. A Tasmanian journalist claimed that “she, (Carleen Bryant), told Martin that unless he confessed to the crimes, she and his younger sister Lindy would commit suicide”.
These were words that might be uttered by a very emotional woman who was convinced her only son was capable of the horrible murders before he was even found guilty. Strange words indeed from a mother…..but as Joe Vialls points out, Carleen vehemently denies the claim and as the saga continues we find out how senior police, brought this woman in for questioning before Martin Bryant was even identified.
She has been refused visits to see her son who, as yet, has never been tried for the Port Arthur Massacre, only accused before a hearing and sentenced after his “not guilty” plea was denied in order to avoid a trial by jury. A trial which would surely have found him “not guilty” because to this very day there has not been a single soul identify Martin Bryant as the killer. Hundreds of witnesses would have had to have given testimony at a trial which would have exposed the inadequacies of the justice system in this country and proved that not only could Bryant not be identified but that he was incapable of the deed.
A crime which has been hailed as one of the worst in our history has never been properly investigated by the police, never been tried by a jury and to this day cries out for a Royal Commission to answer the leading question…..
who was the man with the long blond hair?
MARTIN BRYANT’S MOTHER SPEAKS OUT
On 28 April 1996 at Port Arthur in Australia, some of the best combat shooters in the world used a total of only 64 bullets to kill 35 people, wound 22 more, and cripple two cars. The first 19 victims in the Broad Arrow Cafe each died from a single 5.56-mm bullet to the head, all fired in less than 20 seconds from the right hip of a fast-moving combat shooter.
This awesome display of marksmanship was blamed on an intellectually impaired young man called Martin Bryant, who had no shooting or military experience at all. In the months and years following Martin’s arrest, much of the public and private strain fell on his widowed mother Carleen.
This is a very small part of Carleen Bryant’s profoundly disturbing story.
Tasmanians are a hardy breed and Carleen Bryant is probably one of the hardiest of them all. Her idea of “taking a break” this year was to navigate her camper van alone from Tasmania to Western Australia with only a CB radio for company, drive half way around WA looking at the sights, then drop in on us for the afternoon before starting back eastward across the Nullarbor Plain. Not being a radio buff, she was disappointed that her CB “wasn’t working too well” but a quick twist of the squelch knob fixed that, and Carleen slowly accelerated out of Perth, happily listening to about twenty truckies chattering incoherently over her CB loudspeaker on channel nine.
Life has been hard for Carleen, probably hardest of all when she realised that her son Martin needed speech therapy as a child, and other remedial help later which led to an invalid pension. As a mother she handled difficult situations well enough but her husband Maurice found it much harder. He was a devoted husband and father and a highly organised man, but Carleen says “it was more difficult for him. Martin was his son and fathers expect their sons to be normal.”
Hard though Maurice tried over the years he slowly but surely became depressed and “mentioned” suicide on a number of occasions. Then without warning in 1993 Maurice took his own life at the family farm at Copping, but long before his death had already taken steps to minimise its impact on Carleen and their children. Carleen was dreading all of the paperwork after his death “because Maurice always looked after that’, but was astonished to find all of the documents she needed placed in a single neat pile where she could easily find them.
Even more astonishing, months earlier Maurice had transferred the Hydro account from their joint names to Carleen alone, ensuring things would run automatically after he died. “Maurice was a very thoughtful man” Carleen says, which indeed he was.
Life then continued as normally as possible until 8 p.m. on the evening of 28 April 1996 when two burly plain-clothes police officers knocked on her door in Hobart and asked, “Do you have a son called Martin Bryant?” When Carleen said yes, the officers took her down to headquarters and bombarded her “with questions about Martin’s big house in Newtown and his trips overseas”.
But despite being at Police Headquarters during the exact period when a telephone conversation was allegedly in progress between her son at Seascape and police negotiators in the same headquarters building, Carleen was not asked to assist police by identifying her son’s voice. She says that at that point in time she did not know the conversation was taking place, but was later provided with the name of the person who “assisted” police by identifying her son’s voice at 7 p.m. the same evening, a name she provided for the author in confidence. But Carleen says it made no sense because this particular person “hadn’t spoken to Martin since he [Martin] was twelve years old and would not know what his voice sounded like anyway.”
Shades of JFK
Bearing in mind that even the police marksmen in position around Seascape did not discover Martin Bryant’s identity until he stumbled out of the building with his back on fire the next morning, how was it possible for Carleen to be asked detailed questions about her son’s large house and his obscure overseas trips, at Tasmanian Police Headquarters more than twelve hours before he first stumbled out of Seascape into the arms of waiting police? Carleen’s version of events, if chronologically correct, proves that at least one stratospherically-placed police officer in Hobart was already well ahead of the game. Though this sequence appears to indicate direct police involvement in the mass murder itself, there is a more likely explanation which Carleen was not aware of before she visited Perth.
Shortly after the murder of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, a Christchurch, New Zealand morning newspaper printed a detailed story it received on the New York news wire about Kennedy’s “assassin” Lee Harvey Oswald. There was a major problem with this news story, because at the time the New Zealand newspaper went to press in Christchurch, Lee Harvey Oswald had only just been arrested in a Dallas cinema for the alleged murder of a Texas policeman called Tibbet. Several more hours passed before Dallas police even accused Oswald of the murder of President Kennedy. So the Christchurch newspaper inadvertently printed an impossible story, a concocted lie “seeded” onto the New York news wire too early by the real murderers, who forgot that international time zones and thus real-time would allow the New Zealand newspaper to print their pre-arranged cover story hours before the events happened. That single critical planning error proved conclusively Lee Harvey Oswald was only a fall-guy, a patsy arrested and charged on cue by the unwitting Dallas Police Force. It was impossible timing and too many background details which proved conclusively that Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy, and the same impossible timing and background details prove conclusively that Martin Bryant was used for identical purposes. While Carleen was being interrogated at Hobart Police Headquarters at 8 p.m. on 28 April, all the terrified staff and survivors at Port Arthur knew for sure was that the shooter was a man with long blonde hair. There are thousands of men with long blonde hair in Australia, each equally likely to be the man on the trigger, so there was no innocent way police could possibly have already singled out Martin Bryant or obtained knowledge about his obscure overseas travels. So between the time of the mass murder at 1.30 p.m. and Carleen’s interrogation at 8 p.m., someone very carefully pointed the finger, and “seeded” Tasmanian Police Headquarters with an impossible amount of personal information about her son, many hours before he was first positively identified stumbling out of Seascape the next day. Ever since that frightening interrogation more than three years ago, Carleen Bryant, mother of the accused, has been denied a copy of, or even access to, the telephone tape alleged to contain a long rambling conversation between her son and police negotiators. Why?
Nothing could prepare any mother for what happened next. When Martin was transferred from the Royal Hobart Hospital to Risdon Prison as a remand prisoner, Carleen had visiting rights but no privacy with him at all. She was shocked to see her son, badly burned in the Seascape fire and still in great pain, bound to his wheelchair by leather straps. Martin told her that he had asked to have the painful restraints removed but was refused. When Carleen asked who refused, her son nodded towards the prison officers, one of whom then leaned towards Carleen and said “you cannot discuss the [Risdon Prison] staff”. Carleen, suitably intimidated, fell silent. In fact under the Prisons Act a remand prisoner can be restrained on the orders of the Prison Superintendent, but only if under escort outside the prison, or if he poses “a significant danger to others”. By no interpretation could an entirely passive intellectually impaired young man with third-degree burns to his back and left side, isolated behind bullet proof glass, be considered a significant danger to others. But at that time Carleen Bryant did not understand the prison rules and was unable to help her son ease his pain. Nowadays the only coherent reason for Martin’s illegal restraint is obvious. Prison officers and psychiatrists, in the manner of the Spanish inquisition, were determined to intimidate and physically punish intellectually impaired Martin Bryant until he finally “confessed” to a series of crimes in which he played no active part. That such obscene and barbaric treatment is illegal under Australian and international law, and justifiably condemned by Amnesty International as both physical and psychological torture, does not appear to have impeded the Tasmanian authorities at all.
It was only at this point while describing the treatment of her son in Risdon Prison that Carleen’s composure slipped for a second and she shed a tear or two. “He was so terribly lonely” she said, briskly wiping the tears from her cheeks before continuing. It was a cry from the heart of a mother who had been unable to help her son in distress, a cry that went home on this author as surely as a razor-sharp knife.
Next Carleen discussed Martin’s actual injuries, because those reported by the media were wholly inconsistent with the official story of the day, i.e. that Martin Bryant had set fire to Seascape, panicked, then fought his way out of the blazing building. Carleen didn’t know exactly why I was asking, but confirmed that the burns were restricted to “his back and left hand side”, pointing to her own left side to illustrate exactly where. “Were there any burns at all to his face, chest, arms or hands?” I asked. “Oh no, none at all” Carleen replied confidently. As any fireman will confirm, the official story of the day is mission impossible. Any person fighting his way out of a burning building does so head-first so that he can see where he is going, arms and hands held high to protect his face from the flames and to deflect burning debris away from his body. It is an instinctive survival response that we all use in life-threatening fire situations.
Minor first-degree burns are enough to make anyone retreat from a fire immediately, the split-second that nerve endings send warning impulses to the brain. Despite this known fact, Martin Bryant remained inside Seascape until burning debris had caused horrific third-degree burns to his back and side, but not to his face, chest, arms or hands. How? The only possible scientific answer is that Martin was lying face-down, either comatose or drugged, and remained that way as burning debris from the first floor above (where the fire started) fell onto his back until the intense pain finally forced him back to consciousness. This is confirmed by video footage of Martin leaving the building, stumbling along like a dazed drunk. Those readers asking themselves “but who else could have started the fire if Martin Bryant was unconscious and the only man left alive inside Seascape, and how did they do it?” might like to consult standard Army manuals under the chapters headed “incendiary devices” and “radio detonators”.
Carleen continued to visit Risdon Prison and made little lists of questions she wanted Martin to answer, but most of the time felt so intimidated by officials that some of the more important questions remained unanswered. She says constant bombardment by officials pushing the story that “Martin did it” started to make her believe her son may have been responsible for the crimes, but for a number of very substantial reasons could not work out how he could have physically committed them.
Although “Martin was making money cutting lawns and selling his crayfish”, Carleen added “Maurice did not approve of guns and took Martin’s air rifle away. He [Martin] did not know how to shoot properly and never owned any real guns.
Carleen was also mystified by the “cache” of weapons allegedly found inside a piano at Martin’s house by police several days after the mass murder. “When he was away on trips I used to go round there, clean the place up and poke around as mothers tend to do” she says, “Martin knew this and he also knew I didn’t approve of guns. He would never have dared keep any in the house.” Carleen Bryant is not the only person mystified by this impossible evidence.
Soon after the mass murder, two journalists from a prominent newspaper illegally entered Martin’s house searching for clues. Their search included the piano in question, which contained only piano parts. Planting false forensic evidence after the crime to “prove” guilt is far from new and has occurred many times in the past, including the last high-profile case the author investigated, which was the murder of Policewomen Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan Embassy in London during April 1984. The Libyans were wrongly accused of shooting her, and after the Libyan diplomats left the Embassy to return to Tripoli, a specialist army clearance team was sent into the building to search for booby traps or other weapons.
The team carried out one of the most intensive searches in British Army history, from the basement of the building to the roof, but found absolutely no trace of guns, ammunition, explosives or any other incriminating materials. So imagine the Army’s stunned amazement when one week later the Metropolitan Police Service announced that its members had just found two loaded handguns, machine gun spare parts, and more than three thousand rounds of ammunition inside the Libyan Embassy!
It is beyond doubt that a person or persons unknown illegally entered and “seeded” the Libyan Embassy with damning false evidence, sometime during the week separating the army and police searches.
For Carleen things got worse at Risdon Prison, but she vehemently denies the claim of Tasmanian journalist Bingham that “she told Martin that unless he confessed to the crimes, she and his younger sister Lindy would commit suicide.” in Carleen’s view by that late stage any intervention of this sort by her would have been unnecessary. “The continual pressure [from officials] brainwashed Martin to the level where he may have started to believe he was guilty.” This is hardly surprising. Stalin’s communist thought-police in Russia crafted false beliefs like these into an art form, and could eventually convince even the most intelligent of men they were guilty as charged or they wouldn’t be in Lubianka Prison in the first place, would they?
Carleen’s last visit to her son was during November 1997, when she was told by prison officials and psychiatrists that “Martin no longer wants to see you, which is his right”, but at no time has Carleen been able to establish this message actually came from her son. Martin could, for example, have told her face to face but did not. He could also have told her over the telephone but did not. Finally although not a fluent writer, Martin could have sent her a brief note, but did not do so. Outraged by this procedure Carleen says she called the prison and asked “what about my rights as a mother?” Her question went unanswered and the line was disconnected. Neatly manoeuvred into a subservient position by the Tasmanian authorities, Carleen was then circumstantially forced to ask a prison psychiatrist, whose name she provided in confidence, what she should do next, “Write to him” was the answer and Carleen proceeded to do so, at least once and sometimes twice a month.
Still she received no word from her son and during a later visit to the named psychiatrist, Carleen asked what had happened to her last letter. The psychiatrist flicked through his clip board and found her opened letter to Martin near the bottom of his papers. “I sent that three weeks ago” Carleen protested, to which the psychiatrist merely said “sorry”.
It is highly relevant here to ask why any psychiatrist should still be communicating with her son and handling his mail. After all, the crux of the psychiatric evidence against Martin Bryant was that he was “fit to plead”, i.e. of sound mind. A prisoner of sound mind has rights, one of which is the right not be to forced to act as a guinea pig for psychiatrists busily writing learned papers for local or international psychiatric journals about a crime he could not have committed. Had Martin Bryant been found to be of unsound mind and incarcerated in a mental hospital instead, one might reasonably expect such close psychiatric attention, but not inside Risdon Prison as a convicted felon serving life imprisonment.
The psychiatrists will probably defend their intrusive and manipulative position by claiming “Martin Bryant asked to speak to us.” No doubt he did, after contact with all other prisoners and visitors was first effectively severed, i.e. de-facto solitary confinement. No man including Martin Bryant is an island, and all normally need periodic verbal interactions with others to remain sane in the long term. If the only other humans you are allowed to meaningfully interact with are psycho-scientists, the chances are you will eventually ask to speak to them.
The bizarre behaviour of the psychiatrists involved in the Port Arthur case has presented their profession with an impossible credibility problem. Setting aside meaningless psychiatric mumbo jumbo and double talk, the act of entering a historic site and killing or wounding fifty-seven citizens is perhaps the ultimate hallmark of absolute insanity, rendering the perpetrator permanently unfit to plead. Indeed, it is difficult for most normal people to imagine a more insane act. So when Tasmanian and Victorian psychiatrists declared Martin fit to plead, i.e. sane, at the same time they acknowledged he could not have committed the crimes.
Nowadays Carleen Bryant wonders why the police did not go to the trouble of properly verifying her son’s new guilty pleas in early November 1996 using standard police procedures. Many people plead guilty to crimes they could not have committed, a situation that routinely presents police forces around the world with a big problem, especially if the guilty pleas are entered by a person who is intellectually impaired or otherwise mentally deficient. Standard procedure in these circumstances is to take the suspect out to the crime scene and ask for details of exactly how he committed the crime(s), i.e. where each victim was standing, what sex, how many bullets, where the weapon was reloaded, etc etc., all recorded on continuous (Time-stamped) video.
The Victorian Police Service observed this standard procedure meticulously in the case of Julian Knight at Hoddle Street during 1987, as did the New South Wales Police Service after a street shooting in Wollongong in 1998. Both suspects provided ample accurate details at the respective crime scenes on continuous video tape without prompting by police, and both were then properly and fairly dealt with. Nearly three years after Martin inexplicably changed his pleas to guilty in November 1996, the Tasmanian Police Service has still not verified his guilt using this standard procedure, and its continued refusal to do so can realistically be taken as proof of Martin Bryant’s innocence.
When Carleen left Tasmania some weeks ago she was unaware that others had recently spoken out on behalf of her son, most prominent being Brigadier Ted Sarong DSO OBE, the former head of Australian Forces in Vietnam and one of the world’s leading experts on counter-terrorist techniques and their application. In an interview with Frank Robson in the Sydney Morning Herald on 10 April 1999, Brigadier Serong makes it plain that Martin Bryant could not have been responsible for the mass murder at Port Arthur. “There was an almost satanic accuracy to that shooting performance” he says. “Whoever did it is better than I am, and there are not too many people around here better than I am”. He continues “Whoever did it had skills way beyond anything that could reasonably be expected of this chap Bryant … if it was someone of only average skills, there would have been many less killed and many more wounded. It was the astonishing proportion of killed to wounded that made me open my eyes first off.” Brigadier Serong believes more than one person was involved and directly infers that the mass murder at Port Arthur was a terrorist action designed to undermine Australian national security. “It was part of a deliberate attempt to disarm the population, but I don’t believe John Howard or his Government were involved. Howard is being led down a track. He doesn’t know where it’s leading, and he doesn’t much care…”
Some readers might consider that as a soldier Brigadier Sarong is not qualified to comment on police matters, but they would be wrong. In addition to his acknowledged military achievements he also raised, trained, organised and directed a police force larger than all the police forces in Australia combined. After returning to Australia, as he notes in his book Defence of Australia Analysis: “I did gently but firmly decline a suggestion that I be Victoria’s Chief Commissioner of Police.” Brigadier Ted Serong is thus far better qualified to comment on the chain of events at Port Arthur than the current commissioner of the Tasmanian Police Service, who commands a total force of less than one thousand men, none of whom has any knowledge of international terrorism or practical experience of counter-terrorist techniques.
Having broken the ice and had her say in this report, might Carleen now move on to bigger and better things, perhaps an article in the Melbourne Age or maybe even a television interview with the fabled Ray Martin? She says not. “After it happened I had all those [media] trucks parked at the end of my street for a week, they wouldn’t leave me alone and kept asking for pictures.” Even now Carleen Bryant remembers one persistent female reporter who simply refused to take no for an answer. “She kept jumping over my front fence” Carleen says, “then she would walk around the outside of my house, tapping on the windows and calling out my name.” Carleen feels only pity and contempt for all members of the local and international media who so brazenly vilified her son and nearly destroyed his and her lives.
As I stood by the side of the Great Eastern Highway in Perth waving goodbye as Carleen’s camper slowly accelerated towards Kalgoorlie at the start of her lonely 2,000 mile trip back to Tasmania, I must admit to feeling a little sorry for the Tasmanian Government and other officials when they are finally forced to release her son Martin, which they must. Bound by his oath as protector of the public interest, the Attorney-General in particular is obliged to fully investigate all fresh evidence promptly and openly or face serious legal sanctions. There are no political escape clauses whatever. The longer the Attorney-General tries to bury fresh evidence under the parliamentary carpet in Hobart, the more severe those legal repercussions will be.
The only offence Martin committed on 28 April 1996 was that of being gullible enough to be lured to Seascape by others under false pretences. Though certainly unwise behaviour, gullibility is not yet a felony punishable by strict life imprisonment. When Martin Bryant is released, the Tasmanian Government and other officials will have many people to answer to: First the millions of Australians deliberately misled into believing that thirty five of their own countrymen were slaughtered by an intellectually impaired young man when they demonstrably knew this was a blatant lie; then perhaps to Martin Bryant himself who they treated as sub-human and discreetly tortured behind the dark forbidding walls of Risdon Prison. If the Tasmanian Government and other officials find these unpleasant prospects daunting, I can assure them there is something far worse looming on the horizon: Eventually they will also have to answer to Martin Bryant’s angry mum. Rather them than me…
10. OFFICIAL MARTIN BRYANT STORY PROVED AN IMPOSSIBLE LIE
At 8 p.m. on 28 April 1996, less than seven hours after the mass murder at Port Arthur, Martin Bryant’s mother Carleen was suddenly taken to Tasmanian Police Headquarters in Hobart. Unknown to Carleen, in another part of headquarters at exactly the same time, police negotiators were allegedly engaged in a long conversation with a man at Seascape they later claimed was her son. Despite being Martin Bryant’s closest relative, at no time was Carleen asked to identify his voice, and she has never been allowed access to the telephone tape. Hard evidence suggests that a senior police officer ruthlessly ordered Carleen Bryant’s forced visit to headquarters that evening, in order to later “authenticate” the impossible premature police identification of her only son, Martin Bryant.
Copyright Joe Vialls, 16 June 1999, All Rights Reserved 45 Merlin Drive, Carine, Western Australia 6020
Police and security services have standard procedures for every situation they are likely to encounter, especially sensitive situations where armed offenders and hostages are involved. Though the prime objective of any hostage negotiation team is obviously to “win”, i.e. resolve the crisis without anyone getting hurt, there are standard techniques used throughout, aimed at giving the active negotiator an edge as quickly as possible.
One of the most important is obtaining a positive identification of the offender, enabling agencies to swiftly locate enough background details to provide an insight into his behaviour, and time to contact relatives for assistance where necessary. As every trained negotiator in the world knows, an emotional hostage-taker is likely to respond far more positively to the pleas of a close relative than to a complete stranger.
As a mother Carleen Bryant would have been ideal in this role, the person most able to pacify her son and ask him to lay down his arms. However, Carleen could only achieve this if the suspect at Seascape was really her son. If police believed the voice on the phone from Seascape was that of Martin Bryant, why did the senior officer who ordered Carleen’s interrogation deliberately isolate her away from the radio room? Sadly, there are no innocent answers to this critical question.
Police were very short of personnel that Sunday, and the three experienced plain-clothes officers involved in Carleen Bryant’s transportation and interrogation that day should have already been at Port Arthur. So exactly who was the shadowy senior officer responsible for holding back these three experienced officers, then ordering them to take Mrs Bryant to headquarters, where she was swiftly isolated and used so effectively to cement the official story of the day? Only an open Royal Commission can provide these and other essential answers.
Media reports distorted truth.
Few people in Australia and overseas realise that Tasmanian reporters were told within six hours of the mass murder that the “lone-nut” responsible was a man called Martin Bryant, then holed up at Seascape, and in the rush of excitement that followed they completely forgot to ask where this impossibly accurate information came from. Diligent independent investigation revealed most never gave it a second though, either at the time or over the years that followed. As one senior accredited reporter tried to explain:
“There’s nothing suspicious about that. Mr Martin, the son of the Seascape owners, told police he thought it might be Bryant because he’s heard about the man with long blonde hair and the yellow Volvo, and Martin Bryant had apparently threatened his parents over a farm purchase some years earlier.”
Times DO NOT add up
However, it was not until about 8.30 p.m., when details of the vehicle’s registration came through, that police finally knew the identity of the person they were dealing with.”
Next we have “Martin Bryant’s passport had also been found in the Volvo abandoned by the toll booth… “No it had not, at least not at the time the official story claims. The only police present at Port Arthur at 6.30 p.m. were the two young police women taken off the beat in Hobart, and possibly an Inspector Warren of later Bryant interrogation fame, Coroner Ian Matterson and his team of forensic examiners did not arrive at the crime scene(s) until much later.
As Ian Matterson recalls “On arrival at the Police Forward Command post set up at Taranna we were advised that the Port Arthur historic site had still not been rendered safe for entry by our team and we waited until 7.30 p.m. before we received the all clear” … “On site at 8.05 p.m.
Coroner Matterson then started an examination of each crime scene, starting with the bus park below the Broad Arrow Cafe, then the Broad Arrow Cafe itself, followed by the scene at which the Mikac family died, before eventually arriving at the tollbooth and the yellow Volvo. Though Ian Matterson does not provide a precise chronology for this period, it is reasonable to assume he spend at least thirty minutes at each crime scene, meaning he reached the Volvo around 9.40 p.m. at the earliest. He notes “On a road hump near the toll gate and beside a yellow Volvo lay an adult male. Inside the open boot of the Volvo could be seen firearms and a small white gun shooting target that appeared to have been used.” So the earliest that Martin Bryant’s passport could have been found was 9.40 p.m., three hours later than claimed in the official story.
Let us be generous and assume that either Matterson or Warren fossicked around in the Volvo and found Martin Bryant’s passport at 9.40 p.m. That was exactly one hour and forty minutes AFTER Martin’s mother, Carleen Bryant, was frog marched to police headquarters in Hobart.
Because of Carleen Bryant’s inexplicable treatment that night, we are forced to assume that the as-yet unidentified senior officer at headquarters decided to hold these three experienced officers back for use as her escorts and interrogator, but how could he possibly have known in advance this would be necessary? Obviously he did know, and dispatched his three plain-clothes men to Mrs Bryant’s house in Hobart nearly two hours before Martin’s passport could possibly have been discovered in the Volvo at Port Arthur.
Carleen was completely isolated from the radio room, and at 8 p.m. was “bombarded with questions about Martin’s big house in Newtown and his trips overseas.” The officer went on to ask whether her son owned a yellow Volvo with roof racks, which she said he did. He then asked whether it had a surfboard on top. Carleen responded “I don’t know”. This activity outside the direct chain of command then provided “corroborative evidence” that Martin Bryant was the shooter at Seascape,
This then forms the last part of the official story: “However, it was not until about 8.30 p.m., when details of the vehicle’s registration came through, that police finally knew the identity of the person they were dealing with.” The registration details did not “come through” as seductively suggested by the official story, but were already deep inside the Tasmanian Police Headquarters building itself, unwittingly provided in person for the three plain-clothes officers at 8.30 p.m. by Martin Bryant’s trusting mother.
Puzzled, I asked “At that time, had police broadcast any appeals over the radio for information on men with long blonde hair and yellow Volvo cars?” There was a short pause “No, actual details were kept to the minimum” he replied. “Did Mr Martin tell you [the media] that he’d given police this information?” A longer pause, “No, we saw him standing outside police headquarters and thought it was him.”
“Well then, did the police tell you [the media] that Mr Martin had provided headquarters with this information?” A pencil could be heard tapping on the desk at the other end of the telephone line. “No they didn’t in fact. Until then the only suspect on the police white board in operations was an aboriginal, who apparently wanted a helicopter ride to South Australia. Martin Bryant’s name was added to the white board later.” These media claims were all unsubstantiated rubbish. The Bryant family sold their seaside shack near Port Arthur nearly four years earlier and Martin Bryant’s last visit was more than two years before the shooting, at which time he had short instead of long blonde hair, and drove a Honda not a Volvo. Mr Martin Jr. did visit headquarters on 28 April but not about Martin Bryant. As police media liaison officer Geoff Easton writes “A young man called at the Public Inquiries counter and asked for me. He was to tell me he was a relative of the Martins, the owners of Seascape, and that he had a cache of weapons stored there, and, in his own words, ‘Shitloads of ammo mate!’”
Planted identification?
Wherever the “instant” identification came from during that afternoon it was not from Mr Martin Jr., nor anyone at Port Arthur. Nobody at the historic site could have provided the identification because not one of the staff or survivors had been interviewed by police, and were still in fear of their lives. Though two police SOGs [groups of armed policemen] were dispatched from Hobart at 3.57 p.m. and 4.04 p.m. respectively, they never reached Port Arthur. As Chief Executive Craig Coombs notes “At this stage, about 5.30 p.m., the day was drawing to a close. We were assured there was a group of SOGs arriving by helicopter” … “I commandeered 3 four wheel drive vehicles and had them ready to transport the SOGs to secure the [Port Arthur] Site. Driving the vehicles to the edge of the oval, we waited for the helicopter to arrive. The helicopter contained two young policewomen who had come off the beat in Hobart.”
Understandably in the circumstances, the two young policewomen off the beat in Hobart did not conduct group or individual interviews. This gaping black hole in the evidence did nothing to deter other reporters hell bent on reinforcing the “official” story. In a book which brazenly uses unproven anecdotal evidence to demonise Bryant, its author tries to explain this impossible identification by claiming “Around 6.30 p.m. a call to Hobart headquarters from a member of the public in Hobart suggested that a man called Martin Bryant could be the man holed up in Seascape because he had an obsession about the owners, David and Sally Martin.” He continues “Martin Bryant’s passport had also been found in the Volvo abandoned beside the tollbooth at the entrance to the historic site. However, it was not until about 8.30 p.m., when details of the vehicle’s registration came through, that police finally knew the identity of the person they were dealing with.”
Again this media claim was unsubstantiated rubbish, predictably similar in parts to the rubbish provided for the author by accredited senior reporters, but this time with the imaginative additions of a passport and vehicle registration. We will now prove point by point that the official story of the day was a fairy tale, a creative lie designed to protect members of the police and others who would otherwise be terminally embarrassed by their access to impossible quantities of accurate information about Martin Bryant at an impossible time, and face prosecution as a result.
A REAL terrorist incident.
The claim “a member of the public in Hobart suggested that a man called Martin Bryant could be the person…” has already been partly dealt with, but further explanation is necessary to destroy it completely. At the time of this alleged call Tasmanian Police Headquarters was in uproar, with officers solely concerned about how many shooters were involved, and at how many locations. This is proved by Assistant Commissioner Luppo Prins, who writes “The Police command structure for management of the Port Arthur incident was essentially along the lines of a SACPAV terrorist incident.” Forget the word “essentially”. At that time and until the next morning police operated rigidly along these lines to contain the real terrorist incident they were facing, including interaction with the Crisis Policy Centre in Canberra, briefings for the duty Federal Minister and Prime Minister, and the deployment on Tasmanian territory of the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation’s Technical Surveillance Unit. Though there were doubtlessly many calls to headquarters from the public about Jack Smith, Harry Evans, Tom Spratt or Martin Bryant being the likely culprits, police would have filed the lot for examination at a later date. Dozens of excited members of the public call at the height of nearly every major emergency, but unless a caller offers hard evidence directly related to the crime scene, all calls are filed until much later because police are far too busy with the current operation, especially when that operation is of the full-blown SACPAV terrorist variety. To even suggest the two words “Martin Bryant” would have caused officers to suddenly stop in their tracks and say, “Of course, it must be young Martin from Newtown!” is both absurd and operationally impossible.
Next we have “Martin Bryant’s passport had also been found in the Volvo abandoned by the toll booth… “No it had not, at least not at the time the official story claims. The only police present at Port Arthur at 6.30 p.m. were the two young police women taken off the beat in Hobart, and possibly an Inspector Warren of later Bryant interrogation fame, though it is unclear how Warren could have reached Port Arthur when the heavily-armed SOGs could not. At 6.30 p.m. all police, staff and survivors were hiding, and no one was poking around in the dark interior of a yellow Volvo surrounded by dead bodies. Coroner Ian Matterson and his team of forensic examiners did not arrive at the crime scene(s) until much later. As Ian Matterson recalls “On arrival at the Police Forward Command post set up at Taranna we were advised that the Port Arthur historic site had still not been rendered safe for entry by our team and we waited until 7.30 p.m. before we received the all clear” … “On site at 8.05 p.m. I conversed with Inspector John Warren, the officer in charge of the major crime scene.
Having assessed no person had, at that stage, been apprehended and charged with any offence arising from the deaths on the historic site, I advised I would take over the area as a coronial site with the operation to be conducted in tandem with his major crime investigation.”
Coroner Matterson then started an examination of each crime scene, starting with the bus park below the Broad Arrow Cafe, then the Broad Arrow Cafe itself, followed by the scene at which the Mikac family died, before eventually arriving at the tollbooth and the yellow Volvo. Though Ian Matterson does not provide a precise chronology for this period, it is reasonable to assume he spend at least thirty minutes at each crime scene, meaning he reached the Volvo around 9.40 p.m. at the earliest. He notes “On a road hump near the toll gate and beside a yellow Volvo lay an adult male. Inside the open boot of the Volvo could be seen firearms and a small white gun shooting target that appeared to have been used.” So the earliest that Martin Bryant’s passport could have been found was 9.40 p.m., three hours later than claimed in the official story.
Even this discovery time may be premature, because Matterson continues “Attempts by police photographers, ballistic experts, investigators and the forensic pathologist to commence their investigation were hampered by a lack of suitable light. Whilst there was an urgent need to commence the investigation and remove all the bodies, it was agreed the need to ensure a precise investigation of the highest standard of both bodies and exhibits made it imperative to wait until first light the following morning.” A single dark blue passport is a small low-visibility object, which would normally take a very long time to find under a hefty pile of firearms, targets and ammunition.
Let us be generous and assume that either Matterson or Warren fossicked around in the Volvo and found Martin Bryant’s passport at 9.40 p.m. That was exactly one hour and forty minutes AFTER Martin’s mother, Carleen Bryant, was frog marched to police headquarters in Hobart by two burly plain-clothes officers and interrogated by a third, all of whom should have been down at Port Arthur investigating the worst mass murder in Tasmanian history. Remember that the Tasmanian Police Service was stretched to the limit, evidenced by it sending two inexperienced young policewomen off the Hobart beat down to Port Arthur, to protect hundreds of terrified survivors still in fear of their lives.
Because of Carleen Bryant’s inexplicable treatment that night, we are forced to assume that the as-yet unidentified senior officer at headquarters decided to hold these three experienced officers back for use as her escorts and interrogator, but how could he possibly have known in advance this would be necessary? Obviously he did know, and dispatched his three plain-clothes men to Mrs Bryant’s house in Hobart nearly two hours before Martin’s passport could possibly have been discovered in the Volvo at Port Arthur.
Based on known standard procedures used by all police forces when faced with a SACPAV terrorist emergency, the senior officer in question was certainly not in the operations centre, i.e. the direct line of communication from main switchboard to radio room etc., because all activities in these areas are strictly controlled for the duration of the emergency, with no opportunity at all to subvert proceedings. Carleen was completely isolated from the radio room, and at 8 p.m. was “bombarded with questions about Martin’s big house in Newtown and his trips overseas.” The officer went on to ask whether her son owned a yellow Volvo with roof racks, which she said he did. He then asked whether it had a surfboard on top. Carleen responded “I don’t know”.
This activity outside the direct chain of command then provided “corroborative evidence” that Martin Bryant was the shooter at Seascape, corroborative evidence that could later be used to blur over fatal errors in the grossly premature and thus impossible timing of his initial identification. This then forms the last part of the official story: “However, it was not until about 8.30 p.m., when details of the vehicle’s registration came through, that police finally knew the identity of the person they were dealing with.” The registration details did not “come through” as seductively suggested by the official story, but were already deep inside the Tasmanian Police Headquarters building itself, unwittingly provided in person for the three plain-clothes officers at 8.30 p.m. by Martin Bryant’s trusting mother.
That Carleen Bryant was kept strictly outside the official chain of command is proved by the fact that direct identification of her son could have been established in a few seconds, simply by her listening to the conversation then in progress between police negotiators in the radio room and the suspect at Seascape. If it was Martin she would have been able to provide direct identification immediately, and quite possibly have talked him out of the building, thereby greatly minimising risks to others. The use of close relatives for exactly this purpose by police and other negotiators has already been explained. Therefore the only valid reason for keeping Carleen outside the chain of command was that someone either knew or suspected the man on the telephone was not her son, and had no intention of allowing her to discover this. Carleen herself reinforces this view when commenting on the person used by police to “identify” the voice on the telephone from Seascape: “he hadn’t spoken to Martin since he [Martin] was twelve years old and would not know what his voice sounded like anyway.” It is perfectly reasonable to claim that the impossibly early “positive identification” of Martin Bryant was leaked to the media by the same senior officer responsible for setting Carleen Bryant up at police headquarters later the same day, a sequence that must have required a lot of advance planning.
What will remain unclear until a Royal Commission examines all the evidence, is how the senior police insider became involved in this atrocity in the first place. Was he unwittingly tricked into a series of reckless acts by the group directly responsible, or was he in a vulnerable position and open to blackmail? Alternatively, he may have been a witting player who actively assisted with the chain of events for his own ideological reasons. Obscure but more likely is another ploy, one that has been used before on covert operations. The insider may have been sucked in by a proposed plan of action which appealed to his patriotism or sense of duty, and only found out too late that the plan had gone much further than he had agreed, thereby compromising him and ensuring his permanent silence.
In the case of the premeditated murder of Policewoman Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan Embassy in London during April 1984, a senior officer foolishly allowed himself to be influenced by powerful outsiders, members of the secretive private “club” to which he belonged, who suggested a limited operation in which Fletcher’s bare legs would only be lightly peppered with shrapnel, producing a bit of blood for the TV cameras and generating sufficient public outrage to have the nasty Libyans deported from Britain for ever. When instead of being lightly peppered with shrapnel, Yvonne Fletcher was almost cut in half by a high velocity assault bullet fired from an American multinational building, the compromised senior officer understandably felt quite unable to approach his Commissioner and confess “It wasn’t supposed to go that far…” From start to finish at Port Arthur and Seascape, all information provided for the media was filtered by Tasmanian Police Headquarters in Hobart. In addition, by mid-afternoon an air exclusion zone was in place to prevent media aerial photography, and the police forward command post at Taranna actively stopped all members of the media from approaching any of the crime scenes.
Police were in total control of the flow of information at all times, and it would be futile at this late stage for officials to claim that some mysterious civilian outsider burgled police headquarters, scribbled Martin Bryant’s name on the operations white board, then ordered two sworn police officers to drive across Hobart to fetch Carleen Bryant. The hard facts prove that this sequence of events could only have been planned and executed successfully by a senior officer with direct access to police headquarters’ facilities and personnel. Three years after the event, the official story is now proven a fairy tale, an impossible myth, so how did most Australians and the rest of the world fail to spot the gross errors? The answer lies in the same sort of clumsy sleight-of-hand that inexperienced magicians use when cutting their professional teeth at children’s birthday parties.
(Remember me telling you about my first suspicians when the Sunday Telegraph printed this photo of Bryant only days after the incident?
They highlighted his eyes to make him look crazy and were never reprimanded for this flagrant disreguard for the due process of law which elliminated any line up identification process. To my knowledge it has never been done before. People in this country are usually concidered innocent until proven guilty….not so with Martin Bryant…..Ned)
Story Continues……
Though a photograph of Martin Bryant was printed in the Tasmanian newspaper on the morning of 29 April, with no explanation of how the newspaper miraculously obtained such a recent photograph of him in time for the newspaper’s deadline, the photo was not shown in mainland Australian or international newspapers until the morning of 30 April, a full 24 hours later. So by the time 99% of us saw the famous picture of Martin Bryant with his artificially-enhanced staring blue eyes, he had already stumbled out of Seascape, been arrested and formally identified, and was receiving treatment for third-degree burns in the Royal Hobart Hospital. Nothing suspicious about that is there?
In light of this, why the frantic haste to put Martin Bryant in the frame when the facts prove he would certainly have been positively identified at Seascape early the next day at the latest, dead or alive? At first glance it seems a dangerous and unnecessary risk, but in operational terms it was essential. Any small group “operating behind the lines” is terribly vulnerable to accidental discovery and capture, an unacceptable risk that can be greatly reduced by prearranging a decoy incident designed to distract the attention of the enemy, thereby enabling the small group to escape detection. An example of this was a four-man special forces group in the Middle East tasked with the assassination of an especially brutal terrorist leader, who was unfortunately surrounded by about two hundred of his own armed men. So the SF group waited until nightfall and placed explosive charges at a nearby fuel tanker and more distant ammunition dump. First they blew the fuel tanker by radio detonator, then 30 seconds later the ammunition dump. Terrorists started running frantically towards these “obvious” attackers, while the four-man SF group quietly moved in behind them and killed the boss. By the time the terrorists returned and discovered their boss had two small holes in his head, the group was already more than ten miles away.
Martin Bryant was an obvious decoy, allowing the professional group time to extract safely before anyone got suspicious. Of critical importance here is the fact that decoys must be used at the time of the operation, not 24 hours later, hence the need for Bryant’s “instant” identification at Seascape. We already know that intellectually impaired Martin Bryant was in no way responsible for the shooting at Port Arthur and elsewhere that day, during which some of the best combat shooters in the world used only 64 bullets to kill 35 people, wound 22 more, and cripple two cars. The first 19 victims in the Broad Arrow Cafe each died from a single 5.56-mm bullet to the head all fired in less than 20 seconds from the right hip of a fast-moving combat shooter.
As experts including former Vietnam military commander Brigadier Ted Serong, and SAS counter-terrorist shooters agree, this awesome display of combat marksmanship was an impossible feat for Martin Bryant, who had no shooting or military experience at all. The fact that we missed the critical errors at the time does not absolve us from shared responsibility for Martin Bryant’s plight today. We simply cannot sweep it all under the carpet and try to forget that an innocent man is in prison for a crime he could not have committed, nor the fact that taxpayers might still be employing an accessory to mass murder at Tasmanian Police Headquarters. It was we the Australian people who unwittingly allowed corrupt officials and the media to pull the wool over our eyes, and it is only we the Australian people who have enough collective power to right those wrongs. Our objectives must be to secure Martin Bryant’s release, and ensure the conviction of the unknown senior police officer. To achieve these objectives we must first force an appeal on behalf of intellectually impaired Martin Bryant, and a Royal Commission into the Tasmanian Police Service. This will not happen all by itself, so get off your backside, grab the nearest pen and start writing to your Member of Parliament.
Not tomorrow or the next day or the day after that. Do it now. Martin Bryant has already been in prison far too long, and needs to go back to his mum for a home-cooked meal.
“Journalists say a thing that they know isn’t true, in the hope that if they keep saying it long enough it will be true.” Arnold Bennett (1867-1931)
11. LACK OF FORENSIC EVIDENCE AT PORT ARTHUR
Very few members of the public realise that absolutely no hard forensic evidence exists linking Martin Bryant to Port Arthur, or to any weapon used in the mass murder. Indeed, in the opinions of two prominent Queen’s Counsels, Bryant would have been released from prison if strictly illegal sensory deprivation had not been used to extract his false guilty pleas in November 1996.
Do not mistake guilty pleas for a confession, because in the latter Bryant would be required to provide detailed information on the mass murder that he did not have. Pleas are far simpler. All Martin Bryant was required to do was stand in the dock and say “guilty” seventy-two times, not a difficult task for an intellectually impaired young man with an IQ of 66.
But these simple guilty pleas then technically enabled the Tasmanian Justice Ministry to confiscate Bryant’s sizeable fortune and other property, before locking him in a dungeon and throwing away the keys.
If these obscene procedures had been used in faraway China, Cuba, Colombia or a dozen other countries, the democratic (sic) Australian media would have been first off the blocks, screaming with self-righteous outrage about the “human rights abuse” of the accused, and denial of a fair trial before his peers.
Unfortunately, human rights are used solely as a lobby tool to manipulate foreign nations, proved beyond doubt by hysterical Australian media behaviour in Tasmania during April 1996. Reporters vied with each other to tell you how “terrible” Bryant was, and never once mentioned that in a so-called democracy, remand prisoners are assumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
This disgusting behaviour by the media proved that unlike prisoners in China and Cuba, luckless prisoners in democratic Australia have no human rights at all.
Though the media must accept the lion’s share of the blame for Martin Bryant’s contrived and very public “trial by television” there were other more shadowy figures who goaded the media on, long after the mass murder. A handful of public servants, politicians and police officers, hyped-up false evidence in order to keep Bryant in the frame, most in an attempt to save their own miserable “reputations” and jobs.
A large part of this false evidence was aimed at convincing the public that police had literally hundreds of eyewitnesses who identified Bryant at Port Arthur. In fact, to this day the Tasmanian Police Service does not have a single legally valid eyewitness identification.
At a more subtle and dangerous level, there were veiled hints of hard forensic evidence linking Martin Bryant to Port Arthur, including convincing displays by police officers holding up semi-automatic weapons on television.
The inference was obvious: Bryant was holding a smoking gun when apprehended by police, with his fingerprints all over the weapon and its ammunition.
Leading on from this first gross untruth, it was hoped the public would assume a second gross untruth: that the bullets and fragments found at Port Arthur would match “Bryant’s Guns” as displayed on national television.
It was all a pathetic rort. Martin Bryant was not apprehended with a smoking gun, there were no fingerprints on the guns and ammo displayed by police, and the bullets, fragments and cartridge cases found at Port Arthur did not provide a perfect match with the weapons displayed on national television.
Some of these points were accurately reported by the author in 1997 and early 1998, then in December of that year the Australian Police Journal decided to print an article by Sergeant Gerard Dutton, titled “The Port Arthur Shooting Incident”.
Dutton took over as Officer in Charge of the Tasmania Ballistics Section in 1995, and had eleven years ballistics experience at the time the Port Arthur mass murder took place. Though his article is flagged “ballistics evidence” on every page of the APJ, there is no discussion of guided projectiles in flight. Most of the eighteen-page article is a chronology of events at Port Arthur from a police perspective, with repeated references to the two weapons allegedly used in the mass murder by “Bryant”.
Because of the latter weapons content it might have been more accurate to flag each page of Sergeant Dutton’s article “Forensic Firearms Identification”, the correct term used by forensic sciences for this work.
This report is not intended as a thesis on forensic science, but there is a need to explain briefly in general terms how firearms examiners go about proving that an individual bullet was fired by an individual weapon. The word “individual” is extremely important here, because in the Port Arthur case, it means proving scientifically that the bullets and bullet fragments found at Port Arthur were fired by the exact weapons found by the police at Seascape Cottages, and subsequently shown to the public on television as “the murder weapons”. Not fired by a similar weapon or class of weapons please note, but only by the weapons displayed by police.
There are two stages in this process. First the firearms examiner checks to confirm that the bullets, cartridge cases and weapons all match in the general sense, known in the trade as “Class Characteristics”. For example, in the case of the 5.56-mm bullets and cartridges found at Port Arthur, would they fit the Colt AR-15 weapon found at Seascape? The answer is yes, but those bullets and cartridge cases would also fit thousands of other Colt AR-15s not found at Seascape, and many other different brands of firearm chambered for the same 5.56-mm round. No one including the author is disputing the simple class identification made by Dutton, but it is utterly meaningless in terms of individually matching the bullets and cartridge cases at Port Arthur with the weapons found at Seascape. To do this requires the second part of the process, predictably called “Individual Characteristics”.
No two weapons manufactured are the same. Every single one has marks in the barrel and breech, and on the action, that are unique. And because weapons are made from exceedingly hard “tool grade” steel, these unique marks leave unique impressions on every bullet and cartridge case cycled through them, all of which are made from softer metal than the weapon itself. Using special microscopes, firearms examiners try to match the unique impressions on the fired bullets and cases found at the crime scene, with unique impressions on test rounds fired from the suspect weapon or weapons in the laboratory.
This is more easily explained with pictures shown here, which are from America, not Port Arthur.
Exhibit 1 shows typical rifling marks left on the soft metal of bullets, and exhibit 2 shows matched striations on two bullets, one from the crime scene and another fired in the lab. Now the cartridge cases:
Exhibit 3 shows matching breech marks,
while exhibit 4 shows matching ejector marks.
With the exception of exhibit 1, which is included to show the variations in rifling marks on otherwise identical bullets, all other exhibits show “Individual Characteristics”, sufficient to satisfy any firearms examiner that the bullets and cartridge cases under examination were fired by the suspect weapon.
Sergeant Dutton’s eighteen-page article on “ballistics” includes many photographs, but not one of them shows individual characteristics matching the bullets and cases at Port Arthur with the weapons at Seascape. Without individual characteristic matches, the weapons are no more valuable than scrap iron, and absolutely useless as evidence against Martin Bryant.
The pristine weapons from Seascape you were shown on national television, only got that way because the Tasmanian Police Service borrowed many spare parts from the New South Wales Police firearms library. Before their startling resurrection to nearly new condition, both weapons were very badly damaged, a critical fact the Australian television networks rather artfully forgot to tell you.
How the weapons got that that way is of considerable importance in tracking down those really responsible for the mass murder at Port Arthur on 28 April 1996.
If we are to believe the media and Tasmanian Government, the Colt AR-15 serial number SP128807,
cycled and fired a minimum of 35 rounds faultlessly at Port Arthur and other crime scenes. Then, inexplicably, the AR-15 allegedly had an “accident” at Seascape Cottage, which destroyed part of the rifling in the barrel, most of the breech, and part of the receiver – the moving part of the weapon which includes the firing pin and extractor claws for the cartridge cases.
This was attributed to a “faulty cartridge” which exploded in the breech.
Oh, really, and how did it do all that damage in a weapon proofed to withstand 55,000 p.s.i?
In Sergeant Dutton’s own words, the damage caused by the burst cartridge showed “Amazingly high chamber pressure”, and “I had never seen a cartridge case that had been subjected to so much pressure that it caused brass to extrude substantially into apertures in the bolt face.”
What would normally be needed to cause this kind of damage is too much of the correct powder in the cartridge case, or a different much faster-burning powder or explosive in the cartridge case. Because the correct power in this particular cartridge case fills it right up to the neck, it could not have been the first example, i.e. too much of the correct powder.
This leaves us with a different much faster-burning powder or explosive. With such powders the grains are typically much smaller, allowing a greatly increased flame front, and thus the ability to increase pressures at a far higher rate. Special Forces put this knowledge to good use if they wish to destroy enemy artillery pieces behind the lines. A sizeable chunk of C3 plastic explosive is strategically placed inside the breech of the artillery piece, then later detonated, destroying the breech and rendering the weapon useless.
What this process achieved with the AR-15 at Seascape was so much damage to the barrel, breech and receiver, that forensic “Individual Characteristic” matches could not be made with the fired bullets and cases found at Port Arthur.
Now why on earth would you do that, if the AR-15 in question really was the same one used at Port Arthur, then afterwards positioned neatly next to alleged gunman Martin Bryant in Seascape, ready to be collected and identified by the local constabulary the following morning?
Martin Bryant (or his body), and a weapon that could be individually matched to the bullets and cases at Port Arthur. Perfect! But only if the gunman at Port Arthur really was Martin Bryant, which we now know he was not.
Best to look at the effect of the damage in reverse then. What the explosion and resulting damage really achieved, was preventing police and others from proving that this particular AR-15 was not the weapon used at Port Arthur, but merely a decoy designed to draw attention towards Bryant.
As Arthur Conan-Doyle once wrote: “When you have ruled out the impossible, then whatever remains, no matter how improbable, is the truth.”
There is one other critical point of evidence about the “exploding” AR-15. When the charge in the cartridge detonated, the resulting blast was sufficient to blow the bottom of the magazine right off, and cause severe damage in the immediate vicinity of the trigger, where Martin Bryant’s finger would have been if he was handling the weapon at the time. Most explosions of this kind neatly amputate a finger or two, and shred the skin on the rest of the hand. In addition there is very significant marking of the flesh by firearms discharge residue (FDR for short), caused by microscopic particles of burned or unburned propellant impregnating the flesh at high velocity.
When Bryant was taken into custody he had severe burns to his back and left-hand side caused by the Seascape fire, but no injuries or serious burns to his hands, and no trace of FDR. So Bryant did not fire the Colt AR-15 found at Seascape Cottage, end of story.
The other weapon displayed so enthusiastically by police was a Belgian FN-FAL serial number G3434 in 7.62-mm calibre,
but alas, this weapon was also severely damaged before the NSW police firearms library helped out with copious spare parts.
Unlike the AR-15, found in Seascape itself, the FN-FAL was recovered from the roof of an outhouse some distance from the main building.
This in itself is decidedly odd, with Martin Bryant allegedly in the cross-hairs of an entire highly trained Special Operations Group all evening and all night. How is Bryant supposed to have put it up on the roof?
There was no exploding cartridge in the breech of the FN-FAL, but by a rare coincidence beyond the calculations of most actuaries, the effect of the damage was exactly the same as that inflicted on the AR-15. The barrel, breech, and receiver were damaged beyond hope of making “Individual Characteristic” matches with bullets and cartridge cases found at the various crime scenes. So, once again, police and others were unable to prove the FN-FAL was not one of the weapons used at Port Arthur.
It is the FN-FAL rather than the AR-15 which provides absolute scientific proof the two weapons were merely dummies designed to deflect attention away from the guilty parties, probably dumped at Seascape as stage props long before any of the shooting started.
Despite being terminally damaged, nearly all of the AR-15 components were located close to the weapon in Seascape, though the pistol grip was missing and was never found. However, the FN-FAL lacked a major component called the “return spring tube assembly”, plus its butt plate and magazine. These are all large items impossible to miss in thorough forensic searches of crime scenes. The forensic teams went over every crime scene with a fine-tooth comb several times, leaving no stone or even a blade of grass unturned.
I have resisted the temptation to provide the exact size of the return spring tube assembly because I do not have precise, technical details to hand, but believe me when I say it is big.
Many years ago I field-stripped and reassembled FN-FALs dozens of times, and can assure readers the assembly is a minimum of six inches long, with the large springs inside made of tempered steel.
Without its return spring assembly (and magazine), the FN-FAL cannot fire at all, proving the damaged weapon found at Seascape played no part in the Port Arthur mass murder. Evidently it had been carefully “damaged” at a location a considerable distance away from either Port Arthur or Seascape, before the mass murder took place.
This of course proves that the mass murder was a pre-meditated crime, one that Australian counter-terrorist personnel must solve if we are to prevent further attacks on this nation. Exactly how they go about this is their concern, but counter-terrorist personnel are reminded that their pay packets are generously filled each month by Australian taxpayers, not by international lobby groups in Canberra and Hobart.
A good starting point for counter-terrorism would be to hunt for the real 5.56-mm and 7.62-mm weapons actually used at Port Arthur on 28 April 1996 to kill or wound fifty-seven civilians, and dead-block the Daihatsu Feroza driven by Linda White.
We now know the weapons used were not the crippled AR-15 and FN-FAL found at Seascape, and we also know the shooter was not Martin Bryant, because he was completely contained by SOG personnel throughout the entire period in the same Seascape compound as both crippled weapons.
Find the real weapons used and they will hopefully in turn lead you to the real shooters, though the trail is now cold. Either way, it is now time for the authorities to stop pussyfooting around, and get on with a serious counter-terrorist investigation.
There are those in power determined that a serious investigation should not take place, and recently went out of their way to discourage me in particular.
Some months ago my 21 and 18 year-old, children inexplicably failed their police “integrity checks”, essential here in Western Australia for anyone wishing to get a decent job.
Stunned by this I lodged an official complaint, and then made several discreet inquiries. Eventually I was told that a powerful federal politician had persuaded a police unit in Canberra, to flag me in the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence computer as a “security risk”, which is a bit rich bearing in mind my former (very high) security clearances with NATO.
Because my work on Port Arthur focuses solely and openly on protecting Australian national security, logic and security protocols dictate it is not I, but the powerful federal politician who poses a significant security risk to this nation.
Once the illegal false data about me was entered into the BCI computer, there was a trickle-down effect on my children, who were then found guilty of associating with a known security risk – their own father!
Fortunately there are officials in Western Australia with very high ethics, and the entire sordid mess was sorted out in less than two weeks. My children now once again have positive integrity status, and I have the name of the powerful federal politician who tried to destroy the credibility of this family. The politician in question is advised not to try this again, or members of the public might start wondering
exactly why he chose to take this illegal action in the first place.
The author wishes to acknowledge the expert assistance of a leading American firearms examiner, who for the present prefers to remain anonymous
12. MARTIN BRYANT GETS A VISITOR
Mrs Carleen Bryant has been allowed her first contact visit with her son Martin, more than three years after he was first arrested and charged with the mass murder at Port Arthur.
Martin was very pleased to see his mum and was quite forthcoming during the visit, but for the present at least Carleen prefers that full details not be published. This is understandable because premature release of the information could lead to a renewed shock wave of media vilification against her son, designed to suppress what he has always maintained is the truth about Port Arthur.
A comprehensive report will be published later.
In the meantime, you might like to ponder on a society which allows an intellectually impaired young man like Martin to be locked away and tortured by means of sensory deprivation, without raising the slightest murmur of protest. Have we all lost our way, or has the media finally achieved the mind-bending abilities attributed to it by George Orwell in his book?
Those who prefer to sit on the sidelines and let this obscene travesty of justice run its course, should always remember that the same thing could happen to their fathers, brothers or sons.
13. HARD SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE AT PORT ARTHUR
Since the blatant but failed attempt on Martin Bryant’s life in December 2000, the mainstream media and other interest groups have gone into overdrive, attempting to deflect public attention away from the core scientific evidence that proves his innocence. The methods vary but the objective appears to remain the same: use unacceptable hearsay testimony and inaccurate guesswork to overwhelm the existing hard scientific evidence, thereby denying Martin Bryant the trial he has not yet been allowed.
As any competent police detective will confirm, hearsay evidence and guesswork are instant death to any serious inquiry, leading investigators and readers into numerous blind alleys from which there is little chance of escape. For example, suggesting the mass murder was “probably” planned to take place on the Isle of the Dead near Port Arthur, or on board a ferry on its way to the Isle of the Dead, deflects away from the reality that the principal crime scene was the Broad Arrow Café. At the same time this approach indirectly implies a specific form of advance planning that can never be proved in scientific terms. Great material for a “whodunit” crime novel perhaps, but useless and confusing within the confines of a serious mass murder investigation.
Attempts have also been made to “stretch” the time the shooter actually fired inside the Broad Arrow Café, and the total number of rounds expended. This is a far more damaging claim, leading as it does to the inevitable image of a slower clumsy shooter, one that might more easily be compared with random killers like Kip Kinkel in Springfield, or Michael McDermott in Wakefield.
Though known to be a proficient shooter, Michael McDermott used a total of seventy-seven rounds to kill just seven of his work mates trapped in their office at Edgewater Technology. As with Kip Kinkel in the school canteen in Springfield, most of McDermott’s rounds missed their targets completely, resulting in bullet and fragment holes all over the room. Not one of McDermott’s seven victims was hit in the head or upper neck, unlike the first nineteen victims in the Broad Arrow Café during April 1996. Each of the latter was coldly dispatched with an expert single shot to the head,
After the bodies at Springfield and Wakefield were removed, both crime scenes bore all the hallmarks of a major military engagement: ejected cartridge cases by the score, and dozens of expended whole bullets and fragments that missed their targets buried in the walls, ceiling and furniture. Springfield and Wakefield were forensic gold mines, littered with enough exhibits to keep the crime labs busy for months.
This was certainly not the case in the Broad Arrow Café at Port Arthur. As the official forensic diagram compiled by the New South Wales Police scientific team shows in great detail (see picture), there were only 29 ejected cartridge cases, and a total of seven bullet fragments. We know that all 29 bullets hit their intended targets because we have the post mortem results for the victims, and we also know that fragments from three of those same bullets injured a further three victims, resulting in 32 dead or injured for only 29 shots fired.
“POSITION OF CARTRIDGE CASES”
CLICK HERE FOR FULL SIZED MAP
The forensic diagram also shows limited damage to the floor and furniture, but it must be remembered this damage does not include any residual bullets, bullet fragments or bone chippings. So far as the investigation is concerned, the damage serves only to illustrate the likely course or direction of travel of a bullet, or bullet fragment, or bone chipping, and cannot be meaningfully “added” to the seven existing bullet fragments in order to provide a more dramatic expanded total.
The fragments require further explanation. Due to the unusual mass and velocity combination of the 5.56-mm NATO (.223 Remington) round at close range, bullets do not stay intact when striking hard targets, as they would normally do in the case of the old .303 Lee Enfield round of World War 2 fame. On contact with the hard bone of a human skull for example, the old 150 grain .303 bullet would create an entry wound, then use its mass [weight] and resulting inertia to continue through the skull and punch a larger exit wound through the rear.
Though the .223 Remington round used at Port Arthur has the same overall kinetic energy as a .303 Lee Enfield at the point of impact, it lacks the mass and inertia needed to continue through hard bone because it only weighs 55 grains. The massive kinetic energy expended at the point of impact with hard bone, causes the little.223 Remington bullet to fragment, in turn frequently causing the skull to explode due to a sudden increase in internal hydrostatic pressure. The result? Bullet fragments and bone chips continuing on from the primary target to injure further victims.
This ugly characteristic of the .223 Remington round at close range, has been proved on hundreds of occasions during the last three months in Palestine. Children hit in the shin or knee by identical rounds fired by Israeli soldiers and settlers, invariably have their legs amputated, because the shattered mess of bullet fragments muddled up with hundreds of bone chips, makes effective remedial surgery impossible.
Where Port Arthur is concerned, remember that unlike the Hoddle Street and other open-air murders, the mass murder in the Broad Arrow Café took place within a completely confined space, thereby restricting residual evidence to the same confined area. To prove this mass murder was the same as (or even vaguely similar to) the random events at Springfield and Wakefield, would require at least two dozen bullet holes and associated 100 – 150 bullet fragments to validate the comparison.
There were none of these items, and because the mere seven fragments found in the Broad Arrow most probably originated from the same three frag through-shots that injured victims 30-32, the crime scene was almost spookily clean. This, shrieked the lack of evidence, was the work of a man who never missed his targets. It may have been this very lack of visible evidence that led to the Tasmanian Government order for the premature destruction of the internal structure of the Broad Arrow Café. Not to “hide evidence” as some have speculated, but rather to hide the more damning total lack of evidence or artifacts: evidence and artifacts that would later be required in court to validate the “lone nut” and thus “random” shooting.
Anyone trying to subtly deflect away from the harsh reality of the expert shooter in the Broad Arrow, might imply that the thorough official forensic diagram was later “altered” or “forged” to fit the evidence submitted in the Supreme Court of Tasmania. This is not only an insult to the entire New South Wales Police scientific team, it is also hopelessly irrational. Any attempt at forgery down the line would be aimed at significantly increasing the “evidence” in order to enhance the illusion of a “lone nut” random event. The New South Wales Police scientific team did not forge, alter, or delete anything. By generously placing its official forensic diagram in the public domain, the scientific team has provided you the reader with the official means to prove the Tasmanian Government’s story of the day was, and remains, an impossible lie.
The alleged extended “total shooting time” in the Broad Arrow Café is easy to rebut. The audio tracks of two amateur video cameras filming at the time of the shooting accurately recorded the incredible speed of the shots, and were later submitted to the Supreme Court of Tasmania as evidence. The author has copies of these videos, both of which were subjected to extensive testing by audio experts using sophisticated computer audio analytical programs. There is not the slightest trace of forgery or editing breaks on either tape, both of which prove the astonishing rate of fire of the expert combat shooter. at Port Arthur. There is not an amateur shooter in the land who could get even close.
Alternative views on Port Arthur are encouraged, because it is the democratic right of every individual to speak his or her mind on any subject. In this context it matters not whether the speaker is a New South Wales farmer, a Victorian security guard, or a Port Arthur survivor obliged to ride the harsh and emotional roller coaster of extended psychiatric hypnosis in Melbourne, Victoria, at Tasmanian Government expense. No matter who might decide to take the stand, he or she is entitled and encouraged to speak independently on the matter.
The down side is that those who care about Australia and Australian national security should be very careful with their selection of words, especially at this late stage with the Federal and Tasmanian Governments known to be severely shaken by the reality that their best efforts have failed to quash the Port Arthur “conspiracy”. In some cases the public might be tempted to question the underlying motives of those who seek to mislead their audiences, and subtly deflect away from the known hard scientific facts.
Remember. Collectively as Australians we allowed government to imprison an intellectually impaired young man for a series of crimes he could not possibly have committed. At the time we all stood by meekly and allowed this to happen while raising not the slightest objection to Bryant’s severe abuse while on remand in Risdon Prison, nor to the fact that he should have been provided with a qualified guardian to protect him from his own lawyers. It is time to forget personal ego trips and “control” of the Port Arthur story. Martin Bryant needs a trial and he needs it now, before someone somewhere has time to arrange another “accident” in his lonely cell.
14. REINFORCING MARTIN BRYANT’S “GUILT”
Academic calls for “mass murderer” DNA analysis
* Copyright Joe Vialls – April 2001 – All Rights Reserved, 45 Merlin Drive, Carine, Western Australia 6062On Sunday 9th December, Martin Bryant’s mother Carleen phoned to say she was disturbed to hear that authorities were demanding that Martin undergo full DNA analysis, in a bid to find out what makes a mass murderer tick. Obviously concerned about her only son’s welfare, Carleen Bryant continued nervously “I suppose this means they will want to interrogate him [Martin] all over again.
At the time of her telephone call, Mrs Bryant was staying with friends on the mainland, and the information on Martin and his DNA was relayed by a contact in Hobart who had just read The Sunday Tasmanian. Perhaps luckily for Martin and his mother, the information provided by her contact in Hobart was incomplete. For the present at least, Martin is not about to be tied down so that his blood can be forcibly extracted, or once again be subjected to the modern Australian equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition.
The call for Martin’s DNA apparently originated from Professor Paul Wilson of Bond University in Queensland, touted by The Sunday Tasmanian newspaper as a leading criminologist. Wilson claims”There’s a lot of interest in the whole area of genetic pre-disposition to crime”…”especially with DNA technology advances, there is a big argument for looking at Bryant, it’s a unique case.”
Martin Bryant is certainly a unique case, but examining his DNA will not help at all in identifying mass murderers. As most readers are already aware, hard scientific evidence exists today proving that Bryant never visited Port Arthur on 28th April 1996, and therefore cannot possibly be a mass murderer.
Presumably Professor Paul Wilson has not yet been advised that nineteen of the twenty dead in the Broad Arrow Café were killed with single shots to the head fired from the gunman’s right hip. In total only 29 rounds were fired in the Café, killing twenty and wounding another twelve. This was a staggering technical achievement, a feat so far beyond the known capabilities of an intellectually impaired invalid like Bryant, that it beggars the imagination.
Compare this deadly accuracy with the performance of experienced Irish Loyalist gunman Torrens Knight, who in company with one other, used a total of 120 rounds to kill eight and injure another eleven in the Catholic Rising Sun pub at Greysteel, Northern Ireland, during 1993. Only two of the victims were hit in the head, and most of the rounds missed completely, burying themselves in the furniture and walls.
Anyone deluded enough to suggest that intellectually impaired Martin Bryant was three times as accurate as two of the top Loyalist shooters in Northern Ireland, should probably make an appointment with his or her psychiatrist as a matter of urgency.
Predictably perhaps, the Tasmanian Police Service does not appear keen to participate in any new DNA adventures where Bryant is concerned. According to the newspaper, a police representative said that the “CrimTrac” database uses only junk DNA for identification purposes which does not contain any detailed genetic information. Any detailed examination of Bryant’s DNA might bring to light the embarrassing fact that no DNA matches were made between Bryant and the Broad Arrow, nor between Bryant and the expended shell cases found on the floor.
Put bluntly, the Tasmanian Police Service has no scientific evidence at all linking Martin Bryant to Port Arthur. Today, nearly five years after the event, TasPol has still not conducted the routine procedure of walking Bryant around the crime scenes to “validate” his seventy-two guilty pleas extracted under duress during November 1996.
In the view of this author, some senior Tasmanian Police Officers would probably be prepared to walk over broken glass in their bare feet, rather than conduct another interview with Martin Bryant, this time properly recorded on dual videos not subject to the various “breakdowns” claimed during his initial police interview in July 1996.
More interesting than Professor Wilson’s comments, are remarks the newspaper attributes to forensic psychologist Ian Joblin, who submitted a 30-page clinical psychological evaluation of Bryant to the Supreme Court of Tasmania, based on four days of interviews. Mr Joblin may be better known nationwide to the public for his work as clinical psychological counselor to the “notorious” and high-profile John Freidrich, Chief Executive of the doomed Victorian NSCA during the early nineties.
Readers may recall that after trying desperately to dig himself out of the mess he eventually found himself in, John Freidrich a.k.a. “Iago”, allegedly by shot himself through the back of the head with a handgun – twice. Police recorded a verdict of suicide, although no suicide note was ever found.
“The Sunday Tasmanian quoted Mr Joblin as saying that anxiety and stress after Port Arthur may have affected Bryant’s demeanour during those four days of interviews and it was time for more research. “I’d like to see him again to compare notes” Joblin said, “To try and understand …. five years later.”
If these quotes are accurate, then we have a truly extraordinary situation. Out of his own mouth, the only forensic psychologist to interview Bryant appears to be suggesting that his reports may have been different if Bryant was not under stress after Port Arthur, though straightforward stress can have nothing to do with it.
At the time of these interviews Bryant was in agony from third-degree burns to the back and side, suffered when Seascape caught fire. There can be few stresses more powerful than those induced by third degree burns. If the quotes in The Sunday Tasmanian are not accurate, Mr Joblin should ask the newspaper to print a retraction.
Quite obviously neither Mr Joblin or anyone else has the right to talk to convicted felon Martin Bryant without his consent, and because Bryant is an intellectually impaired invalid, any applicant would also need to seek consent from his guardian. Because the Tasmanian Government and Supreme Court blatantly failed to provide Bryant with a guardian, the only person at this late stage who can lay claim to this position is his own next-of-kin and mother, Mrs Carleen Bryant. Mrs Bryant has confirmed for me that Mr Joblin has not approached her on this matter.
One can reasonably ask why all of the sudden renewed interest in Bryant after five years of almost total neglect, but the answer is obscure. Perhaps the best clue is that Risdon Prison suddenly received a large number of written apologies for Martin Bryant in the week leading up to “Martin Bryant Sorry Day” on 22nd November, two weeks before the newspaper was published.
The apologies were signed by ordinary Australians, all seriously concerned that Bryant had not received a trial, and wishing him well. By all accounts, this sudden rush of mail to Risdon led to a limited number of panic attacks around the Australian establishment, especially withinTasmania.
Within days of the same event, the author suddenly received multiple inquiries from the mainstream media asking for interviews, with at least one caller showing considerable ingenuity. Because we have a silent telephone line, Radio 2UE managed to find the telephone number of the house across the road here in Perth, and asked its owner to walk over and ask me to call the John Laws Programme in Sydney. Apparently Mr Laws wished to speak to me on air about “Martin Bryant Sorry Day”.
My response to a producer of the John Laws Programme, was that I could see no point in going live to air on the matter, unless a format could be devised which provided ordinary people with the background, i.e. why we had to arrange “Martin Bryant Sorry Day” in the first place.
After thinking about the options, I suggested that John Laws find a commissioned Tasmanian Police Officer to go head-to-head with me on live radio, thereby providing an opportunity to convince the Australian public once and for all time that there is absolutely no evidence linking Martin Bryant to Port Arthur. On the flip side of the coin, it might provide an opportunity for a major Australian media star to put me down completely, and thus rid the poor harassed Australian politicians of an arch “Conspiracy Theorist”.
But I would only be put down if I failed to convince Australian listeners that my independent investigation was accurate, and the Tasmanian Police Service investigation of 1996 inaccurate. A calculated risk by any media standard. To be fair, the producer seemed quite enthusiastic and said she would pass on my offer to John Laws. Then she told me John Laws was going on holiday, and then of course there was Christmas. Oh well, maybe we can talk about it again in the New Year.
Regardless of who wants to interview whom about what, the sudden resurgence of interest in Martin Bryant is the single most important factor. No matter whether it is academics and doctors who wish to use him as a human guinea pig, or the media and others who might prefer to vilify him all over again, his name has once again been put in front of ordinary Australians. And so it should be.
Our initial collective lack of concern for an intellectually impaired young man tortured into admitting guilt for a mass murder he did not commit, shames Australia and Australians as no other single act could. We owe it to ourselves to ensure that Martin Bryant receives the trial he is entitled to in law.
Australian Officials Recklessly Endanger Martin Bryant’s Life
Vialls Investigations
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 11 JULY 2003
During 1996, Martin Bryant was sentenced to life imprisonment for the alleged murder of 35 people at Port Arthur in Tasmania. According to Attorney General Ray Groom, Bryant was the “most dangerous man in Australia”, who would be detained inside a custom-built Risdon Prison hospital cell “for the rest of his natural life”.
During the same time frame, television networks and newspapers alike ensured that Martin Bryant also became the most hated man in Australia. Much emphasis was placed on Bryant allegedly shooting a child hiding behind her mother’s skirt’s, then shooting another helpless child cowering behind a tree. According to the hysterical media, here we had the very worst kind of prisoner: Not only a mass murderer, but a ruthless child killer as well.
Australians nationwide were and are still taught to hate Bryant with a passion, to the point where dozens spray foul graffiti over the Tasmanian hospital walls, and tens of thousands mutter how they will kill Martin with their bare hands if they ever get the chance. Impossible of course, but is it? Quite suddenly since 21 June 2003, and apparently due to an inexplicable policy reversal, the public have already been given two chances to kill Martin Bryant, and will be generously provided with more chances in the future.
On Saturday 21 June 2003, another prisoner hit Martin in the face. In the words of Prison director Graeme Barber, it was “Just an incident between himself and another inmate who have lived in that environment together for the past few years.” Prison inmates concur with this statement, but then suddenly, Martin Bryant, most dangerous and hated prisoner in Australia, was bundled into a prison bus and driven to the Royal Hobart Hospital for a “check up”. Typically this journey takes between 15 and 20 minutes each way. One day later, the Australian media openly reported the details.
Exactly two weeks later, on Saturday 5 July 2003, another prisoner threw cleaning fluid in Martin’s face. Normal eye irrigation was initiated, as it would be in any other industrial situation. But then instead of following the normal procedures [any antidote for the known chemical followed much later by a vision test], Martin Bryant, most dangerous and hated prisoner in Australia, was bundled into a prison bus and driven to the Royal Hobart Hospital for a “check up”. As with the first incident, the Australian media openly reported the details one-day later.
Compare these two startling breaches of security with far more serious injuries that “happened” in December 2000. On that occasion Martin Bryant was suddenly frog-marched to the distant remand wing of Risdon Prison, where he was found some time later with serious stab wounds. One particular wound in his thigh had cut down almost as far as the femoral artery, and required ten stitches. Martin Bryant, most dangerous and hated prisoner in Australia, was NOT bundled down to the Royal Hobart Hospital for a “check up”. A doctor was called to the hospital and repaired Martin on the spot. This is proper procedure for a high-risk prisoner.
To summarize, Martin Bryant has been incarcerated inside Risdon Prison without a break since early 1996, a period of more than seven years. In all that time he has been subject to incredibly high security, and never been allowed outside the walls. Then all of a sudden, starting on 21 June 2003, security is removed to the point where he is driven in a bus to the Royal Hobart Hospital along an insecure route, not once but twice in two weeks, for trivial injures inflicted by two different men. The media widely report both incidents. Why?
The most likely answer to anyone with ant-terrorist experience, is a genuinely chilling scenario that should be of concern not only Martin Bryant, but also to the prison officers who escort him, and to their wives and families. Bryant is the only man alive who can tell the Australian people in open court exactly what happened to him in the days and hours leading up to his arrival at Seascape Cottages, and who was involved in luring him there. Hard forensic evidence has already cleared him of any presence at Port Arthur. As pressure grows for Martin Bryant to be given his day in court, he becomes a greater and greater risk to the professional killers who were really behind the horrific mass murder at Port Arthur. They would sleep a lot easier if he were dead.
Killing Martin Bryant inside the prison has so far proved impossible, though it must be said that at least one attempt has already been made. Such a killing would also result in an undesirable inquiry which might or might not implicate one or more members of the staff. Best to do the job outside then, thereby severing all possible links to officialdom, and to any “fellow travellers” in the Tasmanian political establishment. So how can it be arranged?
This is bog-standard stuff for professionals, and considerably easier than robbing an armored car loaded with cash or bullion. First establish a pattern, which in this case means inflicting minor injuries on Bryant, thus enabling him to be sent to the Royal Hobart Hospital several times for “check ups”. This procedure also sets precedents, making it seem perfectly normal for Martin Bryant to be shuttled backwards and forwards in a prison bus, despite the fact this only started a few weeks ago in June 2003. Make sure the newspapers relay this revised Orwellian “normality” to the Australian public.
Study the behavior of Bryant’s escorts when they make the first trip to the Royal Hobart Hospital. They will be jumpy of course, because this is the first time the most dangerous and hated prisoner in Australia has been allowed outside the prison walls in seven years. Discreetly study the speed of the bus, traffic lights, and road intersections. Check intercept points, monitor police and any other relevant radio frequencies.
During the second [and possibly third] dummy runs to the Royal Hobart Hospital, run another check on the escorts. Getting used to it, more normal now. Escorts relaxed and cracking jokes, no longer paying attention to their surroundings or possible risks. Fine-tune operation for next, final, trip from Risdon Prison.
Exactly which methods and means will be used on the day is a matter of speculation, though it seems certain that under the circumstances “saturation” will be ordered, i.e. a terminal job for all on the bus, leaving no witnesses and ensuring swift efficient exfiltration. Remember that the people who organized and carried out the ruthless murder of 35 people at Port Arthur in April 1996, will not be worried about killing a mere handful of completely insignificant prison officers in order to silence Martin Bryant. Nor will they lose any sleep over grieving wives and children.
The Orwellian media will tell you that “vengeful” members of the public launched a “completely unexpected” attack on ‘hated’ Martin Bryant as he left the Royal Hobart Hospital to return to Risdon Prison. There will then be a massive police search, but no offenders will ever be caught. The widows and children will try to get on with their lives, though severely hampered by hopelessly inadequate compensation. You will go back to sleep, reassured that “the killer” is dead.
If Prison Director Graeme Barber wishes to prove me wrong, or wants to make me look stupid, there is one certain way of doing it, and I will have no objections. It is simply this: Keep Martin Bryant safe inside Risdon Prison until a trial can be forced for him, and order your subordinates to provide the required care which has been visibly absent these past few weeks. If all else fails and the next “incident” is a broken arm or leg, pick up the telephone and call for professional counter-terrorist assistance, plus armored vehicles to take your charge to the Royal Hobart Hospital.
So Mr Barber, you have been warned of the risks – in advance. If Bryant is allowed outside Risdon prison again, and just happens to die one way or the other, guess who will be the responsible person?
Joe Vialls
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