I was going to write about how lies are always found out. That notion was based on my time as a media advisor to the provincial cabinet in Saskatchewan. The basic rule of thumb was that lying was verbotten. The truth will always come out in the end and telling lies and attempted cover-ups only make things worse. Someone will always have a fit of conscience and blab. Or someone to protect their own hide will blow the whistle. Or, just once a while, someone will tell the truth because it's the right thing to do. I'd been reminded of my days in Saskatchewan when I found out that someone hadn't got the memo, or decided to ignore it, about the cover-up surrounding former SAS man Royal Farran's murder of a Jewish teenager in Palestine in 1947 and kept details of his confession to his boss on file. I bet there were some deep sighs of relief when that boss refused to appear in court and Farran's written confession was ruled inadmissible as evidence on a highly dubious legal technicality. But then I found out that the cover-up over who ordered the 1948 Batang Kali Massacre in Malaya is to continue. The United Kingdom's Supreme Court ruled that Her Majesty's Government cannot be forced to order a public inquiry into why a Scots Guards patrol murdered 24 ethnic Chinese rubber plantation workers. And that Government has lied from Day One and obstructed police investigations into the killings. So, what blame there is dumped on the squaddies and their sergeants. No sensible person can believe the 24 executions were carried out on the initiative of a sergeant. That the sergeant usually identified as being the prime mover at the scene of the massacre was eventually made a Regimental Sergeant Major raises a whole new raft of questions. All we can hope is that some civil servant filed the truth away in a file that now lies waiting for public inspection at the National Archives. Too much to hope; probably.

See Batang Kali Revisited