George
Webster
of USA, writes on

Evans is squirting again

HAVE you see Richard Evans’ mealy-mouthed article in the current (January 2000) issue of BBC ‘History’
Magazine? To say that the content of the article is economical with the truth would be an understatement. For anyone who has followed the Lipstadt Trial, Evans’ version contains distortions and omissions which are so crass as to beggar belief.

One example: Evans (right) writes: “As an expert witness, my first duty was to the court, and the defence was not entitled in any way to influence what I wrote, though if it did not like my conclusions it always had the option of refusing to present my report to the court.”

Disingenuous is too mild an epithet for these assertions by Evans. The blindingly obvious omissions in this short passage are,

  • Evans makes no mention of the large
    retaining fee paid to him by the defendants,
    which
  • invites the obvious conclusion that he clearly WAS
    under the influence of, and obligation to, the
    defendants (ie his ‘first duty’ was not ‘to the
    court’, but to his paymasters);
  • of course, is the fact that the defendants were
    hardly likely to have passed over such monies for a
    report that had any chance whatsoever of being less
    than fully partisan to their cause (they clearly
    assessed

    their man well before awarding him the
    ‘contract’) – therefore the ‘option’ of their not
    presenting Evans’ report to the court would never been
    a serious consideration at any point to the
    defendants.

This would all be very amusing were it not for the fact that many people not au fait with the detail of the trial, and Evans’ financial relationship to the defendants, will read his article and come to totally unwarranted conclusions.

Through this scurrilous article, Evans has, once again, bequeathed the high moral ground to you.

George
Webster

Related item on this website:

Evans hired
to destroy career of New Zealand academic Dr Joel
Hayward
New
Zealand tribunal judges note: “Professor Orchard cited
examples in the Evans Report of exaggeration,
omission, minimisation and misrepresentation