Spuriouser and Spuriouser!

Peering back through the mists of time, another case of spurious retraction - of a statement which inadvertently reveals - just another bog-standard political conspiracy.

The Daily Mail ('Tear up the sentencing guidelines and jail EVERY looter': Crackdown on looters revealed) reports an incautious statement in court by a JP, Novello Noades:

Our directive for anyone involved in the rioting is a custodial sentence. That is the directive we have had - it is a very serious matter.

And indeed, as the Guardian discovered, emails were circulated to justices' clerks, telling them

...you should advise magistrates to commit to the crown court cases of commercial burglary, or handling … or violent disorder arising from the recent disturbances. There is a general acceptance that what occurred earlier this week is not covered by the sentencing guidelines and it will be very much the exception that such cases are sentenced in the magistrates courts...

These emails were sent by a 'senior justices clerk' in the London regional office of Her Majesty's Courts and Tribunals Service, that is to say, in effect, an official working for the Ministry of Justice, which was the body forced to release the emails in response to an FoI request. The reader is invited to consider how likely it is that this official produced these instructions on their own initiative and formulated them without guidance from higher up the political chain.

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Spurious Retraction: Goldstone

This is overdue; I'd been planning a longish post analysing the Goldstone 'retraction' which Israel and allies have of course accepted at face value - face value, that is, if you're not reading too closely and stick to the headline message.

But I think Ha'aretz pretty well has the essentials covered, and even provides an explanation for the spurious retraction.

Aaronovitch, Lies - a retraction

In my last post, David Aaronovitch: expert on lies, I stated that Aaronovitch's 2005 article we weren't lied to was "bollocks". It has come to my attention that this is a misleading statement.

Andrew Watt, of the voluminous and absorbing Chilcot's Cheating Us blog has pointed out that in fact the article is Voodoo Bollocks.

I acknowledge that while I did not intend to mislead, this was a half-truth which might have given an inaccurate impression, and that Dr Watt is entirely correct in his observations.

I am therefore glad to accord this correction prominence commensurate with that of the original statement.

I had considered merely appending a little footnote somewhere unobtrusive, perhaps even including a dismissive remark instructing the reader to conclude that it doesn't affect my main argument. I might even have adopted the common technique of silently editing the post, or the less common one of just deleting the original while avoiding embarrassing 'page not found' errors by substituting a blank page. However, not being a paid journalist, I can afford some professional ethics.

Apologies to both of my readers. I should have been more careful.

UPDATE 29 May 2011:

via Jay Rosen, via Crooked Timber: the most spurious and creepy retraction I've come across yet.

As reported by the Washington Times
:
John DiIulio, the former director of the White House faith-based initiative office, yesterday apologized for saying that President Bush's domestic priorities are determined exclusively by political considerations.

Using words uttered hours earlier by White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, who called Mr. DiIulio's remarks in the January edition of Esquire magazine "baseless and groundless," the first high-ranking Bush official to leave the administration asked for forgiveness and vowed never to speak or write again about his short White House stint.

"My criticisms were groundless and baseless due to poorly chosen words and examples. I sincerely apologize and I am deeply remorseful," Mr. DiIulio said in a statement.

Spurious Retraction Syndrome (or: do you really want to say it's straight out of a textbook?): Dr Hunt on Dr Kelly

There have been a few remarks about recent statements in the press by one of the pathologists in the Kelly case, Nicholas Hunt. Unfortunately Hunt chose the Sunday Times to speak to, so the first edit of his interview is behind the Murdoch paywall. angrysoba provided this excerpt from the Mail:

Dr Hunt says he found up to a dozen cuts on Dr Kelly's wrist, each around 2in to 3in long, one of which opened the ulnar artery. 'Some cuts were very shallow, some were deeper and deeper, which is typical of someone feeling their way. You have a knife, apply light pressure and realise that it actually takes a bit more effort and you get more bold as your resolve increases. It's one of the classic features of self-inflicted injury.' He adds that there was clear evidence Dr Kelly repeatedly dislodged clots or scabs to ensure he continued bleeding. 'His wrist was red so he must have been doing this for some time.'

which is notable for the fact that Hunt says some cuts were shallow, others 'deeper and deeper', thus implying what appears pretty implausible: that he was able to observe the order in which the cuts were made. Of course, the multiple cuts tend to indicate a suicide and progressively deeper cuts - but it's just a small example of the importation of conclusions into descriptions of data (see 'read-ahead', below).

A few other points:

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