The trial began nearly four months after Schapelle's arrest and the defence petitioned the court to have the inner bag fingerprinted in late March of 2005. The response from the judges to this defence petition was have the marijuana brought to the bench and then to rub their hands all over the plastic thereby destroying any chance of getting any identifiable fingerprints. While the media never reported this deliberate destruction of evidence by the judges photographers watching the proceedings covered the event in case photos were later required by their editors.
It was this action that allowed us to date this series of photographs to just over five months after Schapelle's arrest. The photograph below is one of the photos taken on that day and it is very obvious that the bags are brand new and this marijuana is fresh and could not possibly be the same marijuana discovered in her luggage five months before.
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| Fresh marijuana, intact delicate flowers in brand new plastic bags... 5 months after the arrest? |
Marijuana is cured so that it retains enough moisture to be pliable but dry enough to burn. If it is kept sealed in plastic and not removed daily it will begin to rot within a few weeks. Within two months obvious pale fungi will appear all over the marijuana. If it is removed from its plastic container regularly and allowed to dry out the marijuana will become brittle and the hair-like stamens and fine leaves will break off and form dust on the plastic and the bottom. After three months most of the stems will be visible as the flowering material separates to form crumbs on the bottom of the bag.
These are pictures of growing and cured marijuana from all over the world. What is obvious is that regardless of the strain or the colouring, marijuana flowers are delicate. The flowering heads are covered in very fine leaves that protrude outwards and each flower is covered in thousands of minute hair-like stamens.
And yet, when we look at the image of the marijuana presented in court there is no dust and no crumbs. The marijuana is fresh and the bags are brand new.
Below are images of the original marijuana alleged to have been discovered in Schapelle Corby's luggage. The Indonesian authorities had summoned the media within minutes of the 'discovery' and dozens of journalists, photographers and camera crews had gathered in the public customs area waiting for something to photograph or video. And yet, not a single sharp focus or close-up of the original marijuana taken that day exists in the public domain.
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| LEFT: Customs Officers reveal the marijuana for the media on the day of Schapelle's arrest. RIGHT: An insert enlarged by me. |
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| Another 'Customs Officer' shot.
However, indentations in the plastic from marijuana stems are clearly
visible on the side of the bag facing the camera. |
Many commentators have used a media observation that the bag of marijuana had the same shape as the body board bag as if this somehow made Schapelle or one of her family guilty. The plastic bags themselves are rectangular and made of a rigid plastic by the USA Company, "Space Bag", and these are the "Large" bags designed for travellers to fit into large suitcases. While no photos exist of a body-board-bag-shaped bag of marijuana, with the addition of a pair of flippers and the body board itself, the fit was so tight that the seams of the body board bag were visibly stretched and the zipper was broken by whoever had forced the drugs into the bag. The sealed plastic bag of marijuana above shows the battering it has endured.
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| Prosecutor Wiswantanu (right) helps one of the Judges to return the inner bag of marijuana to its outer containing bag. |
But when we look at the bag of marijuana presented to the court it becomes obvious that these plastic bags are brand new. There are no indentations, no dust, and not a single mark. The scratching from the marijuana stems is not there and no sign that this was ever crushed into tight-fitting body board bag. This marijuana is all fluffy and loose with its delicate fine dried leaves intact.
Where is the shrinkage? Whether the marijuana sweated in the plastic and then rotted or it was removed regularly to dry out, the moisture would not and could not remain in the plant. It would shrink and we would not see the full pillow-like bag of fluffy, pristine flowers supposedly well over five or six months old.
If you look at this picture closely, you can see dozens of fine, tiny dried leaves clinging to the flowers but a complete absence of dust on the plastic. And, regardless of what you may think or what you believe, the process where dried leaves turn to dust when subjected to constant handling is something that no 'spin' or propaganda can counter. And when you do discover such concealment, 'spin', and propaganda you know that you are being scammed.
You need to know the extent of this scam, who planted the drugs and why. Everything the public has been told about Schapelle, her arrest, her trial, her family, their financial status and their connection to known scumbags like McCauley and others has been a massive lie.
From Wiki:
The Big Lie (German: Große Lüge) is a propaganda technique. The expression was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his 1925 book Mein Kampf, about the use of a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously."
However, the big question facing the public is how the Australian Government could create such a massive lie that involved so many people from so many opposing factions.
John Howard had used his 'Deputy Sheriff of South-East Asia" status to form the Australian/Indonesian task force to combat transnational crime and he got away with such an insult to Indonesia because Indonesia was satisfying the conditions to end the USA trade sanctions. This put Australian police onto Indonesian soil and there was no hint that Indonesian police would be patrolling Sydney.
Alexander Downer demanded... DEMANDED... that the Indonesian court issue a warrant for the arrest of Abu Bakr Bashir and claimed that Bashir who couldn't keep his mouth shut for five minutes over his hatred of Westerners was the 'mastermind' behind the Bali bombing. Downer then insisted that Indonesia outlaw 'Jamaah Islamiah' which translated to "Islamic community". And, all through this time Professor Tim Lindsay, who was working for Downer's DFAT was trying to mollify Indonesia's fury by describing Howard's insults towards them as him "trying to help a struggling democracy."
Indonesia is a modern nation. Their universities are some of the finest in the world. The Indonesian State laboratory matched DNA to Bali bomb blast victims from little more than stains and every victim was accounted for. And yet, Howard's treatment of Indonesia suggested that they were backwards or primitive.
On the 20th of March 2004, seven months before Schapelle was arrested an Australian citizen, Van Tuong Nguyen, was convicted and sentenced in a Singapore court to be executed for a heroin trafficking charge. This caused an uproar in Canberra and as the months rolled past Ministers of Howard's government used words like "barbaric" to describe Singapore.
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| Van Tuong Nguyen executed on heroin charges in Singapore on 2nd of December 2004. |
If the execution of an Australian citizen for a drug the entire world condemns would cause such upset in the Howard cabinet, how great would the Australian anger be if an Australian citizen were executed by firing squad for a marijuana charge - a drug that many Australians and much of the world considers trivial.
And, by planting marijuana on a unsuspecting Australian tourist, the Australian/Indonesian task force to combat transnational crime that was actually formed to investigate 'Indonesian' crimes could not investigate this crime without attracting the criticism that Australia was protecting its own.
So, not only did the Indonesian Government deliberately plant 4Kg of marijuana on an unsuspecting tourist they did so blatantly so that any trained investigator would know this.
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| The Bali Police showing a cocaine seizure. The drugs are in evidence bags to preserve fingerprints. The police are still wering their gloves. |
They didn't wear gloves. If Schapelle had been guilty then their divergence from their own procedures were destroying Schapelle's fingerprints that would have condemned her outright.
Finding the fingerprints of other people on the plastic would not have helped Schapelle. The court wasn't interested in who grew the drugs or who packed them or put them into her luggage; it was only interested in who brought them into Indonesia. If fingerprints of the Bali Police had been found on the plastic it would have been put down to carelessness; it would not have helped Schapelle. Fingerprinting could only have condemned Schapelle if hers were on the plastic.
So when only they could gain why not collect fingerprints? Firstly, they knew Schapelle’s fingerprints weren’t on the plastic already but by not collecting them when it was standard operating procedure before and after Schapelle’s case they were sending a message to Howard that they were framing Schapelle and there was nothing he could do about it.
They refused to give the Australian Federal Police a sample of the drugs. According to the charge the marijuana came from Australia and, therefore, it was in Australia that the investigation to determine the extent of the crime had to continue. This sample was required to arrest any of the rest of the 'gang' and to end any further trafficking to Bali. However, giving the AFP a sample of the drugs when the drugs were Indonesian would have given Howard solid evidence or Indonesia’s actions.
They didn't so much as question Schapelle's travelling companions even though they all claimed in court that they were present when Schapelle packed her bags. Their luggage was group weighed. Schapelle was guilty by definition of ownership and the circumstances were ignored. Why weren't her companions arrested on conspiracy charges? That’s simple. The unforseen had to be minimised and they only needed one victim.
Why wasn't Mercedes questioned and arrested? Weren't the drugs on their way to her home? She went to the airport to discover what was holding up her sister, brother and their friends and yet according to the charges she was there to find out what was happening to her drugs, wasn't she?. Not only was she not even questioned she was allowed to go to the restricted sections of the airport to speak with Schapelle. However, Mercedes was married to an Indonesian and while the Australian media were fully occupied with “Our Schapelle” the Indonesian media weren’t and it was important to keep it that way.
There was absolutely no interest that day in fighting drugs or investigating a new trend in transnational drug trafficking because there were only two objectives: to get a conviction with as little real evidence as possible thereby upsetting the Australian people and to inform the Australia Government that an Australian citizen was being deliberately and knowingly framed to end Howard's interference in Indonesian domestic affairs.
So, what was Howard to do? Should he have confronted Indonesia and allowed the media to report that Schapelle's luggage was scanned at Sydney Airport and that there was no marijuana in it when it left Australia? Should he tell the people that Schapelle was innocent because the Indonesian Government had deliberately framed an Australian citizen thereby breaking international law and jeopardizing peaceful, friendly, relations between our countries when radio shock jocks were already calling Indonesians "monkeys" and arrests had been made against misguided Australians organizing mercenary raids to free her?
And the day Schapelle was arrested everything changed. Howard who had shown Indonesia no respect was talking about how our anger would hurt Schapelle. This was an independent democratic court governed by the rule of law he was talking about, right? Downer who had been demanding that the Indonesian justice system arrest Bashir was now telling us we couldn't interfere in the justice system of a sovereign nation and Lindsay's "struggling democracy" was transformed overnight into a "vibrant democracy".
So Schapelle became a political football when Indonesia framed her and Howard pulled in his horns. So lets look at some facts.
Schapelle was framed. It is standard procedure for all luggage going to Indonesia to be x-rayed prior to leaving Australia. Once scanned it is set aside in a clear area to be loaded onto an outgoing flight.
Below is a photo of the other luggage taken to Bali by Schapelle and her companions showing that it had been scanned and we see the tags that prove it.
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| The tags on the other Corby luggage showing that it had been x-rayed in Sydney. |
Below are two photos of the body board bag that contained the marijuana showing the tag that proved that it too had had no special treatment. It too had been x-rayed prior to leaving Australia.
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| While blurred in this image we still see that the tag used by the Sydney Airport Authority to show that the luggage was x-rayed prior to leaving. |
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| Another shot proving that the body board bag was x-rayed prior to leaving Australia. |
This is proof that Schapelle Corby was innocent. The bags were x-rayed and nothing out of the ordinary was reported as they and Schapelle left the country. Four days later, a friend of the Corbys, Guy Pilgrim, went to Brisbane Airport and spoke to the man in charge of the CCTV footage at the airport. He told guy he had seen the footage and that it was in good order and while he could not allow Guy to see it, if the defence lawyers would forward a request through the court within 24 days a copy of the footage would be sent to them.
This man spoke knowing that his words could be quoted in court. If the cameras were down for repair or if the footage was somehow damaged he would not have volunteered without prompting "I have seen the footage and it is in good order," and then to suggest that the court order a copy.
But John Howard had a real problem. Indonesia hadn't made a mistake. This wasn't a case of greedy police wanting a bribe and "Not Guilty" was never going to happen. Regardless of what evidence got through Schapelle was going to be convicted and Howard's job was to make her conviction and sentence as palatable to the Australian people as possible.
Schapelle begged for an investigation, got angry when the police destroyed fingerprints and was told by her lawyers that her request to have the drugs forensically tested would not go well for her and would cause the prosecution to demand her death. She begged the AFP to investigate her, her finances and her family and Mick Keelty's response was: "It is not the AFP's job to clear people." Since it is the job of the AFP to prosecute drug offenders I find it difficult to understand how some Australians still think she is guilty.
Then the CCTV footage disappeared from Bali, Brisbane and Sydney Airports for the 8th of October and the reasons for this make a mockery of transparency. Brisbane Airport said the cameras were down for repair. Canberra said that the cameras were only switched on when someone important was moving through the airport but this was later amended to 'there was an error and the footage was corrupted and unable to be viewed.' Finally, with the public's short memory and a complete unwillingness for the parliament to get involved, it was claimed that the footage was wiped in record time and so the Australian Government didn't manage to get copies... apparently, from any of the airports. Since these stories conflict it is proven that some of them at least are deliberate lies which means that all of the official explanations are suspect. However, there is more.
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| AFP document drawing attention to the fact that the computer entry for the body board tag was missing. |
There are those who say that persons unknown in Sydney engineered the situation whereby the body board bag somehow escaped the scanning process and resulted in the tag data not being entered onto SACL computer system and given that this could be achieved by blue collar airport workers this would be the Government's preferred interpretation.
However, a number of issues make this impossible. Regardless of the scenario suggested those who cling to this interpretation must also claim that those responsible did not want the owner of the bag, Schapelle, to be arrested in Sydney. If Sydney Customs or the AFP discovered the drugs in Sydney, Schapelle would have been arrested not Sydney baggage handlers. Furthermore, effort made to circumvent scanning would draw attention to the Sydney baggage handlers and so this completely refutes the assertion that they merely wanted to get rid of the drugs. It also means that Schapelle’s arrest in Bali and the resulting chaos and division was planned since getting the drugs past the scanning would have been deliberate and would take effort. All of this makes this assertion nonsense.
A far more likely scenario is that as it stood that computer entry was solid proof that Schapelle was innocent and that her luggage contained no drugs while it was in Australia. It was proof that the drugs were planted in Bali and that the Indonesian Government was in full support of an attack on an Australian citizen. So, like the CCTV footage that showed Schapelle entering Brisbane Airport with a thin body board bag, the proof that the bag was x-rayed without incident was removed by agents of the Australian Government.
On the 8th of April the last of the Bali 9 arrived in Bali where they would go under police surveillance for 10 days before being arrested. However, on the same day that this surveillance began, Federal Justice Minister Chris Ellison was on the phone with the Indonesian Attorney-General, Abdurrahman Saleh and these discussions resulted in Saleh's agreement not to seek the death penalty for Schapelle. See Death for Sale
Schapelle was special. Her life was bought with the lives of the Bali 9 but then there was a meaningful difference: she at least was innocent.
The day before Schapelle's conviction was to be announced a scurrilous piece of fiction was published. Matthew Moore, working for the Melbourne "The Age" and "The Sydney Morning Herald" claimed that because Bali's drug scene was so thoroughly infiltrated by the Bali Police and their informers, that tourists were too frightened to buy their marijuana from Indonesians and he was right. However, in order to make Schapelle's impending conviction more palatable he went on to claim that other tourists who apparantly laugh at death are selling Australian marijuana to the sensibly scared tourists who are being watched like fearful rabbits by the Indonesian dealers hoping to make a sale. And in 8 years not one Australian drug dealer has ever been caught there. Schapelle was the only person ever to be charged with importing marijuana into Indonesia. So for a real laugh at how the Australian people were conned, read The Truth about "Aussie Gold" .
There is so much more for those who want to know the truth. There is the fact that the Chief of Bali's Customs said in court that none of his men were aware of the marijuana until it was "discovered' by Customs Officer Winata in the public inspections area. However, this meant that the Bali Police lied and could not have seen the marijuana on the X-Ray machine.
Consider this: the luggage is placed onto a conveyor belt from a sorting shed where it is offloaded from the tarmac. This conveyor belt takes the luggage into the customs area where it must first pass through an X-ray machine. Any suspicious bags are removed from the conveyor belt at this point for a more thorough physical investigation. If the marijuana had been seen, the bag would have been removed since the X-ray could not have differentiated between marijuana, an herbal sleep pillow, alfalfa for cooking or potpourri. Considering that no one had ever been charged for importing marijuana into Indonesia before this would be a story that the customs officials would be passing on to their grandchildren and there is no way the Chief of Customs could stand up in court, accuse the police of lying and say that neither he nor his men were aware of the marijuana until it was “discovered” by Winata if the entire Customs department had been celebrating their find around the X-ray machine.
Therefore, someone with a high enough rank not to be questioned brought the body board bag from the tarmac in through a side door and placed it near the carousel while the incoming passengers were waiting to be cleared. So much for Indonesian justice.
Otherwise, this marijuana must have had magical qualities to pass through Brisbane, Sydney and then Bali's X-ray machine without being seen. And why is everyone lying about everything if Schapelle is guilty?
So when ASIS, ASIO, the AFP and DIO reported to Howard that the Indonesians had deliberately framed an Australian citizen he could support Schapelle and propel this country into hostile relations with the Indonesian Government or he could bow to the inevitable and call Schapelle collateral damage. But Schapelle is not dead. The suffering of being falsely accused and imprisoned in a hole lingers on.
While the morons who appear incapable of independent thought or logic continue to think Schapelle is guilty and continue to believe the liars like Stewart, Duff and Moore who have not been able to produce a single shred of evidence of guilt that for a marijuana offence should have been a cakewalk. The thinkers of this nation know that no one would take marijuana to Bali when there is such a healthy market for it here. We know that Innocent people don't beg for an investigation or suffer for 8 years and refuse to admit guilt. We know that a Mum like Ros, who has fought tooth and nail and sold everything she owned while caring for two men who had cancer, would never allow her daughter to go to Bali with dope.
But I am not doing this for Schapelle. I'm doing it so that one day I can say I wasn't a moron. I'm doing it because I don't want to live in a country where the government lies to its people and gets away with it. I'm doing it because of a deep respect for justice and the rule of law and my country doesn't allow courts to swap out evidence of a crime for appearances sake and we certainly don't give such courts the credence of calling their victims the "convicted" anything.
This is not for Schapelle; it's for you. Turning a working class family driving who were driving beat up cars and who lived in a housing commission home into a cash-rich international drug cartel worked so well that this template for public control is now ready to criminalise and marginalise anyone who protests or upsets the plans of the powerful.
Indonesia is still a military dictatorship and if the police say you are guilty, then you are found guilty. No Westerners are selling marijuana there. Don't you know that?
