Have you ever found yourself reading a newspaper article - of course you have, and saying to yourself "Is this fucker for real?"
We've
almost become desensitised to the bullshit we're subjected to by the mainstream media. It's been happening for years; in reality, we expect it; we might not like it, but it kinda is what it is.
Then you come across something so ridiculous - in this case admittedly so, that you wonder...
Feast your eyes on this article in today's Daily Mirror:
Madeleine McCann Netflix viewers convinced they've spotted clue proving she was snatched:
The press never misses a chance to shake loose change from the big tatty sofa in the room.
New speculation about Madeleine McCann's disappearance is circulating following the controversial Netflix show
Indeed, there's a lot of it about. Despite the McCanns' cries of "Objection!" to the Netflix documentary, it was clearly a Pro McCann Production. Yes, there were a few areas that cast doubt upon Kate and Gerry - most notably the inclusion of the dogs; but even these gems were glossed over by the usual McCannites: Clarence Mitchell; Jim Gamble; Summers and Swann; Justine "ooo what a big bar tab" McGuinness; Metodo 3 and more, but on the whole, the documentary was a playground for propaganda.
A wild new theory has emerged about the disappearance of Madeleine McCann following the controversial Netflix documentary about her kidnapping.
Wild eh?
By the way, kidnappings are generally followed by demands for money, but whatever.
<reads on>
Viewers picked up on a line in the show the toddler was "sleepy" in the hours before she was picked up by her parents from a daycare centre at the Portuguese resort of Praia da Luz in 2007.
People are now suggesting the McCann family were spied on and three-year-old Maddie was drugged by the kidnapper in the hours before she was snatched from her bed.
Now bear in mind that the above is a theory actually purported by Kate McCann...and that word
"wild" becomes all the more interesting.
The usual script follows:
Maddie's parents, Gerry and Kate McCann, were eating out with friends at a tapas restaurant close to the hotel and regularly checked up on their children before realising their daughter was gone.
We've read
that a million times, and the majority of us don't believe a word of it, but...
In the show it's said Maddie was sleepy on the day she was kidnapped and the fact her twin siblings, Sean and Amelie, failed to wake up when she vanished is adding fuel to the theory online.
Is it adding fuel to that
"wild theory" or is it that
"wild theory" - Kate McCann's
"wild theory", of an "abductor" sedating the twins, them failing to wake, and the former anaesthetist doing precisely nothing other than to check their breathing with her hand, giving rise to a far more plausible theory, given the evidence we have?
Was the journalist who wrote the above drawing attention to Kate McCann's
"wild theory" so that the normal people in the world would look more closely at the heavily supported sedation theory?
He could have written about that right? Sure, his editor would have run a white-hot skewer through his testicles and pinned them to his forehead, but he could have...he
should have.
I don't want to take up too much space here, but what I do want to show you, is the flip side to Kate McCann's
"wild theory" a much more stable theory. One that doesn't involve an astronomical leap into the incredulous. One the journo at The Mirror bottled out of writing. One that implicates the parents:
This is the most comprehensive and brilliantly put together pieces you will ever read on the sedation theory and unlike Kate McCann's, it's not at all "
wild"
Written by NT
You are falling into a deep, deep sleep...........
Sedation
Welcome to the first of what will be several articles about this aspect of the McCann case. We'll be looking at the evidence that sedation was used and most importantly, we will be looking at what the McCanns had to say about it.
But first, let's talk a bit about sedating children in general; why is it done, how is it done, and what are the dangers?
I'm going to start with a disclaimer - I'm not a medic and I have no hands-on experience of sedating children, so my knowledge comes from study rather than observation. Having said that, I am more than happy to hear from anyone with experience, correct any errors, and provide source material if required. A great deal of what I am going to say could equally well apply to adults, but there are specific risks associated with sedating children, and I'll point them out as I go
Why is sedation used?
There are a number of reasons why sedation might be used in children, these are the main ones:
To carry out an otherwise painful treatment, such as reducing a fracture or suturing a cut
To relieve anxiety in a patient undergoing a procedure
To enable certain tests to be conducted - imagine asking a toddler to keep perfectly still during a CT scan? Yeah, good luck with that one.
To carry out other examinations where the child might be frightened, might struggle or where a relaxed sleepy child will make the procedure easier.
For dental procedures
To manage very ill patients, eg in ITU or as part of palliative care
You will notice that night sedation is not included. There is a good reason for that. I will come to it later...
So, to sum up, sedation should be and is used to make things easier for the child and to help the professional to treat the child. It is not something which should be used lightly or where there is no clinical need - if it was, we would be handing ketamine out to new parents left right and centre, and that doesn't happen. Well - maybe in Manchester.
How is it done?
Very simply, sedation can be given to children in hospital, in the GP surgery and in some circumstances at home, by the administration of one or more drugs. These can be in the form of a gas, such as nitrous oxide, an injection, by infusion or orally. The choice of drug is to an extent governed by what level of sedation is required and any relevant medical history. Some of the drugs used to sedate children are not actually licenced for use in children, but this is not uncommon - many drugs are not licenced in kids, but they are still used. That's because it's not considered ethical to test drugs on children - but it's fine to fuck off for the evening and leave them home alone
Preparation is also important where the sedation is planned - the person doing the sedating needs to know the medical history, the weight of the child, any developmental issues etc - and sometimes the child needs to be fasted before the procedure
And that brings me round to the dangers of sedation in children.
Is sedation inherently more dangerous in children than adults?
In short, yes.
Children and babies are less able to maintain their own airway than adults. That presents a danger in sedation as they could require intervention or even intubation to maintain their airway and keep them well ventilated enough to maintain the correct levels of oxygen in their blood.
Another danger is the nature of some of the drugs used
There are several levels of sedation
Minimal sedation Where patients are awake and calm and respond normally to verbal commands;
Moderate sedation Where patients are sleepy, but respond purposefully to verbal commands or light tactile stimulation;
Conscious sedation Similar to moderate sedation, except verbal contact is always maintained with the patient. This is commonly used in dentistry;
Deep sedation Patients are asleep and cannot be easily roused but do respond purposefully to repeated or painful stimulation. They may need assistance to maintain a patent airway
The stage after this is anaesthesia - which is where the patient is fully unconscious and impervious to external stimuli.
Now - some of the drugs used to achieve sedation can very easily cause anaesthesia if too much is given and there may be only a small difference between just enough and too much. When you consider that the dose has to be calculated according to the weight of the child and the reaction can vary from one individual to the next, it becomes clear how important that children having sedation are closely monitored by a suitably qualified person at all times and that they always have access to resuscitation equipment, so that they remain sedated and not anaesthetised, that their vital signs are good, and that they are not in distress.
Now - I apologise if that was rather long-winded, but I thought it was important to set the scene for what we are expected to believe was a sort of wandering minstrel abductor, fully equipped to sedate young children and make off with one.
Next, we'll look at the evidence that sedation played a part in this crime and ask some questions about the actions of the McCanns that night - actions and omissions which have never been explained
Vital signs
In this section,
we will look at the evidence that the twins were actually sedated and the action - or lack of action - taken by their parents. Section 3 will deal with what they actually said, when they said it, and discuss why they said it when they did.
But first, imagine the scenario as reported by the McCanns.
You arrive at your holiday flat, to find one child missing and your twin infants lying in what sounds like the recovery position, completely spark out, to the point where you are observed checking that they are breathing. Do you
Tell the emergency services to send an ambulance as well as the police?
Strip both children and examine for signs of a) Abuse; b) administration of drugs via injection or IV?
Say absolutely nothing to anyone that night, only to claim years later that you told a police officer - a conversation of which there is no record?
Call me fussy, call me over-protective, but I think I would need a fucking ambulance for myself if I didn't choose option number 1.
When I have written about these matters before, the responses have fallen into the following groups:
"Kate was a qualified doctor; she could tell the twins were fine and provide any care they required"
This led to the invention of Honestbroker's magic finger, when the well-known McCann defender and congenital halfwit decided that every piece of monitoring equipment - ECG, sphygmomanometer, pulse oximeter - could be replaced by Kate's finger.
"It was an over-reaction; the kids were fine"
"Don't you think they had enough to be dealing with, you heartless hater?
"The PJ should have done it, you utter bastard"
All these responses are, of course, complete bullshit.
We have to assume at this point that the twins were abnormally deeply asleep/unconscious/sedated. We are not taking Kate's word for it, Fiona described seeing Kate checking the children repeatedly and their state was unusual enough to be noted by the first-on-the-scene GNR. So even without Kate's book, we can be fairly confident something was amiss.
Kate would have been able to do a certain amount of basic monitoring - respiration, pulse, reflexes etc, and from those determine how deeply sedated they were, but there is no record of, nor does she claim to have done anything other than check they were breathing (We will be going through her versions of that night in the next post)
This flies in the face of every aspect of emergency care, something she would have had to do as part of her training. Hell, anyone with a First Aid certificate knows most of it, and this is what is, to me, inexplicable.
When presented with a casualty, medics conduct what is referred to as a PRIMARY SURVEY.
This, as the name suggests, is the vital stage of assuring that the three basics of:
Airway
Breathing, and
Circulation
...are established. There is very little point, for example, trying to do something about a fracture if the patient doesn't have a clear airway and isn't breathing.
However, this is where Kate appears to have stopped. She talks about placing her hand on their chests to see if they were breathing, but she makes no mention whatsoever of trying to establish anything further with respect to their condition. She doesn't even mention checking their pulses.
Importantly, she appears to have made no attempt to establish their level of consciousness.
Consciousness isn't an on/off switch, it's a scale. Anyone who has watched Casualty will be familiar with the paramedics handing the patient over with the helpful info "He's had 1 gram of paracetamol IV and he had a GCS of 13 at the scene" as they go off to scoop up the next patient.
GCS refers to a measurement called the Glasgow Coma Score. This is a way of determining whether the patient is in a "Never mind, he's fainted, poor chap" state, or if he is basically what is often referred to as a "T F Bundy", ie totally fucked, but unfortunately not dead yet, in which case, you might as well start checking for an organ donor card. The score goes up to 15 - patient hurling themselves around the inside of the ambulance, demanding morphine now, you fuckers - and as low as 3 (dead)
The basic principles are the same, it takes account of the differences in terms of things like verbal response.
Kate appears to have done virtually nothing.
She did not attempt to wake them
She did not check their response to pain
She did not try to get a verbal or motor response to commands or other stimuli.
She did not do obvious things if drugs were suspected, such as check their pupils and examine them for puncture marks.
If these children were drugged by a stranger, none of Kate's actions - or failures to act - make any sense whatsoever. None.
You don't just assume they'll be okay because they are breathing now. You supposedly have no idea what they have been given, so you supposedly don't know how much they were given, or how long ago.
You don't know how it was administered - how about a nice HIV+ or Hepatitis+ needle?
You don't know if they were given slow-release meds, which may not have reached their maximum concentration yet.
In short, you know nothing.
But despite being in a room full of fucking doctors, you don't mention any of this to the others?
You don't make sure they are taken to hospital?
Call me an old sceptic if you like, but if you have time to be farting about demanding a priest, you have time to arrange an ambulance for your drugged children.
The next section will pull everything together - we will look at what Kate claimed, where and when. We will also look at how her version was engineered to retro-fit the fact that it became evident she had been observed checking on the breathing of the twins and we'll look at the questions she has never been asked in public
Testing, testing.......
Picture the scene:
You arrive in your apartment to perform one of your trademark cursory inspections, only to discover that one of your children has vanished. After some wailing and gnashing, while you wait for the scruffy, tobacco-using morose police to arrive, you notice that your two remaining children are barely breathing, and despite the fact that you have been running about the place, screaming "Ay?Ay? Where is she, Ay?" like an anorexic, pissed Cilla Black, they haven't woken or shifted from the odd, identical recovery positions they have settled into.
Like any concerned parent, you check they are breathing. Well, it's the least you can do. No, seriously, it is the LEAST you can do. They are - phew! - but they continue to sleep through all this highly-trained medical intervention. How terribly odd!
But never fear, the cavalry has arrived!
"I wandered into the children’s bedroom several times to check on Sean and Amelie. They were both lying on their fronts in a kind of crouch, with their heads turned sideways and their knees tucked under their tummies. In spite of the noise and lights and general pandemonium, they hadn’t stirred. They’d always been sound sleepers, but this seemed unnatural. Scared for them, too, I placed the palms of my hands on their backs to check for chest movement, basically, for some sign of life. Had Madeleine been given some kind of sedative to keep her quiet? Had the twins, too? It was not until about 11.10pm that two policemen arrived from the nearest town, Lagos, about five miles away. To me they seemed bewildered and out of their depth, and I couldn’t shake the images of Tweedledum and Tweedledee out of my head. I realize how unfair this might sound, but with communication hampered by the language barrier and precious time passing, their presence did not fill me with confidence at all. We did not appreciate until later that these two officers were from the Guarda Nacional Republicana, or GNR, who are essentially military police, like the Gendarmes in France or Guardia Civil in Spain, run by the Interior Ministry. They deal with matters like highway patrol and crowd control, and are also responsible for law enforcement in more rural areas like the Algarve, but they do not handle criminal investigations. At that stage, of course, we weren’t familiar with the various tiers of the Portuguese police system. As far as we were concerned, they were simply ‘the police’. We tried to explain what had happened. David reiterated his concerns about roadblocks and border notification and I reported my fears that all three children could have been sedated. A lady called Sílvia, who worked at the Ocean Club, had arrived to help out with translation."
And here is where it gets really interesting.
Because the words above were published in May 2011, four years after Madeleine disappeared and incredibly there is no record anywhere of her mentioning this incident to anyone, anywhere and at any time, like a shit Martini Girl.
Now - call me picky, but I would have thought that finding two unconscious children, and one vanished, she might have remembered to mention it? You know - to the police, maybe?
So why, after the passage of four years, did she suddenly reveal this little gem?
Well, it might have been because of this:
1485
“Did the twins wake up at all?”
Reply
“They didn’t. They didn’t”.
1485
“In the aftermath?”
Reply
“No, and that was the other thing, she kept going into the twins, she kept putting her hands on the twins to check they were breathing, she was very much concerned in checking that they were okay. But they were okay, I mean, they were fine, they didn’t, they were asleep, but at the time it did seem weird, I remember thinking, you know, when the Police came they turned the lights on, there was loads of noise, obviously from the moment Kate discovered that Madeleine was gone, the screaming and the shouting and there was a lot of noise and they, they didn’t, you know, so much as blink”.
Or this:
''He says there were two children in cots placed in Madeleine's room in a transversal position to the beds. The children never woke up, were in a ventral position, they did not even move during or after the search''
The first passage is from Fiona Payne's rogatory statement, the second is from the statement of one of the first GNR officers on the scene.
The world became aware of their comments after the publication of the PJ files and their subsequent translation in later 2008 and into 2009.
I bet that was an interesting day at Chez McCann.
So, now aware that she had been observed checking on the twins and that the information was in the public arena, I guess it became imperative for Kate to explain this away, hence the above passage from the book. There was only one problem with this.
There is no record of her mentioning her suspicions to anyone, despite her claim in the book that she did so.
No GNR officer mentions it
No translator mentions it
No PJ officer mentions it
No other member of the Tapas 9 mentions it
She does not mention it in her statements to the PJ, such as they were.
So this fundamental clue, the biggest indicator of what happened that night, only emerged after she put it in the book, four years after Madeleine disappeared, when it popped up like a strategically placed vase, obscuring a stain on the wallpaper.
Of course, the whole drugs issue had raised it's head prior to then. The McCanns are not stupid - at the first opportunity they put the feelers out. Were the PJ considering whether the children had been drugged? Because you know, now we think of it, the twins slept through it all!
However, and somewhat predictably, what ensued was a widespread whisper that maybe the McCanns had drugged the children? So eventually, this happened:
"And on 24 September, a forensic scientist from Control Risks came to take samples of hair from Sean, Amelie and myself. On the night Madeleine was taken, you may remember, Gerry and I had been very concerned that Sean and Amelie had hardly moved in their cots, let alone woken up, despite the commotion in the apartment. Since Madeleine was snatched apparently without making a sound, we had always suspected that all three children might have been sedated by the abductor. We mentioned this to the police that night and several more times in the following weeks, but no testing of urine, blood or hair, which could have revealed the presence of drugs, had ever been done. Apparently, hair grows at a rate of approximately 1cm per month, so it was possible that hair samples taken even four months later could provide us with additional information. It was worth a shot, at least. I asked for samples of my own hair to be taken as well simply because I was fed up with the constant insinuations that I took tranquillizers, sleeping pills or any medication, for that matter. The process seemed to take ages and we all lost loads of hair. I couldn’t believe they had to take so much. The scientist cut chunks of it from Sean and Amelie’s heads while they were sleeping. I cried as I heard the scissors in their baby-blond hair. I felt angry that the children had to go through this further insult. As for me, I looked as if I had alopecia. Though I cursed the abductor and the PJ, I had bigger things to worry about. All the hair samples produced negative results. While this didn’t totally exclude the possibility that the children had been sedated, especially given the time that had elapsed, it meant nobody else (including the PJ and the media) could prove otherwise. It also confirmed that I didn’t ‘abuse’ sedative medication. It is sad that we had to go to such lengths to demonstrate this; sadder still that such tests weren’t carried out at the time."
So here we are, nearly five months later. Do read the above passage carefully, as it is very revealing. Kate now states she and Gerry had always suspected the use of sedatives, that they mentioned it that night and several more times after that. But here's the thing, Kate - there is no evidence whatsoever that you did so.
No recollection of any officer
No recollection of any translator
No mention in any statement
No reference to it in all the other bits and pieces you shoved in front of the PJ, positively bristling with descriptions of phantom men, precise timelines and minute descriptions of pyjamas. Not a damn word.
The description is, of course, as overblown and emotive as possible - a ''further insult'' to the children, chunks cut away from their blond locks, Kate herself virtually scalped. Just for the record, it requires a strand of hair about the width of a shoelace. No More.
The conclusion is very interesting
"All the hair samples produced negative results. While this didn’t totally exclude the possibility that the children had been sedated, especially given the time that had elapsed, it meant nobody else (including the PJ and the media) could prove otherwise."
This is an extremely odd description. It appears Kate had an explanation planned, whatever the outcome
Positive - "See, the abductor drugged them"
Negative - "See, the abductor drugged them, but it's been a long time so a negative result doesn't mean he didn't"
In reality, the testing was done to try to scotch rumours that the McCanns routinely drugged their children, but in returning a negative result it cast doubt on Kate's belated claim of a drugging abductor, created to explain why she was checking her own kids were breathing.
So, these are my conclusions
Kate was worried enough to keep checking the kids, but not motivated enough to take them to hospital, raise the alarm, or ask any of her equally qualified colleagues to examine them.
From that, I conclude that they were drugged, but not by a stranger
Despite their claims, there is no record that they made an officer aware of their suspicions.
From that, I conclude that if they were drugged, it was not by a stranger.
No record exists of them telling the police in any interview about their suspicions.
From that, I conclude that they deliberately withheld this information. That does not indicate a stranger
No testing was done until such time had passed that no interpretation of the results could be precise. The motive for testing at all was to return a negative result for Kate.
In conclusion, I can find no earthly reason why any parent believing they have two infants who have been sedated by a stranger would fail to seek help, tell the police and have them tested.
I can find many reasons why they might fail to do the above if they were responsible for the sedating, though.
