So much has been said on this website about the importance of details that it would be superfelous to repeat it. Canonical Stories are made up of details. When the details are put together, the result, i.e. the Canonical Story, becomes greater than the sum of its details. But the devil’s in the details, and if one looks rather intently at the details, one might just find the devil. And that’s not a good thing. Or is it? To drop the cliché, one might say that you might find the truth. Yet, that is quite unlikely. If the details don’t make sense, and you’re dependent on details…you see the problem. A wise man once said that being wrong gets you closer to the truth. How? You’ve eliminated one possible explanation.

The phrase…Details of Absurdity, that has been used on this website to identify a detail in a Canonical Story that is, to put it simply, absurd. A rational, reasonable person should see such a detail as, basically, untrue. It doesn’t make sense. But it’s not supposed to make sense. Details of Absurdity are used by people who are forced, for one reason or another, to confess to something they didn’t do. Not just that…they have to commit to something horrible. A Detail of Absurdity is intended by the confessor to signal that what he is confessing to isn’t the truth. He or she hopes that something with a teaspoon and an open mind…someone who likes to study details and has no problems watching a Canonical Story crumble into pieces…will examine such a detail and realize that it can’t be true, and that it was intended to do just that. One example might be the fact that Ricky, having to confess the horrible branding of Sylvia Likens in Gertie Wright’s basement, refused to take all the blame. In Ricky fashion, three people share blame. He did the same thing with the story of the slogan. In the latter, he takes one-third of the blame, Gertrude Baniszewski gets one-third of the blame, and Sylvia herself gets one-third of the blame. In the story of the branding, Sylvia gets one-third of the blame, and Ricky takes one-third of the blame. The Detail of Absurdity is to be found in the person who gets the remaining one-third. He picked Shirley…the 10 year old. What he did was interesting. Only two other characters were younger than Shirley; Jimmy was 8 years old, and Little Denny was just a baby. Those who crafted the Canonical Story decided that Jimmy was not to be part of that story. So Ricky picked the youngest person that he could. Why? Because if Ricky had really done what he did, then he couldn’t have done it alone. He picked the one character who could not possibly have been his accomplice. Ricky essentially dares us to believe something so absurd.

Another type of detail that can be helpful when looking at Hillsborough is what I will call a Detail of Ambiguity. This type of detail is very different than that found so often in the Sylvia Likens case. A Detail of Ambiguity is one that, when examined by itself, appears to make the Canonical Story more ambiguous. One is left doubting the credibility of the detail. That doesn’t make the detail untrue. Not per se. Some details don’t seem credible, but ultimately are. Perhaps you just don’t have all the knowledge you need to see it as credible. As a wise man once said…nothing is inexplicable, only unexplained. And that’s true. But! If you find yourself with an impressive number of Details of Ambiguity, then the numbers begin to tell. The more there are, the more problems with the Canonical Story one finds. The purpose of this serial essay to identify the Details of Ambiguity that are to be found in the Hillsborough story. And there are plenty to be found. Nothing here should be understood as a claim that such a detail is false…untrue…a lie…or anything else. And! No alternative explanation for the deaths at the Hillsborough statement in 1989 is being offered. I don’t have one. The explanation, whatever the right one is, is not nearly as interesting as the Details of Ambiguity. Accusations of Conspiracy Theory are unfounded, unjust, and certainly would not be made by teaspooners. I understand that one way to upset people is to produce doubt. That is interesting. Why? Because a very neurotic process is involved. To point out things that might not make sense is to do no more than that. A person becomes upset because they see the lack of credibilty in that detail…the person pointing it out isn’t actually responsible for the doubt the other person suddenly feels. Then, in Freudian terms, projection takes place, whereby the person who pointed out the ambiguity in the first place is deemed to have caused the other person’s doubt. That is neurotic, and simply a way not having to face the fact that the only reason why someone feels doubt about something is because they feel doubt about something. Conspiracy Theories usually offered very detailed and comprehensive alternative explanations for something. No explanations are offered here. Choose the one you think is best.

The first Detail of Ambiguity is the most entertaining one. The newspaper element of the Crush Barrier 124a story is hard to put down…sorry, that was a bad pun. But here’s the scoop…did it again. It won’t be news to anyone that… Ok. It’s so hard to put down that I had to look again at the material and read all about it. What about this picture:

Come on! You can't fool me! It's Pen 3. We see the broken crush barrier. Notice the litter…this is of course on the ground, as opposed to being crammed into the hollow bar. It’s interesting that the diameter of the cross bar doesn’t appear to be very large. That’s strange. One might think that, given the diameter, that it would take a great deal of effort to get a pre-Adolf Hitler newspaper crammed into it. I like the date of the Strange Newspaper…not the one in the back pocket of the man…you remember, the one that is rolled up perfectly to allow us to see the word DEATH on it. I wonder to what DEATH that newspaper was referring. It’s in big letters, so one might think that the DEATH it refers to was rather dramatic. How many newspapers had DEATH in big letters on the cover the day after the disaster. This appears to be one of the most striking coincidence I’ve ever seen. Wait, not a coincidence…almost a prophecy. It’s as if the Sybil and the Pythia had taken their prophetic skills and bestowed them on a British tabloid. The newspaper on the day of the 96 deaths, which reflected events of the day before the 96 deaths, ran a cover story that featured DEATH on the cover. Then someone who went to the match purchased that newspaper. He rolled it up and put it in his back pocket. Then he became involved in the action at the perimeter fence as the disaster occurred. Yet despite that action, the newspaper didn’t fall out of his back pocket. And having rolled up that newspaper, and having placed it in his back pocket, he rolled it up in such a way that we clearly see DEATH. I have search my mind for something more striking than this and found…nothing. Almost.

That’s one newspaper. But what about the Yorkshire Telegraph & Star? Of course…October 24, 1931. That’s a fascinating year. Why? Because the first step in Hitler’s obtaining absolute power in Germany…well, that is clearly debatable. Was it the Reichstag Fire Decree? This was issued by President Hindenburg after the Reichstag was burned down on February 27, 1933. Of course Hitler, the chancellor at the time, blamed the communists. Chancellor? Yes; not the Iron Chancellor mind you, but the chancellor who had been appointed on January 30, 1933. However, one might focus on the Reichstag elections immediately preceding the Reichstag fire. In July 1932, the number of NSDAP members of the Reichstag jumped to 230 seats, being a gain in 123 seats. That’s not bad. Of course, there was no doubt, speaking in hindsight, that Hitler was headed to control of Germany. In November 1932, Hitler lost 34 seats, a decline of 33%. However, the DNVP, allies of the Nazis, gained 15 seats. And the Social Democrats, Hitler’s only real competitor on a head-to-head basis, lost 12 seats. In March 1933, Hitler picked up a whopping 92 seats, putting him at 288. The DNVP had 52 seats. If you added the seat count of the Centre (74) and the BVP (18) to the seat count of the Social Democrats, you get 212 seats. Hitler held 76 more seats than a, hypothetical of course, coaltion against him comprised of these parties. The communists came in with 81 seats. So to form an effective coalition against the NSDAP in the Reichstag, you would have to get votes from the communists. And the world press was full of accounts of the terror being wrought by the Sturmabteilung. Then Hitler became chancellor and the world would never be the same again. So if one were given to commenting on things such as chronology, the Bionic Newspaper stuffed into the crush barrier that would break 58 years later, reflects a time that one might call..the end of the good ole’ days. If I were a British person of the WW2 generation, and I were looking back at those years from a point in time decades later, years 1931-1932 marked the end of the old order of things. The happy, or perhaps not so happy, time before the greatest exercise in blood-letting that the species Homo Sapiens has ever known. Large parts of London would be devastated. Of course, you rebuild. How different the world looked in 1931! How different Britain looked in 1931! Just before Hitler would become chancellor; just before the Reichstag burned down; and years during which Nazi power was in the ascendancy…constitutional power mind you. The war wouldn’t start until September 1, 1939. Hitler invaded Poland, and the British government declared on Germany. Still…if one reminisced, 1932 might seem like the best year of your life. That was before your relatives died in the Blitz of 1940-1941. Your husband, or brother, or son was alive and kicking in 1931. Before dying fighting the Nazis in Europe. He didn’t die until years after 1931. But that doesn’t matter. 1931 was the last year before the Great Human Catastrophe was set in motion when Hitler became chancellor on January 30, 1933. For me, 1932 would seem like a Golden Year. And prophetic pieces of paper? The “death” paper is pretty good. Who burned down the Reichstag? The communists? No…the Nazis. And the interesting thing is that the fire broke out on the evening of February 27th. What timing! In the Reichstag, the Nazi party held power as a result of having formed a coalition. With who? The DNVP- the German National People’s Party. Herr Guertner, a member of that party, and Minister of Justice at the time, submitted a draft for the Infamous Decree. When? On the afternoon of February 27th.  So one of Hitler’s lackies wrote a draft of the decree that afternoon, and then the fire broke out that evening. If Herr Guertner left the Reichstag the day before, on February 26th, and he had a newspaper in his back pocket, and it were rolled up just so, the word FIRE in big letters might just be the only thing you could see. I am fascinated by such anachronisms. There are more one Canonical Stories where people who built them jumped the gun, as it were..an expression I use in order to avoid throwing out cliches. Newspapers…government decrees…not to mention the appearance of too-soon postings on websites. I’m also fascinated by the fact that people who build certain Canonical Stories don’t seem to notice that they produce certain things too soon, and thereby reveal that something other than what were told happened…happened. This Sybilline Error is astounding…how hard is it to avoid disclosing things that will happen the next day, on the day before? Apparently, very hard.

What about the horizontal cross-bar? That’s where they found the newspaper..well, the 1931 newspaper. They also found a piece of newspaper dated September 26, 1959. I commented in an earlier essay about how odd it was that the only way to determine how old the barrier was…not records or files, no, two pieces of newspapers crammed into the cross-bar.

Here is a shot of the cross-bar of Crush Barrier 124a at the third support:

The diameter? 60mm, which for us Yanks is 2.4 inches. It would be strange if the bit of the good ole’ pre-Hitler days newspaper was found toward the opening. But it wasn’t. It was found in that part of the tube that runs from support 2 to support 3. Thus the newspaper was found in the middle of the long, horizontal cross-bar.

The length of the cross-bar was 7.5 meters, or 24.7 feet, in length. If the 1931 newspaper were found at the middle of the cross-bar, then it would have had to been, originally, stuffed into the opening of the cross-bar, and then shoved all the way to the center. But the diameter was only 2.4 inches, so how could the newspaper have ended up in the center? It would seem like some kind of object like a broom handle would have been necessary to use as a ram-rod. Take a long piece of pipe with this diameter. Then start cramming paper into the end. You will find that you can’t get very much paper into the pipe before the end has become compacted. And so you will need a ram-rod to actually shove the paper any further into the tube.

The newspaper element is therefore a Detail of Ambiguity because of the significance of the date, and because it seems hard to believe that you could have managed to get the newspaper where it was found within the cross-bar. But there is another element worth noting. Why aren’t there bits of newspaper from, say, 1964? 1968? 1973? 1979? 1982? 1985? How about one that has the word DEATH clearly visible to all and sundry? It is odd that since 1931, only two guys hit upon the idea of stuffing newspapers into the cross-bar. And it’s a darn good thing that the guy in 1931, the apparent originator of the idea, did so. It became the only way to get an idea of how old the cross-bar really was. The age of the cross-bar as determined by a very convenient newspaper, along with the corrosion of the support pieces, and the generations of paint..perhaps the first coat of paint was slapped on the barrier in 1931…helped establish a pattern leading to another party sharing the blame for the disaster. It looks almost like the way Ricky Hobbs accepted blame; 33% for himself; 33% for someone else (e.g. Shirley or Gertrude or Stephanie), and 33% for Sylvia. In the case of the Disaster, three parties were made out to be to blame: the cops; the fans; and the authorities responsible for upkeep and maintenance of the stadium. It’s an interesting parallel, although it is probably no more than that. Over a period of 68 years, only two people, of the untold thousands of people who stood in Pen 3 reading newspapers, hit upon the idea of cramming their newspapers into the cross-bar. That might seem to be a little odd. And I can’t help one more tedious mention of the other bizarre newspaper; i.e. the DEATH newspaper. If something that didn’t happen happened, and you shot footage the day after the Hillsborough Stadium Disaster, and then called it footage from the day of the Hillsborough Stadium Disaster, then there would have been a plethora of British newspapers with the word DEATH on their covers. If you were a bit player in the cast, and bought a newspaper that morning, and carried your newspaper in your back pocket, you would end up with what would be an Anachronism Within 24 Hours. As I said, that didn’t happen, although it would be cool in a fictional movie. Not so much in a documentary. So I suppose we end up with three, rather strange, British newspapers. Of course, we have many more strange Yankee newspapers when it comes to the Sylvia Likens case. Not to mention the Whitechapel murders.

The second Detail of Ambiguity in the Story is the group of people to whom those who tragically lost their lives belonged. The tragedy that played out affected one finite, definable and quantifiable group of people. And speaking only in general, that group of people, themselves really just a small group within a gigantic group of people made up of small groups of people, had a certain ghost that haunted them. That has nothing to do with the actual people who made up this small group in 1989…nothing whatsoever. But the ghost that haunted this group seems to be rather convenient when read in light of what the police began to do before the whole event in all its horror could have been known, unless it was already known.

Before identifying that group and the ghost flitting behind the scenes that the police may have intended to manipulate, and on the surface, if so, offered considerable promise, there is yet another Detail of Ambiguity, what I will label the third such detail, that must be discussed first. Although the horror in Sheffield probably holds the top spot, there have been other football tragedies. And for decades, British football appeared unable to find a cure for the English Disease…groups of thugs who went to football games simply to cause trouble…to riot..to smash things and destroy things…and to destroy lives. So British law enforcement became experts on how to reduce the likeliness of such tragedies. Numbers is a big part of this…the larger the uniformed presence, the less likely it is that people will cause trouble. But you can’t push 5,000 cops into a football stadium; members of the SAS simply won’t be patrolling the front of the pens. So you have numbers, but you, the cops, are so badly outnumbered that a serious disturbance, such as riotous football hooligans, or a dreadful disaster, like a lethal crowd-crush, once in full swing…well, you won’t be able to stop it. That said, British law enforcement had maintained a pretty good record. If numbers won’t do it, then planning, knowledge, and skill…that will be critical. How critical? Ask Liverpool fans. This clearly indicates that planning, knowledge, and skill were a decided strength of British cops working football matches. Planning? Yes training for all possible emergency situations. Knowledge? Yes! Knowing where the potential flash points are. Being able to observe football fans, spot trouble-makers and remove them quickly. After all, the modification to a key crush barrier in Pen 3 was supposedly made by the police so as to enable a fast and decisive intervention in the pen to extract trouble-makers. You better be able to do that fast, if you don’t want the whole pen to go up in violence. Not just flash points…that’s for spotting and dealing with hooligans. What else can go wrong at a football match? That which has happened in the past…a crush. Given the crowd sizes, a crush can turn lethal in no time flat. Trained to spot thuggish behavior? And trained to spot a crowd crush… when it’s beginning…what it looks like at the outset. People caught in a crowd-crush don’t realize right away what’s happening. You start trying to suck in air, and paresthesia…pins and needles..becomes noticeable. Suddenly you can’t breathe at all, and then it may very well be too late. Where does a crowd-crush happen? In the seated sections? No…in standing pens…cattle-cars without the railway…essentially…giant cages. Getting out isn’t easy…getting out fast is virtually impossible. And for cops, getting in once the crush starts…is more than virtually impossible. And if a crush is going to happen…and it will happen in the standing pens…police at the end of the pitch, those assigned with watching the pens, will spot a crush developing and will know what to do. And do it before the people in the pen begin to panic. And that takes skill.

The pens aren’t the only place for a crush. Outside the entrances, the crowd building up at the turnstiles, getting smashed up against a cement wall by a crowd that can’t move back…that’s certain death. Of course, crowd control takes considerable training and skill. It’s not just a matter of cops milling around, hoping that the presence of the Law keeps everything…in Paul Middup’s words…orderly; yes, if only everyone was orderly! There’s truth in what he said. But crowds will take on a life of their own. The situation involving a large crowd that isn’t being actively controlled is that it can easily spiral out of control. People don’t know how to be in a large crowd and be safe. And it doesn’t take being disorderly…sorry Paul. People, waiting to get into an event the beginning of which they are going to miss, get antsy. They push…they complain…with no intention of hurting anyone…they push forward. The people against the walls…the masses behind them don’t see them. The crowd is too noisy for anyone to hear people yelling for help. A hundred Greenwoods can stand up on something and motion for the crowd to move back. Sure, but it won’t do anything because people can’t. And! Let it be known that an emergency has developed…one that ultimately is life and death…panic. Stopping such a crush as it forms takes training, knowledge, and the willingness to intervene quickly. However, what ultimately makes the difference is maintaining control from the beginning. That’s crowd control…not a show of force, but the formation of police cordons. A large crowd won’t form up in lines on their own. Lines of police officers will have this effect, and directing people as to how to move through the area is essential. A large crowd left alone will inevitably becoming a Middupian Disorder, though with no intention of becoming so. Once the disorder starts, forcing mounted officers into the middle of the throng will not help, and will probably make the situation worse. This is strange:

I stopped playing a cop on TV some time ago. But! The crowd at the turnstiles looks dangerous. And on the left side of the shot, there appears to be a police cordone. What’s strange is that if it is, the cordone formed along a natural barrier, what looks like bushes of some kind. I hope they aren’t bushes, since if the police form a cordonne to keep the local flora safe! Perhaps they’re only shadows. This is a dangerous crowd. How dangerous? It’s 2:44, and we’re not far from the opening of Gate C, then Gates A and B, and then Gate C again. Why? To avoid deaths in the completely mis-handled crowd situation outside the turnstiles. Notice something else:

Notice what? The crowd situation is actually much worse than it appears when you look at the crowd outside. Look at the situation developing inside the gate and turnstiles. It is strange that, police outside the gate, having apparently failed utterly to control the crowd, police inside the turnstiles appear to be doing the same. Given the situation on the other side of the wall, one might think that cops inside the courtyard would keep the incoming crowd moving quickly toward…hopefully, the side pens. Why? If the police were to suddenly open Gate C, and there was a large inrush of people…welcome to the crush inside the courtyard. According to the Canonical Story, the crush took place down in Pens 3 and 4. So in a metaphorical way, the “crush” becomes like a rook on a chessboard…it’s still there, all you’re doing is moving it around. Still:

This will end badly…or will it? There were no deaths outside the stadium. So whether it ends badly will depend upon where these people end up. And it is very doubtful that they ended up in Pens 3 and 4, given the fact that those pens were completely full 37 minutes prior to this picture.

I think it would be interesting to compare the utter failing at the Liverpool end with the utter failing at the Nottingham Forest end. Ah! A potentially lethal crowd crush develops at the turnstiles…before too long, police throw open gates to save lives of the Nottingham Forest fans…wait! That’s not right. I have yet to hear of or read anything that suggests that things went wrong on the other side of the stadium. And therein lies the Detail of Ambiguity. How is it that despite the police planning, and the general experience with maintaining safety at English football matches, did something go so badly wrong at one of the stadium, while things went smoothly at the other? The cops at the far end of the stadium were doing something right? Were all the incompetent cops down at the Leppings Lane end? A police officer working undercover among the crowd at the Liverpool end states very clearly that on the basis of his experience, there simply were not enough police officers at the Liverpool end. And that was something that struck as odd on the day of the disaster. Why was the other end staffed appropriately? Why did the training, planning, knowledge, and skill of those cops ensure that things went smoothly? And, at the same time, why were there such a significant paucity of police at the Leppings Lane end of the stadium? And why did the officers who were there do such a lousy job controlling the crowd? If the police-work at the stadium failed in general, then why weren’t there any dead Forest fans? The two ends of the stadium are like two parallel worlds…the Matter World of the Nottingham Forest end, contrasted with the Anti-Matter World of the Liverpool end. It is easy to miss this astounding contrast…did the cops at the Liverpool end miss the planning meeting? If one focuses only on what went wrong…well, it’s human nature to notice the things that go wrong…it’s easy not to notice what went right. But when you do, the whole picture…a whole picture of one detail begins to look rather suspicious.

So the Detail of Ambiguity just discussed is the dramatic difference between the crowd control at the Nottingham Forest end of the stadium and that at the Liverpool end of the stadium. Not just numbers…skill? Knowledge? All of the cops lacking these traits managed to get assigned to Leppings Lane? That can’t be the answer. I now double back to Detail of Ambiguity Number Two. In what might appear to be a bizarre twist of fate, an amazing coincidence, almost a matter of kharma, the fans who suffered and died in such numbers were Liverpool fans. Is that significant per se? I think it is. Why? Because throughout the worst decades of Football Hooliganism, which reached such intensity that it would lead Margaret Thatcher to elevate football supporters to the rank of striking miners and the Irish Republican Army in their unrestrained violence and wanton destructive nature. Perhaps decent British folks follow Cricket…when is the last time you heard of Cricket Hooligans? How about crowd crushes at Cricket matches? Perhaps Irish Republicans and striking miners don’t have any affinity for that noble game. And I’ll bet that Cricket was the thing in Finchley. Mrs. Thatcher’s personal sentiments aside, during the worst years of football violence, Liverpool fans actually had pretty good record, especially when compared to the thugs who followed other clubs. However, the reputation of Liverpool supporters would change dramatically during the Heysel Stadium Disaster in Brussels. Unlike the Hillsborough disaster, which is so full of confusing details, Heysel is easily quantifiable. Watch the coverage, look at the pictures…it all makes sense..it looks like what one expects it to look like. I’m at a loss to find Details of Ambiguity in the Heysel Stadium Disaster. And upwards of 39 people died in a terrible outbreak of football violence on that fateful day. The match was the championship match, and obviously held on the continent. A very important initial statement is that those responsible for the Heysel Stadium had done a far worse job than those in Sheffield who dealt with unsightly corrosion by painting over it, or apparently lost the records that showed how old the cross-bar of Crush Barrier 124a was. The cement of the Heysel stadium, particuarly on the terraces, was crumbling, and apparently stadium maintenance thought it unimportant to pick up the myriad of cement chunks that would prove to make dangerous missles. Plastic tubes laying around at the back of the terraces? I suppose we should be relieved that they didn’t leave medieval battle-axes or cross-bows instead of cross-bars lying about the place. Liverpool was playing Juventus, an Italian team. And at a certain point in the match, violence broke out between Liverpool fans and Italian supporters on the terraces. The force of the clash caused a concrete wall to collapse. Then dreadful rioting broke out. Those who died were Juventus fans. Liverpool fans were charged with crimes, and some convicted. Hanging over the head of the Liverpool fans was one of the most dreadful football disasters in European history. It was something that would not, and still isn’t, forgotten. Or forgiven. Well, not by all. Personally, I suspect that the Heysel Story has been distorted, and when you watch the footage, you will see plenty of Juventus fans rioting as well, and it may well be that not all the blame rested with Liverpool. But that was not the way that most would have seen it. For many, Liverpool fans were murderers. And this may well have caused Liverpool supporters to stand out from the rest.

In Britain, the anger at Liverpool was most likely amplified by another consideration. At that time, English teams were dominating world cup play. It was no doubt an exciting time for football fans throughout Britain. Between 1977 and 1982, English teams won a record six successive finals. In fact, at the time of the disaster in an unsuitable and run down studium in Brussels, Liverpool was in their ninth successive season of European Cup competition. But Thatcher wielded Heysel like a broad sword, and she wasn’t aiming at Cricket. She intervened, and the ultimate result was that English teams were banned from European Cup competition. And for some time too. If you were a big fan of football, and had gloried in the dominance of English clubs…and in a tremendous irony, Liverpool was actually the most dominant, you probably harbored considerable resentment at the Liverpool supporters for bringing down, not just the Heysel stadium, but the preminence of English football as well. If you were a Liverpool supporter, you probably had few friends in Britain, not to mention continental Europe. Perhaps a sliver of another nuance may exist in the sheer anger that the Liverpool players themselves must have felt. Their performance had been stellar. Now it all came to an end because of…their own fans.

So I find in this a fascinating Detail of Ambiguity as far as Hillsborough goes. It is well established that the police intended to blame the disaster on the fans…Liverpool fans. Perhaps, of all the fans that could have been blamed for some domestic football disaster, blame would stick to Liverpool more readily than any other club supporters. They did it again! Perhaps there were people who when they first heard the news, might have thought, hearing that Liverpool was to blame, that what the police were saying about who caused the disaster was surely correct. It wouldn’t take much effort to bring about such a public perception. Perhaps Liverpool fans alone would not be given the benefit of any doubt…Liverpool fans? It figures! But this time, there was a bizarre twist to the story…Liverpool fans killed 96 people? They outdid their record at Heysel! Liverpool supporters killed 96 Liverpool supporters? A horrible explosion of kharma. Would there be a single person who wouldn’t see in this something akin to a dramatic vengeance for what happened at Heysel? And not a single Nottingham Forest fan died? I see. And how did the people at Heysel die? They were crushed to death. How did the Liverpool supporters at Hillsborough die? Ah, yes! Liverpool supporters killed Liverpool supporters by crushing them to death just like they killed Juventus fans by crushing them to death. Is Hillsborough related to Heysel? Are they somehow linked? Some cosmic connection? That is an interesting question. Or…questions.

So Detail of Ambiguity Number 3 makes Number 2 look more suspicious, and Number 2 makes Number 1 more suspicious. Perhaps. But if the police wanted to make a disaster really stick to the supporters of a particular club, Liverpool was the obvious choice. It failed. And it failed because the circumstances by which that blame was created was shot through with holes. The first hole? Duckenfield fired off that round when he claimed, too soon in my opinion, that Liverpool fans had broken open a gate, presumably C Gate. Peter Wright had to back that out on the next day, though with a replacement claim that lead to the same conclusion as that of Duckenfield. What mistake did the latter make? I can’t be sure, but is it possible that someone forgot about the CCTV camera aimed at C Gate? Liverpool fans can claim all they like that the police opened the gate, and the cops can say that riotous Liverpool fans did it. And who would the public believe? Just remember Heysel. But a CCTV camera was aimed right at the gate, and it is clear, well..as clear as the lousy quality of the coverage turned out to be, that police opened this gate. At least its first and second opening. Thus the police lied, and camera footage would show that. Perhaps without the about-face of South Yorkshire, all the blame would have easily settled on the Liverpool fans, and few would have questioned it. Wright’s claim was clever in that Duckenfield was wrong when he said that Liverpool fans broke through the gate…no, police opened the gate. But! The opening of the gate had nothing to do with the crush in the pens. So Liverpool fans were still to blame. Of course, these two back-to-back claims may lead to the same conclusion, they totally undermine the credibility of what the police would end up saying for decades.

I can’t say with certainty how important the CCTV camera looking down on the courtyard, C Gate, and Leppings Lane in general actually was in any perceived change in the police attempts to blame the Liverpool fans. But apparently contradictory statements, when nuanced properly, can suddenly become a little less contradictory.

Position 1: the crush in Pens 3 and 4 was caused by very unmiddupian, disorderly Liverpool fans who broke through the gate

If you weren’t particularly good at creating a lying story, which actually says something quite positive about you unless it is due to incompetence, which doesn’t, you might make the mistake of not knowing where the CCTV cameras were located throughout the stadium. Wait, there are a lot of CCTV cameras in a football stadium. If, in a purely hypothetical and fictional way and no way intended to be a conspiracy-theory-substitution for the real Canonical Story, you knew in advance about something very tragic that might, fictionally, happen at the Leppings Lane end of the stadium, and the story you concocted ahead of of time was that the horrible Liverpool fans caused the disaster that, quite conveniently, happened only to themselves and thus left the Nottingham Forest supporters without a scratch, you would need C Gate. If you open C Gate suddenly, after engineering the ridiculous situation outside the gate at the turnstiles…you? Who? Hmm. Entering through C Gate, the Tunnel stares you in the face…you don’t notice the way to Pens 1 and 2 on the one hand, or the way to Pens 5 and 6. If no one is present to direct the crowd toward the side entrances to the side pens, the crowd will transform itself into a Big Red River, and water follows the path of least resistance. It would be very clever, if you were making a movie, to engineer the situation at Leppings Lane. But! To save lives! C Gate must now be opened. And to what does that lead? Nuances can lead in different directions. The too-early claim was not that police opened C Gate…that claim came the next day. Instead! The problem at Leppings Lane was due to crowds of Liverpool fans arriving late, drunk, and with no tickets. Now we can proceed to…they broke through the gate! So in this permutation, you engineer the problem outside the stadium…the police open C Gate…the Tunnel is open and so the crowd heads for the Tunnel and crash into Pens 3 and 4. The result is a lethal crowd-crush, or, if you were an even more clever maker of fictional movies based as loosely on real events as possible that you are still able to use the word “based”, you create what looks and feels like a crush but is really something else. But you make no claims to opening C Gate to save Liverpool fans…the game is about to start and they’re…Liverpool fans after all…break through. But even if you were incompetent and didn’t know to get a full report ahead of time detailing where all the CCTV cameras are located…you really only need to be one degree less incompetent to think to yourself…if the sudden opening of C Gate is the key…let’s make sure that we know where all the CCTV cameras at that part of the stadium. If you then learned, later that evening, that there was a CCTV camera looking right down at the action…well, that could be a problem. So a different story would have to appear suddenly. And that could have the far-reaching effect of ensuring that no matter how many lies the authorities told, no matter how many inquiries took place and all reaching the same lying conclusion…the matter would simply refuse to go away.

All of this intersects with my belief that even if you did know about the camera, even if you were very competent at creating lying stories..which when done in the movies are cool fiction instead of lying stories, you would need have a certain “cool under pressure” aspect about yourself. Lying stories are often undermined by “jumping the gun.” Things are worked out ahead of time, but then someone implements a part of the scheme too soon. If the story was going to be a horrible crowd-crush took place in Pens 3 and 4, that very fact, not to mention the sheer scale of it, would unfold over time. You would have to pretend that nothing, in fact, was planned ahead of time. What is that disturbance in the pens? You need information from the officers. But it will take them a little time to figure out what is going on. They swoop into action, and it might be hard to reach someone down at the perimeter gate on the radio for a little while. The exact event and the scale of it would not be something you would know for some time..indeed…96 bodies should be autopsied first..and that’s a lot; not to mention a myriad of witness statements to take, analyze, compare, etc. Then you might present the Home Secretary with a complete report on the tragedy, who in turn briefs the Prime Minister. Now say it. What you present to the public will stick…you don’t get to take it back…and if you try…you will probably find yourself in yet another inquiry decades later. The responsible thing to do would be to present the public with your position after all the examinations have been made, a supposedly complete picture having been obtained. It wasn’t a tornado…it wasn’t an earthquake. And if the whole event were a complete surprise, well, announcing the supposed cause of the whole thing only several minutes into it..who would believe that there isn’t something wrong with that? And I will say that there are other Canonical Stories in which a person or persons, perhaps fraught with anxiety, says something too soon, does something too soon. If that is noticed, the matter will probably never go the way you want it to go.

Yet another nuance. You may have all the elements of your fictional plan go off like clock-work…except, all of those elements can’t. There are a lot of people around, and anything can go wrong. So you wait, play the responsible schemer, and in the supposed investigation, if something that might be a spanner in the works suddenly drops into your works, you can make adjustments to your story accordingly. Again…you present the public with a definitive and comprehensive report on what happened, and avoid having to try and change your ill-executed story on the fly. So now you are a responsible individual, and very, very clever at the same time. It just may be, that your plan will work out after all.

Another nuance could be interesting here. If you didn’t know about the camera, until you suddenly did know about the camera, and not being able to make the footage disappear because others know it’s there…it would have been easier to break the camera the day before the match. Then! You can blame stadium maintenance for not keeping the cameras working properly! So there’s no footage of the actual break-in, but that isn’t your fault. Stadium maintenance painted over it with blue paint! No one noticed the April 14, 1985 edition of the Sun crammed into the broken lens! And so you’re doing pretty good. But you didn’t know about the camera…and now you do! All is lost? No! The footage from this camera is terrible…stadium maintenance should have replaced this camera! When I look at the footage, I can see a cop heading right toward C Gate. I can see C Gate open. But in the footage available to me, which has been represented as the footage shown to the jury, I can’t actually see the cop open C Gate. If I’m not careful, knowing the Canonical Story, I simply “fill in” the gap that actually exists…I see a cop opening C Gate. But that wouldn’t be true, and the process of filling in gaps is one of the reasons I am very hesitant about witness statements. I don’t see the cop open the gate. So if I were the schemer in the movie, and I didn’t know about the camera, but I was smart enough to not blurt out the cause of the event far too soon, I could review the footage from that camera and…make a small adjustment.

Position 2: There was a dangerous crowd-crush developing at the Liverpool entrance to the stadium. To save lives, the order was given, as has been done in the past, to open C Gate and pull the people at the front of the developing crush out of harm’s way, and through the gate. Then! An officer, who we see in the footage, goes to open C Gate. But! Those Liverpool fans! As the police open the gate to save lives, hooligans push open the gates and charge through like animals! Yes we opened C Gate, and yes you can see an officer head to C Gate, and trying to do it carefully, because if you simply threw open the gate, then a stampede of fans could result, the drunken, late, ticket-less hooligans of Heysel-disgrace shove it open, causing an influx of fans, in a far too disorderly way, to race toward the Tunnel, through it, and ultimately cause a lethal crowd crush in Pens 3 and 4.

If you hadn’t jumped the gun, you might have more room to maneuver. I think this story isn’t too bad. Liverpool fans will say that this isn’t what happened. But they will, assuming that there are no police claims that fall away in less than 24 hours, not be believed. Your allies in the press can play up the story line, and could even inundate the public with reminders of Heysel. A little patience can go a long way.

The problem with trying to understand something like Hillsborough, well one of many, is knowing what to believe. Is one side lying and the other side telling the truth? If the police were shown to have lied, and they did, and the inquests and investigations can’t be trusted, and they can’t, and Thatcher took the position of the police, then one is left at position zero. There are simply too many lies to be able to trust any part of their side of the story. The victims who died were unlawfully killed, if not worse, and that is something that isn’t open to debate. But is all the testimony, in its various shapes and in its various contexts, completely reliable? The difference is between night and day? Good and Evil? The Truthful and the Liars? Usually, the answer lies somewhere in between. Witness testimony, as any student of the Sylvia Likens case knows, can be highly compromised. Why? Well..lying. But there’s a huge difference between the death of someone in your house, and a large-scale human disaster. Survivors can, though I am not saying do…or all do…have problems remembering exactly what happened. That is common in traumatic stress situations, where the mind blacks things out. Sometimes the memory recovers what was temporary lost. But sometimes the gaps get filled in. These fillers will appear to be memory recovery…but they are not. How can one know the difference? How can sometime trying to understand the Great Disaster, someone who knows to look critically and take nothing for granted…it’s important to keep nuanced contexts in mind. If someone were to take the position that the fans contributed to what happened…that will seem cold-hearted…it may seem as though such a person is blaming the victims. But viewing the fans as sharing some of the blame is not to blame the victims. That is especially true if these two shots are examined:

The eye now wants to focus on the three cops. But look at the back of Pens 3 and 4. It is 2:00. C Gate will not open, the second time, until 2:52. So this is the back of the pens 52 minutes before the second opening of C Gate. It is impossible to not realize that the two pens are packed all the way to the very back. There may still be some room for a few people to force their way in. Don’t forget that people are making their way through the turnstiles, so more fans are moving through the courtyard and toward the pens. Now, the back is obviously full…actually, it looks too full. How about this shot:

There's nothing more satisfying than seeing a young person studying before the football match! Mr. School would be proud! This is the view of Pen 3 from Pen 2, or I suppose it could be the view of Pen 4 from Pen 5. The time is 2:19, which is, of course, 19 minutes later than the photo that shows the back of the pens at 2:00. So what we would expect to be true of the front of Pens 3 and 4 is the same thing that is true of the back of Pens 3 and 4….the pens are full. 

Now I emphasize that I am in no way making any claims that anyone who survived whatever happened at Hillsborough is lying, has a faulty memory, is “filling in” details missing from their recall, or anything like that. I am simply analyzing parts of a Canonical Story by focusing on various details. A prominent witness of the disaster at Hillsborough relates entering in through C Gate. The witness then says that she went down the Tunnel. Once in one of the pens, i.e. Pen 3 or Pen 4, she became caught in the growing crush, and was soon in distress. Although not remembering what actually happened next, she states that someone pulled her out of the pen through the perimeter gate, and that she was one of the first persons to escape through the gate. Of course, to be one of the first to be pulled through the gate meant that the witness had been at the very front of the pen…in fact…right by the perimeter gate. And the footage, although it does not show her actually being pulled through the gate, does, quite suddenly, show her standing outside the perimeter gate. It is also clear that she is very distressed, as anyone in that situation would be.

There is, however, something very interesting that is easy to miss. Remember, don’t let your eye be directed toward what it would naturally be directed toward; force yourself to look elsewhere:

In front of which perimeter gate is she standing? Perimeter gate 2…the gate leading from Pen 2 to the pitch. One might get the impression that the witness was pulled out of Pen 2. In fact, she looks indeed like she was one of the first people pulled out of that pen…Pen 2. The Tunnel leads to Pens 3 and 4.

The Tunnel is along the back wall in the middle of the picture. Going down that Tunnel will take you into Pen 3 or Pen 4. To get into Pen 2, you would proceed toward the back far right top of the photo. To be one of the first persons pulled through the perimeter gate 2, you would be at the front of Pen 2.

The photo showing the witness standing outside of Pen 2 is consistent with what is observable about Pens 3 and 4 at 2:00 and 2:19. The footage available to me that shows the flow of people through C Gate is rather odd because it doesn’t actually show where these people went. The way the footage is viewed suggests, and of course you’re watching the footage in light of what the Canonical Story tells you about where those people went, indicates that they headed, en masse,, to the Tunnel and into Pens 3 and 4. As the photo from 2:00 shows, these people, as a whole, could not have possibly got into the Pens. And…if you did fight your way into Pen 3, it is hard to believe that you could have forced your way through the crowd, and around the crush barriers, to end up standing at the perimeter gate for Pen 3. Thus it is strange that, if the people entering C Gate actually headed into the tunnel, that these people could have got into either pen. It is noteworthy that only one crush barrier failed. All the rest remained structurally intact. The arrangement of the barriers creates zones in between them. Beginning at the front, and moving toward the rear, the people in each zone are protected from crushing by those in the zone behind them. The entrance into each zone can not be done en masse, i.e. as a large stampeding crowd:

While it is true that the removal of the middle part of Crush Barrier 136 may have been ill-advised, the means by which one moves between the zones created by the crush barriers is restricted by the size of the access point. From the perspective of someone who is clearly not an expert, the arrangement of the crush barriers looks like the people in the front zone are the safest, with the risk of injury increasing as one moves back toward the tunnel. Those in the third zone back appear to be the most at risk should a large crowd move quickly into the back of the pen. That said, the entrance from the Tunnel into Pens 3 and Pens 4 does not allow a sudden emergence, en masse, into the zone created by Crush Barriers 136 and 149, in Pen 3. The removal of Crush Barrier 144 in Pen 3 would allow more people to suddenly enter the pen than was possible when that portion of the barrier was still there, but to the untrained eye, such as my own, it would appear as if a large group of fast, though not disorderly, people descended into the Tunnel, they would come to an abrupt stop given the narrow entrance into the pens, and the difficulty that those at the front of the crowd would have trying to get into pens they couldn’t have gotten into 48 – 52 minutes before C Gate was opened. The result could have been, though probably wasn’t, that a crush would develop in the Tunnel, made worse by the concrete walls, with increasing pressure being applied by the crowd behind pushing against the crowd that had become trapped in the Tunnel. But this didn’t happen, so one might, not knowing any better, suspect that the crowd suddenly entering through C Gate was somehow directed to the side pens, and did not suddenly descend into Pens 3 and 4. One witness stated that he saw a man pinned up against the radial fence in one of the pens, and that he was looking quite distressed. This would suggest that by a certain point, it would not have been possible to climb out of Pen 3 into Pen 2. So if you were pulled out of a perimeter gate, and that gate was Pen 2, then you had actually been in that pen from the start. If you were able to climb the radial fence that separated Pen 2 and Pen 3, then there would have had to have been enough room in Pen 3 to make that climb. The radial fence is not an easy one to climb, and would have required sufficient room to maneuver. The photos of Pens 3 and 4 at 2:00 and 2:19 show that it would be impossible to make your way through to the front of either pen at 2:48; 2:52; or any time later. Still, the Tunnel was open. So was someone actually directing the inrushing fans toward the side pens? Or would the sudden stopping of the first persons heading into the Tunnel caused people behind them to take the path of least resistance, heading toward the right and into Pens 1 and 2?

The above pictures of Pen 2 are very important. Liverpool fans were pouring out onto the pitch at 3:04, one minute before Crush Barrier 124a failed. The announcer states that there was an overflow of fans, and says: “there is room in the sections to either side.” Does he really have a sufficient view of the crowd in Pen 2? Either he is correct and therefore Pen 2 still had room in it for more people as late as 3:04, or he doesn’t have a good enough view of the side pens, and thus he is mistaken. Which option would I say is correct? The answer is important…very important. I think that it is clear that the announcer was right about the room left in the side pens. Since police were leading fans who had suddenly appeared on the pitch to Pen 1, those side pens still had room. What about Pen 2?

The lethal crush that occurred, according to the Canonical Story, did not take place in the Tunnel. It took place in Pens 3 and 4, and was caused when people were let in through C Gate, and then charged down the Tunnel, and somehow made it into pens that were far too crowded as early as 2:00. The crush was worse down toward the front, despite the fact that the crush barriers, except for one segment, held. I am not aware of any claim that there was a lethal crush in Pen 2. And if that is true, look at the photo again. The perimeter gate is open, which it would have to be if someone pulled you through it. There are two cops. One fan is just getting past them, another is coming through the open gate, yet another is climbing over the top of the perimeter fence. In fact, it looks like there was, Pen 2, a similar scene developing to the one that the Canonical Story says manfested itself in Pens 3 and 4. As concerns the situation with the crowd:

Pen 2 = Pen 3 = Pen 4

Pen 2 ≠ a crush

Pen 2 = Pen 3 = Pen 4 ≠ a crush

This would be, only theoretically of course, a tremendous problem for the Canonical Story. It raises the possibility that people initially responded to something other than a crush. If what was happening was in fact that people, at various points in the crowd, in at least Pens 2, 3, and 4, suddenly could not breathe and began turning syanotic, which are two of the main manifestations of Compression Asphyxia, but are also symptomatic of something else, then the over-crowded situation in the pens could lead to what would appear to have been the only likely interpretation…a crowd-crush. If people were suffocating while in a standing position, which would occur during a crush, or theoretically could happen if people suffocating for another reason were standing in a crowded pen, then the crowd would interpret the situation as a lethal crush, not knowing any other way to understand what was happening. This would lead to panic, which, rather than Beardsley’s kick hitting the cross-bar of the goal, could have created the situation that led to Crush Barrier 124a finally breaking. And there is much in this impossible possibility that can go a long way in explaining behavior of the police, particuarly those present at the perimeter fence, and perhaps even the behavior of emergency medical personnel who also were present at the perimeter gate.

I suppose it’s a good thing that this portion of an amateurish, pedantic, and down-right annoying discussion of certain Details of Ambiguity that may demand, in part, a second look, has mercifully come to an end.  Still, these details whiz around us like protons and electrons speeding around a nucleus. If you looked into a Canonical Story Mirror, you might see these harmless and irrelevant details bounce off the Looking Glass that stands before you. And so it should be. Perhaps one or two are moving fast enough that small fractures appear in the glass when they hit. Now it might be hard to make any sense of what you see reflected in the glass. Such a distorted image is far less desirable than a ready explanation. Of course, staring at a distorted image long enough..well, you might just start to see something else. After long enough, a clear, though very strange and fictional, picture might slowly appear. How do you know that what you see now is any more real than what you saw before? I’m not sure…maybe it’s not.