Spain continue with their onslaught of lies and attacks- trying to justify the unjustifiable

Spain continue with their onslaught of lies and attacks- trying to justify the unjustifiable

Everyone who knows about SPAIN know there is more smuggling of tabacco by containers via Algeciras, Valencia ports than in Gibraltar.

Everyone knows how much tabacco smuggling even goes on via the borders of Andorra and yet they focus on Gibraltar!

It is amazing that the Spanish Government think that via our land frontier is a financial threat to Spain. IT is almost laughable but is in fact sad that they continue to lie and twist facts!

At a time where everyone in SPAIN can see how deep their government is in corruption - their government continues to try and pull the wool over their eyes and get them to focus on the Gibraltar issues and not the truth of the corruption they are suffering in SPAIN!


Below is a write up by a very brave reporters of the panorama daily newspaper - says it all as it is.

Spanish Customs to use full-body see-through scanner at the frontier

By Leo Olivero
PANORAMA NEWSDESK: The Spanish Government is to deploy a ‘Mobile X-Ray Scanner’ at the frontier to detect, according to them, cross-frontier smuggling of tobacco.

In a Panorama Investigation we can exclusively reveal the mobile X-ray scan technology mentioned is one installed and operated in a mobile vehicle (van) - it is system that is potentially dangerous!

Serious concerns start to emerge when specifications and the potential of the vehicles equipment are examined. This important information has been kept firmly under-wraps by the Spanish Authorities. however our investigation has been able to discover, unwrap and expose another dirty gamí:e by Spain against the people of Gibraltar. One that may have human rights implications, as the use of such intrusive equipment at a frontier not only raises important privacy issues but also matters of health!

To give a brief description of the equipment, spanish customs intend to use at the frontier: this is an apparatus with known hi-tech capabilities, it’s scanning device aims a focussed X-ray beam that reportedly has the ‘capability of penetrating 14 inches of steel and capturing detailed parts of the human body as vehicles and people pass across equipment’s (dangerous) beams’ this is a process that is simultaneously monitored by operators inside the van.

Shocking Revelation

This is quite a shocking revelation. These plans are said to be part of a strategy to crack-down on cigarette smuggling across the frontier, which they say is causing untoward damage to the Spanish economy

The regional special representative of ‘La Agencia Tributaria’ (Spanish Tax) Alberto García Valera, says he has found it necessary to spend money and invest heavily on new technologies to combat fraud and tax evasion in places like the Le Linea-Gibraltar Frontier.

He is a high ranking customs officer and a national Inspector for Hacienda . He said the state will be installing what he describes as ‘video –surveillance’ which he sparsely described as van with the capability to scan in 30 seconds the presence of tobacco products in any part of a Vehicle or on the Body of a Person”

Valera added that the mobile scan equipment is specifically built to detect tobacco products only; he added that for every euro invested by his organisation a 400% return is expected with the use of this equipment. He also says the frontier will also see an improved system to monitor i/d cards which would speed up frontier crossings, particularly for cross-frontier Spanish (only) workers it seems.

As Expected Gibraltar Gets The Customary Verbal Assault

As you would expect the obvious and awaited anti-Gibraltar jibe didn’t take long to come this when Valera said “its jurisdictions like Gibraltar who sell tobacco at half the price who create these incentives for people to smuggle them over the frontier”

There was something obviously not right with what was said, the details were sketchy, unconvincing and if Gibraltar is blamed in anyway then you know these scheming conniving Spaniards are up to something…Which Was The Sign For Panorama to Investigate Further.

We conducted our own investigation, it took us a long afternoon and early evenings work to discover that the ‘La Agencia Tributaria’ placed an order with the American company American Science and Engineering (AS&E) for the delivery of this very sophisticated and hi-tech scan system known as the ZBV S-Class to be used for Frontier deployment.

The makers of the ZBV System are a USA company ‘American Science and Engineering’ are said to be one of the leading worldwide suppliers of X-ray detection equipment.

The ZBV or Z Backscatter Van, according the makers is a mobile X-ray vehicle screening system, it uses technology known as ‘Backscatter’ which provides a photo-like images of concealed objects, such as explosives, drugs, currency trade-fraud items and of course things like cigarettes, but the latter not exclusively so.

The ZBV X-Ray Scanning equipment is integrated into a standard van type vehicle, usually powered by a Mercedes or Chrysler engine. According to the makers AS&E the ZBV creates a photo-like Z Backscatter images showing materials by directing a sweeping beam of X-rays at the object under examination, and then measuring and plotting the intensity of scattered X-rays…if you’re in your car, your body will get zapped by the X-Ray beams!

Another significant feature to this equipment is that these vans can scan adjacent vehicles while the system (the ZBV) itself is moving, scanning an entire row of parked cars in a single pass-through and producing clear images. They can also be operated in stationary mode by parking the van, and producing X-ray images of vehicles and people inside as they pass by.

Privacy and Health Concerns Elsewhere!

Other technological abilities include near-photo quality that views through clothes.

As you would expect there have been serious health and privacy concerns raised in the USA and elsewhere particularly where these units are in operation.

The ZBV system was introduced in 2003 each unit cost in the region of $750, 000.

A Powerful Scanning Equipment Not Suited In An Enclosed & Restricted Frontier

If you take our own scenario which is a very enclosed and busy frontier with its unique geographical setup, a situation which I believe is not conducive (health wise) for the introduction of such hi-tech and potentially potent piece of scanning equipment.

With 40,000 people crossing the frontier everyday, the same people, and children included, making the regular frontier crossing dozens of times a week. Now exposed to the whims of people who literally hate us… who will be hidden in a van and would zap us with x-ray beams whenever they felt like it, something we would never know!

Where are the guarantees from the Spanish Government that this new Brain Wave to generate money will not be a health hazard to the many thousands of people who cross the frontier regularly - who live and work on either side of the frontier?

Are we to believe Mr Valera who said the new equipment is only there to catch tobacco smugglers, yet in the same breath says the X-ray scans the entire body looking for the odd packet of cigarette someone may have stashed down someone’s knickers or in another’s underpants.

Are we to trust that the Spanish customs operators of the unit will keep to strict operating procedures and not use the machine to scan everyone that crosses the frontier…suspect smugglers or not! Are we also to believe this mobile scanning unit will not drive along the frontier fence and scan local vehicles on this side of the frontier even before they drive across or are even going about their business on British territory.

How can we believe these people when they daily invade our waters break our laws and take shots at innocent civilians in BGTW and then openly deny everything - OF COURSE WE CAN’T!

In theory, experts say that the device is supposed to be safe for human targets, this if it’s operated at a distance, because the beam is weakened by penetrating the metal of a vehicle before it reaches a person, the frontier does not allow for any kind of a safe distance.

Professor Peter Rez, a physicist at Arizona State University who specializes in X-ray technology, and who has been doing research on backscatter X-ray dosages, says that if used properly, the radiation doses received by targeted persons would be very small, but then he notes that if the government (in the USA) begins a major campaign of stealthy X-raying on roads and at locations there are concerns. If you receive 15 doses a month is that SAFE?

Another scan expert also quoted that radiation from “one scan is the equivalent to flying for 15 minutes at 30,000 feet in an aircraft”, so if you cross the frontier 30 times a month and get zapped ten times only – this would be the equivalent of flying 90 minutes at 3000,000 feet - sounds dangerous to me! And not because I don’t like flying!

I believe this is an important issue that should be officially investigated and many questions asked by the UK and Local Government to the Spanish Government. Probably also suggesting to them to send a fleet of these mobile scan vehicles and station them outside the Spanish Parliament and start zapping Spanish ministers and others as they walk in and out of La Moncloa…I have no doubt this would be much more profitable

01-07-13

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In another newspaper in GIbraltar we have an avid supporter of Gibraltar who writes and defend our land in everyway he can. The latest the letter below

Letter to Chairman Special Committee on Decolonisation

By Vox Editor 

I refer to the question of the decolonisation of my homeland i.e Gibraltar on your committee’s agenda since the fifties

 H.E. Marty. N. Natalegawa,
Chairman Special Committee on Decolonisation,
2, United Nations Plaza,
New York, NY 10017,
U.S.A.
2nd July 2008. 

Your Excellency, 

First and foremost my congratulations on your appointment and hope that justice will not only be done but appear to be done. 

I refer to the question of the decolonisation of my homeland i.e Gibraltar on your committee’s agenda since the fifties and nothing as yet done, not through the fault of either our elected Government or the Colonial Power but as a result of the interference of the democratic government of Spain to whom more credence is given than to our elected representatives, something unheard of in diplomatic circles. 

You have recently heard our petitioners, for the umpteenth time, both the Chief Minister, elected by majority, this time by only 643 votes but nevertheless the leader of our Parliament and the Leader of the Opposition, himself a previous Chief Minister pleading our indisputable sound case and based on UN established principals and not on fabricated and self opinionated desires by an illegal claimant. 

His Excellency Ban.Ki-Moon in his address to your committee urged that progress be made in settling the status of the remaining 16 non-self governing territories, Gibraltar is one of these. Unfortunately your Excellency when the colonial power agreed a new Constitution for Gibraltar and therefore the inhabitants, the people who count., matters could not be taken further because of the objections of Spain and their interpretation of the so called principal of territorial integrity, something on which your legal arm i.e the ICJ has already pronounced itself and always in favour of the colonial people. For ease of reference see,
1. Guatemala’s claim to British Honduras now the independent state of Belize.
2. South Africa’s claim to Namibia.
3. Morocco’s claim to the Western Sahara. ( the old Spanish Colony).
4. Recently Indonesia’s claim to East Timor. 

In the cases of 2-4, the claiming countries had within the life of the UN exercised governance over the named territories, mark the essential difference with Gibraltar when Spain’s last measure of control was before August 1704. 

With the greatest of respect let me remind your Excellency and members of the committee that this much maligned interpretation of the principal of territorial integrity has been broken by the General Assembly in the cases of the Soviet Union (a permanent member of the security council), Yugoslavia and Czech Republic, all of these countries joined the UN as one country, but when Spain was allowed to join in 1955 Gibraltar had not been Spanish for over 251 years a marked difference to the cited countries or is this mistaken principal only applicable to Gibraltar. 

N.B. Not Colonies ‘per se’, Spain controls Olivenza within Portugal, which should have been returned in 1806, Ceuta, Mellilla and offshore islands in Morocco and Llivia an enclave in the Pyrenees not returned to France in 1660 under the Treaty of Llivia, because it was listed as a city and not a village. 

Your Excellency, the principal of the United Nations Charter is that it trumps all other treaties, ‘Lex posterior derogat priori and furthermore that the principal of self determination is applicable to all colonial peoples, with no exception, furthermore Article 103 states that in the event of a conflict between a previous treaty and the UN Charter the Charter prevails and Spain’s intransigence must not be permitted to further delay the excellent work of your committee. The answer is very simple Gibraltar must be treated just like every other colonial territory and Spain should be advised that if she feels so strongly she has recourse to the ICJ once Gibraltar attains the status of decolonised.
 
Spain’s opinion would not be sustainable in a Court of Law for the following reasons :- 

1. They lost Gibraltar by conquest in 1704.
2. They surrendered in perpetuity in 1713.
3. They further accepted situation in 1729.
4. They received two territories i.e.Minorca and Florida in 1783, treaty of Versailles in
exchange for Gibraltar, later selling Florida to America for a substantial sum. 

Other considerations to be taken into account being that your committee has been invited by both the Government of Gibraltar and the colonial power the UK to send a fact finding delegation to Gibraltar and who objects Spain, Gibraltar was listed a colony way back in 1946 by the colonial power, Spain entered the UN in 1955 and at no time has Gibraltar been listed a Spanish colony so they cannot object to a fact finding mission visiting, the only reason because they are afraid of what you would find out. 

In was once mooted by a legal minded person that ‘Pacta sunt servanda’ could be a consideration to Utrecht 1713, but surely as a result of the antiquity and international events since that day, it would be more appropriate to apply ‘Clausula rebus sic stantibus’.
My most profound apologies to your Excellency as your task must be enormous, but to us Gibraltarians it is of the greatest importance that this stigma of colonialism be done away with and our lives return to normal without having to look daily over our shoulders at an aggressive neighbour who preaches democracy to the four winds but steers well clear of a court appearance, no doubt they would find it difficult to justify their continuous fabricated lies in this scenario. 

Yours faithfully,
W.L.Chamberland. MBE, FCIS. 
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One of the hardest things is that UK Government are doing nothing at all to defend our land, sea or air!

Time and time again we are given only excuses after excuses! All we do see is appeasment after appeasement to SPAIN!

We need to get people in UK to give their own MPs or MEPS a very hard time for neglecting all the issues with the bullying from SPAIN! We need the FCO pen pushers to stop - think - learn about us!

Gibraltar is BRITISH - We are not a colony! But UK Government have a duty to defend and secure our British Territorial Waters!

Spain's actions are practically an invasion in many ways - are they testing the response or support from UK?

Wake up UK, FCO and our Governor you all have a duty to protect us!

Anne-Marie Struggles