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Parts of the network
1.Thomas Deichmann: how a concentration camp defender was reinvented as a GM expert
2.Bill Durodie - 'Advisor to the Prime Minister's Cabinet Office Strategy Unit'
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1. Thomas Deichmann - a GM WATCH profile
[full text and links here:
http://www.gmwatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=161]

Thomas Deichmann is the editor of Novo, the German sister publication to LM, formerly Living Marxism - the monthly review of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP).

He has also co-authored a book on biotechnology with Thilo Spahl, Das Populäre Lexikon der Gentechnik: Überraschende Fakten von Allergie über Killerkartoffel bis Zelltherapie (The Popular Lexicon of Genetic Engineering: Surprising Facts from Allergy and Killer Potatoes to Cell Therapy), which has been published by Novo.

In April 2003 he was one of the speakers at a Genes and Society 'festival' in London organised by the Institute of Ideas, where he was involved in debate on GM crops and the Third World.

Deichmann has also contributed articles to Novo and Spiked on Percy Schmeiser, the Canadian famer who has been in a long-running legal battle with Monsanto over patent issues and GM crops. In his Spiked piece Deichamnn chides the German media over what he claims is the inaccuracy of their reporting: 'there is a striking difference between the issues raised by the case and the way Schmeiser has been represented in sections of the German media - which indicates that, in the GM debate in Europe, scaremongering often has more purchase than science.'

This is not the first time Deichmann has taken the media to task. Prior to his reinvention as a GM expert, Deichmann was best known for an article on Bosnia he contributed to LM, in which he accused British journalists of fabricating evidence of imprisonment and atrocities at the Trnopolje camp in Bosnia. As a result of the article, LM was sued out of existence with the court finding, as did war crimes tribunals at the Hague, that Trnopolje was 'a camp where Muslims were undoubtedly imprisoned' and where 'many were beaten, tortured, raped and killed by their Serb guards'. (High stakes in battle over Serbian guilt)

Deichamnn also published an interview in LM with the Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, who had by then been charged with genocide and crimes against humanity (see Poison in the well of history). Deichmann also put in an appearance as the final defence witness at the trial in the Hague of Dusko Tadic. The war crimes tribunal clearly did not find Deichmann's evidence convincing as it convicted Tadic of crimes against humanity, including 'killings, beatings and forced transfers' of civilians, as well as a particularly horrific sexual mutilation. These crimes were found to have been committed in Trnopolje as well as at two other detention camps, Omarska and Keraterm. (see the Tadic judgement)

Deichmann also played a leading part in the RCP/LM front organisation the London International Research Exchange (LIRE), directed by fellow Living Marxism contributor Joan Phillips. LIRE and Living Marxism worked together to deny the genocidal nature of the conflict in Bosnia and to present Serbia as merely the West's latest whipping boy - a victim of Western imperialism. (The Serbian Unity Congress and the Serbian Lobby: A Study of Contemporary Revisionism and Denial)

One of Deichmann and Phillip's principal targets was the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Roy Gutman. In a letter to the journal Foreign Policy, Michael Sells points out how Gutman's award-winning articles 'ultimately forced the closing of several notorious concentration camp complexes (Omarska-Keraterm, Manjaca, Trnoplilje).'  Sells notes that if those who sought to undermine Gutman's credibility had succeeded, Omarska, the worst of the camps, 'may have operated for months, even years. How many would have perished there: 50,000, 80,000, 100,000?'  Sells draws a parallel with the second world war, 'The systematic killing of Jews in WW2 was known as early as 1942, but denials - very similar to the Joan Phillips reports - allowed people to persuade themselves that it couldn't be true, until it was too late.'

According to German journalist Paul Stoop of the Berlin Tagesspiegel nobody had ever heard of Deichmann before the editor of Novo reinvented himself as a fully-fledged Bosnia expert (The Guardian, 12 March 1997) . As the battle of ideas over Bosnia has receded, Deichmann seems to have reinvented as an expert commentator on biotechnology.

In effect, Deichmann has been transformed from an expert exposer of 'myths' about Serb nationalist atrocities into an expert apologist for biotechnology. The platforms that have made this repackaging possible - Novo, Spiked and the IoI - are all part of the same network. However, when the IoI present him as, 'Thomas Deichmann editor, Novo magazine and co-author of The Popular Lexicon of Gene Technology', there is nothing to indicate that Novo is a sister publication of LM or that  Deichmann's book was published by Novo's publishing house. This is an incestous and self-perpetuating world of undisclosed  affiliations in which truth is consistently subjugated to ideology.

The ideological position of the Living Marxism network to which Deichmann belongs is that it is vital to support genetic engineering in order to champion 'science' and 'human endeavour', and that all restictions on genetic technologies or big business should be strenuously opposed.
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Bill Durodié - A GM WATCH profile
[for all the links
http://www.gmwatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=148]

Bill Durodié is a member of the advisory board of the Scientific Alliance and he also  describes himself as an 'Advisor to the Prime Minister's Cabinet Office Strategy Unit study "The Costs and Benefits of Genetically Modified (GM) Crops." ' This study formed the economic strand that complemented the UK government's Public Debate on GM crops which culminated in 2003.

Durodié is also a Senior Research Fellow & Project Co-ordinator for the Domestic Management of Terrorist Attacks Programme, at the Centre for Defence Studies, which is part of the International Policy Institute at King's College London. He also says he has, 'Worked as a European advisor within both the private and public sectors, including a secondment to the Government Office for London'.

On behalf of King's College London, Durodié organised the conference Communicating the War on Terror, which took place at the Royal Institution in June 2003. Among those chairing sessions at the two day event were Fiona Fox (director of the Science Media Centre ) and Bruno Waterfield. Like Durodié, both have been contributors to the magazine LM, formerly Living Marxism . Among the conference speakers were Frank Furedi, Phil Hammond, Michael Fitzpatrick and Mick Hume, all of whom connect to LM and the Revolutionary Communist Party out of which it emerged. Another LM contributor, Ellen Raphael, the Assistant Director of Sense About Science, assisted Durodié with organising the event.

The fact that all these people had long term connections to each other and have been part of the same extreme political network does not appear to have been disclosed to those attending the conference. It can hardly be considered irrelevant given that the Revolutionary Communist Party , contributors to LM/Living Marxism , and the RCP's front group, the Irish Freedom Movement, which Fiona Fox at one time headed, all supported the 'armed struggle' in Northern Ireland, and refused to condemn any of the acts of terror of the IRA. They also, after the IRA announced their cease-fire, opposed the peace process and  LM provided a platform for dissident republican views in articles written by Fox (under her alias Fiona Foster).

Durodié himself frequently cites the RCP's chief ideologist, Frank Furedi, in his publications, and has contributed to all the network's main platforms: LM, Spiked and the Institute of Ideas.

Many of Durodié 's papers have been published by far right think tanks, eg the Competitive Enterprise Institute (Poisonous Propaganda) and the European Science and Environment Forum (Poisonous Dummies), or by Living Marxism network connected groups, eg the Institute of Ideas (Can we trust the experts?) and Audacity.org (Society loses when the polluter is made to pay).