My evil plans were foiled again.
A funny thing happened this summer. As most of the people who read this blog are aware, I spoke on a whistleblowing panel at the Oxford Union in February of 2018 and became the only person in the history of the self proclaimed last bastion of free speech to be censored by them. You can read all about it here, here and here. In brief, the 2018 talk was censored because the other panelist, David Shedd, CIA agent and former Director of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, had a tantrum. On July 7 of this year, I received an unexpected invitation to speak at the Oxford Union. Again. That’s pretty funny in itself but there’s more.
The invitation is posted below. As indicated in the invitation, the new committee members are fully aware of what happened the last time I spoke there. After a quick search to find out who the new committee was, I decided the invitation warranted a polite response and I sent one on July 10, agreeing tentatively to the dates but expressing some concerns based on my last experience. I requested a written commitment that the talk would be posted on their Youtube channel and pointed out that my name was already on their list of prior speakers but had been suppressed. I asked if they would publish the prior talk on their Youtube channel, with the dissenting panelist (David Shedd) blurred and muted if necessary.
And that was the last I heard from them. Then on August 4, I received an email from a journalist, Douglas Lucas, who had been the only journalist to cover my last censored appearance at the Oxford Union. His article had been published on May. 31, 2018, and at some time prior to that (over four years ago) he had contacted David Shedd for a comment. He had no idea that I was recently in communication with the Oxford Union; he wrote to tell me that he thought I ought to know, he had received a very random text message the day before from David Shedd. I’ll let him tell you about it, but the message was an attempt at an ‘accidental pocket dial’ type of contact where Shedd obviously wants this journalist who phoned him once over four years ago to know he’s thinking of him.
This was so bizarre that I decided to get the closest thing I could expect as a confirmation from Oxford Union and I sent them the following on August 6:
Good morning Geronimo and Ahmad,
Since it has been a month with no response from you and David Shedd has
been strangely contacting people in my circle out of the blue after five
years, it is looking very much like the last bastion of free speech has
once more been told by the CIA/Shedd that you are not allowed to
communicate with me. I will take no response as a confirmation of that.
Heather Marsh
I received no response so I am taking that as confirmation that yep, the ‘former’ CIA agent and head of the DIA has absolutely nothing better to do in these troubled times than to stalk journalists and forbid student unions from talking to me ever again.
I am disappointed that I am denied the opportunity to be the only person ever censored by the Oxford Union – again – but the whole thing is deeply funny. Or it would be if these weren’t the people supposedly running the world. When we spoke on the panel all those years ago, Shedd told the audience to “Get all your James Bond questions ready.” Seriously. And this is how he spends his days.
Oh, what was it I was censored for saying the last time, you ask? I was censored for saying that the CIA was too incompetent to keep anyone safe and also they weren’t trying to – they only cared about keeping themselves safe. So what I said still holds and the CIA is still hard at work protecting itself. My evil plans were foiled again.
If you’d like to read the transcript of what I said in 2018, it’s here.
Heather Marsh 