More Emails flying between Steve Bates, Reporter for the Guardian and Paul Gillies, WTS Press Man for Britian.
First the Gilles letter
"Paul Gillies" < [email protected]> on 25/10/2001 05:56:19 pm
To: Stephen Bates/Guardian/GNL@GNL
cc: letters
Subject: FW: from Stephen Bates, the Guardian
Message:
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Dear Mr. Bates,
My apologies for the delay in responding to your letter as I am at present out of the country and relying on my email being forwarded. You stated in your second article on 15 October that thousands around the world had read your previous article within hours of publication. Obviously then, the best way to communicate my response is to publish my letter in The Guardian. I have supplied you with an honest answer, but I am sorry that you do not agree with it. I do not give you permission to circulate my letter. Rather, if my letter is published the thousands who have written to you may judge its veracity for themselves.
sincerely, Paul Gillies
-----Original Message-----
From: Forward Mail [mailto: [email protected]]
Sent: 22 October 2001 07:26
To: ' [email protected]'
Subject: from Stephen Bates, the Guardian
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Here is Steve Bates, response
He's written again - and here's my response too....
---------------------- Forwarded by Stephen Bates/Guardian/GNL on 25/10/2001
11:02 am ---------------------------
Stephen Bates
25/10/2001 11:01 am
To: "Paul Gillies" < [email protected]>
cc:
bcc:
Message:
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Dear Mr Gillies
Thank you for your response. The Guardian will not publish your letter because it appears to us to be untruthful, or possibly part of your sect's ludicrously-entitled "theocratic war strategy".
As you must know if you have troubled to check the matter out, what you described as a library pass was in fact accreditation as an NGO to obtain access to the United Nations - that is what the WTBTS secured in 1992, after applying in 1991. If you have been informed otherwise by the WTBTS you have been misled and I expect you will want to make inquiries to discover why.
In accordance with resolutions 1247 and 1248 of the United Nations, passed in 1968, some 23 years before the WTBTS applied, accredited organisations are required to subscribe to the aims and ideals of the UN charter, so this was not changed during the course of the WTBTS's membership as you erroneously stated.
Furthermore, the accreditation was required to be renewed annually during the WTBTS's association, so it is inconceivable that your people in New York were not aware of what they were signing up to each year. To obtain re-accreditation someone at the WTBTS must have signed an application form each year and I would be grateful if you could let me know who that was. It appears that whoever did so may not have been informing the rest of the organisation what was going on, in applying to associate with what your literature with astonishing hyperbole described in 1997 as "a disgusting thing."
In addition, your letter appears to be at a certain amount of variance with what your Portuguese colleague told a newspaper there, when a journalist followed up the story, that the NGO status was applied for to assist the WTBTS's humanitarian aid work in the Third World. Was it to do this or to apply much more mundanely for access to the library?
I am sure you will understand that until these issues can be answered, the Guardian is unable to publish your letter because it seems to us to be misleading and not factually correct, indeed possibly "designed to misdirect the enemy" as your strategy has it. I note that you have so far been unable to point to any factual inaccuracies in my stories or to deny the veracity of the highly damaging statements from WTBTS publications that I quoted. I note en passant that you did not dissent from my reference to myself as bird seed and I can state that, contrary to the apparent assertions of some of your more ill-informed elders, I am neither an apostate nor an agent of the devil.
You will however be reassured to note, I am sure, that, since my articles were widely read on Jehovah's Witnesses' websites and message boards across the world, most of whose correspondents could not hope to see the copies of the Guardian newspaper in which they originally appeared, I have published your previous letter and my response to it, and will also publish this one, there. This is to enable witnesses and former witnesses - those most affected by and interested in the stories and best able to understand them - to assess their veracity and the calibre of your response. I must say that many hundreds of them in several countries including the US doubt your version of events. If your original letter was not intended for publication, I am not quite sure why you wrote it.
Perhaps you might also like to explain the truly distasteful images of Armageddon, including the destruction of skyscrapers, that appear in Jehovah's Witnesses' literature, which would appear to undermine any public expressions of sympathy by the WTBTS over the events of 11 September.
Yours sincerely,
Stephen Bates
(Note From hawk - Steve Bates & I noted he made a minor error but it was too late. He used Resolutions 1247 and 1248. He mean't to say Resolutions 1296 and 1297 passed by ECOSOC council in the UN in 1968.)
hawk
P.S. Here is Bates Orginal Message
-----Original Message-----
Subject: from Stephen Bates, the Guardian
From: [email protected]
Addr: [email protected]
Sent: Mon 22/10/01 at 15:25:41
Dear Mr Gillies,
I have just been shown your letter, submitted for publication two weeks after my initial article appeared in the Guardian.
I would be very grateful if you would allow me to circulate it to the thousands of Jehovah's Witnesses who have contacted me since the articles appeared because, if there was nothing secret about your association with the Scarlet-Coloured Beast, I am surprised that so many followers did not know of it, given the WTBTS's frequent condemnation of the UN in its publications.
This may account for the witnesses' feelings of betrayal and sense of hypocrisy over the whole affair. If it was not secret and was only done to obtain a library ticket,. why did you not tell me when I spoke to you several days before the article appeared? Surely you would have known it or could have found out very easily - most press officers are able to do so.
And why did the WTBTS decide to disaffiliate only two days after the article appeared, when the WTBTS "learned about a situation" which was anyway not secret? Any organisation which affiliates to another surely must know that it has to ascribe to its basic principles, so to pretend that acceptance of the UN charter's aims has been suddenly sprung on you is being disengenuous at best.
As far as I can tell from your letter there are no factual inaccuracies in my reports for you have not pointed to any that you did not have the opportunity to explain to me when we spoke. I don't think the letter will be published. But then what would I know - I'm only bird seed in your demonology!
Best wishes,
Stephen Bates