chrissy57 said:
Maybe Al Fayed is right and Stephens has been blackmailed and this is his way of saying so - make one obvious error and everyone will know the rest of the report is wrong?
Chrissy - this is the only way the British investigators could manage the whole Diana debacle on avoiding the impression that anyone is lying of influenced by the establishment.
Look: they published more than 800 pages. In it they look at the case from each imaginable point of view and quote all the witnesses they interviewed. Most statements are O-tone, direct quotes. As each witness has been given a written report of their statement to sign after the interview and has a copy of this statement, there is no way anyone could have tampered with these statements. After each collection of statements there is a resumee explaining the position the investigators towards this investigated aspect of the case.
Now the report is out in the open. Each witness has a chance to read it and see if all their answers have been used. There is enough time to come out into the public if they investigators left out statements that a witness deems important. And anyone reading it can make up his7her own mind if he/she comes to the same conclusions.
Eg the question about the note: so many people say that if Diana really felt threatened, she would have talked to them about it. Or that she didn't act on her alleged fears. The most normal reaction would have been to have the car checked. But all people concerned with servicing Diana's car said that she didn't say anything about it and that the brakes were okay. You cannot lie to the police about such circumstances. There are bills about inspections which detail what kind of work was done. There are internal reports about the way the car was checked, because the service people of course knew about their resonsibility. If anything like that had happened they knew they would be in for trouble! So of course the whole "career" of Diana's cars is documented both by the princess's office and by the service station.
So the conclusion about how Diana actually felt sounds sensible to me. Like the other points as well. So if no one comes forward now and proves that their statement has been omitted or changed, we simply know that what's in the report is the truth. Because it's impossible to manipulate an investigation of that public nature without somebody speaking up.
And that's IMHO why they published this report. So prove once and for all times that Diana's death was an accident. A unfortunate one, but an accident none-the-less. Even though the investigators say that there are questions that will never be completely answered, there is enough circumstancial evidence that these question are not vital for the outcome of the investigation. Because those facts who really point to the basic truth are there, as established facts. Established through crime evidence specialists or through the statements of witnesses who are supporting each other without having known what the others would say when they were interviewed.
I'm only saddened that prince Willaim and prince Harry have to learn so much about their mother they'd probably prefered to not know. Like the real strange people their mother trusted in. Or the whole affair with Hasnat Khan and later Dodi, Diana's obvious paranoia, the way she thought about prince Charles etc. It's IM HO not something the children of a person should need to read, but at least they are grown up now and will have a kind of understanding for Diana's situation.
