Words have power. They do. And written words carry an added dimension of truth with them. People believe what they see written down. Somehow it feels more real than what they hear. I couldn't tell you why.

A few years back I was in the security queue at the airport and an over zealous Homeland Insecurity guard wanted to search my bag. I had 4 things in there. The laptop to work on the plan, a copy of Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind, a pen and a small moleskine notebook. The guard took the book out of my bag and started to flick through it, then cracked the spine on the brand new paperback and really started pulling at the pages.

I've got a smart mouth sometimes. I remember the conversation well. Actually it wasn't so much a conversation as a diatribe. It went something like this: "Dangerous things, books. They contain words. Words make up ideas. Ideas make people think. People start thinking for themselves instead of thinking what they're told to think and you get revolutions. Revolutions can change the world. You're right to be frightened of that book. You don't want to let it into you country because you can't afford to have people thinking for themselves. You know what they say? The pen is mightier than the sword. But here's the thing, if I really wanted to do some damage on that plane the most dangerous thing in my bag is that pen. It's a steel tipped fountain pen. Thrust hard enough it could easily be plunged into someone's neck making it a lethal weapon, but you keep on worrying about the book."

Needless to say everyone around me looked on with first mild amusement and then a little horror as the mouth just wouldn't stop.

But the thing is it really irritated me. I mean really.

This morning most Brits have woken up to the headline in the daily newspaper of The Real Truth. This is in response to a similar headline run in 1989 four days after the events of Hillsborough. Americans reading this probably have no idea what Hillsborough was, but for every football fan in Britain there's an element of 'it could have been me' about it. As a Spurs fan, doubly so because only a few years earlier in the same stadium at the same stage of the FA Cup police HAD opened security gates at the Leppings Lane end to allow us onto the field as we were being crushed to death inside the stands. That should have been a salutary lesson to the police and the FA and Hillsborough should have been removed as a semi-final venue because it quite simply couldn't cope with the volume of support.

96 people died that day.

I remember it like it was yesterday. I remember I was out shopping with the then girlfriend in the Metrocentre in Newcastle and had stopped to watch the preview moments in the window of the electronics store. It was a bit of a ritual, most men would watch the teletext results or the vidiprinter scrolling through the scores on a saturday in the 80s. You'd see them crowded around the shop windows just waiting, then see the air punched and a grin and a yes, or you'd see shoulders slump, some muttered 'bollocks' and people shuffle away to finish shopping with their partners. The crowds in the previews looked bad.

Then when we got home to watch the match we saw them spilling onto the pitch, trying to climb over the barriers caging them in, passing kids forwards, and we saw bodies lying on the pitch and a single ambulance and one paramedic because at 3:15 the police ordered the ambulances to stay outside. They told us everyone who had died was deceased by that point. They chose that time.

Four days later The Sun newspaper ran a headline: THE TRUTH and it claimed that the Liverpool fans had not only been complicit in the 96 deaths but solely to blame. Reading the paper you'd think these people were scum. It claimed they robbed the bodies of the dead. It claimed they pissed on the policemen trying to help the wounded. It claimed some fans beat up the police as they tried to give the kiss of life to dying kids.

It was a gross lie masquerading under the title THE TRUTH. It was nowhere near approaching the truth. It was a manufactured cover-up to mask the failings of the police force at the time, who treated those people like scum in the wake of the Heysel Stadium disaster four years earlier in which 39 fans died as a wall collapsed due to a large group of football hooligans breaching a fence. That along with the political climate, the working class revolts of the 80s and dissatisfaction with the Thatcherite government meant it was all too easy to smear these people. The police tested alcohol levels on the children who died, for instance. Anything they could do to smear the dead and protect the culpable.

People believe what they read. Last year in the minute's silence at the FA Cup final Chelsea fans chanted 'murderers' at the Liverpool fans in attendance.

Long before the documents were finally released yesterday football fans already knew the TRUTH, that the disaster was due to the catastrophic mistakes made by the South Yorkshire police. We suspected that the deception of all deaths occurring before 3.15pm was a lie that would let the authorities off the hook, because it meant that their subsequent actions of keeping the paramedics out of the ground wasn't a contributory factor in any of the deaths.

But what the release of those documents yesterday did was reveal how in the days and weeks following the tragedy, the authorities - and most particularly the senior officers in the police - didn't show any sign of humanity. They didn't care about the scores of dead people or grieving families, they simply wanted to cover their arses and keep themselves out of court so they instigated the largest cover-up in my life time, from the top down. And three of the leading policemen behind it have since been knighted.

The release of documents is too late to be called justice.

Don't get me wrong, it's good it is happened, and it had to happen in the end, but there was no justice for the 96 on the day of the tragedy or in the ensuing years, and that for me is a permanent stain on the authorities whatever they do now to try and make amends.

David Cameron issued a heart felt apology, Kelvin McKenzine, the editor of the newspaper who declared 'The Truth' ... has spent a good amount of time covering his arse and squirming rather than just saying, look, I lied because those people were easy targets. But in writing those headlines and making those claims he did change the world for nearly 25 years. He changed the world for the families and friends and loved ones of those 96 dead people. He made it a living hell in which they had to fight to get the REAL TRUTH out.

Those documents confirmed that the police deliberately tried to smear the fans and falsified statements to cover their incompetence. the police checked the police records of those who had died to try and find reasons to put the blame on them. Reprehensible. They proved the 3.15 threshold was a falsehood. The lives could and should have been saved. They proved large scale criminal corruption by the people meant to protect us.

The officers' initial crimes on the day were primarily negligence and incompetence. Whilst they are criminally responsible for these, there is no suggestion of mens rea. The police officers' actions to change statements and fabricate a case against Liverpool fans after the event however are very much pre-meditated, malicious and intended to pervert the course of justice. Those are the crimes should be tried.

It wasn't journalists who finally gave us the truth. It wasn't diligent detective work of the police. It was the families of the victims. Ordinary people. It takes a lot of heart-ache and a lot of resolve in the face of let-down after let-down to keep pushing year after year after year to get at the truth. Ordinary people who wouldn't give up.

Words have power. Especially ones that are written down. Especially ones that appear presented as the truth in the newspapers we buy. It takes something incredible to overturn them and show the real truth. This isn't finished. And it shouldn't be until those proven to have lied and deceived are found guilty and condemned by the real truth.