Sunday, January 30, 2011

Vatican Told Irish Bishops Not to Report Abuse to Police

via CBS:

"Mandatory" Reporting of Child Sex Abuse Claims Conflicted with Canon Law, Archbishop Said

A newly revealed 1997 letter from the Vatican warned Ireland's Catholic bishops not to report all suspected child-abuse cases to police — a disclosure that victims groups described as "the smoking gun" needed to show that the Vatican enforced a worldwide culture of cover-up.

The letter, obtained by Irish broadcasters RTE and provided to The Associated Press, documents the Vatican's rejection of a 1996 Irish church initiative to begin helping police identify pedophile priests following Ireland's first wave of publicly disclosed lawsuits.

The letter undermines persistent Vatican claims, particularly when seeking to defend itself in U.S. lawsuits, that the church in Rome never instructed local bishops to withhold evidence or suspicion of crimes from police. It instead emphasizes the church's right to handle all child-abuse allegations, and determine punishments, in house rather than hand that power to civil authorities.

Signed by the late Archbishop Luciano Storero, Pope John Paul II's diplomat to Ireland, the letter instructs Irish bishops that their new policy of making the reporting of suspected crimes mandatory "gives rise to serious reservations of both a moral and canonical nature."

Storero wrote that canon law — which required abuse allegations and punishments to be handled within the church — "must be meticulously followed." He warned that any bishops who tried to impose punishments outside the confines of canon law would face the "highly embarrassing" position of having their actions overturned on appeal in Rome.

Catholic officials in Ireland and the Vatican declined AP requests to comment on the letter, which RTE said it received from an Irish bishop.

Child-abuse activists in Ireland said the 1997 letter should demonstrate, once and for all, that the protection of pedophile priests from criminal investigation was not only sanctioned by Vatican leaders but ordered by them.

"The letter is of huge international significance, because it shows that the Vatican's intention is to prevent reporting of abuse to criminal authorities. And if that instruction applied here, it applied everywhere," said Colm O'Gorman, director of the Irish chapter of human rights watchdog Amnesty International.

Joelle Casteix, a director of U.S. advocacy group Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, described the letter as "the smoking gun we've been looking for."

Casteix said it was certain to be cited by victims' lawyers seeking to pin responsibility directly on the Vatican rather than local dioceses. She said investigators long have sought such a document showing Vatican pressure on a group of bishops "thwarting any kind of justice for victims."

"We now have evidence that the Vatican deliberately intervened to order bishops not to turn pedophile priests over to law enforcement," she said. "And for civil lawsuits, this letter shows what victims have been saying for dozens and dozens of years: What happened to them involved a concerted cover-up that went all the way to the top."

To this day, the Vatican has not endorsed any of the Irish church's three major policy documents since 1996 on safeguarding children from clerical abuse. Irish taxpayers, rather than the church, have paid most of the euro1.5 billion ($2 billion) to more than 14,000 abuse claimants dating back to the 1940s.

In his 2010 pastoral letter to Ireland's Catholics condemning pedophiles in the ranks, Pope Benedict XVI faulted bishops for failing to follow canon law and offered no explicit endorsement of Irish child-protection efforts by the Irish church or state. Benedict was widely criticized in Ireland for failing to admit any Vatican role in covering up the truth.

O'Gorman — who was raped repeatedly by an Irish priest in the 1980s when he was an altar boy and was among the first victims to speak out in the mid-1990s — said evidence is mounting that some Irish bishops continued to follow the 1997 Vatican instructions and withheld reports of crimes against children as recently as 2008.

Two state-commissioned reports published in 2009 — into the Dublin Archdiocese and workhouse-style Catholic institutions for children — unveiled decades of cover-ups of abuse involving tens of thousands of Irish children since the 1930s.

A third major state-ordered investigation into Catholic abuse cover-ups, concerning the southwest Irish diocese of Cloyne, is expected to be published within the next few months documenting the concealment of crimes as recently as 2008.

Irish church leaders didn't begin telling police about suspected pedophile priests until the mid-1990s after the first major scandal

of a priest, Brendan Smyth, who had raped dozens of children while the church transferred him to parishes in Dublin, Belfast, Rhode Island and North Dakota — triggered the collapse of the entire Irish government. That national shock, in turn, inspired the first victims to begin suing the church publicly.

In January 1996, Irish bishops published a groundbreaking policy document spelling out their newfound determination to report all suspected abuse cases to police.

But in his January 1997 letter seen Tuesday by the AP, Storero told the bishops that a senior church panel in Rome, the Congregation for the Clergy, had decided that the Irish church's policy of "mandatory" reporting of abuse claims conflicted with canon law.

Storero emphasized in the letter that the Irish church's policy was not recognized by the Vatican and was "merely a study document."

Storero warned that bishops who followed the Irish child-protection policy and reported a priest's suspected crimes to police ran the risk of having their in-house punishments of the priest overturned by the Congregation for the Clergy.

The 2009 Dublin Archdiocese report found that this actually happened in the case of Tony Walsh, one of Dublin's most notorious pedophiles, who used his role as an Elvis impersonator in a popular "All Priests Show" to get closer to kids.

Walsh in 1993 was kicked out of the priesthood by a secret Dublin church court — but successfully appealed the punishment to a Vatican court, which reinstated him to the priesthood in 1994. He raped a boy in a pub restroom at his grandfather's funeral wake that year. Walsh since has received a series of prison sentences, most recently a 12-year term imposed last month. Investigators estimate he raped or molested more than 100 children.

Storero's 1997 letter, originally obtained by RTE religious affairs program "Would You Believe?", said the Congregation for the Clergy was pursuing "a global study" of sexual-abuse policies and would establish worldwide child-protection policies "at the appropriate time."

Today, the Vatican's child-protection policies remain in legal limbo.

The Vatican does advise bishops worldwide to report crimes to police — in a legally nonbinding lay guide on its Web site. This recourse is omitted from the official legal advice provided by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and updated last summer. That powerful policymaking body continues to stress the secrecy of canon law.

The central message of Storero's letter was reported secondhand in the 2009 Dublin Archdiocese report. The letter itself, marked "strictly confidential," has never been published before.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Another unlikely story....

Over the past few years I've been gradually cutting back on the amount of weed I'm smoking until it's down to a fraction of what it was: once every couple weeks now instead of several times a day. Sobriety is the ultimate goal. I've been using amino acid supplements temporarily to rebalance brain chemistry but I have to take them every day to avoid cravings. So this morning I forgot to take them and by mid afternoon I start having thoughts about how to get my hands on some weed. As I ride my bike to the grocery store another bicyclist starts riding alongside me and talking. My first thought is this guy smokes weed. I wonder if he has any. Right away he asks me if I have a rolling paper. So we stop at the 6-12 and I buy some papers. We then walk down a little alleyway and he starts telling me a story about something that happened to him years ago at a hospital. Incidentally, I wouldn't recommend wandering down alleyways with random strangers but my intuition about people is usually dependable so it happens on rare occasions.

He had lost two of his toes as a kid and ended up sharing a hospital room with a ten year old girl who he became good friends with. The girl told him her mom took happy pills to go to sleep at night. A couple years later he finds out that the girl had died after overdosing on her mom's sleeping pills. At this point it is forty years later and the guy, Jerry, ends up at the hospital, which is now abandoned, with several of his friends. While they are sitting on the grass outside, he hears a voice say Jerry, calling his name over and over again. His friends hear the voice too. He looks behind him and sees the girl standing in a window of the hospital, still looking as young as ever. Jerry says hello and asks what she's doing there and why she looks so young. She says don't you remember? I died of a drug overdose.

I was inclined to believe him because of the way he seemed to read my mind about smoking weed, but of course this could be a California thing too since pretty much everyone of a certain income bracket does it. Jerry also starts telling me about selling speed and I wonder if he know something about relevant subject matter, to phrase it ambiguously. As a matter of habit, I ask him if he's ever heard about satanic groups that murder people as part of a ritual human sacrifice. He says he knows all about it and swears that what he's about to tell me is true. Jerry had been living in an apartment that used to be a morgue before it was renovated. Already I am half convinced because Springmeier has written about how rituals are often conducted on the site of crematories and morgues because it is easier to dispose of evidence. Jerry tells me one day he is in the shower and touches the wall, which sounds as if it is completely hollow. Jerry works installing dry wall so he convinces his friend to let him rip out the wall to see what's on the other side. After removing it they discover a room with a steel table in the middle and what looks like autopsy tools.

The room also has a black book which turns out to be a diary that was apparently left by the coroner starting in the 1930s. The diary charts the course of several decades during which the coroner continually receives dead bodies with all the blood removed from them, except for trauma wounds which contain blood on the skin. None of these murders end up in the paper. The diary picks up years later and the entries are now written by another coroner who continues to receive dead bodies containing no blood. One afternoon a neighbor comes up to the coroner and asks him what's going on with the bodies. Has he discovered what happened to them yet? The coroner says no and asks the neighbor if he's been talking to the police. The neighbor says he just knows about it. The coroner wonders about their conversation and wants to talk to the neighbor about it more to find out what he knows. He even leaves a description of the street and house where the man lives. A couple weeks later the coroner leaves the apartment and discovers that the neighbor had been standing right outside his front door. He asks the coroner again if he knows anything about the bodies and of course the answer is no. This is where the diary ends.

Jerry and his friend then replace the dry wall but he can't stop thinking about it. Finally, he decides to follow the description to where the neighbor had been living. When he gets there he finds a very large house that is obviously owned by a wealthy person. Jerry stands outside the gate for awhile and then leaves. A few weeks later he comes back and does the same thing. This time a man comes outside. He says that he always sees Jerry riding around the neighborhood on his bike, breaking into cars. Then the man asks him if he enjoyed reading the diary.

He says it was placed there as a joke so Jerry and his friend would read it. The next part of what he told me sounds like a late night B movie. He also says he is a vampire who kills bad people and some of the other vampires in his group have the power to read minds. I suspect that, if this story is true, "mind-reading" could be a hidden camera although I wouldn't rule out remote viewing as a possibility either. It reminds me of Confessions of A Satanist, an articulate article written by a guy who brags about his involvement in snuff and kiddie porn, which he claims are niche industries run by and for the elite. My own experience in being in and around the black market confirms his claims that marginal elements of society are, instead of the source of the problem, more often expendable tools of higher-ups. In any case, Jerry was really creeped out by the guy but nothing ever came of their conversation. He hasn't been back to the house since then.

I may incorporate Jerry's anecdote into the Elite Human Trafficking story, in which case this post will get deleted as is the typical pattern. I'm going to meet with him soon to exchange homeopathy for tattoo work so at that point I'll get a better sense of the situation. In the meantime, if anyone recognizes the plotline of a B movie in the story here, please let me know so I can take this post down before too many people see it. :)

Another thing I want to add: others have pointed out that insider intel may be released to the public for a reason since, as anyone who studies the global power structure for any length of time knows, layers of disinformation can often be contradictory and seemingly unending. Many have surmised that the impending economic collapse of the US (which is not a certainty, by any means, although clearly the media has every intention of whipping the American public into a frenzy) has been engineered by bankers and others with an economic stake in international markets. So I wonder if the recent demonization of the US in international media doesn't somehow fit into that. I can see how personal scandals, such as the involvement of Pentagon employees in kiddie porn rings, could tie into removing the US from its current position of global dominance as a way to establish global governance. So this has got me thinking about the broader picture a bit, how to be responsible about reporting sensitive information in a way that doesn't further inflame current tensions. In a general sense, how are all these MK Ultra exposes ultimately going to be used? It's a troubling thought, and the reason for why I'm realizing that taking all the different factors into account is necessary if one wants to deal with this subject matter in a productive way.


On a personal level, obviously sobriety is an easy way to make sure that my own writing isn't "externally directed", so to speak. I've realized for awhile now that I seem to have some kind of magnetic attraction to these situations and, honestly, this too concerns me because I know how easy it is to manipulate people towards a specific agenda. Feel free to call me a megalomaniac here for thinking my blog will initiate the New World Order. ;) So anyways I'm working on it....

Monday, January 10, 2011

Thousands of Pentagon Employees Linked to Child Porn Ring: part 2

At a certain point it becomes hard to even know what to say. These are the people who run our country, who are given access to warrantless wire-tapping and just about any other private information they may want. Our constitutional rights are being trampled on by a bunch of kiddie porn peddlers. How can the American public not be outraged?

Sunday, January 9, 2011

Child Porn Probe Leads to FBI Headquarters

Given the fact that the FBI reportedly has a long history of covering up highly organized child porn rings, stories like these should be looked at with a critical eye to say the least. Because evidence points to the strong probability that this situation is a lot more than an isolated incident.


JANUARY 5--The government’s pursuit of suspects trafficking in child pornography recently led federal agents to a familiar address--the FBI’s Washington, D.C. headquarters, where a bureau official is the subject of an ongoing criminal probe, The Smoking Gun has learned.

The investigation by the Department of Justice’s inspector general is focusing on FBI employee Joseph Bonsuk’s receipt of nearly 80 illicit images that were e-mailed to him by an Illinois sex offender whose rap sheet includes felony convictions for bank robbery and solicitation of a minor.

In a telephone interview last night, Bonsuk, 51, acknowledged that he is under investigation, but said that the matter was a “misunderstanding” and a “mix-up.” Bonsuk, who claimed he is cooperating with probers, said that FBI officials had told him yesterday not to discuss the ongoing investigation. While adding that he was “totally innocent,” Bonsuk, pictured at right, said that he has not been told that he will avoid criminal charges.

That direction was apparently triggered by TSG inquiries to the agency’s press office about Bonsuk. Kathy Wright, an FBI spokesperson, refused to disclose Bonsuk’s job title, his responsibilities, or how long he has worked for the bureau. Claiming that FBI policy barred disclosure of such details about a public employee, Wright also declined to say whether Bonsuk’s job status has changed in light of the child porn investigation. more...