"Townshend (lead singer of the rock band, The Who) was busted as part of Operation Ore, which is England's reaction to
Operation Avalanche, a U.S. Justice Department crackdown on more than
250,000 suspected pedophiles across the globe, who were traced using credit
cards to pay for Internet child pornography. In recent weeks, Scotland Yard
has arrested over than 1,300 suspects in the investigation, including more
than 50 police officers, judges, teachers, doctors, care workers and
soldiers, the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper reported." —SOURCE
From our
comfortable seat in life … we never could have imagined that thousands of
well-off adults, integrated and even cultured, find pleasure in seeing
children tortured and killed.”
From a front-page
editorial in Italy’s Corriere della Sera, reprinted in The Irish
Times, September 29, 2000
“British
detectives are trying to close a website showing pictures of a man eating a
dismembered baby … the website, based in California … has been linked with the
ritual abuse of children … A second website showing similar scenes of sadistic
and ritualistic abuse has been successfully shut.” Independent, February 21, 2001
“Paedophiles can boldly and courageously affirm what they choose... I am also
a theologian and as a theologian, I believe it is God's will that there be
closeness and intimacy, unity of flesh, between people... paedophiles can make
the assertion that the pursuit of intimacy and love is what they choose. With
boldness, they can say, 'I believe this is in fact part of God's will'."
Ralph Underwager, 'expert' witness for the defense in scores of child abuse
cases and former vocal member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, in an
interview in Paidika (a pro-pedophilia publication), conducted in June
1991
To the
vast majority of Americans, the name Marc Dutroux does not mean much. Drop
that name in Belgium though and you are likely to elicit some very visceral
reactions. Dutroux - convicted along with his wife in 1989 for the rape and
violent abuse of five young girls, the youngest of whom was just eleven - now
stands accused of being a key player in an international child prostitution
and pornography ring whose practices included kidnapping, rape, sadistic
torture, and murder.
Dutroux was sentenced in 1989 to thirteen years for
his crimes, but was freed after having served just three. This was in spite of
the fact that, as prison governor Yvan Stuaert would later tell a
parliamentary commission: “A medical report described him as a perverse
psychopath, an explosive mix. He was an evident danger to society.” The man
who turned Dutroux loose on society, Justice Minister Melchior Wathelet, was
rewarded with a prestigious appointment to serve as a judge at the European
Court of Justice at The Hague.
Shortly after Dutroux’s release, young girls began
to disappear in the vicinity of some of his homes. Though technically
unemployed and drawing welfare from the state, he nevertheless owned at least
six houses and lived quite lavishly. His rather lucrative income appears to
have been derived from trading in child sex-slaves, child prostitution, and
child pornography. Many of his houses appeared to stand vacant, though at
least some of them were in fact used as torture and imprisonment centers where
kidnapped girls were taken and held in underground dungeons. Some of Dutroux’s
homes were used in this way for several years following his early release,
with a growing body of evidence to indicate that fact to the police.
Authorities nevertheless failed to act on the information, or acted on it in
ways that implied either complete incompetence (according to most press
reports), or police complicity in the operation (according to any sort of
logic).
Officials seem to have routinely ignored tips that
later proved accurate, including a report from Dutroux's own mother that her
son was holding girls prisoner in one of his houses. In addition, key facts
were withheld from investigators working on the disappearances and lines of
communication were unaccountably broken, inexcusably hindering the
investigation. Police did search one of Dutroux's homes on no less than three
separate occasions over the course of the investigation. On at least two of
those occasions, two of the missing girls were being held in heinous
conditions, imprisoned in a custom-built dungeon in the basement.
Nevertheless, according to the Guardian, the police searches came up
empty – even though the investigating officers reported “hearing children’s
voices on one occasion.”
It was not until August 13, 1996, four years after
the disappearances began, that authorities arrested Dutroux, along with his
wife (an elementary school teacher), a lodger, a policeman, and a man the Guardian described as “an associate with political connections” –
elsewhere identified as Jean-Michel Nihoul, a Brussels businessman and
nightclub owner. One of those taken into custody - Michel Lelievre, described
in a May 2002 BBC report as a “drug addict and petty thief” -
reportedly told his interrogators that at least some of the girls abducted by
the ring “were kidnapped to order, for someone else.” This was just one of
many statements by suspects and witnesses that would later be dismissed by
Belgian officials.
Two days after the arrests, police again searched
Dutroux's home and discovered the soundproof dungeon/torture center. As CNN
reported, three years earlier “police ignored tips from an informant who said
Dutroux was building secret cellars to hold girls before selling them abroad.”
In addition, in 1995, the same informant had told police that Dutroux had
offered an unidentified third man “the equivalent of $3,000 to $5,000 to
kidnap girls.” Incredibly, it was later reported by the Guardian that
police actually had in their possession a videotape of the dungeon being
constructed: “Belgian police could have saved the lives of two children [who
were] allegedly murdered by the paedophile Marc Dutroux if they had watched a
video seized from his home which showed him building their hidden cell.” The
tape had been seized in one of the earlier searches.
At the time of the final search, two
fourteen-year-old girls were found imprisoned in the dungeon, chained and
starving. They described to police how they had been used as child prostitutes
and in the production of child pornography videos. More than 300 such videos
were taken into custody by the police.
On August 17, 1996, the story got grimmer as
police dug up the bodies of two eight-year-old girls at another of Dutroux's
homes. It would later be learned that the girls had been kept in one of
Dutroux’s dungeons for nine months after their abductions, during which time
they were repeatedly tortured and sexually assaulted – all captured on
videotape. The girls were then left to slowly starve to death. Alongside of
their decimated corpses was the body of Bernard Weinstein, a former accomplice
of Dutroux who had occupied one of the houses for several years. Weinstein had
been buried alive.
A few weeks later, two more girls were found buried
under concrete at yet another of the Dutroux properties. By that time, ten
people connected to the case were reportedly in custody. As the body count
mounted, the outrage of the Belgian people grew. They demanded to know why
this man, dubbed the 'Belgian Beast,' had been released after having served
such an absurdly short sentence. And they demanded to know why, as evidence
had continued to mount and girls had continued to disappear, the police had
chosen to do nothing. How many girls, they wanted to know, had been killed due
to this inaction?
Adding further fuel to the fire, as a Los
Angeles Times report revealed, were claims by “a highly regarded
children’s activist, Marie-France Botte … [that] the Justice Ministry is
sitting on a politically sensitive list of customers of pedophile videotapes.”
The same report noted, “the affair has become further clouded by the discovery
of a motorcycle that reportedly matches the description of one used in the
1991 assassination of prominent Belgian businessman and politician Andre
Cools. Michel Bourlet, the head prosecutor on the pedophile case, meanwhile,
has publicly declared that the investigation can be thoroughly pursued only
without political interference. Several years ago, Bourlet was removed from
the highly charged Cools case, which remains unsolved.”
A report in Time magazine alluded to murky
links between the Dutroux operation and organized crime figures. Marc
Verwilghen - the chief investigating magistrate on the case – stated the case
more bluntly: “For me, the Dutroux affair is a question of organised crime.”
Also mentioned in the Time article was the use of secret “underground
tunnels,” not unlike those described by children a decade earlier at the
infamous McMartin Preschool.
Outrage continued to grow as more arrests were made
and evidence of high-level government and police complicity continued to
emerge. One of Dutroux's accomplices, businessman Jean-Michel Nihoul,
confessed to organizing an ‘orgy’ at a Belgian chateau that had been attended
by government officials, a former European Commissioner, and a number of law
enforcement officers. A Belgian senator noted, quite accurately, that such
parties were part of a system “which operates to this day and is used to
blackmail the highly placed people who take part.”
According to the BBC, Nihoul has brazenly
claimed: “I am the monster of Belgium.” He has all but dared the state to
prosecute him, claiming that he is beyond the reach of the law because he has
information that, if made public, “would bring the Government and the entire
state down.”
In September 1996, twenty-three suspects - at least
nine of whom were police officers - were detained and questioned about their
possible complicity in the crimes and/or their negligence in investigating the
case. As the Los Angeles Times noted in a very brief, two-sentence
report, the detainments “were the latest indication that police in the
southern city of Charleroi may have helped cover up the alleged crimes of Marc
Dutroux.” The arrests followed raids on the police officers’ homes and on the
headquarters of the Charleroi police force and were based on information
supplied by police inspector Georges Zicot, who had already been charged as an
accomplice. Three magistrates had also reportedly been interrogated by police
investigators.
Just days before the arrests, police had also
arrested five suspects in the Cools assassination, including a former regional
government minister named Alain VanderBiest. Strangely enough, the News
Telegraph reported that: “Police investigating the Cools murder in 1991 …
have been given helpful leads by some of those arrested in the Dutroux case.”
The Telegraph also noted that Cools “had promised ‘shocking
revelations’ before his death.”
On October 14, 1996 came the straw that broke the
camel's back: Jean-Marc Connerotte, who had been serving as the investigating
judge on the Dutroux case, was dismissed by the Belgian Supreme Court.
Connerotte was viewed by the people as something of a rarity: a public
official/law enforcement officer who actually appeared to be pursuing a
prosecution, rather than a cover-up. The News Telegraph described him
as: “the only figure in the judiciary who enjoys the nation’s confidence.” As
the New York Times reported, Connerotte “became a national hero in
August after saving two children from a secret dungeon kept by a convicted
child rapist and ordering the inquiry that led to the discovery of the bodies
of four girls kidnapped by a child pornography network.” He had also arrested
three men in 1994 as suspects in the Cools assassination – just before the
case was transferred to the jurisdiction of another magistrate.
Victimized
as a child by top-level perpetrators who today claim she is insane. The
detail of Regina's testimony is extraordinary. In 1996, she
named and described in great detail, to a specially assembled police
team, the people and places involved in the pedophile ring. Senior
judges, one of the country's most powerful politicians - now dead - and
a very influential banker were included. One of the regular organisers
of these parties, she said, was the man she knew as 'Mich', Jean Michel
Nihoul. The sessions not only involved sex, they included sadism,
torture and murder; and again, she described in detail, the place, the
victims and how they were killed. She also claimed the young Marc
Dutroux was there. "At these parties Nihoul was a sort of party beast
while Dutroux was more on the side." SEE VIDEO CLIPS ON THE "BELGIAN
X-FILES"
SOURCE:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/correspondent_europe/1962244.stm
The lingering distrust of the people was not
alleviated by the fact that a parliamentary inquiry had identified, in April
1997, thirty officials who had, as the Times tactfully put it, “failed
to uncover Dutroux’s misdeeds.” Nearly a year later, none of them had yet
suffered any repercussions. Additionally, at least ten missing children
suspected of having fallen prey to Dutroux’s operation have never been found.
Just a few months before the parliamentary
commission issued its report on the Dutroux case, viewed by many as a
shameless cover-up, the Telegraph reported, “grim rumors … have been
circulating that a second paedophile network at least as appalling may have
been operating in parallel to that said to involve Dutroux.” The bodies of
seven children were believed to have been hidden by the ring, which was
thought could be linked to Dutroux through Michel Nihoul. Two months after
that, a man named Patrick Derochette and three of his family members were
arrested following the discovery of the body of a nine-year-old girl. Rumors
quickly began circulating linking that crime to Dutroux as well. Like Dutroux,
Derochette had previously been convicted on multiple counts of child rape. He
had been committed to a psychiatric institution from which he was released
after just six weeks. Authorities quickly denied that there was any connection
between the cases. In January 1998, however, the Telegraph reported,
“new evidence from a lawyer involved in the investigations blows a hole in
previous police claims that there was no link between the cases involving the
alleged child murderers Marc Dutroux and Patrick Derochette.” Once again, the
connection was said to be through Nihoul.
In April 1999, the Guardian weighed in with
this report: “the highly respected chairman of a parliamentary inquiry into
the [Dutroux] case claims that his commission’s findings were muzzled by
political and judicial leaders to prevent details emerging of complicity in
the crimes … Mr. Verwilghen claims that senior political and legal figures
refused to cooperate with the inquiry. He says magistrates and police were
officially told to refuse to answer certain questions, in what he describes as
‘a characteristic smothering operation.’”
As of May 2002, nearly six years after Dutroux was
taken into custody, his trial had yet to begin. Parents of victims continued
to loudly shout of a cover-up, and the Telegraph was reporting that:
“It was recently learnt that scientific tests on 6,000 hairs found in the
[underground dungeon] began only this year.” Those tests, of course, could
reveal how many victims passed through Dutroux’s chamber of horrors. Perhaps
more importantly, they could also, as a BBC News report noted in
January 2002, “establish whether the girls had any other visitors.”
Anne Thilly, the aforementioned Prosecutor General
of Liege who dismissed as “mad” a key prosecution witness, has been quoted as
saying, “there was no need to get the hairs analysed as no one else entered
the cage. There was no network so there was no need to look for evidence of
one. In any case, the hairs have all now been analysed.” Thilly gave no
indication of how she knew there was nothing to find before even bothering to
look. And contrary to her claims, the BBC reported in May 2002 that the
hairs had “still not been analysed,” according to “sources central to the
investigation.” Thilly has also claimed “the bodies [recovered from Dutroux’s
properties] were too decomposed to test for DNA.” The BBC though noted
“the autopsy states quite clearly that the bodies were not decomposed. Samples
were taken. It is just that no one seems to know what has happened to the
results.” It would appear, alas, as though Anne Thilly is a rather brazen
liar.
The January BBC report came on the heels of
an interview that the imprisoned Dutroux granted a Flemish journalist and a
Belgian senator. Therein, Dutroux was quoted as admitting, “a network with all
kinds of criminal activities really does exist. But the authorities don’t want
to look into it.” He also acknowledged the existence of “a well-grounded [paedophile]
ring. I maintained regular contact with people in this ring. However, the law
does not want to investigate this lead.”
If the Marc Dutroux case were some kind of
aberration, it would still be a disturbing story for the level of unspeakable
corruption and depravity of the Belgian political and law enforcement
establishment of which it speaks. Far more disturbing is the fact that it does
not appear to be an isolated case at all.
As 1999 drew to a close, the nation of Latvia was
rocked by a child prostitution/child pornography scandal that reached to the
very top of the political power structure. The case first broke in August,
when police uncovered a massive operation involving as many as 2,000 severely
abused children. When media reports began linking top Latvian officials to the
case, a special parliamentary commission was assembled to investigate the
emerging allegations. In February 2000, the chairman of the commission
delivered a report to Parliament linking the country's Prime Minister and
Justice Minister, the director of the State Revenue Service, and a number of
army and law enforcement officers to the case. A campaign was immediately
begun to discredit the committee chairman, including allegations that he is
tied to the former KGB – a classic case of red baiting that enabled the
allegations to be dismissed as ‘Communist’ propaganda.
On November 27, 2002, The Guardian reported
that many among Portugal’s elite were linked to a pedophile ring as well: “A
scandal over a paedophile ring run from a state orphanage gripped Portugal
yesterday as it threatened to engulf diplomats, media personalities and senior
politicians. Photographs of unnamed senior government officials with young
boys from Lisbon’s Casa Pia orphanage were among the evidence reportedly
available to police after they arrested a former orphanage employee called
Carlos Silvino.” One revelation in the case was “that systematic sexual abuse
of children at the home had allegedly been going on for more than 20 years and
had been known to police and other authorities for most of that time.” Teresa
Costa Macedo, a former secretary of state for families, has said that she sent
a dossier to police twenty years ago containing “damning proof” of the abuse,
including photographs and eyewitness statements. The information was not acted
upon, and, for her trouble, Macedo became the victim of a campaign of threats
and intimidation.
In June 2003, the Independent reported that
police “at first denied her reports existed,” but then later produced them.
Macedo has testified before parliament that the former president, Antonio
Ramalho Eanes, the former foreign secretary, Jaime Garcia, and elements within
the police all knew of the ongoing abuse. An official report claims that,
“among the children still living at Casa Pia, at least 128 had been subjected
to sexual abuse. Many are deaf and dumb.” Countless other victims have passed
through the facility over the last thirty years. Among those detained or
questioned in the case were Carlos Cruz, known in Portugal as “Mr.
Television”; Manuel Abrantes, a former director of Casa Pia; Joao Ferreira
Diniz, a doctor at Casa Pia; Jorge Ritto, a former ambassador to UNESCO; Hugo
Marcal, Carlos Silvino’s former attorney; Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues, Portugal’s
Socialist Party leader; television talk show host Herman Jose; and Paulo
Pedroso, a former Labour minister.
A follow-up report in the Independent noted
that Casa Pia, founded by a police superintendent, first “came under scrutiny
20 years ago when a young inmate died … Officials found the home’s doors open
all night and youngsters in a cruising area for male prostitutes. Four
children aged between eight and 12, missing for a fortnight, were found in a
luxury flat in nearby Cascais owned by a diplomat.” That diplomat was Jorge
Ritto. It is now alleged that Silvino, an employee and former resident of Casa
Pia, acted for years to procure young boys for rich and powerful pedophiles,
including Ritto. Adolescent witnesses have claimed on Portuguese television
that they were offered enticements and “then raped … and recruited for sex
parties with powerful ‘friends.’ Others, now adult, have told of chilling
experiences long suppressed.” A Portuguese organization calling itself Innocence in Danger has been working for years to publicize the problem of
child abuse and child abductions in the country, but have been unable to
penetrate what they describe as a “media blackout.”
As of February 2003, a campaign was underway in
Scotland to unseal records that have been sealed for 100 years under special
order. The records concern the activities of Thomas Hamilton, a notorious
child molester/murderer who was credited with killing sixteen schoolchildren
and a teacher, and then himself, in 1996. One police report sealed under the
order “concerns Thomas Hamilton’s activities at a summer camp in Loch Lomond
in 1991, five years before the shootings,” and allegedly links Hamilton to
“figures in the Scottish establishment, including two senior politicians and a
lawyer,” according to the Guardian.
A report in Scotland’s Sunday Herald, from
March 2003, revealed that 106 documents had been sealed. These included “a
letter connected to Hamilton, which was sent by George Robertson, currently
head of NATO, to Michael Forsyth, who was then Secretary of State for
Scotland,” as well as “correspondence relating to Thomas Hamilton’s alleged
involvement in Freemasonry.” A deputy justice minister, Michael Matheson, was
quoted in the article questioning the official justification for sealing the
documents: “The explanation to date about the 100-year rule was that it was
put in place to protect the interests of children named in the Central Police
Report. How can that explanation stand when children aren’t named?”
On September 29, 2000, The Irish Times
reported that yet another pedophile network had surfaced: “Eight people were
arrested in Italy and three in Russia, and police said 1,700 people were being
investigated in Italy.” The images traded by this ring were “divided into
several categories … The most gruesome, police said, was coded ‘Necros Pedo,’
in which children were raped and tortured to death.”
And so it is that we first confront that most
disturbing of topics – snuff films, which most people assume do not actually
exist. As recently as February 1999, the New York Post assured readers
that: “Snuff films are the stuff of urban legend … how did this legend get
started? No one knows.” The unfortunate truth though is that snuff films do
actually exist, and they likely have existed for as long as film has existed,
though they were not always known by that name. According to the Post:
“The term ‘snuff’ was actually coined during the Charles Manson case, when
press reports repeated a rumor that the Manson ‘family’ had filmed home movies
of the brutal slayings.” Other reports hold that the term was coined in 1976
by a writer for the New York Times who was in need of a phrase
to describe reports of murders following sexual activity being captured on
film.
In the late 1970s, as
Carl Raschke noted in Painted Black, the “Texas House Select Committee
on Child Pornography disclosed … that investigators probing leads to organized
crime in Houston, Dallas, and other major cities found that ‘slave’ auctions
for sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys were routinely held in Mexico. Some
of the boys were featured in brutal snuff or ‘slasher’ movies.” Raschke also
quotes from a study by U.S. mental health professionals that claims that a
child from Mexico “can be packaged, delivered, and sold deep within [the
United States] in a short time,” and that many are purchased solely “for the
purpose of killing.”
In Enslaved,
Gordon Thomas reported that: “At the start of the year [1991] Britain’s
Scotland Yard was continuing to investigate reports that up to twenty children
in London had been murdered last year in [snuff films] and the video tapes
sold on the Continent.” Journalist Nick Davies, writing for the Guardian
in November 2000, revisited that investigation, which was centered on a group
of British pedophiles living in Amsterdam. The investigation revealed that the
men were running gay brothels that were essentially ‘fronts’ for trafficking
underage boys, many purchased from the streets of economically ravaged Eastern
Europe, and others collected from the streets of London. Prominent among the
group of pedophiles were a man named Alan Williams, known as the “Welsh
Witch,” and another named Warwick Spinks, who according to Davies, “pioneered
the trafficking of boys as young as 10.”
The men used the boys
in the production of child pornography and, according to several witnesses, in
the production of snuff films. Davies wrote: “not just once but repeatedly,
evidence had come to the attention of police in England and the Netherlands,
that, for pleasure and profit, some of the exiled pedophiles in Amsterdam had
murdered boys in front of the camera.” Indeed, witnesses had independently
given descriptions of snuff films that were remarkably consistent in the
details of the types of torture used and the manner of death, though the
descriptions of the victim and the filming location differed, indicating that
a number of such films had been made. One witness claimed to have seen five
such films.
In the fall of 1998, British detectives flew to
Amsterdam to investigate a particularly detailed account provided by a
witness. The investigators had in their possession: a detailed description of
the apartment where the witness had viewed the tape; the name of the owner of
the apartment and videotape; the name of the man who committed the murder; a
detailed description of events on the tape; and the first name and approximate
age of the victim. With all that in hand, says Davies, the detectives “hit a
wall.” Dutch police “said it was not enough” to warrant launching any sort of
an investigation. By that time, investigators had been hearing accounts of the
snuff films for nearly eight years. At one point, they had recruited an
undercover officer “to pose as a child abuser and befriend Warwick Spinks,”
who acknowledged to the officer that he was actively involved in trafficking
boys. He also revealed that he knew “some people who were involved in making
snuff movies and how they did it was, they only sold them in limited editions,
made 10 copies or something, 10 very rich customers in America, who paid
$5,000 each or something like that.” There is no indication that any thorough
investigation was ever conducted, or that any arrests were ever made.
In September 2002, the Chicago Sun Times
carried a brief report of two brothers who were arrested and charged with
possessing an enormous collection of child pornography. Seized from the
brothers were 5,000 photographic images, along with about 100 videotapes and
8mm films. Among this evidence were images of “young girls apparently
tortured, raped and killed.” The American media has shown no inclination to
shine any additional light on the case.
An account of the recent Italian case carried by the
Guardian affirmed the existence of snuff films: “Police have discovered
a massive international paedophile network selling violent child-pornography
videos to clients in Italy, the US and Germany … (authorities are) trying to
identify 5,000 people who are suspected of attempting to purchase the videos,
some of which appear to contain images of children being tortured and
murdered.” The UK’s Independent, in a follow-up published in November
2000, also confirmed that the seized materials included child snuff films:
“Horrified investigators gathered images of more than 2,000 children who were
filmed while being abused, raped, and … killed.” By that time, close to 1,500
people had been charged in the case, but not - as the Guardian noted -
“those in high places who are believed to form a ‘paedophile lobby.’”
As in the Belgian, Latvian, and Portuguese cases,
there were indications in the Italian case of high-level complicity and a
strong belief among the people that the facts of the case were being covered
up. And as with the other cases, the Independent reported that the
magistrate heading up the inquiry “provoked a furore by denouncing a
‘paedophile lobby’ supported by politicians which he said openly obstructed
the investigators and worked to prevent tougher sanctions for the consumers of
child pornography.” The New York Times reported in March 1997 that
there is “growing public indignation in France and elsewhere about the
recurrent reports of kidnapping, rape or incest involving the very young.” The
same Times report revealed that French police had "detained more than
250 people and confiscated some 5,000 videocassettes” in conjunction with an
investigation into a massive child pornography ring. Those detained by police
were described as “mainly married professionals.” A dozen of them soon turned
up dead, allegedly by their own hand.
The BBC filed a brief report on a 1996 case
that was otherwise almost completely ignored by the English-language press:
“Mexican police broke up an international child pornography ring based in the
resort of Acapulco which they said had at least four thousand clients in
the United States,” (emphasis added). A UN envoy investigating the case
said that the “child pornography sometimes involved babies of less than one
month old.”
In June 1997, the News Telegraph spoke of
over 800 French homes being raided and 204 suspects being taken into custody.
Among those detained were “more than 30 teachers … and a number of priests,”
as well as the deputy mayor of the town of Saint Mihiel. By the end of the
week, four had committed suicide, including a school headmaster. Three years
later, the BBC filed a very brief report noting that a verdict was due
“in the trial of more than sixty people accused of possessing child
pornography. One of the judges hearing the case said examining the video
evidence made him feel physically sick.” In a familiar refrain, it was
reported that: “the French courts have been accused of attacking the easy
targets -- porn consumers -- rather than producers and distributors. And one
children’s rights group has alleged that senior public figures were among
those investigated -- but their cases were dropped before coming to court.”
In 1998, another large-scale international ring was
discovered operating out of the Netherlands and Berlin, Germany. The New
York Times reported that investigators called the case “nauseating,” in
that “images of abuse of even babies and infants were peddled via the Internet
and other media.” Police discovered “voluminous records of what appear to be
clients and suppliers from countries including Israel, Ukraine, Britain,
Russia and the United States.” The ring was first uncovered when a key member
was found dead in Italy. According to the Irish Times, he was murdered
by another member of the ring. His apartment in the Dutch town of Zandvoort
was found to contain “thousands of digital images stored on computer disks,”
as well as “hundreds of addresses of suspected suppliers and clients,”
according to the New York Times. The images shocked even veteran
sex-crimes investigators, one of whom stated that the seized evidence “left
[him] speechless … It looks like the perpetrators are not dealing with human
beings but with objects.”
The BBC reported in June 1999 that two
unnamed German men had “gone on trial, accused of running a child pornography
ring in Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic.” The pair, along with at least
eleven identified but unindicted accomplices, “made video recordings of the
gang sexually abusing children between the ages of three and 14 since 1993.” A
large but unspecified quantity of “videos, photography, magazines and CD-ROMs
containing child pornography were confiscated.” Also noted was a possible
connection to the Dutroux case: “There have been cases of Slovak children
being taken to Vienna to make pornographic films. The Belgian paedophile Marc
Dutroux … was a regular visitor to one Slovak town.”
In September 1998, another ring had been raided –
one that the BBC described as “a larger and more sinister paedophile
network called Wonderland.” The San Jose Mercury News reported, “police
in … 22 states and 13 foreign countries conducted coordinated raids … aimed at
breaking up an Internet child-pornography ring … The ring involves as many as
200 people around the world, who exchanged over the Internet thousands of
sexually explicit images of children as young as 18 months.” The Independent later reported that the ring “shared pictures of children
being abused -- in some cases live via web-cam broadcasts over the internet.”
The raids included homes in “Australia, Austria, Belgium, Finland, France,
Germany, Italy, Norway, Portugal and Sweden,” according to the New York
Times, which added that: “Several dozen people were arrested, but
officials said they expected more than 100 to be charged.” The Independent
later reported that 107 suspects were ultimately arrested. The Mercury News
implied that that was only the tip of the iceberg: “The ring actually extends
into 47 countries.”
The case was described by a British official as
“stomach-churning.” The Times reported, “Wonderland Club members are
believed to have posed their own children for pictures … In other cases …
parents may have taken money to let their children be used.” The Guardian
reported that over 1,250 children were featured in the photos and videos,
“many of whom suffered appalling injuries and were seen sobbing uncontrollably
as they were being sexually violated.” The Independent added that the
victimized children were “mostly under [the age of] 10.” A BBC report
held that the combined raids resulted in the seizure of more than “750,000
computer images of children.” A Detective Superintendent with the British
National Crime Squad called these images “disgusting” and added that “the
behavior that has been carried out is absolutely appalling.” The BBC
also took note of the fact that, while ignored by the American press,
“Wonderland originated in the United States.”
Among the scores of U.S. homes raided in connection
with the case, one yielded a “database of more than 100,000 sexual photographs
of naked boys and girls.” Interestingly enough, the Times also noted
that another raid, “in Missouri, turned up a cache of weapons as well as child
pornography in a heavily fortified trailer” – illustrating once again, as did
the Dutroux case, the close ties between organized pedophilia and other
terrorist assaults against society.
As with the earlier raids in Europe, a rash of
‘suicides’ followed the Wonderland arrests. By October 24, 1998, the Mercury News was reporting that no fewer than four of the thirty-four
American suspects had killed themselves. These included a retired Air Force
pilot, a microbiologist at the University of Connecticut, and a computer
consultant in Colorado. In the UK, the Wonderland raids - dubbed Operation
Cathedral - resulted in the indictments of eight suspects. One of the eight
turned up dead four months later – another alleged suicide. The other seven
were given ridiculously light sentences in February 2001 for their complicity
in inflicting unfathomable abuse on countless children. Sentences ranged from
12 to 30 months. Just a few weeks before the sentences were handed down, the
Guardian was reporting that: “Police today arrested 13 suspected
paedophiles in the largest ever UK operation against child pornography.” Once
again, a massive amount of appalling evidence was seized, with most of the
material featuring “scenes of children being raped and sexually abused.”
The Independent reported in February 2001:
“Detectives working on the [Wonderland] case discovered that many of the
paedophiles were also members of other child pornography groups.” One of the
groups most closely tied to Wonderland was a ring known as the Orchid Club,
which had been exposed by a 1996 investigation in San Jose, California. That
investigation had led to the indictment of sixteen men on charges of
conspiring to produce and exchange child pornography. Members of the club were
identified in at least nine states and three foreign countries. By the time of
the Wonderland raids, the Mercury News was able to report that the
purported ringleader of the Orchid Club and “twelve others either have pleaded
guilty or have been convicted in connection with that case.” Their crimes
included recruiting “young relatives and friends of their own children to be
molested and photographed.”
The club was also, like Wonderland, involved in
“real-time exploitation of children” on the Internet. Club members were able
to send in requests and have them acted-out on live feeds. The club also held
a pedophile ‘summit,’ at which members “traded stories about pre-teen girls
they had molested and photographed in sexually explicit poses.” The summit was
held, appropriately enough, on April 20 – the birth date of Adolph Hitler and
a significant occult holiday.
In late March 2001, yet another interlinked, global
pedophile network was exposed. That month, the Independent reported,
“US authorities announced the arrest of four American citizens for involvement
in an international child-porn ring called Blue Orchid.” The Los Angeles
Times added further details: “the United States and Russia have shut down
a Moscow-based international pornography ring that used the Internet to sell
videotapes of children engaged in sexual acts.” These tapes were said to sell
for “between $200 and $300.” As an Associated Press release revealed,
“police seized some 600 videotapes, 200 digital video disks and many boxes of
photographs.” Video duplication equipment and sales and shipping records were
also seized, leading to “criminal inquiries in 24 nations … Many of the tapes
were bought by people in the United States; others went to Germany, Britain,
France, Denmark, China, Kuwait, Mexico and scores of other countries.”
The Times reported that nine people had been
arrested and fifteen search warrants had been issued in the case. The AP
report noted that four of those arrests were in Russia, where two suspects,
alas, had “committed suicide.” The ring was also said by the Times to
offer what were cryptically referred to as “custom-made videos” for the hefty
price of $5,000 each. The contents of these videos were not revealed, but it
was revealed that the “prevalence of child pornography has increased
dramatically with the growth of the Internet. There are approximately 100,000
web sites worldwide associated with child pornography.”
This point was reinforced the next day when the
British press reported police raids on yet another pedophile ring. A report in
the Guardian held “more than 30 people, including a … man working for a
national youth organization, were arrested yesterday in dawn raids on the
homes of suspected paedophiles.” Once again being sold and traded were images
“which showed children being abused.” A report on the case in the Independent quoted a law enforcement spokesman as revealing, “that those
arrested included members of ‘some interesting professions,’” though the
source demurred from revealing what those professions might be. The official
did say that they had “a disturbing scenario of one or two juveniles who have
been caught in this way. One of them appears to be a 13-year-old boy.” The
police acknowledged that the arrested boy was “also a potential victim and
would be treated in that light,” which seems rather obvious. Nevertheless, a
follow-up to the story that the Independent ran in May held that the
boy had become “one of the youngest people to be listed on the sex offenders’
register.”
The next month, the Guardian carried a report
on Eric Franklin Rosser – accused child pornographer, one of the FBI’s
ten-most-wanted criminals, and a former keyboardist for John Cougar
Mellencamp’s band. According to the report, “investigators believe Rosser’s
material is among pornography circulated by a British paedophile ring … More
than 1,800 members are thought to belong to a club called Teenboys. Its
website features boys aged around 12 … Teenboys is considered bigger than the
notorious Wonderland Club.”
In September 2001, the Scottish Daily Record
reported that a “Salvation Army couple working on a British army base have
been arrested in a massive paedophile crackdown.” Seized from the couple’s
home were “some 400 videotapes … computers, discs, photographs and other
material … images of children as young as two have been found.” The same
report claimed “a massive vice probe into kiddie porn in the USA would expose
some of the biggest names in Hollywood as paedophiles. A federal
investigation, codenamed Operation Avalanche, has already resulted in over 100
arrests – and the US Department of Justice say there will be hundreds more,
including celebrities.” Lori Rabjohns, identified as a Justice Department
spokeswoman, was quoted as saying: “These are people who appear upstanding
members of society … We’re talking doctors, lawyers – and celebrities.”
The investigation came about as a result of a raid
on the Ft. Worth, Texas home of Thomas and Janice Reedy, who had been
operating a business called Landslide Productions, which offered child
pornography for sale over the Internet. The Reedy’s website, according to the
Independent, functioned as a portal to “more than 5,700 websites with
names such as Child Rape and Cyber Lolita.” The Reedys had made millions of
dollars from their child porn business, which “employed more than a dozen
staff, including a customer service representative and a receptionist.” This
financial empire was built with “money raised from the torture, rape and
sexual abuse of children as young as two.”
The raid on the Reedy’s home, conducted in September
1999, unexpectedly yielded a database of the names and addresses of a reported
75,000 subscribers around the world. According to a report carried in February
2002 by TechTV, “more than 35,000 [of those] individual subscribers
[were] in the United States.” Nevertheless, only 100 arrests had been made at
that time of the report – a number that remained unchanged in the months after
the initial arrests. By early 2003, the story had dropped out of sight with
little indication that there would be any further arrests, despite Chief
Postal Inspector Kenneth Weaver’s earlier insistence that the initial arrests
were just “the tip of the iceberg.”
More than 7,000 subscribers to the site were British
citizens. Their names, addresses and credit card information were provided by
the FBI to British authorities, who launched an investigation paralleling
Operation Avalanche that was dubbed Operation Ore. As in America, only a few
of the known offenders have thus far been arrested. Included among those
questioned by police have been television personality Matthew Kelly and
legendary guitarist Pete Townshend.
Rushing to Townshend’s defense was The Nation
columnist Alexander Cockburn, who earlier played a prominent role in
denouncing the McMartin prosecutions. In a posting on his Counterpunch
website from February 2003, Cockburn grossly misrepresented the nature of the
charges against Townshend. He charged that, according to the Supreme Court,
“’porn’ encompass[es] even clothed images of children if they are construed as
arousing. ‘Child’ means anyone under 18.” Cockburn labeled Townshend’s arrest
“absurd,” and claimed that if you “have a photo of a kid in a bath on your
hard drive, and the prosecutor says you were looking at it with lust in your
heart, [then] that is tantamount to sexually molesting an actual kid in an
actual bath.”
Cockburn was clearly trying to convey the impression
that Townshend and others are the innocent victims of overzealous prosecutors.
It will be recalled, however, that the images that the Landslide website was
offering to Townshend and other subscribers were images of “the torture, rape
and sexual abuse of children as young as two.” Those are not the types of
images that would easily be mistaken for innocent pictures of a child taking a
bath.
Also included among the 7,272 suspects in the United
Kingdom, according to the Observer, were “hundreds of child welfare
professionals, including police officers, care workers and teachers,” all of
whom were “identified as ‘extremely high-risk’ paedophiles.” Particularly well
represented on the list were law enforcement personnel: “Investigators now
believe as many as 90 police officers have so far been identified from an
initial trawl of 200 of the British names found in the U.S. Many of the other
suspects work in other sensitive professions, often linked to the criminal
justice system.”
On November 4, 2002, the Independent carried
a brief report that noted that virtually all of the British suspects had “yet
to be investigated despite the police having their details for four months.”
All the information on the suspects was sent in July 2002 to the fifty-one
police departments throughout Great Britain, but “despite detailed
intelligence, nearly all of the suspected paedophiles remain at large.” No
mention was made of why it took U.S. authorities n January 2003, the Sunday Herald
announced that the “police inquiry which plans to arrest a further 7000 men
across the UK … is set to end in disaster with many suspects walking free.”
Detective Chief Inspector Bob McLachlan, the former head of Scotland Yard’s
paedophile unit, told the Sunday Herald, “the lack of urgency in making
arrests will lead to suspects destroying evidence … before they are arrested.”
McLachlan also told the Herald that claims made by police chiefs and
the government that they are prioritizing pedophile crime are nothing but
“smoke and mirrors.”
The final line of the Sunday Herald article
revealed that, according to police, there were enough “rich and famous
Operation Ore suspects [to] fill newspaper front pages for an entire year.”
According to The Register and the Sunday Times (which reportedly
obtained, but did not publish, all 7,272 names), the list of suspects included
“at least 20 senior executives, … services personnel from at least five
military bases, GPs, university academics and civil servants.” Also on the
list were a “famous newspaper columnist … along with a songwriter for a
legendary pop band and a member of another chart-topping 1980s cult pop group,
along with an official with the Church of England.”
It is unlikely that any of those suspects, nor the
“high-profile former Labour Cabinet minister” mentioned by the Sunday
Herald, will ever be prosecuted. In August 2003, Scotland on Sunday
reported that the Scottish arm of the “massive internet child pornography
investigation Operation Ore has ended … without anybody being charged with sex
abuse.” An unnamed Scottish police chief said that that outcome “would not
trouble us if we thought that all the men who were looking at child porn on
their computer were just sad creeps who did not pose a risk to the children in
their lives, but that is not the conclusion that was drawn from every raid.”
To the contrary, what investigators repeatedly encountered was evidence that
suspects were engaged in the ongoing abuse of children.
In March 2002, Knight Ridder carried a report
that stated: “Postal inspectors, the FBI and Canadian authorities have broken
up an underground network of adults who traded pornographic videos of children
- sometimes their own - being brutally beaten.” At the time that the report
was filed, ten perpetrators had already been convicted and “more arrests are
expected in the ongoing investigation of what authorities described … as a
unique case.” According to Raymond Smith, head of the Postal Service’s child
exploitation investigations: “We’ve seen organized networks of sadomasochistic
beatings with adults before, but this is the first time we’ve seen it with
children.”
In an apparent attempt to downplay the appalling
behavior uncovered by the investigation, a postal inspector named Michael
Galuppo described the ring as “a bizarre group of people obsessed with
spanking children for sexual gratification.” “Spanking,” it should be noted,
is a rather odd way to describe what in fact were brutally sadistic beatings
involving “whips, hairbrushes, canes and wooden paddles.” The abuse was so
severe that at least one of the children depicted on videotape “suffered
permanent disfigurement from beatings that investigators said went on for
‘years.’” Among those convicted in the case were “a middle school teacher … a
nurse and former Boy Scout leader … [and] a former Sunday school teacher.”
Just months later, in August 2002, the Independent
reported that U.S. authorities had “announced the discovery of
a ‘despicable’ child pornography ring stretching to Britain and continental
Europe, in which parents sexually abused their children and distributed
photographs of them over the internet … Robert Bonner, The Customs
Commissioner, said he was particularly shocked to see the degree of collusion
by parents. ‘If this isn’t unusual, God help us … I’ve rarely seen crimes as
despicable and repugnant.’” Of the sixteen suspects arrested in the U.S., one
“committed suicide shortly after being arrested.”
These cases were not, of course, in any way “unique”
or “unusual,” as veteran Customs and Postal Service officials, with experience
investigating cases of child exploitation, should know.
In September 2003, the International Herald
Tribune carried a report from Berlin concerning “an international police
investigation [that] had uncovered an immense child pornography ring involving
26,500 suspects who swapped illegal images on the Internet in 166 countries.”
More than 500 homes in Germany were searched and hundreds of computers were
seized, along with tens of thousands of CD-ROMs, diskettes, and videotapes.
One seized image “showed a baby of four months being abused.” A statement
issued by the German Interior and Justice Ministries warned that many of the
suspects, a number of whom are reportedly teachers and police officials, “are
extremely dangerous pedophiles and are from all walks of life.” About 800 of
those suspects reside in the United States.
Curt Becker, the justice minister for the German
state of Saxony-Anhalt, called for tougher laws to contend with the growing
market for child pornography. He also directly challenged the notion that mere
possession of such images is largely a victimless crime. “Every case of child
pornography is a document of the sexual abuse of a child,” Becker noted, and
“every look at that image kills a child’s soul.”
A January 2003 Sunday Herald article revealed
that police investigators had discovered “that images of Fred West abusing one
of his children are among child pornography available for downloading from the
Internet. It is unclear whether the child was West’s murdered daughter
Heather.” Fred West was one of the UK’s most notorious, and most prolific,
serial killers. Shortly after being charged with twelve counts of murder, he
died while in police custody, allegedly by his own hand. Like Dutroux, West
had constructed a torture chamber in his cellar where his victims were filmed
being raped, tortured, murdered and mutilated. The remains of nine of his
victims, minus some missing parts, were discovered buried under his house and
in his yard.
While
we are on the subject of serial killers, The Irish Times carried the
following report in July 1998:
Police suspect a series of gruesome gay hate
killings in the Sydney region could be the work of a serial killer whose
victims might be linked through a notorious paedophile ring. The latest
mutilation murder was that of Australia’s longest serving mayor, Frank
Arkell, aged 68, who was bludgeoned to death in his flat and who had
previously faced 29 child sex charges. In the past few months two other men,
one a convicted child sex offender, were attacked in their homes in similar
circumstances and also suffered horrific injuries. Arkell, the former Lord
Mayor of Wollongong, 50 miles south of Sydney, was a key witness in a royal
commission into police corruption which uncovered a network of paedophiles.
Those
serial killers sure come in handy sometimes.
“The case of abduction and murder against Belgium’s infamous paedophile
Marc Dutroux remains unresolved. He has not been brought to book for these
heinous crimes. There appears to be a steel veil drawn over the facts at the
highest level and no one is prepared to expose those involved in this
blatant cover-up … The official answer is that a series of hysterical
conspiracy theories forced investigators to search for paedophile networks,
which didn’t exist. But for observers of this debacle, that’s exactly what
didn’t happen. Far from being investigated, leads pointing to a network seem
to have been blocked or buried.”
Olenka
Frenkiel for the BBC, May 2, 2002
“… several prosecutors, policemen and
crucial eyewitnesses have committed suicide. Important evidence has also
disappeared. So maybe Dutroux is being protected from on high. What other
explanation can there be for such a disgraceful chain of events?”
Andrew
Osborn in the Guardian, January 25, 2002
“Bruno Tagliaferro, a Charleroi scrap metal
merchant who knew Dutroux, claimed to know something about the car in which
Julie and Melissa were kidnapped. But he was soon found dead, apparently of a
heart attack. His wife Fabienne Jaupart, refused to accept the verdict and
arranged for his body to be exhumed. Samples sent to the USA for analysis
showed he’d been poisoned. Soon after, her teenage son found her dead at home
in her bed, her mattress smouldering. Publicly it was declared suicide, or an
accident. There have been 20 such unexplained deaths connected with Dutroux.”
Olenka Frenkiel for the
BBC, May 2, 2002
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SOURCE
©
2004, Allen
Aslan Heart / White Eagle Soaring of the
Little Shell Pembina Band,
a
Treaty
Tribe of the Ojibwe Nation.
