Sexual abuse: the Catholic Church and the daycare cases
Someone has to write it, so I guess I will.
How are the accusations against Catholic priests—such as those that appear in the Pennsylvania grand jury report—substantiated as true or almost certainly true? How many involve evidence in addition to the victims’ reports, how many include confessions, and how many are possibly the result of fabrication, fantasy, exaggeration, and/or the bandwagon effect? Those things are always a risk with accusations about activity that occurs in secret and in private.
This is not to say that I believe that any of the accusers are lying. They all may be telling the truth, and all the accused may be 100% guilty of what is alleged, and more. But it has to be taken into consideration that there is a possibility that some of them are not.
After all, there is a history of significant numbers of false accusations of abuse. Some of these false accusations have ruined the lives of the alleged perpetrators, for example in the McMartin and Fells Acres cases. Both were textbook cases of what not to do in such investigations (see this and this). I do not think it likely that the false accusations in those cases were made with any bad intent by the accusers. They were a result of a combination of hysteria and the power of suggestion, coupled with ignorance about how it is that leading questions can lead to false testimony and the implantation of false memories, especially memories that are “recovered.”
These cases occurred mostly in the 1980s, when not that much was known about how to handle these large-scale situations of abuse within institutions such as day care centers, and very poor interrogation methods were used.
I have done a relatively brief search, looking for information on the dates of most of the accusations, as well as the methods used to question the accusers. For example, did many of these cases involving priests occur during that same 1980s era, when there was a sort of accusation hysteria going on regarding day care, and false accusations were not so very uncommon? So far I have not been able to find that information about dates (or much of anything else), although I did find this:
DiNardo and Doherty noted that the [Pennsylvania] grand jury’s report spans 70 years, and many of the abuse accusations were made before 2002, when the bishops adopted new policies.
Not only did the bishops adopt new policies beginning at that time, but it was not long before that (I believe some time during the 1990s, if I’m recalling correctly) that law enforcement and therapists became more aware of the problems inherent in investigating accusations of abuse, and became more adept at questioning alleged victims in other cases.
If any readers are interested in how far the situation can go regarding false accusations and the belief in them, not just by victims but by alleged perpetrators in certain cases, I suggest reading the book Remembering Satan: A Tragic Case of Recovered Memory, on the subject of the Thurston County ritual abuse case.
I have no dog in the fight about the Catholic Church. I have absolutely no wish to absolve the guilty, priests or otherwise. I always have a wish to protect the innocent. That refers to the children and the other victims, of course. But it can also include the adults—even priests—some of whom may have been falsely accused.
[NOTE: I would really like to know more about the Pennsylvania cases, and if anyone has a link to a more thorough description, please offer it in the comments.]
As I understand (based on superficial study, to be sure), the bulk of the accusations against priests involve teenage boys. Most of the absolutely fabricated abuse cases (e.g., the McMartin case) involved children under 8, who are very suggestible, don’t really understand what sex is, and don’t always distinguish fantasy and reality. When I was a teenage boy, neither I nor any of my friends would have had any interest in fabricating stories of being homosexually molested. And it would have been hard even for someone in authority to pressure us to make up stories, since sullen silence was our preferred mode of interaction with adults.
I believe in the McMartin etc. cases, the “victims” were all very young, and ALL of the “evidence” was coaxed out of them by extremely leading questioning by police. Even then, some of the “evidence” had to be ignored, such as going on an airplane with an elephant. There was no excuse for this destruction of innocent lives to ever have happened, even in the 80’s.
I believe the victims of the Church are much older, and they testify without leading questioning.
y81:
First of all, many of the Pennsylvania cases involve much younger children than teenagers. I have yet to find an article that analyzes or lists the cases by age, but most of the articles mention the details of a few cases and always some of them involve young children. For example:
So we do not know the number of cases with teenagers versus younger children.
In addition, teenagers and even adults make false accusations for a number of reasons (some of them include the power of suggestion and/or mental illness and fantasy). Although the day care cases did indeed involve young children, the phenomenon is most definitely not limited to young children.
For example, please see this. Note that the journalist in question was “Jackie’s” Sabrina Erdely, and the case involved accusations against priests. It occurred in Pennsylvania, by the way.
This link is has a good description from the Catholic side (the other side can be easily found in the mainstream media). It’s biased, of course, but finding an unbiased source is often a difficult task, so the pragmatical solution is to check different sides, to compare and keep looking about what differs.
http://oregonfaithreport.com/2018/08/debunking-myths-lies-in-pennsylvania-abuse-case/
Yann:
Thanks, that was interesting.
Is it true that the more horrible and offensive the crime the more easily we are convinced of its truth? Add to the mix that the accusers are young, and presumably innocent, children. The accused are a group of people that are generally held in suspicion these days. Lastly, for many non-Catholics, the Church is not held in very high regard – especially after all the similar accusations and findings in Boston.
I don’t write this to defend or refute any of what has been alleged, but like Neo I wonder if we have learned anything from previous experiences, particularly the ones that were eventually proven false, and are our institutions of justice capable of an objective, disinterested examination.
One thing that really jumps out about the daycare scares is how much of the testimony was physically impossible or completely absurd, yet a jury still found persuasive enough to convict–and incredibly some people are still imprisoned at this moment, and of those who have been released not all have even had their convictions overturned.
That element is not operating here. The accusers are not talking about dismemberments and burials, or flights to Mexico, or underground tunnels.
Frederick:
False accusations do not necessarily involve any of those more fantastic elements.
Have you read the Pennsylvania grand jury report? I have not read it, but I’ve read articles about some of the allegations, and some are indeed rather elaborate and involve Satanic elements. For example, this is from the report:
Now, all of this is certainly possible. It may indeed has happened just like that. But it has elements of the type of “Satanic” abuse that was alleged quite often during the 80s and was considered especially suspect.
Did you read this, by the way?
I have no idea whether there are any false allegations in the Pennsylvania cases. But I would really like more information before I decide.
I find this article to be persuasive and informative in how long the problem in the Catholic hierarchy has persisted.
The Federalist: “How The Pederasty Cover-Up Will Make Civil War Within The Catholic Church”
The author makes clear that this problem is not going away and that there is a powerful and entrenched group at the top of the Catholic hierarchy that will resist all meaningful attempts at reform.
If the situation is in fact as the author describes, civil war or schism in the Catholic Church is a definite possibility.
Not to put too fine of a point on it, but, insisting in celibacy in priests? What do you expect?
These cases are troubling to me and should trouble prosecutors as well. The accusation alone is sufficient to destroy a man’s life even without being convicted. How do we ensure justice for real victims while protecting the rights of the accused? I do not know the answer. But, as a man, I would hope that police and prosecutors make sure they are truly convinced before making an arrest in such cases.
Blaming celibacy is nonsensical. The priests in question are accused of abusing children – pedophilia.
@Roy – and in most cases, SAME SEX abuses. Pervs are going to go where they have access to kids.
I can’t imagine wanting sexual interaction with a kid or with another woman for any reason. Sexual abuse is all over society, and is not correlated to abstinence.
Some useful links written by far better writers than I:
https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/celibacy-isnt-the-problem
https://www.catholiceducation.org/en/controversy/common-misconceptions/5-arguments-against-priestly-celibacy-and-how-to-refute-them.html
and a critique of the John Jay study:
(The John Jay study: The Nature and Scope of the Problem of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States, commissioned by the USCCB in 2004)
https://www.catholiceducation.org/en/controversy/common-misconceptions/the-john-jay-report.html
Much of what is cited in that report is not quite accurate, as critiqued here:
http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/john-jay-study-undermined-by-its-own-data
Neo – http://thesestonewalls.com/ will give you an idea of how bad the Church has acted in not fighting the outlandish accusations. No research into basic facts always happened. I have no basis to state what I’m going to say other than gut, but I’d bet we’re looking at 10-20% bogus accusations. That’s my gut on #MeToo.
As a resident of PA and someone who was raised Catholic, you will never ever find me in the cheering section for this bureaucracy; having said that, I have to ask just where and how did this grand jury report originate? (My own suspicion is that it began under the tenure of our august feloniously convicted Attorney General Katherine Kane). Grand juries precede indictments, but most (all?) of these issues are well beyond the prosecutable statute of limitations. So the point is?
Furthermore, I remember when this issue hit the fan some 30 years ago and I remember that the situation in Boston was at least as bad, if not worse, than that in PA, yet no Boston report?
It’s not that these offenses and their cover ups should not be outed, it’s that I smell a lot of statewide political opportunism here and a readily available white male patricharical victim.
Rod Dreher on his blog at The American Conservative has posted frequently on this subject. He lost his faith in the Church as a result of reporting he did during the Boston area scandals in the early 2000s. This is a link to his post from today. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/mccarrick-vigano-cardinals-dinner/
T,
Political opportunist AG’s are entirely too common and there is great danger in innocent clergy being swept up in the outrage and political opportunism.
That said, the point is to drain the swamp so that this field of opportunity for the perverts ceases to exist.
There is an overarching and greater problem here, and that is that we have–over the last couple of decades–discovered that virtually all of our institutions, and many of the public figures heading them them, have turned out to be far less that they were represented to be.
Meanwhile, we have also learned, most especially in the last few years, that the MSM we have traditionally relied on to inform us has, instead, been propagandizing us, has been twisting things, leaving out key pieces of information, suppressing information/news they don’t want us to know about, and –more and more–just flat out lying to us.
There is a lot of disillusionment, skepticism, and lack of trust in the air.
In this environment, where lack of trust is a reasonable default position, who can you trust, what and who can you rely on? How to know what is truth, what is exaggeration, or just plain fiction?
It seems as if the only sure way to get at the truth is to have been a witness to it, and if you weren’t a witness to it,in today’s environment, there is just no easy way to reliably and easily sort truth from distortion and fiction.
“That said, the point is to drain the swamp so that this field of opportunity for the perverts ceases to exist.” [Geoffry Britain @ 5:53]
I do not disagree in theory, but in fact I respectfully note that such is a utopian dream. What we see here is no less than a bureaucracy circling the wagons to defend itself. It happens all the time across all bureaucracies over and over again. Even constant vigilance can’t extinguish it, for someone will always find a way to circumvent the system and someone will always look to defend the bureaucracy rather than impose justice. One can only commit to addressing such crimes and sins when they are discovered in their new form; The Catholic bureaucracy has proven, again, to not be up to that task.
My profound sadness is that I think the Catholic Church, over two millenia of evolution has much of the theology correct. The problem is that it still operates as though it were an absolute, unaccountable, Italian Renaissance principiate and has learned nothing from Luther’s 95 Theses of 1517.
Now as a result of its own doing what it got right will most likely be further devalued in our secular society as its bureaucracy is justifiably raked over the coals. It’s a replay of Victor Davis Hanson’s hamartia, hubris, nemesis cycle and I fear we, as a society, will be the worse for it.
Jefferson said this about newspapers and the crucial role they play in our political system and country:
“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
But, Jefferson also said this:
“To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, ‘by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.’ Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of its benefits, than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.”
—Letter to John Norvell, 14 June 1807
[Works 10:417–18]”
I am reminded of a quote from Erik Hoffer that I ran across the other day that seems sadly appropriate here,
“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
This column by journalist Dennis Roddy includes an example of the type of sketchy accusations (that were thrown in with many legitimate cases) as part of the PA grand jury report:
“…Consider the case of the Rev. John E. Brueckner, who died in 1960. The report says that in 2016, a woman phoned the Diocese of Greensburg to say that her husband had once told her that he was abused by a Catholic priest at St. Joseph’s Parish in New Kensington in 1951. At the time, Greensburg was still part of the Diocese of Pittsburgh.
The caller could not recall the name of the priest.
Two days later, the Diocese referred the matter to the Westmoreland County District Attorney’s office. Their memorandum provided a list of priests assigned to St. Joseph. Absent any explanation or reference to further investigation, the grand jury report simply names Rev. Bruckner and “Father Stewart” for which it appears not to have bothered to have obtained a first name.
An unnamed priest. A parish. A list. A name pulled out of God knows where.
That’s in a grand jury report casting shame on a priest 58 years in the grave, with no evidence that the attorney general did anything to determine its truth or falsity.
When real cases, most of them publicized long ago, are salted with reckless speculation and raw files pulled from a complaint file, we’re faced with the Orwellian spectacle of the innocent being tossed in with the guilty for reason of proximity.
We are told to believe victims, which is laudable. But belief requires proof. It’s why we have courts of law and rules of procedure…”
Read the whole thing:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/articles.pennlive.com/opinion/2018/08/shapiros_shoddy_work_on_grand.amp
Over the years I have always known Bella Dodds quoted testimony to congress and what has slowly transpired along with things like the history of Kiril…
I always wondered, did they ever seek to find out who they were and where are they now?
Whatever she knew changed her from party lawyer, head of the teachers union and more within an atheist viewpoint in the heart of NYC, into a catholic whom Fulton j sheen got involved.
In psychology you want to go back to the thing that tweaked the devils nose. OR how J Peterson puts it, no one gets away with anything (in his talk which went over some biblical things).
Do you really want to accept that a certain religion has a disproportionate amount of naturally occurring something, which, conveniently allows the Baizuo to get everyone upset at acts and ideas they themselves celebrate openly (care to see the photos of children at Folsom street fair?), and favor, etc
how long did they fight the stigma of gay men and pederasty leaving now the only explanation being?
anyway, back to Dodd… i brought her up a while back…
but you can hear the changer herself, she gave speeches…
here she mentions how she changed from christian lady to atheist communist etc…
[this one may surprise you that she is telling you about how it works..
control of money, and control of words]
Bella Dodd Explains Communism Ducks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLHNz2YMnRY
here she tells the world of the work SHE DID to put people in places of influence…
Communist Leader, Dr Bella Dodd, Confesses to Infiltrating the Church & USA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37HgRWTsGs0
[Jordan Peterson is baffled as to why Nazis are villains and communists arent given the actual history, i guess his history missed the part we are also told not to pay attention to, confessed changers who risked their lives to tell us something. and some did get dead…]
whether you like it or not, its our history
whether you accept it or not, it happened and it influenced things
some things greatly.. how greatly? well, if you go back to the press clippings of the time you would be terribly shocked how well Stalinist erased the foundations of your own history, even if you believe you know it well…
Here is a clear example. Given the current times and the current games why don’t you know anything in detail (what could be known) of Anthony Johnson? Seriously, people are yelling racism and so on and all manner of stuff of how the US is racist, and you don’t know Anthony Johnson?
Well i guess its moot as most don’t know the modern history of the Catholic church and barely know its older history… for the most part they really really really have a warped knowledge with wrong numbers, areas, responsibilities, titillated facts etc….
There is more from Alice Hildebrand on the Church… but most in Italian..
[she wrote “Memoirs of a Happy Failure”]
you will have a dearth of a time going through the material for like other sensitive things its stuck inside a web of conspiracy theories that have been going on for ages… Disenformatzia
they take real quotes and try to work to real names… they may or may not be right
but they do think they are and are emphatic
its a case of 1) we know what she gave testimony to congress – and which was never recorded (hows that for a neat trick?) 2) we have lots of speeches and writings, like school of darkness, but she never gives names of many who many would want to know 3) some killings near her shocked her and these spurred her, but also influenced what she said…
Here is a persons commentary who read school of darkness and wonders…
People wonder..
tons of stuff which people think they have answers but this happens when there isnt enough to do that, but enough to know that there was something…
Re Fr. Flohr and that alleged, truly satanic-sounding, abuse — “When and where Western Pa. priests named in grand jury sex abuse report served”:
Whether that particular act of satanic abuse occurred or not, just the fact that Flohr was moved around different parishes so frequently, along with the cash settlement, does lend credibility to his having been an abuser.
Alexander Trachtenberg
Dodd Snitches on him…
so did Whittaker Chambers:
When Chambers gave Adolf Berle his account of Soviet espionage in the Roosevelt Administration, he identified Trachtenberg as the “head of GPU” in the U.S.
now… remember there are two people well known to be well connected that gave talk of the man, and then there was the meeting of communists at madison square garden… where Dodd repeats a small speech he gave to senators, and luminaries and educators
Do not think that this thing is minor, the soviets and various marxist milieus have always seen the church as their enemy…
they even tried to assassinate the pope, remember?
its why he got a pope mobile…
Italy: Soviets Tried To Kill Pope
but how do they know?
The [Italian] Mitrokhin Commission
yeah, those dam n archives…
the controversial Mitrokhin Commission, set up by Silvio Berlusconi and headed by Forza Italia senator Paolo Guzzanti, supported once again the Bulgarian theory, which had been denounced by John Paul II during his travel to Bulgaria. Senator Guzzanti claimed that “leaders of the former Soviet Union were behind the assassination attempt”, alleging that “the leadership of the Soviet Union took the initiative to eliminate Pope John Paul”
Yeah, THAT Berlusconi
history is more fun when you know a lot more of these details and left outs
but it gets MORE interesting.. [i could write some great movie scripts]
In 2009, journalist and former army intelligence officer John Koehler published Spies in the Vatican: The Soviet Union’s Cold War Against the Catholic Church. Mining mostly East German and Polish secret police archives, Koehler claims the attempt was “KGB-backed” and gives details
this is from wikipedia, not conspiracy central
for those who dont know, this is what the third secret was about.. however, beyond this is so much conspiracy stuff mixed in you have to get real careful because the archives and so on stuff is enough – the conclusions the information doesnt support or cant ever cause there isnt enough, are mixed in because people refuse to accept the concept that we wont know, cant know and will never know – as there just isnt enough to support more than what it supports
It was announced by Cardinal Angelo Sodano on May 13, 2000, 83 years after the first apparition of the Lady to the children in the Cova da Iria, and 19 years after the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II that the Third Secret would finally be released
Along with the text of the secret, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, (the future Pope Benedict XVI), published a theological commentary in which he states:
regardless of where things go and what dead ends there are, from 1917 onwards the church was under attack by socialists.. people confessed to this and gave testimony, and if you dont believe that then we are just cherry picking what people say in history to suit. the actions happened in the 1920s and 30s… changed in the 40s and 50s.. with Trachtenberg and after the war that Germany AND Russia started… and the confessions of the people doing it are also record… Dodd, Chambers, etc..
and as you can see, when you keep reading them, you find this all connects with people in places you know today, that were nothings yesterday when this history was being written in fading ink..
there are a lot more interesting connections, which is why this scandal is going to get weird
it goes back far enough to connect to this kind of stuff and the history and to people who were part of it who are around today, like Burlesconi… or people who are speaking those loving terms predicted by Trachtenberg in 44 as to liberalism, progressivism, and Democracy…
too bad people don’t know Trachtenberg … if you thought Willi Munzenberg was interesting, and Otto Katz, well, this is another very interesting historical figure that disappeared from history like poor old Nikola Yezhov
not like the politicians aren’t using his terms in their campaigns, and using similar from history…. nope… not at all…
Blaming celibacy is nonsensical. The priests in question are accused of abusing children – pedophilia.
The argument is that getting men who are not perverts would be easier if the “Pink Mafia” did not reject men who are not gay. Read, “Goodbye Good Men,”
I read a LOT of the grand jury report. There is a LOT in there I question as true. I would say roughly about 25% is true, 25% is very highly likely false… and the rest… Hard to say. Probably in between.
Seventy years is a long span of time. There were a lot of very different attitudes towards sex, religion, and religious calling than there are now. Which makes it hard for me to believe some of it. (That confessional story strikes me as highly unlikely to have occurred.)
I have a certain amount of scepticism. Between the day care cases, Mike Nifong, the proverbial ham sandwich, the people who just really hate Catholics, and the people going after the Catholic churches “deep pockets,” I’m sceptical.
There is a reason why the rule of law is desirable. In a sane society, the courts (and juries included) determine guiltey or innocent,
“That said, the point is to drain the swamp so that this field of opportunity for the perverts ceases to exist.” [Geoffry Britain @ 5:53]
“I do not disagree in theory, but in fact I respectfully note that such is a utopian dream. What we see here is no less than a bureaucracy circling the wagons to defend itself.” T
Yes, the current dominant Catholic hierarchy is circling the wagons to defend itself. Which is a self-defeating tactic. As it will drive away too many and either the Catholic Church will become extinct or a schism will occur.
Plus, a bureaucracy cannot long survive without revenue. So the swamp will be drained… though it be involuntarily. And for pragmatic reasons rather than Utopian dreams.
The evidence is on the cusp of becoming undeniable and once that threshold is reached, then every adult Catholic who remains must face becoming complicit in any future abuse of innocents.
Staying itself will have become a mortal sin from which no absolution is possible, as long as the sinner remains sinful because only willful blindness can then be the motivation.
Absolution requires acceptance from the penitent of being in a sinful state and in this case, willful blindness denies participation in enabling the sin…
GB,
Well stated.
As you infer, the Church relies on voluntary contributions, the state relies on coerced payments. So it will be much more likely that we see the eccelsiastical swamp disappear than the secular swamp. However, as I noted above the collateral damage will sorely devalue much that is good and we will all be the worse for that.
There’s a third position between guilty and innocent — guilty, but not of what they are accused.
I’ve seen a similar thing operate from personal experience, where a boy was groomed by an older male. Perhaps some sex took place, but not much, and he seemed happy, indeed eager, to keep going back. He sat on it for 30 years, then made a complaint that was more dramatic and bent the story in time and severity. (Knowing him personally, I imagine he persuaded himself it was true as well — he was targeted precisely because he was pliable.) The defendants paid out, because “yes it happened, but not like that” isn’t very helpful in the court of public opinion.
We’ve all seen people mistreated who, over time, take a small offense and it grows in their mind to be a much bigger one.
So say a priest makes a boy do something distasteful and illegal. The man might later decide to, perhaps unconsciously, inflate the actions. Thereby gaining more pity and a larger settlement. The priest is unlikely to defend himself by openly admitting the original act, and the inflated version can pass. A jury is likely to disregard any such evidence anyway, if given, as an attempt to mitigate the severity.
My guess is that many, if not most, of the church complaints have a degree of this. Especially since you have a situation where people are competing for payouts, so you can add that to embellishment over time. There’s guilt in there, but the extent is difficult to untangle.
I wrote about my experience here.
How it happens.
https://ed-bonderenka.blogspot.com/2018/08/how-it-happens.html
“Guilty, but not if what they are accused” is another big chunk of what I read.
Let me tell you a story about a young junior high teacher who was a little goofy and really targeted by the meaner students. The students came up with a code for sexual stuff that utilized innocuous terms, like candy bar names. And they goaded the teacher (a male) into a conversation that he thought was about candy bars. In front of the whole class, most of whom knew the code. The nice kids were mortified when the teacher would say things like, “Snickers are great. Heath Bars are delicious!” It didn’t take THAT long before the teacher figured it out. But long enough. In today’s atmosphere of zero tolerance, the teacher would probably wind up losing his job. This one survived, learned a hard lesson, and made those boys’ lives miserable for the rest of the year.
Some of the stuff I read about in the grand jury report reminded me of that and I seriously think some of it was what that teacher went through.
Snow on Pine on August 30, 2018 at 6:15 pm at 6:15 pm said:
“There is an overarching and greater problem here, and that is that we have–over the last couple of decades–discovered that virtually all of our institutions, and many of the public figures heading them them, have turned out to be far less that they were represented to be.
Meanwhile, we have also learned, most especially in the last few years, that the MSM we have traditionally relied on to inform us has, instead, been propagandizing us, has been twisting things, leaving out key pieces of information, suppressing information/news they don’t want us to know about, and –more and more–just flat out lying to us.”
T on August 30, 2018 at 6:24 pm at 6:24 pm said:
“What we see here is no less than a bureaucracy circling the wagons to defend itself. It happens all the time across all bureaucracies over and over again. Even constant vigilance can’t extinguish it, for someone will always find a way to circumvent the system and someone will always look to defend the bureaucracy rather than impose justice. ”
Same topic, different instantiations (in two pieces):
Example #1
https://www.redstate.com/brandon_morse/2018/08/29/antifa-domestic-terrorist-organization-cnns-defense-inexcusable/
“But Antifa is more than just youngsters getting dropped off at the protest by their mom, and yelling at people. They want to hurt people, and I don’t mean just the random punch and kick. They want to stab and shoot people, as Steven Crowder discovered when he and his producer Jared went undercover and were handed deadly weapons. Luckily, this Antifa cell in particular was stopped thanks to Crowder handing the footage over to the police.”
(watch the embedded video – Crowder gives the police his surveillance tapes in the presence of MSM reporters, offers to give them access & statements, and is totally ignored – but the next day they are swarming all over the violence)
Example #2
(the moderation is balking on this link; it’s not happy with any of the creative respellings of the URL that I have tried – good luck finding it. I don’t know what the problem is, but this is the source for the reposted report.)
John McCain and the POW Cover-Up
The “war hero” candidate buried information about POWs left behind in Vietnam.
SYDNEY SCHANBERG • THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE • MAY 25, 2010 • 8,200 WORDS
“Eighteen months ago, TAC publisher Ron Unz discovered an astonishing account of the role the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, had played in suppressing information about what happened to American soldiers missing in action in Vietnam. Below, we present in full Sydney Schanberg’s explosive story.”
“In the numerous, lengthy McCain profiles that have appeared of late in papers like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, I may have missed a clause or a sentence along the way, but I have not found a single mention of his role in burying information about POWs. Television and radio news programs have been similarly silent.
Reporters simply never ask him about it. They didn’t when he ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination in 2000. They haven’t now [2008], despite the fact that we’re in the midst of another war—a war he supports and one that has echoes of Vietnam.
…
In its early months, the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs gave the appearance of being committed to finding out the truth about the MIAs. As time went on, however, it became clear that they were cooperating in every way with the Pentagon and CIA, who often seemed to be calling the shots, even setting the agendas for certain key hearings. Both agencies held back the most important POW files. Dick Cheney was the Pentagon chief then; Robert Gates, now the Pentagon chief, was the CIA director.
Further, the committee failed to question any living president. Reagan declined to answer questions; the committee didn’t contest his refusal. Nixon was given a pass. George H.W. Bush, the sitting president, whose prints were all over this issue from his days as CIA chief in the 1970s, was never even approached. Troubled by these signs, several committee staffers began asking why the agencies they should be probing had been turned into committee partners and decision makers. Memos to that effect were circulated. The staff made the following finding, using intelligence reports marked “credible” that covered POW sightings through 1989: “There can be no doubt that POWs were alive … as late as 1989.” That finding was never released. Eventually, much of the staff was in rebellion.
This internecine struggle continued right up to the committee’s last official act—the issuance of its final report. The Executive Summary, which comprised the first 43 pages, was essentially a whitewash, saying that only “a small number” of POWs could have been left behind in 1973 and that there was little likelihood that any prisoners could still be alive. The Washington press corps, judging from its coverage, seems to have read only this air-brushed summary, which had been closely controlled.
But the rest of the 1,221-page Report on POW/MIAs was quite different. Sprinkled throughout are pieces of hard evidence that directly contradict the summary’s conclusions. This documentation established that a significant number of prisoners were left behind—and that top government officials knew this from the start. These candid findings were inserted by committee staffers who had unearthed the evidence and were determined not to allow the truth to be sugar-coated.
If the Washington press corps did actually read the body of the report and then failed to report its contents, that would be a scandal of its own. The press would then have knowingly ignored the steady stream of findings in the body of the report that refuted the summary and indicated that the number of abandoned men was not small but considerable.
…
None of this compelling evidence in the committee’s full report dislodged McCain from his contention that the whole POW issue was a concoction by deluded purveyors of a “conspiracy theory.” But an honest review of the full report, combined with the other documentary evidence, tells the story of a frustrated and angry president, and his national security adviser, furious at being thwarted at the peace table by a small, much less powerful country that refused to bow to Washington’s terms. That president seems to have swallowed hard and accepted a treaty that left probably hundreds of American prisoners in Hanoi’s hands, to be used as bargaining chips for reparations.
Maybe Nixon and Kissinger told themselves that they could get the prisoners home after some time had passed. But perhaps it proved too hard to undo a lie as big as this one. Washington said no prisoners were left behind, and Hanoi swore it had returned all of them. How could either side later admit it had lied? Time went by and as neither side budged, telling the truth became even more difficult and remote. The public would realize that Washington knew of the abandoned men all along. The truth, after men had been languishing in foul prison cells, could get people impeached or thrown in jail.”
parker on August 30, 2018 at 9:40 pm at 9:40 pm said:
There is a reason why the rule of law is desirable. In a sane society, the courts (and juries included) determine guiltey or innocent,
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And they don’t always get it right either — but the odds are better than trial by media.
LTEC:
Please see this comment of mine.
George H.W. Bush, the sitting president, whose prints were all over this issue from his days as CIA chief in the 1970s,
He was director of the CIA for 12 months. He was employed by Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford as a placeholder for a succession of positions, including that one. The CIA’s embarrassments at the time required Wm. Colby be replaced. He had no history as an intelligence professional prior to that, nor was he an intelligence maven during his tour in Congress. I think the issue in question may have been the special province of the Defense Intelligence Agency, btw.
I just read a post, by Paul Rahe, entitled “Prelates and Pederasts.” In it, he argues that pederasts have now taken over large parts of the Catholic Church. The Pope appears to have been criminally negligent, complicit, or both.
Rahe is a terribly sober and meticulous historian, who doesn’t make reckless accusations.
For anyone interested, here’s a link.
https://ricochet.com/547522/prelates-and-pederasts/
Cornflour:
At this very moment, before I saw your comment, I’ve been engaged in reading that very article and writing a short post about it.
Aesop fan, I have to point out some information I have about the missing POWs story. It doesn’t prove that no POWs were left behind, but it shows how that belief becomes a “cause” that won’t go away.
In June of 1965 the Air Group on the USS Midway suffered six losses in one day. It was a blow. Two of the pilots were known to have successfully bailed out. One of them was an A-4 pilot, LTJG David Christian. He was seen by other vA-4 pilots on the mission trying to escape from North Vietnamese soldiers. A aircraft from my unit made some strafing runs to give him cover and help him get to the sea, which was a few hundred yards away, and escape. Our aircraft was shot down at a low altitude and was observed crashing o the beach. Did the crew bail out? (Our unit flew the EA-1F, an electronic warfare aircraft with a crew of four.) Did any of them survive? We hoped for the best, but could not say for sure what happened to them. The most obvious being that they were killed in the crash.
The ship’s Captain, James O’Brien, called me to his cabin. He was a Korean veteran and told me that how I reported the casualties could make all the difference to the family. He had seen several cases where the pilot was reported as MIA that gave the family hope that their loved one might be alive. He knew of several families who had spent many years trying to find their son/brother/grandson all to no avail. He believed it was better to report MIA presumed dead. That way, if they turned up on a POW list, the family would be pleasantly surprised rather than carrying false hope.
That is how I reported my unit losses. MIA, presumed dead. However, in the case of LTJG Christian, his unit reported him MIA, believed captured. Within a week, the name of the other A-4 pilot, LT John McKamey, who was shot down that day appeared on the POW rolls. LTJG Christian’s name never appeared. He was never reported alive in North Vietnam. But his family clung to the hope that he had been taken prisoner. They spent many years and large sums of money searching for their loved one. In 1983 LTJG Christian’s remains were repatriated. The identification was valid – dog tags, squadron insignia, location near where he had last been seen, but his family refused to believe it was him., They were invested, like quite a few other families, in the idea that he was a captive and the North Vietnamese, for some devious reason, had not released his name.
The last of my squadron mates remains were repatriated in 1993. All four were returned to their families for burial as heroes. The families finally had some measure of closure.
Most of the family’s maintaining that their sons/brothers/grandsons were POWs that had not been identified had stories similar to that of the Christian family. Hope can be a powerful emotion. So powerful that a movement of POW families looking for their next of kin sprung up and became quite a powerful organization. No solid evidence of those missing POWs has ever been found. Whenever I hear about these families who are searching high and low for their missing kin, it brings back those memories of long ago.
Cornflour:
I guess the “short post” turned into a long one.
I think that commenter Ann may be mistaken that the number of different parishes at which Gregory Flohr served proves that he was an abuser. I live in the Diocese of Greensburg, and these frequent transfers are pretty much the norm, not an indicator of an abusive priest.
I second Faith2014’s recommendation of “These Stone Walls.” In some places priests were railroaded on flimsy evidence or no evidence at all and received no assistance from their bishop, perhaps due to the bishop’s desire to display toughness or to be rid of the problem as soon as possible. A reporter investigated and thought that the priest who writes through that website was innocent. He is in prison for life, in effect.
By the way, my disgust with the corruption in the hierarchy is deep, but I want to see justice done, not injustice.
“I do not think it likely that the false accusations in those cases were made with any bad intent by the accusers.”
That may be exactly true in the McMartin and Fells Acre cases, but my less than precise recollections are that much of it was fueled by bad intentions in the prosecutor’s office. The bad intentions may be as simple as, “I want a high profile media case, and I want to win.” I believe Dorothy Rabinowitz over at the WSJ, has written about this.
J.J. on August 31, 2018 at 1:24 pm at 1:24 pm said:
Aesop fan, I have to point out some information I have about the missing POWs story. It doesn’t prove that no POWs were left behind, but it shows how that belief becomes a “cause” that won’t go away.
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Thanks for the insight; it is much appreciated.
The point of my comment was not really about the POWs themselves (or even John McCain) so much as to illustrate that lying to the public is well and solidly entrenched, whatever the subject. (Don’t get me started on the revisionist version of the Cuban Missile Crisis!)
Basically, this is the realm of known unknowns, and we can’t even imagine the unknown unknowns — as the FBI/DOJ controversy currently shows, there is strong evidence of frightening aspects of our law-enforcement agencies that were heretofore considered only in the fevered imaginations of the suspense writers and conspiracy brigades.
Cornflour, thank you for the link.
Aesop fan: “Basically, this is the realm of known unknowns, and we can’t even imagine the unknown unknowns — as the FBI/DOJ controversy currently shows, there is strong evidence of frightening aspects of our law-enforcement agencies that were heretofore considered only in the fevered imaginations of the suspense writers and conspiracy brigades.”
Entirely true. We are now distrustful of our government. And with good reason. There is much fakery in official circles. I could tell many stories of unethical behavior that I observed in the Navy. Some of it was corrected and some punishment occurred, but much went uncorrected/unpunished. That mostly affected the efficiency of the Navy, not the general population. In our civilian government it affects many, many more people. I want to believe the best, but cannot help but be cynical. Our trusted institutions are no longer trusted.
As to the Catholic priests’ sexual assaults, I am with Neo. So much of it is in the arena of circumstantial evidence. Without a thorough investigation and trial it is prudent to wonder who is really guilty and what to believe. That the Church hasn’t been more forceful and transparent in dealing with this issue is understandable. It is the ultimate bureaucracy. Bureaucracies always act to preserve themselves no matter what. Which is also what we are seeing in the DOJ/FBI. And it goes on.
A riff on Rumsfeld’s Maxim: “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.”
But what about the unknown knowns: things we know, but don’t realize we know until something brings them to our attention (Comey not having Weiner and Abedin’s marriage “index” for him was just a lie.)
Are some flashes of “inspiration” just a subconscious nudging of data up from the memory banks into consciousness?
Wkipedia also cites this:
“Psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj Žižek says that beyond these three categories there is a fourth, the unknown known, that which we intentionally refuse to acknowledge that we know: “If Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the ‘unknown unknowns’, that is, the threats from Saddam whose nature we cannot even suspect, then the Abu Ghraib scandal shows that the main dangers lie in the “unknown knowns”—the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values.”[12]
German sociologists Daase and Kessler (2007) agree with a basic point of Rumsfeld in stating that the cognitive frame for political practice may be determined by the relationship between what we know, what we do not know, what we cannot know, but Rumsfeld left out what we do not like to know.[13]”
But this is my favorite:
A thirteenth-century Persian poet, Ibn Yamin[22], said there are four types of men:[23]
One who knows and knows that he knows… His horse of wisdom will reach the skies.
One who knows, but doesn’t know that he knows… He is fast asleep, so you should wake him up!
One who doesn’t know, but knows that he doesn’t know… His limping mule will eventually get him home.
One who doesn’t know and doesn’t know that he doesn’t know… He will be eternally lost in his hopeless oblivion!
It probably sounds better in the original.
My generation—now passing from the scene—was apparently living in a fantasy world, where the government and bureaucracy were reasonably honest, and focused on performing the best they could to insure the well being of our country and it’s citizens, and we had some basic trust in them, since they were—supposedly—fighting to protect our democracy, our values, and our way of life.
Similarly, we also trusted that our Press—later the MSM—was actually trying to and telling us the truth.
We were all sold a bill of goods.
Slowly though, over the decades, as we grew up and matured, as our experiences accumulated, the suspicion and, then, the certainty grew that things were definitely not as we were told they were—or as they seemed.
The question is how much that we think we know and believe is true is really a lie (and a deliberate one at that), and what weight of how many accumulated lies is sufficient to first, make our Ship of State impossible to steer and, later on, to overwhelm, capsize, and sink it?
I’ve read that some social scientists concluded that the United States—in contrast to many old world/traditional societies—“works” —and that it works because of the high level of trust we have in our fellow citizens.
We trust our fellow citizens, whereas in the other countries studied such trust was lacking. There was no social cohesion, and it was hard to get distrustful people— who thought that everyone else was out to screw them as a matter of course, to “steal from them their rightful share of a limited pie”—to cooperate, making their countries much less successful.
How much social cohesion, how much “trust” being lost will it take for us to have a country that no longer “works,” and is successful?
P.S.–About that MSM. See this example at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/us-accounts-for-just-1-of-mass-shootings-not-media-hyped-31