------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> <FONT COLOR="#000099">Small business owners... Tell us what you think! </FONT><A HREF="http://us.click.yahoo.com/vO1FAB/txzCAA/ySSFAA/zgSolB/TM";><B>Click Here!</B></A> ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Please send as far and wide as possible. Thanks, Robert Sterling Editor, The Konformist http://www.konformist.com http://www.konformist.com/2001/pedophocracy1.htm The Pedophocracy, Part I: >From Brussels ... By David McGowan July 2001 (McGowan is the author of Derailing Democracy and Understanding the F- Word,and is also the administrator of the website The Center for an Informed America) "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 doesn't mean much. Drop that name in Belgium though and you're 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. Shortly after his release, young girls began to disappear in the vicinity of some of his homes. Though technically unemployed and drawing welfare from the state, Dutroux nevertheless owned seven 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. True to form though, authorities failed to act on the information, or acted on it in a way that showed either complete incompetence (according to most press reports), or police complicity in the operation (according to any sort of logic). Police seem to have routinely ignored tips that later proved to be 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, the police searches came up empty, despite the fact that the investigating officers reported "hearing children's voices on one occasion," according to the Guardian. It was not until August of 1996, four years after the disappearances began, that authorities raided Dutroux's home and discovered the sound-proof dungeon/torture center. An informant had told police of its existence a year before, and before that had told them of being offered cash payments to kidnap girls; the police, as is their custom in such cases, ignored the leads. 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 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 raid, two young girls were found imprisoned in the dungeon, chained and starving. They described to police being used as child prostitutes and in the production of child pornography videos. More than 300 such videos were taken into custody by the police. Dutroux was arrested, along with his wife (an elementary school teacher), a lodger, a policeman, and a man the Guardian described as "an associate with political connections." Just days later, 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. 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 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 demanded to know, had been killed as a result of this inaction? Adding further fuel to the fire, as a Los Angeles Times report revealed, was that: "a highly regarded children's activist, Marie- France Botte, claims that the Justice Ministry is sitting on a politically sensitive list of customers of pedophile videotapes." The same report noted that: "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. Much later, Marc Verwilghen - the chief investigating magistrate on the case - would bluntly state: "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. In September, nine police officers and fourteen others 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." On October 15 came the straw that broke the camel's back: Jean-Marc Connerotte, who had been serving as the investigating judge on the 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. 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." His removal from the case fanned the smoldering flames of public outrage; the Times report noted that: "Hundreds of thousands of people had petitioned the high court to retain the judge." With the families of Dutroux's victims calling for a general strike, men and women all across the country walked away from their jobs in protest as train operators shut down public transportation, bringing some cities to a virtual standstill. On October 20, 350,000 citizens of the tiny nation took to the streets of Brussels dressed all in white, demanding the reform of a system so corrupt that it would protect the abusers, rapists, torturers, and killers of children. The political fallout from the case would ultimately bring about the resignation of Belgium's State Police Chief, Interior Minister, and Justice Minister – likely sacrificial lambs tossed to the outraged masses to avoid what could easily have exploded into a full-scale insurrection by the people, particularly after police `incompetence' allowed Dutroux to escape and remain at large for a brief time in April of 1998. There were in fact calls from the people for the entire coalition government to step down. Months later, an opinion survey by Brussels' Le Soir newspaper found that only one-in-five Belgians still had confidence in the federal government and the nation's justice system. As the Los Angeles Times reported in January of 1998, "the conviction remains stubbornly widespread that members of the upper crust - government ministers, the Roman Catholic Church, the court of King Albert II - belonged to child sex rings, or protected them." The lingering distrust of the people was not alleviated by the fact that a parliamentary inquiry had, in April of 1997, identified 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. In April of 1999, the Guardian reported that: "the highly respected chairman of a parliamentary inquiry into the 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.'" 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 doesn't 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 formed to investigate. In February 2000, the chairman of the commission delivered a report to Parliament linking the country's Prime Minister, Justice Minister, director of the State Revenue Service, and a number of army and law enforcement officers to the case. Efforts were immediately begun to discredit the commission chairman, including allegations that he is tied to the former KGB – a classic case of red-baiting, enabling the allegations to be dismissed as `Communist' propaganda. The BBC reported in June of 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." The BBC also filed a brief report on a 1996 case that went almost completely unreported in 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." On September 29 of 2000, The Irish Times reported that: "Eight people were arrested in Italy and three in Russia, and police said 1,700 people were being investigated in Italy," as yet another pedophile network surfaced. 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 we all know don't really exist. As recently as February of 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 they do, as it turns out, actually exist, and they likely have existed for as long as film has existed, though they weren't 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. Not long after that, as Carl Raschke wrote: "The Texas House Select Committee on Child Pornography disclosed in the late 1970s 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 claimed that a child from Mexico "can be packaged, delivered, and sold deep within this country 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." An account of the 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 of 2000, also confirmed that the seized materials did in fact include 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 and Latvian cases, there were clear indications of high-level complicity and a strong belief among the Italian people that the facts of the case were being covered up. And as with the other cases, 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," according to the Independent. If you are interested in a free subscription to The Konformist Newswire, please visit: http://www.eGroups.com/list/konformist Or, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject: "I NEED 2 KONFORM!!!" (Okay, you can use something else, but it's a kool catch phrase.) Visit the Klub Konformist at Yahoo!: http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/klubkonformist Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
