A very high-level protector of priest pederasts, Cardinal Mahoney of the LA diocese, is being kicked out of his job: “Archbishop Jose Gomez said he had stripped his predecessor, the retired cardinal Roger Mahony, of all public and administrative duties.” More details here:
Boing-Boing said: “The Archdiocese this week…removed Cardinal Roger Mahony from his duties, for his role in enabling and keeping quiet the methodical and widespread molestation. The removal is “unprecedented,” but many victims and advocates believe Mahony deserves greater punishment. Auxiliary Bishop Thomas J. Curry, who helped Mahony hide abusers from police in the eighties, has resigned his post as regional bishop in Santa Barbara, California.”
More significantly, 12,000 pages of files have been released by the diocese to the public “more than a week after church records relating to 14 priests were unsealed as part of a separate civil suit, showing that church officials plotted to conceal the abuse from law enforcement agencies as late as 1987.”
To access the released files, click at end of sentence, then scroll down the page to the section labeled “Clergy Personnel Files”, and a list of names appears which link to the file of the named individual perpetrator priest:
Most of the files are variously redacted, and many of the molesters have since died, but the files still offer some gruesome reading, given the victims were children and their molesters Roman Catholic priests.
Was it because his Obama administration handlers gave him awful advice? Peter Beinart on how Hagel prepared for the hearings.
EXTRACT
If the aim of the hearings was simply to make sure Hagel gets confirmed, all this may not matter very much. After the hearings, three important Senate Democrats—New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand, Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal, and Colorado’s Mark Udall—said they would support Hagel. And if the Democrats hold firm, as it appears they will, it’s unlikely the Republicans will be able to mount an effective filibuster. But if the aim of the hearings was also to begin building a case for Obama’s second term foreign policy—a foreign policy that brings military spending into balance with economic resources and aggressively pursues diplomacy with Iran, and maybe Israel and the Palestinians too—Hagel failed. And if he continues to fail as a foreign policy spokesman once confirmed, that second term agenda will be harder to achieve.
Watching the Senate Armed Services Committee interact Thursday with former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel-President Obama's candidate to be secretary of defense-was a profoundly depressing experience.
Hagel's performance in his “confirmation” hearing was remarkable; he spent the day eating his own words under pressure mostly from Republicans-so much so that it is hard to understand what views he might actually hold.
Unlike most effective politicians who are always clever at saying nothing or changing positions, he was so inarticulate at doing so that it is also hard to understand how he ever could have been elected twice to the Senate from Nebraska.
As fumbling and apologetic as Hagel's answers were to the members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, even my low expectations for the performance of the senators on that committee went unmet.
This should scare the hell out of anyone who cares about American democracy. When a majority of the citizens of a country no longer trust their government there is a serious problem, and a real chance for social breakdown.
Much of this, as you can see, is centered around the Theocratic Right which is increasingly estranged from the nation's mainstream. And it should not be forgotten that anti-government fear and hate is a staple of the Theocratic Right media machine.
Click through to see the charts which will help you understand this story.
Views of Congress: Problem Lies with Members, Not the System
Pew Research Center for the People & The Press
Released: January 31, 2013
Overview
As Barack Obama begins his second term in office, trust in the federal government remains mired near a historic low, while frustration with government remains high. And for the first time, a majority of the public says that the federal government threatens their personal rights and freedoms.
A big problem in sharing even excellent, well-sourced information on the theme of pedophiles occupying the highest ranks of organizations, whether they be corporate, governmental or even religious, is not the sense of incredulity such information usually provokes in typically asleep middle-class readers who have lived relatively protected, cocooned existences oblivious to the innumerable black undersides of what some call reality. That's to be expected from those who live in middle-class cocoons. The real difficulty is in examining and sharing information on practices that are unarguably loathsome, depraved, vile, degenerate and in essence evil, and done by people we look upon as our highest and most respectable leaders. It's easy to accuse someone of evil, and it is insufficient by itself to do so. One has to provide evidence, and providing evidence entails describing something ineffably malign and almost unutterable in its horror – that's hard to do, by comparison, because except for those with a strong appetite or attraction to very, very dark things, a minority, no one else, understandably, wants to look at such things. People flee from what repels them, and what is more repellent than pederasts, especially those who have great power and privilege?
This undoubtedly largely has to do with living in a dominantly secular age. The influence of those who don't believe in a Divine Order or God is pervasive enough to compel the masses to assume the flip side: to take for granted there is no Devil, no source of deep, abiding non-human evil. Anything conveyed about people and their practices that smacks of a quality or degree of evil that puts the smug assumptions of modernity into doubt, that makes the Satanic much more plausible despite the stubborn persistence of modernity's assumptions about good and evil, is an object of terror and revulsion to the degree that modernity's values has descended into people's hearts and minds. Not that religious “authorities” can be counted on to protect innocent children. Note the Catholic Church's endless calls to stop abortion, which victimizes innocent children, they say, which is all well and good, but its compulsive, monotonic repetition of this meme seems to be a sign of a compensatory spilling-out of a guilty conscience for having permitted and protected the many pederast priests in its midst. They seem to ignore the more concrete or real crime in exchange for protesting the more abstract one when it comes to their most repeated phrase: innocent children. This happens likely because the real crime is done by their very own, at the center of power and control in the Church, by priests and their bishops.
For these and other reasons, getting the message out about pedophiles who are very powerful is more challenging and daunting than getting out information on any other category of crimes performed by members of the Elite. Yet the task should be done, if only as a microscopic, belated effort to help get some chance of justice for the countless and truly innocent children victimized and even tortured and killed by pederasts, especially those in the highest places, plus to help prevent new such crimes by the high and mighty especially.
Sandy Hook poses so many uncertainties and even contradictions that it should come as no surprise that virtually every aspect of whatever happened is being subjected to the most minute scrutiny. I have now published multiple articles about it here at Veterans Today, including “Sandy Hook: Huge Hoax and anti-Gun ‘Psy Op’”, where others, such as historian of science and expert on 7/7, Nicholas Kollerstrom, have addressed the parallels between those events. On one web site, I have even been asked by a serious but skeptical reader whether it is even possible that none of the children were actually killed.
The question is not as unwarranted as most of the public might believe. If this had been a real shooting of children, there would have been a sense of panic and of hysteria. EMTs would have rushed into the school building. The children would have been rushed out on stretchers and into ambulances and other vehicles and rushed to a hospital for doctors to treat them and formally pronounce the death of those who had been killed. Nothing remotely like this happened. The police cordoned off everyone from the school. No one was allowed to see the bodies. They were transported in the dead of night. It was simply bizarre beyond belief. A resourceful student has turned up visual evidence that Sandy Hook was not even an operating school, which, if she is right, discloses the stunning enormity of the hoax:
Phi Beta Iota: Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a Reagan Republican and former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has also been a columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. In other words, a man with a brain and a devotion to facts. He is very angry. This specific article adds weight to the view that the Department of Justice is no longer able to actually focus on justice, or truth, only on ideologically and financially motivated vendettas. The average America appears to be trapped in the midst of multiple competing crime family, all of them with pieces of the US Government at their beck and call.
In the 21st century Americans have experienced an extraordinary collapse in the rule of law and in their constitutional protections. Today American citizens, once a free people protected by law, can be assassinated and detained in prison indefinitely without any evidence being presented to a court of their guilt, and they can be sentenced to prison on the basis of secret testimony by anonymous witnesses not subject to cross examination. The US “justice system” has been transformed by the Bush/Obama regime into the ”justice system” of Gestapo Germany and Stalinist Russia. There is no difference.
In an article available here Stephen Downs, formerly Chief Attorney with the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct and Kathy Manley, a criminal defense attorney and member of the New York Civil Liberties Union, report on how the US government destroyed a charity, the Holy Land Foundation, which provided money for feeding the poor and for building schools and hospitals in Palestine.
The charity, aware of the perils of being based in the US and doing anything for Palestinians, relied on the US State Department and the US Department of Justice (sic) for guidance on where to send humanitarian aid. The charity sent its aid to the same aid committees in Palestine that the US Agency for International Development and the UN used to distribute aid to the Palestinians.
In the first trial of the Holy Land Foundation, the US government admitted that none of the charity’s donations had gone to terrorist organizations, and the federal prosecutors failed to achieve a conviction. So the prosecutors tried the charity again.
In the second trial, the judge permitted the prosecutors to call an “anonymous expert” to tell the jury that some of the committees used by USAID and the UN and approved by the US Department of State were controlled by Hamas, the elected government of Palestine that Israel requires the US government to brand as “terrorist.”
As Downs and Manley point out, an “anonymous expert” cannot “be challenged because he is unknown.” There cannot be a cross examination. The “expert” could be anyone–someone paid to lie to the jury, a Jew who believes all help to Palestinians comprises “aid to terrorists,” or a member of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service that has throughly infiltrated the US according to US intelligence experts.
