Church’s Legal Pressure on Abuse Victims’ Group, SNAP petition, Bradley Manning’s treatment was cruel and inhuman

articles
- Church Puts Legal Pressure on Abuse Victims’ Group
- Cardinal Dolan – “Stop the legal bullying!” – SNAP Petition
- Bradley Manning’s treatment was cruel and inhuman, UN torture chief rules

Church Puts Legal Pressure on Abuse Victims’ Group
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
March 12, 2012

Turning the tables on an advocacy group that has long supported victims of pedophile priests, lawyers for the Roman Catholic Church and priests accused of sexual abuse in two Missouri cases have gone to court to compel the group to disclose more than two decades of e-mails that could include correspondence with victims, lawyers, whistle-blowers, witnesses, the police, prosecutors and journalists.

The group, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, known as SNAP, is neither a plaintiff nor a defendant in the litigation. But the group has been subpoenaed five times in recent months in Kansas City and St. Louis, and its national director, David Clohessy, was questioned by a battery of lawyers for more than six hours this year. A judge in Kansas City ruled that the network must comply because it “almost certainly” had information relevant to the case.

The network and its allies say the legal action is part of a campaign by the church to cripple an organization that has been the most visible defender of victims, and a relentless adversary, for more than two decades. “If there is one group that the higher-ups, the bishops, would like to see silenced,” said Marci A. Hamilton, a law professor at Yeshiva University and an advocate for victims of clergy sex crimes, “it definitely would be SNAP. And that’s what they’re going after. They’re trying to find a way to silence SNAP.”

Lawyers for the church and priests say they cannot comment because of a judge’s order. But William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, a church advocacy group in New York, said targeting the network was justified because “SNAP is a menace to the Catholic Church.”

Mr. Donohue said leading bishops he knew had resolved to fight back more aggressively against the group: “The bishops have come together collectively. I can’t give you the names, but there’s a growing consensus on the part of the bishops that they had better toughen up and go out and buy some good lawyers to get tough. We don’t need altar boys.”

He said bishops were also rethinking their approach of paying large settlements to groups of victims. “The church has been too quick to write a check, and I think they’ve realized it would be a lot less expensive in the long run if we fought them one by one,” Mr. Donohue said.

However, a spokeswoman for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Sister Mary Ann Walsh, said Mr. Donohue was incorrect.

“There is no national strategy,” she said, and there was no meeting where legal counsel for the bishops decided to get more aggressive….

Mr. Clohessy was deposed in January by lawyers for five accused priests and the diocese. In the 215-page transcript, made public on March 2, most of the questions were not about the case but about the network — its budget, board of directors, staff members, donors and operating procedures.

Mr. Clohessy testified that he had never had contact with John Doe.

“It was not a fishing expedition,” Mr. Clohessy said. “It was a fishing, crabbing, shrimping, trash-collecting, draining the pond expedition. The real motive is to harass and discredit and bankrupt SNAP, while discouraging victims, witnesses, whistle-blowers, police, prosecutors and journalists from seeking our help.” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/us/catholic-church-pressures-victims-network-with-subpoenas.html

Cardinal Dolan – “Stop the legal bullying!”
As the head of America’ bishops, we urge you to publicly denounce, and stop, the bullying tactics used by bishops and church defense lawyers against those seeking help from the support group SNAP, including victims of abuse by clerics, witnesses, whistleblowers, police, prosecutors and journalists. http://www.snapnetwork.org/snap_petition

Bradley Manning’s treatment was cruel and inhuman, UN torture chief rules

UN special rapporteur on torture’s findings likely to reignite criticism of US government’s treatment of WikiLeaks suspect

Ed Pilkington in New York
guardian.co.uk, Monday 12 March 2012 09.41 EDT

The UN special rapporteur on torture has formally accused the US government of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment towards Bradley Manning, the US soldier who was held in solitary confinement for almost a year on suspicion of being the WikiLeaks source.

Juan Mendez has completed a 14-month investigation into the treatment of Manning since the soldier’s arrest at a US military base in May 2010. He concludes that the US military was at least culpable of cruel and inhumane treatment in keeping Manning locked up alone for 23 hours a day over an 11-month period in conditions that he also found might have constituted torture.

“The special rapporteur concludes that imposing seriously punitive conditions of detention on someone who has not been found guilty of any crime is a violation of his right to physical and psychological integrity as well as of his presumption of innocence,” Mendez writes.

The findings of cruel and inhuman treatment are published as an addendum to the special rapporteur’s report to the UN general assembly on the promotion and protection of human rights. They are likely to reignite criticism of the US government’s harsh treatment of Manning ahead of his court martial later this year…..

The Pentagon has refused to allow Mendez to see Manning in private, insisting that all conversations must be monitored. “You should have no expectation of privacy in your communications with Private Manning,” the Pentagon wrote.

The lack of privacy is a violation of human rights procedures, the UN says, and considered unacceptable by the UN special rapporteur. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/12/bradley-manning-cruel-inhuman-treatment-un

WikiLeaks Vatican – US abuse cables, Morgellons and the CIA’s MK/NAOMI Project

includes:
Cables show Ireland irked Vatican on sovereignty
WikiLeaks cables: Vatican refused to engage with child sex abuse inquiry
CIA FILES – Operation ARTICHOKE

Leaked Cables Show Vatican Tensions and Diplomacy With U.S.
By RACHEL DONADIO December 10, 2010   ROME – Recently released diplomatic cables show the Vatican fighting to shore up its eroding control over sexual abuse scandals in the United States and Ireland, highlighting complex tensions between the Vatican  hierarchy, local bishops and civil authorities. The cables were obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to The New York Times and other news organizations. They do not appear to contain any bombshells about the Vatican, but they provide a telling glimpse of how American diplomats often rely on the Roman Catholic Church’s worldwide network of prelates for intelligence.

Some cables read in part like thrillers, like when Opus Dei, the powerful religious order, took pains to distance itself from one of its members: Robert P. Hanssen, an F.B.I. agent who in a dramatic case in 2001 pleaded guilty to being a longtime Russian spy.
Others reveal some of the complex diplomacy between the United States and the Vatican during the abuse scandal that hit the United States in 2002.  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/world/europe/11vatican.html

Cables show Ireland irked Vatican on sovereignty (AP) – 12/11/10 VATICAN CITY (AP) — Newly released U.S. diplomatic cables indicate that the Vatican felt “offended” that Ireland failed to respect Holy See “sovereignty” by asking high-ranking churchmen to answer questions from an Irish government commission probing decades of sex abuse of minors by clergy.

That the Holy See used its diplomatic immunity status as a tiny-city state to try to thwart Ireland’s government-led probe has long been known. But the WikiLeaks cables, published by Britain’s The Guardian newspaper on Saturday, contain delicate, behind-the-scenes diplomatic assessments of the highly charged situation. The Vatican press office declined to comment on the content of the cables Saturday, but decried the leaks as a matter of “extreme seriousness.” http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5i_GXdub34VCz5Deiq3s52q4L5IFQ?docId=c1ef34ff867b4f048918320d1c6ce20a

WikiLeaks cables: Vatican refused to engage with child sex abuse inquiry – Leaked cable lays bare how Irish government was forced to grant Vatican officials immunity from testifying to Murphy commission Heather Brooke The Guardian,  11 December 2010
The Vatican refused to allow its officials to testify before an Irish commission investigating the clerical abuse of children and was angered when they were summoned from Rome, US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks reveal.

Requests for information from the 2009 Murphy commission into sexual and physical abuse by clergy “offended many in the Vatican” who felt that the Irish government had “failed to respect and protect Vatican sovereignty during the investigations”, a cable says.

Despite the lack of co-operation from the Vatican, the commission was able to substantiate many of the claims and concluded that some bishops had tried to cover up abuse, putting the interests of the Catholic church ahead of those of the victims. Its report identified 320 people who complained of child sexual abuse between 1975 and 2004 in the Dublin archdiocese.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/10/wikileaks-vatican-child-sex-abuse-investigation

Morgellons and the CIA’s MK/NAOMI Project (Part 2)
by Hank P. Albarelli Jr., Zoe Martell
Why is it that the U.S. state apparatus is standing in the way of any serious medical investigation into Mogellons disease? For the simple reason that it would inexorably lead to the covert biological war programmes of the 1950’s. Hank Albarelli lifts the veil on a period – which may not necessarily be over – when the military-industrial complex proclaimed to safeguard the “free world” while testing new experiments on the civilian population that it purported to protect; a period when members of the medical profession – including the CDC – developed diseases that they should have been preventing but
which they used instead to contaminate the very people they were supposed to protect.

One of the many pages from the MKNAOMI and MKULTRA declassified documents. MKNAOMI was the code name for a joint Department of Defense/CIA research program lasting from the 1950s through the 1970s. It is generally reported to be a successor to the MKDELTA project and to have focused on biological projects including biological warfare agents—specifically, to store materials that could either incapacitate or kill a test subject and to develop devices for the diffusion of such materials.

( List of declassified MK-Ultra Project Documents http://www.michael-robinett.com/declass/c000.htm )

….MK/NAOMI was the cryptonym for an ultra-secret project instituted by the CIA for its partnership with the Special Operations Division (SOD) of the U.S. Army’s biological warfare center at Fort Detrick, Maryland. The general objectives of MK/NAOMI, as stated in contemporaneous CIA documents, were:

- To provide for a covert support base to meet clandestine operational requirements.
- To research, develop, and stockpile severely incapacitating and lethal materials for the specific use of CIA’s Technical Services Division.
- To maintain in operational readiness special and unique items for the dissemination of biological and chemical materials.
- To provide for the required surveillance, testing, upgrading, and evaluation of materials and items in order to assure absence of defects and complete predictability of results to be expected under operational conditions.
Recently obtained CIA documents reveal that in the mid-1950s, scientists at Fort Detrick’s SOD undertook intensive research and experimentation with a large number of “paralysis agents.” This phase of MK/NAOMI was referred to in-house at Fort Detrick as the “K Project” and the “K Problem.” According to CIA documents, K indicates both “knockout” and “kill”, depending upon the circumstances under which researched biological products were employed by CIA operatives in the field operations conducted under “Project Artichoke” and later programs.
http://www.voltairenet.org/article166027.html

CIA FILES – Operation ARTICHOKE – BACM RESEARCH -
WWW.PAPERLESSARCHIVES. About BACM Research – PaperlessArchives.com
http://www.paperlessarchives.com/FreeTitles/ARTICHOKECIAFiles.pdf