Sept. 7, 2012

Having met with less than overwhelming interest earlier in the week in front of the bustling Charlotte Convention Center, I narrowed my focus.

Thursday I situated my “Exonerate” placard at the entrance to the peripheral and unhurried Crowne Plaza hotel, convention headquarters for the North Carolina Democratic Party, and our message was well received (except for an overly territorial security guard).

Not only did several delegates express support for the Edenton Seven, but also a dozen or so more took cards with the site address. And I was able to bend the ears of reporters from Greensboro, Rocky Mount and the Outer Banks, as well.

Yes, the delegates are mostly ordinary folks, not influential officials – I didn’t see Gov. Perdue – but I’m grateful they will take home a greater awareness of this shameful injustice, still unaddressed, in their own state.

March 19, 2012

In “The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life” (2011), Robert Trivers briefly addresses the causes and costs of the ritual abuse mania.

I asked Trivers, professor of anthropology and biological sciences at Rutgers University, about the role played by prosecutors in such cases:

“Prosecutors are notoriously vulnerable to tunnel vision – i.e., once a suspect has been identified, others disappear from sight; they also need to justify themselves in retrospect.

“I was told by (Innocence Project cofounder Peter J.) Neufeld that even after incontrovertible DNA evidence, 75 percent of the original detectives who came up with (and helped convict) the wrong person still say they believe they got ‘the right man.’ ”

June 13, 2016

“…A large community of like-minded people on the internet who call themselves ‘targeted individuals,’ or T.I.s…. is organized around the conviction that they are victims of a sprawling conspiracy to harass thousands of everyday Americans with mind-control weapons and armies of so-called gang stalkers. The goal, as one gang-stalking website put it, is ‘to destroy every aspect of a targeted individual’s life.’…

“An internet search for ‘gang-stalking’… turns up page after page of results that regard it as fact. ‘What’s scary for me is that there are no counter sites that try and convince targeted individuals that they are delusional,’ said Dr. Lorraine Sheridan, co-author of perhaps the only study of gang-stalking. “They end up in a closed ideology echo chamber.’”

– From “United States of Paranoia: They See Gangs of Stalkers” by Mike McPhate in the New York Times (June 10)

The T.I. phenomenon is new to me, but the proliferation of true believers sounds all too familiar. And my own Google alert continues to turn up page after page of supposed validation of “satanic ritual abuse.”

Not surprisingly, T.I. and SRA hang out in the same rationality-resistant neighborhoods. This is a promo for a recent conspiracy podcast:

“Meet David and Patty: David was raised in a Satanic cult under MK Ultra mind control. Patty is being burned with plasma lasers and having her thoughts extracted without her consent. We talk about electronic harassment, microchipping, breathable nanotechnology, mind control, sex kitten programming, project Monarch, brain mapping, gang stalking, voice to skull technology (V2K), and Satanic ritual abuse. And we find out how much it costs to build your own laser at home….”

April 4, 2012

“An appeals court Thursday overturned the conviction of six people accused of participating in a pedophilia ring in northern France five years ago, unraveling one of the most mismanaged cases in French judicial history and leaving the nation asking how the court system could have gone so awry.

“ ‘I apologize to the acquitted and their families,’ Justice Minister Pascal Clement said at a news conference after the verdict was announced in Paris.

“He ordered a triple investigation of the police, judiciary and social services involved in the case…. ‘I want the French people to know that I will get to the bottom of this,’ he said.

“Paris’s chief prosecutor, Yves Bot, had personally asked the appeal court to acquit the six, calling the case a ‘true catastrophe’ and demanding an investigation into who was responsible for such a gross miscarriage of justice. ‘We must do what is necessary to make sure this doesn’t happen again,’ Bot said.

“But others were heartened by the appeal, saying that it showed that the courts were capable of self-criticism and self-correction.

“ ‘That’s indispensable in a democracy,’ said Dominique Wolton, a sociologist at France’s National Council for Scientific Research.

“The case began in 2000 in the town of Outreau after a number of children told a teacher that they had been abused.

“It was marred by deep doubts from the beginning, said Yves Jannier, France’s attorney general.

“He noted that the investigative report by the police in July 2002 found ‘more doubts than certainties’ in the accusations, but said, ‘No one had enough critical sense to stop the machine.’ ”

– From the International Herald Tribune, Dec. 2, 2005

Thanks to lawyer-neighbor Lou Lesesne for steering me to this account of the Outreau Affair.
Although the case differs in numerous significant ways from such U.S. ritual-abuse prosecutions as Little Rascals and McMartin, I was most struck by the readiness of French officials to acknowledge and apologize for a justice system gone crazy.

Soon after, president Jacques Chirac wrote letters to 13 acquitted defendants and to the widow of a defendant who committed suicide in prison awaiting trial: “Justice is the soul of the republic. We have the imperative duty to draw all the lessons from the immense sufferings endured by all the accused whose innocence has now been established.”

How to explain the French state’s humane response to its costly misdeeds, while our own prosecutors, attorneys general, governors, et al., keep silent?

Why aren’t they too “capable of self-criticism and self-correction”?

Why don’t they too recognize “the immense sufferings endured by all the accused”?