Westminster paedo ring

Except in this instance the Met have put themselves on record as saying they believe the witness is credible, which is an extraordinary thing to say publicly given the circumstances.

Nevertheless, internet conspiracy theorists be having a field day over this - the Cameron/Ken Clarke thing seems particularly outlandish given that Cameron would later go on to put him in charge of the British legal system.

Wasn't LEON BRITTAN in charge of the British legal system for some time?

well, quite. i think regular conceptions of 'outlandish' don't really apply when we're talking seriously about MPs raping and murdering little boys.

Except in this instance the Met have put themselves on record as saying they believe the witness is credible, which is an extraordinary thing to say publicly given the circumstances.

They didn't just say the allegations were credible, they said they were "true", which is even more extraordinary unless they have substantially more corroborating evidence than they are admitting to.

A number of MPs were clearly involved in abusing children. That seems beyond doubt. Beyond that, it doesn't sound like they are currently in a position to say what happened. The degree to which the net and the press have been willing to accept 'the murderous gay conspiracy at the heart of the establishment' before any robust evidence has been brought to light makes me a touch uneasy, given the echoes of other homophobic conspiracy theories that have circulated over the years. Which is obviously not to say it couldn't be true.

The idea that they self-identified as gay to remove their actual 'sexuality' from investigation or scrutiny?

theres an antisemitic element as well as gay panic

Yes, absolutely.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/18/victim-i-watched-british-mps-sexually-abuse-murder-young-boys.html?via=twitter_page

I can't really understand the lack of coverage about this. Isn't it usually the kind of thing the guardian are all over?

They seem supportive: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/18/guardian-view-tackling-child-sex-abuse-job-half-done

When, in 1999, Sir William Macpherson published his report into Stephen Lawrence’s murder and pronounced the Metropolitan police institutionally racist, it marked the moment when the whole discourse around policing changed. Something similar may have happened on Thursday, when the Met declared that, despite a lack of corroboration, it found the evidence of a survivor of child sex abuse at the hands of a VIP paedophile ring to be “credible and true”.

Lack of anything to go on other than the statement mean there would be nothing they can print though. They can't accuse living people of anthing without any evidence.

I was wondering if this had to do with the cuts to the police budget?

I don't want to be rude or anything, but these stories sound an awful lot like some of the satanic ritual abuse cases in the late 80s/early 90s, which of course turned out to be totally false... Children being driven to secret abuse parties involving elite members of the society, kids being killed with no repercussions, etc, similar claims were made in those cases, and it turned out to be either false memories (in the case of adult witnesses), or just kids making up stuff. What makes me spectical is the claims of these sort of outrageous things (like child murders) happening involving heavily scrutinized public figures, and yet no one seems to have known or talked about this events besides this one guy, seems like the police can't even figure out who these supposed dead children were. It's just like what happened during the SRA panics.

I'm not saying this guy wasn't abused by someone as a kid, but since false memory syndrome is very real, and there are numerous cases where adults claiming they were abused as kids turned out be suffering from it, I find it weird if the whole police investigation is based on the claims of this one man alone, seemingly with no other evidence. Are the British cops really that eager to act?

Thing is, we're all aware of those past things, as are the Police.

seems like the police can't even figure out who these supposed dead children were

well, they have leads:

Officers confirmed that they had spoken to the family of Martin Allen, a boy who disappeared in 1979, but they said it was too early to say if his case was linked to Nick’s allegations. The force also said it was in contact with Sussex police which is carrying out a review of the case of an eight-year-old boy murdered 33 years ago.

Vishambar Mehrotra, a 69-year-old retired magistrate, recorded a male prostitute saying in a telephone call that his son Vishal may have been abducted and taken to the Elm Guest House in Barnes, south-west London, in 1981, the Daily Telegraph reported.

Mr Mehrotra took the recording to the Metropolitan Police at the time but told the newspaper that they refused to investigate an allegation implicating "judges and politicians".

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/child-abuse-inquiry-met-police-investigate-alleged-murders-9933320.html

while i can see how this has parallels to satanic panics, there have been allegations swirling about this for a long, long time and there does seem to be a fair amount of evidence that those allegations were ignored or covered up and important evidence was conveniently 'lost'.

yeah, I think the 80s/90s satanic abuse thing is in the back of a lot of people's minds & it's another reason there isn't more noise about this yet.
Not really evidence, but interesting:
http://www.exaronews.com/articles/5428/police-privately-admit-cover-up-for-paedophile-mps-and-vips

just read that there were 144 complaints of abuse against cyril smith. fucking hell

Thing is, we're all aware of those past things, as are the Police.

I would hope so. Of course it's perfectly possible they have other evidence they're not willing to share with media yet, but based on all the articles linked to this thread their only source for these claims seems to be thic "Nick" guy. And sure there may be some kids who disappeared around the same time "Nick" says he saw boys being murdered, but sadly kids disappearing isn't that odd, there's isn't necessarily any connection.

What I'm trying to say is, I've no problem believing this guys was abused, and it's certainly possible some high-standing politicians could be pedophiles, such things have happened before. But the stories of kids being driven by chauffeured into secret pedophile parties where some of them are killed for thrills, this all sounds a bit too lurid, and too reminiscent of earlier (baseless) abuse panics to accept based on guy's testimony alone.

not so long ago people wouldn't believe this stuff because no one was on the record and now some people won't believe it, even though people now are on the record. some people don't believe the Bill Cosby stuff despite a tsunami of testimony, so.. you know.

At the very least people who come from traditionally powerful families, who have been through boarding school and elite universities, would not be out of place at an initiation or semi-ritual gathering involving sex

ot so long ago people wouldn't believe this stuff because no one was on the record and now some people won't believe it, even though people now are on the record. some people don't believe the Bill Cosby stuff despite a tsunami of testimony, so.. you know.

I knew someone would bring the Cosby case up, but I don't think it's comparable at all. With Cosby, you have several women repeating similar stories of what he did to them, and they were all grown-ups when he raped them, so there's no reason to doubt these stories aren't true. Something like false memory syndrome certainly wouldn't explain it. Whereas in this case there seems to be one person telling what happened to him when he was young child decades ago. The possibility that he's suffering from false memory syndrome, or that he simply invented some of this stuff, is much higher than in the Cosby case, where it's zero.

Again, I'm not saying that I think his whole story is false. That there are people with power who use that power to cover their abuse of children is an undeniable fact. But what this guy is saying goes beyond that, he seems to be suggesting that there was/is a conspiracy of paedophile politicians that managed to cover up, among other things, multiple murders. Of course it's not impossible that this really happened, but I don't think one guy's testimony, based on his childhood memories (however much he himself believes all these things really happened), should be enough to make it a fact.

I was wondering if this had to do with the cuts to the police budget?

It has been mentioned, with the subtlety we've come to expect from the British police force, that "investigations into historical abuse" might be compromised by further cuts - which would be fair comment if they'd picked another day to bring it up.

At the very least people who come from traditionally powerful families, who have been through boarding school and elite universities, would not be out of place at an initiation or semi-ritual gathering involving sex

― cardamon, Friday, 19 December 2014 13:15 (4 hours ago)

jesus, four hours and nobody has noticed this late contender for uk post of the year

What exactly goes on at these elite universities then?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piers_Gaveston_Society

inb4

Ian Hislop?!??!

struck by another's tut

That's fair put me aff ma tea. (xp)

inb4

― imago, Friday, December 19, 2014 5:34 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that was def a semi-ritual from your description

Oh well, even for Wiki that doesn't exactly scan like ironclad proof.

full turgidity, I protest!

Ironclad what? Oh, proof!

there is something telling in its low-functioning prurience, the notion that the golden thread is not between like instances of pederasty and violence, a predilection enjoyed by all classes since time immemorial, but between like instances of well-to-do people gathering in dark rooms, every struck jet eventually landing somewhere in the salo republic

pshaw.. Bollinger! *spits*

this lurid ingenuous nonsense is part of the same tendency that ensures that searching for the name of any jewish politician from the 1980s is likely to find intimations of hideous conspiracy

there is a limitless appetite for unearthing cabals, blood libels and all things sinister, which is all the more unhelpful in instances like this where serious crimes and coverups have happened

Hmm wasn't going for 'only toffs are paedos', more that there's this whole history of little clubs and fraternities and societies at the ancient universities and at eton and harrow, wherein people do various excessive things, which are contrary to their public demeanour/role

Like fraternities in American university life also help people get into exclusive networks, and help hide abusers, right? Not to mention the general trend for big organisations, closed to most people, whose meetings are necessarily secret to some extent, being places where abusers can get away with it - cf the Catholic church and the BBC

But I am aware that the excitement of chasing fictional cabals is a stupid thing to get involved in when a real child may actually have been abused in real life, and likewise the idea of digging out, er, 'cabals' comes with anti-semitic and homophobic baggage, and perhaps worst of all comes with a nice connotation that everything down here on my level is perfectly wholesome, bad stuff only goes on up there in dracula's castle, which is for sure not true

the problem is the conflation of consensual behaviour with what is being alleged here, rather as the way 'sex scandal' is used to describe adultery and rape alike, 'an initiation or semi-ritual gathering involving sex' is not a meangingful category if it includes both public school dormitory hijinks and the rape and murder of children

the 'all big institutions' claims are rather overstated, the primary social form that facilitates sexual coercion and violence is the primordial sewer of the nuclear family under nature, incest and the fathering of children by daughters being a historical commonplace; every derived patriarchal social forms facillitate it in the same measure

the interesting thing here is not so much the time honoured traditions of elite social groups having their way with children of the lower orders, but the way the paedophile information exchange enabled previously dispersed sorts of degenerates from prison workers, remedial schoolteachers, the judiciary etc to gather together

they were all the beneficiaries of the radical tolerance engendered by the new left, evident in places like daniel cohn-bendit's anti-authoritarian kindergarten and the (now of course strenuously denied) contacts between pederasty adovcates and the national civil liberties council, so really a politically and socially heterodox movement altogether

I don't think one guy's testimony, based on his childhood memories (however much he himself believes all these things really happened), should be enough to make it a fact

The police believe him, that's enough for me and it should also be enough for you.

mmmmmmmmmmm.......

I nearly said something very similar. Then I thought of times gone by.

Yeah, at this exact moment I'm not ready to give the police the benefit of the doubt. Though hopefully we will get more information at some point, we actually don't have to judge rigt now, right?

I don't think one guy's testimony, based on his childhood memories (however much he himself believes all these things really happened), should be enough to make it a fact

The police believe him, that's enough for me and it should also be enough for you.

I'm not sure if you're familiar the satanic ritual abuse hysteria I mentioned above, but if not, check the Wiki link in my post... In several of those cases the police believed abuse stories, the judges and juries believed them too, and many innocent people went to prison for years, until the whole hysteria finally died, their cases were reopened, and they were acquitted. (Though some of them had to sit in prison for over a decade, see this documentary for some particularly depressing stories. Or read Debbie Nathan's Satan's Silence, which is an excellent analysis of how these hysteria's started, explaining false memory syndrome and other factors that contributed into well-meaning psychologists, cops and other law officials sentencing judging loads of people for crimes they never committed.)

Again, I'm not saying abuse doesn't exist or that the cops are necessarily wrong here. But historically, it's well documented that sometimes the police have been wrong about such cases when they were based on nothing else but supposed childhood memories... And this has happened particularly at times when there has been a widely spread social panic that has lead to a "pedo hunt". I don't live in the UK, but it certainly seems like there's a wide pedo hunt going on there at the moment, fueled by the Jimmy Savile revelations and the subsequent arrests. Now, those cases are undeniably true, but maybe the cops feel a bit embarrassed that Savile and co. were allowed to do all that horrific stuff for so long while the law enforcement turned a blind eye on it, so they may have an extra incentive to appear "tough on pedos"? Of course it's their duty to carefully examine all abuse claims, but all I'm saying is that the more outlandish claims (such as this child murder conspiracy) should be treated with appropriate scepticism unless there's some solid evidence to back it up, because there's sad history of innocent people suffering when the officials accepted such claims unconditionally.

But like I said, my comments are based solely on those news stories, where the only evidence presented seems to be the memories of "Nick". If the UK cops have discovered other things that corroborate the story but haven't shared them with the media yet, that's a different story.

Iirc part of the investigation revolves around over 100 files, from 1979 onward, containing statements or allegations made to the authorities and submitted to the Home Secretary, Leon Britten which were subsequently lost or destroyed. To say that the entire case revolves around the allegations of Nick would seem, at this stage, to be incorrect or at least extremely unlikely.

yeah there seems to be a growing mountain of stuff that they have admittedly not completely released (and some of it has gone missing) that has been accumulating for over 30 years.

as to why no one has done anything about it until now, well, that is what is particularly disturbing

I was reading Connie Fletcher's What Cops Know recently and I was struck by how folkloric some of the knowledge cops had seemed to be, e.g., one or two cops were certain that a missing finger on a victim meant a murder was a part of a satanic ritual and that this fact was deserving of knowing grunts and nods from other cops and criminologists. The book was written before satanic ritual abuse was debunked, and I wonder how many cops still cling to their beliefs about that b.s.

I've noticed a similar strain of hysteria and folklore in commentary about child sexual abuse, and although I agree with nakh that the family unit (nuclear or otherwise) is where most child sexual abuse occurs, the big difference between satanic ritual abuse and CSA/CSE is that the former is virtually nonexistent and the latter is incredibly common. It's also not always helpful to characterize CSA/CSE as "pedophilia," I think because that word has a tendency to assign abusers to a category of pathological deviant that is only sexually excited by children lacking secondary sex characteristics rather than to perpetrators who would seem ordinary to us sexually, romantically, personally, etc.

This book-length report on child sexual abuse by Catholic priests came to the conclusion that fewer than 5% of abusers were pedophiles:

http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/child-and-youth-protection/upload/The-Causes-and-Context-of-Sexual-Abuse-of-Minors-by-Catholic-Priests-in-the-United-States-1950-2010.pdf

I don't think that the stock profile of those priests necessarily matches the profiles of the hypothetical MP who visits a sex ring, though.

This ECPAT International report describes a spectrum of child sex tourism offenders, but, similar to the USCCB report above, it claims that most abusers are "situational" abusers and not "preferential child sex tourists" or "paedophiles."

Regardless of whatever the stock profile might be of an abuser who visits a domestic child sex exploitation ring, it's clear that horrific events of institutional child abuse have gone unpunished and under-investigated. No one was ever charged for deaths or murders that occurred at the Florida School for Boys.

Iirc part of the investigation revolves around over 100 files, from 1979 onward, containing statements or allegations made to the authorities and submitted to the Home Secretary, Leon Britten which were subsequently lost or destroyed. To say that the entire case revolves around the allegations of Nick would seem, at this stage, to be incorrect or at least extremely unlikely.

That's what the public enquiry is going to look into. Again, it seems fairly clear that there's a substantial amount of evidence against individuals including Cyril Smith and, even if it wasn't 'covered up' as such, it was ignored.

The allegations that three Tory ministers whose identities the witness, to this day, doesn't know murdered three children (again with no leads as to identity) and this was covered up by a shadowy cabal of senior government figures seem to be, even in the words of papers that accepted their truthfulness implicitly, "uncorroborated'" at this stage.

Yeah, my scepticism wasn't towards the claims that some individual men in power were abusers; there seems to be plenty of evidence for that. But the idea of a cabal of politicians killing kids for thrills sounds far more unlikely, the stuff of movies and TV shows like True Detective. So there definitely needs to be more evidence for that than the memories of one man. Based on what the papers have reported, these earlier allegations and investigations seem to be related to the former, not the latter.

Strikes me as a weird statement to release.

the fact that the police also leaked to newspapers about how they're "110% sure" that there is substance to the allegations may lead one to think a lot of this is about justifying the time and resources that have been spent on this

given that it was already known operation conifer's remit would include ted heath it surely would have been stranger if they hadn't addressed their findings, inconclusive as they are, when the report was published

it'd be the first thing the media would ask about, might as well address it head-on

This business seems to have run its course:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/may/14/westminster-vip-abuse-accuser-fled-to-sweden-when-story-collapsed

Jesus.

I don't wanna say "I told you so", but...