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January 31, 2007
Documentary ambushed during Slamdance screening
The Park Record
http://parkrecord.com/
fastsearchresults/ci_5095527
Cult members hijack Q & A after "Children of God"
Dan Bischoff, Of the Record staff
Park City, Utah - Noah Thomson's five-year struggle to make the documentary "Children of God: Lost and Found" exhausted him physically and emotionally.
"It was an emotional roller coaster ride," Thomson said. "I've lived all over the world and been in trying situations, but nothing has taken me to an abyss like this did."
His film documents the lives of former members of the cult-like group known as "Children of God." Thomson was a former member of the cult, but his mother still belongs to what is now called "the Family."
The reward for his years of work was being accepted in the Slamdance Film Festival. But the question-and-answering session following the screening wasn't a warm welcome to the film industry.
"Obviously, I was blindsided," Noah said.
Family members of Children of God traveled across country to protest the film in Park City. Without ever seeing it, they dispersed flyers on Main Street declaring Thomson a liar. The protest culminated in a heated diatribe following the film.
"It was emotionally-charged and had an element of surprise to it," said producer Randy Barbato, who has also worked on projects such as "Inside Deep Throat" and "Eyes of Tammy Faye."
When Thomson got up to speak, a woman from the audience approached the microphone and took over the discussion.
"She basically attacked him and the film in terms of it being truthful and honest," Barbato said.
Barbato said Thomson kept his cool and let the woman speak for about 10 minutes. The monitor of the event said "this was not a debate" and told her to sit down.
"I said, 'Let her talk, she has her opinion,'" Thomson said.
"Noah never lost his temper even though there was a heated exchange going on and other people in the audience were getting annoyed," Barbato said. "This went on for ten minutes and this woman was yelling and eventually sat down because the audience was booing."
In his movie, Thomson documents his experiences and those of others in the cult.
"Noah, the filmmaker, has been so careful and thoughtful about that. It was a No. 1 concern. Most films or pieces you see about the family are tabloids; you don't see someone talking about the good times he had," Barbato said. "With the good, he included the bad, they don't want anything bad (shown), no matter what."
Thomson talks about his respect of his mother but he couldn't ignore certain circumstances.
"I interviewed someone who was sexually abused at six years old. I say, 'This might hurt my mom, but how can I turn my back on this?'"
Because of Thomson's fairness in the film, they didn't expect the backlash from the Family.
"I never experienced anything like it," Barbato said. "It was such a surprise to all of us. Everyone's eyes were darting around. She was filled with such anger and rage towards Noah, it didn't match the film that everyone had just seen."
As the incident raged on, Barbato noticed the lady had a microphone and another member of the Family carried a video camera. It drew immediate suspicion that they had filmed the documentary.
"Clearly, this girl and another man had an agenda," Barbato said. "She had a camera and that's when I thought, 'What's going on? Did she tape the film?' Any kind of taping is illegal."
It escalated at this point. At the steps of Treasure Mountain were roughly 10 family members. Barbato followed them outside, demanding they turn over their cameras.
"I said, 'We're calling the police,'" Barbato said. "It quickly got kind of heated and they started to leave and we followed them up the street. We didn't want them to leave until the police got there."
The police finally came and it turned out, all they recorded was the discussion following the film.
"The way that Noah was ambushed at the screening, I really think that all of us were taken by surprise and we didn't know what to expect," Barbato said. "Everything that went on was so suspicious, and giving our history of trying to make this film, we were as cautious as possible."
Barbato, however, understands the Family's position but thinks the protestors hurt their image even more by displaying their actions.
"Sadly, for the people and The Family who came out to protest the film, the way they went about it reinforced the stereotypes," Barbato said. "Noah's film does a much better job of representing some of the good work that some of the people in the Family do than the protesters of the film.
"Noah respects a lot of their work," Barbato said. "That's what makes the whole thing even sadder.
Thomson claims he had no intention to make a commentary on the cult as a whole.
"I'm not an activist, I'm a filmmaker and I chose to make a film about my life within the group and after the group," Thomson said.
"I think I expressed that clearly in the film. "The incident was discouraging. I actually hoped that when they saw the film, they would feel it was a fair piece done on them. It's addressing abuse and so forth but I also wanted to humanize them."
Thomson said creating this film may have been a "nail in the coffin" to his dwindling relationship with his mother.
"When it comes down to it, I love my mother and I don't want to misrepresent her," Thomson said. "That whole incident was discouraging as a filmmaker, I told an honest story, my story, and some other people that were hurt by the group and they painted us as being complete liars."
Before "Children of God" came to Slamdance, Thomson told Barbato, "I can never enjoy the success of this film."
"It's a bittersweet moment in a bittersweet journey," Barbato said. "He gets to go to Slamdance and can't move forward in his life."
Posted by Perry at 04:08 PM
Jehovah Witnesses Clergyman Sentenced For Offering Boys Sex
Hudson Valley News
http://www.midhudsonnews.com/News/
Cano_sentenced-29Jan07.htm
January 29, 2007
Goshen – A hamlet of Wallkill man who was convicted in a non-jury trial last fall for trying to lure boys to engage in sexual activity was sentenced in Orange County Court Monday to two to six years in state prison.
Jesus Cano, 50, who was a clergyman with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, was sentenced for the felonies of attempted use of a child in a sexual performance and attempted promotion of a sexual performance by a child.
Cano was charged with driving around the City of Middletown last summer, handing out packets to boys with nude photos of himself, his phone number and other information.
When Middletown Police arrested him, they found a video camera in his car which a tape that was shot inside a men’s room at O’Hare Airport in Chicago.
Posted by Perry at 03:48 PM
Sexual predator sentenced for propositioning underage boys
Times Herald-Record
http://www.recordonline.com/apps/
pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070130/
NEWS/701300316/-1/NEWS
By Oliver Mackson
January 30, 2007
Goshen — Jesus Cano stared at his handcuffs and passed up his last chance to speak in his own defense yesterday.
Cano, 50, of the hamlet of Wallkill, was sentenced in Orange County Court to two to six years behind bars for propositioning underage boys in Middletown last summer.
Cano didn't testify during his non-jury trial last fall, letting his lawyers argue that prosecutors didn't prove their case.
But Judge Jeffrey G. Berry convicted Cano of attempted use of a child in a sexual performance and attempted promoting a sexual performance by a child, both felonies, as well as three misdemeanors. When Middletown police arrested him during a sting operation in June, Cano had condoms, petroleum jelly, cold beer and a camera in his car. He had approached two teenage boys for sex before his arrest, and passed out pictures of his naked buttocks.
Prosecutor Kelle Grimmer told Berry that "the people do consider him a danger to the community and a sexual predator."
Sentencing is the last chance for someone to plead for mercy after they've been convicted of a crime. But Cano made no plea for mercy or understanding from the judge. Asked if he had anything to say, he raised his head briefly and said, "no," through a Spanish interpreter.
Berry then sentenced Cano to two to six years in state prison.
Cano had a U.S. green card when he was arrested last year, but because he was convicted of sex offenses, his card was revoked. He also was expelled from the Jehovah's Witnesses community where he was living at the time of his arrest.
After he serves his time, Cano faces deportation to his native Mexico. The judge said Cano should be removed from the United States as soon as possible.
"I don't want to risk having him, even as a parolee, here in Orange County," Berry said before Cano was led out of the courtroom.
Posted by Perry at 03:45 PM
Mormon Missionary sued in alleged sex abuse
Lexington Herald-Leader
http://www.kentucky.com/mld/
kentucky/news/state/16577219.htm
MORMON CHURCH ALSO NAMED IN CIVIL ACTION
Jan. 30, 2007
By Beth Musgrave - HERALD-LEADER STAFF WRITER
A Lee County woman is suing The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and one of its missionaries over the alleged sexual abuse of her son.
Jason Stark of Idaho was on a two-year missionary trip to Kentucky and Indiana when he allegedly sexually abused three young men in 2005. Stark was charged in Lee County with two counts of sodomy and one count of attempted sodomy last February.
His criminal trial is scheduled for July 16.
The woman said in court documents that Stark's conduct has damaged her son psychologically, socially and mentally. The boy, who is younger than 18, has suffered public scorn, ridicule and embarrassment because of Stark. She is asking for unspecified damages.
The Herald-Leader does not identify alleged victims of sexual assault.
The case was originally filed in Lee Circuit Court in December. The Mormon church asked last week that the case be moved to federal court.
After Stark's arrest, the church issued a statement saying he had "been released from his missionary duties" pending the outcome of the trial. He is out on bond.
In the statement issued in March, the church said, "We abhor and condemn child abuse or mistreatment of any type in the strongest terms and have established a number of programs to assist local church leaders in preventing abuse and caring for victims."
In court documents, the church argues that the case should be dismissed. It says some of the claims might be barred by statute of limitations, and that it cannot be held responsible for actions of someone not necessarily under its control.
The church also contends that the lawsuit violates its "rights of freedom of religion" as guaranteed under the U.S. and state constitutions.
In a statement, Jon Fleischaker, who represents the church, said Stark "continues to dispute the allegations and a criminal trial is pending." Because of that, he said it would not be appropriate for the church to comment on the civil suit.
Michael Stidham, a Jackson lawyer who represents the mother and son, said he has not seen the church's response to the lawsuit, but that he does not understand how freedom of religion can translate to protection against lawsuits when a member of the church commits a crime.
"I don't think freedom of religion gives you the right to sexually abuse a minor," Stidham said.
Reach Beth Musgrave at (859) 231-3205, 1-800-950-6397, Ext. 3205, or bmusgrave@herald-leader.com.
Posted by Perry at 03:36 PM
January 29, 2007
Parents fight newborn blood testing
Lawrence Journal-World
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2007/jan/28/
parents_fight_newborn_blood_testing/
By Anna Jo Bratton - Associated Press Writer
January 28, 2007
Wahoo, Neb. — Ray and Louise Spiering wanted to observe a period of silence after their daughter Melynda’s birth, but what they got was an uproar.
To the Spierings, Nebraska’s requirement that newborn babies undergo blood screening within 48 hours of birth is an infringement on their religious beliefs and their right to decide what’s best for their four children.
The couple attend a fundamentalist Christian church and follow some teachings of the Church of Scientology. Louise Spiering said they wanted “that balance of our beliefs included into the births of our children.”
It’s taken them and another set of parents to the Nebraska Supreme Court and the Legislature in a drive to make the newborn screening law more flexible.
The mandatory test, in which a few drops of blood are drawn from a baby’s heel, screens for dozens of rare congenital diseases, some of which can cause severe mental retardation or death if left undetected.
Nebraska is one of four states — along with South Dakota, Michigan and Montana — that don’t let parents opt out of the testing.
The Spierings wanted to avoid loud noises after Melynda’s birth, and also reduce the pain she experienced in order to protect her physical and mental health. The concept comes from the Church of Scientology — minimizing talking around someone who is in pain, said the Rev. Brian Fesler of Minneapolis, a regional representative for the church.
The church teaches that words spoken during moments of pain and unconsciousness affect physical and mental health later in life, he said. The church encourages silent birth, in which those attending avoid talking.
But the church doesn’t discourage parents from having their children tested, Fesler said.
The Spierings, who apply some tenets of Scientology to their faith, took the silent birth concept a step further. They believe newborns are in pain for at least 3 1/2 days, and don’t want blood drawn — which they believe would cause more pain — for at least that long.
They asked for seven days to complete the testing to avoid any unforeseen problems, although they would have preferred to skip the test altogether.
The state insisted, and in September a federal judge upheld the law as constitutional. The judge, however, granted the Spierings an eight-day waiting period while the case was pending, so their daughter was not tested within 48 hours.
Armed with a petition including about 100 signatures, Louise Spiering testified Thursday before the Legislature’s Health and Human Services committee.
Health officials testified that the requirement is one of the state’s most cost-effective public health programs.
“Some parents may not comprehend the risks they are taking with their children’s health,” said Bruce Rieker of the Nebraska Hospital Association.
Many of the diseases covered in the bill are deficiencies, and one, phenylketonuria, can result in severe mental retardation without diet restrictions starting at birth.
Posted by Perry at 05:36 PM
Reining In Abuse Part 2
Cleveland Jewish News
http://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/
articles/2007/01/25/news/local/
insightabuse0125.txt
Wayward clergy by the numbers: Is it rampant or an aberration?
January 25, 2007
BY: EUGENE L. MEYER and RICHARD GREENBERG JTA
Editor’s note: Last week’s CJN cover story reported on the fact of sexual misconduct and abuse among Jewish clergy and how the Jewish establishment is attempting to grapple with it. This article continues the discussion.
How extensive is the problem of sex abuse by clergy in the Jewish community? It depends which criteria are used as a yardstick.
Judging by the tiny caseload, the problem appears to be negligible n unless, of course, wrongdoing by rabbis and other clergy is underreported, as some observers maintain.
Rabbi Richard Hirsh, executive vice president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, counted three or four investigations into rabbinic sexual misconduct since the 300-member organization adopted a new code of ethics in 1999. The code is again being revised.
“We’re not allowed to discuss any details,” he explained, although in one instance, he added, the association’s ethics committee merely admonished the accused rabbi to “be careful next time.”
Rabbi Joel Meyers, executive vice president of the Conservative movement’s 1,600-member Rabbinical Assembly, said in the 17 years he has held his current post, only three rabbis have been asked to leave the R.A. or have left on their own due to “inappropriate behavior” of a sexual nature. This year, one rabbi was expelled. In addition, the R.A. insisted that “several” other rabbis found to have engaged in “seductive behavior” undergo therapy.
The Union for Reform Judaism, which has 900 member congregations, sees no “particular need” to keep records on the numbers or dispositions of sexual misconduct cases, according to its president, Rabbi Eric Yoffie.
The Awareness Center, a controversial Baltimore-based Jewish clearinghouse of information about sex abuseby the clergy lists on its website scores of Jewish clergy who are alleged to be sexual predators. Some of them have been convicted of crimes, but some have not even been charged.
Although authoritative statistics quantifying the problem appear to be nonexistent, “some experts” estimate that “between 18% and 39% of Jewish clergy are involved in sexual harassment, sexual exploitation and/ or sexual misconduct n the same percentage as non-Jewish clergy,” according to the 2002 book Sex, Lies, and Rabbis: Breaking a Sacred Trust by psychotherapist Charlotte Rolnick Schwab. “All denominations are involved,” Schwab wrote.
It’s not just rabbis
Rabbis are not the only religious authority figures who may be accused of victimizing congregants. Cantors, among others, have committed sexually abusive acts, as indicated by several cases, high-profile and otherwise.
In one instance, a woman who was interviewed by JTA, reported being sexually assaulted by her cantor several years ago in a parking lot following a communal event. The woman said she initially did not report the incident to the police after being advised by an acquaintance “to keep it quiet, and keep it in the community.”
But as word of the incident spread, the woman said she and her son were soon ostracized by members of the religious community that had once embraced them. They became the targets of a harassment campaign, according to the woman, that included pointed intimations that she and her son might not be Jewish.
“They destroyed my son spiritually,” said the woman, now in her mid-40s, her voice breaking. “They ripped the heart of Jerusalem from him, and I had to watch it.”
Eventually the woman’s Jewish bona fides n and those of her son n were confirmed by an Orthodox beit din, a rabbinic court, sitting in New York, which also advised her to report the sexual assault to the police.
“They did everything right,” she said of the beit din.
Felony charges were filed against the cantor, who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. He was given a one-year suspended sentence, three years probation, and ordered to undergo domestic-violence counseling.
Although procedures for adjudicating sexual misconduct complaints against cantors differ from movement to movement, none of these cases is handled by the denominational rabbinic organizations n unless perhaps the cantor is also an ordained rabbi.
The Orthodox Union (OU), which has about 450 member synagogues in North America, has no congregational ethics guidelines applying specifically to non-rabbinic clergymen, such as cantors.
It was not immediately apparent which Orthodox organization would in fact have jurisdiction over a sexual misconduct complaint involving a cantor.
The Reform and Conservative movements have cantorial associations that rule on ethics complaints against their members.
Over the past five years, five complaints alleging sexual misconduct have been filed with the Conservative movement’s Cantors Assembly, resulting in the expulsion of three cantors from the organization. The Reform movement’s American Conference of Cantors has received one complaint of sexual harassment since 2004. That complaint was investigated and found to be without merit.
Sweeping things under the carpet
Within Jewish circles, much of the focus on sexual predators has centered on the Orthodox community, particularly its more fervently religious precincts, where some contend that clergy’s sex abuse is more hidden n and possibly more widespread n than elsewhere.
True or not, the problem in that community was spotlighted by two recent episodes.
The first involved a fierce debate over remarks by a haredi (rigorously Orthodox) rabbi, Matisyahu Salomon, who reportedly suggested that his community sweeps the issue “under the carpet.” The second involved the arrest of a haredi rabbi and teacher, who was charged with sexual abuse and endangering the welfare of a minor.
According to Rabbi Avi Shafran, director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America, Salomon meant that rather than ignoring or covering up sexual misconduct, as detractors maintain, haredi officials deal with it discreetly to protect the dignity of the families of perpetrators and victims.
The response to Salomon’s remarks was swift and often heated, with several website and blog contributors arguing that haredi officials often look the other way when sex abuse by clergy takes place in their midst.
“Denial, secrecy, and sweeping under the carpet are not unique to haredi, Orthodox, or Jewish institutions,” wrote Nachum Klafter, a self-described “frum (Orthodox) psychiatrist,” in a Nov. 26 posting on the website haloscan.com.
Eleven days after those remarks were posted, a haredi rabbi, Yehuda Kolko, was charged in connection with the alleged molestation of a 9-year-old boy and a 31-year-old man, both former students of his during different eras at Brooklyn’s Yeshiva-Mesivta Torah Temimah. Kolko, 60, had long served the yeshiva as a teacher and an assistant principal.
Kolko is named in at least four civil suits filed over the past eight months by his alleged victims, including the 9-year-old. The most recent litigation alleges not only that Kolko molested the 9-year-old during the 2003-04 school year, but that the school administration covered up the rabbi’s pedophilia for 25 years.
The suit charges that Rabbi Lipa Margulies, identified as the leader of Torah Temimah, knew of many “credible allegations of sexual abuse and pedophilia against Kolko,” yet continued to employ him as an elementary school teacher “and give him unfettered access to young children.”
Avi Moskowitz, the attorney representing Torah Temimah, said: “The yeshiva adamantly denies the allegations.”
Another one of the lawsuits brought against Torah Temimah was filed in May by David Framowitz, now 49 and living in Israel. In that $10 million federal litigation, Framowitz, who was joined by a co-plaintiff also seeking $10 million, alleged that he was victimized by Kolko while he was a seventh- and eighth-grader at Torah Temimah.
After his own reports of abuse were met with disbelief and inaction, Framowitz said he chose to “deeply bury” his painful memories of the alleged incidents.
“I never really got over it,” he said, “but I was able to get on with my life.”
Framowitz decided to speak out publicly about his experience after he learned through the Internet in the fall of 2005 that Kolko was still teaching young boys. He said he is relieved that Kolko has been arrested and charged “and that maybe Kolko will be prevented from being around other kids.”
Attorney Jeffrey Herman, who is representing the plaintiffs in the lawsuits stemming from Kolko’s alleged misconduct, was quoted in a May 15 New York magazine piece saying that the abuse by clergy in the haredi community “reminds me of where the Catholic Church was 15 or 20 years ago. I see some members of the community turning a blind eye to what’s going on in their backyards.”
Judging the judges
“The problem in the ultra-Orthodox community is that people go to the beit din and not to civil authorities,” said Mark Dratch, a modern-Orthodox rabbi who chairs the Rabbinical Council of America’s Task Force on Rabbinic Improprieties.
Dratch, who directs JSafe, a nonprofit organization addressing abuse in the Jewish community, said he has “pleaded with members of Agudath Israelto expose the dangers of clerical and familial abuse. I said if you don’t expose, victims have no place to turn.”
Agudath Israel has not promulgated anti-abuse policies for its affiliated congregations, but it does have binding behavioral guidelines that apply to its youth groups and its five summer camps, which serve about 2,000 youngsters, according to Shafran.
Elsewhere in Orthodoxy
The modern Orthodox community was deeply scarred by the sex abuse scandal involving Rabbi Baruch Lanner, a former regional director of the National Conference of Synagogue Youth (NCSY), a branch of the centrist Orthodox Union.
Lanner was sentenced in 2002 to seven years in prison for sexually abusing two female students during the 1990s while he was their principal at a yeshiva high school in New Jersey.
However, a 2000 report by a special OU commission found that Lanner had also sexually abused women and teenage girls and physically abused boys and girls while he was a leader at NCSY. The case attracted widespread attention, in part, because the report said some OU and NCSY leaders had failed to take action for several years to halt Lanner’s misconduct.
Both the OU and the NCSY say they have upgraded their behavioral guidelines and enhanced anti-abuse training programs.
The Chabad-Lubavitch movement has no written conduct guidelines applying specifically to its estimated 4,000 global emissaries, known as shlichim, or its approximately 3,000 multi-use facilities that double as synagogues and are usually referred to as Chabad Houses. However, many Chabad Houses have adopted behavioral policies originally formulated for the movement’s schools, according to movement spokesman Rabbi Zalman Shmotkin.
In addition, shlichim must strictly abide by the Shulchan Aruch, the 16th-century code of Jewish law that prohibits non-married or unrelated adults of the opposite sex from being secluded with each other.
On the school front
Some of the denominational policies examined by JTA are designed to guard against situations that could result in inappropriate contact with minors, regardless of their sex. They mandate, for example, that at least two adults be present when a child is receiving private religious instruction.
The policies also instruct school officials to consult two recognized rabbinic authorities n one Chabad-affiliated and one not n regarding mesirah.
Mesirah, a centuries-old Jewish legal injunction, which in some instances prohibits Jews from reporting Jewish perpetrators to non-Jewish authorities, has been blamed for the reticence of some Orthodox sex abuse victims to go public with their complaints. In a spring 2004 article in the anti-abuse publication Working Together, Dratch of JSafe said that in cases of child sex abuse, “the consensus of contemporary Jewish religious authorities is that such reporting is religiously mandatory.”
Three years ago, several safeguards were adopted by Torah Umesorah-The National Society for Hebrew Day Schools, which provides religious educational materials for nearly 200,000 Orthodox students spanning that denomination’s ideological spectrum.
But the guidelines are nonbinding because each of the hundreds of schools served by Torah Umesorah are self-governing.
Elliot Pasik, a New York attorney and children’s rights advocate, said the way in which the guidelines were distributed calls into question Torah Umesorah’s commitment to protecting students from sexually predatory teachers and other staffers.
Few, if any, parents Pasik knows with children attending schools serviced by Torah Umesorah were told about the rules unless they called the Torah Umesorah national office in Manhattan. Furthermore, he added, “I have personally spoken with several teachers, and they knew nothing about these guidelines.”
Pasik said the situation shows the need for a centralized governing body n perhaps a state or federal agency n that can hold schools accountable for the safety of students.
“It’s hard for people in any organization to govern themselves,” he said. “We’re not being patrolled or governed by anybody.”
The larger issue of child molestation in the Orthodox community was addressed in a one-page statement accompanying the Torah Umesorah guidelines.
The statement urges “everyone to use every means to stop these violations of children, including, at times, exposing the identities of the abusers and even their incarceration. At times, our primary intent may not be to punish the perpetrators, but rather to help them. Therefore, it is preferable, wherever appropriate, to force them to undergo appropriate professional therapy.”
Posted by Perry at 05:31 PM
Reining In Abuse Part 1
Cleveland Jewish News
http://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/
articles/2007/01/18/news/local/
acover0119.txt
January 18, 2007
Clergy's sexual misconduct: What's being done to squelch it?
BY: EUGENE L. MEYER and RICHARD GREENBERG, JTA
The rabbi in a mid-sized Pennsylvania city was eager to share his congregation's wrenching experience - but no names, please.
It's been nearly five years since the synagogue's cantor pleaded guilty to sexually molesting two girls he was preparing for their bat mitzvahs. He was sentenced to 15 to 30 months in prison and is now on Pennsylvania's sexual offender list.
Still, the rabbi wanted the name of his synagogue and of the abuser, whose crimes are a matter of public record, kept confidential.
But the rabbi wanted it known that measures have been instituted to guard against a repeat occurrence. For example, the synagogue now requires that another adult be present during private religious instruction.
In that respect, this synagogue typifies many Jewish institutions, which over the past several years have adopted new policies - or beefed up existing ones - aimed at cracking down on rogue rabbis and others in positions of trust who sexually exploit congregants, students or others.
The issue of clergy sexual abuse has gained increased attention in the 10 years since it was first investigated by JTA. That earlier investigation, which focused primarily on rabbis who sexually coerced adult congregants, indicated that the problem was more widespread than had been assumed. the Jewish establishment was beginning to grapple with it, but not always effectively.
Since that original investigation was published, the Catholic Church has been rocked by a massive pedophilia scandal, while the Jewish community has been buffeted by high-profile cases of sexual impropriety involving rabbis and other authority figures.
The list of offenders includes Orthodox youth leader Rabbi Baruch Lanner, a former regional director of the National Conference of Synagogue Youth, who is now serving a seven-year prison sentence for abusing teenage girls while he was principal of a New Jersey yeshiva. The scandal set off a storm in the Orthodox world, stemming from allegations that rabbinic leaders and others had long been negligent in supervising Lanner.
More recently, David Kaye, a prominent 56-year-old Conservative rabbi from Maryland, was ensnared in a nationally televised pedophile sting operation. Kaye, the former vice president for programs of Panim: The Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values, was sentenced Dec. 1 to six-and-a-half years in prison for trying to solicit sex last year from someone posing on the Internet as a 13-year-old boy, a case that was featured on the network television show “Dateline NBC.”
Virtually all denominations, except segments of fervent Orthodoxy, now have formal codes on the books that outline unacceptable clergy behavior and mandate precisely how complaints of sexual impropriety are to be investigated and adjudicated by in-house ethics panels.
In a three-month-long investigation, JTA examined those policies with the help of mental-health providers, victims' advocates, rabbis, and others whose assessments reflected a mix of encouragement and skepticism.
Among the findings:
€ The anti-abuse guidelines represent a well-intentioned yet sporadically flawed attempt to address a problem that had once been neglected entirely.
€ The system, according to critics, suffers from an institutional fear of lawsuits and excessive secrecy - both byproducts of an ethical quandary faced by decision-makers. They must balance an individual's right to privacy against the obligation to protect the public from a potential sexual predator.
€ A symbol of that ethical push-pull is the Awareness Center, a private, 5-year-old Baltimore-based Jewish organization that is devoted to protecting the public from abusers. The center has been both criticized and praised for its policy of identifying rabbis and other sexual predators on its website, whether or not they have been tried in court.
€ Perhaps the most serious impediment to controlling clergy abuse is what Chicago psychologist and psychoanalyst Vivian Skolnick calls “the plague of silence” - the continuing reluctance of victims to report transgressions.
Like most of the observers contributing to the JTA analysis, anti-abuse activist and author Drorah Setel, a rabbi at a Reform congregation in Niagara Falls, N.Y., lauded the denominational rule-makers for taking steps to undo decades of inaction and denial - but she faulted their specific policies.
The notion of image-conscious, liability-minded, and often male-dominated rabbinic ethics boards policing their own members, she says, is like “the fox guarding the henhouse.”
Secrecy vs. privacy
Although Judaism's get-tough policies may have their flaws, conclusive proof of their effectiveness - or ineffectiveness - is elusive. One reason is that the pool of sex abuse complaints processed by ethics panels over the past several years is minuscule.
It is an open question, however, whether the low volume of cases indicates that the problem of sexual misdeeds among rabbis and other Jewish clergy is minimal, as some claim, or is simply underreported, as Skolnick and several others contend.
In addition, the administrative proceedings aimed at meting out justice are typically cloaked in what critics call excessive secrecy and advocates of the system maintain is an environment of prudent and compassionate privacy. The denominational hearings are generally closed to the public, and in some cases, public access to the results of those hearings is severely limited.
Proponents of this approach say it is warranted to avoid unnecessarily tainting the reputation of the accused while sparing the accuser additional shame, embarrassment and fear.
That fear is not always illusory. Victims are indeed sometimes shunned and even harassed by fellow congregants. Consequently, other victims fail to report transgressions.
Despite encouraging inroads in the area of reporting sexual abuse, the reticence of victims to come forward continues to be a major problem across all denominations. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that under-reporting may be more prevalent in the fervently Orthodox community - the type of neighborhood where denial runs rampant regarding sexual misconduct by clergy, according to Framowitz.
The denominational policies examined by JTA, which were developed by both the congregational and rabbinic wings of the major religious movements, have several similarities. For example, they address a vast range of prohibited deeds, from criminal acts such as rape and child molestation to sexually charged conduct that is exploitive but not necessarily criminal. That includes sexual harassment, adultery and other forms of “seductive” or coercive behavior that are grouped under the broad heading of “boundary violations.”
Most of the denominational guidelines recognize that the inherent power imbalance between clergyman and congregant makes otherwise consensual sexual contact unacceptable.
The Rabbinical Council of America (RBA), a primarily modern-Orthodox organization, specifies that whoever initially assesses complaints not be a member of the RCA, that the organization's fact-finding team include one mental health professional, and that all members of that team “have appropriate training in the area of sexual abuse.”
The Central Conference of Amerian Rabbis (reform) guidelines, meanwhile, require that its three-member fact-gathering team include a lay person in addition to two rabbis.
Limiting mobility
Another key provision of the denominational codes focuses on an issue that gained prominence during the child-molestation scandal in the Catholic Church. That is, the problem of sexual predators who escape apprehension by relocating to another institution or community where they repeat their conduct.
In the case of the church, pedophile priests were aided by superiors who routinely shuttled them from one parish to another where they continually had access to children.
“This is an area of great concern in the Jewish community as well,” said Alison Iser, director of The Jewish Program at the FaithTrust Institute, a Seattle-based nonprofit devoted to combating sexual and domestic violence. “The Jewish community has viewed with disdain that sort of behavior elsewhere, and as a result, has felt a sort of smugness that it was not happening here.”
Whether segments of the Jewish community do in fact have a “Catholic-priest problem” is debatable.
Declaring that “confidentiality is crucial,” the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association guidelines of 1999 - which are now being revised - say the chair of the association's Ethics Committee may only disclose that a member is under investigation, the investigation “has been resolved but is confidential,” or that the member has been suspended or expelled. “No other details are to be revealed.”
News of a rabbi's expulsion from the RCA, the modern Orthodox organization, must be disseminated throughout the RCA, and the rabbi's current employer must also be notified. Beyond that, though, RCA officials shall determine “who else, if anyone,” is to be informed that such an action took place.
The CCAR, the Reform rabbinic arm, mandates that a prospective employer be provided with a fairly detailed report of disciplinary action taken against a CCAR member. But “after an extended period of time,” a single non-criminal infraction doesn't have to be reported at all.
The proper role of transparency in the adjudicative process is a controversial topic, highlighting the tension between maintaining the public's right to know and enabling an individual to keep his or her reputation intact - especially in the absence of criminal charges or civil allegations.
“If you act on a false accusation, you're killing a guy and his family; the responsibility is awesome,” said Rabbi Abraham Twerski, medical director emeritus of the Gateway Rehabilitation Center in Pittsburgh. “Plus, you can be sued for defamation of character. And, boy, does that ever hamper the system.”
Some victims' advocates are transparency absolutists, insisting on full disclosure of virtually all details of sex-abuse cases involving religious authority figures that have been ruled on by denominational ethics panels. They feel that such information should be released not only to prospective employers, but to the public at large to protect the maximum number of people.
Due in part to concerns over civil liability, the RCA generally limits the public release of details regarding sex-abuse cases, even those that have resulted in a rabbi's expulsion from the organization, said Rabbi Basil Herring, RCA's executive vice president.
The RCA guidelines, however, do have an emergency clause that recommends informing a wide range of individuals, including neighbors and civil authorities, if a rabbi might pose an immediate danger to “alleged or potential victims.”
Sources within the other movements said that regardless of official policy, an expansive disclosure stance would likely apply in similar circumstances.
Due in part to extensive First Amendment protections enjoyed by religious organizations, the keepers of clergy personnel records have “lots of leeway” in terms of what information they can release without being successfully sued, said Minneapolis psychologist Gary Schoener.
The prospective employer should know both the good and the bad,” he said. “There should be an accurate description of the full person, including his recovery plan and how it is being monitored. “The idea is to know exactly what kind of situation we're dealing with.”
Posted by Perry at 05:25 PM
Three Sikh priests held on sexual abuse charges in Canada Gurdawara
Punjab Newsline
http://www.punjabnewsline.com/
content/view/2651/38/
27 January 2007
by Aman Singh
WINNIPEG(CANADA): The Sikh community in Winnipeg is reacting with shock to news that police have formally charged three Sikh priests with a variety of sexual assault charges.
All three teach at the Gurdwara Nanaksar temple in the St. Vital area.Gurdwara Nanaksar is one of only 17 temples of its kind worldwide - it is affiliated with a specific Sikh sect, Nanaksar Satsang Sabha. Others in the Sikh community worried about the scars the charges may leave on the reputation of the nearly 15,000 Sikhs in Winnipeg.
The priests are alleged to have abused a Winnipeg man when he was a boy, over a period of more than five years from June 1990 to January 1996.
"The community is totally stunned by this," said Tej Bains, a retired social worker and activist."We are still in shock and there's a number of factors. First of all, we just don't talk about sexuality and … we really honour our priests."
Bakhshish Singh, 47, Kuljit Singh, 43, and Dalbag Singh, 37, all face charges of sexual assault, sexual exploitation, sexual interference and invitation to sexual touching.
Some Sikhs have identified the Gurdwara Nanaksar temple as that of a sect outside mainstream Sikhism in which religious leaders remain celibate.The temple is one of three of its kind in Canada -- the others are in Brampton, Ont., and Surrey, B.C. Winnipeg's Gurdwara Nanaksar began in 1982.
"This is very bad... any allegations of this kind reflect bad on the community as a whole," said Mohinder Singh Dhillon, who worships at Singh Sabha, a mainstream Sikh temple on Sturgeon Rd.
The priests were first arrested Dec. 23 and are set to appear in court next month.
They have been ordered to stay away from the alleged victim. They've also been told to hand over their passports and not be in the presence of anyone under 18 years without supervision.
Sheldon Pinx, the lawyer representing all three men, said last month that his clients maintain their innocence and deny all charges. Meanwhile, a police spokesperson says there may be more arrests in the case.
Winnipeg police said two more priests were arrested last weekend and were released on a promise to appear in court.
Sgt. Kelly Dennison added the charges are linked to an alleged kidnapping occurring earlier this month. The Free Press previously reported that on Dec. 14, a man armed with a sword and another man armed with a tire iron allegedly kidnapped two priests from the temple. The men drove them to a residence in the Waverley area where they allegedly physically assaulted the priests.
Jeewan Jyot Kahlon, 24, and Amandeep Singh Chana, 25, both face charges of kidnapping, forcible confinement, assault with a weapon and possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose.
At the time, police said a "personal dispute" was behind the incident and the victims knew their attackers.
Posted by Perry at 05:18 PM
Priest accused of abuse defrocked
Concord Monitor
http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/
pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070127/
REPOSITORY/701270348
January 27. 2007
By ANNMARIE TIMMINS - Monitor staff
The Diocese of Manchester announced yesterday that the Vatican has defrocked the Rev. John Nolin, a former Lakeport and Penacook priest removed from ministry in 1994 after allegations that he abused a Keene girl. Nolin is the third New Hampshire priest to be defrocked.
Nolin, 74, resigned his ministry in 1994 after he was accused of sexual assault, but he has been retired and collecting a retirement check from the diocese since 2000. As recently as 2005, Nolin was living in New Mexico with a woman he was romantically involved with during his time in Keene.
Bishop John McCormack warned Nolin in writing in 2002 to leave the woman and relocate to Manchester alone. If he did not, McCormack warned, the diocese would seek to have Nolin defrocked. By then, the diocese had a history of confronting Nolin about his sexual affairs with adult women, according to church records.
In 1982, Msgr. Francis Christian, now an auxiliary bishop with the diocese, told Nolin he was lucky one of the women he was intimate with "had not seen fit to publicize this matter, since in that case you certainly would face suspension and even possible laicization," according to church records.
The Vatican "laicized" or defrocked Nolin two months ago, on Nov. 10, but the diocese released the news just yesterday. The move means Nolin will no longer receive financial support from the church, including his retirement, or be allowed to act as a priest.
The church's press release did not explain its delay in announcing the Vatican's decision or say why Nolin was defrocked when several other accused and imprisoned priests from New Hampshire have not been. Four priests are serving long prison sentences for sexually assaulting children: the Rev. Roger Fortier, the Rev. Gordon MacRae, the Rev. Joseph McGuire and the Rev. Francis Talbot.
Melanie English of the diocese's communication's office said church officials were not taking phone calls about the Nolin press release or disclosing additional information. Nolin could not be reached.
Nolin was ordained in 1960 and spent his early years in a variety of parishes: St. Mary's in Newmarket, St. Kieran's in Berlin, St. Joseph's in Salem and Our Lady of the Mountains in North Conway. He was reassigned at least once because the diocese learned of his affairs with women, according to church records. His local assignments included our Lady of the Lakes in Lakeport in 1968 and Immaculate Conception in Penacook in 1969.
The Diocese of Manchester first learned of abuse allegations against Nolin in 1994, when a 32-year-old woman reported that Nolin had assaulted her several years earlier, when she was 12 or 13. At the time, Nolin was having an affair with the girl's mother, according to church files. He spent nights with the family and visited the girl in her room, the records said. She pretended to be asleep while he touched her sexually.
Christian confronted Nolin in 1994 about the child sexual abuse allegation. Nolin admitted to having the affair with the girl's mother and said he had been involved with several other women, according to church records. But he denied assaulting the girl. He admitted only to a "vague memory" of going into her room while she was asleep.
In April, 1994, Christian and Nolin discussed how to respond to the allegation, according to church records, and reached the following agreement: Nolin would resign his current parish assignment at St. Jospeh's in Woodsville, sell his home in Keene near the accuser's family and relocate. The diocese would grant him early retirement and he would agree not to function as a priest.
Nolin followed through with the agreement and by 1995 had moved to New Mexico. He remained in contact with the diocese, and in 2002 Bishop John McCormack wrote to Nolin ordering him to return to Manchester to reside in a retirement home for priests. McCormack said the move was necessary to cease the scandal Nolin was causing by living with a woman in New Mexico.
In his 2002 letter, McCormack warned Nolin that he would seek to have him defrocked if he did not relocate to Manchester alone. McCormack was upset that Nolin's "cohabitation" with a woman had become publicly known. The only other option, McCormack wrote, was for Nolin to have himself removed from the clerical state.
It was not clear yesterday whether McCormack or Nolin requested Nolin's laicization.
The same year McCormack demanded that Nolin move back to New Hampshire alone, the diocese released the names of priests who'd been accused and removed for child sexual abuse allegations. It did so under pressure from the state attorney general's office, which had been investigating the diocese for child endangerment.
The woman who accused Nolin in 1994 noticed immediately that his name was missing. The diocese added Nolin's name a month later, after the family demanded it. Church officials said at the time that Nolin had been left off the list by accident.
The family accused the church of omitting Nolin's name and his story on purpose.
Posted by Perry at 05:14 PM
Names of accused priests released
Portland Press Herald - Maine Sunday Telgram
http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/
news/state/070128priests.html
January 28, 2007
By TREVOR MAXWELL, Staff Writer Maine Sunday Telegram
Maine Bishop Richard Ma-lone on Saturday released the names of four Catholic priests accused of sexual abuse, whose cases are still pending with church courts in Rome.
The priests already had been removed from ministry prior to 2002, but their names and the allegations against them had not been disclosed.
Malone has recommended laicization for all four, meaning permanent removal of all rights and duties as a priest.
They are George Beaudet, 67, who served at nine parishes until being removed in 2000; Frederick Carrigan, 72, who served at seven parishes until removal in 2002; Michael Plourde, 56, who served at nine parishes until removal in 1994; and Ronald Michaud, 60, who served at five parishes until removal in 1989.
The announcement marked a change in church policy by Malone, who is head of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland and spiritual leader of the state's 234,000 Catholics.
The bishop had waited to release names of accused priests until receiving a final decision by the Vatican.
But Malone said on Saturday the process was taking longer than expected.
"I have become increasingly concerned about the possible risk of re-offense in the cases of those who have not been publicly identified," Malone said in a statement, released at a news conference in Bangor. Malone noted a case in Delaware, in which an accused priest who had not been named publicly was arrested on a charge of sexual abuse in October.
"I am now convinced that the time has come to release the names of the remaining priests who were removed from ministry due to abuse allegations, whose offenses were admitted or sufficiently established," Malone said.
Fourteen other dioceses and archdioceses nationwide have adopted similar policies, said Sue Bernard, a spokeswoman for the diocese.
Paul Kendrick was not satisfied with the disclosures, and he continued to call for Malone's resignation. Kendrick helped found Ignatius Group, which advocates for abuse victims. His and other groups want the diocese to release the names and addresses of all priests and church workers facing credible abuse charges.
Kendrick asked why Malone didn't release the four names earlier if the men might be capable of additional offenses.
"When he leaves people like Michael Plourde in neighborhoods full of kids, when he won't say the whereabouts of these people, and parents have no idea about these men with substantiated abuse charges against them, he is putting kids at risk," Kendrick said of Malone.
Basing his conclusions on a report released by the state Attorney General's Office in 2004 and on information from families and communities, Kendrick said he believes around 20 priests and religious and church workers facing credible charges have not been identified publicly.
Kendrick was planning a rally and leaflet drop this morning in front of St. Joseph's Church in Biddeford, where Michael Plourde once served as a priest. Kendrick said Plourde was living recently in an apartment complex near the church.
Also Saturday, Malone announced the Vatican has made final rulings in the cases of two other accused Maine priests.
Peter Gorham, 79, and Francis Kane, 79, both were assigned a life of prayer and penance, which is generally applied to people who are very old or in poor health.
Gorham was accused in 1995 of an offense from 1953. He retired in 1996.
Kane was accused of abuse in 1986, his ministry was limited in 1987, and he retired in 1997.
Malone provided updates on three cases that previously had been made public.
The Vatican has granted a request for a canonical trial by Thomas Lee, who stepped down from ministry in 2003.
In the case of Jim Michaud, the diocese has no proof of sexual abuse, but Bishop Malone decided Michaud should not have public ministry because of other misconduct.
Lastly, John Harris agreed with Malone's recommendation that Harris step down from ministry, although no victims of sexual abuse came forward during an investigation by the diocese.
Malone said the diocese previously reported all of the priests to civil authorities.
The church court process in Rome is a way to make rulings in cases that cannot be prosecuted in criminal courts, because too much time has passed.
Staff writer Trevor Maxwell can be contacted at 791-6451 or at:
tmaxwell@pressherald.com
Posted by Perry at 05:10 PM
Diocese Of Charleston Reaches Sexual Abuse Suit Settlement
ABC News
http://www.abcnews4.com/news/
stories/0107/391906.html
January 26, 2007
Charleston, SC - The Diocese of Charleston reaches a 12 million dollar class action agreement for child sexual abuse cases. The Diocese has already paid close to 3 million dollars, resolving some 50 claims of childhood sexual abuse against Priests, clergymen and Diocese faculty dating back to 1950. In an attempt to resolve any unreported cases, it may pay up to 12 million more.
"One of the things that's hardest for the victims is these were people they trusted. Most of them it happened in their young teens, that formidable age of who to look for with advice and who they respect," says David Haller, legal counsel representing the claimants.
All victims who enter the suit will remain anonymous. So far three individuals allege Father James Nyhan fondled them while in the 8th grade at the Nativity Catholic School. A fourth has accused the late Father Lawrence Sheady. All four, plus 3 family member have reached settlements totaling more than a half a million dollars. 8 additional claims are now under review. "We gotten to the point and we all believe in a just resolution. We want healing and justice for all and it's a fact that we're here and ready to resolve," says Peter Shahid, who represents the Diocese.
Other Diocese have gone bankrupt from similar sexual abuse suits filed against them, but the Diocese of Charleston believes by reaching a class action agreement and resolving claims they know are valid, this step will prevent a possible bankruptcy situation in the future.
"It is my fervent hope that this settlement will allow us, as the Catholic community of faith in South Carolina, to bring closure to an ugly period in our history and look forward with joyful hope to the future of our Church," says the Rev. Bishop Robert B. Baker.
The settlement will award up to $200,000 to individuals born on or before August 30th, 1980, who as minors were sexually abused by someone associated with the Diocese. Parents and spouses may receive up to $20,000. A fairness hearing for final approval of the agreement is set for March 9th. The Diocese of Charleston represents all Catholic institutions in the State and is encouraging victims to come forward and file a claim by calling 849-6000.
Posted by Perry at 05:06 PM
January 28, 2007
Inside The Moonies: Propaganda and Power
consortiumnews.com
http://www.consortiumnews.com/
Print/2006/122706.html
The GOP's $3 Billion Propaganda Organ
By Robert Parry (A Special Report)
December 27, 2006
The American Right achieved its political dominance in Washington over the past quarter century with the help of more than $3 billion spent by Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon on a daily propaganda organ, the Washington Times, according to a 21-year veteran of the newspaper.
George Archibald, who describes himself “as the first reporter hired at the Washington Times outside the founding group” and author of a commemorative book on the Times’ first two decades, has now joined a long line of disillusioned conservative writers who departed and warned the public about extremism within the newspaper.
In an Internet essay on recent turmoil inside the Times, Archibald also confirmed claims by some former Moon insiders that the cult leader has continued to pour in $100 million a year or more to keep the newspaper afloat. Archibald put the price tag for the newspaper’s first 24 years at “more than $3 billion of cash.”
At the newspaper’s tenth anniversary, Moon announced that he had spent $1 billion on the Times – or $100 million a year – but newspaper officials and some Moon followers have since tried to low-ball Moon’s subsidies in public comments by claiming they had declined to about $35 million a year.
The figure from Archibald and other defectors from Moon’s operation is about three times higher than the $35 million annual figure.
The apparent goal of downplaying Moon’s subsidy has been to quiet concerns that Moon was funneling vast sums of illicit money into the United States to influence the American political process in ways favorable to right-wing leaders – and possibly criminal cartels – around the world.
Though best known as the founder of the Unification Church, Moon, now 86, has long worked with right-wing political forces linked to organized crime and international drug smuggling, including the Japanese yakuza gangs and South American cocaine traffickers.
Moon insiders, including his former daughter-in-law Nansook Hong, also have described Moon’s system for laundering cash into the United States and then funneling much of it into his businesses and influence-buying apparatus, led by the Washington Times.
The Times, in turn, has targeted American politicians of the center and left with journalistic attacks – sometimes questioning their sanity, as happened with Democratic presidential nominees Michael Dukakis and Al Gore. Those themes then resonate through the broader right-wing echo chamber and into the mainstream media.
Washington Times articles are routinely cited by C-SPAN, for instance, without explanations to viewers that the newspaper is financed by an ultra-right religious cult leader, a convicted tax fraud and a publicly identified money-launderer. Most American listeners just think they’re getting straightforward news.
The Times also has led attacks on investigators who threatened to expose crimes committed by Republican and right-wing operatives. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Times targeted Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, who recounted in his memoir Firewall the importance of the Times in protecting the Reagan-Bush administration’s legal flanks.
When journalistic and congressional investigations began uncovering evidence of drug trafficking by the Nicaraguan contra rebels, the Washington Times counter-attacked, too, although in that case the Moon organization may have had a direct interest in containing the probes that could have exposed its relationship with South American drug lords.
Buying Influence
Besides the estimated $3 billion-plus invested in the Washington Times, Moon has spread money around to influential right-wingers, often coming to their rescue when they are facing financial ruin as happened with Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell in the mid-1990s. [See below.]
Moon also has paid lucrative speaking fees to political figures, such as former President George H.W. Bush who has appeared at Moon-organized functions in the United States, Asia and South America. At the launch of Moon’s South American newspaper in 1996, Bush hailed Moon as “the man with the vision.”
Moon has key defenders, too, in the U.S. Congress, such as Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, a ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In 2004, Moon was given space in the Senate’s Dirksen building for a coronation of himself as “savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent.” [See The Hill, June 22, 2004]
Though primarily allied with the Republican Right, Moon has tossed money to some African-American ministers to gain favor with a key Democratic constituency.
Moon’s multi-billion-dollar political investments, in turn, have shielded him from sustained scrutiny since 1978 when he was identified by the congressional “Koreagate” investigation as part of a covert Korean influence-buying scheme. As a result of those findings about his finances, he was convicted in 1982 of tax fraud.
Ironically, however, as Moon implemented the influence-buying blueprint exposed by the “Koreagate” probe – investing in U.S. media, politicians and academia – he became an untouchable. He founded the Washington Times in 1982 and quickly put it into the service of Republican power.
President Ronald Reagan hailed Moon’s publication as his “favorite newspaper”; it even helped raise money for the Nicaraguan contras; and President George H.W. Bush invited its editor Wesley Pruden to the White House in 1991 “just to tell you how valuable the Times has become in Washington, where we read it every day.”
Washington Times defenders argue that the newspaper is independent of Moon’s religion and doesn’t proselytize for his faith.
But the argument misses the point because Moon’s organization is only a religious entity on one level. More substantively, it is an international conglomerate with investments in fishing, restaurants, gun manufacturing, tourism, banks, real estate and media.
Since its finances often operate on the shady side of the law, Moon’s organization requires, most of all, political influence for protection.
Similarly, Moon’s operation is not really “conservative” in the normal sense of the word. While it has worked with everyone from right-of-center Republicans to neo-fascist organizations, it also has joined forces with the reclusive communist leaders of North Korea when that was to Moon’s advantage. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Moon, North Korea & the Bushes.”]
Power Struggle
Veteran Washington Times journalist Archibald as well as other Times employees who recently spoke to The Nation magazine have described a bitter internal struggle at the newspaper.
Times president “Douglas” Dong Moon Joo is standing by Pruden and other right-wing editors who have run the Times for years, while other influential Moon operatives believe it’s time to abandon the newspaper’s hard-right positions.
“A nasty succession battle is now heating up at the paper, punctuated by allegations of racism, sexism and unprofessional conduct, that have implications far beyond its fractious newsroom,” wrote Max Blumenthal in The Nation.
“According to several reliable inside sources, Preston Moon, the youngest son of Korean Unification Church leader and Times financier Sun Myung Moon, has initiated a search committee to find a replacement for editor-in-chief Wesley Pruden – a replacement who is not Pruden’s handpicked successor, managing editor Francis Coombs.
“Preston Moon wants to wrest control of the paper from Pruden and Coombs, according to a Times senior staffer, in order to shift the paper away from their brand of conservatism, which is characterized by extreme racial animus and connections to nativist and neo-Confederate organizations. A Harvard MBA, Preston Moon is said to be seeking to install an editorial regime with more widely palatable politics.”
Archibald’s essay describes Pruden as “an unreconstructed Confederate from Little Rock, Arkansas, who still believes the South and slavery were right and Lincoln was wrong in saving the Union.”
Pruden’s father, Wesley Pruden Sr., was a Baptist minister and chaplain to Little Rock’s segregationist Capital Citizens Council, which spearheaded the opposition to President Dwight Eisenhower’s order in 1957 to integrate the city’s Central High School.
In the 1990s, Pruden’s Washington Times continued to tap into those old segregationist ties, such as “Justice” Jim Johnson, to get salacious allegations about President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary. The mainstream press soon followed, setting the stage for the Republican congressional sweep in 1994 and Clinton’s impeachment in 1998.
In 2000, the Washington Times again was at the center of the assault on Al Gore’s candidacy – highlighting apocryphal quotes by Gore and using them to depict him as either dishonest or delusional. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Al Gore vs. the Media.”]
By then, however, the Washington Times had the help of a rapidly expanding right-wing media as well as mainstream journalists from the New York Times and the Washington Post who had come to realize the career advantage of tilting their reporting to the right.
Arguably one of the measures of the Washington Times’ success was how the major U.S. news organizations increasingly seemed to march to the same drummer, even when not under direct pressure to do so.
Over the past half dozen years, it has often been hard to distinguish between the fawning coverage of George W. Bush from the Washington Times and from the Washington Post. Both major Washington dailies bought into Bush’s false claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction with almost no skepticism.
Currently, the Washington Times seems inclined to continue serving as a leading defender of Republican power and thus of President Bush. Calling itself “America’s Newspaper,” the Moon-financed Times also has championed the cause of anti-immigration activists, another hot-button issue on the Right.
But the Times and other right-wing news outlets risk a credibility crisis as more and more Americans turn away from the Bush presidency and are turned off by the right-wing rhetoric demonizing citizens who have objected to Bush’s policies.
Nevertheless, history will surely record that Moon’s $3 billion-plus investment succeeded in buying a remarkable degree of Washington influence – and legal protection – for his dubious political/business/religious empire.
The extraordinary rise of Sun Myung Moon also tells a cynical story about how “respectability” is just one more Washington commodity that can be purchased with enough money.
Known for crowning himself at lavish ceremonies and ranting for hours in Korean about the proper use of sex organs, Sun Myung Moon may have the distinction of being the most unusual person ever to gain substantial influence in the U.S. capital. He has proved that in Washington, money talks.
When Moon became a major benefactor of the American conservative movement starting in the latter half of the 1970s, it was a time when the conservatives desperately needed money to build what they called their counter-establishment.
From a mysterious and seemingly bottomless slush fund, Moon ladled out cash to sponsor lavish conferences, to finance political interest groups and to publish the Washington Times.
Despite his strange goals – including the need to replace democracy and individuality with his own personal theocratic rule over the most intimate details of every person’s life – Moon lured into his circle some of the most prominent political figures of the modern era, including George H.W. Bush who grasped Moon’s value as a deep pocket for the conservative movement and for the Bush family.
Moon began building his political influence in Washington at a time when he was best known to Americans as the leader of the Unification Church, called the “Moonies.” Moon was blamed by thousands of American parents for brain-washing their children and transforming them into automatons who gave up their previous lives to devote nearly every waking hour in the service of Rev. Moon.
Gradually, however, Moon’s money gained him access to the nation’s ruling elite. The worst of the negative press coverage subsided. But few Americans, even those who took his money, knew much about his life and his true allegiances.
Who Is Moon?
Who Is Moon?
Moon was born on Jan. 6, 1920, in a rural, northwestern corner of Korea, a rugged Asian peninsula then occupied by Japan, an occupation that would continue through the first 25 years of Moon’s life. Allied forces liberated the peninsula from the Japanese in 1945 and then divided Korea into two sections, the south controlled by the United States and the north occupied by Soviet troops.
In this post-war period, Moon, who had been raised within a Christian sect, moved to southern Korea and joined a mystical religious group called Israel Suo-won. The group preached the imminent arrival of a Korean Messiah and practiced a strange sexual ritual called “pikarume,” in which ministers purified women through sexual intercourse, the so-called “blessing of the womb.”
As he developed his own theology, Moon returned to the North, to communist-ruled North Korea, where he soon ran into legal troubles. North Korean authorities arrested him twice, apparently on morals charges connected to his sexual rites with young women. Moon’s supporters, however, have tried to portray Moon as the victim of communist repression, claiming that he was arrested not for sex charges but for espionage.
Whatever the real story about his detention in North Korea, Moon’s luck soon changed. On Oct. 14, 1950, with war raging on the Korean peninsula, United Nations troops overran the prison where Moon was held, freeing Moon and all the other inmates. According to Unification Church histories, Moon then trekked south, carrying on his back an injured prisoner named Pak Chung Hwa.
For years, church officials even published a photograph purportedly showing Pak piggy-backing on Moon across a river. But much of that story appears to be propaganda. Several church sources have since admitted that the photo was a hoax, that Moon is not the man in the picture and the location is not where Moon was.
Moon’s southward journey ended in the South Korean port of Pusan, where he resumed his missionary work. He later moved to Seoul, South Korea’s capital, where he founded his own church in May 1954. He called it T’ong-il Kyo, or Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity. It became known as the Unification Church.
At the center of Moon’s theology was a new twist to the Old Testament story about the Fall of Man. Instead of biting into a forbidden apple, Eve copulated with Satan and then passed on the sin by having sex with Adam.
Thousands of years later, God sent Jesus to restore man to his original purity, Moon taught. But Jesus failed because he was betrayed by the Jews and died before he could father any sinless children.
Sex, therefore, remained at the center of Moon’s theology, the need for a Messiah to purify the human race through the reversal of the contamination caused by Satan’s seduction of Eve.
Moon taught that the failure of Jesus to begin this purification process by fathering children forced God to send a second Messiah, who turned out to be Moon himself. Moon saw his task as starting this sexual purification process and thus establishing God’s Kingdom on Earth.
The ultimate goal would be a worldwide theocracy ruled by Moon and his followers cleansed of Satan’s influence. Political power and religious authority went together, Moon lectured. “We cannot separate the political field from the religious,” Moon said.
But in South Korea, Moon found that government continued to be an obstacle to his religious plans. When he began to concentrate his religious recruitment on young idealistic college students, especially from an all-girls Christian school, Moon landed in legal hot water again.
The South Korean government arrested Moon in 1955 for allegedly conducting more sexual “purification” rites, according to several U.S. intelligence reports which are now public. Moon was freed three months later because none of the young women would testify for fear of public humiliation, according to an undated FBI summary, released under a Freedom of Information Act request.
“During the next two years in the national news media of South Korea, Rev. Moon was the butt of scandalist humor,” the FBI report said.
Six Marys
Church officials repeatedly have denied the reports of Moon’s sexual rituals. But the charges received new attention in 1993 with the Japanese publication of The Tragedy of the Six Marys -- a book by the early Moon disciple, Pak Chung Hwa, whom Moon supposedly carried to South Korea.
According to Pak’s book, Moon taught that Jesus was intended to save mankind by having sex with six already-married women who would then have sex with other men who would pass on the purification to other women until, eventually, all mankind would have pure blood.
Pak contended that Moon took on this personal duty as the second Messiah and began having sex with the “six Marys.” But Pak alleged that Moon began to abuse the practice by turning the “six Marys” into a kind of rotating sex club.
Pak wrote that Moon’s first wife divorced him after catching him in a sex ritual. In all, Pak estimated that there were at least 60 “Marys,” many of whom ended up destitute after Moon discarded them.
According to the testimony of one “Mary,” named Yu Shin Hee, she met Moon in the early 1950s and became a follower along with her husband. Devoted to the church, her husband abandoned her and her five children, whom she then put into an orphanage. She, in turn, agreed to become one of Moon’s “six Marys.”
But Yu Shin Hee claimed that Moon tired of her after just one “blood exchange,” a phrase referring to sexual intercourse. Still, she was required to have sex with other men. Seven years later, a broken woman with no money, she tried to return to her children, but they also rejected her.
When Moon impregnated another one of the women, Moon sent her to Japan where she gave birth to a baby boy, according to Pak’s account. Moon later admitted fathering the child, who died in a train crash at the age of 13. But Pak wrote that Moon refused to admit responsibility for other illegitimate children born to the women.
“By forwarding this teaching, he violated mothers, their daughters, their sisters,” Pak wrote. (After The Tragedy of the Six Marys was published, the Unification Church denounced the allegations as spurious. Under intense pressure, the aging Pak Chung Hwa agreed to recant. However, his book’s accounts tracked closely with U.S. intelligence reports of the same period and interviews with former church leaders.)
Moon’s history of sexual liaisons out of wedlock also was corroborated by Nansook Hong, one of Moon’s daughters-in-law who broke with the so-called True Family in 1995 over abuse she suffered at the hands of Moon’s eldest son, Hyo Jin Moon, during their 14-year marriage.
Nansook Hong reported in her 1998 book, In the Shadow of the Moons, that family members, including Moon himself, acknowledged that he had “providential” sex with women in his role as the Messiah. Nansook Hong said she learned about Moon’s sexual affairs when her husband, Hyo Jin, began justifying his affairs as mandated by God, as his father claimed his affairs were.
“I went directly to Mrs. Moon with Hyo Jin’s claims,” Nansook Hong wrote. “She was both furious and tearful. She had hoped that such pain would end with her, that it would not be passed on to the next generation, she told me.
“No one knows the pain of a straying husband like True Mother, she assured me. I was stunned. We had all heard rumors for years about Sun Myung Moon’s affairs and the children he sired out of wedlock, but here was True Mother, confirming the truth of these stories.
“I told her that Hyo Jin said his sleeping around was ‘providential’ and inspired by God, just as Father’s affairs were. ‘No, Father is the Messiah, not Hyo Jin. What Father did was in God’s plan.’” Later, in a discussion about the extramarital sex, Moon himself told Nansook Hong that “what happened in his past was ‘providential,’” she wrote.
As for the sexual purification rituals, Nansook Hong said the rumors had followed the church for decades, despite the official denials.
“In the early days of the Unification Church, members met in a small house with two rooms,” Nansook Hong wrote. “It was known as the House of the Three Doors. It was rumored that at the first door one was made to take off one’s jacket, at the second door one’s outer clothing, and at the third one’s undergarments in preparation for sex.”
As for Chung Hwa Pak’s Tragedy of the Six Marys, Nansook Hong said Moon succeeded in persuading his old associate to rejoin the church and then got him to disavow the memoirs. “I’ve always wondered what the price was of that retraction,” Nansook Hong wrote.
Madeleine Pretorious, a Unification Church member from South Africa, also had worked closely with Moon’s temperamental son, Hyo Jin, and had learned from him that the long-denied accounts of Moon’s sexual rites with female initiates were true.
“When Hyo Jin found out about his father’s ‘purification’ rituals, that took a lot out of wind out of his sails,” Pretorious told me in an interview after she left the church in the mid-1990s.
In late 1994, during conversations in Hyo Jin's suite at the New Yorker Hotel, "he confided a lot of things to me," Pretorious said. Hyo Jin also had discovered that the Reverend Moon fathered a child out of wedlock in the early 1970s. Moon arranged for the child to be raised by his longtime lieutenant Bo Hi Pak, Pretorious said.
The boy – now a young man – had confronted Hyo Jin, seeking recognition as Hyo Jin's half-brother. Pretorious said she later corroborated the story with other church members.
Intelligence Ties
The alleged sexual rituals, which involved passing around women, would become a point of embarrassment later, but the practices apparently helped the Unification Church in recruiting men in the early days.
By the late 1950s, Moon had managed to build a small cadre of loyal followers and was reaching out beyond Korea. By the early 1960s, the church also was pulling in better educated young men, including some with connections to South Korea's intelligence services.
Kim Jong-Pil and three other young English-speaking army officers became closely associated with Moon's church during this transitional phase as the institution evolved from an obscure Korean sect into a powerful international organization.
Beyond his association with Moon’s sect, Kim Jong-Pil was a rising star in South Korea’s intelligence community. In 1961, he founded the KCIA, which centralized Seoul's internal and external intelligence activities. Another one of the promising young KCIA officers was Colonel Bo Hi Pak, also a Moon disciple.
With these KCIA officers, however, it was never clear whether the benefits of the religion were paramount or if they simply recognized the potential that an international church held as a cover for intelligence operations.
In many countries, especially the United States, churches are granted broad protections against government interference. With missionaries traveling around the world and with church members attending international religious conferences, a church also provided an effective cover for spying, money-laundering or passing on messages to agents.
In 1962, KCIA founder Kim Jong-Pil traveled to San Francisco where he met with Unification Church members. According to an account later published by a congressional investigation, Kim Jong-Pil promised discreet support for Moon's church.
At the same time of his contacts with associates from the Unification Church, Kim Jong-Pil was in charge of another sensitive negotiation: talks to improve bilateral relations with Japan, Korea’s historic enemy.
Those talks put Kim Jong-Pil in touch with two other important figures in the Far East, Japanese rightists Yoshio Kodama and Ryoichi Sasakawa, who once hailed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini as "the perfect fascist."
Kodama and Sasakawa were jailed as fascist war criminals at the end of World War II, but a few years later, both Kodama and Sasakawa were freed by U.S. military intelligence officials.
The U.S. government turned to Kodama and Sasakawa for help in combating communist labor unions and student strikes, much as the CIA protected German Nazi war criminals who supplied intelligence and performed other services in the intensifying Cold War battles with European communists.
Kodama and Sasakawa obliged U.S. intelligence by dispatching right-wing goon squads to break up demonstrations, according to the authoritative book, Yakuza, by David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro.
Kodama and Sasakawa also allegedly grew rich from their association with the yakuza, a shadowy organized crime syndicate that profited off drug smuggling, gambling and prostitution in Japan and Korea. Behind the scenes, Kodama and Sasakawa became power-brokers in Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party.
Kim Jong-Pil's contacts with these right-wing leaders proved invaluable to the Unification Church, which had made only a few converts in Japan by the early 1960s. Immediately after Kim Jong-Pil opened the door to Kodama and Sasakawa in late 1962, 50 leaders of an ultra-nationalist Japanese Buddhist sect converted en masse to the Unification Church, according to Kaplan and Dubro.
"Sasakawa became an advisor to Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Japanese branch of the Unification Church" and collaborated with Moon in building far-right anti-communist organizations in Asia, Kaplan and Dubro wrote.
The church's growth spurt did not escape the notice of U.S. intelligence officers in the field. One CIA report, dated Feb. 26, 1963, stated that "Kim Jong-Pil organized the Unification Church while he was director of the ROK [Republic of Korea] Central Intelligence Agency, and has been using the church, which had a membership of 27,000, as a political tool."
Though Moon's church had existed since the mid-1950s, the report appeared correct in noting Kim Jong-Pil's key role in transforming the church from a minor Korean sect into a potent international organization.
New Worlds
With alliances in place in Tokyo and Seoul, the Unification Church next took aim at Washington.
In 1964, Bo Hi Pak, who was emerging as one of Moon’s most able lieutenants, moved to America and started the Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation, a front that performed the dual purpose of helping Moon meet important Americans, while assisting the KCIA in its international operations.
Bo Hi Pak named KCIA founder Kim Jong-Pil to be the foundation's "honorary chairman." The foundation also sponsored the KCIA’s anti-communist propaganda outlets, such as Radio of Free Asia, according to the congressional report on the “Koreagate” scandal.
Moon's church also was active in the Asian People's Anti-Communist League, a fiercely right-wing group founded by the governments of South Korea and Taiwan. In 1966, the group expanded into the World Anti-Communist League, an international alliance that brought together traditional conservatives with former Nazis, overt racialists and Latin American “death squad” operatives.
Retired U.S. Army Gen. John K. Singlaub, a former WACL president, told me that “the Japanese [WACL] chapter was taken over almost entirely by Moonies.”
By the 1970s, the U.S. public was aware of Moon and his church, but much of the attention was negative. Parents complained that the church brainwashed their children and pressured them to cut off contacts with their families, while proclaiming Moon their “True Father.”
The totalitarian nature of Moon's church stood out in his staging of mass marriages, or "blessings," in which he would pair up husbands and wives who had never met. Moon also regulated the sexual behavior of even his married followers, a practice that replaced the more personal method of “blessing the womb” that allegedly had prevailed in the church’s early days.
In 1973, amid American reversals in Indochina, alarm began to spread within Seoul’s right-wing dictatorship about the strength of the U.S. commitment to defend South Korea in case of aggression from the communist North. Those fears led the KCIA, long known for its gross human rights violations, to begin plotting how to bolster its friends in the United States and undermine its enemies.
Lee Jai Hyon, the chief cultural and information attaché at the South Korean embassy in Washington, later testified before the U.S. Congress that he sat in on a series of meetings chaired by the KCIA’s station chief, involving senior embassy officials.
Lee Jai Hyon described six sessions over a five-week period in spring 1973 at which a conspiracy was outlined to “manipulate,” “coerce,” “threaten,” “co-opt,” “seduce,” and “buy off” political and other leaders of the United States. Lee Jai Hyon said one of the South Koreans participating in the operation was Moon's top aide Bo Hi Pak.
At the time, Moon was raising concerns among U.S. immigration authorities for bringing hundreds of foreign followers to the United States on tourist visas and then assigning them to mobile fund-raising teams.
But Moon, who owned property outside New York City while maintaining a residence in South Korea, somehow managed to secure a “green card” from the Nixon administration on April 30, 1973. The permit making Moon a “lawful permanent resident” also granted him more legal rights than would be available to a foreign visitor.
“The advantages of using the First Amendment were seen early,” wrote Robert Boettcher, the former staff director of the House Subcommittee on International Relations, in his 1980 book, Gifts of Deceit. “Before Moon moved to the United States in 1971, he and his small band of followers realized the operation would have the most flexibility if it was called a church. Businesses, political activities, and tax-exempt status could be protected.”
As Moon stepped up his activities, however, the FBI soon began to suspect that Moon’s activities had a political motive. The FBI summary of its evidence about Moon’s church was marked by a number indicating that the Unification Church was under a counter-intelligence investigation in the 1970s.
Although blacked-out portions obscured who was stating some of the conclusions – an individual source or the FBI – the report described the church as "an absolutely totalitarian organization" which was part of an international "conspiracy" that functioned by its own rules.
"One of the central doctrines of the Moon relig[i]ous aspects is what they call heavenly deception,” the FBI report said. “It basically says that to take from Satan what rightfully belongs to God, you may do most anything. You may lie, cheat, steal or kill."
Making Friends
Despite the FBI's concerns, Moon began making friends in Washington the old-fashioned way: by spreading around lots of money. Moon also had his followers cozy up to government officials.
According to the FBI summary, Moon designated "300 pretty girls" to lobby members of Congress. "They were trying to influence United States senators and congressmen on behalf of South Korea," the FBI document read.
"Moon had laid the foundation for political work in this country prior to 1973 [though] his followers became more openly involved in political activities in that and subsequent years," a congressional investigative report on the "Koreagate" influence-buying scandal stated in 1978.
The report added that Moon's organization used his followers' travels to smuggle large sums of money into the United States in apparent violation of federal currency laws.
Moon organized rallies in support of the Vietnam War and in defense of President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal. Moon sponsored a National Prayer and Fast Committee, using the slogan: "forgive, love, unite." The public rallies earned Moon a face-to-face "thank you" from the embattled President on Feb. 1, 1974.
Intercepted Message
In late 1975, the CIA intercepted a secret South Korean document entitled "1976 Plan for Operations in the United States." In the name of "strengthening the execution of the U.S. security commitment to the ROK [South Korea]," it called for influencing U.S. public opinion by penetrating American media, government and academia.
Thousands of dollars were earmarked for "special manipulation" of congressmen; their staffs were to be infiltrated with paid "collaborators"; an "intelligence network" was to be put into the White House; money was targeted for "manipulation" of officials at the Pentagon, State Department and CIA; some U.S. journalists were to be spied on, while others would be paid; a "black newspaper" would be started in New York; contacts with American scholars would be coordinated "with Psychological Warfare Bureau"; and "an organizational network of anti-communist fronts" would be created.
Several months later, in summer 1976, Moon returned to the United States and delivered a flattering pro-U.S. speech at a red-white-and-blue flag-draped rally at the Washington Monument.
"The United States of America, transcending race and nationality, is already a model of the unified world," Moon declared on Sept. 18, 1976. Calling America "the chosen nation of God," Moon said, "I not only respect America, but truly love this nation."
While professing his love for America in public, Moon shared with his followers a very different sentiment in private. He despised American concepts of individuality and democracy, believing that he was destined to rule through a one-world theocracy that would eradicate all personal freedoms.
"Here's a man [Moon] who says he wants to take over the world, where all religions will be abolished except Unificationism, all languages will be abolished except Korean, all governments will be abolished except his one-world theocracy," Steve Hassan, a former church leader, told me. "Yet he's wined and dined very powerful people and convinced them that he's benign."
In 1976, Moon’s search for growing influence in the United States seemed to be following the KCIA script.
Moon started a small-circulation newspaper in New York City that featured a column by civil rights leader Jesse Jackson. Moon promoted the anti-communist cause through front groups which held lavish conferences and paid speaking fees to academics, journalists and political leaders.
In 1976, Moon, Bo Hi Pak and other church members deepened their investments in the U.S. capital, buying stock in the Washington-based Diplomat National Bank. Simultaneously, South Korean agent Tongsun Park was investing heavily in the same bank.
But the South Korean scheme backfired in the late 1970s with the explosion of the "Koreagate" scandal. Rep.Donald Fraser, a Democrat from Minnesota, led a congressional probe which tracked Tongsun Park's influence-buying campaign and exposed the KCIA links to the Unification Church.
The “Koreagate” investigation revealed a sophisticated intelligence project run out of Seoul that used the urbane Park as well as the mystical Moon to cultivate U.S. politicians as influential friends of South Korea – and conversely to undermine politicians who were viewed as enemies.
Though it's clear the church did collaborate with the KCIA during the 1960s and 1970s, it's less clear whether Moon was using the KCIA or it was using him. Most likely, the relationship was symbiotic, each using the other to advance their overlapping but different interests.
The alliance with the KCIA gave Moon political protection and business opportunities, while the KCIA got a cover for promoting South Korean interests inside the United States, the country responsible for South Korea's defense.
The “Koreagate” investigation traced the church's chief sources of money to bank accounts in Japan, but could follow the cash no further. In the years since, the sources of Moon’s money have remained cloaked in secrecy.
In the mid-1990s when I inquired about the vast fortune that the Unification Church has poured into its American operations, the church's chief spokesman refused to divulge dollar amounts for any of Moon's activities.
"Each year the church retains an independent accounting firm to do a national audit and produce an annual financial statement," wrote the church’s legal representative Peter D. Ross. "While this statement is used in routine financial transactions by the church, [it] is not my policy to make it otherwise available."
In 1978, Fraser got a taste of the negative side of Moon’s propaganda clout as the South Korean religious leader’s new U.S. conservative allies mounted a strong defense against the “Koreagate” allegations.
In pro-Moon publications, Fraser and his staff were pilloried as leftists. Anti-Moon witnesses were assailed as unstable liars. Minor bookkeeping problems inside the investigation, such as Fraser's salary advances to some staff members, were seized upon to justify demands for an ethics probe of the congressman.
One of those letters, dated June 30, 1978, was written by John T. "Terry" Dolan of the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC). Dolan's group was pioneering the strategy of "independent" TV attack ads against liberal Democrats. In turn, Moon's CAUSA International helped Dolan by contributing $500,000 to a Dolan group, known as the Conservative Alliance or CALL. [Washington Post, Sept. 17, 1984]
With support from Dolan and other conservatives, Moon weathered the “Koreagate” political storm. Facing questions about his patriotism, Fraser lost a Senate bid in 1978 and left Congress.
Though Moon had helped defeat his chief congressional critic, the evidence unearthed by Fraser became the foundation of a tax-fraud conviction of Moon in 1982 and his sentencing to two years in federal prison.
A Media Empire
Despite his felony conviction, Moon pressed ahead with his boldest bid for political influence. In 1982, Moon launched the Washington Times.
The Times was just what the Reagan administration wanted, a reliable voice for its version of events that would push the message into the public debate.
Though Moon would have to subsidize his publications with hundreds of millions of dollars from his seemingly bottomless pool of cash, the newspaper – over the next two decades – would change the parameters of how the U.S. press corps works and affect the course of U.S. presidential campaigns.
Where all that money came from, however, would remain one of Washington’s least examined secrets.
Authors Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson wrote in their 1986 book, Inside the League, that Sun Myung Moon was one of five indispensable Asian leaders who made the World Anti-Communist League possible.
The five were Taiwan’s dictator Chiang Kai-shek, South Korea’s dictator Park Chung Hee, yakuza gangsters Ryoichi Sasakawa and Yoshio Kodama, and Moon, “an evangelist who planned to take over the world through the doctrine of ‘Heavenly Deception,’” the Andersons wrote.
WACL became a well-financed worldwide organization after a secret meeting between Sasakawa and Moon, along with two Kodama representatives, on a lake in Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan. The purpose of the meeting was to create an anti-communist organization that “would further Moon’s global crusade and lend the Japanese yakuza leaders a respectable new façade,” the Andersons wrote.
Mixing organized crime and political extremism, of course, has a long tradition throughout the world. Violent political movements often have blended with criminal operations as a way to arrange covert funding, move operatives or acquire weapons.
Drug smuggling has proven to be a particularly effective way to fill the coffers of extremist movements, especially those that find ways to insinuate themselves within more legitimate operations of sympathetic governments or intelligence services.
In the quarter century after World War II, remnants of fascist movements managed to do just that. Shattered by the major Allies – the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union – the surviving fascists got a new lease on political life with the start of the Cold War, helping both Western democracies and right-wing dictatorships battle international communism.
Some Nazi leaders faced war-crimes tribunals after World War II, but others managed to make their escapes along “rat lines” to Spain or South America or they finagled intelligence relationships with the victorious powers, especially the United States.
Argentina became a natural haven given the pre-war alliance that existed between the European fascists and prominent Argentine military leaders, such as Juan Peron. The fleeing Nazis also found like-minded right-wing politicians and military officers across Latin America who already used repression to keep down the indigenous populations and the legions of the poor.
In the post-World War II years, some Nazi war criminals chose reclusive lives, but others, such as former SS officer Klaus Barbie, sold their intelligence skills to less-sophisticated security services in countries like Bolivia or Paraguay.
Other Nazis on the lam trafficked in narcotics. Often the lines crossed between intelligence operations and criminal conspiracies.
Auguste Ricord, a French war criminal who had collaborated with the Gestapo, set up shop in Paraguay and opened up the French Connection heroin channels to American Mafia drug kingpin Santo Trafficante Jr., who controlled much of the heroin traffic into the United States. Columns by Jack Anderson identified Ricord’s accomplices as some of Paraguay’s highest-ranking military officers.
Another French Connection mobster, Christian David, relied on protection of Argentine authorities. While trafficking in heroin, David also “took on assignments for Argentina’s terrorist organization, the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance,” Henrik Kruger wrote in The Great Heroin Coup.
During President Nixon’s “war on drugs,” U.S. authorities smashed the famous French Connection and won extraditions of Ricord and David in 1972 to face justice in the United States.
By the time the French Connection was severed, however, powerful Mafia drug lords had forged strong ties to South America’s military leaders. An infrastructure for the multi-billion-dollar drug trade, servicing the insatiable U.S. market, was in place.
Trafficante-connected groups also recruited displaced anti-Castro Cubans, who had ended up in Miami, needed work, and possessed some useful intelligence skills gained from the CIA’s training for the Bay of Pigs and other clandestine operations. Heroin from the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia soon filled the void left by the broken French Connection and its mostly Middle Eastern heroin supply routes.
Enter Rev. Moon
During this time of transition, Sun Myung Moon brought his evangelical message to South America. His first visit to Argentina had occurred in 1965 when he blessed a square behind the presidential Pink House in Buenos Aires. But he returned a decade later to make more lasting friendships.
Moon first sank down roots in Uruguay during the 12-year reign of right-wing military dictators who seized power in 1973. He also cultivated close relations with military dictators in Argentina, Paraguay and Chile, reportedly ingratiating himself with the juntas by helping the military regimes arrange arms purchases and by channeling money to allied right-wing organizations.
“Relationships nurtured with right-wing Latin Americans in the [World Anti-Communist] League led to acceptance of the [Unification] Church’s political and propaganda operations throughout Latin America,” the Andersons wrote in Inside the League.
“As an international money laundry, … the Church tapped into the capital flight havens of Latin America. Escaping the scrutiny of American and European investigators, the Church could now funnel money into banks in Honduras, Uruguay and Brazil, where official oversight was lax or nonexistent.”
In 1980, Moon made more friends in South America when a right-wing alliance of Bolivia military officers and drug dealers organized what became known as the Cocaine Coup. WACL associates, such as Alfred Candia, coordinated the arrival of some of the paramilitary operatives who assisted in the violent putsch.
Right-wing Argentine intelligence officers mixed with a contingent of young European neo-fascists collaborating with Nazi war criminal Barbie in carrying out the bloody coup that overthrew the elected left-of-center government.
The victory put into power a right-wing military dictatorship indebted to the drug lords. Bolivia became South America’s first narco-state.
One of the first well-wishers arriving in La Paz to congratulate the new government was Moon’s top lieutenant, Bo Hi Pak. The Moon organization published a photo of Pak meeting with the new strongman, General Garcia Meza.
After the visit to the mountainous capital, Pak declared, “I have erected a throne for Father Moon in the world’s highest city.”
According to later Bolivian government and newspaper reports, a Moon representative invested about $4 million in preparations for the coup. Bolivia’s WACL representatives also played key roles, and CAUSA, one of Moon’s anti-communist organizations, listed as members nearly all the leading Bolivian coup-makers.
Soon, Colonel Luis Arce-Gomez, a coup organizer and the cousin of cocaine kingpin Roberto Suarez, went into partnership with big narco-traffickers, including Trafficante’s Cuban-American smugglers. Nazi war criminal Barbie and his young neo-fascist followers found new work protecting Bolivia’s major cocaine barons and transporting drugs to the border.
“The paramilitary units – conceived by Barbie as a new type of SS – sold themselves to the cocaine barons,” German journalist Kai Hermann wrote. “The attraction of fast money in the cocaine trade was stronger than the idea of a national socialist revolution in Latin America.” [An English translation of Hermann’s article was published in Covert Action Information Bulletin, Winter 1986]
A month after the coup, General Garcia Meza participated in the Fourth Congress of the Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation, an arm of the World Anti-Communist League. Also attending that Fourth Congress was WACL president Woo Jae Sung, a leading Moon disciple.
As the drug lords consolidated their power in Bolivia, the Moon organization expanded its presence, too. Hermann reported that in early 1981, war criminal Barbie and Moon leader Thomas Ward were seen together in apparent prayer.
On May 31, 1981, Moon representatives sponsored a CAUSA reception at the Sheraton Hotel’s Hall of Freedom in La Paz. Moon’s lieutenant Bo Hi Pak and Bolivian strongman Garcia Meza led a prayer for President Reagan’s recovery from an assassination attempt.
In his speech, Bo Hi Pak declared, “God had chosen the Bolivian people in the heart of South America as the ones to conquer communism.” According to a later Bolivian intelligence report, the Moon organization sought to recruit an “armed church” of Bolivians, with about 7,000 Bolivians receiving some paramilitary training.
But by late 1981, the cocaine taint of Bolivia’s military junta was so deep and the corruption so staggering that U.S.-Bolivian relations were stretched to the breaking point.
“The Moon sect disappeared overnight from Bolivia as clandestinely as they had arrived,” Hermann reported.
The Cocaine Coup leaders soon found themselves on the run, too. Interior Minister Arce-Gomez was eventually extradited to Miami and was sentenced to 30 years in prison for drug trafficking. Drug lord Roberto Suarez got a 15-year prison term. General Garcia Meza became a fugitive from a 30-year sentence imposed on him in Bolivia for abuse of power, corruption and murder. Barbie was returned to France to face a life sentence for war crimes. He died in 1992.
But Moon’s organization suffered few negative repercussions from the Cocaine Coup. By the early 1980s, flush with seemingly unlimited funds, Moon had moved on to promoting himself with the new Republican administration in Washington. An invited guest to the Reagan-Bush Inauguration, Moon made his organization useful to President Reagan, Vice President Bush and other leading Republicans.
Domestic Spying
An early concern of the Reagan administration was the possibility that a popular movement – similar to the anti-Vietnam War protests – would undermine the hard-line policies that the new U.S. government considered indispensable for stopping the spread of Soviet influence in Central America.
Staunch anticommunists in the administration also suspected that some groups opposed to U.S. intervention in the region could be discredited for holding suspect political loyalties. Though Moon’s organization itself had been exposed by the “Koreagate” investigation as a foreign intelligence operation, the administration still turned to it to help probe the loyalty of Americans.
Starting in 1981, the FBI cooperated with one of Moon’s front groups during a five-year nationwide investigation of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), a domestic organization critical of Reagan’s policies in Central America.
According to FBI documents obtained by Boston Globe reporter Ross Gelbspan, the FBI collected reports from Moon’s Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles (CARP), which was spying on CISPES supporters. The reports came from CARP members at 10 university campuses around the United States and included commentaries on the purported political beliefs of Reagan’s critics. [Boston Globe, April 20, 1988]
One CARP report called a CISPES supporter “well-educated in Marxism” while other CARP reports attached “clippings culled from communist-inspired front groups.” The Globe investigation reported that Frank Varelli, who worked for the FBI from 1981 to 1984 coordinating the CISPES probe, said an FBI agent paid members of the Moon organization at Southern Methodist University while the Moon activists were raiding and disrupting CISPES rallies.
“Every week, an agent I worked with used to go to SMU to pay the Moonies,” Varelli said in an interview. Because of the CARP harassment, CISPES closed its SMU chapter.
While Moon’s organization was helping to spy on American citizens, the case against Moon as a suspected intelligence agent for South Korea was petering out. It’s still not clear why.
“I don’t think there was any doubt that the Moon newspaper took a virulently pro-South Korea position,” Oliver “Buck” Revell, then a senior FBI official in the national security area, told me. “But whether there was something illegal about it...” His voice trailed off. As for the internal security investigation of Moon, Revell added only: “It led its full life.”
Mysterious Money
Where Moon gets his cash has been a long-time mystery that few American conservatives have been eager to solve.
“Some Moonie-watchers even believe that some of the business enterprises are actually covers for drug trafficking,” wrote Scott and Jon Lee Anderson. “Others feel that, despite the disclosures of Koreagate, the Church has simply continued to do the Korean government’s international bidding and is receiving official funds to do so.”
While Moon’s representatives have refused to detail how they’ve sustained their far-flung activities – including many businesses that insiders say lose money – Moon’s spokesmen have angrily denied recurring allegations about profiteering off illegal trafficking in weapons and drugs.
In a typical response to a gun-running question by the Argentine newspaper, Clarin, Moon’s representative Ricardo DeSena responded, “I deny categorically these accusations and also the barbarities that are said about drugs and brainwashing. Our movement responds to the harmony of the races, nations and religions and proclaims that the family is the school of love.” [Clarin, July 7, 1996]
Without doubt, however, Moon’s organization has had a long record of association with organized crime figures, including ones implicated in the drug trade. Besides collaborating with Sasakawa and other leaders of the Japanese yakuza and the Cocaine Coup government of Bolivia, Moon’s organization developed close ties with the Honduran military and the Nicaraguan contras who were permeated with drug smugglers.
Moon’s organization also used its political clout in Washington to intimidate or discredit government officials and journalists who tried to investigate those criminal activities. In the mid-1980s, for instance, when journalists and congressional investigators began probing the evidence of contra-connected drug trafficking, they came under attacks from Moon’s Washington Times.
An Associated Press story that I co-wrote with Brian Barger about a Miami-based federal probe into gun- and drug-running by the contras was denigrated in an April 11, 1986, front-page Washington Times article with the headline: “Story on [contra] drug smuggling denounced as political ploy.”
When Sen. John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, conducted a Senate probe and uncovered additional evidence of contra drug trafficking, the Washington Times denounced him, too. The newspaper first published articles depicting Kerry’s probe as a wasteful political witch hunt. “Kerry’s anti-contra efforts extensive, expensive, in vain,” announced the headline of one Times article on Aug. 13, 1986.
But when Kerry exposed more contra wrongdoing, the Washington Times shifted tactics. In 1987 in front-page articles, it began accusing Kerry’s staff of obstructing justice because their investigation was supposedly interfering with Reagan-Bush administration efforts to get at the truth.
“Kerry staffers damaged FBI probe,” said one Times article that opened with the assertion: “Congressional investigators for Sen. John Kerry severely damaged a federal drug investigation last summer by interfering with a witness while pursuing allegations of drug smuggling by the Nicaraguan resistance, federal law enforcement officials said.” [Washington Times, Jan. 21, 1987]
Despite the attacks, Kerry’s contra-drug investigation eventually concluded that a number of contra units – both in Costa Rica and Honduras – were implicated in the cocaine trade.
“It is clear that individuals who provided support for the contras were involved in drug trafficking, the supply network of the contras was used by drug trafficking organizations, and elements of the contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers,” Kerry’s investigation stated in a report issued April 13, 1989. “In each case, one or another agency of the U.S. government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring or immediately thereafter.”
Kerry’s investigation also found that Honduras had become an important way station for cocaine shipments heading north during the contra war.
“Elements of the Honduran military were involved ... in the protection of drug traffickers from 1980 on,” the report said. “These activities were reported to appropriate U.S. government officials throughout the period. Instead of moving decisively to close down the drug trafficking by stepping up the DEA presence in the country and using the foreign assistance the United States was extending to the Hondurans as a lever, the United States closed the DEA office in Tegucigalpa and appears to have ignored the issue.” [Drug, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy – the Kerry Report – December 1988]
The Kerry investigation represented an indirect challenge to Vice President George H.W. Bush, who had been named by President Reagan to head the South Florida Task Force for interdicting the flow of drugs into the United States and was later put in charge of the National Narcotics Border Interdiction System.
In short, Bush was the lead official in the U.S. government to cope with the drug trade, which he himself had dubbed a national security threat.
If the American voters came to believe that Bush had compromised his anti-drug responsibilities to protect the image of the Nicaraguan contras and other rightists in Central America, that judgment could have threatened the political future of Bush and his politically ambitious family.
By publicly challenging press and congressional investigations of this touchy subject, the Washington Times helped keep an unfavorable media spotlight from swinging in the direction of the Vice President.
Drug Evidence
The evidence shows that there was much more to the contra drug issue than either the Reagan-Bush administration or Moon’s organization wanted the American people to know in the 1980s.
The evidence – assembled over the years by investigators at the CIA, the Justice Department and other federal agencies – indicates that Bolivia’s Cocaine Coup operatives were only the first in a line of clever drug smugglers that tried to squeeze under the protective umbrella of Reagan’s favorite covert operation, the contra war. [For details, see Robert Parry, Lost History, or for a summary of the contra-drug evidence, see Consortiumnews.com's "Gary Webb's Death: American Tragedy."]
Other cocaine smugglers soon followed, cozying up to the contras and sharing some of the profits, as a way to minimize investigative interest by the Reagan-Bush law enforcement agencies.
The contra-connected smugglers included the Medellin cartel, the Panamanian government of Manuel Noriega, the Honduran military, the Honduran-Mexican smuggling ring of Ramon Matta Ballesteros, and the Miami-based anti-Castro Cubans with their connections to Mafia operations throughout the United States.
The drug traffickers’ strategy also worked. In some cases, U.S. intelligence officials bent over backwards not to take timely notice of contra-connected drug trafficking out of fear that fuller investigations would embarrass the contras and their patrons in the Reagan-Bush administration.
For instance, on Oct. 22, 1982, a cable written by the CIA’s Directorate of Operations stated, “There are indications of links between [a U.S. religious organization] and two Nicaraguan counter-revolutionary groups. These links involve an exchange in [the United States] of narcotics for arms.”
The cable added that the participants were planning a meeting in Costa Rica for such a deal. When the cable arrived, senior CIA officials were concerned. On Oct. 27, CIA headquarters asked for more information from a U.S. law enforcement agency.
The law enforcement agency expanded on its report by telling the CIA that representatives of the contra FDN and another contra force, the UDN, would be meeting with several unidentified U.S. citizens. But then, the CIA reversed itself, deciding that it wanted no more information on the grounds that U.S. citizens were involved.
“In light of the apparent participation of U.S. persons throughout, agree you should not pursue the matter further,” CIA headquarters wrote on Nov. 3, 1982. Two weeks later, after discouraging additional investigation, CIA headquarters suggested it might be necessary to knock down the allegations of a guns-for-drugs deal as “misinformation.”
The CIA’s Latin American Division, however, responded on Nov. 18, 1982, that several contra officials had gone to San Francisco for the meetings with supporters, presumably as part of the same guns-for-drugs deal. But the CIA inspector general found no additional information about that deal in CIA files.
Also, by keeping the names censored when the documents were released in 1998, the CIA prevented outside investigators from examining whether the “U.S. religious organization” had any affiliation with Moon’s network of quasi-religious groups, which were assisting the contras at that time.
Red Flags
As Moon continued to expand his influence in American politics, some Republicans began to raise red flags.
In 1983, the GOP’s moderate Ripon Society charged that the New Right had entered “an alliance of expediency” with Moon’s church. Ripon’s chairman, Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa, released a study which alleged that the College Republican National Committee “solicited and received” money from Moon’s Unification Church in 1981. The study also accused Reed Irvine’s Accuracy in Media of benefiting from low-cost or volunteer workers supplied by Moon.
Leach said the Unification Church has “infiltrated the New Right and the party it wants to control, the Republican Party, and infiltrated the media as well.” Leach’s news conference was disrupted when then-college GOP leader Grover Norquist accused Leach of lying. (Norquist is now a prominent conservative leader in Washington with close ties to the highest levels of George W. Bush’s administration.)
Despite periodic fretting over Moon’s influence, American conservatives continued to accept his deep-pocket assistance. When White House aide Oliver North was scratching for support for the Nicaraguan contras, for instance, the Washington Times established a contra fund-raising operation.
By the mid-1980s, Moon’s Unification Church had carved out a niche as an acceptable part of the American Right. In one speech to his followers, Moon boasted that “without knowing it, even President Reagan is being guided by Father [Moon].”
Yet, Moon also made clear that his longer-range goal was destroying the U.S. Constitution and America’s democratic form of government.
“History will make the position of Reverend Moon clear, and his enemies, the American population and government will bow down to him,” Moon said, speaking of himself in the third person. “That is Father’s tactic, the natural subjugation of the American government and population.”
In September 1987, conservative columnist Andrew Ferguson cited some of Moon’s anti-American sentiments as cause for concern, despite his appealing anticommunism.
“There is little else in Unificationism that American conservatives will find compelling,” except, of course, the money, Ferguson wrote in the American Spectator. “They’re the best in town as far as putting their money with their mouth is,” Ferguson quoted one Washington-based conservative as saying.
Though Moon’s money sources remained shrouded in secrecy, his cash undeniably gave the Right an edge over its political adversaries.
After the Iran-Contra scandal exploded in fall 1986, the Washington Times and other Moon-related organizations rushed to the battlements to defend Reagan’s White House and Oliver North.
Ronald S. Godwin, who was a link between Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and Moon’s Washington Times, raised funds for North through a group called the Interamerican Partnership, which was a forerunner to North’s own Freedom Alliance. [See Common Cause Magazine, Fall 1993]
Another Moon-connected group, the American Freedom Coalition, went to bat for North. According to Andrew Leigh, who worked for a Moon front called Global Image Associates, AFC broadcast a pro-North video, “Ollie North: Fight for Freedom,” more than 600 times on more than 100 TV stations.
Leigh quoted one AFC official as saying that AFC received $5 million to $6 million from business interests associated with Moon. AFC also bragged that it helped put George H.W. Bush into the White House in 1988 by distributing 30 million pieces of political literature. [Washington Post, Oct. 15, 1989]
When Vice President Bush was struggling in his 1988 presidential campaign against Democratic nominee, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, Moon’s Washington Times came to the rescue again publishing a slanted story about Dukakis’s mental health.
Times reporter Gene Grabowski had interviewed a Dukakis relative and asked whether Dukakis had ever sought psychiatric help during a low period in his life. “It’s possible, but I doubt it,” the relative responded.
Grabowski’s editors, however, snipped out the phrase “but I doubt it” while keeping the phrase “it’s possible” and then spotlighting the story under a headline, “Dukakis Kin Hints at Sessions.”
Dukakis’s supposedly questionable mental health became an important theme for the Republicans. President Reagan personally underscored the message by referring to Dukakis as a “cripple,” which forced more mainstream publications to reprise the suspicions about the suspected psychiatric treatment.
The story spread doubts among the electorate about Dukakis’s fitness for office. For his part, Grabowski, a former Associated Press reporter, resigned in protest of the distortion, but by then the damage to Dukakis was done.
Weird Behavior
But even as Moon con