[part 2]

In April of 1999, the Guardian reported that: "the highly respected chairman of a parliamentary inquiry into the case claims that his commission's findings were muzzled by political and judicial leaders to prevent details emerging of complicity in the crimes ... Mr. Verwilghen claims that senior political and legal figures refused to cooperate with the inquiry. He says magistrates and police were officially told to refuse to answer certain questions, in what he describes as 'a characteristic smothering operation.'"

As of August of 2001, fully five years after Dutroux was taken into custody, his trial had yet to begin. Parents of victims continued to shout of a cover-up, and the Telegraph was reporting that: "It was recently learnt that scientific tests on 6,000 hairs found in the [underground dungeon] began only this year." These tests could, of course, reveal how many victims passed through Dutroux's chamber of horrors.

If the Marc Dutroux case were some kind of aberration, it would still be a disturbing story for the level of unspeakable corruption and depravity of the Belgian political and law enforcement establishment of which it speaks. Far more disturbing is the fact that it doesn't appear to be an isolated case at all.

As 1999 drew to a close, the nation of Latvia was rocked by a child prostitution/child pornography scandal that reached to the very top of the political power structure. The case first broke in August, when police uncovered a massive operation involving as many as 2,000 severely abused children. When media reports began linking top Latvian officials to the case, a special parliamentary commission was formed to investigate.

In February 2000, the chairman of the commission delivered a report to Parliament linking the country's Prime Minister, Justice Minister, director of the State Revenue Service, and a number of army and law enforcement officers to the case. Efforts were immediately begun to discredit the commission chairman, including allegations that he is tied to the former KGB - a classic case of red-baiting, enabling the allegations to be dismissed as 'Communist' propaganda.

The BBC reported in June of 1999 that two unnamed German men had "gone on trial, accused of running a child pornography ring in Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic." The pair, along with at least eleven identified but unindicted accomplices, "made video recordings of the gang sexually abusing children between the ages of three and 14 since 1993."

A large but unspecified quantity of "videos, photography, magazines and CD-ROMs containing child pornography were confiscated." Also noted was a possible connection to the Dutroux case: "There have been cases of Slovak children being taken to Vienna to make pornographic films. The Belgian paedophile Marc Dutroux ... was a regular visitor to one Slovak town."

The BBC also filed a brief report on a 1996 case that went almost completely unreported in the English language press: "Mexican police broke up an international child pornography ring based in the resort of Acapulco which they said had at least four thousand clients in the United States," (emphasis added). A UN envoy investigating the case said that the "child pornography sometimes involved babies of less than one month old."

On September 29 of 2000, The Irish Times reported that: "Eight people were arrested in Italy and three in Russia, and police said 1,700 people were being investigated in Italy," as yet another pedophile network surfaced. The images traded by this ring were "divided into several categories ... The most gruesome, police said, was coded 'Necros Pedo,' in which children were raped and tortured to death."

And so it is that we first confront that most disturbing of topics - snuff films, which we all know don't really exist. As recently as February of 1999, the New York Post assured readers that: "Snuff films are the stuff of urban legend ... how did this legend get started? No one knows." The unfortunate truth though is that they do, as it turns out, actually exist, and they likely have existed for as long as film has existed, though they weren't always known by that name.

According to the Post: "The term 'snuff' was actually coined during the Charles Manson case, when press reports repeated a rumor that the Manson 'family' had filmed home movies of the brutal slayings." Other reports hold that the term was coined in 1976 by a writer for the New York Times who was in need of a phrase to describe reports of murders following sexual activity being captured on film.

Not long after that, as Carl Raschke wrote: "The Texas House Select Committee on Child Pornography disclosed in the late 1970s that investigators probing leads to organized crime in Houston, Dallas, and other major cities found that 'slave' auctions for sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys were routinely held in Mexico. Some of the boys were featured in brutal snuff or 'slasher' movies."

Raschke also quotes from a study by U.S. mental health professionals that claimed that a child from Mexico "can be packaged, delivered, and sold deep within this country in a short time," and that many are purchased solely "for the purpose of killing." In Enslaved, Gordon Thomas reported that: "At the start of the year [1991] Britain's Scotland Yard was

continuing to investigate reports that up to twenty children in London had been murdered last year in [snuff films] and the video tapes sold on the Continent."

An account of the Italian case carried by the Guardian affirmed the existence of snuff films: "police have discovered a massive international paedophile network selling violent child-pornography videos to clients in Italy, the US and Germany ... (authorities are) trying to identify 5,000 people who are suspected of attempting to purchase the videos, some of which appear to contain images of children being tortured and murdered."

The UK's Independent, in a follow-up published in November of 2000, also confirmed that the seized materials did in fact include child snuff films: "Horrified investigators gathered images of more than 2,000 children who were filmed while being abused, raped, and ... killed." By that time, close to 1,500 people had been charged in the case, but not - as the Guardian noted - "those in high places who are believed to form a 'paedophile lobby.'"

As in the Belgian and Latvian cases, there were clear indications of high-level complicity and a strong belief among the Italian people that the facts of the case were being covered up. And as with the other cases, the magistrate heading up the inquiry "provoked a furore by denouncing a 'paedophile lobby' supported by politicians which he said openly obstructed the investigators and worked to prevent tougher sanctions for the consumers of child pornography," according to the Independent.

The New York Times reported in March of 1997 that there is "growing public indignation in France and elsewhere about the recurrent reports of kidnapping, rape or incest involving the very young." The same Times report noted that: "police across France have detained more than 250 people and confiscated some 5,000 videocassettes" in conjunction with an investigation into a massive child pornography ring. Those detained by police were described as "mainly married professionals." A dozen of them would soon turn up dead, allegedly suicide victims.

In June, the News Telegraph spoke of over 800 French homes being raided and 204 suspects being taken into custody the week before. Among those detained were: "More than 30 teachers ... and a number of priests," as well as the deputy mayor of the town of Saint Mihiel. By the end of the week, four had committed suicide, including a school headmaster.

Three years later, the BBC filed a very brief report noting that a verdict was due "in the trial of more than sixty people accused of possessing child pornography. One of the judges hearing the case said examining the video evidence made him feel physically sick." In a familiar refrain, it was reported that: "the French courts have been accused of attacking the easy targets -- porn consumers -- rather than producers and distributors. And one children's rights group has alleged that senior public figures were among those investigated -- but their cases were dropped before coming to court."

In 1998, another large-scale international ring was discovered operating out of the Netherlands and Berlin, Germany. The New York Times reported that investigators called the case "nauseating," in that "images of abuse of even babies and infants were peddled via the Internet and other media." Police discovered "voluminous records of what appear to be

clients and suppliers from countries including Israel, Ukraine, Britain, Russia and the United States."

The ring was first uncovered when a key member was found dead in Italy. According to The Irish Times, he was murdered by another member of the ring. His apartment in the Dutch town of Zandvoort was found to contain "thousands of digital images stored on computer disks," as well as "hundreds of addresses of suspected suppliers and clients," according to the New York Times. The images shocked even veteran sex-crimes investigators, one of whom stated that the seized evidence "left [him] speechless ... It looks like the perpetrators are not dealing with human beings but with objects."

In September 1998, another ring was raided - what the BBC described as "a larger and more sinister paedophile network called Wonderland." The network was so named in honor of Lewis Carroll's revered children's book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Carroll was widely known to have a predilection for underage girls and boys, and is now something of a patron saint of pedophiles around the globe.

A concerted effort has been made over the decades to cover up Carroll's pedophilic tendencies, though the truth is evident even in the heavily whitewashed profiles of him that can be found in modern encyclopedias. Microsoft's Encarta notes that: "Always a friend of children, particularly little girls, Carroll wrote thousands of letters to them," and also that he "gained an additional measure of fame as an amateur photographer. Most of his camera portraits were of children in various costumes and poses, including nude studies."

The Encyclopaedia Britannica reports that Carroll's photographic 'hobby' was abandoned in 1880, while dismissing suggestions that "this sudden decision was reached because of an impurity of motive for his nude studies." Britannica also notes that Carroll - who was raised in an environment where there were "few friends outside the family," and who was ordained a deacon in the Church of England on the winter solstice of 1861 (an occult holiday) - generally lost interest in his child 'friends' when they reached the age of twelve.

Wonderland is also the name of the quarterly publication of the Lewis Carroll Collector's Guild, which bills itself as a "voluntary association of persons who believe nudist materials are a constitutionally protected expression and whose collective interests include pre-teen nudes." As Gordon Thomas has noted: "In Wonderland the 'delights' of 'transgenerational sex' pepper the pages." Such is the legacy of the men whose literary works are peddled to our children ... but here I digress.

The San Jose Mercury News reported that: "Police in ... 22 states and 13 foreign countries conducted coordinated raids ... aimed at breaking up an Internet child-pornography ring ... The ring involves as many as 200 people around the world, who exchanged over the Internet thousands of sexually explicit images of children as young as 18 months." The Independent later reported that the ring "shared pictures of children being abused -- in some cases live via web-cam broadcasts over the internet."

The raids included homes in "Australia, Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Portugal and Sweden," according to the New York Times, which added that: "Several dozen people were arrested, but officials said they expected more than 100 to be

charged." The Independent later reported that 107 suspects were ultimately arrested. The Mercury News implied that this may be only the tip of the iceberg: "The ring actually extends into 47 countries."

The case was described by a British official as "stomach-churning." The Times reported that "Wonderland Club members are believed to have posed their own children for pictures ... In other cases ... parents may have taken money to let their children be used." The Guardian reported that over 1,250 children were featured in the photos and videos, "many of whom suffered appalling injuries and were seen sobbing uncontrollably as they were being sexually violated." The Independent added that the victimized children were "mostly under [the age of] 10."

A BBC report held that the combined raids resulted in the seizure of more than "750,000 computer images of children." A Detective Superintendent with the British National Crime Squad called these images "disgusting and the behavior that has been carried out is absolutely appalling." Though ignored by the American press, "Wonderland originated in the United States."

Among the scores of U.S. homes raided, one yielded a "database of more than 100,000 sexual photographs of naked boys and girls." Interestingly enough, the Times also noted that another raid, "in Missouri, turned up a cache of weapons as well as child pornography in a heavily fortified trailer," illustrating once again - as did the Dutroux case - the close ties between organized pedophilia and other terrorist assaults against society.

As with the earlier raids in Europe, a rash of 'suicides' soon followed. By October 24, the Mercury News was reporting that no fewer than four of the thirty-four American suspects had killed themselves. These included a retired Air Force pilot, a microbiologist at the University of Connecticut, and a computer consultant in Colorado.

[continued in part 3]