Wars
of the Laptop Bombers
Today's
Stories
January 29
/ 30, 2005
Gabriel Kolko
Wilsonian
and Neoconservative Myths
Linn Washington, Jr.
Con Job: Bush Pledges on Racism Lack Realism
January 28,
2005
Rachard Itani
Tsunami
Aid By the Numbers: the US Really is a Miser
Jensen / Youngblood
Iraq's
Non-Election
Patrick Cockburn / Elizabeth
Davies
Attacks on Polling Places Leave 13 Dead
Dave Zirin
The Great Donovan McNabb: Proud "Black Quarterback"
Dave Lindorff
Suicide by State Execution?
Karyn Strickler
A Corporate Death Penalty Act?
Jorge Mariscal
Fighting
the Poverty Draft
January 27,
2005
Seymour Hersh
We've
Been Taken Over By a Cult
Cockburn /
Sengupta
The
US's Bloodiest Day in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
Juke Box Journalism: Shilling for Bush
Ignacio Chapela
/ John F. García
The Laws of Nature
Mike Whitney
The Widening Chasm Among Conservatives
Dr. Teresa
Whitehurst
Those Liberal Southern Baptists!
Ray McGovern
Reining In Cheney
Russ Wellen
Marginalizing Bin Laden
Christopher
Brauchli
The
FBI's Carnival of Errors
Website of
the Day
Informed Eating
January 26,
2005
Saree Makdisi
An
Iron Wall of Colonization: Fantasies and Realities About the
Prospects for Middle East Peace
Scott Fleming
In Good Conscience: an Interview with Concientious Objector Aidan
Delgado
Dave Lindorff
Filling Saddam's Shoes: the Puppet Regime Return's to Torture
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Salazar and Obama: Two Dismal Debuts
Toni Solo
The
US and Latin America: a Not-So-Magical Reality
William James Martin
Condoleezza Rice: Confused About the Middle East
William A.
Cook
Bush's Second Inaugural Address: the Lost Ur-Version
Eric Hobsbawm
Delusions
About Democracy
Alexander Cockburn
The CIA's New Campus Spies
January 25,
2005
Brian Cloughley
Iraq
as Disneyland
Mike Roselle
Satan is My Co-Pilot
Josh Frank
/ Merlin Chowkwanyun
The War on Civil Liberties
John Chuckman
Freedom on Steroids
Paul Craig
Roberts
A
Party Without Virtue
Dr. Teresa
Whitehurst
The
Intolerance of Christian Conservatives
James Petras
The
US / Colombia Plot Against Venezuela
Website of the Day
Lowbaggers for the Environment
January 24,
2005
Fred Gardner
Last
Monologue in Burbank
Lori Berenson
On the Politicization of My Case
Uri Avnery
King
George
January 22
/ 23, 2005
Jennifer Van
Bergen / Ray Del Papa
Nuclear
Incident in Montana
Alexander Cockburn
Prince
Harry's Travails
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Company That Runs the Empire: Lockheed and Loaded
Stan Goff
The Spectacle
Saul Landau
Nothing Succeeds Like Failure
Gary Leupp
Official Madness and the Coming War on Iran
Fred Gardner
Is GW Getting the Runaround?
Phil Gasper
Clemency Denied: the Politics of Death in California
Stanley Heller
A Kill-Happy Government: Connecticut Chooses Death
Greg Moses
The Heart of Texas: an Inauguration Day Betrayal on Civil Rights
Justin Taylor
The Folk-Histories of John Ross
Daniel Burton-Rose
One China; Many Problems
Elaine Cassel
Try a Little Tyranny: Questions While Watching the Inaugural
Mike Whitney
Failing Upwards: the Rise of Michael Chertoff
Mark L. Berenson
My Daughter Has Been Wrongly Imprisoned
Christopher
Brauchli
It Doesn't Compute: a $170 Million Mistake
Gilad Atzmon
Zionism and Other Marginal Thoughts
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Day of the Rats
Mark Donham
The Secret Messages of Rahm Emmanuel
Ben Tripp
Adventures in Online Dating
Walter Brasch
Hollywood's Patriots: Soulless Kooks, Mr. Bush?
Poets' Basement
Wuest, Landau, Ford, Albert & Drum
January 21,
2005
Dave Lindorff
A
Great American Journalist:
John L. Hess (1917-2005)
Sharon Smith
The
Anti-War Movement and the Iraqi Resistance
Don Santina
Baseball, Racism and Steroid Hysteria
Ron Jacobs
Locked Out and Pissed Off: Protesting the Bush Inauguration
Kurt Nimmo
The Problem with Mike Ruppert
Don Monkerud
Once They Were Cults: Bush's Faith-Based Social Services
Alan Farago
Swimming Home from the Galapagos
Derek Seidman
An
Interview with Army Medic and Anti-War Activist Patrick Resta
Read How the
Press & the CIA
Killed Gary Webb's Career
January 20,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
Dying
for Sycophants
William Cook
The
Bush Inauguration: A Mock Epic Fertility Rite
Joshua Frank
The Democrats and Iran: Look Who's Backing Bush's Next
Eric Ruder
Why Andres Raya Snapped: Another Casualty of Bush's War
Mike Whitney
Coronation in a Garrison State
Robert Jensen
A Citizens Oath of Office
Peter Rost
Bush Report on Drug Imports: Good Data, Bad Conclusions
David Underhill
Is It Torture Yet?: the Eclectic Fool Aid Torture Test
James Reiss
Adieu, Colin Powell: Pea Soup in Foggy Bottom
CounterPunch
Staff
Voices
from Abu Ghraib: the Injured Party
January 19,
2005
Marta Russell
Social
Security Privatization & Disability: 8 Million at Risk
Mike Ferner
Marines
Stretching Movement: Protesting Urban Warfare in Toledo
Nancy Oden
The
Nuremberg Principles, Iraq and Torture
Tony Paterson
A Catalogue of British Abuses in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
Bush's Divide-and-Conquer Plan to Destroy Social Security
Doug Giebel
BS and CBS: When 60 Minutes Helped Promote WMD Fantasies
Alexander Cockburn
Will
Bush Quit Iraq?
January 18,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
How
Americans Were Seduced by War: Empire and Militant Christianity
Jennifer Van
Bergen
Federal
Judge: Abu Ghraib Abuses Result of Decision to Ignore Geneva
Conventions
Douglas Lummis
It's a No Brainer; Send Graner: a Rap for Our Time
Ron Jacobs
Syria Back in the Crosshairs?
Seth DeLong
Enter the Dragon: Will Washington Tolerate a Venezuelan-Chinese
Oil Pact?
Lance Selfa
Stolen Election?: Most Democrats Didn't Even Bother to Inquire
Paul D. Johnson
Mystery Meat: a Right-to-Know About Food Origins
Elisa Salasin
An Open Letter to Jenna Bush, Future Teacher
January 17,
2005
Heather Gray
Misconceptions
About King's Methods for Social Change
Robert Fisk
Hotel Room Journalism: the US Press in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
What the NYT Death Chart Omitted: Civilians Slaughtered by US
Military
Jason Leopold
Sam Bodman's Smokestacks: Bush's Choice for Energy Czar is One
of Texas's Worst Polluters
Gary Leupp
A Message from the Iraqi Resistance
Douglas Valentine
An Act of State? the Execution of Martin Luther King
Harvey Arden
Welcome to Leavenworth: My First Encounter with Leonard Peltier
Greg Moses
King
and the Christian Left: Where Lip Service is Not an Option
January 15
/ 16, 2005
James Petras
The
Kidnapping of a Revolutionary
Robert Fisk
Flying Carpet Airlines: My Return to Baghdad
Ron Jacobs
Unfit for Military Service
Brian Cloughley
Smack Daddies of the Hindu Kush: Afghanistan's Drug Bonanza
Fred Gardner
The Allowable-Quantity Expert
Dr. Susan Block
The Counter-Inaugural Ball: Eros Day, 2005
John Ross
Zapatista Literary Llife
Suzan Mazur
Unspooking Frank Carlucci
M. Shahid Alam
America's New Civilizing Mission
Frederick B. Hudson
Jack Johnson's Real Opponent: "That I Was a Man"
Mike Whitney
Bush's Grand Plan: Incite Civil War in Iraq
Tom Crumpacker
A Constitutional Right to Travel to Cuba
Bob Burton
The Other Armstrong Williams Scandal
John Callender
La Conchita and the Indomitable 82-Year Old
Lila Rajiva
Christian Zionism
Saul Landau
An Imperial Portrait: a Visit to Hearst's Castle
Doug Soderstrom
A Touch of Evil: the Morality of Neoconservatism
Poets' Basement
Davies, Louise, Landau, Albert, Collins and Laymon
January 14,
2005
Robert Fisk
"The
Tent of Occupation"
Lee Sustar
Bush's Social Security Con Job
José
M. Tirado
The Christians I Know
Dave Zirin
The Legacy of Jack Johnson
Sheldon Rampton
Calling John Rendon: a True Tale of "Military Intelligence"
Tracy McLellan
Under the Influence
Yves Engler
The Dictatorship of Debt: the World Bank and Haiti
Tom Barry
Robert
Zoellick: a Bush Family Man
Website of
the Day
Ryan for the Nobel Prize?
January 13,
2005
Mark Chmiel
/ Andrew Wimmer
Hearts
and Minds, Revisited
Joe DeRaymond
The Salvador Option: Terror,
Elections and Democracy
Greg Moses
Every Hero a Killer?...Not
Dave Lindorff
The Great WMD Fraud: Time for an Accounting
Jorge Mariscal
Dr. Galarza v. Alberto Gonzales: Which Way for Latinos?
Christopher Brauchli
Gonzales and the Death Penalty: the Executioner Never Sleeps
Gary Leupp
"Fighting
for the Work of the Lord": Christian Fascism in America
January 12,
2005
Robert Fisk
Fear
Stalks Baghdad
Josh Frank
The
Farce of the DNC Contest
Jack Random
Casualties
of War: the Untold Stories
John Roosa
Aceh's Dual Disasters: the Tsunami and Military Rule
Carol Norris
In the Wake of the Tsunami
Mike Whitney
Pink Slips at CBS
Alan Farago
Can
the Everglades be Saved?
Paul Craig
Roberts
What's
Our Biggest Problem in Iraq...the Insurgency or Bush?
January 11,
2005
Tom Barry
The
US isn't "Stingy"; It's Strategic: Aid as a Weapon
of Foreign Policy
James Hodge
and Linda Cooper
Voice
of the Voiceless: Father Roy Bourgeois and the School of the
the Americas
Linda S. Heard
Farah Radio Break Down: Joseph Farah's Messages of Hate and Homophobia
Derrick O'Keefe
Electoral Gigolo?: Richard Gere and the Occupied Vote
Gila Svirsky
A Tale of Two Elections
Harry Browne
Irish
"Peace Process", RIP
January 10,
2005
Ramzy Baroud
Faith-Based
Disasters: Tsunami Aid and War Costs
Talli Nauman
Killing
Journalists: Mexico's War on a Free Press
Uri Avnery
Sharon's Monologue
Dave Lindorff
Tucker
Carlson's Idiot Wind
Dave Zirin
Randy
Moss's Moondance
Dave Silver
Left Illusions About the Democratic Party
Charles Demers
Plan Salvador for Iraq: Death Squads Come in Waves
William A.
Cook
Causes
and Consequences: Bush, Osama and Israel
January 8 /
9, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Say,
Waiter, Where's the Blood in My Margarita Glass?
John H. Summers
Chomsky
and Academic History
Greg Moses
Getting Real About the Draft
Walter A. Davis
Bible Says: the Psychology of Christian Fundamentalism
Victor Kattan
The EU and Middle East Peace
John Bolender
The Plight of Iraq's Mandeans
Robert Fisk
The Politics of Lebanon
Fred Gardner
Situation NORML
Joe Bageant
The Politics of the Comfort Zone
Mickey Z.
I Want My DDT: Little Nicky Kristof Bugs Out
Ben Tripp
CounterClockwise Evolution
Ron Jacobs
Elvis and His Truck: Out on Highway 61
Saul Landau
Sex
and the Country
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Time to End the Blackout
Ellen Cantarow
NPR's Distortions on Palestine
Richard Oxman
Bageantry Continued
Poets' Basement
Gaffney, Landau, Albert, Collins
January 7,
2005
Omar Barghouti
Slave
Sovereignty: Elections Under Occupation
Kent Paterson
The Framing of Felipe Arreaga: Another Mexican Environmentalist
Arrested
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Old
Vijay Merchant and the Tsunami
David Krieger
Cancel the Inauguration Parties
Gideon Levy
New Year, Old Story
Dave Lindorff
Ohio Protest: First Shot Fired by Congressional Progressives
Christopher
Brauchli
Privatizing the IRS
Roger Burbach
/ Paul Cantor
Bush,
the Pentagon and the Tsunami
January 6,
2005
Brian J. Foley
Gonzales:
Supporting Torture is not His Greatest Sin
Greg Moses
Boot
Up America!: Gen. Helmly's Memo Leaks New Bush Deal
Petras / Chomsky
An
Open Letter to Hugo Chavez
Alan Maass
The Decline of the Dollar
Dave Lindorff
Colin Powell's Selective Sense of Horror
Jenna Orkin
The EPA and a Dirty Bomb: 9/11's Disastrous Precedent
P. Sainath
The
Tsunami and India's Coastal Poor
January 5,
2005
Alan Farago
2004:
An Environmental Retrospective
Winslow T.
Wheeler
Oversight
Detected?: Sen. McCain and the Boeing Tanker Scam
Jean-Guy Allard
Gary Webb: a Cuban Perspective
Fred Gardner
Strutting, Smirking, As If The Mad Plan Was Working
David Swanson
Albert Parsons on the Gallows
Richard Oxman
The Joe Bageant Interview
Bruce Jackson
Death
on the Living Room Floor
January 4,
2005
Michael Ortiz
Hill
Mainlining
Apocalypse
Elaine Cassel
They
Say They Can Lock You Up for Life Without a Trial
Yoram Gat
The
Year in Torture
Martin Khor
Tragic
Tales and Urgent Tasks from the Tsunami Disaster
Gary Leupp
Death
and Life in the Andaman Islands
January 3,
2005
Ron Jacobs
The
War Hits Home
Dave Lindorff
Is
There a Single Senator Who Will Stand Up for Black Voters?
Mike Whitney
The Guantanamo Gulag
Joshua Frank
Greens and Republicans: Strange Bedfellows
Maria Tomchick
Playing Politics with Disaster Aid
Rhoda and Mark
Berenson
Our Daughter Lori: Another Year of Grave Injustice
David Swanson
The Media and the Ohio Recount
Kathleen Christison
Patronizing
the Palestinians
January 1 /
2, 2005
Gary Leupp
Earthquakes
and End Times, Past and Present
Rev. William
E. Alberts
On "Moral Values": Code Words for Emerging Authoritarian
Tendencies
M. Shahid Alam
Testing Free Speech in America
Stan Goff
A Period for Pedagogy
Brian Cloughley
Bush and the Tsunami: the Petty and the Petulant
Sylvia Tiwon
/ Ben Terrall
The Aftermath in Aceh
Ben Tripp
Requiem for 2004
Greg Moses
A Visible Future?
Steven Sherman
The 2004 Said Awards: Books Against Empire
Sean Donahue
The Erotics of Nonviolence
James T. Phillips
The Beast's Belly
David Krieger
When Will We Ever Learn
Poets' Basement
Soderstrom, Hamod, Louise and Albert
December 23,
2004
Chad Nagle
Report
from Kiev: Yushchenko's Not Quite Ready for Sainthood
David Smith-Ferri
The
Real UN Disgrace in Iraq
Bill Quigley
Death
Watch for Human Rights in Haiti
Mickey Z.
Crumbs
from Our Table
Christopher Brauchli
Merck's Merry X-mas
Greg Moses
When
No Law Means No Law
Alan Singer
An
Encounter with Sen. Schumer: a Very Dangerous Democrat
David Price
Social
Security Pump and Dump
Website of the Day
Gabbo Gets Laid
December 22,
2004
James Petras
An
Open Letter to Saramago: Nobel Laureate Suffers from a Bizarre
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Omar Barghouti
The Case for Boycotting Israel
Patrick Cockburn / Jeremy Redmond
They Were Waiting on Chicken Tenders When the Rounds Hit
Harry Browne
Northern Ireland: No Postcards from the Edge
Richard Oxman
On the Seventh Column
Kathleen Christison
Imagining
Palestine
Website of the Day
FBI Torture Memos
December 21,
2004
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The
New Zeus on the Block: Unplugging Al-Manar TV
Dave Lindorff
Losing
It in America: Bunker of the Skittish
Chad Nagle
The View from Donetsk
Dragon Pierces
Truth*
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"Things Always Get Worse"
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Aiding Oppression in Haiti
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|
Weekend Edition
January 29 / 30, 2005
Priest Abuse and Recovered Memory
The
Passion of Paul Shanley
By
JOANN WYPIJEWSKI
Editors' Note: Paul Shanley
is now on trial in the most notorious of all priest abuse cases.
The criminal charges against Shanley, 73, are rooted in the "recovered
memories" of one man whose claims will never be tested in
court. The initial accuser, Gregory Ford, got more than $1.4
million in an settlement but was dropped by the prosecution,
along with three other accusers, presumably on the grounds that
their "recovered memories" would not hold up. The prosecution
is relying on the recovered memories of Paul Busa. AC/JSC
Paul Shanley, a political radical who
ministered to runaways and spoke out for gay rights in the 1970s,
was once known as Boston's "street priest". By 2002,
he'd become "a depraved priest," according to a
Boston Globe editorial. The city's largest-circulation gay
paper, Bay Windows, argued in an editorial, "He deserves
whatever the criminal justice system has in store for him."
And after Mass one Sunday at Boston's Jesuit Urban Center, a
gay man said he could never be an impartial juror in a criminal
case against Shanley: "It's just too awful." Those
opinions were voiced before Shanley was arrested, charged, and
indicted in June 2002 for indecent assault and battery and for
child rape.
Shanley, then Father Shanley,
emerged as a central figure in the Catholic sexual abuse scandal
from the day The Globe launched a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning
articles about the church in January 2002. No other priest has
received as much high-profile national press attention. Few others
have faced trial. When Shanley was released on $300,000 bail
the following December, after seven months in jail, his lawyer
used a double to divert the media frenzy. When people in Provincetown
on the tip of Cape Cod learned Shanley had taken up residence
there, signs began appearing on lampposts, warning neighbors
that a pedophile was in their midst.
Through the deft maneuvers
of his personal injury lawyer, Roderick MacLeish, Jr., Gregory
Ford became a poster child for priestly abuse early in the scandal.
The media relentlessly replayed Ford's assertions that beginning
when he was a little boy, he was pulled out of religious instruction
class by Shanley, who fondled, sodomized, and otherwise sexually
assaulted him in the church and rectory of St. Jean L'Evangeliste
in Newton, Mass., where the priest was pastor in the 1980s. After
Ford made those allegations, three other men made similar claims,
all involving the classes at St. Jean's. Like Ford, the other
three said they immediately forgot being raped or abused. And
like Ford, they said they recovered their memories after reading
the Globe article about Shanley or with other press coverage
of the priests scandal. All four sued the Boston Archdiocese
for civil damages, all received monetary settlements, all had
the same lawyer, and all were initially listed as victims in
the criminal case. In July , 2004, the Middlesex County District
Attorney's office announced that "in order to make this
the most manageable case for a jury to hear," it would not
go forward with charges on behalf of Ford and one of the other
men. In other words, prosecutors deemed the allegations of Shanley's
headline accuser too risky or unsupportable, yet the prosecution
proceeds. The Boston media barely noted this development.
Until the criminal allegations,
there were no claims against Shanley involving sex with young
children. Instead, there were claims of sexual encounters between
the priest and adolescents or young adults during the late 1960s
and '70s. Shanley himself, according to people close to him,
has admitted to past "sexual misconduct." In a January
2002 letter to friends, he explained that "it was never
with a child but with a highly sexualized adolescent, never with
an 'innocent,' and was so non-traumatic then that some of the
victims returned. And it was never repeated in the thirty years
since that I have tried to make up for my wrongs." Following
the advice of attorneys, Shanley does not speak to the press
or to the public. "They want angels or devils," he
told a confidant. "Anything in between is very difficult
for them." He has pleaded not guilty to the charges against
him.
TO SOME DEGREE, THE D.A.'S
DECISION IN JULY creates a new battleground. The headline victim
is now Paul Busa, a classmate of Ford's at St. Jean's. But the
claims of Busa and Ford, who were childhood friends, have been
closely linked for two years. So Ford remains integral to the
case, his story a matter for the prosecution to avoid and for
the defense possibly to exploit. It's hard to imagine that charges
would have been brought in the first place without Ford.
To start at the beginning,
on January 31, 2002, a friend of Paula and Rodney Ford in Newton
called to alert them about a long article in The Globe
titled "Famed 'Street Priest' Preyed Upon Boys." The
article related the story of a teenager who'd come to Father
Shanley for counseling in the 1970s and was inveigled into a
game of strip poker. It said that the priest abused the runaways
he was thought to have helped. And it quoted a man who said he
"became Paul's sex slave" at the age of 20 and sank
into a depression that never lifted.
The Fords read with interest.
Their son Gregory, now 27, has had a hard time in life. He has
been in 17 mental institutions or halfway houses. At age 11,
he began drinking; he has also used anabolic steroids, cocaine,
LSD, and other drugs. He has threatened his father with a knife
and a metal pipe, assaulted a girlfriend, burned a local field,
and threatened to kill his whole family and burn down the house.
The Fords told the Newton Tab that Gregory's problems
had no explanation before that day in January. After reading
the Globe article, Ford's father said, "I knew from
that moment on that I was going to have all the answers."
The Fords showed Gregory the
article with Shanley's picture. He didn't react. Then they showed
him a photograph of himself receiving his First Holy Communion
from Shanley, and he fell to the floor in tears. Over the next
year and a half, Gregory reported a series of "flashbacks,"
recovered memories of abusive and violent incidents, numbering
more than 70, most of which involved strip poker and anal penetration.
In depositions taken for the civil case brought by Ford against
the Boston Archdiocese for failing to protect him from Shanley,
Gregory Ford testified that he buried the memory of each attack,
and thus approached each new encounter with the priest as if
it were the first, without fear. At the time this began, Ford
would have been 6; Shanley, 52.
The day after Ford's epiphany,
Paul Busa, also 27 and then a military police officer at Peterson
Air Force Base in Colorado, got a call from his girlfriend telling
him about the Globe article. The girlfriend called Busa
again 10 days later to tell him that Ford had recovered memories
of abuse. According to papers filed in his civil case, Busa's
memories "began flooding back." He called Ford, who
by then had retained MacLeish, a Boston lawyer who has represented
more than 200 alleged victims in the latest public scandal and
who earlier negotiated dozens of secret settlements with the
church. A few days later Busa was flying to Boston, his ticket
paid for by MacLeish. By March, Busa had retained the lawyer.
At MacLeish's suggestion, Busa consulted two psychiatrists who
had also talked to Ford. Back at Peterson, another psychiatrist
had encouraged Busa to keep a journal, his "emotional barf
bag," in which he reconstructed his memories, backdating
them to February 1, 2002, the day he heard about the Globe
story. He was discharged from the Air Force that April, and now
works for the Newton fire department.
Busa and Ford were joined in
their allegations by Anthony Driscoll, another childhood friend
and classmate, also 27. He asserted that while flying to Las
Vegas to gamble, he experienced "severe flashbacks"
of rape and other indecencies by the priest. Driscoll met with
Ford and MacLeish in March 2002 and spoke with Busa at about
the same time. He reportedly did not say then that he thought
he'd been abused. He did, however, ask MacLeish to recommend
a psychiatrist, and subsequently met with the same doctors seen
by Busa and Ford. That April, MacLeish filed a civil complaint
for him. In July, the prosecution dropped Driscoll along with
Ford from the case against Shanley.
The remaining victim in the
criminal case, now 34, has requested anonymity. His civil complaint
never underwent discovery and little is known about him, except
that he has a history of incarceration and drug and alcohol abuse.
He claims to have been abused by Shanley in the early 1980s and
to have recovered his memories in 2001, after reading a newspaper
article about another accused priest. He did not make a civil
or criminal complaint until 2002, after Ford came forward, and
after he himself had retained MacLeish. According to Shanley's
defense counsel, Frank Mondano, the man's first memory is dated
to the day that it would be admissible under the state's six-year
statute of limitations. That day was a Tuesday, when CCD (as
these Catholic religious classes are called) never met.
For Busa and Ford, the memories
of abuse are nearly identical. Both say Father Shanley regularly
pulled them out of CCD, sometimes as often as every week, between
1983 and 1989. All of the criminal activity would have occurred
before the 10 o'clock Sunday Mass. Until Gregory Ford came forward,
none of the thousands of children who attended CCD at St. Jean's
while Shanley was pastor reported anything untoward. No one is
on record at the time as having noticed anything unusual involving
the boys and Shanley. Not their parents. Not the several women
who taught the classes, including Ford's mother. Not Verona Mazzei,
the woman who supervised the program. After Ford made his accusations,
Mazzei told reporters she could not confirm his account of the
priest's continual class disruption. By the time of the indictment,
she said she'd been advised by lawyers not to comment; her position
was compromised because Paul Busa was her daughter's fiancé.
The couple married this summer.
The accusations against Shanley
rely on a psychological theory called dissociated or repressed
memory. It holds that the mind can submerge the most traumatic
memories in some walled-off place, where they remain unaltered
and retrievable in exact detail by a triggering event or therapy.
The idea comes from Freud's early work, and is one which he ultimately
rejected. It was reformulated in some feminist psychotherapeutic
circles beginning in the 1970s, and reached its apex in the 1980s
and early '90s, when children, prodded by therapists, began reciting
"memories" of satanic ritual abuses committed at their
day care centers. Many people went to prison as a result of those
stories. Most of those convictions have since been reversed;
others continue to be fought. Yet the theory persists. Daniel
Brown, a psychotherapist who testified to the grand jury in Shanley's
case, argues that "material that is too intense may not
be able to be consciously processed and so may become unconscious
and amnesic."
Other experts, however, reject
the notion that highly traumatic memories can be spontaneously
repressed and recovered. One of Ford's first therapists, Robert
Azrak, testified in a deposition that "there is no scientific
basis" for the type of recovered memories described in this
case. As Richard McNally, a clinical and experimental psychologist
at Harvard and the author of Remembering Trauma, pointed
out, "There is just no mechanism in the mind for keeping
the door shut to traumatic memory. The more times a particular
type of event happens, the harder it may be to distinguish one
incident from another, but that doesn't mean people fail to remember
the entire set of events." Remembering trauma, McNally said,
"is crucial to evolutionary development; if you've been
threatened, you better remember if you want to survive."
That was as true for cavemen as it is for the contemporary child
who, once burned, learns to avoid a hot stove.
In a series of experiments
involving people who claimed to have recovered memories of alien
abduction-a patently false memory-McNally and colleagues found
that their subjects remembered things actually presented to them
as well as the control group did, but that the subjects had far
higher rates of false recall and recognition. The responses of
the self-described alien abductees mirror the responses from
separate studies that the researchers conducted involving people
who reported recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse.
The tricks of memory and imagination
are illustrated by a trauma that Gregory Ford indisputably experienced
at CCD. When Ford was 11, Driscoll held a sharpened pencil upright
on Ford's chair as a joke. Ford sat down on it and howled in
pain, and, according to accounts at the time, there was blood.
Verona Mazzei called Ford's mother, who hurried to the church
and took her son to an emergency room. Doctors treated Gregory
for a puncture wound to the buttock. They found no injury to
the anus nor anything indicative of sexual abuse, according to
medical records cited by the defense in Ford's civil case. Shanley
does not figure in the story.
Driscoll, Busa, and Ford never
forgot the essential features of that incident. Driscoll said
he lives with guilt for hurting Ford. In Ford's recovered memories,
however, the pencil incident prompted Shanley to arrive on the
scene and resulted not in a puncture wound but in the rape of
Ford and an anal laceration. This version of events has been
repeated by Ford's parents and lawyer. It was, according to Busa,
the subject of the first conversation he had with Ford, by phone
in February 2002, after he heard of his friend's recovered memories.
In 2002 MacLeish argued that
Ford hadn't buried every memory of abuse; occasionally a shard
would surface, as when, at 19 and juiced on steroids, he cried
out, "I was raped!" However, Gregory's sister, Kathryn,
testified in a deposition that a neighbor witnessing the outburst
had told her that her brother "specifically said 'my father
raped me.' " Kathryn was firm in her recollection, especially,
she said, because the claim was so shocking and "impossible."
In 2003, when the neighbor contradicted her in the press, Kathryn
recanted. Now everyone's memory is synchronized that Gregory
screamed at his father, "How would you like it if you were
fucking raped?" before being taken off to an institution.
There the story took another
twist. A doctor noted, "Patient revealed being sexually
molested by neighbor and cousin(s) for about 3 years ages 7 to
9." Doctors considered this a major breakthrough and, according
to court documents, Gregory's parents instantly suspected one
adult. But then Mr. Ford interviewed his son, and the family
concluded it was all a misunderstanding, and that Gregory had
been talking about sexual games, strip poker, with other boys.
This is now the family narrative, though the doctors assert there
was no confusion, and the playmates say they have no memory of
strip poker, according to depositions cited by the defense in
the civil case.
In light of such contradictions
and the difficulties Ford's medical history could cause on the
witness stand, the prosecution dropped him as an accuser. For
the same reasons, in 2003, lawyers who represented the church
against Ford's civil claims prepared a defense. According to
a pretrial memorandum, they planned to argue that Ford and the
other plaintiffs could not prove "the essential predicate
to all of their claims: that Paul Shanley, based upon the credible
evidence, in fact abused Gregory Ford." The recovered memories
were not believable, the memorandum states, and were unsupported
by corroborating evidence. Yet in April of 2004, Archbishop Sean
O'Malley, in the ninth month of his assignment to lead the Boston
church beyond its devastating scandal, made cash settlements
with Ford Busa, and Driscoll. Although the amounts were not disclosed,
The Globe reported that Ford got over $1.4 million, the largest
known payout to an alleged victim in the Boston area. In May,
O'Malley sent two priests to ask Shanley to resign from the priesthood.
Shanley, near tears, refused. Days later, the archdiocese defrocked
him. Where previously the church had held itself above the law,
now it was saying that defense is not an option.
SO MUCH OF WHAT IS PUBLICLY
KNOWN ABOUT PAUL SHANLEY has its origin in a two-and-a-half-hour
press conference that MacLeish held in April 2002. That event,
televised live in Boston, showcased Ford's recovered memories
and featured, as evidence of the priest's moral corruption, a
PowerPoint presentation of strategically edited excerpts from
a 1,600-page personnel file that the archdiocese had kept on
Shanley, and that it released only after MacLeish and the press
sued for access.
Following that press conference,
it was reported that Shanley's file reveals a 30-year pattern
of accusations of sexual abuse, cover-ups, and transfers of the
priest from parish to parish. That they contain an admission
by Shanley of rape as well as the results of a psychiatric examination
showing that "his pathology is beyond repair." That
they indicate Shanley was a founding member of the North American
Man/Boy Love Association. That they show he left St. Jean's in
1989 because of sex abuse charges, and was transferred to California
although the church knew he was a child molester. Those claims,
repeatedly recycled, created a portrait of the priest as criminal
before any legal charge was made. Not one of them is supported
by documents in the file.
The documents do contain one
allegation later determined to be by a 16-year-old in 1966, which
Shanley forcefully denied and which was not pursued further at
the time. There are also four allegations involving male teenagers,
dating back about 25 years, which were made in 1993-94. By then
Shanley, finished with parish work, was nearing retirement. One
March 1994 document appears to be notes taken by a church official
of a conversation with a staff member from the Institute of Living,
a clinic in Connecticut where Shanley was sent for evaluation
after the 1993-94 allegations. In the notes, Shanley is said
to have admitted to the "substance of complaints-sexual
activity w/ 4 adolescent males and w/ men and women" going
back many years. The archdiocese settled those claims by 1998.
Shanley never admitted to the version of events in the settlements;
other allegations arose subsequently.
The bulk of Shanley's file
chronicles the progress of his life of controversy during one
of the most tumultuous periods in American history. He had been
ordained in Boston in 1960, at 29, and spent his first few years
in parish work. By the late 1960s, as tens of thousands of runaways
began converging on the city, he took up a roving ministry to
youth. It would be his official assignment until 1979. He held
folk Masses in a storefront, grew long hair and sideburns, and
shed his black suit and Roman collar for jeans and a coarse shirt.
Photographs of him disclose an ambiguously rakish figure, part
hippie, part nerd. He is said to have had tremendous charm. In
those years Shanley was surrounded by teenagers, male and female,
sometimes up to 30 "cases" in 30 minutes by his account.
He began his workday at 6 or 7 p.m., touring the Boston Common,
the red-light Combat Zone, and the city's squares and subway
stations into the small hours of the morning, finding kids lost,
strung out, raped, pregnant, suicidal, entrapped by vice cops,
or en route to one of those horrors.
"Imagine yourself, a social
worker newly arrived in a town," he wrote in a 1972 newsletter.
"There is no ADC, no Children's Service, no Mental Health
Center, no Legal Aid, no Social Security, no Blue Cross, no Family
Counseling, no Guidance people, no Red Cross, no TB wagon-nothing.
You are all alone, buddy." With Sister Barbara Whelan, he
fitted out a Winnebago and started Bridge Over Troubled Waters,
a mobile clinic providing free, confidential treatment for venereal
disease and other ailments to street people. He was accused of
abetting delinquency.
The kids had come to Boston
as part of the great youth rebellion-after the Summer of Love,
after Woodstock, after the Stonewall riot in Greenwich Village
marked the beginning of the modern gay movement. The drinking
age was 18 then, and bars were thick with young teens passing
fake IDs and grinding to songs from Sticky Fingers. In
the Fenway, police were entrapping, arresting, and beating gays,
but in underground bookshops the magazine Fag Rag proclaimed
"Cocksucking as an Act of Revolution." The Vietnam
War was over, almost. It had come home in the form of drugs and
broken vets, a generation turning to spiritualism and mystic
cults. In the Catholic Church priests were leaving the collar
for love. Others stayed in, questioning everything. "Social
sin," the U.S. bishops wrote in 1973, applies to "structures
that oppress human beings, violate human dignity, stifle freedom,
impose gross inequality." Meanwhile in South Boston, white
Catholic gangs were stoning black children. And at the headquarters
of the archdiocese, Father Shanley's personnel file was growing
fat with letters of condemnation and a few of praise. The spirit
of Vatican II had unleashed forces of both liberation and reaction.
The clash would be greatest over sex.
Shanley's file is rife with
sex, in the form of his words and reported words on the subject.
In the civil complaints he filed, MacLeish filled gaps where
evidence of criminal action was lacking by stressing Shanley's
"deviant beliefs." Because of what Shanley had said,
MacLeish argued, the church should have known what he had done.
For example, a woman who attended a 1977 lecture by Shanley noted
in a letter, "He can think of no sexual act that
causes psychic damage-'not even incest or bestiality.' "
Shanley himself, as disclosed in the file, had written, "We
can say some things without question: Any sexual act with the
same or the opposite sex is sinful if it is rape. Or if it involves
the seduction of children." Whichever statement better represents
Shanley, neither proves what he might have done.
By 1973, Shanley was offering
a "ministry to sexual minorities." Gay Community
News printed his phone number every week with the notice:
"Fr. Paul Shanley . . . has been working with younger gays
and bisexuals, to overcome the negative conditioning of the Catholic
Church. For raps and counseling." To review the archives
of GCN and Fag Rag now is to witness a community
putting itself together. Along with politics and current events,
sex, including intergenerational sex, was discussed regularly
and without restraint. "For me it was the Golden Age,"
says John Mitzel, a writer who worked on both papers and now
owns a gay bookstore in Boston. At 17 he had run away from his
Cincinnati home, where his mother had mistaken homosexual precocity
for mental illness. "I've always been interested in older
men, and I was sexually active from about the age of 12. I would
follow hot-looking men onto the bus-20-, 30-, 40-year-olds-then
get off where they did. My technique was rather crude. I'd just
say, 'Can I blow you?' Of course, they ran off in horror. They
don't teach you how to be a sexual predator at age 12."
In Boston, the grittier edge
of such transactions was to be found at hustling grounds like
Park Square and bars like The Other Side, where a man who calls
himself Wayne Hay worked from 1974 to 1977. "That's where
I met Paul," Hay recalled. "He'd come around every
night. Mostly he was looking for someone he already knew was
in trouble. These were people abandoned by their family because
they were gay-throwaway kids, really. I saw Paul take people
who had no place to go but under a bridge, or who were looking
for a trick at 3 a.m. so they'd have a place to sleep."
Amid the nightly gossip, Hay says, he never heard anyone complain
or even talk about sex with Paul Shanley.
By 1977 anyone wanting to report
molestation could call an anonymous tip into a hotline instituted
by the Boston D.A. Innuendo poured in about hundreds of gay men.
It was a year of panic that set the stage for Shanley to articulate
his most "deviant belief." In nearby Revere, a police
dragnet implicated 25 men and 64 youths in an alleged sex ring.
Police detained the young people, or enlisted psychiatrists and
priests, to coerce them into cooperating. A group called the
Boston/Boise Committee was formed to defend civil liberties.
Ultimately none of the men did time, and the district attorney
responsible for the scandal was swept from office. Afterward,
the committee held a conference to discuss sex between men and
teenage boys. Shanley was among the clerics, ethicists, lawyers,
activists, and psychologists invited to speak. He told the story
of a gay teenager, rejected by his family, who took up with an
older man. When the boy's parents found out, they called the
police and the man was imprisoned. "He had loved that man,"
Shanley said of the boy. "And when he realized that the
indiscretion in the eyes of society and the law had cost this
man perhaps 20 years . . . the boy began to fall apart. We have
our convictions upside down . . . the 'cure' does far more damage."
At his 2002 PowerPoint show,
MacLeish projected a sentence from a 1979 account from Gaysweek
that read, "At the end of the conference, 32 men and two
teenagers caucused and formed the Man Boy Lovers of North America."
The suggestion or assertion that Shanley was among the 32 has
been repeated in the press many times since. But Shanley wasn't
part of that group, say a Catholic priest and Protestant minister
who were.
AND YET SHANLEY MAY WELL HAVE
SEDUCED TEENAGERS. In the civil cases against the archdiocese,
MacLeish gathered affidavits from 19 men who say the priest used
them sexually when they were young. The statements were meant
to demonstrate that the recovered memories of Ford and the others
were consistent with Shanley's sexual modus operandi. The D.A.'s
office has reportedly entered those affidavits in the criminal
case against Shanley for the same dicey purpose. Their admissibility
will no doubt be challenged by the defense.
Taken together, the affidavits
present an alarming picture of a priest obsessed with sex, one
who exploited school settings or counseling sessions to make
conquests. Individually, many lack credibility; all are untested;
and some raise an issue studiously avoided since the scandal
broke: teenage consent.
The standard argument is that
the priest was in a position of power; there could be no consent.
On the strength of that claim, even men who say they had sex
with Shanley while in their 20s have won financial settlements
from the church.
Yet repeatedly in the affidavits,
the teenager faces a choice: to go away for the weekend with
the priest after being propositioned, to climb into his bed naked,
to travel alone to another state to visit him, or stay with him
another night, or return for counseling, all after allegedly
being molested or raped. Repeatedly, the teenager chooses the
priest. In one affidavit, a 14-year-old comes to Shanley to talk
about his worries; there is a full-body massage and a sleepover.
He returns another time and there is a candlelight bath, Gregorian
chants on the stereo, and the priest performs oral sex. Five
times in six months the teenager comes to see the priest and
they have sex; they stay in contact for years. Walking with the
priest on the street, the accuser says, "I felt lucky to
have Father Shanley as a father figure." In another affidavit
Shanley is said to advise that if a 16-year-old ever finds himself
tempted by girls and in need of sexual relief, the priest will
offer himself up as the "lesser of two evils." Later
Shanley invites the youth to a cabin in the Blue Hills outside
Boston, and he accepts. That night, he says, the priest "performed
oral sex on me. . . . I was profoundly embarrassed and mortified."
If Shanley did make the "lesser
evil" proposition, it was clearly manipulative. It was also
a seduction, to which the 16-year-old was capable of consenting,
and, by his own account, did. Regrets don't negate the choice.
At the same time, the seduction wouldn't have been a good idea
even if the kid had come home happy. A priest's authority, like
that of a professor or psychiatrist (some of whom were regularly
having sex with students and patients during that period), further
complicates the already complicated emotions around sex. Many
of Shanley's accusers came from violent, sometimes extremely
violent, homes, which may have made them more vulnerable and
made things more complicated still. But complexity has been a
casualty of the Shanley story as told, from all sides. Shanley
says every encounter was a willing encounter; his accusers say
every encounter was abuse. Perhaps it was something in between,
and both are deceiving themselves, as people often do about sex,
revising events in a way that puts their own actions in an acceptable
light. Perhaps, given the evasions of memory, the lure of money,
or self-justification, neither accused nor accusers even know
the truth anymore.
However outrageous Shanley's
actions with teens and young adults seem today, they belong to
their time. "What you have to understand is there was a
void then for young gay people," said John Scagliotti, a
gay filmmaker who lived in Boston in the '70s. "A lot of
them got to the only gay person they knew who was out or sort
of out, and he was usually older. And a lot of the people who
got into 'helping' also did it because they liked the young things.
The problem is as soon as you're talking about sex, you're also
talking about fear, and wherever there's fear, there's also the
possibility of exploitation. But Shanley had a fear of sex, too.
Those ads saying 'Gay, Bi, Confused? Call Father Shanley'-if
he'd added one more sentence, 'Want to have sex with an older,
handsome priest?' I'd have no problem with it. One could get
moralistic about it and say that's a bad thing, but what's really
immoral is the whole homophobic reality that made it so hard
for people to be honest."
IN HIS JANUARY 2002 LETTER
TO LOVED ONES, Shanley confessed: "I am sorry beyond telling
for the wrongs of my life and for the sorrow and anguish of which
I have been the occasion. How I envy those who say in their declining
years: 'if I had it to do over I would not do anything differently.'
For me it is the opposite: I would do many things differently.
For one, I would never have become a priest and tried to wrestle
with mandatory celibacy and the myriad consequences of that folly.
But who knew?"
It is revealing that Shanley,
who fought so publicly for gay rights, has never actually come
out to his family members. Reviewing his personal scrapbook,
which they let me see, I was struck by the little markers of
"difference" that would have gone unnoticed before
gay liberation gave them meaning: pictures of him as a teenage
camp counselor, with rarely a girl in sight; sensitive shots
of sensitive boys his own age, neatly dressed, hands on hips;
here a quote from Oscar Wilde, there a photo of Rock Hudson,
and, before long, a procession of men in black cassocks.
Why did Shanley stay in the
priesthood once there were more options and some safety for gay
men? His best friend, the late Father Jack White (who, guilty
by association, was evicted from a Boston-area rectory soon after
Ford's accusations), said it was a calling that kept Shanley
going, a confidence "that we could revolutionize society
and the church" and a commitment to the Gospel. "Whatever
else is alleged, true or not," White added, "he has
a pastor's heart."
But Shanley was also on the
older edge of a generation that saw the transfiguration of homosexuality
from something sick to something people claimed with pride. As
Shanley noted in one of his lectures, before Stonewall, only
in the priesthood could a gay man with no particular courage
escape the prying questions, the life of whispering, and be admired.
And only in the priesthood could a young man be transformed overnight
from novice to sage. The dislocations accompanying that transition,
the sudden investment of authority and expectation of purity,
must have cut two ways for a young man both aflame with Catholic
idealism and weighted with a sexual secret. Shanley was a closet
case in a closet culture, weak and powerful at the same time.
In one of his writings, part
of the more than 150 pages of his file that constitute a politico-social
memoir of the 1970s, there is a haunting entry:
Holy Week 1972:
Midnight. Some where on Route
78 . . . I am overwhelmed with loneliness, ashamed at my pleas
to God to find a way out for me. All my prayers should be for
my people for whom there is no way out. How many 16 year olds
are also lonely tonight on the road, on the run? Is it really
so important for me to go on? The Letters say so. They warn:
"If you give up so must we. You are our hope." People
shouldn't put such hope in a mere man, any man. It's almost sacrilegious.
If they knew the madness in me, festering below the surface,
they would join the ranks of my accusers.
. . . My thoughts run to that
beautiful whiskey priest of Graham Greene's novel, the last one
left in Mexico, underground, no good, yet he cannot leave.
Jurors in Boston won't have
to judge the whole narrative of Shanley's life. They will have
to decide whether the state has proved beyond a reasonable doubt
that he raped and molested little boys over a period of many
years while nobody noticed. Because the whole case hangs on his
accusers' recovered memories, the narrative of their lives will
be up for grabs. If they are not believed, the foundation upon
which they have constructed their present stories of themselves
may be rocked. And whatever the jury's verdict, the accusers
have to live with the horror of what they may now believe their
memories to be. For Gregory Ford there is already no vindication,
as there is none for the defense; Ford's claims will never be
more, or less, than that.
As for Shanley, should he lose,
any sentence is likely to be a life sentence, given his age.
His silence, for a man whose life was distinguished by rebellion,
indicates how much he has already lost. Shanley's defeat came
long before his name was made tinder for scandal. When he decided
to resign his pastorship at St. Jean's in November 1989, by his
account because he could not take an oath committing pastors
to give "internal assent" to the Pope's position on
any issue, his lifetime of loyal opposition and prophetic witness
was finished. As he wrote then to the cardinal: "I do not
leave in protest, or for a woman, or from disillusionment. I
leave the active priesthood in grief. . . . To take this oath
would dishonor the priesthood. . . . With rage at the dying of
the light." From there, his archdiocesan file traces his
decline-ailing, without a mission, estranged from the family
of the church, full of doubt and disappointment though not without
a brittle humor, finally accused.
JoAnn Wypijewski has also written on the Matthew Shepard
case., most recently at http://www.counterpunch.org/jw11272004.html
She can be reached at jwyp@thenation.com.
The above article was written
in the summer of 2004 and first appeared in the September/October,
2004, issue of Legal Affairs.
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