Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Flashback: Vatican pair removed in homosexual prostitution inquiry




Louis CK learns about the Catholic Church












Page last updated at 18:50 GMT, Friday, 5 March 2010
An aide to the Pope and a Vatican chorister have been removed from their posts over allegations of involvement in a homosexual prostitution ring.
The Vatican confirmed it had suspended Angelo Balducci, an usher known as a Gentleman to His Holiness, whose duties included greeting important visitors.
Police had been tapping his phone in connection with a corruption inquiry, when they heard about the sex ring.
The chorister, Ghinedu Thomas Ehiem, is said to have found men for Mr Balducci.
The Nigerian sang for 19 years in the Giulia Choir, which performs at St Peter's Basilica when the Pope is not present.
In addition to being a Gentleman to His Holiness, Mr Balducci is an engineer who is a board member of Italy's public works department.
'Seminarian'
The case has made front-page news in the Italian media.
Excerpts of wiretaps published in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica on Thursday, showed Mr Ehiem had been in regular contact with Mr Balducci before the latter was arrested on corruption charges last month.
 He asked and I executed. He would give me 50 or 100 euros, never more than 1,000 or 1,500 euros a year 
Ghinedu Thomas Ehiem, quoted in Italian newspaper Panorama
The transcripts suggest that Mr Ehiem procured at least 10 contacts for Mr Balducci, including a male model and a rugby player.
A police document prepared for magistrates said Mr Ehiem and another man were part of "an organised network... to abet male prostitution".
Mr Balducci's lawyer, Franco Coppi, told the Reuters news agency he had no comment on the newest accusations against his client.
"We have much more serious things to be concerned with right now," he said, referring to the corruption charges.
Mr Ehiem told the Italian newspaper Panorama that he would find men on the Pianeta Escort (Planet Escort) website and set up encounters between them and Mr Balducci at his apartment in Rome.
"He asked and I executed. He would give me 50 or 100 euros, never more than 1,000 or 1,500 euros a year," Mr Ehiem added.
A spokesman for the Vatican told the BBC that Pope Benedict XVI was aware of the matter.

Georg Ratzinger, Pope's Brother, Says He Will Testify In Church Sex Scandal

The brother of Pope Benedict XVI has told a newspaper he is willing to testify in the sex scandal rocking Germany's Catholic Church, even though he says he knows nothing about the alleged abuse of boys in a choir he later led.


Pope Benny is the wildest party-Pope since Pope Alexander VI!



Guardian UK: Vatican hit by gay sex scandal

The Vatican was today rocked by a sex scandal reaching into Pope Benedict's household after a chorister was sacked for allegedly procuring male prostitutes for a papal gentleman-in-waiting.
So ..... God is cool with gay prostitution? :)






In light of the accumulated molestation scandals, Pope Benny should ...

Blame the mess on Satan and/or Muslims
17% (245 votes)
Claim that God sanctifies molestation.
8% (122 votes)
Burn the heretics.
10% (146 votes)
Resign.
47% (684 votes)
Trade in those Red Prada shoes for a more conservative look.
8% (113 votes)
Blame it on the molested kids (reader suggestion)
9% (132 votes)
Total votes: 1442
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U.S. and Allied Forces: We Killed Those Pregnant Afghan Women After All

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U.S. Admits Cover-Up in February Killing of Afghan Women


The admission immediately raised questions about what really happened during the Feb. 12 operation — and what falsehoods followed — including a new report that Special Operations forces dug bullets out of the bodies of the women to hide the true nature of their deaths.
U.S. and Allied Forces: We Killed Those Pregnant Afghan Women After All

Derek Crowe | Rethink Afghanistan April 4th, 2010











http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV904wsXwPo






Brave New Foundation’s Rethink Afghanistan project has been following the story about a night raid in Gardez by U.S. and Afghan forces (see the video above), and today those forces made a major admission about their responsibility for civilian deaths. In a press release issued on Easter (gee, I wonder if they hoped people would be distracted today), the U.S. and allied forces under General McChrystal’s command, International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), admitted they killed two innocent civilians and three women, two of them pregnant.


KABUL, Afghanistan (Apr. 4) – A thorough joint investigation into the events that occurred in the Gardez district of Paktiya Province Feb. 12, has determined that international forces were responsible for the deaths of three women who were in the same compound where two men were killed by the joint Afghan-international patrol searching for a Taliban insurgent.

The two men, who were later determined not to be insurgents, were shot and killed by the joint patrol after they showed what appeared to be hostile intent by being armed. While investigators could not conclusively determine how or when the women died, due to lack of forensic evidence, they concluded that the women were accidentally killed as a result of the joint force firing at the men.
Recall that on March 15, ISAF’s spokesperson, Rear Adm. Greg Smith, said:


"The women, I’m not sure anyone will ever know how they died." He added, however, "I don’t know that there are any forensics that show bullet penetrations of the women or blood from the women." He said they showed signs of puncture and slashing wounds from a knife, and appeared to have died several hours before the arrival of the assault force. In respect for Afghan customs, autopsies are not carried out on civilian victims, he said.
Now wait just a minute. NATO has strenuously denied any cover-up in this incident while smearing journalists who challenged their initial, untrue story. Yet somehow, we’ve gone from knowing enough about the condition of the bodies to say that there were puncture and slashing wounds from a knife to conclusions "that the women were accidentally killed as a result of the joint force firing at the men." NATO then expects you to believe that all the bad information in this story was due to "a lack of cultural understanding by the joint force and the chain of command."

Someone please explain to me the cultural misunderstanding responsible for Smith’s implication that women were killed by knife wounds when they were in fact killed by gunfire.

These are not errors of cultural understanding. They are intentional lies meant to allow someone to escape responsibility for killing three women, two of them pregnant. Smith was lying before when describing the bodies or repeating lies he was told. ISAF was perpetrating a cover-up, and Smith participated in it, either willingly or unwillingly. Until ISAF admits that they did, in fact, attempt to perpetrate a cover-up, they are still lying to you.

I said it last week and I’ll say it again:


Starkey’s reporting and ISAF’s reaction to it shows that their natural inclination to escape accountability remains strong and operative when they think they can get away with violent mistakes under the cover of darkness.
This incident shows why it’s important to push back against the ISAF/Pentagon message machine. If you want to help, a good way to start is to become a fan of Rethink Afghanistan on Facebook.








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U.S. Admits Cover-Up in February Killing of Afghan Women










Related

Pentagon's Collateral Murder: The Cover-Up of Killing Reporters and Coordinated Attacks on News Websites who Dare Report the Executions

U.S. and Allied Forces: We Killed Those Pregnant Afghan Women After All





More Related articles at end of story













New York Times


 
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
Published: April 4, 2010
 Feb. 12 operation — and what falsehoods followed — including a new report that Special Operations forces dug bullets out of the bodies of the women to hide the true nature of their deaths.
A NATO official also said Sunday in an interview that an Afghan-led team of investigators had found signs of evidence tampering at the scene, including the removal of bullets from walls near where the women were killed. A senior NATO official later denied on Monday that any evidence tampering occurred.
The disclosure could not come at a worse moment for the American military: NATO officials are struggling to contain fallout from a series of tirades against the foreign military presence by the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, who has also railed against the killing of civilians by Western forces.
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the American and NATO commander in Afghanistan, has tried hard, and with some success, to reduce civilian casualties through new rules that include restricting night raids and also bringing Special Operations forces under tighter control. But botched Special Operations attacks — which are blamed for a large proportion of the civilian deaths caused by NATO forces — continue to infuriate Afghans and create support for the Taliban.
NATO military officials had already admitted killing two innocent civilians — a district prosecutor and local police chief — during the raid, on a home near Gardez in southeastern Afghanistan. The two men were shot to death when they came out of their home, armed with Kalashnikov rifles, to investigate.
Three women also died that night at the same home: One was a pregnant mother of 10 and another was a pregnant mother of six. NATO military officials had suggested that the women were actually stabbed to death — or had died by some other means — hours before the raid, an explanation that implied that family members or others at the home might have killed them.
Survivors of the raid called that explanation a cover-up and insisted that American forces killed the women. Relatives and family friends said the bloody raid followed a party in honor of the birth of a grandson of the owner of the house.
On Sunday night the American-led military command in Kabul issued a statement admitting that “international forces” were responsible for the deaths of the women. Officials have previously stated that American Special Operations forces and Afghan forces conducted the operation.
The statement said that “investigators could not conclusively determine how or when the women died, due to lack of forensic evidence” but that they had nonetheless “concluded that the women were accidentally killed as a result of the joint force firing at the men.”
“We deeply regret the outcome of this operation, accept responsibility for our actions that night, and know that this loss will be felt forever by the families,” said Brig. Gen. Eric Tremblay, a spokesman for the NATO command in Kabul.
The admission was an abrupt about-face. In a statement soon after the raid, NATO had claimed that its raiding party had stumbled upon the “bodies of three women who had been tied up, gagged and killed” and hidden in a room in the house. Military officials had also said later that the bodies showed signs of puncture and slashing wounds from a knife, and that the women appeared to have been killed several hours before the raid.
And in what would be a scandalous turn to the investigation, The Times of London reported Sunday night that Afghan investigators also determined that American forces not only killed the women but had also “dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath” and then “washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened.”
A spokesman for the Afghan Interior Ministry, Zemary Bashary, said that he did not have any information about the Afghan investigation, which he said remained unfinished.
In an interview, a NATO official said the Afghan-led investigation team alerted American and NATO commanders that the inquiry had found signs of evidence tampering. A briefing was given by investigators to General McChrystal and other military officials in late March.
“There was evidence of tampering at the scene, walls being washed, bullets dug out of holes in the wall,” the NATO official said, adding that investigators “couldn’t find bullets from the wounds in the body.”
The investigators, the official said, “alluded to the fact that bullets were missing but did not discuss anything specific to that. Nothing pointed conclusively to the fact that our guys were the ones who tampered with the scene.”
On Monday, a senior NATO official denied that there was any effort to tamper with evidence.
“We have discovered no evidence in our investigation that any of our forces did anything to manipulate the evidence at the scene or the bodies,” said the deputy chief of staff for communications for General McChrystal, Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith.
Several bullets that were fired but had not struck either of the two men were removed from the walls, Admiral Smith said. But he said that was done “to make sure what kinds of rounds they were.”
NATO officials have also rejected allegations that the killings were covered up. But it was not immediately clear on Sunday night how troops who shot the women and later examined their bodies would not have recognized that it was their bullets that killed them.



Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed reporting.
A version of this article appeared in print on April 5, 2010, on page A4 of the New York edition.





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Pope Ratzinger and the Bushes: Two Peas In a Pedophile Protection Pod














A Newsday article from 2005 details the dirtbags, including Neil Bush, who served on Pope Ratzinger's 'ecumenical foundation' -- all protected from on 'High.' Also in 2005, Pope Rat asked US President [sic] George W. Bush to 'declare the pontiff immune from liability' in a lawsuit that accused him of conspiring to cover up the molestation of three boys by a seminarian in Texas. In September 2005, the U.S. asserted that the lawsuit should be dismissed, as the Pope enjoys immunity as head of state of the Holy See.



The New Pope Benedict XVI --Neil Bush, Ratzinger co-founders -- President's younger brother served with then-cardinal on board of relatively unknown ecumenical foundation By Knut Royce and Tom Brune, Washington (Newsday) April 21, 2005 Neil Bush, the president's controversial younger brother, six years ago joined the cardinal who this week became Pope Benedict XVI as a founding board member of a little known Swiss ecumenical foundation. The charter members of the board were all well-known international religious figures, except for Bush and his close friend and business partner, Jamal Daniel, whose family has extensive holdings in the United States and Switzerland, public records show. The Foundation for Interreligious and Intercultural Research and Dialogue was founded in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1999 to promote ecumenical understanding and publish original religious texts, said a foundation official. Besides then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, founding board members included Rene-Samuel Sirat, the former chief rabbi of France; Jordan's Prince Hassan, a Muslim dedicated to religious dialogue; the late Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, another prominent Muslim; Olivier Fatio, director of the Institute of the History of the Reformation; and foundation president Metropolitan Damaskinos, a Greek Orthodox leader. Gary Vachicouras, a theologian and foundation official in Geneva, would not explain in a telephone interview yesterday why Bush, who has no clear public connection to religious causes, was on the first board... In his highly publicized divorce last year, Bush revealed he and Daniel are co-chairs of Texas-based Crest Investment Co., which pays him $60,000 a year for consulting. Recently, Crest Investment officials used Bush's name as a reference in cutting an exclusive deal with Texas officials on construction of a liquid natural gas storage facility that will guarantee Crest payments of at least $2 million a year, according to the Los Angeles Times... The foundation, based at the Orthodox Center of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Geneva, is listed by Dun & Bradstreet business credit reports as a management trust for purposes other than education, religion, charity or research... Fatio, who left the board three years ago, said the foundation "never had any money." Vachicouras declined to discuss finances.






Pope seeks immunity over sex abuse suit (The Associated Press, The Sydney Morning Herald) 17 Aug 2005 Lawyers for Pope Benedict XVI have asked US President [sic] George W. Bush to declare the pontiff immune from liability in a lawsuit that accuses him of conspiring to cover up the molestation of three boys by a seminarian in Texas, court records show. The Vatican's embassy in Washington sent a diplomatic memo to the State Department on May 20 requesting the US government grant the pope immunity because he is a head of state, according to a May 26 motion submitted by the pope's lawyers in US District Court for the Southern Division of Texas in Houston. Joseph Ratzinger is named as a defendant in the civil lawsuit. Now Benedict XVI, he's accused of conspiring with the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston to cover up the abuse during the mid-1990s. The suit is seeking unspecified monetary damages. In Washington, US State Department spokeswoman Gerry Keener, said today that the pope already is considered a head of state and automatically has diplomatic immunity. Keener said Benedict doesn't have to ask for immunity and Bush doesn't have to grant it.



U.S. Government Says Pope Immune from Lawsuit By Nicole Winfield, Rome (The Associated Press, carried in Fort Worth Star-Telegram) 20 Sep 2005 The U.S. Justice Department has told a Texas court that a lawsuit accusing Pope Benedict XVI of conspiring to cover up the sexual molestation of three boys by a seminarian should be dismissed because the pontiff enjoys immunity as head of state of the Holy See. Assistant U.S. Attorney General Peter Keisler said in Monday's filing that allowing the lawsuit to proceed would be "incompatible with the United States' foreign policy interests." There was no immediate ruling from Judge Lee Rosenthal of the U.S. District Court for the southern district of Texas in Houston. However, U.S. courts have been bound by such "suggestion of immunity" motions submitted by the government, Keisler's filing says. A 1994 lawsuit against Pope John Paul II, also filed in Texas, was dismissed after the U.S. government filed a similar motion.



Pope 'led cover-up of child abuse by priests' (London Evening Standard) 30 Sep 2006 The Pope played a leading role in a systematic cover-up of child sex abuse by Roman Catholic priests, according to a shocking documentary to be screened by the BBC tonight. In 2001, while he was a cardinal, he issued a secret Vatican edict to Catholic bishops all over the world, instructing them to put the Church's interests ahead of child safety. The document recommended that rather than reporting sexual abuse to the relevant legal authorities, bishops should encourage the victim, witnesses and perpetrator not to talk about it. And, to keep victims quiet, it threatened that if they repeat the allegations they would be excommunicated.



Catholic Cardinal rejects sex abuse 'gossip' (BBC) 04 Apr 2010 A senior cardinal has said the Roman Catholic faithful will not be swayed by "petty gossip" about child sex-abuse allegations. Cardinal Angelo Sodano, dean of the College of Cardinals, made the remark in an unusual message of support to Pope Benedict XVI during Easter Mass. The Pope did not mention the scandal directly in his Easter address. He said humanity was suffering from a "profound crisis" and needed "spiritual and moral conversion".



Permanent URL for this article and updates: http://www.legitgov.org/price_pope_bushes_two_peas_050410.html








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