The story in yesterday morning’s Telegraph was unambiguous and damning:-

Old boy network is obstructing police investigation

An “old boy network” of officials is deliberately obstructing police investigating decades of alleged abuse at care homes in Jersey, according to the police officer who spearheaded the inquiry.

Deputy Chief Officer Lenny Harper angrily hit out at the figures who he says have engaged in a “day by day attack” on the inquiry team and the alleged victims of abuse at Haut de la Garenne and other island institutions.

In his most outspoken criticism of the Jersey authorities, Mr Harper told the Telegraph: “I can quite clearly say that the investigation is being held up. There are people on the island who just don’t want us going down the route of this inquiry.”

... More suspects would have been charged by now, said Mr Harper, if it hadn’t been for delays in the island’s legal system.

“We are walking through treacle at the moment,” he said. “One file has been with the Attorney General’s office since April 29 and it’s still showing no signs of moving at the moment. It’s been very frustrating.

“I don’t think they are involved in child abuse, it’s more like an old-boy network.

“The ordinary people of Jersey are overwhelmingly in favour of the inquiry, but how many expressions of support and sympathy for the victims have we heard from the politicians? None. They don’t do sympathy for the victims.”

This situation of the investigator obstructed at every turn by shadowy Establishment forces crops up with alarming regularity in large-scale child abuse cases.  In Jersey the obstruction takes the form largely of an official code of silence.  Since Jersey is a family holiday destination, one could charitably conclude that these are the machinations of a pack of Larry Vaughn types (Vaughn being the “don’t-rock-the-boat” Mayor of Amity artfully played by Murray Hamilton in both Jaws and Jaws 2: “I’m only trying to say that Amity is a summer town. We need summer dollars. Now, if the people can’t swim here, they’ll be glad to swim at the beaches of Cape Cod, the Hamptons, Long Island ...”)

Jersey, however, is a highly successful if no longer entirely off-shore banking centre.  Its wealthy residents are perfectly content to avoid prying eyes - indeed, that’s the whole point of being there.  There is, then, a darker materialism at work on the island than a mere interest in ice cream sales and beach balls, and this interest is surely what Harper means by “an old boy network”.  The implication for any revelations damaging to the zeitgeist of confidentiality, never mind allegations of child abuse, are plain.  There will all too probably be an outbreak of “official incompetence”.  As the News of the World reported on 13th July:-

An inside source told The News of the World: “There’s a strong suspicion that the files are being held on to until Lenny Harper goes and a new team is in place.

“No one will be surprised if the truth about what happened in the care home never surfaces and once more the evidence gets swept under the carpet.”

Lenny Harper has now gone from the enquiry.

Any British readers with a half-decent memory will remember Operation Ore, which was the UK end of the FBI’s Operation Avelanche.  Avelanche uncovered 7,272 British subscribers to a US child pornography site run by the Reedys in Fort Worth (Thomas Reedy was jailed last year for 1335 years).  Those implicated in the UK included lawyers and court officials, businessmen, civil servants, teachers, social workers ... and two “very senior” Labour Party politicians.  By January 2003 a familiar story was taking shape:-

Detective Chief Inspector Bob McLachlan, former head of Scotland Yard’s paedophile unit, told the Sunday Herald that the lack of urgency in making arrests will lead to suspects destroying evidence of downloading child pornography before they are arrested.

... McLachlan, who was one of the main officers on Operation Ore before his retirement last year, said: “Sufficient warnings have been given that if people haven’t got rid of their computers then they are either stupid, don’t believe they’ll be arrested or are so obsessive about their collections that they can’t destroy it. As time goes on, the chances of successful prosecutions will diminish with speed as the information out there must impact on the offenders.”

One does not have to look far for reasons.  Allegations had surfaced that the investigation had identified:-

a surprisingly large number of alleged paedophiles at the highest level of British government, including one very senior cabinet minister

Whether these were “black op” allegations against the Blair government we’ll never know.  But Blair responded by shutting down press interest, either by means of a voluntary agreement with the editors or a D-Notice.  Bob McLachlan’s investigation itself was guided into the long grass.

The case of Madeleine McCann is rife with suggestions that the Portugeuse police, led by Gonçalo Amaral, were Mayor Vaughans to a man.  Amaral was a hate figure in the British press, who described him as “sweaty” and “incompetent”.  His eventual departure from the enquiry was presented as an humiliation.  But, in fact, he was promoted from the post of officer in charge of criminal investigations in the Portimão area of the Algarve to Criminal Coordinator of two police division (Organized Crime and Drug Trafficking) covering the entire region.  So he must have been doing something right.  Except that, from the papers released by Portugeuse authorities last week, it is hardly clear that that really involved police work:-

MADELEINE McCann was stolen to order by a Belgian paedophile ring, Scotland Yard fears.

An email claims the gang “ordered” a young girl just three days before Maddie vanished.

A pervert saw her in Portugal, took her photo and sent it to the ring, who then approved her kidnap, an informant claimed. The email was sent by John Shord of the Met’s CO14 vice intelligence unit, to police in the McCanns’ home county of Leicestershire.

It was then passed on to Portuguese cops [but only 6 weeks later - Ed].

It states: “Intelligence suggests that a paedophile ring in Belgium made an order for a young girl three days before Madeleine McCann was taken.

Via Interpol the word came back from Belgium that some aspects of the information was “not credible”.  So ... the Portugeuse police, who seemed remarkably dedicated to exporting the crime to Robert Murat and, when that failed, to Madeleine’s parents, and who at all costs sought to avoid the conclusion that child abusers might be fastened on to the country’s tourism industry, were relying on a vigorous response from Belgian police to prove exactly that.

To no one’s surprise, The Sun reports:-

Responding to the Metropolitan Police intelligence, a spokesman for Belgium’s Federal Police said: “At this point we do not have any information such as that quoted in press reports.

“Our police, our missing person team, paedophile unit, are not aware of this information. We are checking with the British police.

“We find it all a bit strange. We are not aware and we have never found a paedophile network in Belgium that could order, sell or buy children like this.”

Well, Belgium.  Complex and troubling enough though the Madeleine case is, it is the adbuction of a single child.  The case of Marc Dutroux, however, reached levels of depravity that had not been seen before or since.  It would take a series of lengthy books to detail every aspect of the affair.  This is no mere tale of state interference with the investigation and unexplained judicial delay.  Allegations of participation of members of the very highest reaches of the Establishment ... assassination ... a cover-up that may have run to the serial murder of up to 20 witnesses ... it cut Belgian national life to the quick.  At the White March of 1996, hundreds of thousands of decent Belgians challenged the moral authority of the Establishment.

I cannot do anything like justice to it here.  But there is a comprehensive resource on the internet run by the Institute for the Study of Global and Covert Politics.  The web-pages drawn from the so-called X-Dossiers trawl far beyond the crimes for which Dutroux was eventually prosecuted.

Having read this far, American readers might be pondering the infamous case of the Franklin child abuse allegations and the suspected cover-up which followed.  The allegations involved the abduction of minors from care facilities in Nebraska.  They were, as Nebraska State Senator Ernie Chambers put it, “transported around the country by airplane to provide sexual favors” for senior Republicans in Washington DC.

A Grand Jury of the Nebraska state legislature was convened and, yes, found that the allegations were “a carefully-crafted hoax”.  That didn’t satisfy John W. DeCamp, a four-term Republican member of Nebraska Legislature, and an attorney involved in the investigations and court proceedings that arose from the case.  He continued his efforts to investigate the allegations, but found his path resolutely blocked at every turn.  His friend William Colby, the former CIA director and member of what, these days, is known as Le Cercle, urged him to drop his enquiries and write a book about his experiences instead:-

“What you have to understand, John, is that sometimes there are forces and events too big, too powerful, with so much at stake for other people or institutions, that you cannot do anything about them, no matter how evil or wrong they are and no matter how dedicated or sincere you are or how much evidence you have. This is simply one of the hard facts of life you have to face.”

The Franklin Cover-Up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska was published in May 1992.  Colby died in mysterious circumstances four years later.

Establishment motives in these cases - and they are by no means the only instances - are twofold.  Commonly, an Establishment moves against an investigation because it carries a serious threat to its interests (which might be political or financial).  This appears to be the case at Haut de la Garenne and Praia de luge, and in Operation Ore.  Establishments, as Deputy Chief Officer Lenny Harper observed, just don’t do sympathy for the victims.  And do please put away any thought of moral dilemma ... of the terrible decision to go soft on the horrors of paedophilia because of, say, “national interest” or some other “higher” interest.  Establishments are self-interested.  Ultimately, Lord Acton would understand why - the object of their lives is power, and their dominant desire is to retain the exercise of it.

But then there are the hard cases like Franklin and Dutroux where Establishment figures themselves are embroiled in abuse allegations.  Here the threat is much more immediate, and is to the Establishment’s moral legitimacy.  The retention of the exercise of power is still the key determinant.  It always is.  But the tide of filth in which the supposed miscreants have been indulging has risen to lap about the feet of everyone in and around government.  It’s guilt by association on steroids - no longer a case of “us the decent” and “them the depraved”.  The very nature of paedophile crime, so grotesque and unnatural, drives the wider Establishment to deny everything at any cost.

What more there might be ... whether the most heinous and inhuman of crimes really holds some talismanic significance for some members of the elites, I cannot say.  Generally, we perceive paedophiles to be lowly and repulsive little reptiles incapable of the emotional requirements of normal human relations.  Whilst they will be drawn to places where there are children, particularly parentless children, and so come into contact with one another, nonetheless they are concentrated far from wealth and power.  But this image of the lowly little reptile is wrong.  He is not representative of paedophiles.  He is representative only of those paedophiles who are apprehended and successfully prosecuted - the expendable paedophile.  Those who are numbered among the elites, and therefore above the law, remain at liberty to continue in their perversions.  And in extremis their benighted fellow elites, regardless of whether they are family men of unimpeachable moral character, will be forced to aid and abet them.