Cardinal Pell: What’s Wrong with this Picture?

By James Shanahan, 22 February 2016

On the evening of Friday the 19th of February, the Herald-Sun of Melbourne broke the story that Victoria Police was investigating Cardinal George Pell for alleged sexual offences against a number of boys over many years.

From discussions with others who have an intimate knowledge of how these institutions can covertly operate, I have distilled the main problems within the story as presented in the media down to four suspicious circumstances.

Suspicious circumstance #1

The story was published on Friday evening which is a traditional time for governments and other institutions to break stories that they particularly want to control the narrative of. In other words, they want to control the meaning the public draws from the information provided.

The reason, briefly, is that people are not at work for over two days and are less likely to hear questions asked about the inconsistencies in the presented story. (If a story contains falsehoods, it will necessarily contain inconsistencies or contradictions).  On the weekend, we tend to mix with friends and families who tend to, by and large, think as we do. So our thinking is less likely to be challenged as might happen in a commercial environment where all sorts of people are brought together for reasons other than friendship or like-mindedness. Therefore, in the absence of challenges from people we know but do not necessarily think like, we are more likely to accept the official narrative as it comes to us via the media.

Social media is breaking this tendency down somewhat and may account for the shift in timing from Friday afternoon to Friday evening in later years.  But, never-the-less, whoever is controlling the official story is more likely to prevail if the story breaks late on Friday than at any other time during the working week.

Still, the timing could be quite innocent or incidental. One brick does not make a wall but it does contribute to it if there are other bricks. And there are other bricks.

Suspicious circumstance #2

The story was published complete with a lengthy statement from the Church rebutting the allegations. The statement was presumably drafted by the church’s lawyers.

Now anyone who has had anything to do with lawyers knows that they are never in a hurry because time to them equates to money from us. So the church’s lawyers would have taken some days to draft and approve this statement and because it was released to the public with the ‘leaked’ story, this means that the church had advance notice by some days of the impending publication.

So why didn’t the church’s lawyers move for a court injunction to be placed on the story to prevent publication? The law was probably being broken, after all (more on that below). Hmmm?

If an injunction was sought from the court, it would be hard to keep that information away from the public. So, it is very likely that no injunction was sought on behalf of the Catholic Church and/or George Pell because we have heard nothing of it. Also, if an injunction had been sought from the court and it had been refused, this simple fact would have supported the church’s claim that Pell’s legal rights were being compromised not only by the media but also by the court itself and the church would have undoubtedly publicised that fact.

To not seek an injunction would be the mark of incompetence if not professional negligence on the lawyers’ part, surely?  Plus, Pell would have had to have been ‘asleep at the wheel’ during all this. That is most unlikely!

So we can safely say that Pell and his lawyers knew this story was about to break yet they deliberately did nothing to stop it. Curious, no?

Suspicious circumstance #3

Any journalist writing about the alleged criminal activity of a public figure who has access to the financial and legal resources that Pell has will be exceedingly careful in what they say. They will make sure they can back up what they allege with solid facts and credible sources. Hearsay will not cut the mustard here. That would be a recipe for a legal disaster.

Any journalist in this position will want to be covered within their own organisation and will want an editor’s approval of every word written. Similarly, any editor faced with this sort of situation and wanting to keep their job will insist on approving anything published and will want to run the story past their in-house legal counsel beforehand. These are serious charges with serious implications.

Any competent legal counsel will insist on the establishing of facts from an authoritative and knowledgeable source – someone who is directly involved and can vouch for the facts from personal experience and, what is more, will be accepted by a court as a knowledgeable and credible source, a primary witness, should it ever come to that.

It is also quite possible that any in-house legal counsel would seek an external legal opinion to cover themselves.

So, we can say with confidence that the most likely (and possibly the only) source for the leaked information is someone directly involved with the police investigation and that doesn’t leave anyone outside the SANO squad except for perhaps a responsible superior in the chain of command within Victoria Police. No one else, I contend, is going to be acceptable to the newspaper’s legal counsel.

Suspicious circumstance #4

It is illegal for a police officer to pass information about an investigation to the media. A former head of the Sexual Crimes Squad (from which the SANO squad was formed), Det. Insp. Glenn Davies found himself facing the Melbourne Magistrates court a few years ago after leaking information about an ongoing investigation into sexual abuse to the press. He was suspended and later resigned.  It cost him his career.

So it cannot be claimed that the police involved with the investigation into Pell would be ignorant of the fact that they would be breaking the law by talking to the media about this investigation. Nor that they thought the law would not be enforced. It is reasonable to assume, then, that any talkative officer would expect there to be a subsequent investigation especially when someone as high profile as Pell is involved. And, indeed, Pell has demanded just such an investigation into this leak.

Under what circumstances, then, could a police officer be induced to talk to the media which could easily cost them their job at least? The only reasonable possibility that comes to my mind is that this officer was assured that there would be no comebacks; that they would have political cover and that they would be rewarded for doing so.

But how could that be so? The only way that could be so is if there is, indeed, a thoroughly corrupt system or network in place which can afford police, legal and political protection to ‘the leaker’. A system as I outlined in my previous article.

Summary and possible conclusion

– We have the curious timing of the release of the story by the media. This timing is associated with manipulating public perception.

– We have the curious conundrum of the church being informed days and possibly weeks ahead of the story breaking but did not move to stop the story from being published.

– We have been able to deduce that the only possible source that would be acceptable to the newspaper’s legal counsel would be someone directly involved with the investigation because otherwise the journalist would be relying on hearsay which will not protect them or the newspaper in any subsequent law suit.

– We have made the case that the informant must be connected directly with the investigation and that this person would be fully conversant with the fact that they were breaking the law and risking their job and possibly their liberty. Therefore they must have been confident that they would not be the subject of any resulting inquiry into the illegal leak (assuming there is an inquiry at all). That assurance can only come from that officer’s superiors; superiors that are part of a corrupt and widespread network that can put those assurances into effect.

There is a principle in logic that is known as “Occam’s Razor” named after a monk and philosopher from many centuries ago, William of Occam. Occam’s Razor states that the simplest scenario that fits all the known facts is the most likely of all the possible scenarios or explanations to be the truth.

Following on from that, the simplest scenario that I can think of to explain all these very curious facts is that senior members of the church, the police and the media have all co-ordinated their efforts to present the story as published. We, the public, are being treated to a piece of orchestrated theatre…as usual.

For the article as published to be the result of simple mistakes or incompetence rather than by deliberate design, one would have to accept that a very long line of incompetent decisions was necessary. A major point concerning incompetence is that it is random. Even an idiot gets it right sometimes. Economists, for instance, have historically a 50% success rate with their predictions.

But we are faced with 100% consistency in the decisions that led to the publication of the newspaper article in question. It would have taken only one alternative decision from only one of the actors to stop the publication. But we didn’t see that. What we saw was a totally consistent pattern that goes way beyond the parameters of incompetence into the field of deliberate and co-ordinated corruption. This necessarily implies that very senior people within the institutions involved were responsible for the co-ordination of these decisions across their organisations.

It is very possible that the media personnel involved would not be aware of all the machinations engaged in by the police and the church but the question now is: Why would the church and the police be part of this deliberate leaking of apparently damning information?

But before you go there, I would ask you, the reader, to spend some time contemplating the above facts and the connecting logic. Look for holes in the reasoning. If you find any, please leave a comment for me to consider and reply to. If you cannot find any gaps in the reasoning, would you consider that you are looking at the truth however uncomfortable that might be?

The above article has been an exercise in inductive logic. A scenario or concept has been built up using directly observable facts, the non-contradictory implications of those facts and fitted into and consistent with our wider global knowledge-base such as legal requirements, bureaucratic chain-of-command practices and basic human psychology as it applies to ‘cover-your-arse’ strategies. There is also the long history of apparent police protection of criminals within the Catholic Church through a never ending series of botched police investigations.

Inductively, we have established that the church was almost certainly involved in the leaking of the story by the media.  It is important to let this information ‘settle’ before you move onto ‘why’.

We have been trained, especially by the media, to ingest ‘facts’ followed by an explanation as to the ‘why’. We are repeatedly presented with scandalous facts and then told what those facts mean. In other words, we are used to going from data to conclusions and completely skipping the necessary in-between step of the logic that connects the facts together in a non-contradictory manner and also connects those facts to the conclusion (also in a non-contradictory manner).

The result of this conditioning is that we are unused to following the form of critical thinking and if we don’t like the conclusion that is presented, we often, in a knee-jerk fashion, dismiss the ‘facts’ of the matter, saying, “it can’t be true”. It is easy to do that when we are not in possession of the logic which will contest this throwing away of the facts.

As I said at the conclusion of my previous article, A Case of Ritual Abuse and It’s Meaning for Society, “the Truth is in front of our physical eyes, as always. We just need our mind’s eye to see it for what it is”.  Seeing things for what they are in our deceptive society requires exercising our minds.

We need to practice working out the meaning for ourselves rather than accepting what we are being fed. We need to think our way through the repetitive and ubiquitous message from ‘authorities’ which may be paraphrased as –

“Who are you going to believe? What we tell you or your own lying eyes?”