The Wichita Massacre
The news media are supposed to be watchdogs that bark loudly when serious crimes are committed, but we have learned over the years that there are many serious crimes that they choose to ignore. They refuse to investigate and report some because they don’t want to expose official cover-ups. Their refusal to report the evidence showing that Vincent Foster was murdered, that TWA Flight 800 was shot down and that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols had accomplices in the Oklahoma City bombing are examples of this. There are other crimes that the media tend to shy away from because they reflect negatively on protected minorities. In addition, horrible crimes may not be covered because many journalists are reluctant to report the degradation that lies at the foot of the slippery slope our society is now on. The combination of sex, torture and murder occurs all too often and escapes the attention it deserves.
On September 17, Court TV broke new ground, announcing that it would cover the trial of Jonathan and Reginald Carr, two black youths who were responsible for one of the most horrific of these crimes in recent years. With the publisher’s per-mission, here is a condensed version of an article by Stephen Webster in the August 2002 issue of American Renaissance.
Late on the night of Dec. 14, 2000, the Carr brothers broke into a home in Wichita, Kansas where three white men and two women, all in their 20’s, were sleeping. The men who roomed together were Jason Befort, a high school science teacher and coach, Bradley Heyka, a financial analyst, and Aaron Sander, who was studying for the priesthood. The women were Heather Muller, a church pre-school teacher and H.G., Befort’s fiancee, also a teacher. She was the only one to escape death that night. She is called H.G. in the police records for her protection.
Shortly after 11 p.m., two young blacks, Jonathan and Reginald Carr, somehow got into the house. Jonathan entered the bedroom where Befort and H.G. were sleeping and ripped the covers off the bed. His brother, Reginald, brought Aaron Sander at gunpoint in from the living room where he had been sleeping on a couch and threw him on the bed. They asked who else was in the house and were told that Heather Muller was in another bedroom and Bradley Heyka was in the basement. They were brought into Befort’s bedroom, and all five were forced to strip naked and get into a closet. One or two at a time were let out of the closet and ordered to perform sex acts on each other for the amusement of the Carrs or with one of the brothers. Sander was beaten with a golf club when he failed to perform.
At around midnight they asked the victims if they had ATM cards, and Reginald proceeded to take Heyka to a bank to withdraw money. While he was gone, Jonathan raped H.G. Reginald next took Jason Befort to the bank, while Jonathan raped Heather Muller. When Reginald returned, H.G. volunteered to go to the bank with him. He let her put on a sweater, but nothing else. When they got back, he raped her and forced her to perform oral sex. At one point, he told her, “Relax. I’m not going to kill you yet.” Jonathan again raped Miss Muller and H.G. They then ransacked the house, looking for money and valuables. They found the engagement ring that Befort had planned to give H. G. a week later.
Shortly after 2 a.m. they were all taken outside, naked, except for a sweater and a sweatshirt that the two women were allowed to wear. The temperature at midnight had been 15 degrees below freezing and the ground was covered with snow. The Carrs tried to force all five of them into the trunk of Aaron Sander’s Honda Accord, but that didn’t work. They put the three men in the trunk. Jonathan let Heather Muller ride with him in the car and Reginald took H.G. with him in Befort’s pickup truck. They drove to a nearby soccer field, where H.G. was ordered to sit with Heather in Sander’s Honda while the men were let out of the trunk and lined up in front of it. H.G. and Heather were then lined up with them. They were ordered to turn around and kneel in the snow.
“As I was kneeling, a gun shot went off,” H.G. said. She heard Aaron Sander pleading for his life before he was shot. She said that when she was shot she felt the bullet hit the back of her head. She said it didn’t knock her out and she didn’t fall forward until she was kicked. She then played dead. In her testimony she says, “I waited until I couldn’t hear anymore. Then I turned my head and saw lights going. I looked at everyone. Everyone was face down. Jason was next to me. I rolled him over. Blood was squirting everywhere, so I took my sweater off and tied it on his head to try and stop it. Blood was coming out of his eyes.”
In the distance, H.G. saw Christmas lights. Barefoot and naked, with a bullet wound in the head, she managed to walk more than a mile in the freezing cold, through snow, across a field and construction site, around a pond, and through the brush, until she reached the house with the lights. She pounded frantically on the door and rang the doorbell until the young married couple who lived there woke up. “Help me, help me, help me,” she pleaded. “We’ve all been shot. Three of my friends are dead.” (H.G. thought her boyfriend was still alive.)
The couple wrapped H.G. in blankets, and reached for the phone to dial 911, but she would not let them call. She was afraid she would die, and wanted to tell what had happened. She described the attackers and what they did, as the couple listened in amazement at her courage and determination. Only when she was sure they knew her story did she let them call the police. Still thinking she would die, she asked them to call her mother-“Tell her I love her”-and her boyfriend’s parents. She was worried about the children she teaches, and kept wondering, “Who’s going to take care of the kids in school?”
H.G.’S Evidence Nails The Killers
When the police arrived they questioned H.G. briefly before paramedics took her to the hospital. From her description of Mr. Befort’s truck, they were able to get the license plate number from the vehicle’s registration records, and put out an alert. As dawn broke, radio and television stations were broadcasting the plate number. The Carrs had driven the truck back to the house and loaded it with everything of value they could find.
By 7:30 a.m., police had a report that the missing truck was outside a downtown apartment building, and that a black man had been carrying a television set up to one of the apartments. The police moved in to seal off the area. Two officers knocked on the door of the apartment, and after several minutes a white woman named Stephanie Donly opened the door. She was Reginald Carr’s girlfriend, and shared her apartment with him. Police caught Mr. Carr as he tried to slip out a window. The police learned from Miss Donly that Reginald’s brother Jonathan was driving a late model Plymouth Fury. Shortly after 12:00 p.m. they found the car parked outside a house in a black part of town. Jonathan Carr was there with his girlfriend of a few days, Tronda Green. He bolted when he saw the police, but was caught after a short chase. Fewer than 12 hours after the murders, Reginald and Jonathan Carr were both in custody.
That night’s quadruple murder was only the most gruesome of a series of Carr brother attacks. Just one week earlier Andrew Schreiber, a 23-year-old white man, stopped at a convenience store in E. Wichita. Reginald and Jonathan Carr forced themselves into his car at gunpoint and made Schreiber drive to various ATM machines and withdraw money. “I was just hoping if I did what they said, they’d let me live,” he says. The two split up, and one followed in another car as they made him drive to a field northeast of town. There they pistol-whipped him, dumped him out of the car, and fled in the other vehicle after shooting out his tires.
Four days later, the Carrs tried to hijack 55-year-old Linda Walenta’s SUV while she sat in it in the driveway of her suburban East Wichita home. The Carrs were looking for an SUV in which to drive people at gunpoint to ATMs. They thought they could keep their victims out of sight in a large vehicle as they drove through town. One of the brothers approached Mrs. Walenta, apparently asking for help of some kind. She was suspicious because she thought a car had been following her and rolled her window down just a little to hear what he was saying. He stuck a gun sideways into the opening, and shot her several times as she tried to drive away. Mrs. Walenta, a cellist in the Wichita Symphony Orchestra, survived the shooting but was paralyzed from the waist down. She was able to help police in their investigation, but she died of her wounds on January 2, 2001.
Wichita police confirmed the Carr link to all the crimes when a highway worker found a black .380 caliber Lorcin semi-automatic handgun along Route 96, a highway near the soccer field where the massacre took place. The Kansas state crime lab confirmed that it was the weapon used to kill Mrs. Walenta and H.G.’s friends, and to shoot out the tires of Andrew Schreiber’s car. No one knows what other crimes the brothers may have committed, but they certainly appeared guilty of these.
DIRKHISING'S DEATH BY DEBAUCHERY
September 26 was the third anniversary of the murder of 13-year-old Jesse Dirkhising in Rogers, Arkansas by two homosexuals. Jesse was found lying face-down on a mattress with his legs bound with belts and duct tape and his arms taped to the mattress. Pillows had been placed under his abdomen to raise his buttocks to facilitate his sodomization. His briefs had been stuffed in his mouth, secured by duct tape. His undershirt had been put over his head. He died of asphyxiation after having been tortured, raped and sodomized over a period of several hours. Joshua Brown, 22, and Davis Carpenter, 38, were charged with capital murder and six counts of rape. The prosecutor said that what he saw in their apartment was perhaps the most horrific thing he had witnessed in his career.
The Associated Press gave the story only regional distribution. On Oct. 22, the Washington Times ran a story on its front page. The AP then reported the murder on its national wire on Oct. 29. The Washington Post, which had run over 80 stories about the murder of Matthew Shepard, a homosexual college student in Wyoming, ran 57 words from the AP story about Jesse Dirkhising. That was better than most of the print and electronic media. A Nexis search found only 176 stories about Dirkhising in 1999 and over 3,000 stories about Matthew Shepard in the month after his murder in 1998.
The Dirkhising story made national news again with the trial and conviction of Joshua Brown on the charge of first-degree murder on March 22. He and Carpenter are serving life sentences without possibility of parole. Only three out-of-state newspapers reported the trial. The Washington Times used Arkansas Democrat-Gazette stories. The others were the Memphis Commercial Appeal and the Tulsa World, which used AP stories. In addition to reporting Brown’s conviction on page one, the Washington Times ran a 1,200-word story by Robert McCain about the double standard in the coverage of stories like this.
The media deny there is a double standard. A spokesman for ABC News called it “a local crime story that does not raise the kind of issues that would warrant our coverage.” Sandy Genelius, speaking for CBS News, said, “Obviously we can’t cover every story that happens in this country every day, so each day we make an editorial judgment, and on the days when (the Dirkhising murder) story was unfolding the overall editorial judgment was that it couldn’t fit into the broadcast that day.” Addressing the question in 1999, Jonathan Gregg on “Time on Line” came up with this rationalization: “The reason the Dirkhising story received so little play is because it offered no lessons. Shepard’s murder touches on a host of complex and timely issues: intolerance, society’s attitudes toward gays and the pressure to conform, the use of violence as a means of confronting one’s own demons. Jesse Dirkhising’s death gives us nothing except the depravity of two sick men. There is no lesson here, no moral of tolerance, no hope to be gleaned in the punishment of the perpetrators.”
Wrong! There are very important lessons to be learned from the Dirkhising case. One is that the homosexual lifestyle frequently involves practices that are disgusting and dangerous. Josh Brown and Davis Carpenter, the killers of Jesse Dirkhising, were just doing what Carpenter, who is thirty-eight years old, had been doing for years-inflicting physical pain on others for kicks. Sadomasochism is celebrated in homosexual literature and art. There is a tendency to try extreme perversions in search of thrills. One, called “golden showers,” is urinating on a partner. Another, called “fisting,” is using one’s hand to sodomize a partner. In Jesse Dirkhising’s case, his tormentors used cucumbers, a banana, a sausage and a douche bottle. These practices are shown in the celebrated Mapplethorpe photos. During the 1993 Gay Rights March on Washington, an exhibit in the Mellon Auditorium, a federal building, featured whips, chains, bondage devices and electric cattle prods as instruments of sexual pleasure. Homosexuals have argued that consensual rough sex that results in death should not be treated as a crime.
Not all homosexuals engage in all of these practices and not all of them have sex with young boys, but the revelations of wide-spread pedophilia among Catholic priests shows that many do. The North American Man-Boy Love Association wants to make this legal, and efforts are being made to get schools to teach children that homosexuality is normal and nice. The death of Jesse Dirkhising shows that is false. That is why it was ignored.
A case very damaging to the homosexual cause that could not be ignored by the media was the recent conviction in Pensacola, Florida of two young boys of killing their father, Terry King, after they came under the influence of a convicted pedophile, Ricky Marvin Chavis, 40, who was having sex with Alex King, age 13. Alex wrote a note in which he said, “Before I met Rick I was strate (sic) but now I am gay.” He and his brother, Derek, 14, bludgeoned their father to death and set the house on fire. The prosecutor claimed they were encouraged to do so by Chavis. He is to be tried as an accessory to Terry King’s murder and for sexually molesting Alex. The boys wanted to get rid of their father so they could live with Chavis.
On January 9, 2002, Ashley Pond, age 12, left home for her classes at the Gardiner Middle School in Oregon City, but she never arrived. Two months later, on March 7, her neighbor, classmate and friend, Miranda Gaddis, also vanished on her way to the same school. Oregon City is near Portland, Oregon, and the disappearance of the two girls was a big story in the state. But compared to the abduction of Elizabeth Smart from her home in Salt Lake City, the amount of media coverage nationally was minuscule. A Nexis search found only 18 stories about Ashley Pond’s disappearance from January 16 to March 8 when the first report on Miranda Gaddis having vanished made the papers. That greatly increased media interest. From January through March 25, Nexis found about 200 stories, but still very few outside the area.
The reason for the difference in the news media’s coverage of the Smart abduction and the disappearance of Ashley Pond and Miranda Gaddis is obvious. Elizabeth Smart’s parents are very wealthy and live in an expensive home in an upper-class neighborhood. They are also devout Mormons, a church that imposes strict moral standards on its members.
Ashley Pond and Miranda Gaddis came from poor homes and parents with backgrounds of degradation that are shocking. Ashley’s mother, Lori Pond is an alcoholic who has had four children by different fathers and has seldom had a job. She was only 16 when Ashley was born. She married David Pond, but the marriage broke up when Ashley was seven. David Pond, fighting child-support payments, took a paternity test. It turned out that her biological father was Wesley J. Roettger, Jr. Arrangements were made for Ashley to visit him on weekends. Steve Duin, a columnist for the Portland Oregonian, says that “what happened on those weekend visits produced a 40-count indictment, including 20 counts of rape and 20 more of sodomy. ” Duin says the case never went to trial and that Roettger pleaded no contest to one count of attempted unlawful sexual penetration. He was let off with 10 years’ probation.
The deputy district attorney explained, “There were significant changes in the nature of our case.” It turned out that Ashley had claimed Roettger was not the only man who had sexually abused her and that she had been molested by at least two other adults. One of them was Ward Weaver III, a friend of her mother’s. Weaver’s daughter was a friend of Ashley’s, and Ashley frequently stayed at the Weaver house when she quarreled with her mother. She had also taken a trip with Weaver and his daughter to California in the summer of 2001. She told her mother that Weaver had sexually molested her on that trip. Ashley’s mother mentioned this in an interview with KATU-TV in Portland. She admitted that she had done nothing to verify the allegation. She said, “Nothing came of it, but I was there for her, and I told her that I’d be there if she needed to talk about it.”
If she had reported this to the police, Weaver might have been imprisoned and the lives of Ashley and Miranda might have been spared, because Ward Weaver has turned out to be their killer. After Ashley vanished, Weaver told the Oregonian that he was one of nine men that Ashley said sexually abused her. He said he learned this when he and Lori Pond took Ashley to the district attorney’s office that summer “before one of her court hearings.” Rather than have this come out in court, the district attorney decided to let Roettger plead guilty to a lesser offense.
Miranda's Life No Bowl Of Cherries
Miranda’s father was Jason R. Gaddis, who served 19 months in prison after being convicted on six counts of rape and custodial interference involving minor girls in 1994. They did not involve Miranda. Her mother, Michelle Duffey, found a new boyfriend named Brett. E. McEnnaney. He had completed 10 grades of school without learning how to read. He was indicted in 1999 on 22 counts of sexual abuse involving Miranda and two other girls. He was convicted of three counts of abuse and one count of criminal mistreatment. He is currently serving time in the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution.
Steve Duin reported that Miranda had been taken from her mother, Michelle Duffey, because she was being sexually abused. For a year and a half she lived with a foster mother who was very fond of her. She hoped to adopt Miranda, but the state, in its wisdom, sent her back to Michelle Duffey. The foster mother described Miranda as “amazingly together, considering all she’d been through in her life....She told me everything she’d been through. She was very open about her past, way too open. All the kids at school knew everything that had happened to her. She talked incessantly, but it was almost like talking about a third person, like it happened to someone else, so it didn’t really hurt.” Miranda’s foster mother lived in Lake Oswego for five months, and she told Steve Duin that Miranda had been deeply involved in the Lake Bible Church. “Her faith held her together,” her foster mother argues.
Ward Weaver III, who was arrested for the rape of his son’s girlfriend on August 13, had not been charged with the murders of Ashley Pond and Miranda Gaddis when this report was written. His father is in prison on death row in California, charged with the fatal beating of Robert Radford, 18, and raping and killing Radford’s fiancée, Barbara Levoy, 23. The Oregonian says that he first buried Levoy before digging a grave for her behind his home. His son, Rodney, who was 10 years old at the time, helped dig the grave and cover it with cement. If the FBI and the police who were investigating the murders of Ashley and Miranda had known this, they might have found the bodies of the two young girls a lot sooner than they did. Weaver copied his father’s handling of at least one of the bodies, even to the point of having one of his young sons help him dig the hole and pour the cement slab that covered up Ashley Pond’s body. Miranda Gaddis’s body was found in a shed in his backyard.
Weaver’s ex-wife, Kristi Sloan, told Connie Chung in an inter-view aired on CNN on August 27 that three days after Miranda Gaddis vanished, a hole was dug and filled with cement in back of Weaver’s house. She claimed she had told the FBI to search the back yard and they did not do it. The Oregonian said that in June she told them to search a remote campground that Weaver liked, and they did so. It is unlikely they would have disregarded what she claims she told them about searching the back yard.
Weaver’s 19-year-old son, Francis, was living with his father at the time of the murders. In the early days after the girls vanished, he maintained that his father would never have murdered them. He changed his mind after his father raped his 19-year-old girlfriend and was arrested on Aug. 13. Francis then called 911 and said his father had admitted that he had killed Ashley and Miranda. This is what sparked the investigation of Weaver’s back yard. Ten days later, on Aug. 23 at 11:20 p.m., the FBI revealed that they had obtained a warrant to search Weaver’s property. They promptly put up cyclone fencing around the house and taped off the shed and the concrete slab. The next morning, they found Miranda’s remains in the shed and Ashley’s remains under the slab.
Steve Duin summed up the criticism of the investigation in a column on Aug. 27. He said, “The FBI’s Charles Mathews noted in early August that from eight to 12 investigators were working on the case each day. All that effort failed to produce a compelling argument to search Weaver’s property until after he was charged with raping his son’s girlfriend. Maybe investigators weren’t clueless until the bitter end. There may very well be a coherent, reasonable explanation for what they’ve been doing for the last seven months. But given all that caution, it may just be dumb luck another body didn’t end up buried without the proper gravestone in Weaver’s back yard.”
Perhaps things would have been speeded up if the national media had given this story as much attention as they gave to the abduction of Elizabeth Smart. But that would have involved exposing the sexual degradation and violence that has resulted from liberal culture’s successful war on traditional values.
What You Can Do Send the enclosed cards or your own cards or letters to Chris Albrecht, Chairman and CEO of Home Box Office (HBO), and Fred Graham, Chief Anchor and Managing Editor of Court TV.
NOTES FROM THE EDITOR'S CUFF BY
By Reed Irvine
THE MEDIA ARE NOT EAGER TO REPORT THE ULTIMATE DEGRADATION THAT LIES NEAR the foot of the slippery slope our society is now on. The depravity of sex, torture and murder that occurs all too often in our society often escapes the attention it must get if it is to be curbed. Court TV has just announced that it will cover the trial of Jonathan and Reginald Carr, two black thugs who broke into a home in Wichita at about 11 p.m. on Dec. 14, 2000. They rousted three young white men and two young women out of their beds, forcing them to perform various sex acts on each other. They repeatedly raped the women. They took three of their victims out naked in the freezing weather, to have them withdraw money from ATMs. At about 2 a.m. they took all five, the men completely naked and the women naked from the waist down, to a snow-covered field with the temperature 15 degrees below freezing, and shot them all, execution-style.
MIRACULOUSLY, ONE OF THE WOMEN SURVIVED EVEN THOUGH SHE WAS HIT IN THE head by a bullet that apparently ricocheted off. For her protection she has been referred to as H.G. in all the official documents that have been made public. H.G. played dead and when the killers left, she managed to walk naked and barefoot through the snow, making it to a house about a mile away, where she aroused the owners. They took her in, heard her story and called 911. The Carr brothers were captured the next morning. Thanks to Court TV these murders will now get the national exposure they should have had at the time. The race of the killers may explain why the story was so uniformly ignored by the national media. What they did to their victims is so revolting that the judge seems to want to minimize discussion of it at the trial.
THE ARTICLE IN AMERICAN RENAISSANCE WHICH WE CONDENSED FOR THIS REPORT discusses why this should be regarded as a hate crime and why the national media ignored it. The author, Stephen Webster, contrasts the coverage with the attention given to the death by dragging of James Byrd, who was black, in Texas three years ago. I don’t think there is much doubt that if the Carr brothers had been white and their victims black it would be called a hate crime and the coverage would have been comparable, if not exceeding, to that given to the terrible murder of James Byrd. Webster also raises some questions about the submissiveness of the victims in the Wichita massacre. They apparently did everything they were ordered to do, no matter how offensive or degrading it was. We don’t know all the circumstances, but it would seem that five young men and women might have had opportunities to overpower their captors, especially when one of thugs was out collecting money from ATM machines and his partner was busy raping one of the women. Publicizing the case widely would teach others that it was a huge mistake to assume that their lives would be spared if they did what they were told to do. It would also show that encouraging law-abiding citizens to own handguns and learn how to use them in their own defense can save lives.
A THIRD LESSON THAT CAN BE LEARNED FROM THIS CASE IS THAT SOMETHING NEEDS TO be done about the terrible violence-inciting “music” that teaches blacks to hate whites and glorifies the kind of violence that the two black brothers inflicted on their white victims. Have you ever read the lyrics of the “music” that you may hear blaring from a car stopped alongside you as you wait for the light to change? Here are two examples of the lyrics that could have influenced the Carr brothers. They can be accessed through the American Renaissance Web site, www.amren.com. “Niggas in the church say: kill whitey all night long. . . . the white man is the devil. . . . the CRIPS and Bloods are soldiers I’m recruiting with no dispute; drive-by shooting on this white genetic mutant. . . . let’s go and kill some rednecks. . . . . I got the .380; the homies think I’m crazy because I shot a white baby; I said; I said; I said: kill whitey all night long.”
“It’s open season on crackers, you know; the morgue will be full of Caucasian John Does....Allah have mercy; I’m killing them devils because they’re not worthy to walk the earth with the original black man; they must be forgetting; it’s time for Armageddon, and I won’t rest until they’re all dead.”
TEN YEARS AGO, CHARLTON HESTON PROTESTED THIS TYPE OF “MUSIC” AT THE TIME Warner Annual meeting. He said, “I’m here to condemn this company’s response to the growing clamor across the country against Body Count, the CD Time Warner released some weeks ago....I condemn the irresponsible officials of this company. After police groups across the country, the President of the United States, members of Congress, and major religious and media figures protested Body Count, Time Warner shipped CDs to disc jockeys in miniature black plastic body bags. Isn’t that cute?....In the end, of course, the buck stops at the top. At Gerald Levin.” He shocked President Levin, the directors and the shareholders by reading some of the vile lyrics by Ice-T, including one that described his sodomizing Tipper Gore’s 12-year-old niece.
THE MURDER OF JESSE DIRKHISING, 13, THREE YEARS AGO BY TWO ADULT HOMOSEXUALS who used him to satisfy their sadistic appetites was also virtually ignored by the media outside of Arkansas and neighboring states. This gruesome death provided an occasion to alert parents and society to the danger of letting young boys associate with adult homosexuals, but the journalists did not see it that way. The influence of homosexuals in the media today is very strong. We see this in the efforts of many newspapers and television and radio to stigmatize the Boy Scouts for rejecting homosexuals as scoutmasters and the strong support by many in the media for allowing homosexual men to adopt boys. Even Bill O’Reilly of Fox News thinks it is better for boys to be raised by two “loving” homosexuals than not to be adopted by anyone. He seems to overlook the fact that a far better option is finding heterosexual foster parents for children who are not adopted. The only way homosexuals can sustain or increase their numbers is by recruiting young boys, and it is hard to believe that two homosexual men or two lesbians would think it improper or wrong to introduce children they have adopted to homosexual practices. Who is to stop them from doing so? Those men who find sodomy, fisting and golden showers enjoyable are not likely to teach their adopted or borrowed boys that such practices are repugnant.
THE OREGON CITY MURDERS OF ASHLEY POND AND MIRANDA GADDIS REVEAL THAT incest, which I have always thought was unthinkable, is commonplace in some circles. I had never heard of it when I was a child growing up during the depression on the wrong side of the tracks. It is hard for me to understand how 12-year-old girls can tell their friends in school about their being sexually abused by their fathers. Why wouldn’t they tell their teachers or someone in authority who could put a stop to it? Could it be because our society has embraced sex education (including, in Massachusetts, instruction on the mechanics of homosexual sex) and accepted entertainment in the form of movies, television, radio, magazines, books and music that rob children of their innocence at an early age? Human beings by nature find forbidden fruit tempting and it appears that we are now on the road to eliminating rape and incest as taboos. In the cases discussed in this report, forced degradation, torture and murder were the ultimate forbidden fruit. Charlton Heston as Moses parted the Red Sea, but as a Time Warner shareholder, his bold effort to stop the tide of filthy entertainment succeeded only in getting one CD withdrawn and one performer, Ice-T, dropped by Time Warner. We need another Moses and another miracle if we are ever going to slow down or halt our slide down this very slippery slope.
SCOTT RITTER WAS INTERVIEWED ON C-SPAN ON SEPT. 16, SHOWING HIS GREAT SATISFACTION with the letter from Iraq that had just been made public that agreed to letting weapons inspectors back in. Rep. Nick J. Rahall II, a West Virginia Democrat, had a short article on the op-ed page of the New York Times eight days later, describing his mission to Iraq to inform Saddam Hussein that he would have to permit “unconditional and unfettered” access by U.N. weapons inspectors if he wanted to avoid devastation of his country. Rahall was part of a delegation sponsored by the leftist Institute for Public Accuracy, which Ritter admitted was also reimbursing him for the expenses he incurred on his trip. The treatment Rahall got in Baghdad was just the opposite of Ritter’s. Rahall said he found that V.I.P. treatment meant the last ones through security. Their satellite phone was confiscated and his speech to the Iraqi national assembly was canceled. He couldn’t see Saddam to deliver his message. All this because he and the others declined to visit a facility that had been identified as a possible nuclear weapons factory. The foreign ministry wanted to take them there and prove that the charges were false. Rahall said he declined to go because he was not a weapons inspector and was not going to vouch for anyone’s innocence. Ritter’s credibility was not helped by his C-SPAN interview. He denied saying the opposite of what he said in his 1998 testimony even when confronted with the transcript. After saying the trip was on “my penny,” he said he had help from the IPA and others.