NEWS from the USA and CANADA

More than 500 people allegedly abused by Los Angeles Catholic priests are to receive a record-breaking compensation pay-out, their main lawyer says. The deal, which a judge must approve, is reported to be worth $660m (£324m). With the alleged abuse dating back to the 1940s, lawyer Ray Boucher said it was payment of a long overdue debt. Cardinal Roger Mahony, the leader of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, later apologised to the victims, pledging that the abuse "will not happen again. There really is no way to go back and give them that innocence that was taken from them. The one thing I wish I could give the victims ... I cannot," Cardinal Mahony said.

'Transparency critical'

It would be the largest payment by the US Church since the abuse became public in 2002 and just before a series of trials into sex claims were to begin. The agreement, if approved, will settle all 15 upcoming paedophilia trials against Los Angeles archdiocese and avoids the threat of Cardinal Mahony being forced to testify about how the Church dealt with abuses spanning the 1940s to 1990s. Los Angeles diocese records released in the past revealed that for decades priests accused of child sex abuse were simply moved to new assignments or provided with therapy, Church leaders believing that they could be rehabilitated.

This latest settlement calls for the release of confidential priest personnel files, Mr Boucher said. "Transparency is a critical part of this and of all resolutions," he said. Steven Sanchez, a plaintiff in the case, said he was both relieved and disappointed by the outcome. "I was really emotionally ready to take on the archdiocese in court in less than 48 hours, but I'm glad all victims are going to be compensated," he said. "I hope all victims will find some type of healing in this process."

Insurance claim

The deal is expected to be officially announced in a joint statement to be released by the plaintiffs and archdiocese later on Sunday, and a news conference will take place on Monday. The reported figure of $660m dwarfs the $157m settlement paid out by the diocese of Boston following a child sex scandal which became public in 2002. The Los Angeles payment, which amounts to an average of $1.3m for each plaintiff, takes the total paid out by US dioceses to $2bn since 1950, with Los Angeles paying about one quarter of that.

Los Angeles is the country's most populous Catholic diocese, serving more than three million parishioners, but the scandal has brought the archdiocese close to financial ruin. According to Church lawyers the diocese is likely to pay $250m in cash, the rest of the sum being covered by insurance and payments by religious orders. Earlier this year, Cardinal Mahoney (pictured) told parishioners in an open letter that the Church would sell its 12-storey administrative building and was considering the sale of about 50 other non-essential properties to raise funds. The abuse has also severely dented confidence in the Church and its leaders, the BBC's Peter Bowes in Los Angeles says.

'Stolen childhood'

David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said while it was the largest settlement by the Church, money was not the key objective for victims. "No settlement, no amount of money, can restore the shattered trust and the stolen childhoods and the betrayed faith of people who were wounded by abusive priests and by complicit bishops," he said. "But, having said that, certainly this represents a tremendous achievement by these brave survivors, who somehow found the strength to come forward, report the crimes, get legal help, expose the predators and ultimately endure a pretty long, gruelling legal process."

Dick Cheney, he of the undisclosed location, is at it again. He's keeping secrets. You may recall that early in the Bush administration, the vice president refused to disclose which energy companies he had consulted on energy policy. He fought that issue up through the courts and won. Recently, we learned that Mr. Cheney sought to override the Justice Department's objections to a secret surveillance program. The vice president's office even blocked the promotion of a senior Justice Department official who had opposed the surveillance operation.

It turns out that Cheney and other White House officials attended a secret meeting in March 2004. They wanted Attorney General John Ashcroft, from his hospital bed, to approve the continuation of the possibly illegal surveillance program. To his credit, Ashcroft refused. And we learned about another of Cheney's furtive ways this past week. The Secret Service recently ended the practice of keeping logs of visitors to the president and the vice president.

You can probably figure out who wanted to hide the names of his guests – Cheney, of course. You have to wonder who are these mysterious persons that he sees, whose identities must never be revealed.

And wait, there's more. In 2001, the White House tore up its long-standing policy of releasing presidential papers after 12 years. The move came just in time to block the release of the Reagan papers. That was reportedly the work of Cheney, too.

Now that we have a secretary of Homeland Security, perhaps we also need a secretary of Secrecy, who would operate from an undisclosed location. Maybe the vice president should add that to his undisclosed duties, now that his former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, is no longer available.

In the run-up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon planned to create a 'Rapid Reaction Media Team' (RRMT) designed to ensure control over major Iraqi media while providing an Iraqi 'face' for its efforts, according to a ‘White Paper' obtained by the independent National Security Archive (NSA) which released it Tuesday.

The partially redacted, three-page document was accompanied by a longer power point presentation that included a proposed six-month, 51 million-dollar budget for the RRMT operation, apparently the first phase in a one-to-two-year “strategic information campaign.” Among other items, the budget called for the hiring of two U.S. “media consultants'' who were to be paid 140,000 dollars each for six months' work. A further 800,000 dollars were to be paid for six Iraqi media consultants over the same period.

Both the paper and the slide presentation were prepared by two Pentagon offices -- Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, which, among other things, specialise in psychological warfare, and the Office of Special Plans under then undersecretary of defence for policy, Douglas Feith -- in mid-January, 2003, two months before the invasion, according to NSA analyst Joyce Battle.

“The RRMT concept focuses on USG-UK pre-and post hostilities efforts to develop programming, train talent, and rapidly deploy a team of U.S./UK media experts with a team of ‘hand selected' Iraqi media experts to communicate immediately with the Iraqi public opinion upon liberation of Iraq,'' according to the paper. The “hand-picked'' Iraqi experts, according to the paper, would provide planning and program guidance for the U.S. experts and help “select and train the Iraqi broadcasters and publishers (‘the face') for the USG/coalition sponsored information effort.'' [USG is an abbreviation for U.S. government].

“It will be as if, after another day of deadly agit-prop, the North Korean people turned off their TVs at night, and turned them on in the morning to find the rich fare of South Korean TV spread before them as their very own,'' the paper enthused, adding that “a re-constituted free Iraqi domestic media can serve as a model in the Middle East where so much Arab hate-media are themselves equivalent to weapons of mass destruction.''

Whether the plan was implemented as described in the paper is not clear, although the NSA Tuesday also released an audit by the Pentagon's Inspector-General regarding two dozen, mostly non-competitive contracts totalling 122.5 million dollars awarded by the defence department to three defence contractors that carried out media-related activities in Iraq after the invasion.

The contractors included the Rendon Group and Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC) which received a 25 million-dollar contract to create an Iraqi Media Network whose aims appear to be roughly consistent with those laid out in the White Paper, but which largely fell apart after about six months as a result of alleged incompetence and infighting. SAIC is the same company that hired World Bank communications staffer Shaha Ali Riza at the reported behest of then deputy defence secretary (later World Bank President) Paul Wolfowitz with whom she was romantically involved. Riza worked for SAIC from March to May, 2003, as part of a “Democracy and Governance'' team.

The third company covered by the audit is the five-year-old Lincoln Group which, among other activities, has reportedly paid millions of dollars to Iraqi newspapers to publish pro-U.S. articles since the invasion.

The RRMT was conceived as a “quick start bridge'' between Iraq's state-controlled media network and an “Iraqi Free Media'' which the White Paper's authors described as the long-term goal of the program. “After the cessation of hostilities, having professional US-trained Iraqi media teams immediately in place to portray a new Iraq (by Iraqis for Iraqis) with hopes for a prosperous, democratic future, will have a profound psychological and political impact on the Iraqi people,'' according to the paper.

“The mission will be to inform the Iraqi public about USG/coalition intent and operations, to stabilise Iraq (especially preventing the trifurcation of Iraq after hostilities) and to provide Iraqis hope for their future,'' it went on, noting that the RRMT will immediately “collocate and interface with the designated CENTCOM commander in Baghdad, and begin broadcasting and printing approved USG information to the Iraqi public.'' [CENTCOM stands for U.S. Central Command].

The paper lays out a number of “major tasks'' needed to set up the RRMT and its operations and to “translate USG policy and thematic guidance into information campaign (news and entertainment).'' Among the “themes and messages'' to be communicated, the Paper ranked first “the De-Baathification program,” followed by “recent history telling (e.g., ‘Uncle Saddam,' History Channel's ‘Saddam's Bomb-Maker,' ‘Killing Fields,’ etc.); USG-approved “Democracy Series;” “Environmental (Marshlands re-hydration);” “Mine Awareness;” “Re-starting the Oil,” “Justice and rule of law topics;'' and “War Criminals/Truth Commission.''

The plan also listed several related themes to be stressed in programming, including “political prisoners and atrocity interviews, Saddam's palaces and opulence,'' and “WMD (weapons of mass destruction) disarmament.'' As for “Entertainment and News Magazine programming, the plan listed at the top “Hollywood,” followed by “News networks;'' “Arab country donations;'' and “Sports.”

The plan also called for the production of “on-the-shelf programming'' during the first month of the occupation, a process that included obtaining the rights to pre-existing programs, producing new programs, securing translations if produced in another language; and preparing print products, including the “first edition of the new Iraq weekly newspaper (with section for missing persons, Shia news, Kurd news, and Sunni news, etc.).'' All but two million dollars of the total budget was to be devoted to media infrastructure and operating costs, including transmitters and studios for both radio and television and microwave links and repeaters.

The power point presentation called for the RRMT to “identify and vet Iraqi media experts and ‘anchors,' and train a group of Iraqi journalists to staff the new networks. The RRMT should also “identify the media infrastructure that we need left intact, and work with CENTCOM targeteers to find alternative ways of disabling key sites,'' including, presumably, those media outlets whose messages were not consistent with the themes the Pentagon wished to convey.

“Evidently, the Baghdad headquarters of the Arab satellite network al-Jazeera was not part of ‘the media infrastructure that we need left intact,’” noted the NSA's Battle, who pointed to the April 8, 2003 U.S. missile attack that hit the network's Baghdad bureau, killing reporter Tariq Ayoub. The Pentagon had been extensively briefed on the bureau's location before the invasion, and the offices were well-marked as a “TV'' facility.