Pete Townshend and the missing paedophiles

There’s something uncannily similar in the eyes of the faces that have allowed themselves to be seduced by child pornography. Look, for instance, at the faces of Pete Townshend and the recently convicted British actor Chris Langham. There’s an icy hollowness there that looks like a soul that has erased part of itself.

Townshend, the guitarist from The Who, was discovered on the database of a massive internet child-pornography network called Landslide Productions in 1999. The multimillion-dollar “empire” was established by Thomas and Janice Reedy in Fort Worth, Texas. It provided its subscribers with images of “the torture, rape and sexual abuse of children as young as two”. The company had a “customer-service representative” and a “receptionist” in its staff of more than 12.

Allen Heart, who has done an extensive investigation of the modern child-pornography phenomenon, writes on his website: “The raid on the Reedys’ home, conducted in September 1999, unexpectedly yielded a database of the names and addresses of a reported 75 000 subscribers around the world. According to a report carried in February 2002 by TechTV, ‘more than 35 000 [of those] individual subscribers [were] in the United States’.

“Nevertheless, only 100 arrests had been made at that time of the report — a number that remained unchanged in the months after the initial arrests. By early 2003, the story had dropped out of sight with little indication that there would be any further arrests, despite Chief Postal Inspector Kenneth Weaver’s earlier insistence that the initial arrests were just ‘the tip of the iceberg’.”

Seventy-five thousand is enough names to house a moderately sized town. If each member on that database paid a moderate subscription fee of $100, that meant Landslide was already sitting with $7,5-million. Chances are that subscriptions were coming in at $1 000, though, for the “exclusive” content, which means that Landslide was at least $75-million big.

Pete Townshend was one of 7 272 United Kingdom subscribers. Another person on the list was a “high-profile former Labour Cabinet minister”.

Heart writes: “According to the Observer, among the suspects were ‘hundreds of child-welfare professionals, including police officers, care workers and teachers’, all of whom were identified as “extremely high-risk” paedophiles. Particularly well represented on the list were law-enforcement personnel: ‘Investigators now believe as many as 90 police officers have so far been identified from an initial trawl of 200 of the British names found in the US. Many of the other suspects work in other sensitive professions, often linked to the criminal justice system.'”

As we will see when we come to examine the horrific episode of the Belgian paedophile Marc Dutroux at a later date, law-enforcement and judicial officials are often, far from protecting society, a direct and sinister menace.

Two of the names found on the UK list belonged to officers who were involved in the investigation into the murders of the girls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham in 2002. This is another case that we might look at in the future, with a hidden aspect to it far removed from the official media version.

I once sat next to a man on a park bench in Manchester in the early hours of a Saturday morning in 2002. He told me he had been raped at police orgies in Wales. I was sceptical of his story at the time, but now I’m not so sure any more.

The Landslide discovery was not an isolated instance of a massive global child-pornography network. Every year seems to bring news of some new network. Other big groups have been Wonderland and Teenboys. After the initial announcement in the media, the stories have a habit of quietly fading away though.

This begs the question: Just how many “Landslides” are there out there right now that we don’t even know about? Three more? Ten more? The planet could easily be housing a million child-pornography enthusiasts or more. The customers provide the money for the exploitation of children to continue; the battery, as it were.

Alexander Cockburn, a columnist in the UK publication the Nation, rushed to Pete Townshend’s defence in 2003. He wrote on his website that the artist’s arrest had been “absurd” and that “if you have a photo of a kid in a bath on your hard drive, and the prosecutor says you were looking at it with lust in your heart, [then] that is tantamount to sexually molesting an actual kid in an actual bath”.

What Cockburn obviously forgot to mention in his impassioned article was that Landslide specialised in images of “the torture, rape and sexual abuse of children as young as two”. This would have been what Townshend was collecting and viewing on his computer as a paying customer of the network. Affiliated within the Landslide portal were websites with names such as Child Rape.

Cockburn’s deflection of that fact was disgraceful, but a later investigation by investigative journalist Duncan Cambell took the notion of innocent browsing a step further, claiming that Townshend had been “falsely accused”.

In a statement after his arrest in 2003, Townshend said he had accessed the site “purely to see what was there”. That makes it sound like it was a spur-of-the-moment net-surfing decision. But remember, the Landslide images were only accessible through subscription. He had forked out money to “see what was there”. He also offered the feeble excuse that he had viewed the material as part of research for a book he was writing called A Different Bomb.

That supposed book has never seen the light of day, but surely not due to a lack of research.

Townshend’s explanations are reminiscent of the excuses offered this year by actor Chris Langham, who said he had downloaded images of child pornography as part of “research” for a character he was due to play in a TV series. A fellow actor exposed these notions of Langham as absurd in court.

There’s another uncanny similarity in the statements that appeared by these men after they were caught. Suddenly produced were vague revelations of the supposed abuse they had suffered in their distant youth. Langham’s revelations of a seaside rape in a tent were thrown out by the judge as “psychobabble”.

Here’s Townshend’s version of the above: “I believe I was sexually abused between the age of five and six-and-a-half when in the care of my maternal grandmother who was mentally ill at the time. I cannot remember clearly what happened, but my creative work tends to throw up nasty shadows — particularly in Tommy.”

Other glaring discrepancies in Townshend’s stories are how, on the one hand, he had been “working on a campaign against all kinds of pornography since 1995”, but on in another statement saying: “I’ve always been into [adult] pornography and I have used it all my life.”

A subsequent investigation by journalist Duncan Campbell claimed that “under pressure of the media filming of the raid, Townshend appears to have confessed to something he didn’t do”.

According to the research done by Campbell, Townshend had only accessed a single site “not connected” with child pornography.

Maybe Landslide was offering golfing videos for download too, then.

Townshend’s offence is all but forgotten these days. One frequently sees him on music documentaries on the History Channel, lamenting about his dead friends Keith Moon and Jimi Hendrix and indulging in reminiscences of his The Who “masterpieces”. Reunion tours are not infrequent and a new The Who album has even come out. Travel restrictions were almost immediately lifted from him, a stipulation of the police caution he had supposedly “accepted”.

Scotland Yard finished its investigation after four months and stated that no images had been found on Townshend’s computer. That doesn’t mean there weren’t any images on that hard drive before. The delete button was readily at Townshend’s disposal at any stage of the four years before the police even started investigating him. Remember, his name popped up during that initial raid in Texas in 1999. So had the Soham investigating team.

No apparent remorse has been forthcoming; public apologies from him being as muted as his damaged hearing.

“I accept that I was wrong to access this site,” he said in a statement, “and that by doing so, I broke the law, and I have accepted the caution that the police have given me.”

Oh, jolly good show.

If Townshend could escape with a mere slap on the wrist and be allowed to continue his music career shamelessly as an unaffected member of society, it’s hardly surprising to discover what happened to the other names on that British list.

Says Heart: “In August 2003, Scotland on Sunday reported that the Scottish arm of the ‘massive internet child-pornography investigation Operation Ore has ended without anybody being charged with sex abuse’.”

The Brits, it seemed, had once again followed the example of their American counterparts.