[Copyright 1997 Alexander Cockburn. To subscribe to CounterPunch, send $40 ($25 student low/income; $70 for two years) to CounterPunch, POB 18675, Washington DC 20036. Telephone: 202/986-3665]

The Day of Contrition was attended by people wrongly imprisoned in the hysteria over Satanic abuse in the day-care centers, starting in the early 1980's. Present were many of the preeminent defenders of the unfortunates -- Kelly Michaels, the Buckeys, the Amiraults.

McNamara has been a rabid advocate of the guilt of the Amiraults, a family which had run a day-care center in Malden, Mass. In 1984 Violet Amirault, her daughter Cheryl and her son Gerald were accused of the usual grotesque crimes and sentenced to many years in prison. At the time of the Day of Contrition Violet and Cheryl Amirault were out on bail pending a review of their case by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, which would soon be issuing its judgment.

As soon as McNamara's column appeared, participants in the conference wrote to the editor of the Globe, charging McNamara with deception, as was transparency the case. In her column she had said that the meeting was at the Peabody Essex Museum as stated in the pre-conference press release, though at the last moment the affair had been moved to Salem's Hawthorne Hotel. Furthermore, participants had been carefully scrutinized and registered, partly as a security precaution.

The Boston Globe refused to print any of the letters from the organizers or from two moderators, a Bennington professor and a well known former Time correspondent, a fact scandalous in and of itself, but even more disreputable when we recall that the editors knew well that McNamara's columns had been submitted for a Pulitzer.

On April 6th there was a rally in Boston in support of the Amiraults. A Globe reporter did extensive interviews with keynote speaker Alan Rubenstein. DA of Bucks County, PA, and also a participant at Salem, and with Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal , who had written many columns in support of the Amiraults. No story on the rally appeared in the Globe; but then, in her weekly column McNamara attacked the Amirault's supporters as uninformed outsiders who hadn't attended the trial or read the transcripts -- an untrue charge although it's clear that McNamara herself is not familiar with the details of the case.

In the wake of the announcement an Amirault supporter named Bob Chatelle wrote to the Globe, once again raising the matter of McNamara's January deception. He sent copies of his letter to a large number of people, including us here at CounterPunch and also Dorothy Rabinowitz, who urged him to withdraw it on the grounds it might be unhelpful to the Amiraults. He did so.

This most certainly didn't help the Amiraults. On April 28th the State's Supreme Judicial Court issued it's decision agreeing that an injustice had been done to the Amiraults, in that they had been unable to face their accusers (the court permitted the children to face the jury) but holding that this was of small account and they should go back to prison.

McNamara's allusion was apparently to Bob Chatelle and once again she was wrong, since we've been taking a keen interest in McNamara ever since January 15. Nor has Chatelle ever advocated relations with beasts of the field, or -- so far as we know -- birds of the air, or those things that crawleth upon the ground.

On May 6 Massachusetts Appeals Court Judge Robert Barton, presiding over requests by the prosecution that the Amiraults (Violet is now 74 and weighs under 100 pounds) be returned to prison on the grounds they might pose "a risk" to the community. The Amirault's lawyers called both for bail to be extended for a new trial, on the grounds they had been inadequately represented in the original trial. Barton, his voice apparently shaking with emotion, said that in his view the decision of the Supreme Judicial Court had been an injustice to the Amiraults so grave that he could not preside over their fate with impartiality. He recused himself.

The Globe chose to run this explosive development on an inside page. Its main offering that day on the Amirault affair was a truly squalid piece of work by two Globe reporters, David Armstrong and Kevin Cullen, under the headlines "Amirault supporters have diverse agendas." It seems that McNamara -- she has a desk in the Globe newsroom -- had pushed for an article extending her slurs on Chatelle, and the two reporters had done their sordid duty, reporting that "among the Amirault supporters are some who condone consensual sex between adults and minors." While adding dutifully in the next paragraph "the vast majority of the Amirault supporters don't hold such controversial views, and worry that those who do will discredit their cause." This is the oldest stratagem in the Smearer's Handbook.

The Globe reporters had scoured through Chatelle's writings. Though they were unable to substantiate McNamara's wild charges they found a tranquil commentary about consensual man-boy relations. These they triumphantly high-lighted, though they did record Chatelle's retort that his views on sexual consent laws were entirely unrelated to the Amiraults, in whose innocence he strongly believed.

But honesty will out, sort of. On May 8 the Boston Herald published a story about CounterPunch's expose of McNamara. As is her wont, McNamara refused to return phone calls from the Herald's reporter, Tom Mashberg. But he finally elicited this official response from the Globe's executive editor, Helen Donovan, "The column did not purport to report on the event itself. It purported to represent the views of the people there and the surrounding literature. And since she went to Salem to get their materials it seems the dateline was legitimate."

Kind of half-hearted, isn't it ?

Right after this quote from Donovan, Mashberg quoted Hopkins to the effect that McNamara's signature was not on a register used by reporters seeking press packets. And indeed, why would McNamara have driven all the way to Salem just to get a press packet, and still somehow not take in the fact that the venues had switched . It's a cover-up that's getting pretty flimsy.

Associated Press has strict rules about the use and misuse of datelines. AP president and CEO Louis Boccardi was a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board that selected McNamara. Seymour Topping, formerly of the New York Times, is now administrator of Columbia's School of Journalism, thus instructor in journalistic ethics to impressionable youth. He was on the Board, Sissela Bok, an author of a book on lying, was on the Board. William Safire, taproom moralist, was on the Board. How do they all feel now about this faker?

The Pulitzer Prize industry has always been squalid. This story merely highlights the squalor once more . But the truly horrible aspect of the scandal is that McNamara has assisted in the torment of three innocent people, has been rewarded for this, and the Globe has abetted her deceptions.

But the tide is turning. On May 9, Judge Isaac Borenstein, Barton's replacement, granted a new trial to Violet and Cheryl Amirault and said he would allow the women to remain free on bail.