I'm listening but are you listening? Most of these 'debunkers' are directly or indirectly connected to the False Memory Movement. I'm not sure why you referred to Gary Stickel's
Archaeological Investigations of the McMartin Preschool site, which proves the existence of tunnels post date 1966.
To quote Constantine again, from a more
detailed article on the case (and he also mentions Stickel):
The parents wondered, like everyone else, at the
incredibility of the charges -- yet they had to question Peggy
McMartin's testimony that she only worked at the school for a
short time, when payroll records showed that she had been
employed there for years. To the families, the final verdict of
Ray Buckey meant it was now "open season on children."
And the press opened fire. The world was told redundantly
that ABC's Wayne Satz, the reporter who broke the case (killed by
a heart attack at 41), and Kee MacFarlane, a therapist testifying
for the prosecution, had an affair, as if this had any bearing on
the allegations of the children. Even Oliver Stone, perhaps in
ignorance, took to the bandwagon with a film made for HBO,
written by Abby Mann, theorizing that hysteria in Manhattan Beach
was kindled when one child returned home from school one
afternoon with "a red bottom" -- this would be the son of Judy
Johnson, and he hadn't been spanked -- he was bleeding from the
anus.
This hardly constitutes media "spin." It is a conscious
participation in a felony. The account of the case pounded into
collective memory by media repetition goes that far to distort
the facts. The widespread media coverage was, according to Los
Angeles Times editor Noel Greenwood, "a mean-spirited campaign"
organized to discredit the children and their therapists.7
But why should certain members of the corporate press,
and segments of the legal and psychiatric professions, go to such
lengths to suppress evidence of organized child abuse at
McMartin?
The traumatic crimes reported by the toddlers bear an
uncanny resemblance to mind control programming, a specialty of
certain classified federal agencies and cult cut-outs on the
black budget payroll.8
The children are often ridiculed because some of their
charges are impossible. Tunnels under the preschool? Too
ludicrous to consider. But as it happens,
there were tunnels,
confirmed in 1993 by a team of five scientists from leading
universities.
The unearthing of the tunnels, like much of the critical
evidence, never made it to the courtroom. They have been
discreetly excluded from newspaper accounts.
Filling the void, Debbie Nathan, a widely published
skeptic of ritual abuse, heaped ridicule on the tunnel
allegations in the Village Voice in June 1990. She maintained the
McMartin site had already been "painstakingly probed for tunnels.
None were found."9 Nathan's account is a fabrication. In fact,
recalls Dr. Roland Summit, who contributed to the final report on
the tunnel excavation, parents started digging and prosecutors,
reluctantly forced to a showdown, "commissioned a superficial
search of open terrain." District Attorney Ira Reiner then
declared the tunnel stories unfounded "without going under the
concrete floor of the preschool." Once the tunnels were
officially discounted, attempts to explore for an underground
reality were instant targets for ridicule."10
Archaeologist
Gary Stickel was retained to lead the
excavation on the re-commendation of Dr. Rainier Berger, chairman
of UCLA's Interdisciplinary Archeology Program, by parents of
McMartin children.11 Initially Stickel sided with the Buckeys,
believing the abuse allegations to be so much moonlight for
hysterics. However, he'd heard of late homicide detective Paul
Bynum, the first to dig at the site:
Bynum apparently conducted his informal digging in
February, 1984 (Daily Breeze, 1987). It is significant to note
he did unearth some buried animal remains, "numerous pieces of
tortoise shells and bones" (Daily Breeze, 1987). "There was keen
interest at the time since it was reported that the children
testified that tortoises, rabbits, and other small animals were
mutilated to terrorize the children into keeping silent" (Daily
Breeze, 1987).12
But "experts" courted by the press snaffled at the
suggestion that animals were killed to frighten children at
McMartin and other preschools around the country. It was not
until 1993 that a study by the National Center for Child Abuse
and Neglect confirmed that children are not only threatened in
day care settings, "most threats are very specific in terms of
what the consequence of disclosure will be and how the threat
will be carried out.... The use of such severe threats is
obviously quite frightening to young children and is effective in
preventing disclosure. In fact, it appears that threats used in
day care center cases may go beyond what is usually needed to
silence victims, and may in some instances be made for purposes
of psychological terror in and of itself."13
Into the Grotto
Most reporters in Southern California pooh-poohed
evidence of coercion, but there was a great, gaping silence when
the tunnels were found.
"I asked my daughter," recalls Jackie MacGauley, a mother
of two children who attended the preschool, "'How could they have
taken you to these places without being seen?' And she answered
me as though I was silly to ask such a question. She said,
'Through the tunnels, of course.'"
The Los Angeles Times ran a spate of features poking fun
of the excavation team until actual evidence of tunnels was
discovered. Then the Times ran a brief news item, one paragraph
long, dryly noting that "evidence" of tunnels had been found, and
never mentioned the subject again. The local Beach Reporter
covered the story without a blush: "parents began to dig with
shovels, allegedly in an area pointed out by a nine-year-old
former student of the McMartin preschool, who told them to dig
behind a cement planter in the northeast corner. When parents
unearthed several broken turtle shells and a few bones, they
stopped digging and notified the district attorney's office."15
Once the entrance was exposed, Stickel used remote
sensing equipment to read the terrain conductivity of the empty
lot next to the preschool. The survey was conducted by a
respected geophysicist, Robert Beer, working with an
electromagnetic scanner. The tunnel opening was found precisely
where children said it would be. Stickel: "Some of the children
had stated there had been animal cages placed along that wall and
that they had entered a tunnel under the cages." A foreign soil
deposit was found near the foundation. Clearing the anomaly with
a backhoe, they found the roots of an avocado tree cut to clear a
path for the tunnel. The roots had been cut with a hand saw and
torn away, and shreds dangled on either wall of the tunnel.
That's the moment editors at the Times chose to pull
reporters off the story. All other news outlets rapidly followed
suit.
But the excavators cleared the foreign soil and followed
the tunnel anyway. It "meandered under Classroom No. 4 and then
most of Classroom No. 3.... There is no other scenario that fits
all of the facts except that the feature was indeed a tunnel,"
they concluded. "The date of the construction and use of the
tunnel was not absolutely established, but an assessment of seven
factors of data all indicate that it was probably constructed,
used and completely filled back in sometime after 1966 (the
construction date of the preschool)."15
Dr. E. Michael, a specialist in forensic geology in
Malibu, was called to examine a cavity in the underground
passage. Together with Dr. Herbert Adams of the geology
department at Cal State University, a ground resistivity reading
of the tunnel was followed from the preschool to a triplex next
door, a traversing section parallel to the north wall of the
school, 5 feet away, extending 20 feet eastward, 10 to 15 feet
beneath the surface.16
Gerald Hobbs, a local tree surgeon for 25 years, did much
of the actual digging. Hobbs:
The children had told two different stories about this
tunnel prior to the dig. One, that they had gone through the
tunnel and came up in the house next door, and two, they had come
up in the garage, which blocked the house from the street. At any
rate, the tunnel went in that direction.... That evening I went
to the house next door and followed the walk between the school
and the house, only about 4-1/2 feet apart. I went about 30 feet
down between the buildings and found a crawl space under the
house. I bellied my way toward the southwest corner of the house.
After going about 20 feet, I found an area inside the west wall
of the house where the floor was cut out. If I remember
correctly, the area of floor that was missing was 36" X 38" X
41".16
A total of 77 animal bones were found buried at the
McMartin site, an assortment of the osteo-remains of domestic
cattle, chickens, dogs and a single rabbit.17
However, Debbie Nathan, the hide-bound "skeptic" of
ritual abuse, a scion of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation,
told another story. The McMartin site, she insisted, had already
been "painstakingly probed for tunnels" by the D.A.'s office.
(Not so, as we've seen). "None were found. [The McMartin] parents
have invested years believing in demonic conspiracies and
underground nursery tunnels. (Until recently the parents were
still digging. They came up with Indian artifacts)." No mention
of Bynum's independent findings. No mention of the dig as it
happened in the real world. She reserves much of her scorn for
former FBI agent Ted Gunderson and Jackie MacGauley. Nathan seems
not to realize that Gunderson and MacGauley brought in Stickel
and his geological team to defuse accusations they were directly
engaged in the dig. They weren't. The search for the tunnels was
independent, and scores of volunteers pitched in.
Nathan's refrain of "no evidence" is hollow. She has
been known to contort around the facts of ritual abuse in a
grotesque parody of journalism and is frequently blind to
critical evidence. Nathan continues to find "no evidence" of
abuse at McMartin despite the nightmares, the acting-out, medical
molestation reports and sexual infections. The tunnel excavation,
she assures with psychic certainty (and a sniff of
condescension), is a "hoax."