A witchhunt foiled: the FBI vs. NAMBLA

'The big problem is getting under-age boys to testify against their male lovers. The interrogation can be intense. We've got to crack the boy and it's not an easy thing to do.' -Lt. William G. Thorne, Sex Crimes Unit, Bergen County (N.J.) Prosecutor's Office

Standard police operating procedures to get boys to testify and sign statements against their friends includes abusive techniques like: threatening to tell the boys' schoolmates that they are queer; physically roughing them up; offering them beer to lower their resistance; kidnapping them - from home, school, or the street - and holding them incommunicado, without their parents' knowledge, in some cases for many hours at a stretch and into the wee hours of the morning; use of social workers to intimidate parents and threaten to get them thrown off welfare; showing up unannounced at their homes for "questioning"; lying by telling them that their friend has already "admitted everything," so why should the boy hold out?; calling them names, like "faggot" and "queer"; threatening to put them in a juvenile detention center, where the police predict they will be raped. (All of these techniques were used in the cases so far cited in this booklet.)

One boy in another case was held in a psychiatric center for several days before his mother could find out where he was. Another, in the Revere case, described his treatment at the hands of the police as "mental rape." The media have never considered this mistreatment of boys to be newsworthy, even though it surely constitutes "child abuse." The men themselves are subjected to inhuman, sometimes violent, abuses reminiscent of those occurring in right-wing military dictatorships, such as having cigarettes put out on their back, being brutally beaten while in police "protective" custody, and being threatened with death. All this in the name of "protecting" young people from a joyful human experience - the sharing of sexual pleasure! [...]

On January 17, 1983, Time magazine attacked NAMBLA as a group involved in " the systematic exploitation of the weak and immature by the powerful and disturbed." Time's slander prompted poet Allen Ginsberg to respond: "This struck me on first reading as a precise characterization of Time's own assault on the American mind and body politic. The obsessive selfrighteousness of this slick news magazine's judgment glares most sinister in the light of Time's own tendency to manipulate readers' minds through disturbed reporting - such as its story on NAMBLA - not to speak of Time's peddling of local drugs (cigarettes and alcohol) for advertising revenue. Attacks on NAMBLA stink of politics, witchhunting for profit, humorlessness, vanity, anger and ignorance, obvious pack journalism. New York Times ans Time magazine on the subject have been obnoxiously hypocritical. I'm a member of NAMBLA because I love boys too - everybody does, who has a little humanity."

source: From the book 'A Witchhunt Foiled: The FBI vs. NAMBLA'; Published by the North American Man/Boy Love Association; New York; 1985