Loskarn Arrest Only A Tip Of A Pedophile Network That Includes Alexander, Other Tennessee Politicians

Senator Lamar Alexander and his Chief of Staff

the late Ryan Loskarn

The Wayne Madsen Report
Via The 5th Estate

Wayne Madsen

The December 11, 2013 arrest by U.S. Postal Inspectors of Senator Lamar Alexander's chief of staff Ryan Loskarn on charges of possession and distribution of child pornography in connection with international law enforcement's Toronto-based Project SPADE, represents only the tip of an iceberg which connects Alexander to a network of Tennessee politicians and businessmen associated with child sex abuse.

Loskarn, who was released against the wishes of federal prosecutor for the District of Columbia Mi Yung Park to the custody of his parents in Sykesville, Maryland for being a suspected suicide risk, was found hanging in the basement of his parents' home on January 23.

Foregoing an autopsy, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for the State of Maryland in Baltimore concluded, based on a mere visual inspection of Loskarn's body, that he had died from self-inflicted hanging.

Since Loskarn's indictment had previously been postponed until February 10, the last day which prosecutors had to bring formal charges, WMR was informed by legal experts that the delay in indicting Loskarn may have been the result of a pending plea agreement.

Loskarn, who was identified as a child porn distributor, would have been in a position to identify actual or intended recipients of child pornographic photographs and videos found by postal inspectors in Loskarn's possession, had he lived.

Loskarn's purported "suicide note," which makes no specific mention of an intention to commit suicide, instead contains an effusive apology to his friends, family, and Senator Alexander. The suicide note has more of a ring of the type of letter drafted by legal counsel to a judge requesting leniency in sentencing, another indication that Loskarn and his attorneys may have been working out a possible plea agreement with Department of Justice prosecutors.

BRIGHT HORIZONS AND LAMAR ALEXANDER

In 1998, Massachusetts-based Bright Horizons, a child welfare service company, merged with Corporate Family Solutions, a firm that provided similar services and which was founded in 1987 by Lamar Alexander and Bob Keeshan, who had been known to millions of American children as television's "Captain Kangaroo."

The merged company, Bright Horizons Family Solutions, was acquired by Mitt Romney's former firm, Bain Capital, in 2008.

Alexander, the Secretary of Education under George H W Bush, has been tied to a network of Tennessee politicians and businessmen associated with government and private companies, including Bright Horizons and Omni Visions, Inc. of Tennessee, as well as state government social service agencies, such as the Department of Childrens' Services, accused of endangerment and sexual abuse of foster and mentally challenged children.

Alexander's close GOP associate, Jim Henry, the CEO of Omni Visions, provides services contracted out by the state of Tennessee to developmentally disabled and troubled children.

Henry is a close political ally of Tennessee Republican Governor Bill Haslam, as well as Alexander.

Omni Visions has been cited in several legal cases for placing children into the foster homes of convicted pedophiles and endangering children by placing them under the care of abusive staff. There are also documented cases of children dying at the hands of Omni Vision care providers.

The network of child care providers linked to Alexander is also linked to the University of Tennessee and Penn State University, the latter the nexus for the pedophilia scandal involving former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky and his The Second Mile Foundation.

Graham Spanier, the former president of Penn State who was fired over the Sandusky scandal, had previously served as chancellor of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.

Spanier's close friend was his predecessor as chancellor, Ronald Roskans, a close friend of and adviser to fallen GOP rising star Lawrence King, who operated the Franklin Community Federal Credit Union of Omaha. King was implicated in a major GOP pedophile scandal, known as the "Franklin Cover-up," said to have involved former President George H W Bush.

One of the links between the University of Tennessee and Penn State is the Downsbrough family. George Downsbrough, Sr., a former head of HRB Singer, a State College, Pennsylvania-based firm that provided state-of-the-art technology to the National Security Agency, donated $3 million to Penn State.

His son, Bruce O. Downsbrough, served beginning in 2003 as chief operating officer of the University of Tennessee Foundation, which serves as the fundraising arm of the state university. Lamar Alexander had previously served as president of the University of Tennessee.

Downsbrough was installed in his position despite a prior conviction for child molestation.

Downsbrough had previously been an executive of the Colorado University Foundation in Boulder, Colorado. He was later charged and convicted in an 1986 case for molesting two underage boys in Boulder.

Perhaps due to the Downsbrough family's significant political connections, Downsbrough's law license was merely frozen by the Colorado Supreme Court because it deemed him incapacitated because of an unstated disability.

As part of Project SPADE, Downsbrough was arrested in Knoxville, Tennessee in 2012. The same law enforcement operation resulted in Loskarn's arrest.

Project SPADE involved the arrest worldwide of individuals found in possession of child pornographic materials distributed by Azov Films of Toronto.

The common denominator in the arrests as part of the same operation of two seemingly unrelated men in different parts of the country is their professional association with Lamar Alexander.

A confidential source who investigated the Nebraska pedophile ring known as the "Franklin Scandal," believes that after the exposure of the GOP-based ring, the pedophile network moved from Nebraska to Tennessee and the protection of powerful GOP politicians, including Alexander, Haslam, Henry, and ultimately, the Bush family, which considers Tennessee to be a personal political fiefdom.
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This story continues to develop . . .

Veteran investigative reporter Silvija Germek contributed to this report.

Wayne Madsen -- Investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist, Madsen has over twenty years experience in security issues. As a U.S. Naval Officer, he managed one of the first computer security programs for the U.S. Navy.Madsen has been a frequent political and national security commentator on Fox News and has also appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, BBC and MS-NBC. He has been invited to testify as a witness before the US House of Representatives, the UN Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and an terrorism investigation panel of the French government. A member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the National Press Club, Madsen is based and reports from Washington, D.C.

A Posthumous Twist in the Story of a Disgraced Senate Aide

The Atlantic

Jesse Ryan Loskarn was an aide to a U.S. senator until last month, when he was arrested for buying child pornography. Disgraced, he committed suicide last week. Politico has a summary of the details that were known at the time of his death. "According to a federal complaint, he made 'several purchases' from November 2010 to March 2011 from a Toronto-based movie production company," it reports. "Court documents said 'the majority of these films featured young nude boys."

But it turns out there's more to the story. His apparent suicide note has been posted online by his family. Its audience should be as wide as the one exposed to his crime. Here's an excerpt:

I’ve hurt every single human being I’ve ever known and the details of my shame are preserved on the internet for all time. There is no escape. My family has been wounded beyond description. My former boss and colleagues had their trust broken and their names dragged through the mud for no reason other than association. Friends’ question whether they ever really knew me.

Everyone wants to know why.

... The first time I saw child pornography was during a search for music on a peer-to-peer network. I wasn’t seeking it but I didn’t turn away when I saw it. Until that moment, the only place I’d seen these sorts of images was in my mind. I found myself drawn to videos that matched my own childhood abuse. It’s painful and humiliating to admit to myself, let alone the whole world, but I pictured myself as a child in the image or video. The more an image mirrored some element of my memories and took me back, the more I felt a connection. 
This is my deepest, darkest secret. As a child I didn’t understand what had happened at the time of the abuse. I did know that I must not tell anyone, ever. Later the memories took on new and more troubling meaning when I became a teenager. They started to appear more often and made me feel increasingly apart from everyone else. In my mind I instigated and enjoyed the abuse—even as a five and nine year old—no matter the age difference.  Discussing what had happened would have meant shame and blame. I always worried someone might look at me and know, so I paid close attention to others for any sign they might have figured it out. No one ever did. By my late teens I reached a sort of mental equilibrium on the matter.  I couldn’t stop the images from appearing altogether, but I generally controlled when they appeared. As an adult I thought I was a tougher man because of the experience; that I was mentally stronger and less emotional than most. I told myself that I was superior to other people because I had dealt with this thing on my own.

There's more.

 

Loskarn concluded, "to the children in the images: I should have known better. I perpetuated your abuse and that will be a burden on my soul for the rest of my life."

 

The ban on child pornography is one of the few prohibitionist policies that I support. Child pornography ought to be illegal. Possessing it ought to be stigmatized as well. But what this letter brings home is the importance of eliminating stigmas against having been abused as a child, and far more controversially, against the unrequited desire to buy child porn. Our charge is to create a society where people with that impulse seek professional help before giving in to it. That would do far more to protect children than mercilessly vilifying the unrequited impulse. Today, someone who announced, "I have this compulsion to watch child pornography and I'm afraid I'll act on it without help!" would be labeled a pervert and shunned. But seeking help would actually be brave and honorable. 

 

Were I confronted with someone seeking help of that sort, I'd probably feel creeped out. I hope I'd also be kind, helpful, and mindful of just how lucky I am: that is to say, mindful that it isn't elevated moral status or choice of any kind that has caused me to only have sexual feelings for people of roughly my own age. It's just luck. So many of us enjoy that particular kind of luck that it's easy to stigmatize those who don't. We'd do better to vilify acts rather than compulsions, so that more people with compulsions seek help and fewer children are victimized.