Robert Parry: ‘Dirty War’ Questions for Pope Francis

[struggle4progress]

25. OK. Here it is, once more, slowly and in small bits:

In my #5, I noted Parry quotes O'Shaughnessy in the Guardian attributing the following claim to Argentinian author, Verbitsky:

... the Argentine navy with the connivance of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now the Jesuit archbishop of Buenos Aires, hid from a visiting delegation of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission the dictatorship’s political prisoners. Bergoglio was hiding them in nothing less than his holiday home in an island called El Silencio in the River Plate ...

And there I also noted:

In 1979, the island of El Silencio may indeed have been the site for Sunday retreats by the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, but the Archbishop then was Juan Carlos Aramburu

In my #7, I reiterated:

... although there are claims that the archdiocese of Buenos Aires owned El Silencio then, Bergoglio was not in charge of the archdiocese at that time ...

In my #9, I reported finding an article by Verbitsky that contained Verbitsky's actual claim (here translated from original Spanish text at link provided):

... Grasselli himself sold the island "Silence", where the Archbishop Aramburu of Buenos Aires ate his weekend meals, to ESMA in January 1979, so they could hide there a group of prisoners from the American Commission on Human Rights when it inspected military facilities ...

Thus, Verbitsky's allegation concerns an island where a prior Archbishop, Aramburu, allegedly took his Sunday retreats and a certain Grasselli. As I noted in #17, Verbitsky's allegation does not appear to involve Bergoglio: his claim, that the island was where Archbishop Aramburu of Buenos Aires ate his weekend meals and that Grasselli sold the island to the military, has somehow mutated into a claim that Bergoglio had a holiday home there and hid prisoners in that holiday home so human rights workers would not interview them. As I suggested in #5, the natural assumption is that someone appears to have made "the mistake of assuming that Bergoglio was Archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1979," confusing Bergoglio with Aramburu, and "Parry carelessly reproduces the error" -- it now seems we can attribute the error to O'Shaughnessy