Madeleine McCann and the Washington USA Connection
- By Jill Havern
- 2223 views
The Washington Connection: Madeleine McCann, Ernie Allen, Kevin Halligen, iJet and the WePROTECT Global Alliance
by the Madeleine McCann Research Group, February 2021
Within less than 12 weeks of reporting his daughter Madeleine missing, Gerry McCann jet-setted to Washington D.C. on Monday 23 July 2007. As we have documented elsewhere in detail, he spent nearly the whole time in discussions and meetings with Ernie Allen, the boss of the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC).
Ernie Allen resigned as the President & CEO of NCMEC in 2012 and from ICMEC in 2014. But today he strides the international field of child protection as the boss of a new world-wide organisation set up in 2016 to co-ordinate international child protection: the ‘WePROTECT Global Alliance’ (WPGA) (Link: https://www.weprotect.org/)
Allen is the Chairman of the WPGA’s Advisory Board and heads the organisation along with its Founder, Baroness Joanna Shields OBE. Shields was previously British Minister for Internet Safety and Security, and Adviser on the Digital Economy to Prime Minister David Cameron. In 2016, she was appointed the Prime Minster’s Special Representative for Internet Crime and Harms at the Department for Digital, Culture Media and Sport.
WPGA is backed and funded by most of the world’s major corporations and by over 100 national governments.
The logo of WePROTECT
Gerry McCann’s blog
When we look back at Gerry McCann’s blog for that week, we get a feeling of how much he was beginning to feel under pressure:
QUOTE
“Spent the whole day travelling from the Algarve to Washington where I will be visiting the National and International Centres for Missing and Exploited Children and meeting politicians involved in recent legislation on missing children. The flights for our campaign manager and myself were kindly donated by an airline.
“There is a very upsetting story on the front page of a British National Newspaper today. The headline suggests that Kate and I face prosecution for neglecting our children by dining 50 yards away and checking on them regularly. We know that there has been criticism in some quarters of our actions but at the time, we felt our actions were responsible. We were essentially performing our own baby listening service although we have talked of the guilt we felt at not being there at the moment Madeleine was taken.
“We have been advised that legally our behaviour was well within the bounds of responsible parenting and subsequently been assured that no action will be taken. These types of criticism, particularly at this stage, as well as being hurtful are extremely unhelpful in the search for Madeleine. From the moment we discovered Madeleine missing Kate and I have done everything in our power to try and help get her back.
Our opinion now is completely clouded by what has happened to us and of course has sent shock waves through thousands of families. The real issue is that we should not have a constant fear of abduction of our children from their bedrooms, gardens or streets for that matter.
“What Kate and I did was at worst naïve and no one should forget that the real criminal is the predator who has taken a completely innocent child in such a premeditated fashion. It is this act that has wreaked havoc on our family and affected millions of other people”.
UNQUOTE
