Child pornographers deserve the harshest punishments

With arrests in 20 states and more expected, the FBI has cracked down on one of the nation's largest child pornography rings. Those who would profit from the exploitation of children should be punished to the fullest extent the law allows.
Federal investigators have charged some 90 people, including those in positions of trust, with trading sexually explicit images of children through the Internet company Yahoo, Inc.
How reassuring to know that members of the clergy, Little League coaches, a school bus driver, a pre-school teacher's aide, a guidance counselor, a camp counselor and at least one police officer, among others, have been spending their spare time deriving satisfaction -- of at least some sort -- from hard-core filth involving children.
The depictions uncovered by the FBI were no innocent pictures of nude children. Rather, Mike Heimbach, chief of the FBI's Crimes Against Children unit, described the images as & quot;very explicit ... hard-core sexual exploitation of our children. & quot;
There are those who would say that there is no crime in simply looking at pictures. But these are not pictures of consenting adults who presumably know what it is they're doing. Under no circumstance can it be supposed that the rape of a four-year-old is innocent fun.
Molestation: In fact, after the initial arrests, the FBI announced that 27 of the people arrested in conjunction with & quot;Operation Candyman, & quot; as the crackdown has been named, have admitted to molesting more than 36 children.
Three different Internet discussion groups, one called "Candyman," were targeted in the operation. The other two have not been identified because the FBI is continuing its efforts to trace suspects through their e-mail addresses.
The international nature of child pornography and the elusiveness of Internet sites, makes the ringleaders hard to find. As soon as one site is uncovered, the pornographers can quickly move to other sites, many of them based overseas. Considering how many hundreds of thousands of impoverished children are sold into prostitution around the world, there is an immense and deep well from which the young victims can be drawn.
Child pornography has been around for a long time, but the Internet has widened the scope and the scale of the illicit traffic.
& quot;It is clear that a new marketplace for child pornography has emerged in the dark corners of cyberspace, & quot; Attorney General John Ashcroft said at a news conference at FBI headquarters. & quot;Hidden in the vastness of the Internet, innocent boys and girls have been targeted by offenders who ... have tried to use technology and anonymity of the Internet to trade child pornography, and these individuals must be stopped. & quot; He's right.