by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy In his remarkably undistinguished 20-year stint as a Supreme Court justice, Clarence Thomas has rarely called attention to himself for original jurisprudential thinking. But if Thomas had had his way with Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission, in which the court decided this week to remove critically important limits on campaign financing, an already horrible decision would have been made far, far worse. Crazy worse.Thomas went along with the majority in agreeing that corporations and unions can once more be permitted to spend freely on political issues, thus driving a stake through the heart of the democratic process in the United States. But he dissented in part, because he didn't think the ruling went far enough. Specifically, he argued that the court was wrong to continue requiring that the sponsors of political advertising disclose who paid for them.That's right. Thomas came out against the principle of transparency, and for the right of corporations to spend millions of dollars to influence public policy without having to tell anyone what they were up to. It's hard to imagine a less democratic stance.Thomas did have his reasons, however. He blamed the gays. In the heated war over Proposition 8 in California, he wrote, any individual who contributed as little as $100 in favor of the ban on same-sex marriage was required to disclose his or her name and address to the public, and thus opened themselves up to harassment.--This Week in Crazy: Clarence ThomasAlso see:
by Jane Gray, via Facebook People must see clearly the futility of maintaining the fight for social goals within the framework of civil debate. When the forces of oppression come to maintain themselves in power against established law; peace is considered already broken. --Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Guerilla WarfareNow --someone posted the 'official spin' on my FB page. It reads:
"Today, the U.S. Supreme Court announced a landmark victory for free speech, making clear in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that under the First Amendment the government cannot stifle dissent by restricting the right of corporations to spend money on independent political speech." --U.S. Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Free Speech In Citizens United CaseBULLSHIT!
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by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy/Bertolt Brecht excerptsA man who does not know the truth is just an idiot but a man who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a crook!Following --Bertolt Brecht:
Fascism is a historic phase of capitalism; in this sense it is something new and at the same time old. In Fascist countries capitalism continues to exist, but only in the form of Fascism; and Fascism can be combated as capitalism alone, as the nakedest, most shameless, most oppressive, and most treacherous form of capitalism. But how can anyone tell the truth about Fascism, unless he is willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it forth? What will be the practical results of such truth?
The man who does not know the truth expresses himself in lofty, general, and imprecise terms. He shouts about “the” German, he complains about Evil in general, and whoever hears him cannot make out what to do. Shall he decide not to be a German? Will hell vanish if he himself is good? The silly talk about the barbarism that comes out of barbarism is also of this kind. The source of barbarism is barbarism, and it is combated by culture, which comes from education. All this is put in general terms; it is not meant to be a guide to action and is in reality addressed to no one.Consumer spending is 70% of the US economy. It is the driving force, and it has been shut down. Except for the super rich, there has been no growth in consumer incomes in the 21st century. Statistician John Williams of shadowstats.com reports that real household income has never recovered its pre-2001 peak.
The US economy has been kept going by substituting growth in consumer debt for growth in consumer income. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan encouraged consumer debt with low interest rates. The low interest rates pushed up home prices, enabling Americans to refinance their homes and spend the equity. Credit cards were maxed out in expectations of rising real estate and equity values to pay the accumulated debt. The binge was halted when the real estate and equity bubbles burst.
As consumers no longer can expand their indebtedness and their incomes are not rising, there is no basis for a growing consumer economy. Indeed, statistics indicate that consumers are paying down debt in their efforts to survive financially. In an economy in which the consumer is the driving force, that is bad news.
The banks, now investment banks thanks to greed-driven deregulation that repealed the learned lessons of the past, were even more reckless than consumers and took speculative leverage to new heights. At the urging of Larry Summers and Goldman Sachs’ CEO Henry Paulson, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Bush administration went along with removing restrictions on debt leverage.
When the bubble burst, the extraordinary leverage threatened the financial system with collapse. The US Treasury and the Federal Reserve stepped forward with no one knows how many trillions of dollars to “save the financial system,” which, of course, meant to save the greed-driven financial institutions that had caused the economic crisis that dispossessed ordinary Americans of half of their life savings.
--Paul Craig Roberts, The Economy is a Lie, Too
A report published today in the New Yorker finds that Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004 in Texas for setting a fire that killed his three daughters, was innocent. He is pictured at left with his two-year-old daughter Amber, who died in the fire.This is incredibly sad news, but it also marks the most conclusive evidence yet that an innocent person has been put to death in the United States. We’ve known for years that the arson science used to convict Willingham was flat-out wrong. Today’s New Yorker report goes further: it dismantles the case that sent Willingham to his death, point-by-point, proving that every shred of evidence used against him was false.Innocence Project Co-Director Barry Scheck wrote in the Huffington Post: "There can no longer be any doubt that an innocent person has been executed. The question now turns to how we can stop it from happening again."And the New York Times adds, in an editorial today: "The Willingham investigation, which is continuing, is further evidence that the criminal justice system is far too flawed to justify imposing a death penalty."Texas is about 50 years behind the the US, much more so compared to Europe. Minorities --primarily black and Hispanic --are disproportionately represented in the Texas gulag system but under represented in the State legislature, the various city councils, and the state judicial system.I strongly, strongly urge you to read David Grann’s incredible New Yorker piece in its entirety. I can’t imagine that you can leave the story with trust in our system of capital punishment.
--New Yorker: Texas Executed an Innocent Man
Many studies have shown that all crimes increase in death penalty states. I doubt that anyone knows why that is the case but the verifiable numbers prove conclusively that that is the case in fact. I would venture an hypothesis: the death penalty creates and/or encourages a society in which life itself is not valued to the same degree as it is in non-death penalty states. Of the variables, it is difficult to say which is the cause, which is the effect. States Without the Death Penalty Have Better Records on Homicide
A new survey by the New York Times found that states without the death penalty have lower homicide rates than states with the death penalty. The Times reports that ten of the twelve states without the death penalty have homicide rates below the national average, whereas half of the states with the death penalty have homicide rates above. During the last 20 years, the homicide rate in states with the death penalty has been 48% - 101% higher than in states without the death penalty. "I think Michigan made a wise decision 150 years ago," said the state's governor, John Engler, a Republican, referring to the state's abolition of the death penalty in 1846. "We're pretty proud of the fact that we don't have the death penalty."Texas, though it boasts of its 'oil' economy', has apparently forgotten that Texas has not occupied a position of prominence with regard to petroleum production since it was discovered that bombing Iraq and killing civilians there was much, much cheaper than are the expensive secondary recovery methods by which big lying oil companies squeeze a few more gallons out of all but abandoned oil fields in West Texas. It's called 'secondary recovery'. It is very expensive, often not profitable. It is cheaper and easier to con the American public into supporting wars of aggression in which it is known that a primary military objective is the siezure of oil fields!
--New York Times, 9/22/00, Death Penalty Information Center
Still, most people are now ashamed to admit that punishment is based on vengeance and, for that reason, various excuses and apologies have been offered for the cruelty that goes with it. Some of the more humane, or “squeamish,” who still believe in punishment, contend that the object of this infliction is the reformation of the victim. This, of course, cannot be urged of the death penalty or even punishment for life, or for very long-term sentences. In these cases there is neither inducement to reform nor any object in the reformation. No matter how thorough the reform, the prisoner never goes back to society, or he returns after there is no longer a chance for him to be of use to the world or to enjoy life.--Clarence Darrow, Crime: It's Cause and TreatmentTea Baggers are Scumbaggers! Recently --Texas Gov Rick Perry's boisterous audience of schizoid idiots were caught waving US flags even as they shouted: SECEDE! It might have been funny if these folk were not so tragically STUPID! Think about it --traitors to the US, favoring secession from the US waving US flags. IDIOTS! Is 'secession' from the US necessarily 'treason'? Well --the US just prior to the Civil War certainly thought so and fought and won a Civil War to prove the point. In any case, waving US flags while advocating secession is absurd if not downright moronic!
The school board in this impoverished rural hamlet in North Texas has drawn national attention with its decision to let some teachers carry concealed weapons, a track no other school in the country has followed. The idea is to ward off a massacre along the lines of what happened at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999. “Our people just don’t want their children to be fish in a bowl,” said David Thweatt, the schools superintendent and driving force behind the policy. “Country people are take-care-of-yourself people. They are not under the illusion that the police are there to protect them.”Texas Is No. One; Leads the Nation in ExecutionsEven in Texas, with its tradition of lenient gun laws and frontier justice, the idea of teachers’ taking guns to class has rattled some people and sparked a fiery debate. Gun-control advocates are wringing their hands, while pro-gun groups are gleeful. Leaders of the state’s major teachers unions have expressed stunned outrage, while the conservative Republican governor, Rick Perry, has endorsed the idea.--In Texas School, Teachers Carry Books and Guns, New York Times
When Justice Byron White wrote the Enmund decision in 1982, he observed that the Court was not aware of a single execution of someone who did not kill or intend to kill. What a difference another quarter-century makes. Months after Enmund was decided, Texas executed its first prisoner since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976. In the tidal wave of capital cases that followed, numerous defendants would be sentenced to die under the law of parties.One was Norman Green. Green was charged for a murder during a botched robbery in an electronics store in 1985. He got death. His accomplice, the man who actually pulled the trigger, got life. The arbitrary result exemplifies what Green's appellate lawyer, Verna Langham -- who also handled Kenneth Foster's first appeal -- sees as the danger of the law of parties. "[It] is subject to such loose interpretation," she told the Austin Chronicle in 2005. "A kid in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people can end up being sentenced to death." Green was executed in 1999.--Alternet, Innocent Man Sentenced to Death Under Cruel Texas LawBlack people represent only 12% of the Texas population but comprise 44% of the total incarcerated population. Whites make up about 58% of Texas' total population, but only 30% of the prison and jail population.
Everything's big in Texas — big pickup trucks, big SUVs and the state's big carbon footprint, too.Texans' fondness for large, manly vehicles has helped make the Lone Star State the biggest carbon polluter in the nation.The headquarters state of America's oil industry spewed 670 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2003, enough that Texas would rank seventh in the world if it were its own country, according to the most recent figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The amount is more than that of California and Pennsylvania — the second- and third-ranking states — combined.A multitude of factors contribute to the carbon output, among them: Texas' 19 coal-burning power plants; a heavy concentration of refineries and chemical plants; a lack of mass transit; and a penchant among ranchers and urban cowboys alike for brawny, gas-guzzling trucks — sometimes to haul things, but often just to look Texas tough.Debbie Howden, an Austin real estate agent, said her family of six has two pickup trucks, three SUVs, and no apologies. "I would definitely put size and safety over the emissions thing," said Howden, 55. She calls their high fuel bills a "necessary evil."--Texas Is Biggest Carbon Polluter
Ten large companies generate more than one third of the 2.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide emitted each year by U.S. electric power generators, according to figures in a first-of-its-kind database unveiled Wednesday.American Electric Power, based in Columbus, Ohio, and Southern Co. of Atlanta, which run the largest coal power plants in the country, top the list of U.S. companies responsible for greenhouse gas emissions from electricity, according to data compiled by the Center for Global Development, a global economic development think tank in Washington, D.C.The database, called CARMA or Carbon Monitoring for Action, culls for the first time data both from government regulators around the world and commercial databases to provide an up-to-date look at the state of CO2 from power production—which accounts for one quarter of all carbon emissions. (The database doesn't look at other large sources, like transportation and manufacturing.) Here are the top sources of greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation in the United--The 10 Biggest Carbon Dioxide PollutersThe fascist corporatization of state prisons makes a slick end run, a veer, perhaps a 'triple option', around the Bill of Rights, sets up crony [phony?] corporations with a guaranteed gravy train at tax payer expense, and --to sweeten the deal --it provides them with slave labor. Bill Yeoman nor Darrel Royal could have done better on the gridiron. What a hand-off! What an end run around the laws! What a blitz!
For the first time in history more than one in every 100 adults in America are in jail or prison—a fact that significantly impacts state budgets without delivering a clear return on public safety. According to a new report released today by the Pew Center on the States’ Public Safety Performance Project, at the start of 2008, 2,319,258 adults were held in American prisons or jails, or one in every 99.1 men and women, according to the study. During 2007, the prison population rose by more than 25,000 inmates. In addition to detailing state and regional prison growth rates, Pew’s report, One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008, identifies how corrections spending compares to other state investments, why it has increased, and what some states are doing to limit growth in both prison populations and costs while maintaining public safety.It is an Orwellian nightmare of waste, graft, and fascism in which no one is held to account. It is a corporate 'gravy train', relieving elected officials of almost every responsibility that government is traditionally and rightfully accorded. It's a scheme, a legalized payoff, a 'good living' for those profiting from incompetent and irresponsible government.
As prison populations expand, costs to states are on the rise. Last year alone, states spent more than $49 billion on corrections, up from $11 billion 20 years before. However, the national recidivism rate remains virtually unchanged, with about half of released inmates returning to jail or prison within three years. And while violent criminals and other serious offenders account for some of the growth, many inmates are low-level offenders or people who have violated the terms of their probation or parole. --More than One in 100 Adults Are Behind Bars, Pew Study Finds
...by year's end 1999, there were 706,600 Texans in prison, jail, parole or probation on any given day. In a state with 14 million adults, this meant that 5% of adult Texans, or 1 out of every 20, are under some form of criminal justice supervision. The scale of what is happening in Texas is so huge, it is difficult to contrast the size of its criminal justice systems to the other states' systems it dwarfs:Lower and working classes pay more than their fair share of taxes. The government taxes labor and gives capital a free ride, a recipe for an impending economic collapse, a collapse that appears to be well underway and quite beyond anyone's power or ability to stop. But that has not stopped the government from playing it's well-rehearsed role as the shakedown arm of the nation's tiny and shrinking elite. If because of GOP transfers of unearned wealth to the increasingly tiny elite of about one percent of the population, labor is unproductive or impoverished the productivity of the nation will decline and ultimately collapse. The poor are increasingly denied decent housing or food because elites have bid up prices on commodities. If you can no longer afford decent housing, health care or food, you have then, perhaps recently under Bush, fallen off the ladder and your children have been or will be left behind! Already just one percent of the US owns more than the rest of us combined. They RULE! It's the GOP way.
- There are more Texans under criminal justice control than the entire populations of some states, including Vermont, Wyoming and Alaska.
- According to Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates, one quarter of the nation's parole and probationers are in Texas. California and Texas, together, comprise half the nation's parolees and probationers.
- The number of people incarcerated in Texas (in prison or jail) reached 207,526 in mid-year 1999. Only California, with 10 million more citizens, has more people in both prison and jail.
- Texas has a rate of 1,035 people behind bars for every 100,000 in the population, the second highest incarceration rate in the nation (second only to Louisiana). If Texas was a nation separate from the United States, it would have the world's highest incarceration rate--significantly higher than the United States (682), and Russia (685) which has 1 million prisoners, the world's third biggest prison system. Texas' incarceration rate is also higher than China (115), which has the world's second largest prison population (1.4 million prisoners).
- If the US shared the incarceration rate of Texas, there would be nearly three million Americans behind bars (2,822,300)--instead of our current 2 million prisoners.
- The Texas prison population tripled since 1990, and rose 61.5% in the last five years of this decade alone. In 1994, there were 92, 669 prisoners in Texas. This number had increased to 149,684 by mid-year 1999.
- The Texas correctional system has grown so large that in July 2000, corrections officials ran out of six digit numbers to assign inmates, and officially created prisoner number 1,000,000.
--An Analysis of Incarceration and Crime Trends in The Lone Star State
"Are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons? Then let them die and decrease the surplus population." —Scrooge, A Christmas Carol, Charles DickensIn those categories and thanks to the GOP, Texas is NUMBER ONE!Published Articles on Buzzflash.net
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by Ed Encho"The National Security Agency had access to all Americans' communications," he said. "Faxes, phone calls and their computer communications. ... They monitored all communications."The Tice interviews followed another former insider speaking out on the gross illegality of the Bush administration programs, a former DOJ employee named Thomas Tamm was featured in a Newsweek magazine cover story by Michael Isikoff entitled The Fed Who Blew the Whistle from which I excerpt the following:
Tice said the NSA analyzed metadata to determine which communication would be collected. Offering a hypothetical example, he said if the agency determined that terrorists communicate in brief, two-minute phone calls, the NSA might program its systems to record all such calls, invading the privacy of anyone prone to telephonic succinctness.
Tice was involved in only a small part of the project, that involved trying to "harpoon fish from an airplane."
He said he was told to monitor certain groups in order to eliminate them as suspects for more intense targeting. Those groups, he said, were U.S. journalists and news agencies. But rather than excluding the news organizations from monitoring, he discovered that the NSA was collecting the organizations' communications 24 hours a day year round.
"It made no sense," he said.
Tice did not identify the reporters or organizations allegedly targeted.
Olbermann asked if this means there's a file somewhere containing every e-mail and phone conversation these reporters ever had with sources, editors and family members.
"If it was involved in this specific avenue of collection, it would be everything, yes." Tice answered.
(Exerpted from Wired's Kim Zetter's blog)
In the spring of 2004, Tamm had just finished a yearlong stint at a Justice Department unit handling wiretaps of suspected terrorists and spies—a unit so sensitive that employees are required to put their hands through a biometric scanner to check their fingerprints upon entering. While there, Tamm stumbled upon the existence of a highly classified National Security Agency program that seemed to be eavesdropping on U.S. citizens. The unit had special rules that appeared to be hiding the NSA activities from a panel of federal judges who are required to approve such surveillance. When Tamm started asking questions, his supervisors told him to drop the subject. He says one volunteered that "the program" (as it was commonly called within the office) was "probably illegal."The name of the program was Stellar Wind and please pay particular attention to this next excerpted piece from Isikoff's story:
The NSA, with the secret cooperation of U.S. telecommunications companies, had begun collecting vast amounts of information about the phone and e-mail records of American citizens. Separately, the NSA was also able to access, for the first time, massive volumes of personal financial records—such as credit-card transactions, wire transfers and bank withdrawals—that were being reported to the Treasury Department by financial institutions. These included millions of "suspicious-activity reports," or SARS, according to two former Treasury officials who declined to be identified talking about sensitive programs. (It was one such report that tipped FBI agents to former New York governor Eliot Spitzer's use of prostitutes.) These records were fed into NSA supercomputers for the purpose of "data mining"—looking for links or patterns that might (or might not) suggest terrorist activity.This latest glimpse beneath the facade at the massive, secretive and highly illegal surveillance campaign against the American people is an outrage. Given the proclivity of those who run the system in this country to exert raw power to advance their own agendas it is no leap in logic that journalists alone were the only group targeted. There remains the question of whether blackmail, especially sexual blackmail is routinely used as a tool to keep government and media officials from not straying too far from the dirty business of imperialism and financial chicanery of the sort that has brought the economy to its knees.
The bizarre absence of any reporting of this very serious violation of civil liberties has received absolutely no coverage in the corporatized, mainstream pocket media. This is unconscionable that there is apparently no interest in exposing these crimes, especially considering that those targeted could actually save their own hides (and perhaps instill some dignity) by outing this program. It's a sad testament to the state of today's 'journalism' that is shameful by comparison to that of days of yore when reporters were intrepid souls determined to speak the truth to power.
Writer Eric Alterman puts it spot on in his recent Center for American Progress piece entitled Think Again: Spying on Journalists? Why the Silence? when he notes the lack of intestinal fortitude in the mainstream media:
Clearly something deeply disturbing lurks beneath these revelations, and with Bush gone from office, it’s hard to understand just what is preventing journalists from seeking the truth about this program more energetically. The only thing they have to fear is fear itself.
This sad state of affairs brings to mind the following:
And the silence by those tasked by the First Amendment’s now quaint and antiquated imbuing upon them a responsibility for a free press as an essential check on authoritarianism is deafening in its absence. Quislings, cowards and public relations flacks seem to be the one thing that our journalism schools never failed to produce over the past several decades, feckless and spineless careerists with neither a sense of honor nor of their place as defenders of precious liberty. There shall be no refuge for the weasels nor the rats in the end therefore their mass abrogation of their chosen profession along with their acute absence of courage is even more damnable for when the time comes they will perhaps live to lament that they did not speak out when they had the chance.
When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I was not a Jew.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.
- Pastor Martin Niemöller
The National Security State has a history of silencing those who would speak out and especially reporters deemed to have become a nuisance. This is done either through intense pressure brought down on media corporations through organized harassment of sponsors, brutal coordinated smear campaigns much like the one that took down the aforementioned Gary Webb or when all else fails, the reporters often just happen to turn up mysteriously dead. The list of ‘suicides’ and accidents is a long one and in the view of the ruthless psychopaths who both run and profit from a high-tech snooping network seems to be that any means are to be undertaken to keep their games going even if it ultimately results in termination with extreme prejudice. I believe that I will have to put together a list myself but when I just started writing down names off the top of my head of strange deaths I came up with over thirty right off the bat.
“Death Solves All Problems, No Man, No Problem”
-Joseph Stalin
“Casolaro had discovered a common denominator to the theft of Inslaw’s software and other recent scandals” says Hamilton who worked very closely with Casolaro right up to his death in helping him to uncover the dirty dealing behind the theft of Inslaw’s software. A group of individuals trained in covert intelligence operations and aligned with the U.S. political leadership who were allegedly profiting from each of these scandals.
These veterans of U.S. covert intelligence operations had also allegedly been selling pirated copies of Inslaw’s software to foreign intelligence and law enforcement agencies and funneling the funds through BCCI. Casolaro believed that some of the profits from these illegal sales made their way into a slush fund used for political payoffs and covert intelligence operations not authorized by congress.
Danny Casolaro is far from the only one to whom mysterious death had befallen after their investigative work got them too close to the real power structure or presented an obstacle to its need for the cloak of secrecy. Too many rising politicians, uncooperative politicians and judges, hostile witnesses, whistle blowers and reporters have met with no small number of strange and untimely deaths often attributed to accidents (small plane crashes in particular), ‘suicides’( a good deal of them in hotel rooms), sudden heart attacks or seizures (many in people with no history of such problems) and random acts of extreme violence that go unsolved by authorities.
In addition to Casolaro, other suspicious deaths of investigators of this particular nexus of evil include Financial Times reporter Anson Ng, reportedly a friend of Casolaro who was found dead from a gunshot wound in his Guatemala City apartment where he was reportedly working on a story related to BCCI and to try to interview a guy named Jimmy Hughes who according to the writer Rodney Stitch had information regarding shady dealings at the Cabazon Indian Reservation near Palm Springs, CA as well as Jonathan Moyle whose body was found hanging in a closet in a Santiago hotel room where he had been investigating the CIA and the arms trade.
Joel Bainerman also noted in his book that the Cabazon Indian Reservation where the PROMIS software was allegedly modified for espionage purposes by a very interesting character, a technical genius named Michael Riconosciuto to include the ‘back door’ feature (to allow for secret access) was in fact a “CIA cutout”. The government contracting firm Wackenhut, a Florida based corporation alleged to have been involved in senstive 'private security' matters (Blackwater before Blackwater) was involved at the time in a joint-venture with the Cabazon tribe to use the sovereign land status of the reservation to work on a variety of endeavors including the development and testing of arms including a fuel air explosive, biochemical warfare agents and other armaments that could be provided to third world regimes, primarily to right wing governments in Latin America.
The Cabazon Indian Reservation was allegedly transformed into veritable spook nest as well as a staging ground for covert military industrial complex purposes. Wackenhut incidentally is back in the news (or at least the alternative media) with Ellen Brown's recent story about the mysterious prison buses spotted in Arizona so they are still a player and a big one at that. I would venture to speculate that the truth about Wackenhut Corporation and its longtime involvement in the prison industrial complex that has become so very, very lucrative to this fascist society is something that deserves one hell of a good deal of scrutiny.
III: INDIO 2008"I'm more shocked than anything. I had no idea these things were going on. Most of America doesn't know these things are going on," said Begley. "It's still going on to this day. It's a big web of corruption."The series ended abruptly in October after an installment that began to delve into whether other local Indian tribes may have been involved in dealings with Wackenhut and mentioned “an experimental electromagnetic weapon called a "railgun" as being one of the projects. That the KESQ story has not continued is disappointing but certainly not surprising given the history of what has happened to those digging too deeply into affairs involving the PROMIS software - I would hope that it will eventually be resumed. In my own opinion, I would suspect that fear may a motivating factor in the suspension of this series, especially after the detective who had been investigating the case stated that he: "doesn't want to continue on the case based on the number of people who have met an untimely demise while doing so". Who knows, I hope that that isn't the case and that a new installment will be forthcoming in the near future, as a concerned American it is extremely imporant that it at some point continue because Mr. Baca is onto something BIG.
----- Original Message -----IV: Conclusion:
From: X
To: X
Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2008 1:44 PM
Subject: Alvarez Triple Homicide
Hello X
My name is X and I'm with the Riverside County Sheriff's Department. I'm a homicide detective assigned to the cold case division. The Alvarez triple homicide was assigned to me a couple of months ago.
For the past two months I have reviewed nearly a thousand documents of police reports, and spent many hours browsing the Internet for additional sources of information. As I am sure you can imagine, I feel a bit like Alice in Wonderland after falling down the rabbit hole. I no longer have a complete grasp on the real world.
You should know first off, that I am an experienced investigator with 18 years on the Sheriff's Dept. and I consider myself pretty intuitive when it comes to filtering out the BS. After my first review of the police reports in this case, I wasn't sure why it remained unsolved for over 26 years. All of the players were identified and the Modus Operandi seemed to be well established. I couldn't understand why every few years the case was suddenly dropped and put back on the shelf.
That's when Rachel Begley introduced me to the rabbit hole. After the countless hours I have now spent on her website and the numerous other conspiracy theorists websites, I'm having a very difficult time sifting through the BS.
I have also spent much time on your website and I have found your investigations impressive and your opinions refreshing. That is why I am writing to you now. I do not make it a habit of talking to journalists about open homicide investigations, however, it appears you are much more educated about this particular case than I am.
I know you are very busy and I understand the Alvarez triple homicide is a very small part of the Octopus, but I would be very interested in spending any time with you that you have available, in order to get some perspective on what I've read.
Just so you understand where I am in this case. I am currently preparing a review and summary for my Sergeant. My conclusion will be that I do not wish to continue investigating this case, based on the number of people who have met an untimely demise while doing so.
My actions in this matter go against everything I believe in, and this case is very difficult for me to walk away from, especially with the allegations that involve the deaths of Investigator Dave McGowan and his family. But I am conceding to a higher power (my wife) and trying to give her some peace of mind. I cannot look her in the eyes and tell her that I am willing to risk the life of my family by pursuing this.
I am interested in your opinion. Am I just another lamb to the slaughter? Is the Puppet Master pulling my strings via Rachel Begley? Is this just a simple case of murder by Jimmy Hughes at the direction of John P. Nichols, or is it really much more than that?
Thank you for your time and I look forward to hearing from you,
Detective X
RSO - Central Homicide
(951) X desk
(951) X cell
