Freedom and Justice for Some

Blog moved

2006-04-18T09:15:00.000-05:00

Moved to my own server: http://eric.ricebrosresearch.com

Please make a note of it.

OKC Bombing Story Yanked off WorldnetDaily

2006-03-31T08:53:00.000-05:00

http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=49510

For some reseaon, this story went from Breaking News to not being listed on the site at all in record time. Someone is putting pressure on WND to bury this story.

OKC BOMBING FALLOUT Federal judge rules: McVeigh had help

Bolsters claims government had informant inside conspiracy to attack federal building
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: March 30, 20064:41 a.m. Eastern
By J.D .Cash, Roger Charles
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A U.S. District Court judge in Salt Lake City, Utah, has issued a stunning decision that appears to bolster claims that executed bomber Timothy McVeigh was supported by various militia groups, and that the government had an informant inside the bombing conspiracy.

The case in Utah grew out of a dispute between civil attorney Jesse Trentadue and the Oklahoma City FBI over documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

For over a decade, Trentadue has been searching for documents that might shed light on the death of his brother at the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City, in August of 1995.

The federal government maintains that Kenneth Trentadue killed himself in a suicide-proof cell at the Oklahoma City federal installation, where he was being held on a purported parole violation for failing to report to his parole officer.

In the course of this investigation, Trentadue received "tips" from various sources, including one allegedly from a source close to McVeigh, before McVeigh's execution.

That source said that McVeigh told him that Kenneth Trentadue was beaten, tortured and murdered because the FBI mistakenly believed he was linked to a group of bank bandits that considerable evidence now suggests, assisted McVeigh in the plot to bomb the Oklahoma federal building.

The FOIA suit began after heavily redacted documents obtained by this newspaper, from an FBI whistleblower, confirmed McVeigh's links to Elohim City and informants working for the Southern Poverty Law Center who were present at the paramilitary compound on April 17, 1995, when McVeigh called the camp looking for German-national Andreas Strassmeir and additional help in the bombing.

While heavily redacted, that Jan. 4, 1996, teletype from then-FBI director Louis Freeh to a select group of FBI offices contained information appearing to link Strassmeir to McVeigh and the FBI's knowledge that Strassmeir was planning to flee the country soon.

Inexplicably, the FBI did not go to the residence where the memo said Strassmeir was living in Black Mountain, N.C., and detain the individual for questioning about the bombing. Instead, Strassmeir – with the help on his Black Mountain, N.C. attorney, Kirk Lyons, and former CIA pilot Dave Holloway – was able to slip across the Mexican border a few days after the teletype was issued.

Since the discovery of this heavily redacted document linking the SPLC, Elohim City and Strassmeir to McVeigh and the bombing conspiracy, the FBI has since produced 17 additional documents for Trentadue. However, key sections of those documents were also heavily redacted.

Seeking to have the FBI provide unredacted copies of these additional documents, Trentadue has claimed the FBI has a duty to make a full disclosure of who their informants and suspects in the bombing were, because the national interest in the Oklahoma City bombing, far outweighs any privacy interests those informants and suspects may have had.

In order to determine the validity of the claims made by both sides, the FBI was ordered in November to turn over unredacted copies of all the documents at issue for the judge to examine "in chambers."

Considering Trentadue's allegations about his brother's mysterious and violent death, the judge early in his opinion observed: "While officials ruled the death a suicide, the Plaintiff unearthed significant evidence of foul play. Plaintiff's theory is that his brother apparently looked very similar to Richard Lee Guthrie, who allegedly was one of Timothy McVeigh's accomplices in the Oklahoma City bombing and a member of the Mid-West Bank Robbery Gang. Plaintiff believes that his brother was killed during an overly aggressive interrogation by federal agents – who believed Kenneth Trentadue was Richard Lee Guthrie.

Later in his summary of the facts, Judge Dale Kimball also noted that Guthrie was later apprehended by authorities and he, too, is said to have committed suicide his jail cell while in federal custody.

After reviewing the unredacted documents provided by the FBI, Kimball singled out a teletype issued by the FBI, only six days after the blast.

"Plaintiff points out the fact that this document indicates there was an undercover operative in with Timothy McVeigh and members of the various militia groups who aided and supported McVeigh, but plaintiff wonders why, given the subject matter, there are no earlier records produced by the FBI."

Contacted after the ruling was issued, Trentadue told this newspaper that he is heartened by the language the judged used here, which clearly indicates the unredacted documents convinced the court that McVeigh had accomplices that have not been charged and the government had at least one informant within the cabal.

"The judge concurs with my allegations that McVeigh was supported by this bank robbery group at Elohim City and that the government was inside that group with at least one informant."

The court, though, sided with the FBI in refusing to allow the release of the names of the other suspects or their informants that provided them with information about the conspiracy.

In his 22-page ruling, Kimball said, "(FOIA) Exemption 7D protects records of information compiled for law enforcement purposes which could reasonably be expected to disclose the identity of a confidential source or information furnished by a confidential source."

Regarding the FBI's reluctance to provide the information sought by Trentadue, Kimball wrote, "It is troubling that so many of the documents produced by the FBI refer to FD-302s (investigation leads) that were or should have been prepared, and the disclosed documents also refer to other attachments that at one time appear to have accompanied the document, yet these documents have not been produced. While the FBI's failure to discover documents is not necessarily and indication of bad faith, it is puzzling that so many documents could be referenced but not produced."

Focusing on Morris Dees and the organization he co-founded, the SPLC, the judge ordered the FBI to conduct additional record searches for documents containing the names of Morris Dees, the SPLC and several radical members of the far-right that frequented Elohim City and that have been linked in the past to McVeigh.

Encouraging the FBI to fully cooperate with attorney Trentadue in his dogged search for the truth around his brother's murder, Kimball warned the agency: "It appears likely, however, that the FBI has not seen the last FOIA request from Plaintiff."

One senior, retired FBI agent who read only the paragraph quoted above from the judge's ruling said that the judge's finding that there was an informant and a broader conspiracy than heretofore admitted by the government makes even more inexplicable the FBI headquarters' shutting down all investigations into the Elohim City connection to OKBOMB.

He further stated that it would be "a huge scandal" if it is ever proven that Strassmeir's name is among those currently withheld as having been guaranteed confidentiality as an informant.

War of the Worlds

2006-03-08T10:08:00.000-05:00

Read this article:

http://www.amconmag.com/2006/2006_02_27/article3.html

Kimberly

2005-12-08T12:33:00.000-05:00

Today is the 27th anniversary of my beautiful wife's birthday. I am so very blessed to have her in my life.

My love, I would marry you again in an instant.

RIP, Mr. Smith

2005-12-05T13:27:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, a friend's father passed peacefully from this world - his son at his side.

Now the labourer's task is over
Now the battle day is past
Now upon the farther shore
Lands the voyager at last
Father, in Thy gracious keeping
Leave we now thy servant sleeping

Hurt

2005-11-22T10:06:00.000-05:00

Wow, Johnny Cash's cover of 'Hurt' is a very powerful story of regret. I can literally hear the pain and sorrow (self-imposed though it is) in his voice. I highly recommend giving it a listen.

I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that's real

The needle tears a hole
The old familiar sting
Try to kill it all away
But I remember everything

[Chorus:]
What have I become
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know
Goes away in the end
And you could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt

I wear this crown of thorns
Upon my liar's chair
Full of broken thoughts
I cannot repair

Beneath the stains of time
The feelings disappear
You are someone else
I am still right here

[Chorus:]
What have I become
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know
Goes away in the end
And you could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt
If I could start again
A million miles away
I would keep myself
I would find a way

Sir Winston

2005-11-17T16:17:00.000-05:00

A once-again timely passage from Churchill's "The River War, an Account of the Reconquest of the Sudan". Churchill served in this campaign in 1898, and took part in the British cavalry charge against the Muslim forces of the self-proclaimed Mahdi, just north of Omdurman.

"How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity.

The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities - but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome."

-Sir Winston Churchill (The River War, first edition, Vol. II, pages 248-50 (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899).

Repost

2005-11-17T15:22:00.000-05:00

An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State

by Robert Tracinski
Sep 02, 2005

It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself included--did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.

For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency--indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.

When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).

So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?

To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:

"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.

"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....

"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.

" 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,' she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.' "

The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?

Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?

My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)
What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"--the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels--gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails--so they just let many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters--not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.

No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. They don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.

Well, here I am

2005-11-17T10:58:00.000-05:00

It was inevitable...