FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible

[msfreeh]

see link for full story
http://socialistworker.org/2014/04/03/s ... r-40-years" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Still in Attica after 40 years
April 3, 2014
Jalil Muntaqim, a former member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army, has spent more than 40 years behind bars after receiving a sentence of 25 years to life in 1971. Mara Ahmed, an activist, artist, documentary filmmaker and blogger based in Rochester, N.Y., recently visited Muntaqim at the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York.


Jalil Muntaqim
ON FEBRUARY 18, I went to Attica, along with other activists, to visit Jalil Muntaqim (prisoner no. 77A4283, whose birth name was Anthony L. Bottom). This was my first time at a maximum-security prison. With its impossibly high walls and multiple turrets, it looked like a castle, albeit an ugly gray one, and I half expected to be intercepted by a moat.

The inside of the prison is coldly institutional, regulated, bland. The visiting room is large, furnished with tables and chairs, and there's an entire wall of vending machines. The walls are painted with dolphins and miscellaneous underwater scenes. I soon understood why. Many families visit with young children in tow, and soon, their noisy chatter began to reverberate throughout the carefully reinforced and supervised space we were in.

Jalil joined us after 15 or 20 minutes. Tall, affable, with a warm smile on his face and a taqiyah (Muslim skullcap) on his head, it was easy to fall into conversation with him. Jalil is interested in everything. He asked Diane about her work as a Rochester city high school teacher and discussed my films with me, including issues related to Islam and feminism and the Partition of India.

His charm and lively intelligence make it hard to imagine that he's spent more than 40 years of his life in prison. He was a young Black Panther when he was arrested in 1971. Since COINTELPRO--a secret FBI program aimed at sabotaging dissent and disrupting movements for self-determination within the U.S. from the 1950s to the 1970s--has now been exposed for its illegal activities, it's incredible that political prisoners like Jalil continue to be locked up.

Here is a summary of the case against Jalil in the words of Danish activist and writer Kit Aastrup:

[Muntaqim] was only 19 years old and a member of the Black Panther Party when he was sent to prison in 1971 on conspiracy charges following the killing of a police officer, allegedly in retaliation for the murder of Black political prisoner George Jackson.

Muntaqim was targeted by COINTELPRO, an unconstitutional and clandestine FBI operation that was set up to destroy political organizations, especially those from the oppressed communities. In 1975, Muntaqim was wrongly convicted of killing two police officers in New York City, although there was no physical evidence against him and two juries failed to convict him before the State found one that did.

Muntaqim, who received a sentence of 25 years to life, has always maintained his innocence...In 2007 Muntaqim was charged in a cold case from 1971 known as the San Francisco 8 (SF8) case, and he was transferred from Auburn Correctional Facility in New York to San Francisco County Jail. This case was originally dropped in 1975 because it was based on confessions extracted by torture. At the end of July, two of the SF8, Herman Bell and Muntaqim, were sentenced to probation and time served, after Bell agreed to plead to voluntary manslaughter and Muntaqim reluctantly pleaded no contest to conspiracy to voluntary manslaughter.

Charges have been dropped against most of the SF8 on the basis of insufficient evidence. However, Herman Bell and Jalil Muntaqim remain in prison.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

JALIL IS no run-of-the-mill human being. He acquired a college education while incarcerated; in 1976, he initiated the National Prisoners Campaign to Petition the United Nations to recognize the existence of political prisoners in the U.S.; in 1997, he launched the Jericho Movement to demand amnesty for American political prisoners on the basis of international law; he has written books and maintains a blog; and he's quelled prison riots.

He's also involved in literacy programs and has wonderful ideas about vocational training in prison running parallel to community programs outside so that released prisoners can transition effortlessly into them and chances of relapse are minimized. For all these efforts at organizing, Jalil is transferred relentlessly from one correctional facility to another.

Jalil understands that we have reached a racial crossroads in America. Black kids are being murdered for the clothes they wear or the music they listen to, stop-and-frisk and racial profiling have become institutionalized, books like Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow explain how a caste system rooted in mass incarceration has replaced segregation and slavery, anti-Vietnam War protesters and activists have revealed how they stole COINTELPRO files, and books like Betty Medsger's The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI delineate the disturbing history, machinations and criminality of the FBI.

Jalil's concern is that this "spark" might ignite people's anger rather than become the impetus for constructive organizing. He hopes for liberal movements to unite and coalesce as they did during the civil rights era. He wants to hearken back to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign and forge links between the struggles against racism and economic inequity, between Trayvon Martin and Occupy Wall Street.

He envisions an alternative, internal judicial system capable of resolving disputes and interdicting where necessary, based on African American needs and realities. It would work in unison with the American judicial system, the way Jewish, Christian or Amish religious laws do right now.

This reminded me of something August Wilson said in an interview with Bill Moyers in 1988. He talked about African Americans being a "visible" minority and the offensive idea that they must integrate into white, European (in other words, mainstream) society and distance themselves from their own values, aesthetics and worldview in order to be successful.

He gave the example of Asian Americans, whose culture is not only accepted but admired. He mentioned Passover and how it reminds Jews of their history of slavery. There is a need for a Black Passover and for a celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation. By revisiting and keeping alive their common past, African Americans can build a common future.

[msfreeh]

http://www.justacitizen.org" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[msfreeh]

see link to view crime scene photos


http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/24/ ... n-orlando/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


March 24, 2014
CounterPunch Exclusive Investigation: Did the FBI Snuff Out a Boston Marathon Bombing Witness?
Dark Questions About a Deadly FBI Interrogation in Orlando
by DAVE LINDORFF

Ibrahim Todashev, 27, a Russian immigrant friend of suspected Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was shot and killed last May 22 in the middle of the night by the FBI at the violent end of a five-hour interrogation in his home in Orlando. Now the FBI, ten months later, is claiming that its agent was attacked by Todashev, and was justified in killing him. But a CounterPunch investigation raises grave questions about what happened in that apartment.

While it’s of course conceivable that this was just a hugely botched investigation by two inept FBI agents, our investigation suggests that Todashev may have been killed trying to flee a brutal interrogation, and that he may have even been deliberately executed by the FBI.

Questions raised in this case range from why FBI agents failed to follow Bureau’s long-established interrogation protocol, leaving just one agent to question the witness, to why a suspect known to be a competitive mixed martial arts expert was left unrestrained during a hostile and high-pressure interrogation, how Todashev was shot, including a bullet to the top of the head, and finally to how he could have been shot seven times, clearly with intent to kill given where he was hit, if he was considered by the Bureau to be a key witness in the Boston Marathon case.

The FBI and other law enforcement sources, as I reported earlier in the online publication WhoWhatWhy.com, have leaked a series of widely at odds explanations to selected mainstream news media organizations as to how and why Todashev was shot and killed. Initially Bureau sources leaked to reporters that he had variously grabbed a sword off the wall, or left the room and returned from the kitchen with a pipe or a broomstick, or alternatively with a knife.

All of those leaked stories foundered on common sense. The “sword” in question turns out to have been a decorative scmitar with no sharp edge, hung on the wall and with a broken handle. There was no explanation for how the agent, who may have been accompanied in the room by a Massachusetts State Trooper, could have allowed Todashev to leave his seat and go that sword, or alternatively to the kitchen area of the room to pick up any of the other alleged implements of destruction. Ultimately, the Bureau conceded that Todashev had actually been unarmed the whole time.

But the FBI has later claimed, in leaks to selected reporters, that Todashev, left unrestrained that night (in marked contrast to other occasions when he had been cuffed) had lunged across the interview table at the interrogating agent, causing the agent to fear for his life and to shoot him in self defense, by one leaked account firing first four times, dropping his alleged assailant, and than three more times when, surprisingly, he attempted to stand again.

#1JunctionInterrogationRoomandExithallway

Blood stains at the exit point from the room where Todashev was interrogated, leading towards foyer and the apartment’s front door. Was Todashev killed trying to escape a brutal grilling?

A 10-Month “Investigation”

For ten months, the FBI, claiming it was “investigating” this shooting by its agent, took the unusual step of blocking a Florida coroner’s report on the shooting death — one that was completed within days last May by the Orange County/Orlando Medical Examiner’s Office. The FBI also sought, unsuccessfully, to prevent Todashev’s family from recovering and burying the body, insisting there would have to be permission obtained from his parents in Dagestan, as well a presentation of hard-to-obtain documents like his Soviet-era birth certificate. The Bureau in that instance was overruled by the Medical Examiner who, on humanitarian grounds, handed over Todashev’s bullet-riddled body to his widow and mother-in-law, which is why we have photos of his injuries available, which were taken by a family friend.

But an exclusive interview last week by this journalist of Deputy Chief Medical Examiner Gary Utz, who personally conducted the Todashev autopsy, confirms that Todashev was shot seven times by FBI bullets, four times in the torso, two times in the left arm (he was right-handed), and once in the top of the head, slightly towards the back of the head. A significant bruise and contusion over the cheekbone showed he also had been “forcefully struck” on the left side of the head, in Utz’s words — a point that had never been mentioned by the FBI.

Bruising does not occur to a significant extent once a person is dead — especially if the heart has been destroyed by bullets and there has been significant loss of blood — since there is no blood pressure to push blood out of damaged blood vessels into surrounding tissue. This means it is likely the blow suffered by Todashev came before he was shot.

An Open Homicide Case

Coroner Utz, who has classified Todashev’s death as a homicide, while not determining whether it was justified or not, says he “cannot understand” why the FBI has blocked the Medical Examiner’s Office from releasing his report. He called the Bureau’s hold order “somewhat unusual.”

He added, “It just makes everyone suspicious.” It’s apparently a sentiment he shares, as he also said, “If the FBI didn’t have a problem with our report, it would already be released.”

Cyril Wecht is a renowned forensic pathologist, former Allegheny County Coroner and also head of the advisory board of the Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law at Duquesne University. In an interview with this reporter last week, he said he agrees with Utz, saying, “The FBI’s investigation of the shooting should have been released long ago, and the coroner’s report, too.”

Meanwhile, photos of the room taken on the day that the FBI unsealed the apartment as a crime scene, and provided by Todashev’s mother-in-law, Elena Teyer, appear to show that the only significant bloodstains in the room are at the point where a foyer leads out of the room to the front door of the ground-floor apartment. There is no blood visible in the photos in other parts of the room, including by or on the table where the interrogation occurred, which is at the opposite side of the room from where the exit and the blood are. Significantly, there is no sign of blood in the photos, either on the carpets covering the floor or on the room’s white-painted walls. Where there is blood, there is a copious amount of it, making it clear that one spot just before the foyer is where Todashev was shot and where he died, moving no further.

Teyer says the photos were taken exactly as they found the roughly 10-foot-by 24-foot room. Since the FBI claimed Todashev had been seated across a table, and the table in the photo is up against the wall, with no chairs at it, this means that the FBI had tampered with the crime scene before unsealing it and allowing the family’s investigator in. She adds that the agency had a list of 61 items it had removed from the room.

#2FullViewofGrillingRoomw:exit(l)&table(r)

View of the apartment and the room where the interrogation occurred, looking towards the open front door. The FBI appears to have tampered with the scene, righting the table where the interrogation took place and removing the chairs. Note lack of blood on the white walls.

Follow the Blood

Teyer, a six-and-a-half-year active-duty member of the US Army, where she holds the rank of Specialist, working as a pharmicist’s assistant at the Ft. Stewart Army Air Base in Savannah, GA, is a 2006 Russian immigrant and a naturalized US citizen. In an exclusive interview, she says that the first thing the licensed private investigator hired by Todashev’s Russian family said when she and Todashev’s widow Reni Manukyan came to the apartment with a key and let him in was, “Look at this – no blood spattered on the walls. He was shot while down on the floor.”

That investigator, Ed Busquet, a former captain in the North Palm Police Department in Florida, where he handled homicide cases, and also a former DEA agent and Georgia Public Defenders Office investigator, also noted a freshly sliced-away area on the plaster wall just above all the blood on the floor by the foyer. According to Teyer, he said, “It looks like someone may have cut out a bullet from here.” (If the FBI agents removed a bullet, it could be a case of tampering with a crime scene, as the case has been and is still classified by the Medical Examiner as an open homicide case.)

The family’s attorneys have opted not to make their private investigator’s report public until after the FBI finally releases its report on the shooting, and after the State’s Attorney in Orlando, who is also conducting an investigation, releases his. That could be smart on their part, since if they released it early, the FBI could adjust its own report in an effort to explain away any of the investigator’s findings. As it is, they don’t know what he found.

Assailant or Fleeing Witness?

Teyer says the family’s investigator told her that based on the location of blood in the room, Todashev appeared to have been shot at the egress to from his interrogation room to the foyer, not at the table where he was being grilled.

Wecht, while cautioning that he has not seen the coroner’s report, the FBI’s investigative report or a report by the private investigator hired by Todashev’s family and the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR), nonetheless professes skepticism about the FBI’s leaked claim of being attacked by Todashev.

After examining the photos provided by Teyer, he explained, “The lack of blood on the walls doesn’t make sense either if Todashev was attacking. The blood by the exit means that he’s trying to flee, and if he’s doing that, he can’t at the same time be threatening. So why is all the blood at the exit? It’s not consistent with the scenario set forth by the agent.” He adds, “And it wouldn’t be right to shoot him if he was fleeing out the door, if they’re not saying he has a gun.”

The Case of the Missing Agent

The FBI has leaked the information that Todashev, just before being shot, had “confessed” to participating in a long-unsolved brutal triple murder, along with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, of three small-time drug dealers in Waltham, Mass. back on September 11, 2011, and claims that he was “about to sign a confession” to that crime at the time he attacked the agent. But that all is based on having only one FBI agent in the room.

Such a thing would be totally against long-established Bureau procedure and against common sense, as the Bureau doesn’t tape interviews, and relies instead on a second agent to sign and confirm the accuracy of the interrogating agent on a “Form 302.” That’s one reason FBI agents always show up in pairs to interview witnesses and suspects.

However, in this instance the second G-man, an agent from the Orlando FBI office known by Todashev and other friends who had been repeatedly questioned by the FBI as agent “Chris,” was outside the house almost the whole time, at some distance away. He was out there to ensure that Khusen Taramov, a friend whom Todashev had asked to come along back to his house to be present when the FBI came to conduct their interrogation, not come near the scene of the interview.

In an interview with a local television reporter and at a press conference sponsored by CAIR, Taramov, shortly after the Todashev shooting, stated that agent “Chris” had for four hours kept him outside in the yard and parking lot, far from the building where Todashev’s apartment was located.That situation continued until around 11:30 pm. All the while, according to Taramov, the agent was casually asking him “unimportant” questions, and texting on his cell phone (most likely to his partner inside the apartment), not even paying attention to Taramov’s answers.

Then at that 11:30, the agent, giving no explanation (and exercising an authority he did not have, since Taramov was not under arrest and was not even being officially interrogated, and was thus legally free to move around as he pleased), told Taramov he would “have to leave.” He refused Taramov’s request to remain in the parking lot, and ordered him instead to go to a local restaurant far from the residential neighborhood where Todashev lived, and where he said he knew Taramov and Todashev liked to hang out. Agent Chris promised to bring Todashev there to him when the questioning was over.

#3viewOfRoomExitandblood

The spot where Todashev died. Note any lack of blood higher up on the walls, which led a private investigator to say he must have been shot while on the floor.

Removing a Witness?

However to make sure Tamarov actually left the area and went to the restaurant, Agent “Chris” reportedly rode along in Taramov’s car, calling for another vehicle to pick him up and return him to Todashev’s apartment.

Growing fearful of what might be happening, Tamarov, after getting no response to texts he sent to Todashev’s phone, shortly later drove back to the apartment himself only to find lots of police cars in the parking area, helicopters in the air and crime scene tape surrounding the house.

Todashev had been killed during his friend’s enforced absence. Meanwhile, his supposed “confession” could not be attested to by another agent on the Agency’s Form 302, because agent “Chris” wasn’t there to witness it.

Coroner Wecht says, “To my knowledge not having a second agent present was not according to procedure. Also if they had awareness that this guy could be violent and dangerous — and they should have — that would not be a way to proceed. I find that absence of a second agent very puzzling. Even if a state trooper were there, usually the FBI doesn’t work like that. They like to run the show and to use their own people.”

Besides, there was no real reason for “Chris” to be out in the parking lot keeping Taramov away. He could have had one or both of the Massachusetts troopers do that, or could have called on the Orlando Police, so he could do his crucial job of backing up the interrogating agent and verifying the Form 301 report.

#4Viewinto grillingroomfrom frontdoor

The pooled blood, viewed from the perspective of the front door, through the foyer, looking into the apartment.

The Shooting and the Do-Nothing State Trooper

In a recent lengthy public radio report on this case that ran on “This American Life,” Boston radio reporter David Boeri claims a “law enforcement source,” which he later slips and identifies as a Massachusetts State Police officer, was also in the room with the agent and Todashev at the time of the shooting. If correct that means there would have been an armed officer who allegedly witnessed an attack on the agent, and the agent’s shooting of that attacker, but who took no action himself to stop Todashev. Remember, all seven shots, according to the coroner, were fired by the FBI agent.

Wecht scoffs at that account saying, “The agent’s story doesn’t hold up. He says he was in danger for his life. If that was the case, how come the state trooper didn’t intervene? That doesn’t make sense to me. I know from police shootings over the years. They don’t say, ‘Okay, Joe, you do the shooting. I’ve got your back.’ They all shoot, and you end up having to figure out who shot which bullets.”

Interestingly, the bullets were taken from the Medical Examiner by the FBI, an action which Wecht says was also not correct, as they are evidence in an open homicide case that “should be investigated by local or state authorities, not the FBI.”

At the very least, if the FBI’s claim were true that Todashev had actually confessed to the Waltham triple murder just before he was killed, this whole incident represents a colossal failure by the two FBI agents on the case. Dead men don’t talk, the agency doesn’t tape interviews, and with one agent present, there’s no Form 302 to document anything.

Then too, because one agent was left alone to grill a man the FBI claims they knew to have a quick temper and to be a martial arts expert, and because on this particular interrogation, unlike earlier occasions, Todashev was not restrained or cuffed in any way during five hours of intense grilling and was free to strike out if, as alleged, he lost that reputed temper, any chance of getting that confession was blown from the beginning.

But the peculiar decision to leave one agent alone in the room, and the even more peculiar decision, just before the shooting, to have the other agent physically remove Todashev’s friend Tamarov from eye or even earshot, raise a more sinister possibility: was there a plan all along not to obtain a confession about a three-year old murder, but to eliminate a witness who knew Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and who may have known something about the planning of the year-ago Boston Marathon Bombing?

After all, the FBI is already taking heat from critics, including in Congress and in Boston, for failing to prevent the Marathon bombing, and in particular for failing to keep its eye on Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The US was warned about Tsarnaev by Russian intelligence a year before the bombing because he had reportedly met with Muslim militants in Dagestan on a visit to his family. The FBI had even visited him a year before the bombing and questioned him, but then says they dropped their investigation of him. What if Todashev knew otherwise, though? After all, we know that almost every terror event that the FBI has “foiled” since 9/11 has actually been largely or in part the work of an FBI informant or undercover agent. Was this one that went awry, and did Todashev know something about that? His girlfriend, Tatiana Gruzdeva, deported by ICE at the FBI’s urging though she had a valid visa and no criminal history, claims he appeared sad and upset on learning of the elder Tsarnaev’s death following the bombing, and of the claim by the FBI that he had been responsible for it.

And there is one more disturbing question. The shot into the top of the head, clearly a killing shot, according to both coroners Utz and Wecht if the usual FBI standard hollow-point projectile was used, could not have been fired at the time Todashev allegedly lunged at his interrogator. If it had been, he could never have made it to the egress leading into the foyer some 8-10 feet across the room. Nor could it have been fired over the intervening floorspace, as it would have felled him immediately, and would have led to blood appearing elsewhere.

Meanwhle, the lack of any blood on the walls at the exit area, as noted by the family’s private investigator, suggests Todashev was shot down on the floor, not standing.

Shot to head

Todashev’s body, showing the spot where an FBI agent fired a kill shot into his head.

Was the Head Shot then a Coup de Grace?

Teyer has their own theory. Her career in the Army recently torpedoed by the FBI, which maliciously had her listed as a “security risk,” causing her to decide to retire from the service, the unintimidated Teyer says, “My theory is that Ibragim had too much information about Tamerlan, and they didn’t want that information to come out.”

What information would that be? Teyer, who is involved with a group fighting for the freedom of the surviving Tsarnaev brother, Dzhokhar, who faces death if convicted of the bombing, says she does not believe he and his brother Tamerlan were actually the Boston bombers, and says even if they were, they couldn’t have done it alone. “Look,” she says, “those two brothers couldn’t have come up with the idea of bombing the Marathon on their own! Someone would have had to plant the idea in their heads, and someone would have helped them plan it. Why do you think the police tried to kill Dzhokhar when he was hiding in the boat? They fired into that boat over 100 times. Why? He was already surrounded, and with Tamerlan dead, if he had been involved he would have been needed as a witness to find out if there were any accomplices or further attacks planned. Instead they tried to kill him.”

Saying it’s clear from all that has happened — the killings and the deportations and the blocking of people from returning to the US — that the FBI is simply eliminating witnesses to something. She adds, “I don’t know what Ibragim knew about Tamerlan, but he must have known something.”

It’s not such a wild speculation. Several news organizations have reported that all but one of the terrorist attacks between 2001 and the Boston bombing that were “disrupted” or foiled by the FBI have featured Bureau informants or undercover agents who played key roles in setting the plots in motion. Could the Boston Marathon bombing be a case of such an FBI-involved plot going somehow awry?

A call to FBI spokesman Paul Bresson to seek an explanation for the Bureau’s extraordinary ongoing 10-month hold on the coroner’s report on this killing and on its own lengthy investigation into the agent’s shooting of Todashev, as well as for an explanation for the decision to have only one agent with Todashev during an intense interrogation has so far gone unanswered.

A report is due out tomorrow by the Florida State’s Attorney in Orlando, Jeffrey L. Ashton, on this shooting. It is not clear what that conclusion will be. Ashton’s office send out terse note to the media over the weekend protesting an apparently FBI-leaked story claiming his investigation would also, like the Bureau, exonerage the agent in Todashev’s death. He said that his conclusion had not been reached yet, and called the leak “unfair to both the family and the agent.” A good question for Ashton, whatever his conclusion is, would be whether he had access to the witnesses who knew about the FBI’s harassment of Todashev between April 16 and his death on May 22, 2013, and especially to Todashev’s friend Taramov, the witness who was removed by the FBI from the vicinity of the shooting just before it happened. All those witnesses, were driven or deported out of the country by the FBI in the ensuing weeks after the killing, and Taramov, who left voluntarily to attend his friend’s funeral, was barred from returning to the US, despite his having a valid Green Card. Another question for Ashton would be whether his own investigators had access to the bullets removed from the Coroner’s office, and the many items removed from the apartment by the FBI.

Meanwhile, both the ACLU’s national office and its Massachusetts office, citing the “unbroken FBI track record of clearing its agents who use deadly force,” (that’s 150 agents cleared out of 150 agent shootings of witnesses or suspects over 18 years, not counting this latest shooting, according to a report in the New York Times), has objected to having the FBI investigating its own agent in this shooting and has called for an independent inquiry into Todashev’s death.

As Howard Simon, executive director of the national ACLU, said, in response to the Boston Globe’s report that the FBI study will exonerate its agent:

“As we said when we first called for an investigation into Todashev’s death, secrecy fosters suspicion. The DOJ should have called for a truly independent investigation of the shooting, and they still can! There remain too many unanswered questions about what happened in that Orlando apartment last May. Until they are answered—until the public knows exactly how and why FBI agents and police officers walked into an apartment to ask questions and walked out with a 27 year-old in a body bag—we will not stop our calls for transparency and answers.”

DAVE LINDORFF is a veteran investigative journalist, and is founder of the collectively run news site ThisCantBeHappenig.ne

[msfreeh]

I interviewed Pete Seeger in the spring of 2013 for a documentary about the artist Robert Shetterly.

see
http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org ... ete-seeger" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Seeger told me FBI agents tried to assassinate him
on several occasions






http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2 ... nline.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



Seeger died in January at the age of 94, dozens of journalists, researchers and curious members of the public sought his files from the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act. The FBI has been informing requesters that it turned over all of Seeger’s files to the NARA before his death.

NARA spokeswoman Miriam Kleinman said in an interview that the archive would now seek to publish the files once it completes processing them. They are thought to total about 2,500 pages and need to be screened for information that is exempt from disclosure, as well as names and details that might be redacted to protect the identities of informants or confidential sources.

“As soon as possible, NARA will post this file online,” Kleinman said. “We are waiting for review to be complete.”

The NARA initially decided to release the files only to researchers on request, for a hefty administrative fee of at least $2,000. But Kleinman said public interest in the files prompted a switch in policy.

Seeger, the subject of secret FBI and CIA surveillance dating to the 1940s, was blacklisted during the McCarthy era because of his political beliefs and was indicted for contempt of Congress.
Thumbnail image for In defense of Pete Seeger, American communist
In defense of Pete Seeger, American communist

Like his party associates, Seeger was consistently on the right side of history

The government’s files on Seeger will, for the first time, lay bare the extent of federal law enforcement’s and intelligence agencies’ investigations and surveillance of the beloved protest singer.

Even though the FBI claimed it had turned over all its files on him to the NARA, Al Jazeera located one file from the FBI’s Los Angeles field office that consists of 13 pages from the mid-1960s and early 1970s and is released here for the first time.

The file, which contains news clippings, a complaint form and a letter to the FBI from a member of the public, underscores how Seeger was seen as a potential threat to national security. One government official was so repulsed by Seeger’s music that he informed the FBI.

On April 1, 1964, according to an FBI complaint form, the chief of the fiscal division of the Veterans Administration (VA) outpatient clinic in Los Angeles was handed a tape recording from a doctor who was doing research for the VA.

“[Redacted] took the tape home and played same and found that it consisted largely of parodies that were highly inflammatory and derogatory toward the Armed Services of the United States, U.S. defense systems and the FBI,” a bureau agent wrote on the complaint form, in which he characterized the case as “sedition.”

The VA official, whose name is redacted, “became highly incensed” after listening to the tape recording, and his “feelings of revulsion were shared by his family and some neighbors who also heard the tape.”

“[Redacted] advised that he is holding the tape at his home … and had told his wife that he was going to have the FBI come by and listen to it,” the agent wrote. “[Redacted] stated that he wanted his identity concealed, however he was advised that if it was necessary to follow through on the matter, this might not be possible to do.”
Seeger, the subject of secret FBI and CIA surveillance dating to the 1940s, was blacklisted during the McCarthy era because of his political beliefs and was indicted for contempt of Congress.
Seeger, right, performs with early collaborators Baldwin “Butch” Hawes and John “Peter” Hawes, circa 1940. Seeger first grew popular through radio performances. Underwood Archives/Getty Images

The FBI agent’s recommended action was: “Secure tape, prepare transcription to determine whether this is seditious material.”

A week later, FBI supervisor Neal McGinnis sent a memo to the special agent in charge at the FBI’s Los Angeles field office under the subject “Tape recording of folk songs of Pete Seeger (PH) and unknown British singer is — X.”

“Tapes were played by [special agent] Ewing G. Layhew and it appears they are folk songs by one Peter Seeger (PH), the well known left-wing folk singer, and an unknown British music hall entertainer,” McGinnis wrote. “Nothing of a derogatory nature was heard which required any investigative action on the part of this bureau.”

Seeger’s Los Angeles FBI file also contains an Aug. 10, 1970, handwritten letter to the FBI’s Van Nuys office (rerouted to the bureau’s offices on Wilshire Blvd. in Los Angeles) by an individual who wanted the FBI to share “information on a man called Pete Seeger.”

“I have heard he has something to do with the Communist Party. He is going to give a concert at the Hollywood Bowl in September. If you could please send me some information I would be very happy,” wrote the person, whose name is redacted.

FBI special agent Wesley G. Grapp responded on Aug. 14, 1970.

“While I sincerely appreciate the interest which prompted your inquiry, I must advised [sic] you that by order of the attorney general information in the files of this bureau is confidential and available for official use only,” Grapp wrote. “I am sure you will understand the reason for this rule. No inference, of course, should be drawn that we do, or do not, have information regarding the subject of your inquiry.”

The rest of the Los Angeles FBI field office file on Seeger contains a press clipping about a July 3, 1975, report from an informant about a flyer “regarding Political Rights Defense Fund,” identified as a “front group of Socialist Workers Party.” The defense fund flyer was headlined “The Bill of Rights is at stake” and begins with this paragraph: “Government agencies carry out illegal political operations that make a mockery of the Bill of Rights.”

The informant’s report was submitted into Seeger’s file as well as the files of other well-known public figures, including Cesar Chavez, journalist I.F. Stone and Dr. Benjamin Spock.
Document

[msfreeh]

see link for full story


http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/201 ... ot_by.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



Civil rights lawsuit filed after FBI agent kills man at eastern New Orleans motel



d May 29, 2014 at 7:50 PM

The family of a man killed by an FBI agent during an undercover drug sting at an eastern New Orleans motel filed a federal civil rights lawsuit Thursday (May 29).

The lawsuit claims the agent used excessive force when firing on Allen Desdunes, 37, during the July 30 sting in the parking lot of a Motel 6, and that other law enforcement officers helped cover up details surrounding the shooting.

The lawsuit comes after the U.S. Justice Department in April said it closed its probe into the shooting and would not pursue a criminal investigation. Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro's office earlier this year also declined to pursue a criminal case against the agent and referred the case to federal prosecutors on jurisdictional grounds.

After the shooting, family members told NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune that Desdunes was unarmed and felt he had been unfairly targeted and ambushed.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in New Orleans, was brought on behalf of Desdunes' wife, Danette Desdunes, and two sons, Jeremiah Green and Allen Desdunes Jr.

They cite severe emotional distress and are seeking unspecific "economic damages."
Desdunes family.jpgDanette Desdunes and Raven Desdunes, wife and daughter of Allen Desdunes, who was fatally shot by an FBI officer on July 30, 2013. Helen Freund, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune

The lawsuit names as defendants seven FBI agents and New Orleans Police Department officers said to be involved in the shooting, and lists six "John Does" from both agencies. The identity of the agent who fired on Desdunes, who was part of the Violent Crime Task Force and remains with the agency, has never been made public.

A spokesman for the New Orleans Police Department declined to comment, citing the pending litigation. Likewise, a spokeswoman for the FBI declined to comment on the lawsuit.

Police said the shooting happened in the 12300 block of the I-10 Service Road about 2 p.m. while Desdunes was sitting in the car with a friend, Terry Lane, 32. Two unmarked law-enforcement vehicles rammed Desdunes' car so hard his airbags deployed, the lawsuit says. Moments later, Desdunes was shot in the head at close range, according to the lawsuit.

Authorities recovered heroin and a variety of pills from two men who told police they bought the drugs earlier in the day from Desdunes, court records show.

The FBI has released scant on the details of the shooting, even after the U.S. Department of Justice dropped their probe.

"The actions of the defendants in ramming Mr. Desdunes's car, unjustifiably shooting him, failing to intervene to stop the use of excessive and deadly force, and later covering up their unconstitutional conduct, were done knowingly, jointly, and in concert, and thereby constituted a conspiracy under the Constitution and laws of the United States," the lawsuit, filed by attorney Stephen Haedicke, states.

The lawsuit also alleges the officers were racially biased against Des

[msfreeh]

see link for full story


http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... port-based" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Extremely Troubling" Documents Show How Obama Administration Embraced Foreign Detention of Terror Suspects
Changes made to a key FBI interrogation manual highlight the bureau's increasing focus on questioning suspects—including Americans—in overseas prisons.

—By Nick Baumann
| Mon Jun. 9, 2014 6:00 AM EDT



Report: elnavegante/Shutterstock; FBI seal: Federal Bureau of Investigation/Wikimedia Commons; Chain: Picsfive/Shutterstock; Lock: Marc Dietrich/Shutterstock

What happens when an FBI agent steps into a foreign prison to interrogate a US citizen? For several years, even as the FBI has cooperated with foreign governments to question Americans locked up in countries such as Kuwait, South Sudan, and Yemen, the Obama administration has been tight-lipped about the rules that govern such interrogations. FBI officials have told Congress that the same rules apply when FBI agents interview suspects at home and overseas. But an internal bureau interrogation manual suggests that the truth is more complicated—and new information from the FBI shows that key edits were made to the manual as the Obama administration shifted away from the Bush-era practice of questioning terrorism suspects at Pentagon- or CIA-run facilities, and toward outsourcing detentions to foreign regimes.

The FBI acknowledges that information it shares with foreign countries sometimes leads to the arrest of people the FBI is interested in, including Americans, and that its agents sometimes interview these suspects. This controversial practice, often called proxy detention, has been denounced by human rights advocates who say it circumvents suspects' constitutional rights. But it took a lawsuit from the ACLU to force the Obama administration to disclose a manual that offers advice to FBI agents conducting these interviews.

When the manual, titled "Cross-Cultural, Rapport-Based Interrogation" was released in 2012, the sections that dealt with proxy detention were heavily redacted. The FBI's page-and-a-half of "recommended practices" for conducting interviews of suspects in foreign custody was entirely redacted:

[msfreeh]

FBI agents tried to block Martin Luther King commencement address.
When that failed they assassinated him.
as always funded by your tax dime and Utah moonbat da guv Herbert is rockin back and forth in his chair waiting for re runs of Pee Wees Playhouse


2. stories


1st

Why Was JFK Murdered?
A transcript of the Lew Rockwell Show episode 150 with James W. Douglass

http://lewrockwell.com/orig13/douglass1.1.1.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;





Listen to the podcast.




2nd

see link for cost of your tax dime


http://www.theatlantic.com/features/arc ... ch/372258/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


How the FBI Tried to Block Martin Luther King’s Commencement Speech

The untold story of a government plot, a maverick college president, and the most important figure of the civil rights era
Martin Dobrow
June 11, 2014

Their one and only meeting lasted barely a minute. On March 26, 1964, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X came to Washington to observe the beginning of the Senate debate on the Civil Rights Act. They shook hands. They smiled for the cameras. As they parted, Malcolm said jokingly, “Now you’re going to get investigated.”

That, of course, was well underway. Ever since Attorney General Robert Kennedy had approved FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s request in October 1963, King had been the target of extraordinary wiretapping sanctioned by his own government. By this point, five months later, the taps were overflowing with data from King’s home, his office, and the hotel rooms where he stayed.
Henry Griffin/AP Photo

The data the FBI mined—initially about King’s associations with Communists and later about his sexual life—was used in an attempt to, depending on your point of view, protect the country or destroy the civil rights leader. Hoover and his associates tried to get “highlights” to the press, the president, even Pope Paul VI. So pervasive was this effort that it extended all the way to the small campus in Western Massachusetts, Springfield College, where I have taught journalism for the past 15 years.

In early 1964, King was invited by Springfield President Glenn Olds to receive an honorary degree and deliver the commencement address on June 14. But just days after King accepted the invitation, the FBI tried to get the college to rescind it. The Bureau asked Massachusetts Senator Leverett Saltonstall, a corporator of Springfield College, to lean on Olds to “uninvite” King, based on damning details from the wiretap.

King’s biographers have recorded little about this episode. Neither David Garrow nor Taylor Branch—who both won Pulitzers for books about King—ever mentioned Glenn Olds by name or title. Saltonstall is relegated to a one-sentence footnote in Garrow’s The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr., a groundbreaking 1981 book that unmasked the Bureau’s extensive surveillance of the civil rights leader. In the hardcover edition of Branch’s 2006 book, At Canaan’s Edge, the third volume of a towering trilogy about America in the King years that took more than two decades to create, the renowned historian wrote that Saltonstall had “helped block an honorary degree at Springfield College, by spreading the FBI’s clandestine allegations that King was a philandering, subversive fraud.”

There was just one problem with this lively statement. Nobody blocked an honorary degree for Martin Luther King at Springfield College.

It was a small lapse by a formidable researcher and masterful storyteller. But lurking beneath this mistake is a great and almost entirely untold story about the most important figure of the civil rights era and a maverick college president facing his moment of truth.

The students in Springfield’s class of 1964 lived a Forrest Gump-like connection with U.S. history. Born just after the attack on Pearl Harbor, they came to college at the dawn of a new decade. In the fall of their freshman year, Massachusetts’ native son John F. Kennedy appeared at a rally in downtown Springfield one day, and got elected president of the United States the next. In the fall of their senior year, they flocked to the few black-and-white televisions on campus to join America’s grim vigil when JFK was shot. The following June, they expected to turn their tassels from right to left in the presence of Martin Luther King.

For most of their college days, there was an innocence to this group of American youth, at a time just before the ’60s became The Sixties. During their freshman year, they wore beanies. Their social worlds included hootenannies, panty raids, and carefully regulated visiting hours in single-sex dorms, with strict rules of “doors open, feet on the floor.” Many students of the almost exclusively white class learned The Twist from Barry Brooks, a popular “Negro” student from Washington, D.C., who earned election to the Campus Activities Board.

These students, at the tail end of the so-called “Silent Generation,” were less inclined to question authority or conventional wisdom than their younger siblings would later be. They’d also chosen to attend Springfield College, an old YMCA school, known as the birthplace of basketball and best regarded at the time for producing wholesome teachers of physical education. “It was,” says Barry Brooks, “sort of an apple pie kind of place.”

Members of the class were only vaguely familiar with Glenn Olds, who served as college president from 1958 to 1965. He was a trim and conservatively dressed man with receding blond hair and an engaging grin. He sometimes hosted groups of students at his on-campus house, serving apples, cheese, and water. He never drank alcohol or caffeine. He began each morning with calisthenics.

[msfreeh]

In the spring of 2001 we brought attorney John Clarke to speak at Bates college about the involvement of Hillary Clinton and taxpayer funded FBI agents in assassinating Vince Foster.
It was our 12th annual conference investigating crimes committed by FBI. agents.

as always the assassination was funded by your tax dime,eh?


Google. john Clarke Clinton YouTube Vince foster if link does not work


http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rCiiB1_OGUE" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[msfreeh]

I understand clearly why you allowed taxpayer funded FBI terrorists
to pay $1million big ones of your tax dime to create the 1993 1st World Trade Center bombing.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5gawCgJOHWw" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Do You?


http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s9p1AnhDzWg" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Then there was the FBI informant who created the OKC bombing named McVeigh


The FBI informant who created the bombing,eh?



http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/worl ... 120252.ece" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


FBI informant tired of secrecy breaks cover
June 16 2014

Shortly before he was jailed for plotting bombings and assassinations, a fundamentalist cleric rose to his feet in a New York courtroom and screamed at an Egyptian immigrant named Emad Salem, declaring him “Satan” and issuing a fatwa that called for him to be killed.

Mr Salem had been paid $1 million by the FBI to infiltrate the cleric’s followers, and after stepping down from the stand he and his family disappeared into a witness protection programme, living under false names and moving regularly. Now, nearly two decades later, Mr Salem has emerged from hiding to tell his story

[msfreeh]

see link for full story

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/24342 ... aul-coates" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



Real, Real Comrades: What 43+ Years of Prison Mean to Eddie Conway and Paul Coates
Sunday, 22 June 2014 00:00 By Susie Day, Truthout | Interview



Paul Coates hugs Eddie Conway after his release. (Photo: Laura Whitehorn)Paul Coates and Eddie Conway, as Eddie steps into the street - and freedom - March 4, 2014. (Photo: Susie Day)

Marshall Eddie Conway and Paul Coates talk about how they met in Baltimore's Black Panther Party and maintained solidarity and friendship for 43 years after Conway was framed, convicted and jailed for murder.

Marshall Eddie Conway was born in 1946, grew up in the low-income racial segregation of West Baltimore, and joined the US Army at 18. Paul Coates, "a little bit older," grew up in a similar neighborhood in West Philadelphia, also enlisting in the Army as a youth. Sometime in the late 1960s, they met in the Baltimore chapter of the Black Panther Party. Although both men yearned for racial justice, neither could have known at the time the dimensions of injustice they were to face.

It's well known that J. Edgar Hoover directed his FBI to "disrupt, misdirect, discredit and otherwise neutralize" African-American organizations and leaders in general. But the FBI unleashed its worst on the Black Panther Party, which, from its 1966 start in Oakland, California, Hoover saw as "the single greatest threat to the internal security of the country."[1] By 1968, when activists in Baltimore began to form a Panther chapter, there wasn't much that the feds didn't know about them or couldn't "neutralize." The FBI often worked with the local police force to do it.

So in 1970, when a Baltimore police officer was killed, it was important to indict a Panther, preferably a highly able, well-liked one. The state charged Eddie Conway - who unceasingly maintained his innocence - and, in 1971, convicted him of murder. Thus began over 43 years of work by activists, attorneys, family and friends to return Eddie Conway to the community he loves. This is where Paul Coates comes in.

For over four decades, Paul - founder of the Black Classic Press - never stopped working on Eddie's case, never stopped being Eddie's friend. On March 4, 2014, when Eddie Conway finally walked out of prison, Paul was there. Today, they still work together. In fact, for two men who've worried and suffered over so many years, they sure do laugh a lot. I know because I interviewed them recently at Paul's office in Baltimore. I started by asking them how they met.

Eddie Conway: Paul, you'll have to do this; you're mentally sharper than I am.

Paul Coates: That may be true, but I really don't remember. It would have been at Panther headquarters.

EC: What we probably started doing together was going out to the airport and picking up Panther Party newspapers. Because there was a delivery problem; the newspapers were getting lost and misplaced.

PC: The government was losing and misplacing them.

EC: It wasn't accidental. We were trying to resolve those kinds of problems so we could get the newspapers on the streets every week.

Susie Day for Truthout: Did you see a friendship forming at that point?

PC: Since I'm so magnetic, he may have seen a friendship forming. You can tell how rough this guy is (laughter).

I came to the party, must've been the fall of '69. I would do breakfast programs and stuff, but we really did not have many interactions, as I recall. Eddie was much more experienced in the party. He was a Panther; I was at best a community worker, so he was Big Stuff, you know?

You were already deputy minister of defense, Eddie?

EC: There was no such thing. Probably at the time, I was lieutenant of security. But people confuse those titles over the years, and just make up all kinds of stuff. Most states did not have a deputy minister of defense.

PC: People came and went so much; the titles were kind of meaningless. After Eddie went to jail, we had functionary titles, but only about two or three of those.

EC: Like, you're the lieutenant of communications because that's what you already do. You make the phone calls, you write the articles or deal with the PR, and that makes you a "lieutenant" in that area.

But you were Big Stuff in the Party?

EC: I don't think I was Big Stuff. Unlike Paul, I was kind of quiet. Seriously, I did a little traveling, but basically I was just a low-level organizer, is how I see it. I went places and interacted with people.

PC: But you'd been in the Panther Party for a while. I mean Big Stuff in that sense. He wasn't one of the ones that came and went. I recognized him as a Panther.

Did you finally join the Panthers formally, Paul?

PC: Not really. When I came, the Panther Party was closed (chuckling). Even though those idiots gave me an application to fill out. I filled it out, but the ranks of the Panther Party had been closed in what, '68?

EC: Yeah, because they didn't want any more people saying they were Panthers in the midst of a flood of government attacks.

PC: However, people became Panthers largely through their practice. George Jackson said in Blood in My Eye [2]: "You Don't Join Us; We Join You." So if people were acceptable, they were pulled in. But technically, from Oakland, they closed that stuff down.

This is actually how I became a Panther. It was after John Clark, who was in charge of the Baltimore chapter, was arrested, and Eddie and them all were in jail. I was still a community worker. I went to New York to report to the leadership there, and they basically said, "OK, John is gone. That means you're in charge."

I said, "I can't be in charge, I'm not a Panther." And they said, "Well, you're a Panther now." That was it. It wasn't a case of joining.

Paul Coates shows Eddie Conway his cell phone. (Photo: Laura Whitehorn)Paul Coates shows Eddie Conway his cell phone. (Photo: Laura Whitehorn)

Locked into a Cage

Eddie, how did your case change you?

EC: I had already spent a lot of time taking people in the community down to the Eastern District Court in Baltimore. We would set in the back and watch the proceedings during the course of a day. So I knew the criminal justice system wasn't working for us – was working, in fact, against us. By the time of my arrest, I understood that there was no justice in the system. Once I got locked into a cage, I had more time to study and analyze, but I don't think the case changed me that much. What changed was my ability to move around.

How did Eddie's case affect you, Paul?

PC: His case affected me immediately. There was the shooting that went down [3]. The two folks arrested were Jackie Powell and Jack Johnson. (To Eddie) Were you arrested the next night?

EC: Yeah, when I was at work.

PC: The next morning at 6 o'clock, I get a call from the defense captain. He said, "Eddie's been arrested; get your @#$ down here. We got TE to move."

[msfreeh]

In 1995, We brought Ed Tatro to speak at Bates College about how the Texas Oil Mafia,Lyndon Johnson and FBI Director Hoover assassinated President Kennedy


The Warren Report 50 Years Later: A Critical Examination


What we know now, that we didn’t know then.

Presented By: The JFK Historical Group

David Denton, Ed Tatro, Walt Boyes, William Boyes,
Ben Boyes

September 26th-28th

Crowne Plaza East Hotel, Alexandria, VA.

Many of the leading experts on the JFK Assassination and critics of the Warren Commission findings will be meeting in Washington D.C. on this weekend, to give presentations on the
various aspects of this topic.

Ed Tatro, Doug Horne, Phil Nelson, Russ Baker, Gary Powers Jr., Peter Janney, James Wagenvoord (former Life magazine editor and current whistle blower), Don Adams, (former FBI agent
and current whistle blower), Rick Russo, ( a key Nigel Turner consultant), and Gerald McKnight are among those who have agreed to give presentations and we are expecting others to be added as we proceed.

Dr. Cyril Wecht will be the keynote speaker at the proposed banquet.
The conference will begin at 9 AM on Friday, September 26th, and will run through the evening (there will be a meet and
greet with conference speakers that evening), and all day Saturday. On Saturday evening, we will be having a banquet dinner and our keynote speaker will be giving his presentation. The conference will conclude with presentations on Sunday morning. A more complete
schedule will be released as the event gets closer. Registration and hotel accommodation details are included below and in the attachments above:

Conference Fees:

___$115, if paid before August 1st. After August 1st, $125. Walk –up single day session fees will be $65 per
day
___ $30 per day for students presenting an ID.
___ Banquet Dinner and Keynote Presentation Fee of $53.
___ Hotel Accommodations, Special Rate of $119 for single, $129 for double a night. (Ask for JFK Historical Group rate). For more
information about Hotel Accommodations, see the Hotel Brochure included.
Send your registration form and check or money order to:
David Denton, JFK Historical Group
1305 Hall St
Olney, Illinois 62450

Any questions? Contact me at 618-204-1498
Email: [email protected]

For more info and updates check our website at:
http://changehistjfk.blogspot.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;.

[msfreeh]

DISSENT NETWORK NEWS
June 30, 2014










Two extraordinary documentaries are making the rounds this summer, and DDF is pleased to be working with the filmmakers to ensure they reach the widest possible audience. The Newburgh Sting tells the heart-wrenching story of the FBI's entrapment of four men in the impoverished town of Newburgh, NY. We've covered the story extensively, and even made a comic book [ http://www.defendingdissent.org/now/iss ... -strategy/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;] about it. 1971 is a film about the break-in at an FBI office in Media, PA, which ultimately exposed COINTELPRO. I had the opportunity to see them last week and I can highly recommend them both! Find more information here. [ http://www.defendingdissent.org/now/summer-flicks/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;]





*War on Activism*












*..**Why are Military Personnel so A-Scared of Protesters? [ http://www.defendingdissent.org/now/mil ... rotesters/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;]** [ http://www.defendingdissent.org/now/mil ... rotesters/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;]* They have the big guns and tanks (and presumably know how to use them). They are surrounded by barbed wire fences, armed guards and who knows what else. They are trained to kill. Why does the military have such an irrational fear of protesters, especially, it seems, pacifists?

*Art is Not A Crime [ http://www.defendingdissent.org/now/art-is-not-a-crime/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;]** [ http://www.defendingdissent.org/now/art-is-not-a-crime/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;]* Police interpreted a temporary street art exhibit as property damage and arrested four activists.



*More $$$ For Occupy Protesters [ http://www.defendingdissent.org/now/mor ... rotesters/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;]** [ http://www.defendingdissent.org/now/mor ... rotesters/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;]** *New York City agrees to pay $583,000 to Occupy protesters for illegal arrest. The tally is now over $1 million, with more sure to come. Why do police continue to engage in conduct they know will cost the city?
*First Amendment*




*Um…. um…. um… Speech? * [ http://www.defendingdissent.org/now/um-um-um-speech/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;]* *When asked to name the five rights guaranteed by the First Amendment, 29% of Americans drew a blank.

*Protecting Sources [ http://www.defendingdissent.org/now/protecting-sources/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;]** [ http://www.defendingdissent.org/now/protecting-sources/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;]* The Supreme Court refuses to hear James Risen's case. Will the reporter be jailed for refusing to testify about his confidential source? A host of other developments makes the answer murky.
*Courts*




*Supreme Court tells Cops: "Get a Warrant" for Cell Phone Searches [ http://www.defendingdissent.org/now/sup ... -searches/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;]** [ http://www.defendingdissent.org/now/sup ... -searches/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;]** *In a decision that weighs heavily in favor of Fourth Amendment and privacy rights, the Supreme Court Iphone last week ruled that police officers must generally get a warrant before searching the cell phones of people they arrest.

*Time to Ground the "No Fly" List [ http://www.defendingdissent.org/now/tim ... -fly-list/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;]** [ http://www.defendingdissent.org/now/tim ... -fly-list/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;]* The No Fly List is finally getting the scrutiny and skepticism it deserves. It is both a "diabolical bureaucratic beast" Passenger plane above the clouds. (according to former Nixon Counsel John Dean) and a bit of a laughingstock.

[msfreeh]

see link for full story


http://anthonysummersandrobbynswan.word ... t-kennedy/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


November 23, 2013 · 5:26 pm
↓ Jump to Comments
THE CLAIMS THAT MAFIA BOSSES TRAFFICANTE AND MARCELLO ADMITTED INVOLVEMENT IN ASSASSINATING PRESIDENT KENNEDY

By Anthony Summers & Robbyn Swan

There have been allegations over the past twenty years that Florida’s Santo Trafficante and Louisiana’s Carlos Marcello admitted before they died that they had been involved in the assassination.
Do those allegations have merit?

The Mafia thought they had a deal, their help to get Kennedy elected in exchange for a complaisant Justice Department. The month after the election, though, John Kennedy announced that he was making his brother Robert Attorney General. Speaking from the steps of the Department of Justice, Robert made it clear that he intended to use the office to wage war on organized crime.

By early 1962, the Attorney General would be saying new laws and specialized intelligence had top gangsters on the run. Three hundred and fifty mobsters were indicted that year, 138 of them convicted. Some mobsters were fleeing the United States rather than face justice.

Lucky Luciano and Joe Adonis continued to languish in exile. Skinny D’Amato, the New Jersey nightclub owner who had acted as bagman during the West Virginia primary campaign of 1960, reminded Joe Kennedy that his help in the election had been against a promise of leniency for Adonis. Robert Kennedy had no intention of allowing Adonis to return, however, and D’Amato himself was indicted on tax charges.

The Attorney General pressed for the deportation of any other mafiosi who could be shown to be aliens. Early on, New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello had been flown out of the country to Guatemala – though he subsequently returned. There were new efforts to expel Frank Costello and Johnny Rosselli.

Rosselli and Sam Giancana had hoped for special treatment because both had been involved in CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro and – as Giancana put it – considered they had been “working for the government.” FBI wiretaps make clear Giancana simmered with rage. After the deal-making of the election – when his efforts had helped deliver Illinois for Kennedy – he felt he had been double crossed.

In November 1963, within hours of his brother’s death, Robert Kennedy asked rackets specialist Julius Draznin to look for Mob leads in Chicago. “He meant,” said Draznin, “Sam Giancana.” The focus of those who share RFK’s suspicion has long been on Giancana and two other Mafia bosses, Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante.

“The Mob typically doesn’t hit prosecutors or politicians,” said former House Assassinations Committee chief counsel Robert Blakey. “You are all right….just as long as you do not `sleep with them,’ that is, you do not take favors, either money or sex. Once the public official crosses the line, he invites violent retribution.”

In 1977 Santo Trafficante, the Florida Mafia boss, was forced by subpoena to testify on oath before the Assassinations Committee. The questions put to him included the following:

* Did you ever discuss with any individual plans to assassinate President Kennedy?

* Prior to November 22, 1963, did you know Jack Ruby?

* While you were in prison in Cuba, were you visited by Jack Ruby?

In response to all three questions, Trafficante responded, “I respectfully refuse to answer pursuant to my constitutional rights under the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments.” “Pleading the Fifth” invokes the constitutional principle that no one can be forced to give evidence that may be self-incriminating.

Having been granted immunity from prosecution arising from what he might say, Trafficante testified again in secret. Then, in late 1978, he appeared at a public hearing to deny having said in advance of the assassination – as alleged – that President Kennedy was “going to be hit.” Asked whether he had been aware of threats to the President allegedly made by his Louisiana counterpart, Carlos Marcello, he replied, “No, sir; no, no chance, no way.”

There was also, however, a comment Trafficante had made in 1975, while being taped during an FBI surveillance operation. “Now only two people are alive,” the FBI microphone had picked up Trafficante saying—in conversation with Marcello—“who know who killed Kennedy.”

What he meant remains unknown and unknowable. Trafficante died in 1987. Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa, who had been his associate and who allegedly wanted both Kennedys dead, had vanished twelve years earlier—probably murdered by criminal associates.

Sam Giancana, the Chicago Mob boss who had conspired with Trafficante and the CIA to kill Cuba’s Fidel Castro, was also long dead. He had been found in 1975, lying face-up in a puddle of blood, just as the Senate Intelligence Committee was preparing to question him about the Castro plots. He had been shot once in the back of the head and six times—in a neatly stitched circle—around the mouth. It was the Mob’s way, one source said, of warning others not to talk. Some suspected that Trafficante had ordered the hit.

John Roselli had been killed soon after Giancana and Hoffa. What was left of him was found floating in Miami’s Dumfoundling Bay, crammed into an oil drum. He had testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee and was due to appear again. Trafficante was again a suspect.

Before Roselli died, it was reported, he had suggested that his former associates in the Castro assassination plots had gone on to kill President Kennedy. Within weeks of his death, the House of Representatives voted by a huge majority to reopen the Kennedy case—a decision that led to the formation of the House Assassinations Committee.

The Committee finding, in 1979, was that “extensive investigation led it to conclude that the most likely family bosses of organized crime to have participated in [planning the President’s assassination] were Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante.” While both had had “the motive, means, and opportunity to plan and execute a conspiracy,” however, the Committee could not pin anything on either mafioso.

****************************************************************************
In 1994, however, it seemed that credible testimony on the subject had perhaps emerged. Frank Ragano, an attorney who long represented Trafficante, Marcello, and Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa made remarkable claims in a new memoir. “Santo, Carlos, and Jimmy”, he wrote, had often spoken of their wish to see both Kennedy brothers dead. In July 1963, Ragano claimed, Hoffa had sent him to New Orleans to ask Trafficante and Marcello to kill the President. When he passed on this message, Ragano wrote, the mobsters’ response led him to think the idea “had already seriously crossed their minds.”

After the assassination, a gleeful Hoffa had supposedly exclaimed, “I told you they could do it. I’ll never forget what Carlos and Santo did for me.” Marcello supposedly said, “When you see Jimmy, you tell him he owes me and he owes me big.”
According to Ragano, Santo Trafficante had phoned him years later – on March 13, 1987 – to request a meeting. When the lawyer arrived to take him for a drive, the ailing 72-year-old mobster shuffled to the car in pajamas and a terry-cloth robe. Then, slumped in Ragano’s Mercedes-Benz, he talked in Sicilian of the old days, old murders, and of the Kennedys.

“That Bobby,” Ragano claimed the dying mobster had said, “made life miserable for me and my friends…God damn Bobby. Carlos e futtutu. Non duvevamu ammazzari a Giovanni. Duvevamu ammazzari a Bobby.” (“Carlos [Marcello] @#$%&%! up. We shouldn’t have killed John. We should have killed Bobby.”)

Four days after this supposed admission to the crime of the 20th century, Trafficante died. He had not elaborated on his statement, and Ragano said he had not asked him to. He said he thought about it anxiously for a while after the mobster’s death, then confided in his wife, and eventually went public.

Trafficante’s widow, his two daughters, and several friends and neighbors, said the March 13, 1987, meeting never happened. According to Ragano it occurred in the city of Tampa, the family’s traditional base and his own hometown. Trafficante had long since, however, lived most of the time almost 300 miles away, in North Miami Beach. He had not visited Tampa since the Christmas holidays, according to his family. The mobster was so ill, they insisted, what with heart disease, thrice-weekly hospital visits to have kidney dialysis, and a permanent colostomy bag, that travel had become a major undertaking.

The time of his momentous March 13 meeting with Trafficante, Ragano had written, had been about 1:30p.m..Yet Jean Amato, the widow of one of Trafficante’s close associates, says she visited Trafficante and his wife at home in North Miami Beach between noon and 2:00p.m.. Jack Hodus, a pharmacist, said he saw Trafficante there at about 6:00 p.m., and other accounts place the mobster in Miami for dinner. Even if only Jean Amato told the truth, Trafficante could not have been in Tampa at 1:30 p.m., as Ragano claimed.

Ragano asserted he could respond to these counter-allegations with three witnesses of his own, but declined to produce them unless the Trafficantes tried to take him to court for libel.

Meanwhile, there is some medical evidence. The records of Miami’s Mercy Hospital indicate the mobster was being treated in the dialysis unit regularly in early 1987. He was there, receiving treatment until 7.15 pm on March 12 – the day before his alleged lunchtime confession to Ragano – and was back in the dialysis unit by the afternoon of March 14.
Trafficante Dialysis 3-12-87 Trafficante Dialysis 3-14-87

Dr. Felix Locicero, Trafficante’s Tampa nephrologist, told us he knew of no visit to Tampa on March 13 and thought it “unlikely” the mobster was in town.

Exposing Ragano as a possible liar does not dispose of the “Mob dunnit” theory, nor of the notion that Trafficante and Carlos Marcello played some part in Kennedy’s murder. “Mark my word,” Trafficante is reported to have said to a close associate in September 1962, “this man Kennedy is in trouble, and he will get what is coming to him…He’s not going to make it to the election. He is going to be hit.”

Carlos Marcello, the boss of the Mafia in the southeastern United States, had like Trafficante appeared before the Assassinations Committee. His principal business in life, he had earlier had the audacity to tell another committee, was as a tomato salesman earning about $1,600 a month. His answers related to the President’s assassination were no more illuminating.

Asked whether he ever made a physical threat against the President, Marcello replied, “Positively not, never said anything like that.” Trafficante, he said, had never talked with him about assassinating Kennedy. Their contacts had been “strictly social.” He did not know of any discussion with U.S. officials about killing Fidel Castro, had not been to Cuba before or after 1960, never had any interests there. He “never knew” either alleged assassin Lee Oswald or Jack Ruby.

More, just a little more, emerged from FBI surveillance obtained during a bribery probe in 1979, when microphones planted in Marcello’s home and office picked up snatches of relevant conversation. It was the year the House Assassinations Committee was winding up its work, and—on several occasions—mikes picked up the mobster repeating, as though he wanted to be overheard, the sort of “No, I never” denials he had made when testifying.

Once, however, when a visitor asked his reaction to the Committee’s suspicions as to his role in the assassination, the mobster told the man to shut up. There was then the sound of a chair being pushed back, of the two men walking out of the room. In the last words picked up, Marcello could be heard telling his companion that this was a subject better discussed outside. Going “outside” to discuss sensitive matters, the record showed, was something Marcello did on more than one occasion.

An informant the FBI used in that surveillance operation, a man named Joseph Hauser, later claimed he got Marcello to discuss the assassination. According to Hauser, the mobster admitted both that he had known Oswald’s uncle Charles Murret, and that Oswald himself had at one point worked as a runner for the betting operation run for Marcello by a bookmaker named Sam Saia.

Even more provocative was something that—according to Hauser—Marcello’s brother Joseph said. Edward Kennedy was about to run for the White House, and Hauser raised the subject of the “rough time” the elder Kennedys had given Marcello back in the 1960s. “Don’t worry,” Joseph supposedly replied, “We took care of them, didn’t we?”

Oswald’s uncle Charles had indeed been involved in gambling activity, and he was an associate of Sam Saia. Saia was a powerful figure in bookmaking, and was reputedly close to Carlos Marcello. What Marcello is said to have confided is thus plausible—but not evidence. Of the surveillance tapes thus far released, none show that Marcello made such admissions, or that his brother’s remark about having “taken care” of the Kennedys was really made. One must question, too, whether – if it was made – it was meant seriously.

More and similar material is reflected in FBI records. It dates to the mid-1980s, when the Mob boss had at last been imprisoned—on charges of racketeering, wire fraud, and conspiracy to bribe a federal judge. It was then that a fellow prison inmate named Jack Van Laningham, who was being used by the FBI in another surveillance operation against Marcello, made a fresh allegation that the mob boss had admitted involvement in the Kennedy assassination. The FBI file contains a report on what, according to Van Laningham, Marcello told him and another inmate as they were sitting “outside in the patio” of the prison yard. As originally circulated, with Van Laningham’s name withheld, it reads as follows:

A confidential source who has provided reliable information in the past furnished the following:

On December 15, 1985, he was in the company of CARLOS MARCELLO and another inmate at the FEDERAL CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTE (FCI), Texarkana, Texas, in the court yard engaged in conversation. CARLOS MARCELLO discussed his intense dislike of former President JOHN KENNEDY as he often did. Unlike other such tirades against KENNEDY, however, on this occasion CARLOS MARCELLO said, referring to President KENNEDY, “Yeah, I had the son of a &!@$# killed. I’m glad I did. I’m sorry I couldn’t have done it myself.

The report, as currently released by the National Archives with Van Laningham’s name revealed, is here: Confidential Source Report

Later, in a letter to an FBI agent, Van Laningham quoted Marcello as saying he had known Santo Trafficante, who had been his partner in the gambling rackets in Cuba. He had “hated” the President and his brother the Attorney General. He had been “introduced to Oswald,” the mob boss supposedly told Van Laningham, “by a man named Ferris, who was Marcello’s pilot” [a reference presumably to David Ferrie, a Marcello associate long rumored to have been involved in some way in the assassination] —and had thought Oswald “crazy.” He had backed Ruby in business in Dallas, and Ruby had come to Louisiana to “report” to him.

(Portions of Van Lanigham’s multi-page letter – to FBI agent Carl Podsiadly – can be found below.)

[msfreeh]

Ed Tatro just sent me this story.
We brought Ed To speak at our conference dealing with the death squad activities of taxpayer funded FBI agents on two separate occasions.
Ed attended the Clay Shaw trial in New Orleans in the late 1960's
Shaw was the only man charged in the death of President Kennedy.
Our conference was held from 1989-2002 .
You can watch Ed on the banned History Channel documentary
The Guilty Men. Ed Tatro wrote the script Google
the guilty men YouTube JFK. or click link which has been checked and works
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jgNfQYpS1gQ" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Here is Ed's email
Sent: Fri, Jul 4, 2014 10:12 AM EDT
Subject: Interesting MLK Story


FROM A FORMER STUDENT OF MINE:
http://www.riverfronttimes.com/2001-05- ... mphis/full" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
I just started communicating with the reporter who wrote this story. He also wrote some stuff about the dealings of the Fertitta family, who I've been investigating in relation to their ownership of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and Xyience, the company that sued me for $25 million back in 2006 for writing about how corrupt the whole operation was. I just completed a new story at Xyiencesucks.com about a car accident that many speculate was a hit, and this same reporter wrote about that back in 1993 when it first happened.

Anyway, the really interesting angle on the Memphis story is that Stelzer believes the "Paul" in the story is FBI agent Paul Rico, Whitey Bulger's former handler who is now dead. It's long, but a great read. I know you're a JFK/RFK assassination guy, but I figured this was also something you'd be interested in. Let me know what you think.



Maybe in Memphis
Jim Green, ex-con and government snitch, says he and his buddies from the Bootheel took part in the plot to kill Martin Luther King Jr. Trouble is, Green's been lying all his life -- so why should anybody believe him now?
By C.D. Stelzer Wednesday, May 9 2001

Wherever James Cooper Green Jr. goes in Caruthersville, his reputation precedes him. They know his name at the courthouse and at City Hall, at the liquor store and the café. In casual conversation, he tends to reminisce about the town's violent past, when Caruthersville, Mo., was known as "Little Chicago." He broaches the subject in the same way other people talk about the weather.

At his prompting, a woman at the Tigers Hut Café recalls how a bullet flew through her bedroom window when she was a child. The county prosecutor, its intended target, lived next door. Later, a 73-year-old man who once worked for Green's father recounts how he shot and killed a fellow with a .38-caliber pistol. The boys at a local package-liquor store brag about smuggling machine guns over the state line.

They're not lying so much as telling Green what he wants to hear. He revels in the old stories most residents would prefer to forget, tales of bygone days when Caruthersville was the capital of vice in the Missouri Bootheel, times when bootlegging, prostitution and illegal-gambling interests controlled Pemiscot County. It was not so long ago, really. The Climax bar and the Seawall whorehouse have been razed. But other haunts remain: the shady businesses, the former sites of murder and mayhem. Though he left here decades ago, no one knows these places better than Green. When he returns, as he often does, respectable members of the community -- the elder lawyer, the current circuit judge, the retired newspaper publisher -- shun him. His mere presence stirs apprehension, if not fear. Rumors shadow him: Green is a drug trafficker in Florida. Green is an FBI informant. Green is a Mafia associate.


"They're scared to death of me in this town," he says. "They always wonder what I'm up to. They'll tell you I belong to the mob. They'll tell you I work for the federal government. They don't know." Green is an enigma. Reviled by many and trusted by few, he trades in uncertainty as if his life depends on it.

For more than 20 years now, Green has maintained that he has knowledge of the plot to murder the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He testified behind closed doors before the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978; the testimony has been sealed by law until 2029. In 1997, he told his story to Dexter King, son of the slain civil-rights leader, in a private meeting.
The next time Green set out to tell this story, he ended up in jail. He was on his way to meet a senior producer for CBS News in Memphis on Feb. 25, 1998, when he and his wife were pulled over in their Dodge pickup by the Shelby County (Tenn.) Sheriff's Department narcotics unit. Green had ostensibly come under suspicion because police were investigating whether a methamphetamine lab was being run at the hotel where he had spent the night. The narcotics squad found no drugs, but Green was held in police custody for three days before he was released. Because of the arrest, Green missed a scheduled interview with Dan Rather for 48 Hours.

The news program, which preceded the 30th anniversary of the assassination, focused renewed attention -- based on theories promulgated by the late James Earl Ray's last attorney, William F. Pepper -- on a possible conspiracy to kill King. At the time, Pepper was peddling his own conspiracy theory, based on the claims of Loyd Jowers, former owner of Jim's Grill, who said he had paid a Memphis police officer to kill King at the behest of a local mob figure. Rather dismissed Green's involvement in one sentence, telling viewers that Green's prison record showed him to have been in custody on the day of the assassination.

But Green says that his prison record is wrong and that his 1998 arrest and subsequent discrediting are part of a continuing government disinformation campaign promoting the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's "lone gunman" theory. Claims by Green that he possesses what may have been the murder weapon and one of the getaway vehicles make his assertions seem all the more preposterous. Prosecutors from the Memphis district attorney's office to the U.S. Justice Department label him a convicted felon and an unreliable source.

Yet there are untold elements that lend some credibility to Green's far-fetched story. Despite his criminal record, Green has served as a local law-enforcement official and a federal undercover agent for years. Police officers and sheriffs have provided him with reference letters. More telling are Green's FBI files, which provide a partial chronicle of his life over the last 35 years and corroborate many details of his account.

"I just wanted to tell the story and disappear," Green says. He is sitting bare-chested at a table in Room 16 at Pic's Motel on Truman Boulevard in Caruthersville. The motel once served as a location for illicit high-stakes poker games. It no longer holds that cachet. The room smells of mildew and cigarette smoke. Outside, a rusty window-unit air conditioner sits beside the door. Other household debris litters the parking lot.

"I'm serious. I've got a place in Colorado," he says. "They'd never find me. I got several IDs I can use that I've had for years that they don't know about -- Social Security cards, voting cards, everything. And they're legal; they're not fake. I know how to do it. It's the oldest trick in the book, how to disappear."

Green pauses to light a Misty 120 menthol cigarette, takes a drag and then coughs. Of his three tattoos, two are of the jailhouse variety -- a dove on one arm, a hawk on the other. The third has "Jim" inscribed above a crudely etched dagger piercing a heart.

A half-empty fifth of Gilbey's gin sits on one corner of the table, near a bottle of prescription painkillers. Green, 54, continues fantasizing about changing his name, changing his life, starting anew. "The only thing you can't make disappear is your fingerprints," he says. "There's a way, but I wouldn't go through it. Too much work. Acid and sanding. You have to go to a doctor in South America to get it done. I ain't going through that. I done lived too long, anyway. That's the reason I sleep with that." As he speaks, Green reaches into his black overnight bag and pulls out a .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun.

Green's tale begins in the fall of 1964, when he moved to St. Louis with his first wife and their infant son. Green worked downtown at International Shoe. When he turned 18 in January 1965, he dutifully registered for the draft, listing his home address as 2138 Victor Ave. But with his marriage in trouble, he took off for Caruthersville in March. The next month, he and a friend hit the road in a 1959 Ford Fairlane and ended up in Laredo, Texas. After crossing the border, they bought bus tickets to Mexico City. Once they reached the capital, they got a room at the Bonampak Hotel.

According to the official FBI account, the two young men ran out of money after going on a spree, then asked the U.S. Embassy to pay their fare home. The embassy denied the request and advised them to call their parents. FBI communiqués describe the pair as "smart aleck, hostile, generally uncooperative and uncommunicative." During an interview with an embassy official, Green's partner -- his name has been blacked out in the FBI records -- reportedly displayed a switchblade knife and repeatedly flicked it open. They were considered armed and dangerous. After being spurned at the U.S. Embassy, the two decided to see whether they'd get a better reception at the Soviet Embassy, according to FBI records.

Green remembers it differently. He claims that he met a CIA contact, a Mexican lawyer, at the border. His contact, he says, arranged for the sale of his car and directed him to meet a man at the Monterrey bus station who would provide further instructions and travel money. Once directed to the hotel in Mexico City, Green called a number at the U.S. Embassy. At an appointed hour that evening, an English-speaking cab driver took Green and his friend to a side-street café, where an embassy attaché advised them on how to present themselves when they visited the Soviet Embassy the next day.

One aspect of the saga is undisputed. The FBI memos indicate that Green and his companion visited the Soviet Embassy on two successive days. On their second visit, they formally defected to the Soviet Union. When the pair left the embassy, they were promptly arrested by the Mexican secret police and jailed. On April 21, 1965, Mexican authorities deported the two young men.

The case generated a flurry of secret cables. FBI field offices in St. Louis and San Antonio were alerted after urgent messages were dispatched from the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City to the FBI director's office in Washington, D.C. The Memphis and Kansas City FBI offices would later be brought into the investigation. At headquarters, the attempted defection was discussed in internal memos among high-ranking bureau officials. The internal security, domestic-intelligence and espionage sections were all apprised of the situation. Portions of this correspondence have been redacted for national-security reasons. Two of the internal memos are completely blacked out. Ultimately, after an agent interviewed Green in September 1965, the FBI director's office concluded that Green's "Mexican escapade [was] obviously a youthful prank" and expressed no further interest in pursuing the case.

By that time, Green had enlisted in the Army and was stationed at Fort Leonard Wood. In November, he got drunk with some of his Army buddies and drove in a stolen car to St. Louis, where he was arrested. He was convicted of car theft in Oregon County, Mo., and sentenced to three years in prison. At the Missouri Penitentiary in Jefferson City, Green says, he crossed paths with James Earl Ray, an inmate who worked in the laundry. Green was transferred to the Algoa Correctional Center, also in Jefferson City, and, later, to a medium-security prison in Moberly. During at least part of his incarceration, Department of Corrections records indicate that Green worked as an undercover operative for a deputy sheriff in Oregon County. But Green doesn't recall doing that. He was released in late August 1967 and immediately resumed his criminal activities.

At Moberly, Green served time with Moe Mahanna, a Gaslight Square club owner who was doing six years on a manslaughter rap for beating an Indiana tourist to death outside his bar, the Living Room. Being locked up with Mahanna opened doors for Green when he got out, helping him gain acceptance among a cast of St. Louis criminal figures, including East Side boss Frank "Buster" Wortman and labor racketeer Louis D. Shoulders. Just 20 years old, the Caruthersville youth had already put together a sordid résumé. He was an ex-con. He had a network of mob contacts. At 6-foot-1 and 185 pounds, Green could be at once arrogant, rebellious and physically intimidating. But his immaturity also made him pliable. St. Louis' criminal syndicate could use a man like Green.

Within a month of being released from prison, Green says, he and his friend Butch Collier met with Shoulders at Whiskey A-Go-Go, across the street from Mahanna's club in Gaslight Square. The nightclub had a reputation for being a hangout of felons and other notorious characters. As early as 1958, Shoulders himself had been subpoenaed by the Senate Rackets Committee. He later took over Laborers Local 42, and, by 1967, with the Vietnam War raging, he had gained control over hundreds of jobs at the Gateway Army Ammunition plant, a project plagued by millions of dollars in cost overruns.

When Shoulders walked into Whiskey A-Go-Go, Green recognized the man who accompanied him. The man, known by Green only as "Paul," had been introduced to him earlier at a downtown pool hall by Collier. Green says Paul was then in his mid- to late 30s, about 5-foot-10, with a dark complexion. He wore a suit with an open-collared shirt and no tie, spoke with a Northeastern accent and had red hair. Paul, Green says, appeared to be acquainted with the management at the go-go club and seemed to be talking business with several people at the bar.

The meeting, Green says, was not a chance encounter. It had been set up by Lee J. "Jaybird" Gatewood, Caruthersville's crime boss. Jaybird had been contacted by Wortman, who controlled organized crime in East St. Louis, Southern Illinois and Southeast Missouri. Green says Paul agreed to pay Green and Collier $4,500 to pick up a truckload of stolen Cadillacs from a railyard in St. Louis and drive to the Town and Country Motel in New Orleans, headquarters of New Orleans Mafia don Carlos Marcello. Green says he didn't realize who Marcello was until years later. Back then, Green was merely a driver. His entire criminal career to date involved alcohol and fast cars: running whiskey to dry counties in nearby Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi and going on a drunken spree in the Army in a stolen vehicle.

In contrast to his past exploits, Green's next job seemed almost tame. Wortman's rackets included providing "insurance protection" to vending-machine operators, including Broadway Music in Caruthersville, then owned by Harold J. "Bo" Young. A portion of the untaxed cash receipts was regularly shipped north to St. Louis. Less than two weeks after he dropped off the hot cars in New Orleans, Green says, he delivered a payment to Wortman in St. Louis and then met Paul at the downtown pool hall, where they had lunch. Paul lauded him for his work and then reached into his jacket pocket and flashed an FBI badge.

"I thought I was going back to jail," Green says. Paul assured him he was not under arrest, but Green left in a panic and hightailed it back to the Climax bar in Caruthersville. Green found Jaybird in his usual position, perched on top of his safe in the bar. "I said, 'Jaybird, do you know this @%!#$!&%! is a FBI agent?'" Green recalls. Jaybird, he says, laughed and asked him whether he had $#!% his pants. The older crook then tried to calm him down. "Look, we do things for them. They do things for us," Green recalls Jaybird saying. "It works the same way it does with the sheriff. All you got to do is trust what he tells you."

Green says he agreed to cooperate with Paul but continued to feel uneasy about it. Not only was Paul an outsider, he had identified himself as a federal agent and was becoming more involved in calling the shots. Over the next several months, Green recalls, Paul visited Caruthersville three or four times. The meetings, which were always held in the backroom of the Climax, at different times included Jaybird, Young, Collier, Green, Pemiscot County Sheriff Clyde Orton and Buddy Cook, the town's most prominent bootlegger. At one of these meetings, Green says, Paul instructed him to pick up three rifles from a Caruthersville pawnbroker. After retrieving the weapons, he stowed them in a shed behind his parents' house, in a duffel bag holding his Army clothes.

Meanwhile, Green's personal life had taken another unforeseen turn. His second marriage lasted only a week. This time, he moved south to Memphis, where he shared an apartment with Joe R. Tipton Jr., a Caruthersville friend. In late December 1967, Green got drunk on his way back from St. Louis and picked up a hitchhiker, Edward Fatzsinger. Once they reached the Bootheel, they stopped at the Idle Hour tavern in Hayti, where Green's estranged wife tended bar. After leaving in a fit of anger, Green spied a 1966 Chevy Caprice in the parking lot and decided to steal it. It wasn't a strictly impulsive decision. He knew of a Memphis stock-car driver who might buy the car for its 350-cubic-inch engine. Two days later, Memphis police knocked on his door and arrested him for interstate transportation of a stolen vehicle, a federal charge.

Under questioning by the FBI, Green offered to give up the names of other criminals, including corrupt law-enforcement officials, if the feds dropped charges. But the agents refused, and Green remained in the Shelby County, Tenn., jail until Feb. 15, 1968, when he was transferred to the Springfield, Mo., medical facility for federal prisoners because he was spitting up blood. Green contends he faked the symptoms by sucking on his gums. After being held for observation for a little over a month, Green says, he was sent back to Memphis.

On his first night back in jail, Green says, the chief jailer escorted him across the street to the federal building to confer with Paul, who informed him that he would be released immediately. Before leaving, Paul warned him not to make any further statements to the police.

It is impossible to verify Green's version of events through federal-court records, because they were routinely expunged more than a decade ago. Contacted by telephone, a spokesman for the federal hospital says the limited information available shows Green stayed at the Springfield facility until April 9, 1968, five days after King was murdered. Not surprisingly, Green disputes the official record.

By his account, he had returned to Caruthersville by the third week of March and was working for his father at a lumberyard. He began courting his third wife and took her to the Caruthersville High prom. He also attended another meeting in the backroom of the Climax bar. The assemblage included Paul, Jaybird, Young, Orton, Collier and Green. Paul passed around a photograph of James Earl Ray, saying Ray had threatened to snitch on everybody and had to be silenced. Paul ordered Green and Collier to rendezvous with him in Memphis on April 2.

On the afternoon of April 2, 1968, Butch Collier and Jim Green checked into a motel in Southhaven, Miss. That evening, they patronized a nearby massage parlor and then went out drinking. Paul showed up at their room late the next night and dropped a package on the bed containing $5,000. He promised an equal amount once the hit was carried out. Paul told them Ray planned to rob a tavern on South Main Street. Two Memphis police officers had been contracted to kill him as he attempted to make his getaway. If the police missed, Green, who was to be stationed on a nearby rooftop, would shoot Ray instead.

That evening, Collier and Green drove back to Caruthersville to retrieve the weapons. When they returned to Memphis, they took a room at a motel on Lamar Avenue, near the airport. The next night, Paul showed up and explained the plan in detail. Three identical vehicles would be involved in the plot. Ray's white Ford Mustang and another owned by Tipton, Green's roommate, would be parked near a rooming house, Bessie's, where Ray had taken a room. A third white Mustang would be parked down the street, near the Arcade restaurant. In case of a mixup, the third automobile would be used as the getaway car. It would be equipped with a CB radio to monitor police calls, and false identification papers would be stowed in the glovebox. Green would be positioned on the roof of a cotton warehouse south of Jim's Grill, on the opposite side of the street.

After the briefing, Paul, Green and Collier drove to South Main to familiarize themselves with the area. It was cloudy, with a light mist falling, and doubts were beginning to creep into Green's mind. "I really didn't know if I could do it," he says. "So I kept asking Butch what was he supposed to be doing, and he said, 'All I know is, I'm going with Paul.' The pair went back to their motel room and talked. As thunder and lightning flashed outside, Collier went off on a long, rambling screed about his segregationist views. The conversation struck Green as odd, given the circumstances, but he tacitly agreed with his friend's racist rant, not knowing its portent. Green had no idea King had preached his last sermon at the Mason Temple that night. He says he didn't even know King had returned to Memphis. Moreover, he didn't care. "King didn't mean no more to me than anybody else. Back then, a nigger was a nigger," Green says. "You either talked that way or your own white people would run you out of town. You might not agree with it, but you still had to act like you were prejudiced. And I guess, at that time, I was, to a certain extent."

The next day, about noon, Collier and Green drove downtown to the King Cotton Hotel. Butch dressed, as usual, in a navy-blue peacoat and plaid shirt. As they were seated at a back table of a restaurant on the ground floor, Ray walked in, sat down at the counter and glanced in their direction before exiting. According to Ray's own account, he noted two suspicious characters staring at him when he mistakenly wandered into Jim's Belmont Café at 260 S. Main St. later that afternoon.

About 3 p.m., Collier dropped Green off near the rear of the warehouse. After crossing the railroad tracks, Green scaled a ladder and positioned himself on the roof. From his vantage point, he had a clear view of Jim's Grill and Bessie's rooming house. Fifteen minutes later, he saw Collier and Paul pull up in Tipton's Mustang and park a couple of spaces behind Ray's identical vehicle. They got out and entered different doorways. At the same time, to the south, he saw the third Mustang draw to the curb in front of the Arcade. The driver was picked up by another well-dressed man in a dark Chevrolet sedan. Ray then exited the rooming house and entered Jim's Grill, followed by Paul. At 3:30 p.m., Ray left and walked north on Main Street. A few minutes later, Paul came out, looked in Green's direction and then re-entered the rooming house. Ray returned.

Green remembers the sounds that day: the pigeons cooing and flapping their wings on the roof, the sound of the traffic below, river tows blowing their horns behind him. It was the slack time of year for the cotton industry, but at 4 p.m. some employees milled below him. Fearing he would be seen, Green moved to a more secluded rooftop, four doors south.

"I laid on that @#$!%&! building almost two-and-half hours," Green says. "I heard every bird. I heard every noise. I seen everything I could see. I thought every thought I could think. And the question has always been 'Would I have done it?' I don't know."

As dusk approached, Green grew edgier. Then, at 5:55 p.m., he saw Ray step from the rooming house and jump into the Mustang. Something had gone amiss. Ray hadn't robbed the grill. No cops had arrived. Green hesitated. Paul had told Green that Ray would head south on foot. Instead, Ray drove north. Green waited, thinking Ray might circle the block. Five minutes passed, and he thought he heard a backfire. Within moments, Collier appeared at the front of the building across the street, followed by Paul, who dropped a bundle in a nearby doorway. Green heard screams and saw people running from the nearby fire station. Collier and Paul got into Tipton's Mustang, drove north and then made a U-turn. Collier dropped Paul off at the third Mustang, parked next to the Arcade, and then swung behind the warehouse to pick up Green. By this time, Green could hear sirens, and police were starting to arrive.

With Green riding shotgun, Collier cut over Third Street to Lamar Avenue and headed west. After crossing the Mississippi River, he pulled under the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge and tossed two rifles into the river. The pair headed north on Highway 61. Collier had driven all the way to Osceola, Ark., a distance of about 45 miles, before Green noticed the third rifle, still in the backseat. They decided it was too late to ditch the gun. They would have to wait. The remainder of the trip, Green says, they didn't talk much, but Collier kept repeating the same phrase to himself: "I killed that nigger, I killed that nigger." After Collier dropped him off at his parents' house, Green says, he left the rifle with a friend who lived in the neighborhood. By the time he got home, his father was watching the news. Green went into the kitchen, poured a glass of milk, grabbed a handful of cookies, came back to the living room and sat down. On the screen was the image of the rooming house on South Main in Memphis. The TV news reported that a sniper had fired a shot from a rear window of the building, fatally wounding King as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Green says he almost fell out of his chair. It was the first inkling that his Memphis trip had been tied to something more than knocking off a two-bit hood.

Green borrowed his father's car and sped to the Climax bar. On his arrival, Jaybird ushered him into the backroom. Green recalls Jaybird telling him that he had "@#$%&%! up by not killing Ray, and everybody [was] covering their tracks." Green says Jaybird instructed him, if asked, to say he had been gambling all day at the Climax. Jaybird told Green to go home and lie low. Two days later, on April 6, Jaybird called Green to a meeting in the backroom. All the major players attended: Paul, Wortman, Shoulders, Young, Orton and Collier. All the persons named by Green, with the possible exception of Paul, are dead. Paul remains unidentified. This leaves no one to corroborate Green's account of the meeting, which Green could not have attended if he was incarcerated in the prison hospital as his record indicates.

During the alleged meeting, Green recalls, Paul referred indirectly to his superior. Paul said that his boss would go to any length necessary to shield himself from being implicated, Green says. Because Paul had earlier shown him FBI credentials, Green inferred that someone higher up in the bureau was involved. The contract on Ray remained in effect. Green and Collier were each issued a .38-caliber Brazilian-made Rossi pistol and told to stand by.

Green's account -- a subplot within a larger conspiracy that has Ray set up as King's assassin but then murdered by police or by Green -- is incredible by any measure, so fantastic that the U.S. Justice Department has chosen to disregard it altogether. When the department issued its latest findings, last June, it didn't even refer to Green. The department undertook the investigation to look into recent allegations regarding the assassination, including Jowers' claims, after being asked by the King family. Essentially, the government has deemed Green an unreliable witness, if not a liar and a fraud. Barry Kowalski, the Justice Department lawyer who headed the investigation, refuses to comment publicly on Green's allegations. An investigation conducted by the Shelby County District Attorney in 1998 also gave no credence to Green's story.

The version of events Green told the Riverfront Times has discrepancies as well. The inconsistencies relate mainly to locations and place names, errors that could be explained as lapses of memory on Green's part. Less explicable are Green's two mystery men: Collier and Paul. Collier appears to have used more than one name and is likely dead. His participation in the conspiracy cannot be confirmed, except through Green. As for Paul, there is no readily available way to verify whether he ever existed.

Green's only true believer is Lyndon Barsten, a Minneapolis-based conspiracy researcher. The two have teamed up and hit the conference and lecture circuit together. Barsten spends all his spare time delving into the King case. He considers it his search for the Holy Grail. To his credit, Barsten is responsible for obtaining Green's FBI records through the Freedom of Information Act. "What Jim is saying makes perfect sense to me," Barsten says. "There is documentation to back up what he has to say."

Barsten notes that the bureau's records show that Eugene Medori, an FBI agent in Memphis, displayed a photo lineup to Ralph Carpenter, a clerk at the York Arms Co., on April 6. Ray had bought binoculars from Carpenter on the afternoon of April 4. At this time, the FBI had yet to identify Ray as a suspect. One of the mug shots was of Byron De La Beckwith, a white supremacist and a suspect in the 1963 murder of civil-rights leader Medgar Evers. (More than 30 years later, De La Beckwith would be convicted of the murder.) The agent also showed Carpenter a photograph of Green.

"Now, why was I in a lineup with De La Beckwith?" asks Green. "I ain't no killer. All of them boys are Klansmen. I'm just a car thief. What am I doing there? I'm in the lineup of the FBI, two days after King's killing. What am I doing in that lineup -- if I'm in jail?"

Medori's name also shows up on the witness list of Fatzsinger, Green's co-defendant in the car-theft case. Solely on the basis of his Springfield medical record, Green is presumed to have been held without bail from his arrest in December 1967 until his sentencing on July 12, 1968.

On May 15, however, the Memphis FBI office dispatched an urgent cable to its counterpart in St. Louis, requesting that James Cooper Green of Caruthersville be interviewed. The message refers to an earlier communication dated May 1, 1968, which identified Green as the inmate who may have been beaten for not paying for amphetamines purchased from Ray while the two were behind bars in Jeff City. The cable mentions that Green was "currently on bond following indictment ... [in] Memphis." Nevertheless, the date on the cable still does not contradict the Springfield record that shows Green to have been there until April 9.

Other memos in the MURKIN file ("MURKIN" is the bureau's code name for the King case) show the FBI focusing attention on Caruthersville and the Bootheel -- after the bureau had identified Ray as the prime suspect on April 19.

From May 15-20, 1968, for example, the St. Louis field office, in cooperation with local law-enforcement officials, canvassed individuals and businesses in the Bootheel that received phone calls placed from a Sinclair service station in Portageville, calls believed at the time to have a connection to the case. The FBI office in Chicago also searched for J.D. Dailey, a presumed associate of Ray's who had recently moved from St. Louis to Portageville, Mo.

"Why is the town of Caruthersville mentioned in all these documents?" asks Green. "Not just one FBI office, but four or five."

Caruthersville crops up in the MURKIN file again, more than a year after the assassination. By this time, Ray had pleaded guilty, then quickly recanted. Despite Ray's renewed plea of innocence, his biographer, William Bradford Huie, cast him as the lone assassin in a 1968 Look magazine series. In the last article, Huie wrote that Ray stayed at a motel near Corinth, Miss., on April 2, 1968. This prompted FBI headquarters to order its field offices in Birmingham, Jackson and Memphis to investigate Ray's whereabouts between March 29 and April 3. Motel registrations were scrutinized to determine whether anyone had accompanied or contacted Ray during this period. Headquarters advised the field offices not to divulge that their inquiries were related to Ray's case. But after the Jackson FBI disseminated the motel-registration names to other branches across the country, headquarters did an about-face and halted the investigation:

"In view of the fact that more than a year has passed since these persons stayed over night at Corinth, and since similar investigation of this type in this case has previously been unproductive, and since Huie has admitted that Ray frequently is untruthful in statements to him, and further since it is not believed that it is of any particular importance to establish whether or not James Earl Ray stayed over night at Corinth on 4/2/68, all offices will disregard the leads set out in Jackson airtel dated 5/7/69 unless specifically advised by the Bureau to cover same."

The Jackson office's list included the Southern and Nite Fall motels in Corinth. Three men from Caruthersville stayed at the Nite Fall and one registered at the Southern between March 29 and April 3, according to motel records in the FBI file. Green says all four men were then employed by Buddy Cook, the Caruthersville bootlegger who had attended meetings with Paul at the Climax bar.

To bolster its "lone stalker" theory, the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978 produced a laundry receipt signed by Ray in Atlanta on April 1. Ray denied it was his signature and sent his brother to search out the motel he said he had stayed at on that date. Jerry Ray later told the subcommittee that he traveled to Corinth and located the Southern Motel using a map his brother had drawn.

In January 1970, Green was released from federal prison in El Reno, Okla., after serving two years for stealing the Caprice and driving it to Memphis. He moved back to Caruthersville and took up residence in a trailer park with his third wife.

On his return, he discovered that things had changed. Wortman, the East St. Louis mobster, had died in August 1968 of complications following surgery. Less than six months later, on Feb. 15, 1969, an unknown assailant gunned down Jaybird outside his house.

"When Jaybird got killed, that spooked a lot of people," Green says. "I feel like Jaybird's death and Wortman's death and a few others was just like cutting off the snake's head. He was the main link. Jaybird would be the only man who would know everybody, dates, times, places, who's who. After they killed Jaybird and Wortman is gone, there is no link to Paul except me and Butch. And who is going to believe us when the FBI has done put out a one-man theory? I'm an ex-con. If anything went wrong, I believe, me and Butch were the fall guys."

To protect themselves, Collier and Green had fabricated a tale to convince Paul and the other criminal co-conspirators that they had stashed incriminating evidence. "We told them we had some tapes and we still had the guns," Green says. "We didn't tell them that we had put them in the river." According to Green, part of the story was true: he hid one rifle at a friend's house. Green also claims to have kept a diary. "Maybe that's what got Jaybird killed. I don't know. The one thing I do know is, they couldn't prove whether we had it or not."

After Jaybird's death, Green theorizes, a purge took place. Collier became a Caruthersville police officer, and Green would soon join the ranks of law enforcement as well.

Shortly after Green got out of prison, then-Missouri Attorney General John C. Danforth initiated a vigorous campaign to oust Clyde Orton. Danforth's office charged the Pemiscot County sheriff with allowing widespread bootlegging and illegal gambling in his jurisdiction. As a part of the inquiry, Green says, Danforth and others interviewed him at a motel in Miner, Mo. When he entered the motel room, he saw a familiar face -- Paul. The investigators asked Green about gambling and whether Orton had knowledge of it.

After Orton's ouster, Green says, the new sheriff issued him a badge, and he started working undercover with federal Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents out of Cape Girardeau. As his first assignment, he helped set up and bust the pawnbroker who, according to Green's account, provided the rifles for the assassination. Green says he nailed the pawnbroker for selling guns without a federal firearms license.

He then began targeting remnants of Jaybird's and Cook's operations near Reelfoot Lake, Tenn. Although Green says he was working for ATF, a FBI memo from 1971 indicates that his activities were still being monitored at the highest levels of the bureau. The memo's contents are totally blacked out.

As he pursued his undercover career, Green's former criminal associates began to fall in slow progression. Shoulders died in a car bombing near Branson, Mo., in August 1972. A decade later, a jury convicted Cook in the contract slaying of Bo Young, the owner of Broadway Music. Cook died in prison.

In 1975, Green took part in an elaborate undercover project in Memphis called Operation Hot Stuff. Using $66,000 in federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration funds, the Memphis Police Department and federal law-enforcement officers set up a fake company called Investment Sales. Green played the role of "Jimmy Genovese," who was supposed to be the grandson of a mob boss. Police furnished Green with an expensive wardrobe, provided a new Cadillac and rented a townhouse for him. He pretended to be an importer/exporter of lamps who actually fenced stolen merchandise. Each day, he would go to work, read the newspaper, talk on the phone and flirt with the secretaries in the adjacent office. Thieves would drop by and sell stolen guns, TVs, appliances, jewelry, stereo equipment, clothing, cars and drugs. Green was perfectly cast for the part, and hidden video cameras recorded it all. In the afternoons, he knocked off early and played golf. At night, he frequented restaurants and bars, bragging about his organized-crime connections. Hot Stuff netted 43 indictments, according to press accounts. Green -- still in character, perhaps -- claims he racked up 267 felony cases as a part of the operation.

It was during this period that Green says he learned how police procedures were commonly circumvented and the court system manipulated. He noticed how prosecutors refused to indict suspects with political connections. He gained firsthand knowledge of how suspects are entrapped. He became a professional at doing just that. He was, foremost, a product of the criminal-justice system, applying the rules he learned in prison on the outside: How to play dumb. How to talk big. How to lie, when necessary. When to keep his mouth shut and when to talk. And how to apply coercion to get results. He recalls breaking into a druggie's apartment, shoving a gun into his mouth and threatening to cut his testicles off if he didn't turn snitch. He says he went on to practice his craft in Tampa, Key West and New Orleans.

For years, he could justify this behavior: Fending for himself, using the few leverages at his disposal, to keep the Man at bay by doing his bidding. Working both sides of the street. Using scraps of information to his best advantage. Relying on his good-old-boy charms to cajole and confound. Selling his talents to the highest bidder. He was good at what he did. He knew it. His employers recognized it. They paid cash and didn't ask questions, so long as he delivered. He did what he was told. He worked for the government.

But at some undefined moment, Green began to question it all. It's hard for him to say when, exactly. It was like waking up slowly to a nightmare. Green says he used his access to law-enforcement databases to track down the third Mustang used in the plot. He remembers talking to John Talley, the Memphis police detective he says recruited him for Operation Hot Stuff. They met in early January 1974 at the Holiday Inn on Riverside Drive in Memphis. Green expressed misgivings about working with the department. He thought the local cops were corrupt. Green says the detective, now deceased, leaned back in his chair and looked him in the eye. "Jim," Green says Talley confided, "I'm the officer who was late in 1968. If you can't trust me, you can't trust yourself."

After taking the job and assuming the name Jimmy Genovese, Green periodically visited the U.S. Attorney's office in Memphis. When he did, he passed by Kay Black, the chain-smoking court reporter for the now-defunct Memphis Press-Scimitar. In September 1975, Green decided to introduce himself. Their off-the-record conversations danced around the subject of his undercover status. He toyed with her at first, feeding her tidbits on Operation Hot Stuff. But then what had started as a casual flirtation, a game of cat-and-mouse between an inquisitive reporter and coy source, turned into a confession. Green said: "What if I told you I was driving the second Mustang the day King was shot?" Realizing the gravity of his admission, he abruptly left her office. Black, who died in 1997, eventually told investigators for the House Select Committee on Assassinations of the encounter. The subcommittee subpoenaed Green in 1978.



He flew to Washington and stayed in a swank hotel at government expense. Green claims that the night before he testified, Paul, another agent and former assistant FBI director Cartha DeLoach arrived unannounced at his hotel room, where they began to coach him in what he should say in his closed-session testimony the next day. (Efforts to reach DeLoach for comment were unsuccessful.) Green says he was told to limit his account to knowledge of a St. Louis-based conspiracy. Paul's advice both angered and worried Green. The Bootheel bootlegger had been called before Congress to give sworn testimony, and federal agents were urging him not to tell the whole truth -- to risk perjuring himself. He went for a walk near the hotel. It was warm, and he remembers a passerby making fun of his white patent-leather shoes. When he came before the committee, he opened up his diary from 10 years before and began reeling off names. At that point, Green says, Paul and DeLoach entered the chamber and seated themselves at the side of the hearing room, and committee chairman Louis Stokes interrupted Green to ask why he needed to rely on notes. Green says he told the chairman that he had a general recollection of past events but needed the diary for specific details. He continued his testimony: "I told them I was laying on top of this building and I saw James [Earl Ray] walking and that he was not in the area when the shots were fired." Green says Stokes again addressed him in an accusatory manner, and Green exploded: "Look, I don't even have to be here!" He says he closed his diary and walked out.

Green returned home to Caruthersville, disillusioned. He sought refuge by joining the Kinfolks Ridge Baptist Church, became an evangelist, preached at revival meetings and served briefly as a missionary to Mexico, where he helped build an orphanage. But God's calling didn't pay the rent. Out of money, Green used his law-enforcement contacts from his undercover work to secure a job as a deputy sheriff in Lauderdale County, Tenn. When the incumbent sheriff ran for re-election, Green's prison record became a campaign issue, and he was forced to resign. In 1982, he moved his family to Tampa, where he had previously done undercover work for a federal anti-crime strike force. For three years, he taught in a high-school vocational program, although he never attended college.

A former police officer who coached at the school introduced him to Emilio "Bobby" Rodriguez, owner of a topless bar. Rodriguez hired Green to manage the Tanga Lounge in downtown Tampa. Green worked security, handled the door and made sure other employees didn't stick their hands in the till. He also used his knowledge and contacts within law enforcement to further his boss' interests. Over time, Rodriguez gave him new responsibilities and brought him in as a partner in some ventures. In the late '80s and early '90s, Green ran La Pleasures in Lakeland, Fla., the Centerfold in St. Petersburg, the Peek-a-Boo in Key West and the Doll House in Jackson, Tenn. Green, who prefers to call topless clubs "go-go bars," still wears a diamond-studded ring that he says Rodriguez gave him.

"I was living kind of high on the hog, knocking down $5,000 a week tax-free, driving Lincoln Town Cars," Green says.

Green's Florida police record shows a 1988 arrest for "keeping a house of ill fame." He pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charge the next year and paid a $500 fine. Rodriguez and another partner became involved in a feud. Some of the clubs ended up being torched. To stay out of trouble, Green says, he bailed out of the sex business.

Today, James Green gets by on Social Security disability checks. He weighs between 250 and 300 pounds and has bad knees and a bad heart. He smokes too much and coughs after every few drags he takes off each cigarette. When he comes to Caruthersville, he stays at Pic's. Other than the gold ring, he displays no accoutrements of wealth. He dresses in sweatshirts and baggy pants. When he comes from Tampa, where he lives in a modest home with wife Linda, he doesn't fly; he drives his weathered pickup. Green says he's now developing a subdivision with a partner on land he bought years ago, when he was flush with fast cash. He's calling the place Green Estates.

But Green tends to speak more about the past than the future. When he does, his memory meanders like the Mississippi River, in whose delta he was born and raised. The river drifts and eddies and changes course, bending back on itself as an oxbow. In his mind, Green inhabits the lowlands, the muddied backwaters of history, where his story has remained hidden among the growing apocrypha surrounding the King assassination. It is only one man's story, however flawed -- not an official version but one told from the viewpoint of a thief. Though Green's account will never be sanctified as gospel, there are currents within it that run deep, currents that have never been fully explored.

South of Crowley's Ridge, where the Missouri landscape merges with the South, the cotton fields stretch to the horizon and it seems as if everything is laid out in straight lines and right angles. The swamps have been drained. An outsider can easily misunderstand the true nature of this place. And so it is, too, that Green's motives can be misconstrued to fit the preconceived notions of people who have never lived in a town laid out on the site of a former plantation.

Green was raised a Baptist, the same religion as King. He came of age in a white racist culture. Over the course of his lifetime, he has experienced dramatic social change. He can do nothing to stop those who are bent on mocking him. He claims only to be seeking redemption for himself and justice for the King family.

"I think the hardest thing for people to understand is the atmosphere you're raised in," Green says. "Hell, they'd stuff the ballot boxes. They used to hand out half-pints of whiskey and dollar bills at the polls to the blacks so they'd vote for a certain person. When a person is raised in that atmosphere, you kind of believe everything is right: If the grownups do it, and the politicians are doing it, and the government is doing it -- it must be right. I actually believed that. In a way, I thought, working for the government, I was making up for the wrong I did, [but] as you get older, you get wiser. Maybe what you did in your 20s and 30s, that you thought was the right thing to do, becomes something you're not too proud you done. I guess it's kind of like a drunk who drinks all his life and then all of a sudden quits drinking and becomes a fanatic against the drinking. "

After hearing a member of the King family plead for justice on television in the early 1990s, Green says he had his epiphany: "I felt the King family had a right to know the truth."

For Green, at least, the road to Memphis will always run through Caruthersville.

[msfreeh]

http://www.psmag.com/navigation/busines ... ive-84351/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



The Organ Detective: A Career Spent Uncovering a Hidden Global Market in Human Flesh

By Ethan Watters • July 07, 2014 • 6:00 AM


Around the same time, Scheper-Hughes also made another unusual decision for an anthropologist: She began to share her findings with U.S. law enforcement, including officials from the FBI, the Food and Drug Administration, and the State Department’s visa fraud unit. Her information appeared to spark little interest and less action. She recalls one particularly frustrating meeting with an agent from the FBI in 2003. “I could see that the guy’s mind was elsewhere,” she recounted. “He didn’t seem to understand that this was a major crime.” Frustrated, she found herself thinking, “Look, I can do this. Give me a badge and I’ll go make an arrest,” she told me.

[msfreeh]

Jason Leopold on FOIA Fishing
July 7, 2014

http://www.mediachannel.org/jason-leopo ... a-fishing/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[msfreeh]

see link for full story

http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_2 ... -oversight" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



Policing the CHP: Beating shows officers need independent oversight


Posted: 07/09/2014
Activists want inquiry into CHP officer caught on video beating woman on side of Los Angeles freeway

Video shows California officer punching woman

A cellphone video that has gone viral shows a CHP officer pummeling a mentally ill African American woman who had been walking, barefooted, along Interstate 10 near downtown Los Angeles.

Community members have decried what appears to be excessive force by the officer, who can be seen repeatedly punching 51-year old Marlene Pinnock in the head as she lies on the ground. The CHP has vowed to carry out a thorough investigation.

At a press conference, California Highway Patrol's Assistant Chief Chris O'Quinn stated, "We are known as an agency that really polices itself."

Seriously? If ever an incident called for independent oversight, this one is it. Law enforcement officers wield enormous power over us. Independent civilian oversight provides a check on that power.

Today, the value of civilian oversight for law enforcement is well settled. Fifteen countries, ranging from South Africa to Israel to Belgium, utilize civilian oversight. And 200 cities and counties across this nation have oversight agencies, including Atlanta, Philadelphia and San Jose, where the Office of the Independent Police Auditor has been in existence for 21 years.

Still, there are many law enforcement agencies that have no accountability to the public. The FBI is one of them.





Since 1993, every single one of the FBI's shootings was deemed justified by the FBI. Among the 289 deliberate shootings, there were 70 fatalities and 80 wounded. Not one FBI agent was disciplined, except for five letters of censure, veritable slaps on the wrists.

Even where the FBI paid a shooting victim over $1 million, the agency's internal review found that the agent did not use excessive force.

The California Highway Patrol is the largest state police agency in the United States, with more than 7,500 sworn officers. It has patrol jurisdiction over California highways and acts as the state police. CHP officers enforce traffic laws on public roads anywhere in the state and possess full law enforcement authority to enforce all state laws.

When the conduct of CHP officers is called into question, internal inquiries into the allegations are not subject to any form of independent oversight. Rather, these allegations are handled exclusively by their Internal Affairs Unit, which is staffed by CHP officers.

The 1988 case of Officer Craig Peyer, a six-year veteran of the CHP, is a stunning example of why police policing themselves without independent oversight doesn't work. Peyer stopped 20-year old Cara Knott for a traffic violation. When she refused the officer's sexual advances, he bludgeoned her with his flashlight, strangled her and threw her body over a bridge.

It was subsequently revealed by the media that numerous young women had been subjected to similar advances from Peyer, all of whom filed complaints with the CHP's Internal Affairs Unit. However, their complaints were dismissed by the CHP because of Peyer's reputation within the department.

With independent oversight, an officer's reputation is never a consideration in a misconduct determination. Peyer was convicted of her murder and is serving a life sentence.

Perhaps today's CHP's Internal Affairs Unit conducts objective and thorough investigations of its fellow officers. But that isn't the point. It is the independence of the oversight agency that gives the investigations credibility and builds trust. Credibility and public trust fall by the wayside when the police police themselves without independent oversight.

In the wake of the Marlene Pinnock incident, we must demand that the California Legislature mandate an independent civilian oversight agency for the CHP. In this way, something very good may come of something very bad.

[msfreeh]

see link for full story
http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index. ... to_re.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Ex-FBI agent doesn't have to register as sex offender for peeping Tom incidents in Hershey, elsewhere, court says


on July 11, 2014
A former FBI agent who admitted sneaking into bathrooms to watch girls and women use toilets doesn't have to register as a sex offender, the state Superior Court has ruled.

The decision, issued this week in response to a plea by Ryan Seese, comes nearly four years after the Derry Township man was sentenced to 1 to 23 months in Dauphin County Prison, plus 3 years of probation, for committing the crimes at the Hershey Middle School and a private gym.

In its ruling, the Superior Court concluded that Seese isn't subject to sex offender registration because of amendments the state Legislature made to the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act, which took effect two years after his sentencing.

Seese pleaded guilty and no contest in 2010 to three charges of invasion of privacy and pleaded guilty to additional counts of criminal trespass and disorderly conduct. Police said two adult women were the victims in the incident in the women's locker room at the private gym and that Seese spied on two teens in a girl's bathroom during a concert at the middle school.

Seese left the FBI in 2007 after being convicted of another peeping Tom incident in a women's restroom at the University of Arizona.

[msfreeh]

Today's word in the smart criminal justice consumer neighborhood
is criminal justice system crime family. can you say taxpayer funded crime family boys and girls?


nah! didn't think so.....


caution....
do not assume the position before reading.
you will not be mirandized, eh?


News9.com Mobile

http://m.news9.com/story.aspx?story=260 ... tId=112032" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



Current Condition. DIRE


Utah Attorney Wants Federal Government To Release OKC Bombing Surveillance Video
Posted: Jul 12, 2014 10:29PM CDT Heather Hope, News 9

Nearly 20 years after the Oklahoma City bombing, a new federal trial is taking place to determine if surveillance video taken from around the Murrah building from that day will be revealed.

For years, Utah attorney, Jesse Trentadue, has been fighting for information about his brother's suspicious death.

He hopes this lawsuit will get to the bottom of what really happened that tragic day.

If there is never-before-seen surveillance video of the Oklahoma City bombing, Jesse Trentadue is working to get it.

In his latest lawsuit, Trentadue is requesting copies of the videotapes from more than 20 surveillance cameras surrounding the Murrah Federal Building, before the truck bomb went off that killed 168 people.

In an email, Trentadue sent News9 several documents, that he said he plans to use in federal court. It revealed an attorney representing an FBI agent, offered to sell a copy of the bombing surveillance footage for over $1 million dollars to an NBC Dateline producer.
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Trentadue didn't want to speak before the trial, but News9 talked to local attorney David Slane to get his take.

"Here we are almost 20 years later after the Murrah bombing and we still haven't turned these over, and I think this is what leads to the conspiracy theories, I think that if the government has the tapes, and a judge says turn them over, I think that it might answer things once and for all," Slane said.

[msfreeh]

Why taxpayer funded FBI agents said President Jimmy Carter has to go and then created The October Surprise


2. reads


1st



http://www.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroo ... nniversary" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Analysis: 35 years later, Jimmy Carter's energy warning

Carter speech-768

President Jimmy Carter works on a television speech in the Oval Office in 1977. Two years later, on July 15, 1979, Carter would deliver a stern warning to the nation that it was experiencing a "crisis of confidence." Photo by Marion S. Trikosko/Library of Congress

July 15, 2014
President Jimmy Carter tried to change the path of America's energy future with his 'Crisis of Confidence' speech, delivered 35 years ago today. Here's why it didn't work.

By Peter Dykstra
The Daily Climate

Dykstra-115Thirty-five years ago this evening, Jimmy Carter stared America in the eye, and invoking his promise that "I will never lie to you," gave us all a royal scolding.

It ran just over a half-hour, back in the day when such speeches were carried by all three of the commercial TV networks, in prime time, before tens of millions of viewers. Every one of those viewers had likely spent some recent time in a gasoline line, paying inflated prices for scarce fuel.

"Why have we not been able to get together as a nation to solve our serious energy problem?" asked the president, with an earnest gaze and several chopping, pounding motions with his right hand. It was a second sortie for a president who two years earlier had told us that our energy woes were "the moral equivalent of war."

Carter then read a laundry list of public grievances against the government, and against himself, including a concise summary of why America was entering a "moral and spiritual crisis." He said that America was losing faith in government, and in citizens' ability to participate in democracy. He denounced self-indulgence, overconsumption, and government gridlock. He sounded at times like a bitter, unusually articulate Grampa pining for the Good Old Days.
A gloomy prophet

It's hard to watch or read the speech without viewing Carter as a gloomy, forthright prophet. But he also steered his scold back to the central theme of energy. "Energy," he said, "will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally."

Carter's manifesto was hardly an attack on the fossil fuel industry. He called for energy conservation mandates and improved public transportation, but he also urged increased reliance on coal, touted the promise of domestic shale oil, and promised to remove environmental obstacles to oil refinery construction.

What he did do is make a firm acknowledgement that our energy supply controls our destiny, whether it's in the hands of petro-states, coal barons, or solar entrepreneurs. But alas, Americans were no more in the mood to be lectured about driving 55 or cutting down on unnecessary trips than they are today. Carter's other gestures, like installing a passive solar array on the White House roof, also failed to impress or inspire.
Backlash to the scolding

At the time of the speech and following the 1979 Energy Crisis, Carter's approval ratings bottomed out at around 25% – about where Nixon's were in the midst of Watergate, and nearly 20 points lower than Obama's current number. Immediately after the speech, his numbers rose about ten points, but within weeks the backlash to the scolding parts of the speech dropped his numbers lower.

Herblock-450TMonths later, the Iranian hostage crisis unfolded, and the following year, Carter was crushed in his re-election bid by Ronald Reagan. Both the policies and the symbolic White House solar array were soon memories.

But the scolding lived on, dubbed the "malaise speech" by the op-eds and punditry that followed, even though Carter never mentioned the word.
The sad takeaway

Few American presidents have dared to dwell on the issue since. George W. Bush confessed in 2006 that "we are addicted to oil" even as he presided over policies that enabled the addiction. Barack Obama has become more vocal about climate change in his second term while helping vulnerable Democrats in coal and oil states by promising an "all of the above" energy scheme.

Sadly, the biggest takeaway from Carter's "malaise" speech may have been the current political wisdom that Americans are beyond being self-inspired in their own interest.

Jimmy Carter promised to lead on overhauling our energy regime if only Americans were willing to follow. Thirty-five years later, energy divides America more than it unites, and the stakes today are bigger than anyone realized back in 1979.


2nd
http://www.google.com/#q=October+supris ... mmy+carter" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



Jimmy Carter's October Surprise Doubts | Consortiumnews
consortiumnews.com/2011/05/12/jimmy-carters-october-surprise-doubts/
May 12, 2011 - Jimmy Carter's October Surprise Doubts ..... An FBI polygrapher working for Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh's investigation ...
October Surprise - The Consortium
http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/xfile.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
What the KGB knew about the October Surprise mystery, but the American people didn't. ... What FBI wiretaps captured about secret payments from BCCI and a Bush-connected lawyer to an Iranian ... The CIA/Likud Sinking of Jimmy Carter
October Surprise | http://www.jimmccluskey.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
http://www.jimmccluskey.com/october-surprise/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
President Jimmy Carter's negotiations and a disastrous attempt to free the hostages ... mate George Bush (the elder) cynically called it Carter's “October Surprise. ... Casey cultivated sources inside the Carter administration, the FBI and the CIA ...
[PDF]
New Evidence on 'October Surprise': How President Carter's ...
http://www.larouchepub.com/.../eirv19n0 ... dence_on_o.." onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;.
In late November, the FBI released portions of its files on Iranian banker and gun-runner Cyrus Hashemi, who has been identified as a key figure in the October Surprise events which contributed to the defeat of Jimmy Carter in the 1980.
The October Surprise Was Real » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts ...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/07/11/ ... -was-real/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
4 days ago - This secret deal, known as the October Surprise, frustrated the attempts of US president Jimmy Carter to obtain the hostages' release in time for ...
October surprise - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_surprise
In American political jargon, an October surprise is a news event deliberately .... held in Iran might earn incumbent Jimmy Carter enough votes to win re-election. ..... be an October Surprise, a site curated by MSU; [The FBI uses polygraphs to ...
Robert Parry | Part III: The Original October Surprise - Truthout
http://www.truth-out.org/article/robert ... r-surprise" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Oct 29, 2006 - >From the beginning of the hostage crisis, Jimmy Carter never .... when questioned about the October Surprise by an FBI polygrapher working ...
october surprise series ~ bush made deal with ... - Rumor Mill News
http://www.rumormillnews.com/HARRY_MART ... RPRISE.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Former President Jimmy Carter and several Congressmen are now asking for an ... wary of a possible "October Surprise" by the Carter Administration that would result ..... The search also revealed that F.B.I. has a great interest in Russbacher ...
Reprise of the October Surprise: Is the Worst Surprise Still to Come?
http://www.wrmea.org" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; › ... › 1991 May-June
When the hostages were seized in November 1979, President Jimmy Carter .... From this point, all stories about the "October Surprise" that never happened converge. ... and complied with the law by reporting the Iranian overture to the FBI.
'October Surprise': History Haunts Present US Iran Relations - sttpml
sttpml.org/soviet-report-on-1980-october-surprise-history-haunts-present-u...
Jun 2, 2014 - October Surprise X-Files (Part 1): Russia 's Report By Robert Parry ... Council in the administration of Jimmy Carter and former CIA director George Bush .... Another box contained a “secret” summary of FBI wiretaps placed on ...

[msfreeh]

see link for full story

http://www.sfgate.com/nation/article/Zo ... 624023.php" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Zoia Horn, 1st U.S. librarian jailed over alleged antiwar plot



July 15, 2014



Zoia Horn, who in 1972 became the first U.S. librarian ever jailed for withholding information as a matter of conscience by refusing to testify against antiwar activists accused of a bizarre terrorist plot, died Saturday at her home in Oakland, her family said. She was 96.

Ms. Horn devoted much of her career and her retirement years to speaking out against government surveillance and intrusions aimed at libraries and academic institutions. The American Library Association did not support her in 1972, but later praised her courage. The California Library Association now bestows an annual Zoia Horn Intellectual Freedom Award.

"All kinds of options are there for a librarian with a conscience," she told The Chronicle in a 2002 interview.

A native of Ukraine who emigrated with her family at age 8, Ms. Horn started working at libraries in 1942. In January 1971, she was the chief reference librarian at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa., when two FBI agents showed up at her home and asked her to answer some questions and look at photos. When she refused, she was handed a grand jury subpoena.
Kidnap-bomb plot

Prosecutors said they were investigating a plot masterminded by the Rev. Philip Berrigan, along with other current and former priests or nuns, to blow up tunnels beneath Washington, D.C., and then kidnap Henry Kissinger, President Richard Nixon's national security adviser, and hold him until the U.S. stopped bombing Southeast Asia.

Much of the evidence came from an informant who had been in prison with Berrigan and then got a job as a library assistant, where he prevailed on Ms. Horn, a tax-withholding opponent of the Vietnam War, to host a meeting with some of Berrigan's friends.
Her phone was tapped

During the legal proceedings, Ms. Horn learned that her phone had been wiretapped, said her daughter, Catherine Marrion. Prosecutors pressed Ms. Horn for information about the supposed plot. But after appearing before the grand jury, she refused to testify at the 1972 trial of the so-called Harrisburg Seven and was led away in handcuffs. She was freed after 20 days when the jury deadlocked on the conspiracy charges, which were then dropped.

She was "the first librarian who spent time in jail for a value of our profession," said Judith Krug, director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom. The association declared during Ms. Horn's trial that it could not support her defiance, but praised her after her release, and later elected her to its governing board.

In the aftermath of the trial, Ms. Horn, who had moved to California, found that she could no longer get a top-level job at a public or college library.

"Because she was seen as controversial, I think they didn't want to touch her," said a longtime friend, Betty Medsger, former journalism department chairwoman at San Francisco State University.

Ms. Horn spoke out again in 2002, calling on librarians to resist attempts by the FBI, under the newly enacted USA Patriot Act, to secretly obtain library records of patrons allegedly connected to terrorism investigations.
Role of the library

"She believed in the role of the library in a democracy," Marrion said. "People couldn't make intelligent decisions about how to govern themselves and make choices regarding social and political and economic issues unless they had the information."

[msfreeh]

see link for full story


http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politic ... -1.1868841" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

FBI informant admits he took sunny vacation after getting state Sen. Malcolm Smith busted
While giving testimony at former City Councilman Daniel Halloran’s corruption trial, Moses (Mark) Stern said he went on a $5,000 trip to a private island in the Florida Keys, despite facing up to 455 years in prison for fraud.

Wednesday, July 16, 2014, 11:26 AM

The wire-wearing FBI informant in the state Sen. Malcolm Smith bribery case took a sunny vacation almost immediately after getting Smith and others busted last year — despite facing up to 455 years in prison for a massive fraud, he admitted Tuesday.

Moses (Mark) Stern, testifying in former City Councilman Daniel Halloran’s corruption trial, said he and his family went on a $5,000 trip to a private island in the Florida Keys to avoid news reporters and because he was afraid for his safety after the arrests.

“Cooperation is very difficult,” he said, adding, “The only place to go was the island.”

A brother paid for the week-long vacation, testified Stern, a Rockland County businessman who agreed to secretly work for the feds hoping to earn a reduced sentence in his own case.

Halloran, a Queens Republican, is accused in a scheme to obtain the city’s Republican mayoral ballot line for Smith (D-Queens) by bribing GOP leaders. He faces up to 45 years in prison. Smith will go to trial later next year.

[msfreeh]

In 2004 I traveled to Toronto Canada with my video equipment
and helped videotape a conference detailing evidence the US Government created 911.
FBI agent Kimmel spoke at the event. see below and this link
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... 04x1684504" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



couple of reads


1st read


see link for full story

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/22/us/fb ... rrest.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

F.B.I. Rejected Spy Warning 2 Years Before Agent's Arrest

Published: April 22, 2001



Two years before the arrest of a veteran F.B.I. agent accused of spying for Russia, a senior investigator at the Federal Bureau of Investigation concluded in a still-classified report that Moscow might have recruited a mole in the bureau's ranks, current and former bureau officials say.

In early 1999, F.B.I. Director Louis Freeh was told by Thomas Kimmel, the investigator, about his findings. In response, the officials said, senior bureau officials convinced Mr. Freeh that Mr. Kimmel's reasoning was flawed and investigators focused their hunt for a mole at the Central Intelligence Agency, not the bureau.

But with the arrest in February of the bureau agent Robert P. Hanssen on charges of spying for Moscow, Mr. Kimmel's suspicions proved correct. In the aftermath of Mr. Hanssen's arrest, Mr. Kimmel's findings, which have not been previously disclosed, have emerged as a warning within the bureau. The warning first came even as the bureau's spy hunters were searching in the wrong place.

Since the arrest, the bureau and its director have been criticized for failing to detect the betrayal within the agency's ranks for so long. The case has forced senior bureau officials to re-examine their performance in their search for a mole. And, in a series of recent interviews to discuss their actions, they provided new insights into the investigative effort that ultimately led to Mr. Hanssen.

Mr. Hanssen, a 25-year F.B.I. veteran and counterintelligence expert, was arrested in a Virginia park on Feb. 18, after the government said he left a package of secret documents for his Russian handlers at an agreed-upon spot, known as a dead drop site.

The government said he handed over some of the nation's most closely guarded secrets to the Russians, including the existence of a tunnel burrowed under the Russian Embassy in Washington.

The government has charged that Mr. Hanssen began to spy for Moscow in October 1985, about five months after a C.I.A. officer, Aldrich H. Ames, offered his services as a spy for the Soviet Union. Yet Mr. Hanssen eluded investigators for seven more years after Mr. Ames's arrest in 1994.

Mr. Kimmel said in an interview that he had never warned Mr. Freeh or other bureau officials that he suspected that Mr. Hanssen was a spy. ''I wasn't saying that I knew there was a mole in the F.B.I.,'' Mr. Kimmel said. ''I was saying, in effect, you can't rule out that possibility. I thought it was more of a possibility than they did. They were saying that we think the focus of our investigative efforts should be on the C.I.A.''

Yet Mr. Kimmel said he did believe strongly that the evidence was persuasive enough to have prompted an intensive counterintelligence examination of bureau operations.

Neal Gallagher, the bureau's assistant director for national security who has jurisdiction over all counter-intelligence investigations, said in an interview that Mr. Kimmel's belief that there was a spy in the F.B.I. was ''a gut instinct,'' not a well-reasoned position. Mr. Gallagher said that Mr. Kimmel never provided substantive evidence or investigative leads to support his assertion.

''There was nothing there that we could use for investigative purposes to open a case,'' he said. At the time, he added, bureau officials had considered the possibility of a mole within the senior ranks of the F.B.I., but discounted it because the strongest available evidence indicated that there was a spy at the C.I.A.

John Collingwood, an F.B.I. spokesman, said that Mr. Kimmel's thoughts were taken seriously. He said that Mr. Freeh asked Mr. Kimmel ''to organize his thoughts and provide them'' to the bureau's National Security Division.

''At Freeh's instruction,'' Mr. Collingwood said, ''experienced senior counterintelligence experts analyzed Tom's hypothesis and concluded his observations were already explained and his hunches being pursued in other ongoing investigations within the intelligence community.''

Elation and Concern

Publicly, after Mr. Ames was sentenced to life in prison in 1994, Mr. Freeh and his advisers celebrated their success. But privately, they were unsettled by new intelligence that showed that it was highly likely that there were more Russian spies in the United States intelligence bureaucracy, the officials said.

The information came in bits and pieces from several Russian agents. But when taken together, the evidence led the spy hunters to suspect there were at least two more moles. One was believed to have burrowed into the C.I.A., another was thought to be at the F.B.I.

The reports seemed to confirm the growing suspicions among American counterintelligence experts that Mr. Ames could not have been responsible for all of the losses that American intelligence had suffered, since he did not have access to all of the secrets that had been compromised.

In response, senior bureau officials organized a new mole-hunting unit, recruiting more than 60 agents from the bureau's offices around the country. The existence of the secret unit was kept from all but a few top officials at the F.B.I. and C.I.A. A new mole-hunting team, similar to one that helped uncover Mr. Ames, was also created inside the C.I.A.'s counterespionage group within months of Mr. Ames's 1994 arrest. The mole hunters' search included a look for possible suspects in the F.B.I.'s New York offiice.


2nd read
http://www.pearlharbor911attacks.com/tom-kimmels-bio" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Home
Tom's Bio
Reviews & Commentary
Speaking Schedule
Videos & Links »
Contact Us

Tom Kimmel's Bio



A noted Pearl Harbor scholar, former FBI agent, and eldest grandson of Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, Commander of the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor during the attack on December 7,1941, Tom Kimmel comes from a family of distinguished scholars and government servants dedicated to protecting America. Notwithstanding the preceding, his grandfather was accused from the well of the House of Representatives of failing to prevent World War II, and the Cold War. His fourth great grandfather was accused of starting the Revolutionary War, and the Whiskey Rebellion. Tom welcomes the opportunity to respond to the allegations.

A graduate of the US Naval Academy, Tom served on three warships during the Vietnam War and attended John Marshall Law School prior to joining the FBI in 1973, where he continued to serve his Country as an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for more than 25 years.

Tom investigated organized crime in Cleveland, served on the House Appropriations Committee Surveys and Investigations Staff at CIA Headquarters, headed the FBI in East Texas, headed the Labor Racketeering Unit at FBI Headquarters, headed the National Drug Intelligence Center in Johnstown, PA, and served on the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency. Tom was also the Assistant Agent in Charge of the Philadelphia FBI Division heading the Foreign Counterintelligence and Terrorism Programs during the 1st attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.

Upon retiring from the FBI, Tom served as a consultant to the Bureau addressing major spy scandals in the FBI and CIA. Tom has appeared at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, twice on 60 Minutes, on War Stories Investigates with Oliver North, the Discovery Channel, the National Geographic Channel, and spoken throughout the United States, Canada, Columbia, and Japan to hundreds of groups of all ages frequently as a repeat speaker.

Speech Titles:

Adm. Kimmel’s Case: The Story within the Pearl Harbor Story
Admiral Kimmel’s grandson reveals the real reasons for the success of the Japanese attack.
Adm. Kimmel’s Case: The Pearl Harbor and 9/11 Attacks Compared
Lt. Cdr and former FBI agent Kimmel reveals Pearl Harbor mistakes repeated on 9/11.
Adm. Kimmel’s Case: Investigating the FBI
A former FBI agent investigates the FBI’s role in the Pearl Harbor Attack.
Adm. Kimmel’s Case: Why Was It Possible for a Pearl Harbor to Occur?
J. Edgar Hoover thought he knew, so, why did the President's representative not investigate?--A former FBI agent explains.
Adm. Kimmel's Case: What Else Did Mr. Hoover Hide from Pearl Harbor Investigators? Admiral Kimmel's grandson has made a list.
Adm. Kimmel’s Case: Pearl Harbor Perjury
Subornation of perjury is revealed by a former FBI agent.
Adm. Kimmel’s Case: It Ain’t Over Yet
What’s new in the Pearl Harbor story—Admiral Kimmel’s grandson has made a list.
Adm. Kimmel’s Case: Spying on America
A former FBI agent reveals the most successful espionage operation of all time--and it was against America.
Adm. Kimmel’s Case: Indications of Advanced Knowledge of the Pearl Harbor Attack
Advanced indications revealed from the US, UK, Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands.
Adm. Kimmel’s Case: Newt Gingrich's Solution
Lt. Cdr. Kimmel wraps it up.




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RBHam Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri May-28-04 05:53 PM
Original message
Update from Toronto 9-11 Inquiry

Hello 9/11 truth activists and concerned citizens,

We just received this update from the organizers of the
International Citizens’ Inquiry Into 9/11 – Phase 2,
which begins its fourth day today. Check it out, and
make sure and look at the photo album as well!

Emanuel Sferios
Webmaster, 9/11 Visibility Project
http://www.septembereleventh.org" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

-----
The International Citizens’ Inquiry Into 9/11 in
Toronto has successfully completed its third day. There
has been media coverage of the event with interviews
with many of the presenters on local radio and TV
programs. On Wednesday May 26 the Canadian Action Party
held an election campaign press conference at the
Inquiry with appearances by the current leader lawyer
Connie Fogal and by the Founder of the party, former
Deputy-Prime Minster of Canada Paul Hellyer. Both were
photographed with the Inquiry banner and expressed
support for the Inquiry’s objectives.

Thanks to Inquiry attendee Jan Hoyer, the first online
photo album from the Toronto Inquiry is now available
here:

http://911inquirytoronto.digitalstyledesigns.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; /

Jan advises that the next online album will be posted
on Friday evening. Many thanks Jan!

Following is the program listing for the final three
days of the Inquiry.

We invite you to come and join us. You can register at
the door for any and all of the interesting sessions.
Please tell your friends about the Inquiry and visit
our website (http://www.911inquiry.org" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; ) and consider making an
online donation to our work.

Please support the International Citizens’ Inquiry into
9/11 process and become involved in the 9/11 Truth
Movement demanding an end to the 9/11 deception and
cover-up and to the phony "war on terrorism."

……………………….

Here is our Program for Friday, May 28, 2004.
-Ukrainian Cultural Centre, 83 Christie Street, Toronto
(one block north of the Christie subway on the Bloor
line.)

PLEASE NOTE OUR PROGRAM STARTS TODAY AT 9:00 A.M. (8:00
am: Registration.)

THIS IS OUR LAST DAY AT THE UKRAINIAN CULTURAL CENTRE.
TOMORROW (SATURDAY MAY 29) WE MOVE TO CONVOCATION HALL
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO.

Speakers in order of appearance:

Nenke Jongkind
Barrie Zwicker
Walter Davis
Michael Dietrick
Mathias Broeckers
Webster Tarpley
Joyce Lynn
Paul Thompson

Meyssan will not be able to appear at the Inquiry.]

8:00 am: Registration

9:00-9:30: MC-Nenke Jongkind

Barrie Zwicker "Words, the Media and Our Future"

9:30-10:30: Walter Davis "9/11 Overview" Panel and Q&A:

Researcher and writer and social justice activist at
Kent State University, Walter is currently working on a
book tentatively entitled: The Illusion of Democracy
and the Reality of Empire: The Ideological Struggle of
the Twenty–First Century."

10:30-10:45: Break

10:45-12:00 pm: Michael Dietrick "A Professional
Pilot’s View of the Events of 9/11" Panel and Q&A

12:00-1:00: Lunch Break

1:00-2:15: Mathias Broeckers "Welcome to
Brainwashington" Panel and Q&A.

Mathias is a freelance writer who earned his Masters
Degree in Literature and Political Science at the Freie
Universität Berlin in 1979. His most recent books
Conspiracies, Conspiracy Theories and the Secrets of
Sept. 11 (2002) and Facts, Forgeries and the Suppressed
Evidence of 9/11 (2003) became bestsellers in Germany.

2:15-2:30: Break

2:30-4:00: Webster Tarpley "The 9/11 Terror Fraud: A
Coup Against World Civilization" Panel and Q&A.

Webster Tarpley is an author and lecturer. In 1992, he
co-authored George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography,
which still stands as the only comprehensive and
critical account of the former president and his family
network.

4:00-4:15: Break

4:15-5:30: Joyce Lynn-"The Kean Commission Cover-Up"
Panel and Q&A.

Joyce is a journalist with eight years experience as a
political reporter in Washington, D.C. After moving to
San Francisco, she turned to writing about using Inner
Intelligence to evince inner health and outer peace
about matters of the mind. She researches the real
story of 9/11.

530 -7:00: Dinner Break

7:00-8:15: that Thierry Meyssan will not be able to appear at the
Inquiry.]

Webster Tarpley has kindly volunteered to continue his
earlier presentation from the afternoon above to "Part
Two" of the "The 9/11 Terror Fraud." Panel and Q&A

8:15-8:30: Break

8:30-10:00: Paul Thompson "Complete 9/11 Timeline"
Panel and Q&A.

Paul has developed the Complete 9-11 Timeline, a
thorough archive of 9/11 research using mostly
mainstream sources hosted by the Center for Cooperative
Research. This is an invaluable resource for 9/11
researchers.

........................................

Here is our Program for Saturday, May 29, 2004.
PLEASE NOTE VENUE LOCATION CHANGE TODAY TO
CONVOCATION HALL, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO.

PROGRAM STARTS AT 10:30 A.M. (9:30: Registration)

Speakers in order of appearance:

Nenke Jongkind
Barrie Zwicker
Jim Hoffman
Jim Marrs
Don Paul
Thomas Kimmel

Evening "Celebration of the Inquiring Mind and
Compassionate Heart" with
Ralph Benmergui
Spirit Wind
Helen Porter and Eugene Martynec
Steven Bush
David Calderisi
Nancy White

9:30: Registration
10:30-11:45: Welcome: MC-Nenke Jongkind
Introduction: Barrie Zwicker.

Jim Hoffman "WTC Towers Demolition."

Jim is a software engineer and research scientist. He
will demonstrate that the Twin Towers and Building 7
were demolished. He notes that fires have never
levelled steel-framed buildings; that evidence was
systematically destroyed; that the investigation was a
farce.

11:45-1:00 pm: Lunch Break

1:00-2:15: Jim Marrs "Anatomy of an Inside Job" Panel
and Q&A

A chronology and many questions about the events of
September 11, 2001: What Did President Bush Know? What
Happened at the Pentagon? What Caused the Collapse of
Building 7. Jim Marrs is an award-winning veteran
Texas journalist whose books Crossfire: The Plot That
Killed Kennedy (Carroll & Graf) and Rule by Secrecy
(HarperCollins: 2002) reached the New York Times
bestseller list.

2:15-2:30: Break

2:30-3:45: Don Paul "The Financiers Behind 9/11" Panel
and Q&A

Don Paul is a writer, performer, musician and activist.
He co-wrote with Jim Hoffman " '9/`11' " Great Crimes/
A Greater Cover-Up" published in October 2003.

3:45-4:00: Break

4:00-5:15: Thomas Kimmel "Pearl Harbor and 9/11
Compared" Panel and Q&A.

A noted Pearl Harbor scholar, former FBI agent, and
grandson of Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, the
Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor
when the Japanese attacked on December 7, 1941, Tom
Kimmel comes from a long line of distinguished scholars
and servants to the United States Government and from a
family that has dedicated itself, and given generously,
to protecting the freedom and way of life that the 9/11
attacks threaten. He will speak on the similarities
between the two events.
5:15 -7:30: Dinner Break

7:30-10:00:" Celebration of the Inquiring Mind and
Compassionate Heart":

with MC Ralph Benmurgui, Spirit Wind, Helen Porter and
Eugene Martynec, Steven Bush, David Calderisi, Nancy
White.
.....................................

Here is our Program for Sunday, May 30, 2004
– Convocation Hall, University of Toronto
PLEASE NOTE THE EARLIER START TO THE PROGRAM TODAY AT
9:30 A.M. (8:30 am: Registration)

Speakers in order of appearance:

Nenke Jongkind
Ellen Mariani
Phil Berg
John McMurtry
Dr. Robert Bowman
"Town Hall" with Joe Cote
"Conclusion" with
John Corcelli
Barrie Zwicker
Dr. John Gray
Ellen Mariani
Mike Ruppert
Nick Levis
David Kubiak


8:30 am: Registration

9:30 -10:00: Introduction/ Welcome. Nenke Jongkind/John
Corcelli

San Francisco Phase 1 video review

10:00-11:00: Ellen Mariani "A 9/11 Widow’s Personal
Story,"

Ellen Mariani lost her husband in the events of 9/11.
She has filed a civil RICO (Racketeer Influenced and
Corrupt Organizations Act) action lawsuit against
President Bush and other high level members of his
administration based upon alleged prior knowledge of
9/11; knowingly failing to act, prevent or warn of 911;
and the ongoing obstruction of justice by covering up
the truth of 9/11 — all in violation of the laws of
the United States.

11:00-11:30: Phil Berg "RICO Lawsuit"

Philip Berg is Ellen Mariani’s lawyer. He practises in
Lafayette Hill, Pennsylvania and has been a fighter for
individual rights for many years. He was highly
involved in challenging the 2000 presidential election.

11:30-11:45: Q&A

11:45 -1:00 pm: Lunch Break

1:00-1:45: John McMurtry "Why the Facts of 9/11 are
Suppressed’

John McMurtry is a professor of Philosophy at the
University of Guelph, Ontario. Author of over 150 books
and journals, in recent years his work has focused on
the underlying value structure of economic theory and
its consequences for global, civil and environmental
life-organization. His analysis of the meaning and
impact of the 9/11 events and their aftermath is
informed by this perspective.

1:45-2:00: Q&A

2:00-3:15: Dr. Robert Bowman "A Fighter Pilot Looks
Back at 9/11 and Forward to a Resurrected America"
Panel and Q&A

Many people are convinced that George W. Bush knew what
was going to happen on 9/11 and purposely allowed it to
happen.

Dr. Robert M. Bowman is President of the Institute for
Space and Security Studies, Executive Vice President of
Millennium III Corporation, and Presiding Archbishop of
the United Catholic Church. Culminating a 22-year Air
Force career in 1978, Col. Bowman was Director of
Advanced Space Programs Development for the Air Force
Space Division.

3:15-3:30: Break

3:30-6:00: "Town Hall" with Joe Cote: Speakers On Stage
and Audience Q&A. This is the major opportunity of the
Inquiry for members of the public to interact
extensively with our many presenters.

6:00-7:30: Dinner Break

7:30-10:00: Conclusion to Phase 2 of the Inquiry.
MC-John Corcelli

Barrie Zwicker and testimonials

Dr. John Gray "The Need for Truth to Heal the 9/11
Families and America"

Dr. John Gray is a Certified Family Therapist and the
author of 15 books, including Men Are from Mars, Women
Are from Venus (HarperCollins 1992), and is the
best-selling relationship author of all time. He offers
a unique perspective on what healing is needed and how
it might happen to bring closure and resolution to the
loss and trauma of the 9/11 events – for the families
directly affected and for all the rest of us.

Ellen Mariani "9/11 Personal Story"

Mike Ruppert "9/11 Timeline"

Mike Ruppert, 52, is the Publisher/Editor of From the
Wilderness or FTW. An Honors graduate of UCLA in
Political Science (1973), Mike is a former LAPD
narcotics investigator who discovered CIA trafficking
in drugs in 1977. On November 28, 2001 he gave his
first post 9-11 lecture at Portland State University,
which was attended by more than 1,000 and resulted in a
standing ovation. FTW's video, The Truth and Lies About
9-11, has sold more than 10,000 copies. Since 9-11-01
he has been the point man in breaking major stories
involving government foreknowledge, corruption and
violations of the Constitution. He has also pioneered
the effort to educate the world about the consequences
of Peak Oil -- the fact that the world is running out
of hydrocarbon energy, and what this might mean for
human civilization.

Nick Levis "Phase 3 — New York, September 2004"

David Kubiak, Campaign coordinator of 911truth.org and
the developing world-wide 9/11 Truth Movement
Panel Discussion and Audience Q&A

Conclusion to Phase 2 of the International Citizens’
Inquiry Into 9/11.

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The International Citizens’ Inquiry Into 9/11 – Phase 2.
May 25-30, 2004, Toronto, Canada.

http://www.911inquiry.org" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
[email protected]
toll free in North America 1-866-234-7438
416-963-5562 (Tel.); 416-963-8414 (Fax)
7B Pleasant Boulevard, Box 958,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4T 1K2.

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FBI Whistleblower Regrets Nothing
July 24, 2014, 10:30:00AM. By Brenda Craig
Minneapolis, MN: Fifteen years ago, Jane Turner was marched out the front door of the FBI office in Minneapolis, Minnesota. “There,” the FBI said to her, “You’ve had a good career Jane, now it’s over.”

FBI Whistleblower Regrets NothingIndeed, she had had an excellent career. Turner was among the first tide of women admitted to the ranks of the FBI. She’d worked on serial killer cases, she had expertise in crimes against children and interviewing sex offenders. She had even once been loaned to law enforcement in Canada to work as a profiler in a notorious child killer case.

But Jane Turner was a whistleblower. Not once, but twice she had reported on colleagues who had seriously failed in their duty. In one case, young lives were at risk. In both cases, the reputation and integrity of the FBI and its agents were on the line.

“It destroyed me to lose the job that meant so much to me,” says Turner.
“All along the way, I thought what all whistleblowers think. I thought the truth will rescue me. I thought I would get a call from somebody in charge, and they would say ‘oh good and faithful servant,’ thank you for making the bureau a better place.

“But it doesn’t happen,” says Turner.

In the 1990s, Turner was assigned to Minot, North Dakota, where the FBI has responsibility for, among other things, policing nearby Indian reservations.

Aware of Agent Turner’s background, a local emergency doctor asked her to take another look at the case of a boy from Turtle Mountain who arrived at the hospital with severe anal tearing before Agent Turner came to Minot.

The injuries were so horrific that the doctor said the event had “traumatized” her staff.

“The FBI in Minot had investigated and put the boy’s injuries down to a car accident,” says Turner.

“The usual role of an FBI agent is not interviewing children or pursuing sexual offenders,” says Turner. “The FBI does terrorism, or bank robberies, but not sexual assaults. Rather than deal with these cases, the agent assigned had determined the injuries were the result of a car accident so they didn’t have to work the case,” says Turner.

“But it was very clear to me the boy had been sexually assaulted,” she says. “I re-opened the case and got it back on track. The perpetrator turned out to be the father. Then I brought this to the attention of our management in Minneapolis. I also told them this was not the only case where children had been sexually assaulted and the cases dismissed as accidents. It was not something they wanted to hear.

“I took my work very seriously. I loved being an agent,” she recalls. “I spoke nationally to other agents about how to handle crimes against children and I thought if I don’t speak up, who will?” says Turner.

In response, the FBI brass moved Turner out of Minot and questioned her mental health.

“It was pretty ugly,” she says. “They questioned my fitness for duty, sent me to Chicago for psychological testing and tried to fire me. But I fought. It was day after day of mortal combat and then came the Tiffany globe incident.”

Post 9-11, agent Turner was working one of the biggest crime scenes in US history. She was assigned to the World Trade Center investigation. One day, Turner noticed a billiard ball-sized crystal globe on her supervisor’s desk.

It was a very expensive Tiffany globe the agent had gathered as a “souvenir” from Ground Zero. Appalled that an agent had removed evidence from the scene of a mass murder, Agent Turner informed her superiors. The revelation was a national embarrassment for the FBI.

No one was impressed and no one came to rescue Jane Turner for telling the truth about FBI souvenir hunters at the World Trade Center.

“People are not very appreciative of people that snitch,” says Turner. “It is probably one of the toughest things you are ever going to do because of this animosity that people feel toward people they consider ‘rats, finks’ and all kind of other nasty names.

“It takes a particular type of person to be a whistleblower,” she adds. “You have no real support, not monetarily or psychologically. But without the canaries in the coal mine, the truth may not get told.”

Jane Turner is closely connected to the National Whistleblowers Association (NWA) and is grateful to its executive director Stephen Kohn. The NWA has become a critically important organization pursuing truth and providing research and support to the cause.

With the help of the NWA, Turner managed to get the FBI to pay her legal fees.

She does some consulting now but testifying in court is out of the question because on cross examination she would be confronted with questions about why she was fired from the FBI.

“The FBI doesn’t forget and it doesn’t forgive,” says Turner. “They’ve destroyed any hope I might have had about working in law enforcement again. The only thing that sustained me was knowing I stayed true to my own moral compass.”

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FBI Agent Who Works on Child Porn Task Force Charged with Choking 13-Year-Old Boy
Jul. 28 2014 at 6:00 AM

An FBI agent who works with the Boone County Sheriff's Department Cyber Crimes Task Force against child porn is charged with choking a thirteen-year-old boy unconscious.

Special agent Scott Armstrong, 37, pleaded not guilty to misdemeanor third-degree assault charges during an arraignment in June and will appear in court on July 29.

According to the Callaway County police department, the incident occurred at Armstrong's residence at around midnight on March 1. In a probable cause statement, the thirteen-year-old claims Armstrong strangled him with a chokehold until "temporarily losing consciousness."

The boy's parents later took photos of their son's neck, which had signs of being choked, including redness and fabric patterns.

In the probable-cause statement, Armstrong admitted to "placing his arm around" the boy's neck until the teen passed out.

The report does not explain why the boy was at Armstrong's residence. It does say that Armstrong's wife was there at the time, as well.

Callaway County Prosecuting Attorney Chris Wilson explains that the charges are only a misdemeanor because Armstrong apparently did not intend to choke a child.

"Abuse of a child includes knowingly causing physical injury to a child, and Mr. Anderson is charged with recklessly causing physical injury," Wilson tells the Fulton Sun.

The incident has created a bit of a stir in the Boone County Sheriff's Department. Armstrong is officially an FBI employee in the Jefferson City division, but he works part-time on the Boone County task force combating child porn. And after the incident occurred, the FBI didn't inform Armstrong's superiors in Boone County.

"The FBI never did contact me," Boone County Sheriff Dwayne Carey tells the Columbia Tribune. "I wasn't happy about that."