The Last Full Measure of Misery: When Will Prohibition Finally End?

“Our safety and happiness lie in obedience to law by every man, woman and child,” pontificated Attorney General Harry Micajah Daugherty in his keynote address to the 1921 annual conference of the American Bar Association in Cincinnati. His homily on the supposed virtue of submission to the state was offered in the service of the crusade to “suppress the age-long evil of the liquor traffic,” a holy errand to which the assembled legal luminaries were firmly committed, at least while they were on the clock.

“After hours,” Edward Behr wryly observed in his book Prohibition: Thirteen Years that Changed America, “many of those attending the meeting were haunting the speakeasies they denounced.” 

Everyone in Daugherty’s audience was aware that the Attorney General was profiting handsomely from the kickbacks and other illicit emoluments that inevitably accompany prohibition. Most of them were likewise aware that Daugherty had selected Cincinnati as the site of the conference because its police and municipal court system were entirely controlled by bootlegger George Remus – who was among the Attorney General’s most generous benefactors.  

In order for the “Noble Experiment” to proceed, certain “needful lies” had to be recited by people in positions of “authority” – the most significant of which was that the state’s enforcement caste was essentially incorruptible, and thus suited to the task of reforming lesser beings through the application of violence. 

 

A Prohibitionist Pharisee and hypocrite: Daugherty.

Allowing that some decent people opposed the 18^th Amendment and the quasi-totalitarian enforcement scheme it spawned, Daugherty insisted that once “public sentiment has crystallized into law there can be no question as to the duty of good citizens. They can still debate as to the wisdom of the law, but there is only one course of conduct and that is obedience to the law while it exists.”

In the service of a “law” that was routinely violated by those who enforced it, hundreds of thousands of lives would be changed dramatically for the worse – many of them ruined beyond repair. Thousands of people would die through violence either inflicted by agents of the state, or abetted by state policies that gave criminals a monopoly on what had previously been a competitive market. 

An estimated 10,000 Americans – more than three times the death toll on 9/11 -- were killed in chemical warfare waged by the Prohibition Bureau in what can only be called a campaign of state terrorism. Historian Deborah Blum recounts that the federal government, outraged that Americans persisted in consuming something their betters had banned, “ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, produces regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking.” (Emphasis added.)

This facet of the “Noble Experiment” is sometimes called “The Chemist’s War,” and it prefigured the short-lived federal program of the 1970s in which the DEA –working in the company of brow-beaten locals -- sprayed the toxic herbicide Paraquat on Mexican marijuana fields. Suicidal impulses are among the documented effects of Paraquat poisoning. The sociopathic figures responsible for that plan reasoned that “if some citizens ended up poisoned, well, they’d brought it on themselves,” Blum recalled.  

The harm done by government initiatives –which invariably involve aggressive violence -- always outweighs any benefits that some might derive from them. Prohibition, however, may be uniquely devoid of any moral benefit.

 

Draining the sea with a thimble.

Summarizing the accomplishments wrought through the “Noble Experiment” after it came to an end in 1933, the immortal H.L. Mencken observed that although it had consumed less than thirteen years (about the same life-span enjoyed by Hitler’s Reich, interestingly), “It seemed almost a geologic epoch while it was going on, and the human suffering it entailed must have been a fair match for that of the Black Death or the Thirty Years War.” 

The death toll of Prohibition was a few zeroes short of justifying such comparisons, but given the concentrated viciousness exhibited by a government that would poison its subject population in the name of moral uplift, Mencken’s hyperbole is excusable. With characteristic insight he pointed out that there was one entirely unintended healthy consequence of the campaign: It disabused the public of the notion that police are noble protectors of property and virtue. 

Owing to the ubiquitous corruption and abusiveness of law enforcement officers at every level of government, the public was no longer astonished “when police were taken in evil-doing,” wrote Mencken before the 18^th Amendment was repealed. Prohibition enforcement officers, a “corps of undistinguished scoundrels with badges,” propagated misery without redemptive purpose, leaving in their wake a population disenthralled from the notion of unqualified submission to those who embodied “authority.”

This would change, regrettably, with the compound crises of the Depression and World War II, and the prohibitionist impulse would re-emerge as the War on Drugs. 

To carry out the jihad against alcohol consumption, the federal government had to amend the Constitution. The War on Drugs has been carried out without the benefit of a similar amendment, a choice that displays a commendable lack of hypocrisy. If this were a republic by any reasonable definition, the government wouldn’t assert a claim of ownership over the people from whose consent it supposedly obtains its legitimacy. The belief that we are the property of the government is the only rational basis for pretending that the government can dictate what we consume. 

If the Regime has the authority to regulate the content of the individual’s bloodstream, the individual has no right to bodily integrity. Pennsylvania resident Kimberlee Rae Carbone is one of many subjects of the soyuz who can attest to the truth of that principle.

On November 3, 2013, a police officer attached to the Lawrence County Drug Task Force saw a man named Jason Monette, a friend of Miss Carbone, briefly enter an apartment building in New Castle and then sit in the passenger seat of Carbone’s automobile. This behavior can only be deemed “suspicious” in a literal police state, which – to be brutally candid – is the best description of what we have allowed our country to become. 

The officer conducted a pretext traffic stop, pretending that Carbone had failed to activate her turn signal within 100 feet of an intersection. As he did so, the officer contacted District Attorney Joshua Lamancusa, who arrived on the scene and began interrogating Carbone and her passenger about drug possession. Carbone provided the information the State demands of drivers and then invoked her right to refrain from answering further questions. 

Carbone’s insistence on asserting her rights prompted the officer to claim – falsely; he’s a police officer, which means that lying for him is an autonomous reflex – that he smelled marijuana. She was arrested for suspicion of DUI, although no field sobriety test was performed.

Over the next five hours, Carbone endured what can only be described as a protracted episode of sexual molestation supervised by Lamancusa. She was subjected to a pat-down search at the scene of the unlawful traffic stop, then repeatedly subjected to invasive body cavity searches at the Lawrence County Correctional Center. When no evidence of contraband was found, Lamancusa instructed the officers to take the victim to nearby Jameson Hospital, on the pretense of treating her for “a possible overdose, rectal packing and/or oral intake of a controlled substance.”

Carbone, the patient-cum-hostage, withheld consent for “treatment.” She was shackled to a bed while a male physician, Dr. Bernard Geiser, repeatedly violated her genital and emunctory orifices. As she was being molested, Carbone’s agony was amplified by the derogatory comments of officers in the room, and the smug, sadistic taunts of Lamancusa, who asked her if “she knew what prison felt like” and said that the assault would end if she agreed to become an informant. 

Lamancusa’s vita, significantly, lists him as the head of the Lawrence County Sexual Assault Task Force. On the evidence offered by his treatment of Carbone, the purpose of that unit is to commit sexual assault, rather than investigate and punish that crime. It’s also worth noting that he is a former JAG officer in the U.S. Navy. If he had inflicted the same treatment on a POW that he had administered to Carbone, Lamancusa would be occupying a cell at Ft. Leavenworth. 

Carbone filed suit last November against the Lawrence County, the City of New Castle, a half-dozen police officers, two doctors, and DA Lamancusa. US District Judge Terrance McVerry has dismissed several claims in the lawsuit – including one of false imprisonment – because what was done to the victim is not considered extraordinary, let alone shocking to the conscience of the court. Given that roadside abduction and sexual torture are common tactics in the Drug War, Judge McVerry is correct, in a strictly positivist sense. 

Most of the claims against Lamancusa were dismissed because of a perverse Pennsylvania state doctrine called “high public official” immunity, under which he cannot be held civilly accountable for “all conduct … within the course of the official’s duties.” This apparently includes sexual torture of an innocent woman. 

Judge McVerry did find merit in Carbone’s argument that Lamancusa and his rape gang engaged in a conspiracy to violate her rights under the 4^th and 14^th Amendments. In doing so, however, he has narrowed the ground so radically that the best outcome the victim can expect would be a subsidized settlement that would leave the malefactors in place to commit similar outrages against other innocent people. 

Police inflict a forced catheterization on a DUI suspect.

Lamancusa is already a repeat offender. About two weeks after he presided over the molestation of a weeping woman – who required both physical and psychological treatment following her ordeal – the DA was sued by John LaTour, owner of a tobacco shop in Ellwood City. In August 2012, Lamancusa staged a televised “drug bust” at Ellwood’s business, My House Tobacco, on the basis of a single unsubstantiated claim that a local resident had purchased “synthetic drugs” at the shop. 

With cameras in tow and flanked by police, Lamancusa barged into LaTour’s business and confiscated eighty percent of the inventory. LaTour’s crime was selling a product called Burney Incense, which was legal at the time but has since been banned by the sanctified specimens who inhabit the state legislature. LaTour had lab reports documenting that the incense was free of any proscribed substances. He also offered to provide samples of the product to be tested by the task force. 

Lamancusa wouldn’t settle for anything less than the redemptive violence of a televised, state-licensed armed robbery. When Lamancusa, a zealot in the prohibitionist cause, was elected in 2010, he had promised – the term “threatened” would be more apt – to expand drug enforcement and fund it through expanded property seizures, so he was indifferent to the question of whether LaTour had actually committed an offense.  

No time would be spent examining the evidence, and no effort would be made to follow due process: There was property to steal, a business to wreck, and lives to ruin for the greater glory of the State. Such was the attitude of Daugherty and his underlings a century ago, and so it is with his contemporary successors. 

At some point, drug prohibition will end. Who will be the last person killed, maimed, molested, or ruined in the name of that iniquitous enterprise?


Is your "Constitutional Sheriff" a drug warrior? This week's Freedom Zealot Podcast:

 

Dum spiro, pugno!

Sheriff Glenn Palmer and the "Scouring of the Shire"

The "little folk" rise up against Saruman's Ruffians.

The Shire had changed dramatically for the worse when Frodo, Sam, and their companions returned from Mordor. 

The hobbit-folk had previously enjoyed a society largely free of the affliction called “government.” Frodo and his friends were mortified to encounter a regimented dystopia in which the shire-riffs –who had been peripheral under the old order – were enforcing an ever-growing list of rules handed down by an unseen “Chief.” The shire-riffs themselves weren’t intimidating, but behind them lurked a band of “Ruffians” who looked upon the inhabitants of the Shire with disdain and were prepared to inflict mortal harm on anybody who resisted the Chief’s decrees.

Farms and homes, once self-sufficient, had been ravaged by officials called “Gatherers” and “Sharers,” although the bounty that was gathered in the Chief’s name was never shared with the populace. The verdant countryside, which once thrived under the husbandry of private landowners, had been despoiled by those acting on the “authority” of the new government. Any residents of the Shire who resisted that “authority” were hauled away to “lockholes.”

Furious over what had been done to their home and steeled by their experience in battle, Frodo and his companions sounded the tocsin and organized the Hobbit-folk to “scour the Shire.” This meant driving the Ruffians and their adherents from the land, including any shire-riffs who remained loyal to the usurpers. Frodo gave strict instructions to avoid bloodshed where possible. The Chief – as it happens, Saruman in disguise – would not relinquish power without extracting a price in blood. 

The “scouring,” as portrayed by Tolkien in “Return of the King,” is distant kindred to Homer’s account of Odysseus dealing with the interlopers who had plundered his home and sought to seize control of Ithaca during his lengthy absence. “I will not stay my hand till I have paid all of you in full,” Odysseus told the men who had sought to steal everything he cherished, including Penelope. “You must fight, or flee for your lives.” 

In dealing with the shire-riffs – or, to use the more familiar term, sheriffs – who had become oppressors, Frodo and his friends were more merciful than Odysseus and Telemachus had been. As Sauron had expected, many of those who had been public servants found it intoxicating to exercise power over the “little folk.” Others, disgusted by what they had become, threw away their badges of authority and were welcomed into the righteous rebellion against the Chief and his enforcers. 

“What can I do? You know I went for a shire-riff seven years ago, before any of this began,” lamented Robin, one of the officers, as the rebellion coalesced. “It gave me the chance to be walking around the country, and seeing folk, and hearing the news, and knowing where the good beer was --but now it’s different.” He and the others had once been servants of the Shire; now they were law enforcers in the service of the clique that had seized control of it. 

Whatever else may be said about Sheriff Glenn Palmer of Oregon’s Grant County, he appears to be the kind of man who would find himself on the right side of the “scouring.” That section of eastern Oregon strongly resembles Tolkien’s Shire, both in terms of its scenic quality and the Sauron-grade misery inflicted on it by the Federal Government. 

Glenn Palmer, an Air Force veteran, has made a career in law enforcement, which is both a moral liability and a cause for concern. In defiance of reasonable expectations, however, he describes his role as that of a servant, rather than an overseer.

“I am not a government employee,” Palmer insists. “I am a public servant – I serve the people who elected me.”

It’s quite likely that Palmer, like Robin and the other Shire-riffs from Tolkien’s parable, chose a law enforcement career out of relatively benign motives, only to find the nature of that occupation being redefined by those who presume to rule us. 

Re-elected four times by the residents of the vast but thinly populated county, Palmer is now being targeted for removal by the Oregon Department of Justice – which is acting as a cats’-paw for the Regime in Washington. This is not because Palmer has made himself notable by abusing the local citizenry; given the ubiquitous competition he would face, Palmer would have a hard time distinguishing himself had that been his intention. He has become the focus of the Regime’s malign intention because he properly perceives the Feds as a threat to the rights and property of his fellow Grant County residents. 

“We started seeing the excessive use of force, and people getting guns pointed at them by federal officers for wood permit violations [and] road closure violations,” Palmer recalled during a speech a few years ago. “It’s excessive use of force, it’s uncalled-for, it’s unacceptable.”

“I chose … to take a stand between bad government … and the people I am sworn to protect and defend,” Palmer declares. This is true “whether they’re from my county, or whether you come to visit or recreate, or if you have a business, or are just traveling through. I have a duty and obligation to keep you from bad government.” 

Palmer is being denounced as a “rogue” sheriff not because he has violated individual rights, but because he is not a federal supremacist – something that became quite apparent during the recent standoff in nearby Harney County. While he carefully avoided direct intervention in the conflict, Palmer expressed sympathy for the grievances that inspired the protest and met with representatives when they visited Grant County. He also suggested that the Feds should commute the grotesquely disproportionate prison term inflicted on Dwight and Steven Hammond, the Burns-area ranchers whose long-standing conflict with esurient federal bureaucracies led to the protest and ensuing standoff. 

Such a conciliatory posture toward protesters who occupied federal “property” is not without precedent. 

In November 1972, hundreds of activists with the American Indian Movement, many of them heavily armed, seized control of the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and held it for a week. The occupiers assaulted law enforcement officers, blew open a safe, seized documents, ignored judicial orders to vacate the premises, issued a list of demands to the federal government, and did an estimated $2 million worth of damage to the facility – and were allowed to leave without being arrested. For reasons rooted in identity politics, that episode is regarded with reverence by many of the same left-leaning observers who treated the Malheur Refuge protesters as the American analogue to ISIS. 

Ammon Bundy and his fellow protesters were headed to a town hall meeting with Sheriff Palmer in John Day when they were ambushed by the FBI’s proprietary death squad, the so-called Hostage Rescue Team, on Highway 395. That ambush led to the fatal shooting of LaVoy Finicum, which was precipitated by the FBI’s attempt to murder him as he emerged from the truck with his hands raised in surrender. 

Rather than presenting Sheriff Palmer with a valid arrest warrant for the protesters, the FBI – seeing him as politically unreliable -- treated him as a “security leak.” Last week, however, Palmer’s office arrested Malheur Refuge protester Scott Willingham on a federal warrant. However one assesses the wisdom of that decision, it demonstrates that Palmer would have enforced what he considered a valid writ had the FBI sought his help in arresting the protesters. Instead, the Bureau designed a plan that was perfectly calibrated to end in bloodshed. Not only did they treat Palmer as a “security leak,” the FBI operators made a point of concealing both their intentions – and the evidence of their misconduct – from the Oregon State Police. 

This is the behavior of an occupation force – which is how the Feds are regarded by millions of Americans residing in the western United States. 

As is the case in too many counties in the region, the Feds “own” most of the land in Grant County. Using “endangered species” designations and similar tactics, the Feds have moved aggressively to eradicate logging, ranching, and other industry in the county, with the predictable economic consequences for residents who are members of the productive sector.

Grant County Apocalypse: The Canyon Creek Complex Fire.

The federal approach to forest management could be summarized in the phrase, “Lock ‘em up, and burn ‘em down.” Years of such insightful federal stewardship culminated in last summer’s epochal Canyon Creek Complex Fire, which destroyed scores of homes and devoured more than 65,000 acres. Seeking to deflect citizen demands for an independent investigation, the US Forest Service employed a familiar Soviet rationale by blaming the weather, ratherthan its own corruption and ineptitude, for its failure to suppress a fire that feasted on forests flush with fuel following years of federal neglect. 

Frustrated by the timidity of a county commission unwilling to confront the Feds, Sheriff Palmer created a citizens panel to devise a more suitable forest management plan. In doing so he acted within the scope of his delegated authority. Following the fire Palmer also deputized scores of other local citizens to participate in safety patrols and search and rescue operations. This action is depicted by Palmer’s critics as an effort by the sheriff to build his own private militia, which is probably not the case (although there are problems with at least some of his appointees). 

Last August, just before he found himself dealing with the federally abetted inferno that was laying waste to his county, Palmer announced that he was interposing against SB 941, a civilian disarmament measure enacted by Oregon Democrats. Since it was passed on a strict party line vote (save the three Democrats who voted against it), calling that measure a product of the State Legislature is an example of intellectual consumer fraud: It was a purely partisan enactment by urban collectivists who look upon rural Oregonians with a revulsion rivaling that Lenin reserved for the Kulaks and Cossacks. 

Sheriff Palmer had testified against the bill before the Legislature, candidly warning them that he would not enforce it were it to be passed. He was as good as his word. 

SB 941, which would restrict of prohibit the private sale or transfer of firearms without a background check, “is in violation of the Oregon and US Constitutions,” Palmer explained in an August 12 letter to residents of Grant County. The firearms in question “are private property and [if] those firearms, or any firearm for that matter, are used in the commission of a crime [they] will then be subject to search and seizure pursuant to a search warrant….” However, continued the sheriff, “we shall take no part in investigating, responding to, expending resources or taxpayer funds in … disarming law abiding citizens,” nor will his department take part in “sting operations [or] give information to other agencies regarding the sale or transfer of firearms as related to SB 941.”

Despite his commendable willingness to interpose against civilian disarmament initiatives, Sheriff Palmer remains enlisted in the murderous fraud called the War on Drugs. He doesn’t appear zealous in the cause of prohibition, however: His department was not listed among those that had carried out “asset forfeiture” seizures during 2014, the most recent year for which the relevant statistics are available. The Feds have used the prospect of prohibition-derived plunder to entice most sheriffs into their seraglio. On this front, Palmer’s involvement with the Feds appears to be limited to flirting – which no doubt reinforces their determination to see him replaced by a more pliant sheriff. 

If, as anticipated, the Oregon State Department of Justice finds Palmer unsuitable for his office, it can have him de-certified as a law enforcement officer, but he can only be removed by recall or electoral defeat. Palmer could continue in his office as a “civilian” sheriff if his peace officer certification would be revoked – but under Oregon state law he couldn’t run for re-election this November.

During the occupation of the Malheur Refuge, Sheriff Pat Garrett of neighboring Washington County dispatched his deputies to a bar in nearby Burns to help the FBI collect dossiers on demonstrators who had come in support of the protest. 

To use Tolkien’s terminology, Garrett is typical of the complaisant shire-riffs who did the bidding of the “Ruffians” employed by the tyrannical Chief in Bag End. Palmer, irrespective of his faults, had the sand to remain aloof.

“That sheriff,” Garrett later complained to a reporter, with reference to Palmer, “did not see eye to eye with the rest of law enforcement.”

Garrett is the kind of functionary who would see that statement as an indictment, rather than an encomium.  Similar things could have been said of the shire-riffs who put aside their insignia of office and joined Frodo and Sam when the time came for the scouring of the Shire.

                                        This week's Freedom Zealot Podcast:

Dum spiro, pugno!

Merrick Garland, Richard W. Roberts, and the Kenneth Trentadue Murder: The Deep State Takes Care of Its Own

Not a suicide victim: Kenneth Trentadue's brutalized body in his open-casket funeral.

“You have to trust the government,” Justice Department attorney Richard Roberts unctuously told Jesse Trentadue. Seeking to understand why his younger brother Kenneth had died while in federal custody, Jesse, a trial attorney in Salt Lake City, had asked to see the findings of a federal grand jury investigation of the case. 

In an incandescent response to Roberts’s patronizing dismissal, Trentadue reminded the Justice Department functionary that the proper relationship between citizens and the government is not one of “trust,” but rather of “accountability from that government to the citizens.”

“The Department of Justice has yet to account to the family for the death of my brother,” Trentadue pointed out. “There is no love between us, and there certainly is no trust.”

By the time Jesse had sent that October 16, 1997 letter to Roberts – who was Chief of the Justice Department’s Criminal Section – more than two years had passed since his brother Kenneth had died in a federal prison cell in Oklahoma City. In the August 22, 1995 phone call notifying Kenneth’s mother Wilma about her son’s death, the warden casually mentioned that the body was scheduled for cremation within hours.

Wilma demanded to know if Kenneth’s wife had authorized the disposition of his body. The warden replied that she hadn’t been aware that Kenneth was married. After making it clear that her son’s remains were not to be cremated, Wilma joined Jesse in Oklahoma City, where they took custody of Kenneth’s body.

After carefully scraping away several layers of ineptly applied makeup, Wilma and Jesse understood why authorities had been determined to dispose of Kenneth’s body. The official story was that he had committed suicide by hanging himself in what was described as a suicide-proof cell. This wouldn’t explain why his face and torso were mottled with bruises testifying of a severe beating inflicted by several people, or why his throat appeared to have been cut and his scalp was split open.

"Trust the government": Judge/prosecutor/rapist Roberts.

By the time Kenneth’s family had collected his body, all of the evidence in the crime scene had been destroyed. In violation of Oklahoma state law, the floors and walls of the cell had been sanitized, erasing fingerprints and wiping away blood and DNA evidence. The victim’s clothing and bedding had been confiscated by FBI Special Agent Jeff Jenkins, who kept this evidence hidden in the trunk of his car until putrefaction set in, rendering it useless to the FBI Crime Lab. 

One witness in a nearby cell testified that he heard the sounds of a struggle shortly before Kenneth’s lifeless body was “discovered” by a guard.  Several other witnesses reported seeing bloody riot gear, uniforms, and batons belonging to the facility’s SORT (Special Operations Response Team) unit.

The Bureau of Prisons designated “suicide by asphyxia” as the cause of Kenneth’s death, insisting that his other injuries were “self-inflicted.”

Dr. Fred Jordan, Oklahoma’s Chief State Medical Examiner, was pressured to validate the official story that Kenneth was a suicide victim, despite the fact that his body was “covered in blood … soaked in blood, covered with bruises,” as Jordan would later recall. He was forbidden by federal officials to have access to the death scene until five months after the death. An application of Luminol, a blood reagent, left the cell “lit up like a candle because of the blood still present on the walls after four or five months.”

Rather than acceding to federal demands, Jordan listed the cause of Kenneth’s death as “unknown.” Kevin Rowland, chief investigator for the ME’s office, filed a complaint with the FBI describing the incident as “murder.” He also consulted with Col. William T. Gormley of the United States Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, who concurred with Dr. Jordan’s findings.  

Rowland, intriguingly, was recently subjected to the pointless torment over a “sexual battery” charge arising from an incident in which he allegedly twisted a male co-worker’s nipple. That alleged incident, furthermore, occurred decades ago. Bear in mind the nature of that charge, and the institutional memory that led to it being filed against this whistleblower; this will become relevant anon. 

All of the pertinent facts about Kenneth’s murder were exhumed by Trentadue and his colleagues long after the Justice Department had concluded what Criminal Section Chief Richard Roberts claimed was a “flawless” and “thorough” investigation – one that began on August 21, 1995, and was closed the following day. The findings of that one-day “investigation” were submitted to a federal grand jury – not one on Oklahoma City – which ratified the Justice Department’s official story.

When Trentadue requested access to the federal grand jury’s findings, Roberts parried that petition with a patronizing admonition to “trust the government.” The following year, Roberts was selected by Bill Clinton to serve on the District Court for the District of Columbia, an appointment that could be seen as a reward for his role in consummating a vital cover-up.

Kenneth Trentadue, Jesse learned from an anonymous caller shortly after his brother’s death, was “murdered by the FBI” in a lethal case of mistaken identity. In appearance, body type, distinguishing features (including, however implausibly, tattoos), age, and criminal background, Kenneth was a near-twin of Richard Lee Guthrie – who was in the custody of the federal prison system when Kenneth was arrested for an alleged parole violation shortly after the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. 

For several years, Guthrie was involved in an FBI-protected gang called the Aryan Republican Army (ARA), which staged bank robberies to fund white supremacist activities across the country. The ARA was an asset of the FBI’s PATCON (Patriot Conspiracy) program, which seeded “radical right” groups with informants and provocateurs.

The Oklahoma City bombing was the result of a PATCON operation – most likely a security theater production that went badly off-script. Guthrie is one of several very good candidates for the enigmatic “John Doe #2” whom many witnesses saw in the company of Timothy McVeigh on the morning of the bombing – and whose identity the government has sought to conceal ever since. Just a few months after Kenneth’s traumatized body was “found” dangling in a cell at the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma, Guthrie died in a similarly unconvincing “suicide.” Shortly before he was killed, Guthrie had somewhat imprudently announced his intention to write a memoir disclosing critical secrets regarding the Oklahoma City bombing.

Implacably pursuing justice: Jesse

The source who told Jesse that Kenneth had been killed by the FBI described the murder as “an interrogation gone wrong.” Before his parole, Kenneth had been a bank robber, albeit one not affiliated with the alpha gang of the criminal underworld, the FBI. He couldn’t answer any PATCON-related questions, and so he was tortured to death. His captors may have really believed that he was Guthrie. They may have realized that he wasn’t, but decided that it would be compromising to let him live. In either case, the objective was to tie up a loose end quickly. Fortunately, enough of a thread was left dangling for Jesse to find it.  He has been tugging on it for more than twenty years.

Learning the identity of “John Doe #2” is necessary to solve the mystery of his brother’s murder, Jesse believes, and the identity of that PATCON asset remains a protected state secret.

In response to a July 2009 Freedom of Information Act request by Jesse, the FBI turned over six DVDs that supposedly contained all of the video recordings collected after the bombing. Missing from that collection – and pointedly ignored in the FBI’s response to Jesse’s request – is a video captured by the exterior surveillance camera located on the Regency Tower 

Apartments near the ill-fated Murrah Building.

In May 2011, a federal judge ordered the FBI to conduct additional searches and turn over all video records collected, from whatever source, of the Oklahoma City bombing.  The bureau has refused to comply with that order, claiming that if the video exists it is irretrievably lost in a long-forgotten evidence vault. 

The existence of that video is proven by the testimony of FBI Special Agent Jon Hersley during McVeigh’s April 27, 1995 preliminary hearing. Hersley, who was among those agents tasked “to further identify and locate other individuals who may have been involved in the bombing,” testified that within “two or three days” of the bombing he had been shown “still photos” culled from a the video captured by the Regency Tower surveillance system. The film itself, he explained, was in the control of other agents within the bureau.

During cross-examination, defense counsel John Coyle, challenging the foundation for video evidence implicating his client, asked Agent Hersley, “who are those agents that are tasked with the responsibility of reviewing photographs and film footage?”

That entirely reasonable question prompted an objection by the lead prosecutor, a Justice Department attorney named Merrick Garland. The objection being overruled, Hersley identified the agent in question as Walt Lamar. As Coyle continued to pursue this line of inquiry, Garland objected a second time, protesting that “we are going in the area of discovery now.”

The second objection was sustained, the matter was dropped, and potential “discovery” of evidence that could have revealed the identity of John Doe #2 was foreclosed by the man who, two decades later, would be chosen to fill a critical vacancy on the Supreme Court.

Assuming that the Senate holds confirmation hearings on the Garland nomination, some senators reportedly plan to ask why he recused himself in a judicial misconduct case involving a colleague – none other than Richard Roberts, who resigned a few days later for “health” reasons. Roberts was under investigation by the Utah Attorney General’s Office and both the House and Senate oversight committees regarding allegations that he had raped a 16-year-old witness during a civil rights case in Utah in 1980.

At the time, the 27-year-old Roberts was an attorney with the Justice Department’s civil rights division. He was dispatched to Salt Lake City to head the federal civil rights prosecution of Joseph Paul Franklin, a white supremacist serial killer who murdered two African-American joggers, Ted Fields and David Martin from an ambush in August 1980.

Terry Mitchell (whose last name at the time was Elrod) had accompanied the two men and a girlfriend during the jog. She was hit by shrapnel but survived. Two months earlier she had been raped by a man named Philip George Moore, which was merely the latest of several such assaults she had endured since childhood. As if the cumulative trauma of those events hadn’t been sufficient, Terry and her family were subjected to hostility and suspicion owing to the fact that the father was involved in a local motorcycle club called the Barons, a fact seized on by some to suggest that Terry had lured the victims into an ambush.

Terry Mitchell in 2016.

A few weeks after the shooting, Terry fled to Arizona to live with grandparents. She returned the following October to testify in the trial.

During the following January and February, the 27-year-old Roberts sexually exploited the 16-year-old, beginning with an episode in which he lured her into his office on the pretext of reviewing her testimony. Once he had separated the teenager from her mother, Roberts quickly disposed of the fiction that they were going to discuss the case and invited her to dinner.

While Terry was puzzled and concerned, and wanted to go home to fix dinner for her younger sisters, “she complied because … Roberts was an authority figure and she had learned to comply with those in positions of authority,” recounts a lawsuit she recently filed against the former judge. With the practiced, methodical patience of a veteran sexual predator, Roberts lured the intimidated girl into his hotel room, where he compelled her to service him sexually, “then raped her twice.”

While maintaining the pretense that he and his victim were engaged in a consensual “affair,” Roberts made it clear that Terry couldn’t disclose what was going on. A mistrial would have resulted, and Franklin – who had yet to be tried for the murders – may have been let loose. If this were to happen, Roberts told his victim, it would be her fault.

After securing Franklin’s conviction, Roberts left, and Terry rarely heard from him again. In 2013, after the serial killer wasexecuted for a murder committed in Missouri, Roberts contacted Terry anew. Terry recorded the phone call and submitted it to investigators for the Utah Attorney General’s office, which verified the substance of her story.

Roberts has admitted to preying upon the then-sixteen-year-old witness, but continues to characterize the matter as a “consensual” affair and a regrettable “lapse in judgment.” Under current state law, the conduct to which Roberts confesses would be statutory rape or perhaps even child molestation. At the time, however, the age of consent was sixteen. Roberts never faced the prospect of serious criminal charges arising from his calculated exploitation of a traumatized and vulnerable girl.

Today (March 22) Roberts has learned that the misconduct case against him has been dropped, meaning that he will be able to enjoy his tax-subsidized pension without being haunted by the specter of personal accountability. This is to be expected: Two decades ago, Roberts performed a valuable service to the Deep State by suppressing evidence of a murder committed on its behalf. Roberts’ behavior in raping a terrified child demonstrated that he possessed the proper disposition to carry out such a task, and those whose secrets he kept have duly rewarded him.

This week's Freedom Zealot Podcast also discusses the repellent Richard W. Roberts and his role in the OKC cover-up:




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Dum spiro, pugno!