Liberty and Law, not "Law and Order" (Brief Programming Update, 3/26)

With our days as a manufacturing power a wistful memory and the marketing of fraudulent Wall Street "financial products" an infinitely self-replenishing source of national outrage, incarceration may soon become -- by default -- our leading national industry.


The United States is notorious for having the world's largest prison population: As the International Herald Tribune notes, the U.S., with five percent of the world's population, but nearly one quarter of the world's prisoners.


Although our rate of violent crime is high among "developed" nations, the size of the American prison population isn't a product of a uniquely depraved population. It is, in large measure, a product of an exceptionally punitive "justice" system, which reflects a strong streak of cultural vindictiveness -- or what the Herald Tribune calls "populist demands for tough justice."


Following his tour of American penitentiaries in 1831, Tocqueville was prompted to write that "In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States," a practice that contrasted favorably with the legal practices of the British, who were "disposed ... to retain the bloody traces of the dark ages in their penal legislation."



The French sociologist was careful to contrast the light touch of American penology with the "barbarous" treatment meted out to slaves. His observations led him to believe that the disparities in treatment reflected the fact that convicted criminals were seen as errant social equals, and black slaves were not. Americans, Tocqueville concluded, looked upon slavery "not only as an institution which is profitable to them, but as an evil which does not affect them."



Were he to make a similar survey of 21st century American prisons, Tocqueville most likely would find little of the "compassion" and "mildness" he discerned in America during its robust republican youth. As the International Herald Tribune observes, "Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations."


Perhaps the single largest contributing factor, of course, is the prohibitionist impulse, or what the Herald-Tribune describes as a "special fervor in combating illegal drugs."


To an extent unrivaled in the Western World, and perhaps comparable only to the People's Republic of China, America's prison system is populated by non-violent offenders. This is due primarily to that inexhaustible well of policy foolishness known as the "war on drugs," of course.


Another significant element in this equation is the use of jails and penitentiaries as "debtor's prisons" for "deadbeat dads" -- divorced fathers driven into intractable financial misery by the federal child support racket.


Dr. Stephen Baskerville of Patrick Henry College, author of the indispensable study Taken Into Custody, offers a tidy description of the child-napping and extortion racket in operation:


“A parent [generally a father] whose children are taken away by a family court is only at the beginning of his troubles. The next step comes as he is summoned to court and ordered to pay as much as two-thirds or even more of his income as `child support' to whomever has been given custody. His wages will immediately be garnished and his name will be entered on a federal register of `delinquents.' This is even before he has had a chance to become one, though it is also likely that the order will be backdated, so he will already be delinquent as he steps out of the courtroom. If the ordered amount is high enough, and the backdating far enough, he will be an instant felon and subject to immediate arrest.”

Jails and prisons across our land bulge at the seams with men who have been sucked into this vortex. Countless others are on probation, parole, or shackled at the ankle with electronic monitoring devices.


Baskerville's book describes the intricate system of federal subsidies and incentives that created this debtor's gulag. The federally funded army of prosecutors, bureaucrats, counselors, and assorted buttinskis devoted to the war on fatherhood is thirteen times larger than the force mustered to fight the "war on drugs."


In addition to those two federally instigated "wars," the county jail populations are plumped out by local campaigns against other forms of non-violent "crime" -- generally repeat or compound violations of traffic regulations or "quality of life" ordinances.


How is this a crime? Montanez and his colleagues defy an Orlando ordinance against feeding "large groups" of homeless people, left; below, right, Montanez is arrested following an "undercover" operation by the brave and bold Orlando Police Department.

For an exceptionally silly example of this kind of thing we can look to Orlando, Florida, where 22-year-old activist Eric Montanez was arrested -- following an undercover police operation -- for violating a municipal ordinance by feeding more than 25 homeless people in a public park. (That Montanez is distantly affiliated with ACORN and like-minded outfits doesn't make the ordinance and less asinine.)


For a long time, many observers have suspected that many municipal ordinances existed only to provide a steady stream of fine-generated revenue and a self-sustaining supply of inmate labor.

Douglas A. Blackmon's recent book Slavery by Another Name seems to confirm that such cynical suspicions are amply justified.


Blackmon's research, which appears valid and compelling, leads him to conclude that municipal ordinances in post-Emancipation South were designed and enforced with the purpose of producing large pools of inmate labor to be leased to large corporate interests. Other versions of this analysis had been advanced earlier in criminologist Thorsten Sellin's study Slavery and the Penal System, and David Oshinsky's book Worse Than Slavery.


Blackmon's book begins with the account of 22-year-old Green Cottenham, a young man arrested for "vagrancy" by the sheriff of Shelby County, Alabama. "Vagrancy" the stickiest of catch-all charges used to round up anyone unable "to prove at a given moment that he or she [was] employed."


At the time and place of Cottenham's arrest, the charge was most frequently used to justify the arrest of young black men, many of whom were unemployed itenerant workers looking for employment. Cottenham was quickly convicted following a burlesque of a trial and sentenced to thirty days of hard labor.


In a fashion immediately familiar to most people incarcerated today, Cottenham was unable to pay an array of "fees" that accompanied his spurious incarceration. So the thirty-day sentence was quickly expanded to a full year. Immediately thereafter, Cottenham was "leased" -- or, as his parents, both of whom former slaves, would put it, sold -- to the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company, a subsidiary of U.S. Steel.

One of thousands of black men vended by sheriffs across Alabama, Cottenham was dispatched to work in Slope No. 12, a coal shaft that formed part of the Pratt Mines near Birmingham.


"Imprisoned in what was then the most advanced city of the South, guarded by whipping bosses employed by the most iconic example of the modern corporation emerging in the gilded North, [Cottenham and his co-workers] were slaves in all but name," observes Blackmon.


Thousands perished from disease, overwork, and accidents, their mortal remains interred in shallow graves not far from where they expired. This was a continuation of slavery by other means, of course. But the system described by Blackmon -- opportunistic law enforcement feeding non-violent offenders into a penal system hard-welded to government-favored corporations -- exists today.


As a recent report notes, "Private corporations are making a killing employing prisoners across the US. They are hiring the incarcerated to manufacture everything from designer jeans to computer circuit boards." Mother Jones magazine compiled an impressive list of products -- from dressed beef to packaged software and videogames -- turned out by inmates paid less than a pittance.


A large portion of the inmate labor is provided through Unicor, a public-private partnership created during the (last) Great Depression to create "factories with fences." It's difficult to see how this operation differs in principle from China's notorious and brutal Laogai (reform through labor) prison manufacturing system, which may actually be smaller than its U.S. analogue.


There are indications that the prison-industrial complex is suffering some financial setbacks as a result of the ongoing economic collapse. Across the country, budget cuts made necessary by depleted sales and property tax revenues are forcing courts and sheriff's departments to relent in their pursuit of non-violent offenders, and to explore alternatives to incarceration.


This is a positive and encouraging development, an illustration of the corrective effect of an economic contraction. Ideally, states and municipalities would be compelled to abandon incarceration as a punishment for anything other than actual crimes against persons and property, and then to use that option sparingly in dealing with only the most serious offenses.


In colonial and early post-independence America, jails were uncommon and penitentiaries all but unknown. In many communities those convicted of property crimes were compelled to make restitution to their victims, a practice growing out of the recognition that such offenders owe a debt to particular victims, not to a collectivist abstraction called "society."


If the economic correction we're experiencing were to result in a much-overdue social correction, the existing "justice" system would be demolished and reconstructed on the basis of liberty protected by law, rather than "law and order." The purpose of the law, wrote John Locke in his Second Treatise of Government, "is not to abolish or restrain but to preserve and enlarge freedom."


The preservation of individual liberty and property requires a government apparatus so minimal as to be practically invisible, and a law enforcement touch so slight as to be nearly imperceptible.


This is why our rulers have spared no effort to propagate and maintain a cult of "law and order," in which the supposed needs of "society" are paramount and justice for individual victims of actual crimes, where it occurs, is a fortuitous but inconsequential happenstance.


And this is why the next priority of the Obama administration's "stimulus" fraud -- after putting the most corrupt elements of Wall Street in charge of the public purse, and ensuring that the Democratic Party's esurient constituencies are well-fed -- will probably be a "surge" of funding for the "law and order" apparatus, which will probably open up a lucrative new affiliate devoted entirely to the apprehension and punishment of incorrigible political troublemakers.

Housekeeping/Personal Affairs UPDATE, March 26

I appreciate your patience during a lengthy hiatus between postings. My family and I are traveling right now in a combined mini-vacation and job search. I've got portions of two essays written and a third in a preliminary outline stage, so you can expect the op-tempo to pick up dramatically as soon as I can spend more time with my fingers on the keyboard, rather than wrapped around a steering wheel. Thanks!




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From OKC to Abu Ghraib: The Kenneth Trentadue Case

Brothers in better times: Jesse Trentadue (left) poses with his younger brother Kenneth, who would later be murdered by the FBI.


It is doubtful that Kenneth Trentadue really understood, as he was being tortured and beaten to death by federal agents, why he had been singled out for such treatment.


What we do know -- apart from the fact that he was murdered, rather than a victim of suicide -- is that Kenneth (or Kenney, as his family knew him) sold himself dearly.


A muscular man of slightly less than average height who somewhat resembled mixed martial artist Don Frye, Kenney apparently fought tenaciously enough to drive his captors -- people no doubt accustomed to dealing with meek, plaintive victims over-awed by the supposed authority of their assailants -- into a vindictive frenzy. Kenney was not only beaten into a lumpy, bloody pulp, he was throttled with a garrote made from plastic zip-cuffs.


Of the many varieties of freedom, the grimmest may be that exercised by Kenney Trentadue: The freedom to choose how you will die, once you are irretrievably in the hands of the Enemy. Kenney chose not to die on the Enemy's terms.


















Your tax dollars at work: The mortal remains of Kenneth Trentadue, who was tortured and beaten to death by federal agents (most likely FBI) at a Federal Transfer Facility in Oklahoma.


Just a few weeks earlier, Kenney had been detained in San Diego as he re-entered the U.S. from Mexico. His wife Carmen had family down in Mexico, and Kenney had made a quick trip to visit them down south. This was a risky proposition, since a warrant had been issued for his arrest for violating his parole. Kenney was stopped by a border guard who ran a background check on him. As a result, unlikely as it might seem, Kenney was soon bound for Oklahoma City.


Years earlier, Kenney had made a living as a bank robber. Odd as it may seem, it is still considered a crime for private citizens other than those in the employ of the Federal Reserve to rob banks (admittedly, the Fed's methods are more sophisticated than the strong-arm tactics used by common crooks); accordingly, Kenney ended up serving a stretch in prison. In 1988 he emerged a chastened and changed man. He eventually married Carmen, and began working in construction during the early phase of the Fed-engineered housing bubble. Kenney and Carmen had a son, Vito, who was born shortly after Kenney was arrested in June 1995.


Parole officers have extraordinary -- and arguably excessive -- authority over their charges. The one assigned to Kenney apparently was a Pharisaical prig who imposed a total ban on alcohol consumption, despite the fact that Kenney was not an alcoholic and had no intoxication-related offenses on his record.


Nonetheless, the petty dictator presiding over Kenney's parole made abstinence from Demon Rum (and even beer) a condition of his continued liberty. In a decision I consider both completely unwise and commendably rebellious, Kenney simply stopped checking in with his parole officer, focusing instead on providing for his family -- and enjoying the occasional adult beverage, in moderation.

He put up a fight: Kenney Trentadue, before he was murdered by the Feds.



Following his June 10, 1995 arrest in San Diego, the 44-year-old Kenney was taken into federal custody. Just a couple of weeks later, federal indictments were handed down against Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nicholas -- as well as "others unknown" -- for their role in the Oklahoma City Bombing. This occurred on August 10. Kenney arrived at the Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Facility -- just a few miles from the courtroom where McVeigh and Nicholas had been indicted -- on August 18. Three days later, he was dead.


On August 21, 1995, guards "found" Kenney's body hanging from a bedsheet in his cell.


A few hours after this "discovery," Kenney's mother Wilma received a call from acting warden Marie Cutler informing her of the supposed suicide. The call was both perfunctory and pushy: Cutler informed Kenney's mother that the body was to be cremated very soon. Shocked as she was to hear that her youngest son was dead, Mrs. Trentadue had the presence of mind to demand that nothing of the sort would be done without the permission of Kenney's wife. Cutler was nonplussed to learn that Kenney was the married father of a newborn son; she had been told he was single.


Not only were prison officials eager to cremate Kenney's body, they were also frantic to sanitize the "suicide-proof" cell. Doing so before the medical examiner had a chance to inspect the scene was a crime, of course. But it was done anyway.


The floors and walls of the cell were mopped and scrubbed; the bed sheet with which Kenney had supposedly hung himself was "lost" or destroyed; most of his clothing ended up in the possession of an FBI agent who let that vital physical evidence putrefy in the trunk of his car.


Yes, I suppose the common FBI agent is sufficiently stupid and inept to treat evidence this way. But there is such a thing as strategically suitable stupidity, and this case offers a perfect example. There was a wealth of physical evidence produced by the untimely death of Kenney Trentadue, and within a few hours of the event it had been reduced to a pittance through the coordinated efforts of the FBI and prison officials.


When Kenney's mother Wilma and older brother Jesse were finally allowed to see the body, they did so in the unpleasant company of Michael Hood, regional counsel for the Bureau of Prisons. As Jesse later recalled the conversation, the appropriately named Hood issued an ineptly veiled warning:


"The Bureau of Prisons, the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's office -- we're one big Justice Department," Hood reportedly said.


Put more plainly: Don't get any ideas about challenging the Official Line, because nobody in the government that supposedly serves you will provide any help.


Left alone with Kenney's body, his mother and brother set to the awful task of scraping away several strata of post-mortem makeup that had been applied with all the subtlety of a transvestite hooker. They found his body mottled with contusions and other evidence of a severe beating, administered by both fists and batons. His head had been repeatedly lacerated, and his throat appeared to have been cut.


"My brother had been so badly beaten that I personally saw several mourners leave the viewing to vomit in the parking lot!" Jesse, a trial attorney, wrote in an August 30, 1995 letter to the Bureau of Prisons that was incendiary with understandable rage. "Anyone seeing my brother's battered body with his bruised and lacerated forehead, throat cut, and blue-black knuckles would not have concluded that his death was either easy or a 'suicide'! "


"I will always be grateful to my brother for his love of life, great heart and strength," wrote Jesse. "Had my brother been less of a man, your guards would have been able to kill him without inflicting so much injury to his body. Had that occurred, Kenney's family would forever be guilt-ridden over his death. Each of us would have lived with the pain of thinking that Kenneth took his own life and that we had somehow failed him. By making the fight he did for his life, Ken has saved us that pain, and God bless for having done so!"


Jesse wasn't the only one who found the official story facially implausible. On August 22, Kevin Rowland, chief examiner for the Oklahoma Medical Examiner's office, filed a complaint with the FBI describing Kenney's death as "murder."The state's chief Medical Examiner, Fred Jordan, refused to classify the death as a suicide, labeling the cause of Trendtadue's death "unknown."


The Bureau of Prisons convened a board of inquiry, and -- in keeping with Michael Hood's promise -- immediately put in the fix: The attorney heading the probe classified its findings as "attorney work product, a move intended to foreclose discovery of the material in future court actions.


While corrupt cover-ups are commonplace, Jesse found it strange that federal functionaries were so anxious to conceal the circumstances of Kenney's death. He was, after all, a reformed ex-con whose only offense was a trivial parole violation. With a wife and newborn son waiting for him, Kenney had no reason to kill himself. In phone calls to his family during the days before his death, Kenney hadn't displayed any symptoms of suicidal depression. The evidence inscribed in his body by his assailants demonstrated that Kenney had been beaten and tortured to death. But why?


Shortly after he fired off his letter to the BOP, Jesse received an anonymous phone call providing him with an explanation:


"Look, your brother was murdered by the FBI. There was an interrogation that went wrong.... He fit a profile."


Kenney was the victim of a monumentally improbable case of mistaken identity. He was a near-physical match for one of the "Others Unknown" suspected of involvement in the OKC Bombing: Richard Lee Guthrie.


As portrayed in the terse language of an all-points bulletin, Guthrie -- aka "John Doe #2," -- was a ringer for Kenney Trentadue. He was 5'9" and weighed a solid 180-190 lbs, brown-haired, with a dragon tattoo on his left forearm. Most importantly, Guthrie was a bank robber, as Kenney had been before going to prison. More specifically, Guthrie robbed banks on behalf of the Aryan Republican Army, which conducted some 22 bank heists in the early 1990s and netted about $250,000 to fund domestic terrorism.


Guthrie was in federal custody at the time of Kenney's arrest. For neither the first nor the last time, one of Leviathan's tentacles wasn't aware what the other was doing.


Like Kenney, Guthrie was the victim of an anomalous prison suicide: His body was "found" by a guard hanging from a bedsheet in his cell in 1996. Just before his death, Guthrie had told the Los Angeles Times that he was writing a memoir that would, among other things, describe connections between the ARA and the OKC bombing.


Nor was Guthrie the only other inmate connected to the Trentadue case to end up dangling from the ceiling of his cell. Alden Gillis Baker, an inmate at the OKC Transfer Center, told Jesse that he had overheard an "altercation" involving "a lot of physical violence" the night Kenney was killed; that was followed by "faint moaning" and the sound of bedsheets being torn. Baker repeated that account in a subsequent deposition that was rejected by a judge. In 2000, Baker was also "found" hanged to death by a guard in a California federal prison.


For more than a decade, as he pursued the truth about his brother's death with irrepressible tenacity, Jesse Trentadue experienced first-hand the concentrated, malicious corruption of the Regime that rules us. He witnessed what he describes as an "epidemic of government corruption" -- "Perjury, subornation of perjury, threats to witnesses [including Fred Jordan, the Oklahoma medical examiner, who was intimidated into changing his conclusions about Kenney's death], fabrication of evidence, and a sh*t-pile of other acts of obstruction of justice.... The government obtained an order preventing me from reporting those crimes to either federal prosecutors or the Senate Judiciary Committee while at the same time it was trying to indict me and my attorneys with the perjured testimony of a secret FBI informant."


The bogus perjury charge, Jess Trentadue explained to Pro Libertate, was based on an accusation "that I had paid people to perjure themselves. Look, I don't have the money to pay for perjury; I'm a trial attorney who's doing the investigation into Kenney's death on my own time and at my own expense. And even if I wanted to buy witnesses, I couldn't outbid the Feds." That charge was laughed out of court.

















I want my NTV (Nazi Television)! Peter Langan, aka "Commandante Pedro" of the Aryan Republican Army, mugs for the cameras in a recruiting video.


Apart from the self-defense reflex of corrupt officials, the cover-up made no sense to Jesse -- until 2004, when he received -- from a sympathetic source at the FBI -- two redacted documents proving that the FBI had been aware of a connection between the OKC bombing and the Aryan Republican Army, a connection that ran through a bizarre white supremacist commune in Oklahoma called Elohim City. That tip primed a Freedom of Information Act Request that brought forth more than 250 pages of documents -- all of them heavily censored -- confirming that the FBI and other federal agencies (including the ATF, which had planted Carol Howe at Elohim City) had abundant and detailed advance intelligence of the bombing.
















Above and beyond the call of duty: Carol Howe, undercover operative for the ATF, with her then-boyfriend, the malodorous Klans-"man" Dennis Mahon -- who was himself squealing like a frightened little girl to the Feds.


Elohim City was not merely a racist redoubt: As with any similar gathering of white supremacists, federal informants were thick on the ground in that commune. In addition to the above-mentioned Carol Howe, the late Robert Millar, the patriarch of that particular kibbutz, was on the federal payroll.


An enigmatic German national named Andreas Strassmeir, who was the group's head of security, has long been suspected of being an intelligence asset for both Washington and his own national government. A pestiferous Klan activist named Dennis Mahon, also spent time at Elohim City, was likewise doing snitch duty. At least one other individual there was taking notes and passing them along to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a self-appointed "watchdog" group headed by self-promoting fraud and sexual degenerate Morris Dees.



At least two ARA members were "part-time" residents of Elohim City, and there is reason to believe that Timothy McVeigh -- who called the commune just shortly before the OKC bombing -- had hooked up with the ARA to carry out at least some of their robberies.


Last year, with the assistance of Jesse Trentadue, Terry Nichols -- who is serving a life sentence for his role in the bombing, and cannot be tried again on capital charges -- filed a deposition in a Salt Lake City federal court. Not only did Nichols implicate the ARA in the bombing plot, he claimed that McVeigh -- who allegedly had been recruited while in the Army to carry out undercover missions -- had been working under the supervision of Larry Potts, the shame-encrusted FBI official who presided over the murderous attack on the Randy Weaver family and the annihilation of the Branch Davidians at Mt. Carmel, Texas.



Just days ago, Jesse won two significant victories in federal court. A federal judge in Oklahoma, ruling that the FBI had intentionally inflicted severe mental suffering on the Trentadue family, awarded the victims nearly one million dollars in damages. A few days later, U.S. Federal District Court Judge Ted Stewart ordered the "Justice" department to hand over its long-suppressed report on Kenney's death.


"The Justice [sic] Department's lawyers at the hearing were muttering about how they needed `extensions,' and the judge wasn't having any of it," Jesse Trentadue told Pro Libertate. "When Judge Stewart reminded them that the 10th Circuit Court had just ruled that Jesse had a right to see the documents, and imposed a deadline of April 10th, "the Justice [sic!] Department lawyers said that they needed `permission from their superiors' to produce the documents -- which really didn't sit well with the judge," Jesse continues. "He gave them until May 1 to turn over the documents or be hit with a contempt citation."


This would mean "that arrest warrants would be issued, and federal Marshals sent to arrest the non-cooperating officials" -- although, in the surpassingly improbable event that the Marshals were sent to collect the malefactors, they would be treated with much greater delicacy than Kenney had been.


"There must be something really ugly in that set of documents," Jesse points out. "The Feds have done everything they could for nearly a decade and a half to keep me from getting them."


Does he believe Nichols' claim that the OKC bombing was a federally staged event? '


"That's Mr. Nichols' account, and he has no reason I can think of to lie," Jesse told me. "He tried to get [former Attorney General] John Ashcroft to look into his testimony, but he wasn't interested. And David Paul Hammer, who was McVeigh's cellmate [on death row prior to McVeigh's execution] has filed a deposition describing how McVeigh confirmed the same story -- that McVeigh was a government-run undercover operative, that he was involved in the ARA's bank robberies, and that the Elohim City group was riddled with federal informants."


"I'm not saying that this is the real story of the OKC bombing," Jesse concludes. "I got involved in this because I wanted to know what had happened to my brother. But all of these testimonies, coming as they do from men who didn't know each other and who don't have obvious reasons to lie, overlay each other extremely well and tell a very credible story."


But the behavior of the Feds in dealing with all of this could be considered the clincher.


"There was a time when I was someone who believed in the integrity of the `System,' who thought that our government may be inept and occasionally corrupt, but that it was run by basically decent and well-intentioned people," Jesse recounts. "Obviously, I don't think that way any more."


At least three people, including Kenney, were killed through staged prison "suicides" to cover up something "really ugly" about Federal foreknowledge of, and participation in, the OKC bombing plot. Kenney was tortured to death. This wasn't done because the Feds wanted to know something Kenney (mistakenly identified as Guthrie) knew; it was done because the Feds assumed he could tell the truth about OKC, and wanted to shut him up permanently.


Through no desire of his own, Jesse has become something of an expert about the federal prison system. How common is it for people to be tortured or murdered as Kenney was?


"It's very common, I think," Jesse replied when that question was posed to him. "And if you look at what was done to Kenney back in 1995, it was the same kind of thing that was done years later at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. It could be said that they used my brother as practice for Iraq. But that kind of thing happens in our system here all the time, I'm convinced."


This is a thought to meditate on as we approach April 19 -- a date freighted with significance for those who understand the consummately criminal nature of the Regime that rules us.



Obiter dicta


Please forgive me for the length of this post-script.


I've been invited, once again, to address this year's Spring Convention of the United Republicans of California on April 26. The event will be held at the Embassy Suites hotel in Arcadia, California. UROC, which calls itself the "republican wing of the Republican party," is not the Bushified GOP. At last year's convention they enthusiastically endorsed Ron Paul for president. So, trite as it may seem to say so, it's clear that UROC rocks.


Last week my schedule was wonderfully cluttered with radio appearances with exceptionally friendly and well-informed hosts.


My interview discussing torture and permanent war with the heroic Charles Goyette can be heard here.


Mark Anderson invited me to be a guest on his program "When Worlds Collide"; the archived program (which suffered from a few technical glitches, alas) is here.


Chris Arnzen, host of the Christian program "Iron Sharpens Iron," had me on to discuss the background of "Mormon Fundamentalism" in light of the recent crackdown on the FLDS cult in Texas; the audio can be found here. Once again, there are some technical problems in this broadcast: My uncharacteristic occasional stuttering was a reaction to a persistent echo on my end of the telephone conversation. Thankfully, Chris said that the echo wasn't audible over the air.


Dale Williams of Salt Lake City's KTKK ("K-Talk") invited me on for an hour last Thursday while he was filling in for Jack Stockwell. We discussed -- among other things -- my firing by the JBS (he brought up the subject, I didn't), the Free State project, the increasingly well-entrenched police state, and the right to resist arrest. I can't find an archive of that program; hopefully one will soon materialize.


And, as has become customary, Dr. Stanley Monteith had me on his Radio Liberty program as a guest twice last week. Dr. Stan is a wonderful and amazingly well-informed guy.



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Dum spiro, pugno!

Ruby Ridge: The Age of State Terrorism Begins

Enemies of the State: Samuel and Vicki Weaver (left and rear-center) pose with Sara and Rachel.

 

Sara Weaver has forgiven the people responsible for murdering her mother Vicki and younger brother Samuel twenty years ago. Lon Horiuchi, the FBI sniper who shot Vicki in the head while she was holding a ten-month-old infant, is still being sheltered by the Regime that employed him. If he were any part of a man, Horiuchi would make a pilgrimage to Sara’s home in Montana to express remorse for the crimes he committed against her family.

Shortly before he murdered Vicki on August 22, 1992, Horiuchi attempted to murder her husband, Randy Weaver – a man who had done nothing to harm any living soul. Acting under “rules of engagement” that were tantamount to a murder warrant, Horiuchi shot Randy in the back, attempting to kill him instantly by severing his spinal cord. 

Owing to a last-second motion by Randy, the bullet hit his shoulder and exited his armpit. Randy and a visiting family friend named Kevin Harris fled back to their cabin. Vicki Weaver flung open the door and was shot in the head by Horiuchi. The same round used to murder Vicki ended up wounding Harris. 

At the time Horiuchi attempted to murder him, Randy was visiting the forlorn outbuilding that sheltered the lifeless body of his only son, 14-year-old Samuel, who had been murdered the previous day by U.S. marshals preparing to ambush the Weaver family. Three of the six camouflaged marshals threw rocks to distract the Weaver family’s dogs. When Samuel and Harris went to investigate, a marshal panicked and shot one of the dogs.

After Samuel fired in the direction of the gunshots, Randy told him to return to the cabin.

“I’m coming, Dad,” shouted Samuel. 

At that point, one of the marshals, in keeping with the standards of valor expected of those who serve the federal Leviathan, shot the 14-year-old in the back. 

Future Murderer Lon Horiuchi.

In what a jury later found to be a lawful use of defensive force, Harris returned fire. Deputy Marshal William Degan was killed in the gunfight. The Feds claimed that he was killed in the first shot of the skirmish. This was a lie, of course: He had fired at least seven rounds before stopping one, and it’s likely that he was killed by “friendly fire.”

For nine days, Sara had to care for her baby sister, Elishiba, as well as her ten-year-old sister Rachel while the shattered body of her mother decomposed in the family’s cabin. Their home – or “compound,” as it was characterized by the criminals who besieged it, and the media functionaries who retailed their self-serving lies -- was surrounded by a small army of federal, state, and local law enforcement personnel. 

Sara and the other survivors also had to endure the mocking sadism of the FBI agents who had murdered Vicki and Samuel. One morning they were awoken by a taunting message broadcast over a loudspeaker: “Good morning, Mrs. Weaver. We had pancakes for breakfast. What did you have?”

In what could be seen as a foreshadowing of the holocaust at Waco’s Branch Davidian refuge roughly eight months later, the Feds were apparently prepared to fire-bomb the Weaver home, thereby destroying evidence of their crimes. A news crew from KREM-TV in Spokane saw several large canisters of gasoline being loaded onto an FBI helicopter, which took off and circled the cabin – only to veer off suddenly after being videotaped by observers on the ground. 

Much to the disappointment of the Feds, the standoff ended without additional bloodshed.  Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris were acquitted of murder charges arising from the death of William Degan. Randy was found guilty of failing to appear in court to answer a contrived firearms charge engineered by an ATF provocateur who sought to blackmail the ex-Green Beret into becoming an informant. 

Although the Weaver family eventually received a large civil settlement courtesy of the federal government’s tax victims, neither Horiuchi nor his supervisors – Larry Potts and Danny Coulson -- was ever prosecuted. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, invoking a specious concept it called “Supremacy Clause Immunity,” ruled that it would be impermissible for a federal law enforcement officer to face civil or criminal prosecution for official acts that would otherwise be criminal in nature. Judge Alex Kozinski’s scalding dissent lambasted the court for creating what he christened the “007 Standard” – a license to kill that was issued "to all law enforcement agencies in our circuit -- federal, state, and local."

A few months after issuing that ruling, the court modified it to permit the State of Idaho to prosecute Horiuchi under state laws. Denise Woodbury, an assistant prosecutor from Boundary County, was prepared to put Horiuchi on trial, but the prospect of doing so caused incoming county attorney Brett Benson to lose bladder control. Accordingly, the individual who murdered Vicki Weaver and attempted to murder Randy Weaver remains at large. 

As the indispensable James Bovard pointed out sixteen years ago, the Marshals Service “gave its highest award for valor” to the five surviving members of the home invasion squad that murdered Samuel Weaver. In presenting the award, then-director Eduardo Gonzalez hymned the praises of the “exceptional courage … sound judgment in the face of attack, and … high degree of professional competence” displayed by the agents whose actions precipitated the needless deaths of three people, and the attempted murder of two others. 

Prior to the killings at Ruby Ridge, the Marshals Service had spent a year and a half spying on the impoverished, isolated Weaver family. This included multiple acts of criminal trespass and the creation of a network of remote-operated surveillance cameras on the high ground above the family’s land. Weaver was considered a fugitive for missing a court hearing after being issued two summonses giving two different dates. He  was to stand trial on firearms charges after being entrapped by the ATF, which sought to blackmail him into becoming a federal informant inside the Aryan Nation white supremacist organization.

 Weaver’s first encounter with the Feds came in July 1985, when he was visited by the Secret Service after a neighbor accused him of threatening the life of President Reagan. Rather than filing charges against Weaver, the Feds opened a file on him. Four years later, an ATF undercover informant-provocateur named Gus Magisano (who used the pseudonym “Kenneth Faderly”) made a business proposal to Weaver: He offered to buy several shotguns from him if the barrels were sawed off to his specifications. 

With his family practically starving, Weaver was a motivated seller. His customer was an eager buyer – but he was also curiously specific regarding the modifications he wanted on the guns, demanding that Weaver saw off the barrels at a particular length. Those “illegal” alterations – which left the barrels longer than those on the sixty Remington 870 pump-action shotguns ordered by the IRS a few years ago – offered the ATF what it thought was sufficient leverage to blackmail Weaver. 

In January 1990, Weaver was visited by ATF Agents Herbert Byerly and Steve Gunderson, who threatened to prosecute him unless he became an informant. To his eternal credit, Weaver invited them to inseminate themselves. Since defiance of that kind simply couldn’t be tolerated, the ATF, acting with the U.S. Marshals Service and several state and local agencies, initiated the low-intensity war against the Weaver family that eventually claimed the lives of Vicki and Samuel.  

Salt Lake attorney Jesse Trentadue explains that the federal jihad against the Weavers was an outgrowth of an FBI initiative called PATCON, or “Patriot Conspiracy.” The campaign was designed “to infiltrate and incite the milita and evangelical Christians to violence so that the Department of Justice could crush them.”

“Ruby Ridge was a PATCON operation,” Trentadue observes. “Waco was a PATCON operation. And so, too, I believe was the Oklahoma City Bombing.”

Trentadue’s understanding of PATCON is the product of long, arduous investigation of the FBI’s role in inciting domestic terrorism and covering up its officially sanctioned misdeeds. He is a singularly tenacious and motivated investigator: His brother, the late Kenneth Trentadue, was murdered by the FBI in an Oklahoma prison cell on August 21, 1995, after being mistaken for a bank robber named Richard Lee Guthrie, who was part of a PATCON-connected gang called the Aryan Republican Army.

Shortly after the April 19, 1995 OKC bombing, Kenneth – who had served time for robbery and was on parole -- was detained in San Diego as he re-entered the U.S. from Mexico. His wife Carmen had family down in Mexico, and Kenney (as his brother calls him) had made a quick trip to visit them down south.

 Kenney was stopped by a border guard who ran a background check on him.  He was arrested and stuffed into a plane bound for Oklahoma City.

At the time, Kenney Trentadue was 44 years old, in good health, and trying to rebuild his life. His wife was expecting a child, who was born while Kenney was in federal custody.

Kenney assumed that he was being held on a parole violation. He had no idea that he had been snared in the FBI’s manhunt for “John Doe #2,” an unidentified co-conspirator in the OKC bombing. While Kenney was in federal custody, indictments were handed down against Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols — as well as “others unknown”— for their role in the Oklahoma City Bombing. That occurred on August 10. Kenney arrived at the Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Facility — just a few miles from the courtroom where McVeigh and Nicholas had been indicted — on August 18. Three days later, he was dead, supposedly of suicide.

Kenney’s body was “found” hanging from a bedsheet in his cell. A few hours after this “discovery,” Kenney’s mother Wilma received a call from acting warden Marie Cutler informing her that her son had killed himself. In a fashion suggesting both indifference to the family and a great deal of urgency, Cutler informed Kenney’s mother that the body was to be cremated very soon. 

Although understandably devastated by her son’s death, Mrs. Trentadue had the presence of mind to demand that no action be taken to dispose of the body without the permission of Kenney’s wife. Cutler was surprised to learn that Kenney was the married father of a newborn son; she had been told he was single, because the killers had mistaken their victim for somebody else. 

Not only were prison officials indecently eager to cremate Kenney’s body, they were also frantic to sanitize the “suicide-proof” cell. This was a criminal act of evidence tampering.

The floors and walls of the cell were mopped and scrubbed; the bed sheet with which Kenney had supposedly hung himself was “lost” or destroyed; most of his clothing ended up in the possession of an FBI agent who –in the finest tradition of that incurably corrupt agency— let it putrefy in the trunk of his car. Within a few hours of the “suicide,” the FBI and prison officials managed to “lose” or destroy most of the critical evidence.

When Kenney’s mother Wilma and older brother Jesse were finally allowed to see the body, they did so in the obnoxious company of Michael Hood, regional counsel for the Bureau of Prisons. As Jesse later recalled the conversation, Hood issued a poorly disguised warning: “The Bureau of Prisons, the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s office — we’re one big Justice Department.”

Left alone with Kenney’s body, Jesse and his mother peeled away several layers of post-mortem makeup. They found his body riddled with contusions and other evidence of a severe beating, administered by both fists and batons. His head had been repeatedly lacerated, and his throat appeared to have been cut.

“My brother had been so badly beaten that I personally saw several mourners leave the viewing to vomit in the parking lot!” Jesse, a trial attorney, wrote in an August 30, 1995 letter to the Bureau of Prisons. “Anyone seeing my brother’s battered body with his bruised and lacerated forehead, throat cut, and blue-black knuckles would not have concluded that his death was either easy or a ‘suicide’! ”

 “I will always be grateful to my brother for his love of life, great heart and strength,” wrote Jesse. “Had my brother been less of a man, your guards would have been able to kill him without inflicting so much injury to his body. Had that occurred, Kenney’s family would forever be guilt-ridden over his death. Each of us would have lived with the pain of thinking that Kenneth took his own life and that we had somehow failed him. By making the fight he did for his life, Ken has saved us that pain, and God bless for having done so!”

Jesse wasn’t the only one who found the official story facially implausible. Kevin Rowland, chief examiner for the Oklahoma Medical Examiner’s office, filed a complaint with the FBI describing Kenney’s death as “murder.” The state’s chief Medical Examiner, Fred Jordan, refused to classify the death as a suicide, labeling the cause of Trentadue’s death “unknown.”

The Bureau of Prisons convened a board of inquiry, and — in keeping with Michael Hood’s promise — slammed the lid down, hard.  The attorney heading the probe classified its findings as “attorney work product,” a move intended to foreclose discovery of the material in future court actions.

Cover-ups by corrupt officials are commonplace. However, Jesse Trentadue considered it strange that federal functionaries were so anxious to conceal the circumstances of Kenney’s death. Why would the Feds lie about the cause of Kenney’s death, and then spare no effort to destroy all the evidence?

Shortly after sending his letter to the BOP, Jesse received an anonymous phone call providing him with an explanation: “Look, your brother was murdered by the FBI. There was an interrogation that went wrong…. He fit a profile.”

Kenney fell victim to a case of mistaken identity of Dickensian dimensions. He was a near-physical match for Richard Lee Guthrie. They were the same age, and shared the same build -- 5’9″ tall and a muscular 180-190 lbs. Each was brown-haired, with a dragon tattoo on his left forearm. Most importantly, Guthrie was a bank robber, as Kenney had been before going to prison. More specifically, Guthrie robbed banks on behalf of the Aryan Republican Army, which conducted some 22 bank heists in the early 1990s and netted about $250,000 to fund domestic terrorism. At the time of Kenney’s arrest, Guthrie was already somewhere in the bowels of the federal prison system.

Like Kenney, Guthrie would later be the victim of an anomalous prison suicide: His body was “found” by a guard hanging from a bedsheet. Just before his death in 1996, Guthrie had told the Los Angeles Times that he was writing a memoir that would, among other things, describe connections between the ARA and the OKC bombing.

Guthrie wasn't the only other inmate connected to the Trentadue case who would wind up dangling lifelessly from the ceiling of his cell. Alden Gillis Baker, an inmate at the OKC Transfer Center, told Jesse that he had overheard an “altercation” involving “a lot of physical violence” the night Kenney was killed; that was followed by “faint moaning” and the sound of bedsheets being torn. Baker repeated that account in a subsequent deposition that was rejected by a judge. In 2000, Baker was also “found” hanged to death by a guard in a California federal prison.

As this body count demonstrates, the Feds were desperate to conceal something genuinely horrible. Jesse’s understanding of the magnitude of the cover up expanded considerably in 2004, when he received — from a sympathetic source at the FBI — two redacted documents proving that the FBI had been aware of a connection between the OKC bombing and the Aryan Republican Army, which in turn was connected to a bizarre white supremacist commune in Oklahoma called Elohim City.

That tip primed a Freedom of Information Act Request that dislodged more than 250 pages of documents — all of them heavily censored — confirming that the FBI and other federal agencies (including the ATF, which had planted Carol Howe at Elohim City) had abundant and detailed advance intelligence of the 1995 bombing.

As is the case with any significant gathering of white supremacists, Elohim City was a wholly owned subsidiary of the FBI. In addition to Carol Howe (whose cover was blown by her handler when she actually tried to expose those responsible for the OKC bombing), the late Robert Millar, the cult’s patriarch, was also on the federal payroll.

The group’s head of security, a dodgy German national named Andreas Strassmeir, has been identified as an intelligence asset for both Washington and his own national government. A hyper-violent Klan activist named Dennis Mahon, who also spent time at Elohim City, was likewise a paid snitch. At least one other individual there was taking notes and passing them along to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a quasi-private secret police adjunct headed by self-promoting fraud and sexual degenerate Morris Dees.

At least two ARA members were “part-time” residents of Elohim City, and there is abundant reason to believe that Timothy McVeigh — who called the commune just shortly before the OKC bombing — had collaborated with the ARA in carrying out at least some of their robberies.

In 2007, shortly after filing his FOIA request for the OKC bombing videos, Jesse Trentadue contacted by Terry Nichols — who is serving a life sentence for his role in the bombing, and cannot be tried again on capital charges. With Trentadue’s assistance, Nichols filed a deposition in a Salt Lake City federal court.

Not only did Nicholes implicate the ARA in the bombing plot, he claimed that McVeigh — who allegedly had been recruited as an undercover intelligence asset while in the Army — had been working under the supervision of Larry Potts, the same FBI official who wrote the murderous “rules of engagement” at Ruby Ridge and later supervised the annihilation of the Branch Davidians at Mt. Carmel, Texas.

 The Feds weren't pursuing Richard Lee Guthrie for the purpose of solving a crime; they were hunting him as part of a nation-wide drive to tie up loose ends in what was either a criminally inept "sting" operation, or a full-fledged false-flag attack at Oklahoma City. 

Once Kenneth Trentadue became another loose end, he was tortured and beaten to death -- but his brother, God bless him, was determined to pull as hard as he could on the few frayed threads he could find.

“The only difference between the FBI and the KGB,” Jesse Trentadue wearily concludes, “is that the Soviet secret police never pretended to be a legitimate law enforcement agency.” That observation was shared on August 21 – twenty years after federal marshals murdered Samuel Weaver, and the seventeenth anniversary of the torture-murder of Kenneth Trentadue, both of whom were victims of the  FBI’s ongoing PATCON initiative.

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... to everyone who has participated in the Pro Libertate moneybomb. We deeply appreciate your generosity. God bless! 

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