Minggu, 10 Februari 2013

What was the DC Madam case about?

With the blessed passing of yet another election cycle, we might reflect on another one from the recent past which resulted in a significant routing of the GOP by the Democrats: the deeply contentious 2006 national midterms. There's at least one major political sex scandal that takes down a significant politician in the United States every election cycle, generally speaking, two years, with overlap for higher office.
After the fall of the Director of the CIA at the hands of the surveillance state, we might reflect on the DC Madam case and look at the same themes and actions at play.
Jeane got this, maybe more towards the end:


Bil… yes, I saw it. This further supports my belief that escort and adult services – which cater to powerful and influential clients – are being used as the new "hunting grounds" in American politics. –Jeane PS if interested, I will be on Geraldo and Coast to Coast Radio (10:30pm PDT) tonight. Newsweek also has done a piece on me, that is coming out in Monday's edition. It should be available online, by late tonight/tomorrow.

Yet, it appears that the GOP practically brought their own scandal to the attention of the American public. This kind of calculated stupidity is completely in character for them. I walked away from this train wreck a few days after this email. This all began with a leak by federal prosecutors to Bill Bastone and the Smoking Gun, they wanted it out there.
Why do this? Damage control knowing that you can redefine a problem. 2006 had a lot to do with corruption, how much the public will take of it, and damage control rather than the willingness to change or to take responsibility like adults. There are no adults, don’t kid yourself. You look at events differently once you’ve been on the inside of them. Whether others like it or not, Jeane allowed me to take in a lot for a purpose. She invited me to sneak a peek behind the curtain, and indeed, some impotent clowns resembling the Wizard of Oz were incompetently pulling levers that affect people’s lives, tripping, falling over each other, and they were just as blunderingly human and frail as I expected them to be. What the case was about is right in front of your eyes, every day, therefore invisible. It wasn’t a mistake that defense and intelligence technology contractor SAIC and the CPU giant Qualcomm were in Jeane’s phone records, or that they were visiting my website any more than it was that so many arrows pointed to San Diego and numerous military personnel, many of them officers. It wasn’t coincidence that put Lockheed Martin in her phone bills for her escort service, that a World Bank executive was in them, that a major league GOP operative like Jack Burkman was too, and there were many others, others I haven’t even included in my account of what I believe happened and what the case meant. Judge Kessler saw no coincidences when she granted Jeane subpoena power over the intelligence community.

This was a tale of partisan politics and statism, but also where the lines blur in those constructs, because interests overlap, making for the strangest bedfellows of all. Why the 2006 midterms? I believe this election is the key to understanding why an interim-appointed U.S. Attorney named Jeffrey A. Taylor decided to move on Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the press-dubbed “DC Madam,” only one month after she’d shuttered her escort service. I’m assuming here that someone tipped her off. Why waste millions on a small escort service like that? This was first of all about damage control for the part of the public that can be reached when presented with stupid things like facts and corroborated evidence, empiricism, stuff that's not entertainment. Without wanting to, I have no faith in the rank-and-file of either major party, and I think Palfrey’s own apathy about politics and her ignorance of it was instrumental in her undoing, word to the wise. Being the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind doesn’t elevate you to the throne.
She knew some significant things about her predicament and her place, but clearly, not enough. What still surprises me is that before I brought the timing of the search of the Vallejo residence to her attention, she, her counsel, and others assisting her, hadn’t considered it—not even journalists she was encountering were expressing their observations of this. For an openly partisan Republican prosecutor to move on a suspect who, perhaps unknowingly, holds information damaging to his party and other related interests, is an unmistakable political act. Breaking the law to achieve damage control and to protect the defense and intelligence contracting game was implicit to their theater and the media was only too happy to play along.

Not even a nearly unprecedented economic crisis was going to overcome the racist backlash over the 2008 election of Barack Obama and it temporarily breathed new life into an ashen GOP, perhaps for the final time, since it was coming from a demographic of angry, aging white Americans whose political significance has been rapidly eroding over the last few decades. In their bigotry, they fear this massive influx of Hispanic refugees, most of them desperate Mexicans fleeing social chaos, generations of poverty, the militarization of the drug war, corrupt federales, goons, police, the cartels, and enslavement in the maquiladora factories that line the Free Trade Zone along the border, and now, private security, the CIA and drones. Such a happy family relationship between nations brought the dictator Porfirio Diaz to remark, “Poor Mexico, so far from God, and so close to the United States.” Yet, thanks to this ruthless repression and exploitation, there were some unexpected results: a new dynamic where Latin Americans are now heading towards being the future of politics, and possibly the labor movement, in the United States. And with this realization among the nativist rabble element came the inevitable Know-nothing reaction of hounding immigrants, which, like lynching, is a time-honored American tradition. Does the public ever truly learn? Which one would that be in a divided nation when these racists are becoming the minority? They're also the staggering idiots who tolerate an emergent police state and runaway defense spending while at the same time painting themselves inaccurately as rebels. That's called a fool. This is why it wasn't surprising to me that these same people--if you want to call them that--run to conspiracy theories that never truly touch on those power centers. Chasing ghosts and being ineffectual is the safest thing in the world. 2006 wasn't especially different from now.

At this, the halfway mark of the second and unfortunate term of George W. Bush, when the future Tea Party members were cheering the illegal occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and police state tactics in the war on terror, Republican Party officeholders were paying the price for more skeletons in their closet than the Marquis de Sade or Al Capone. The litany of corrupt acts, antisocial behaviors, and general high weirdness, was widespread enough in their elected ranks to warrant decades of inquiries, yet, no, according to President Obama, we must “continue to look forward,” sounding as much like Scarface as the Republicans. Of great note, one of the cappers that went over the line was Florida congressman Mark Foley, who was accused of pedophilia. This is all about breaking the law and surviving through until the next ever-tightening election cycle. Controlling the DOJ never hurts. Besides, you can always fire your Attorney General and appoint another one the public can grow to hate as an arch-criminal the more they get to know about them. Almost a year earlier the profoundly illegal warrantless wiretapping program that bypassed the judicial oversight of the FISA court (housed at the DOJ, and I suspect they knew), initiated by the White House, was no longer being sat on by the traditionally submissive New York Times. (They had done this for a full year, so that the 2004 elections could pass by safely for the GOP, at least regarding that particular skeleton.)

You know that there’s a political crisis going on when the culture of politics has shifted so far to the right, that all the partisan hacks can talk about is a non-existent center. Most of what you’re going to be hearing from the official channels when a system ossifies is unbridled crap and lies, more obfuscations, apologies to power, ignoring the growing herd of elephants (the only one), until this game no longer works. Rather than looking at all of what we’re learning about rampant corruption as an excuse to cop-out (pun very much intended) and run to the temporary safety of jaded apathy, we should be glad that we know about these crimes at all, because knowledge really is power. But then the problem is that you’re forced to decide to do something about it. I made that decision getting involved in this case, hoping that I could bear witness to history and to accumulate whatever materials I could for the record. I was successful in that endeavor. Too often, the residue of events is lost to the ages. Collecting these materials was done so that the information could be out there and the public has the option to discover, more generally, how the private sector and government collude, and I've put it out there, with more to come.
An incredible effort was mounted to neutralize the destructive potential of what the charges against the late Ms. Palfrey were really about. To re-frame a story, and by doing so, redefining it, is a common practice in, ours, the most propagandized modern society outside of the former Soviet Union and China under Mao. "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." This is why corrupt government contractors need to operate in the dark, and that’s what the DC Madam case, a branch of Hookergate, was about: to hide their criminal behavior and bury the evidence of their much greater crimes. When you keep raising this glaring discrepancy between how Palfrey was treated under the law on the one hand and how her privileged clients were on the other, and it’s never addressed in any substantial sense by government prosecutors, career spokesmen like P.J. Crowley, those clients like Senator Vitter, law enforcement, the hierarchy at the DOJ, you begin to realize the fix is in. Mind you, this was being said by many of us during the proceedings very loudly, and to no avail, because the mainstream press did its best to let it die by its own hand, and I mean that literally, because they also knew that Jeane was suicidally inclined. Brecht couldn't have dreamed this nightmare up. That's not murder, it's willful negligence

There had been a very serious scandal in 2006—one of many—that eventually fizzled-out named “Hookergate,” the standard cigar and hooker parties that are held in and around the Beltway for hungry contractors, to obtain coveted, high dollar jobs and assuage the seething addictions of sociopath Republican horndogs (as opposed to Democratic ones) with a taste for the high life on your dime. Yes, this is all about the war on terror and the moronic, runaway militarization of America, the biggest buyer of unnecessary, clunky military hardware in the entire world, six hundred times the spending in this area than of all the other nations of the world combined. That’s pretty stupid—nay—exceptional. We not only have the right to blow our balls off in this manner, but we still somehow have the right to speak about it thanks to a historical accident that began during the Colonial period, freedom of speech and the press. Things working out will never be good enough for the species. In our meanness and selfish tendencies that have been fostered into the emotional equivalents of plutonium, another poison we’ve refined, so as to illustrate our collective wretchedness, we have contaminated the world with our greed. From the moral rot of John Jacob Astor, to the senseless greed of the speculator Jay Gould, America’s first millionaires, on down to the Robber Barons like Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan, men who childish fools have emulated ever since, we compromised with the bad guys and lost our way long ago as a nation, and we’re finally running out of road for the last time. This is our last chance. All of this is what the DC Madam case was about, the culmination of generations of baseness and barbarity. Either this is the beginning, the end, or both, but we’ve undoubtedly come full circle, which is rarely a good sign for the little people out there, the rest of us out here in television land.

This has happened before. Our out of control defense spending is doing to American democracy what it did to that system in Athens, first, by bankrupting their Treasury, then the inevitable collapse into anarchy and dictatorship, wrought by irrational military adventurism. Ask the Greeks how long it’s taken to come back from that one. And, so today, we have a similar situation in place thanks to the same kinds of criminals bent on power at any cost: a crisis on several fundamental levels—political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental. Not so long after Jeane died I conveyed to her former counselor Montgomery Blair Sibley that she may as well have stayed alive since, what with the encroaching economic catastrophe, she could have walked out of prison once there was no money to house her anymore (it elicited no response). What was the DC Madam case about? The fall of America by militarized self-immolation and general greed, nihilism.

Jill Kelley Fiasco Only Gets Worse

This woman really has no idea when it's better to just shut her trap. Yesterday she was reaching out to media through a proxy and today she's back at her emailing in attempts to solicit assistance to repair her ruined reputation. I think we can all assume that the top military brass, the politicians, and every other big shot Jill Kelley is demanding help from has her on ignore at this point.

Kelley is actually screaming to the Tampa Mayor in emails that Paula Broadwell is a criminal and a stalker. I, for one, hope that one day Broadwell sues her lying arse and you all know that I am no fan of the war crowd. I suppose that now I am even less of a fan of their groupies. At least Paula Broadwell is real and she's a woman that made a mistake - no clue if that mistake was love or not, but that's immaterial anyway.

Broadwell is at the very front of the War on Terror, yet I find myself developing a certain level of respect for her. Surprised? You wouldn't be if you actually knew me. Back to Jill Kelley...

Someone needs to disabuse the woman of her strange beliefs in relation to public records in the US and public record laws in Florida, the Sunshine State. Any emails sent to the Mayor of Tampa become a matter of public record and can be obtained by anyone, including me.

All 911 calls are recorded and a matter of public record - records that even I, the lone citizen blogger, can request. All calls to a specific address (like 1005 Bayshore Ave. Tampa, FL 33606 for example) create a record that I could walk in the sheriff's office and request along with each and every report ever created by any dispatcher or officer that responded. I have done it in past and I am more than just capable of doing it today.

I'm tellin' ya Jill, the State of Florida's main witness in the case against me (Theresa Isaacs is one of her many names) actually called the police to her home over 160 times in 2 1/2 years. I had access to each and every report by responding law enforcement and chose a selection by title and date. The stack of reports I picked is over two-inches thick and some of the more interesting reading I have ever come across, and that says much. By the time I finished reading all of that crap, I knew Theresa better than her own mother did. Of course the relevant documents were submitted in discovery in my case and trial.

Of course I ran such a search via the relevant sheriff's office on many so-called witnesses involved in my case. What was not submitted in discovery helped me follow a trail of investigation anyway. All of it is relevant as it is in this current situation.

So now Jill Kelley has publicly accused Paula Broadwell of crimes (i.e. being a criminal and a stalker). Lawsuit worthy indeed! My more recent nasty cop caller that I am currently contending with in the "Forum Fiasco" post needs to take note. See how nice I am by not including the information that I could include? Meanwhile you threaten to sue Amazon if they do not get my post removed. LOL

To the nasty cop callers of the world, everyone is a stalker. They think they can make-up anything in the world and cops will crawl to their rescue, charging the innocent with only their word. Well, not all cops, apparently; just the Orlando MBI. Did anyone read my post yesterday on the Jill Kelley and Natalie Khawam fiasco? If you read the story linked, you'll understand the reference:



What I find amazing is that even with a sister that's an attorney, Jill Kelley is clueless as to public record laws in Florida and in the US. Now your emails are media fodder:



I think Jill missed the statement from the FBI that cleared Broadwell on any sort of federal charge in relation to the semi-offensive anonymous emails. The statement was not binding, but it was obvious to the agents that read the few emails than none fit any sort of criteria for criminal charges. You have worked yourself into a frenzy over something created in your warped mind Jill. 

Paula Broadwell has more class than Jill Kelley has had her entire life in her little finger and coming from me, the anti-war blogger, that should drive a point.

What was the DC Madam case about?

With the blessed passing of yet another election cycle, we might reflect on another one from the recent past which resulted in a significant routing of the GOP by the Democrats: the deeply contentious 2006 national midterms. There's at least one major political sex scandal that takes down a significant politician in the United States every election cycle, generally speaking, two years, with overlap for higher office.
After the fall of the Director of the CIA at the hands of the surveillance state, we might reflect on the DC Madam case and look at the same themes and actions at play.
Jeane got this, maybe more towards the end:


Bil… yes, I saw it. This further supports my belief that escort and adult services – which cater to powerful and influential clients – are being used as the new "hunting grounds" in American politics. –Jeane PS if interested, I will be on Geraldo and Coast to Coast Radio (10:30pm PDT) tonight. Newsweek also has done a piece on me, that is coming out in Monday's edition. It should be available online, by late tonight/tomorrow.

Yet, it appears that the GOP practically brought their own scandal to the attention of the American public. This kind of calculated stupidity is completely in character for them. I walked away from this train wreck a few days after this email. This all began with a leak by federal prosecutors to Bill Bastone and the Smoking Gun, they wanted it out there.
Why do this? Damage control knowing that you can redefine a problem. 2006 had a lot to do with corruption, how much the public will take of it, and damage control rather than the willingness to change or to take responsibility like adults. There are no adults, don’t kid yourself. You look at events differently once you’ve been on the inside of them. Whether others like it or not, Jeane allowed me to take in a lot for a purpose. She invited me to sneak a peek behind the curtain, and indeed, some impotent clowns resembling the Wizard of Oz were incompetently pulling levers that affect people’s lives, tripping, falling over each other, and they were just as blunderingly human and frail as I expected them to be. What the case was about is right in front of your eyes, every day, therefore invisible. It wasn’t a mistake that defense and intelligence technology contractor SAIC and the CPU giant Qualcomm were in Jeane’s phone records, or that they were visiting my website any more than it was that so many arrows pointed to San Diego and numerous military personnel, many of them officers. It wasn’t coincidence that put Lockheed Martin in her phone bills for her escort service, that a World Bank executive was in them, that a major league GOP operative like Jack Burkman was too, and there were many others, others I haven’t even included in my account of what I believe happened and what the case meant. Judge Kessler saw no coincidences when she granted Jeane subpoena power over the intelligence community.

This was a tale of partisan politics and statism, but also where the lines blur in those constructs, because interests overlap, making for the strangest bedfellows of all. Why the 2006 midterms? I believe this election is the key to understanding why an interim-appointed U.S. Attorney named Jeffrey A. Taylor decided to move on Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the press-dubbed “DC Madam,” only one month after she’d shuttered her escort service. I’m assuming here that someone tipped her off. Why waste millions on a small escort service like that? This was first of all about damage control for the part of the public that can be reached when presented with stupid things like facts and corroborated evidence, empiricism, stuff that's not entertainment. Without wanting to, I have no faith in the rank-and-file of either major party, and I think Palfrey’s own apathy about politics and her ignorance of it was instrumental in her undoing, word to the wise. Being the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind doesn’t elevate you to the throne.
She knew some significant things about her predicament and her place, but clearly, not enough. What still surprises me is that before I brought the timing of the search of the Vallejo residence to her attention, she, her counsel, and others assisting her, hadn’t considered it—not even journalists she was encountering were expressing their observations of this. For an openly partisan Republican prosecutor to move on a suspect who, perhaps unknowingly, holds information damaging to his party and other related interests, is an unmistakable political act. Breaking the law to achieve damage control and to protect the defense and intelligence contracting game was implicit to their theater and the media was only too happy to play along.

Not even a nearly unprecedented economic crisis was going to overcome the racist backlash over the 2008 election of Barack Obama and it temporarily breathed new life into an ashen GOP, perhaps for the final time, since it was coming from a demographic of angry, aging white Americans whose political significance has been rapidly eroding over the last few decades. In their bigotry, they fear this massive influx of Hispanic refugees, most of them desperate Mexicans fleeing social chaos, generations of poverty, the militarization of the drug war, corrupt federales, goons, police, the cartels, and enslavement in the maquiladora factories that line the Free Trade Zone along the border, and now, private security, the CIA and drones. Such a happy family relationship between nations brought the dictator Porfirio Diaz to remark, “Poor Mexico, so far from God, and so close to the United States.” Yet, thanks to this ruthless repression and exploitation, there were some unexpected results: a new dynamic where Latin Americans are now heading towards being the future of politics, and possibly the labor movement, in the United States. And with this realization among the nativist rabble element came the inevitable Know-nothing reaction of hounding immigrants, which, like lynching, is a time-honored American tradition. Does the public ever truly learn? Which one would that be in a divided nation when these racists are becoming the minority? They're also the staggering idiots who tolerate an emergent police state and runaway defense spending while at the same time painting themselves inaccurately as rebels. That's called a fool. This is why it wasn't surprising to me that these same people--if you want to call them that--run to conspiracy theories that never truly touch on those power centers. Chasing ghosts and being ineffectual is the safest thing in the world. 2006 wasn't especially different from now.

At this, the halfway mark of the second and unfortunate term of George W. Bush, when the future Tea Party members were cheering the illegal occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and police state tactics in the war on terror, Republican Party officeholders were paying the price for more skeletons in their closet than the Marquis de Sade or Al Capone. The litany of corrupt acts, antisocial behaviors, and general high weirdness, was widespread enough in their elected ranks to warrant decades of inquiries, yet, no, according to President Obama, we must “continue to look forward,” sounding as much like Scarface as the Republicans. Of great note, one of the cappers that went over the line was Florida congressman Mark Foley, who was accused of pedophilia. This is all about breaking the law and surviving through until the next ever-tightening election cycle. Controlling the DOJ never hurts. Besides, you can always fire your Attorney General and appoint another one the public can grow to hate as an arch-criminal the more they get to know about them. Almost a year earlier the profoundly illegal warrantless wiretapping program that bypassed the judicial oversight of the FISA court (housed at the DOJ, and I suspect they knew), initiated by the White House, was no longer being sat on by the traditionally submissive New York Times. (They had done this for a full year, so that the 2004 elections could pass by safely for the GOP, at least regarding that particular skeleton.)

You know that there’s a political crisis going on when the culture of politics has shifted so far to the right, that all the partisan hacks can talk about is a non-existent center. Most of what you’re going to be hearing from the official channels when a system ossifies is unbridled crap and lies, more obfuscations, apologies to power, ignoring the growing herd of elephants (the only one), until this game no longer works. Rather than looking at all of what we’re learning about rampant corruption as an excuse to cop-out (pun very much intended) and run to the temporary safety of jaded apathy, we should be glad that we know about these crimes at all, because knowledge really is power. But then the problem is that you’re forced to decide to do something about it. I made that decision getting involved in this case, hoping that I could bear witness to history and to accumulate whatever materials I could for the record. I was successful in that endeavor. Too often, the residue of events is lost to the ages. Collecting these materials was done so that the information could be out there and the public has the option to discover, more generally, how the private sector and government collude, and I've put it out there, with more to come.
An incredible effort was mounted to neutralize the destructive potential of what the charges against the late Ms. Palfrey were really about. To re-frame a story, and by doing so, redefining it, is a common practice in, ours, the most propagandized modern society outside of the former Soviet Union and China under Mao. "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." This is why corrupt government contractors need to operate in the dark, and that’s what the DC Madam case, a branch of Hookergate, was about: to hide their criminal behavior and bury the evidence of their much greater crimes. When you keep raising this glaring discrepancy between how Palfrey was treated under the law on the one hand and how her privileged clients were on the other, and it’s never addressed in any substantial sense by government prosecutors, career spokesmen like P.J. Crowley, those clients like Senator Vitter, law enforcement, the hierarchy at the DOJ, you begin to realize the fix is in. Mind you, this was being said by many of us during the proceedings very loudly, and to no avail, because the mainstream press did its best to let it die by its own hand, and I mean that literally, because they also knew that Jeane was suicidally inclined. Brecht couldn't have dreamed this nightmare up. That's not murder, it's willful negligence

There had been a very serious scandal in 2006—one of many—that eventually fizzled-out named “Hookergate,” the standard cigar and hooker parties that are held in and around the Beltway for hungry contractors, to obtain coveted, high dollar jobs and assuage the seething addictions of sociopath Republican horndogs (as opposed to Democratic ones) with a taste for the high life on your dime. Yes, this is all about the war on terror and the moronic, runaway militarization of America, the biggest buyer of unnecessary, clunky military hardware in the entire world, six hundred times the spending in this area than of all the other nations of the world combined. That’s pretty stupid—nay—exceptional. We not only have the right to blow our balls off in this manner, but we still somehow have the right to speak about it thanks to a historical accident that began during the Colonial period, freedom of speech and the press. Things working out will never be good enough for the species. In our meanness and selfish tendencies that have been fostered into the emotional equivalents of plutonium, another poison we’ve refined, so as to illustrate our collective wretchedness, we have contaminated the world with our greed. From the moral rot of John Jacob Astor, to the senseless greed of the speculator Jay Gould, America’s first millionaires, on down to the Robber Barons like Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan, men who childish fools have emulated ever since, we compromised with the bad guys and lost our way long ago as a nation, and we’re finally running out of road for the last time. This is our last chance. All of this is what the DC Madam case was about, the culmination of generations of baseness and barbarity. Either this is the beginning, the end, or both, but we’ve undoubtedly come full circle, which is rarely a good sign for the little people out there, the rest of us out here in television land.

This has happened before. Our out of control defense spending is doing to American democracy what it did to that system in Athens, first, by bankrupting their Treasury, then the inevitable collapse into anarchy and dictatorship, wrought by irrational military adventurism. Ask the Greeks how long it’s taken to come back from that one. And, so today, we have a similar situation in place thanks to the same kinds of criminals bent on power at any cost: a crisis on several fundamental levels—political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental. Not so long after Jeane died I conveyed to her former counselor Montgomery Blair Sibley that she may as well have stayed alive since, what with the encroaching economic catastrophe, she could have walked out of prison once there was no money to house her anymore (it elicited no response). What was the DC Madam case about? The fall of America by militarized self-immolation and general greed, nihilism.

let the dead bury the dead is now available!

At present, the book is now available at CreateSpace (a subsidiary of Amazon): 

All the information on it is there, but I can state that, at least for the present, it's 27.95 USD, plus shipping. At 622 pages, it's reasonably priced. There will be sales after it's gone up on Amazon US, and in the weeks after, in the EU. 

I'm hoping there will be a lot of interest in the book, what with how popular the US is there now (I jest). That could help, actually, the anti-American sentiment, because Let the Dead Bury the Dead doesn't paint an especially pretty picture of America as a nation and a culture. That, of course, isn't my fault entirely, it's shared. We all own a piece of this mess. What the reaction to the book will be is beyond my ability to know, but I suspect that it will be mixed. That's fine, and I have to say here that it doesn't matter either way when you're dealing with a historical account. There are no rules here except to be as sincere and as accurate as it was possible at the time. I've gone gone above and beyond the call and honored that. 

There have been a few nibbles already from media and interested parties who want to do coverage. I welcome any and all interested parties who are thoughtful, who are receptive, and who at least know a modicum of the facts surrounding the case. It would be unfair to expect prospective interviewers to know as much as I do about the case, because most of what's in the text is out of view, or not well-known at all. Then, there's my unique take on it and my analysis, which I believe is actually more explosive than the primary materials in the book itself. Not a lot of people share my vantage in all of this for reasons of career--mostly selfish reasons. That's their problem, and I will not be humoring anyone with an obvious agenda. I also won't be answering questions from the conspiracy nut crowd, so save it. I don't recognize any legitimacy of these right-wing clowns. You will be ignored.

As for review copies, they will be provided only in the event of an actual review being written. Tiny blogs--like my own--will not be getting any copies, I'm not a charity. Serious inquiries only, the rest I will ignore...

let the dead bury the dead availability


As of today, Let the Dead Bury the Dead is available from Amazon US. In a few weeks it should be available in the EU. There will be no e-book for some time, at least a year.

you can have fries with that: amazon updates on let the dead bury the dead

The "Look Inside" function is now enabled at the Amazon page, and I like how they did it: only so many pages from the first chapter, almost all of the preface, or all, the index, table of contents, and a bit more, but not enough for the deadbeats. Generally speaking, I've been pretty pleased with CreateSpace, thus far, and have been surprised at the ease of their setup. Now, you can see a little for yourself. 

I'm planning some future e-books too. They will not be of this book for the foreseeable future. Be glad: books never crash, only burn, and that takes effort.

Finally, I've been sending out a number of review copies. If you're a member of the press/media and are actually serious about discussing the book and its implications, drop me a line. If you're not, don't go changin'. I'm certain we don't have to worry about that.

Sabtu, 19 Januari 2013

Sergeant Robert Bales: Made in the USA

For the unaware, Sergeant Robert Bales is accused of murdering 16 Afghan citizens in cold blood in March of 2012. The case against Bales is currently in the status of determining if there is enough evidence for a court-martial. Bales was trained at Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, Washington - he is far from the first to be accused of cold-blooded murder that was trained on that base, which should signal a problem to those in authority.

Bales is a soldier that could easily define my last post on this blog. His enlistment date is November 8, 2001. This was his fourth deployment to the Middle East, with the first three to Iraq. He is a poster child of the Bush administration and its statements that, "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists," and clearly viewed the victims as not with us at all.

We should be wondering how many murders Sergeant Robert Bales committed during his 3 deployments to Iraq. I can guarantee that his mindset did not just happen more than a decade after joining the US Armed Forces and on his fourth deployment to the Middle East. There were warning signs and obviously, if we view his lengthy awards list, those signs were ignored by many people.

We should also be wondering how many lesser versions of Bales are walking around in Iraq and Afghanistan today and have walked around over the last decade. Murder 16 innocent people in cold blood and it becomes major news, but kill one here and one there and, well, no one really notices except for the grieving relatives left behind.

His wife defends him and claims that there is no way he committed these cold-blooded murders. That is her job and to be expected; however, I am shocked that she is smiling while stating her defense and at the same time claiming that her, "heart goes out to the families that lost loved ones".

While Bales denies remembering anything that happened that night, his words to fellow soldiers reveals something entirely different. Kudos to those soldiers that came forward and testified to his true mindset and his actual statements. They are the real soldiers and Bales is something else. While he is only accused at this point, there is also DNA evidence and eyewitness testimony to his comings and goings on the night of the murderous rampage.

This reminds me of cases that Paul Bergrin defended in past, prior to the US DOJ pursuing him over false allegations. In one such case, Begrin brought-up the Rules of Engagement and I must wonder if that is a theory that we will hear from the Bales defense at a later date. The victims were innocent, but often such victims are referred to as collateral damage, or "collateral murder" in the case of the video allegedly released by Bradley Manning in which journalists were gunned-down in the streets.

As the preliminary hearing winds down today, his First Sergeant (Vernon Bigham) testified via video-link from Kandahar Air Field in Afghanistan. I do expect to see court-martial recommended in this case as the evidence demands it. As a person against the death penalty, I hope this is taken off the table and life imprisonment without any possibility of release is substituted. You see, I despise Bales and murderers like him, but do not wish death on anyone - a major difference between me and my detractors. I seek peace - not death and war.

Bales is currently being housed in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas at the same military prison as hero Brad Manning.