Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Secret NSA surveillance and the case of Sherman Austin from Raisethefist.com

If the readers of this Website ever had any doubt that the FEDS are all over the Internet watching any Website that is critical of the US Government and its so called war on terror, the following story should clarify the situation for you in spades.

My 9-11 Website is monitored by the FEDS 24 hours a day and for very similar reasons to that of Sherman Austin's -- they fear those of us who don't buy the government's official story about 9-11, and who spend our days researching the facts behind the 9-11 attacks, while discarding the JFK -like-whitewash that the government has furnished the American people with.

Of course the fact that I am an illegally monitored long term satellite prisoner/nonconsensual human experimentee of the US Government, only complicates matters, since this is something that the FEDS will never willingly admit, and only do so grudgingly when finding themselves behind the 8 ball. However, by then there will be scads of others who've figured out that they've also been targeted by the NSA or other government agencies for precedent setting human right's violations, and the FEDS will utilize their black propaganda campaigns in attempts to justify that tracking Americans by way of satellite 24 hours a day, for decades on end (citizens by the way who have no criminal records) was warranted.

Of course Hitler had convinced the German people that he was well within his right to murder millions of innocent Jews and they went right along without question. So what did Hitler and the US Federal Intelligence community have in common? The FEDS like the late Hitler, have committed heinous crimes against humanity and are equally as criminally insane.

Like my Website, Sherman's was documenting the truth about the US Government and the complete fraud it is, and the FEDS are just looking for any reasons to shut this one down. Moreover, they are also searching for any excuse to arrest me or for that matter any persons who are attempting to expose the truth about 9-11.

They simply do not want any back talk and are expecting to force feed their official line of propaganda down the collective throat of the American people, while they continue to perpetrate the 9-11 coverup. This has been going on for 5 and half consecutive years. And there are far fewer Americans who believe the official story now than they did 5 and a half years ago, which means that the FEDS are failing to make their point and growing more desperate with each passing year.

And why not?? Especially since the bilge that they're pumping is pure garbage -- an outright LIE to coverup for an administration which has set a new low for an already seriously corrupted federal government. But perpetrating a terrorist attack on your own citizens?

The Bush Administration and the PNAC are truly the lowest of the low.

In the present day, the USA is a near mirror image of 1930's Germany shortly before Hitler and his Third Reich took power. And with every passing day, Americans can see within their own towns the gradual formation of a militarized police presence, authorized by the Bush Administration under the Bill Of Rights' emasculating Patriot Act.

Those of us who refuse to back down to this intimidation are being ostracized for it within our own communities and subjected to outright violations of our civil rights. History will record this in detail as time goes by and these fiends are exposed for what they are and punished for their crimes against humanity.

Read on my Brothers and Sisters, because the following information concerns each and everyone of you:


Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2006 at 12:49 PM

Former political prisoner and former webmaster of Raisethefist.com , Sherman Austin talks about NSA wire-taps and FBI “anti-terrorism” surveillance used against him shortly after 9/11.

by Sherman Austin

edited, typed and posted by Akwala

There seems to be alot of buzz in the media on how Bush authorized the use of illegal NSA wire-taps and surveillance for domestic spying to stop terrorism. I thought I'd write an article summarizing how this was used in my case while running a political web site and direct action network www.Raisethefist.com

BEFORE 9/11

Before 9/11 Raisethefist.com was receiving approximately 2,000 hits daily from people around the world. Government agencies also frequented the site daily , monitoring articles, commentary posted by other users and continuously checking the front page for updates. In many cases Raisethefist.com received over 100 hits in a single day from U.S government agencies, the majority of these hits all connecting through Department of Defense gateways.

These agencies were mostly federal , FBI, Secret Service, etc. but monitoring also came from local police, California highway patrol. etc. There was also daily monitoring coming from government and military departments in the UK, Canada, Egypt, Japan, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, etc. on a daily basis. All of this information was filtered, logged and archived through tracking programs I wrote on the server. It's all logged.

As raisethefist.com grew more popular so did the hits from government agencies on the site. This type of monitoring didn't just stick to the web site. I would organize events and post information on the site and the FBI would show up. At one event the FBI circled the area in a car stopping people they recognized who were attending the event calling them by name, they also had an undercover agent taking pictures across the street.

This is a little taste of what was going on before 9/11/2001.

AFTER 9/11

Right after 9/11 government traffic poured into the web site like never before. I was running raisethefist.com off a number of servers that were connected to a residential DSL line. This DSL line was connected through a residential phone number that was installed in the same room as all the equipment.

Before my home was raided 3 ½ months after 9/11 by the FBI and Secret Service L.A joint-terror task force, they had been packeting the internet line that raisethefist.com was hosted from , in other words they were watching all data coming in and out of the line and saving it on a remote device. [the feds did not have to obtain a warrant.

The NSA was secretly authorized to perform this type of surveillance] This started happening immediately after 9/11. In addition they were breaking into several instant messenger accounts and sending messages to other people pretending to be me. For others it wasn't easy to distinguish the difference because they talked just like me. Obviously the team of people the NSA / FBI hired for the job spent a great deal of time doing social profiling while monitoring my conversations.

I would be on one screen name then get kicked off , sign onto a different screen name and receive a threat from the other screen name I was just on saying "your ass is going to jail". I was told "this is a matter of national security". They would also threaten friends of mine sending them messages such as "your ass is next".

They would send me messages with information they knew about myself, the servers I was running, and the conversations I had online with other people. I have logs of all this activity. I also confirmed these were indeed the feds when during the raid when I mentioned to the FBI I knew they were packeting my DSL line and hacking into instant messenger accounts. They didn’t dispute my argument.

Special Agent John I. Pi with the FBI who conducted the raid said, "How did you find out?". I also got to see the individuals who were hired for the job as they accompanied the FBI at my first court arraignment. At the same time these instant messenger accounts were being hacked into and commandeered by the feds, my phone line was being heavily tapped. In addition I would also receive calls over the line at the oddest hours of the night.

Knowing the line was tapped I never answered the phone until the calls became more consistent. I would pick up the phone asking who was there. Nobody would answer but I could tell someone was on the other end because I could hear them breathing. At first I figured it might just be a prank phone call or something.. but the calls wouldn't stop and became more consistent.

Every time I picked up the phone I got no answer. But they wouldn’t hang up either. These calls would come in at spontaneous hours , 1pm, 3am, 6am, 8pm .etc. Then it got to a point where the calls came 24 hours straight with about 2-5 minute intervals. At this point it was obvious the calls weren't coming from a human being but instead it was some kind of automated system running each call through. If this alone wasn't peculiar, at the very same time there was allot of unusual activity outside my house.

I would come home during the day or late at night and see cars with black tinted windows parked in front of the house. All of the windows were tinted pitch black. They never left until after I parked and went inside the house. In one case two individuals were parked across the street one late night when I arrived home. I noticed there was no other car on the side of the street they were parked on so the they stood out and immediately caught my eye.

I watched them in my rear view mirror as I parked and they were both focused directly on me. I turned off my headlights and was about to get out of the car before I hesitated. I started up the car again and drove around the block and they tried to follow me. These incidents became more and more common and continued to intensify before the raid.



THE FBI RAID 1/24/02

On January 24, 2002 at approximately 4PM while I was taking a nap, some 25 federal agents from the FBI and Secret Service joint-terror task force were surrounding my house with loaded sub-machine guns, shot guns, and bullet proof vests. I didn't know they were there until my sister woke me up saying there were fbi-looking cars parked all up and down the street and people outside all focused in on the house. I went to the front door and was pulled outside.

I saw agents emerge from their hiding spots around all angles of the house with their guns drawn. They had even jumped the fence into the backyard to cover the rear end of the house. The FBI came with a 25 page warrant for search and seizure. They knew exactly were my room was when they entered the house. One agent holding a sub-machine gun said "follow me it's this way" leading the others down the hallway to back of the house to the room where I had the servers.

The FBI had pictures of the house including a written description and a complete structural floor plan with every room before they came in. I was probably very lucky I wasn't home alone because I was completely unaware that agents were positioned right outside my bedroom window with loaded weapons while I was asleep. Although I would have probably woke up once they started breaking down the front door with the long piece of special steal they brought with them.

I was told the raid was because of Raisethefist.com. I asked how such an operation could be conducted because of a web site. I was told it was now legal under the new USA Patriot Act (which had passed only 90 days ago). The secret service asked me if I wanted to see the president killed. The FBI kept trying to ask me about Raisethefist.com and where the logs were.

Too bad for them I just happened to purge them before they came. The FBI also said I had content on the web site that dealt with information on how to manufacture explosives. This was a lie. In fact this information existed on a page of a completely different web site I simply had a link to. Nonetheless I was accused of authoring it. The FBI was looking for anything to justify a raid and get their hands on the servers. So they took another persons web site , lied , and said I admitted to authoring it when I never did. The FBI admitted to monitoring raisthefist.com and said I was being watched for along time.

When the FBI left they said I had crossed over a line and as long as I got back on the other side of that line everything would be okay. In other words they were telling me to keep my mouth shut and to discontinue "Raise the Fist". After the raid I continued my plans to attend the world economic forum protests in New York. The Secret Service notified the New York police chief of my presence. When I arrived I noticed I was being followed and surveilled by agents in an SUV.

The police started targeting demonstrators in a number sweeps on the crowd. In the first one I was arrested with 26 other people. We were taken to Brooklyn Navy Yard Jail and I was taken into a back room in hand-cuffs and interrogated for several hours by a detective from the FBI and a Secret Service agent. I was asked if I was terrorist or involved in any terrorist organizations. They asked about Raisethefist. They asked how I got to New York and where my car was parked.

They said I wouldn't leave New York until they searched my car. I was then released. I was in the lobby of the court house for about 30 minutes until I was arrested by the FBI and hurried into a black SUV where I was taken to a federal building then to Manhattan MCC where I was placed into a 24-hour lockdown maximum security federal prison cell. I was in the same cell block as those being accused of the U.S.S Cole bombing and the bombing of the U.S Embassy in Kenya.

I could hear one of the guards arguing with the inmate in the cell next to mine about the Taliban. After this 13 day ordeal of being called a "man on a mission" by the FBI, and newspapers such as the New York Post reading "baby-bomb bust" and "teen terrorist" (I was 18 at the time) , I was released as federal prosecutors decided not to file an indictment just yet. They first wanted to go through all of the servers that were seized during the raid. I flew back to California.



AFTER THE RAID AND FIRST FBI ARREST

You would think at this point that the surveillance and harassment would've toned down a bit since the FBI got what they wanted. But this wasn't the case, it intensified even more. A month later I got raisethefist.com back online by obtaining some remote backups I made before the raid. I also continued my organizing within the community. Raisethefist.com became a network with people setting up chapters in their schools and neighborhoods. This was called the RAISE THE FIST DIRECT ACTION NETWORK.

[http://DAN.Raisethefist.com] I encouraged people to start more chapters in their local communities, schools, etc. Chapters started sprouting up around the U.S , Germany, Brazil, Canada, etc. Views were no longer only being discussed online through words but were now being put to action in our own neighborhoods. Because of all the media coverage after the raid and arrest, Raisethefist.com was now receiving allot more hits. Over 140,000 a week.

The site worked up so much bandwidth that it was constantly going down because hosting companies complained they couldn't handle the load. Eventually I was able to collocate the server to a high-speed backbone in Irvine. I moved to Long Beach and worked with a collective at a revolutionary and community empowerment book store which was built right next door to a living quarters where we lived. Immediately after getting raisethefist.com back online instant messenger accounts were being hacked into again. This time the threats were allot more aggressive and consistent.

Email accounts that were associated with the raisethefist.com domain name registration were hacked into and used to re-route raisethefist.com to a different server knocking the site off-line. When this happened I posted logs of the conversations and threats I received over the screen name that was being hacked into and commandeered by the feds on http://la.indymedia.org. The next day I received a message with the new password and I was told that I better not try to change it because they were watching and they had full control over whether the site would stay up or not.

On one occasion I managed to obtain the IP address of one of the person(s) commandeering these accounts. I traced the IP down to an area of Los Angeles near a federal building. In addition I was also being followed undercover agents. One time I posted a banner on the top of raisethefist.com announcing a press-conference and march that was being held in Inglewood after the police beating of Donovan Jackson. I left with a group of friends. We took 2 cars. It wasn't until we were on the freeway when our friends in the other car told us we were being followed by a man in the white car behind us.

He followed us all the way into Inglewood. When we arrived we parked a few blocks away from the city hall. We could see police and other people in suits on top of the City Hall roof with binoculars, cameras and walkie talkies. Immediately after we parked 4 motorcycle cops drove over to us and followed us to the event. The man in the white car followed us on foot. When we later left we were escorted out of Inglewood by 4 motorcycle cops until we got on the freeway.

Being followed like this became a common occurrence. And it also came from local police not just the feds. One time I was riding my bike down the street late at night. A police car drives up in front of me on the sidewalk and stops me. The cop gets out and say's , "What's up Austin!" , then 2 more units show up right after him and both police get out and say "What's up Sherman!" , "What's up Austin!".

I'm then asked about raisethefist.com and where I’m going. I asked them why they were so quick to stop me and how they all knew my name and I learn my picture is hanging up in the police station. During this harassment and surveillance I was also waiting to hear back from my public defender on whether or not I was facing any charges. After a period of 6 months federal prosecutors call my lawyer and tell him they didn't find anything on the computers to get me for but they didn't want to let me off the hook.

So they present us with a pre- indictment binding plea agreement. Something that my lawyer said he's never seen before because he's used to seeing a formal indictment first. But in this case the prosecutors were so quick to present me with a plea deal. The bargain was to admit to authoring and distributing the pages about explosives that existed on the other web site that I didn’t author or distribute. This web site was called the RECLAIM GUIDE. It was authored and implemented by a different individual. And it's not like the FBI didn't know this. 2 weeks before federal prosecutors contacted my lawyer , the FBI paid this person a visit.

They confirmed that he was indeed the author of information on how to manufacture explosives and put it on online. Then they left. False documents were drafted up saying I admitted to authored the "RECLAIM GUIDE" and all the information on how to build and manufacture explosives. These 2 pieces of evidence are actually in the FBI discovery. Apparently the FBI forgot to black-out the part where they visited the person who actually wrote the explosives information. These 2 contradicting articles were ignored by prosecutors.

They wanted to pretend they didn't even exist because they know the FBI screwed up. They pressed forward urging that I sign this pre-indictment plea agreement.

THE PRE-INDICTMENT CONVICTION / NSA WIRE-TAPS AND SURVEILLANCE COVER-UP

Everyone keeps asking why I was never formerly indicted. This was to cover up the NSA wire-taps and surveillance. At a formal indictment evidence is presented to the court or grand jury. This is a formal document written for a prosecuting attorney charging a person with some offense. This document is supposed to contain evidence backing up the prosecutors accusation.

The only so-called evidence the prosecutors had was obtained through ILLEGAL NSA WIRE TAPS and surveillance. I know the prosecutors had this information because they referred to it in a meeting me and my lawyer had with them when I requested to see the all this so-called evidence they said they were going to use against me if I didn't take the plea. If there was a formal indictment then the FBI would have been forced to unveil the NSA wire-taps and continuous surveillance. Then this whole media buzz about Bush authorizing the NSA to do illegal surveillance against so-called terrorists would have been in the media along time ago.

They couldn't afford this type of publicity. This is why they desperately tried to keep this "hush-hush." This is also why they wrote up false-documents stating that I admitted to authoring information on how to build explosives. They could take the fact that I simply posted a link on www.raisethefist.com to another persons web site which I did not author but happened to contain a page on "bomb-making information", and twist it around. It was all they needed to stir up the 9/11 reactionary emotionalism in the court and get their conviction.

The feds wanted this conviction so bad and so quick because they knew what would have happened if this had gone public. Every time I rejected the plea I was told I wouldn't have a second chance and that the feds would come down on me hard in court and I’d be looking at 3-4 years in prison. They told my lawyer I only had one chance to accept a plea or go to trial. It was a one chance offer and I'd better make my decision right away or face years in prison.

I immediately rejected the plea telling my lawyer I wanted a trial. The prosecuters held out and bought time and tried to convince me and my lawyer. I kept rejecting it. Then I told them I would take it. At the arraignment I changed my mind again and said I wasn't taking any plea deal. Now expecting to prepare for a trial, the prosecutors limboed around to buy more time and told my lawyer the deal was still on the table.

They said I would be looking at 3-4 years in prison if convicted at trial. I said okay fine and rejected again. Then I changed my mind again at the last minute and asked if I could take it. The prosecutors turned around so quickly with the plea agreement wanting me to sign. They initially said I only had one chance to take the plea and that was it. So I decided to change my mind again and reject it. Then they went into legal limbo again trying to buy more time.

Why didn’t they just take it to court like they initially said they were going to do? It was obvious something very fishy was going on. They were so desperate to have me sign the plea. My lawyer said he had never seen a case like this in all the years of his practice.They said they had all this evidence against me yet they never wanted a formal indictment.

DEATH THREATS

During this period of going back and forth to court playing this game of legal limbo I was also receiving countless death-threats from neo-Nazi’s and white supremacists. I got them by email and they were constantly posted to the raisethefist.com news wire.

There had always been death threats from white supremacists, except now they were much more consistent, direct and some cases very peculiar. One made reference to a huge black-out , "when all the lights go off" following with "your nigger ass gets killed". The next day the entire east coast experienced the biggest black-out in 30 years. This is when several power grids went down in August of 2003 leaving 60 million people from Ottawa to Detroit, from Toledo to Hartford, from Cleveland to New York City without electricity.

A day later the same person who posted this threat posted again saying "See I told you so , you better watch out" and followed with more death threat rhetoric. This was all logged and archived on the server. On August 4, 2003 I was sentenced to a year in federal prison and 3 years probation after being threatened with an additional 20 years under a terrorism enhancement.

My lawyer didn't want to take the case to trial under these conditions and I had no legal funds to afford the legal team I needed. I was convicted under statute, 18 U.S.C. 842 (p)(2)(A) "DISTRIBUTION OF INFORMATION RELATED TO EXPLOSIVES OR WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION", pushed through Congress by Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein in the late 1990s under Clinton’s anti-terrorism bill. The offending material, which again I emphasize I did not author, contained amateurish instructions on how to assemble simple explosives. The individual who actually wrote this information was not convicted of anything. He was white.

As I said before, the FBI questioned him, confirmed he authored this information, and left. They fabricated a case in cahoots with federal prosecutors, Dianne Feinstein, John Ashcroft and judge Steven V. Wilson. After I was sentenced government agencies continued to monitor the site heavily. My main concern was getting the site secured and ready for when I went in so it would stay online for the next 4 years without my assistance. 3 weeks before I had to self-surrender the server went down because the hosting company went out of business.
The only way to get raisethefist.com back online was to physically pick up the server from where I had it collocated in Irvine. When I picked up the server I was informed that the FBI called them 2 weeks prior asking to get access to the raisethefist.com box. Luckily the guy running the company declined to give them any access. Yet the FBI was actively trying to get their hands on the server once again. I brought the server back to Long Beach and hooked it up to my residential DSL struggling to keep the site online amidst the threat of feds coming with another search warrant to seize it.

Luckily I received assistance to have it moved to a remote location again. Once I was sentenced, I was ordered to self-surrender to the U.S marshals in 30 days. At this point the death threats came in just about every day. I was told I'd be leaving prison in a body bag. At first I thought the threats were coming from just a couple of people. When I tracked them I noticed they were coming from many different areas and different people. A few months prior to being sentenced I also received information from anonymous persons telling me there was a price on my head set by the NSA and other higher-ups in the government.

I was informed about 3 different supposed assassination attempts to be carried out. I was given some detail on who was serving the contracts, names , license plate numbers, etc. Other then that I was told it was a surprise I was still alive but everything was being taken care of and I was being "looked out for." After I self-surrendered to the U.S marshals I was taken to San Bernardino detention facility to await transfer to my designated institution.

It just so happens that the San Bernardino Detention Facility has the largest number of Aryan Brotherhood and neo-Nazi’s. The U.S Marshals, FBI, USPO, and all other government agencies and persons working on my case all knew about the daily death threats coming from neo-Nazi’s saying they were determined to have me killed once I entered prison. And yet I’m placed in an institution with the largest population of Aryan Brotherhood and neo-Nazi’s. I was in the general population dormitory for about a day and a half. I noticed the whites were all in the back of the dormitory.

My name is called over the intercom to be escorted to one of the deputy offices. Before I leave one of the white inmates walks up to the front of the dormitory and approaches me. I've never even talked to this guy before. He seems extremely interested in my whereabouts and asks where I’m going. I tell him I don't have a clue. He asks me to find out and tell him when I get back. I get escorted to the office by a deputy sheriff where two detectives from San Bernardino County are waiting to talk to me.

They start asking me questions about raisethefist.com such as who was now running the web site. I declined to answer. Then they ask about the death threats I had been receiving prior to coming in. They tell me that a price is on my head and all of the neo-Nazi’s and Aryan Brotherhood's know where I was and word was out. They tell me the reason why they decided to intervene wasn't to stop anybody from getting hurt but instead it was allot of paperwork if something did happen. San Bernardino would have blood on their hands they didn't want to deal with.

So I was placed into PC (protective custody) until I was airlifted to Oklahoma Federal Transfer center where I spent 2 weeks in the hole, then finally to Tucson FCI where I spent another week in the hole before being let out onto the yard in general population.

CONTINUED SURVEILLANCE AFTER RELEASE ....

FEDS MOVE IN ACROSS THE STREET

My official release date was Sept 1, 2004. After I was released I stayed at my Mom's apartment for a few months before I got back on my feet. I had pretty much lost everything so I had to start over. Only 2 weeks being out and the FBI had already moved in across the street.

A man and a woman who both worked at the same Westwood Federal Building that Special Agent John I. Pi worked at along with the rest of his team. They had the blinds closed 24/7 on all the windows. And if a window didn't come with blinds they covered it with black cloth. I noticed something wasn't right early on when I was outside at night walking my dog. I notice the guy who just moved into the unit driving up in his blue car. He parks and sees me across the street and doesn't get out. I walk next to his car and stop and he freezes up.

Then I walk the opposite direction down the street and he watches me the whole time through his rear-view mirror. When I’m out of sight he drives off. Then he comes back thinking I’m not around , parks his car , and enters the unit. I noticed there was something definitely strange about the look he gave me but I didn't want to jump to conclusions so quickly. It was later confirmed through a neighbor that they indeed worked at the Westwood federal building.

Undercover agents shouldn't talk to neighbors about where they work. But it was pretty obvious anyway. Sometimes when they came home at odd hours of the night and they forgot to take off the security badges around their necks. We have photographs. After about 5 months they finally left. Today the case is still far from over. I’m still serving the 3 years of strict probation which prohibits me from having any access to a computer as well as associating with anyone who espouses violence for political change (whoever that might be).

And due to the nature of the case any time I get stopped or pulled over by the police and my name is run i'm detained because it say's I have "terrorist ties". Harassment and surveillance still also continues to this day. Nonetheless, i'm writing this to show people just how deep this NSA wiretapping and surveillance issue goes. This article is only a summary on my case. This whole issue is far deeper than the Department of Defense simply profiling demonstrators at an anti-war march in Hollywood. And if you happened to be profiled because you attended an anti-war march in Hollywood I’m sure it went far beyond just taking your picture and name and putting you in a database.

The fact that every single one of these big anti-war marches are routed down streets with the most security cameras on them speaks for it'self. Bush, Cheney, the NSA, FBI , etc. They're all trying to justify their domestic spying program saying it was necessary to stop terrorists attacks in the U.S. Let's not forgot about the countless people who "look Muslim" or "look middle-eastern" or "look Arab" who were detained and held for months with absolutely no charges. Taken from their homes and their families and eventually deported.

Let's stop looking at how the "war on terrorism" targeted political decent for one minute and look how it was targeted against your average citizen simply because of the way he or she looks. Let's stop looking at the police repression used against anti-war marches for a minute and look at how people who never attended a single protest or demonstration in their life suddenly ended up in a 24-hour lockdown maximum security federal prison cell.

This is national security. It has nothing to do with stopping "terrorism." Some say we're moving closer and closer to a police state. The fact of the matter is we've already been in a police state. And it's just advanced to the next level. What are we going to do about it? Continue to vote? Continue to pay the price? Will we continue to participate in this political circus of democrats and republicans which is nothing more than a tool to keep the people demobilized and distracted from building a revolutionary movement? Are we going to wait until the next presidential selection only to be bamboozled again, and again, and again?

Or are we going to finally realize that we will only get what we are organized to take?

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For more information on Sherman's case and contact info please visit http://www.freesherman.org or http://www.raisethefist.com Sherman was released from federal prison in 2004 with 3 years of strict probation. He has since been focusing on writing a book about his case and working on music projects playing with the group Colectivo Error.

Isn't This A Crime That The FBI Is Supposed To Be Preventing? So Why Aren't They?

The Case Of Former FBI Agent Jane Turner

This is yet another case of a former FBI agent with an excellent reputation, who became sexually harassed by some of her colleagues and consequently forced to filed charges against them.

Yes that's correct. What we have here is a situation where certain FBI agents are sexually harassing others.

And this is far from the only instance in which the FBI and myriad agents have been dragged through the mud for their criminal ways. The FBI has a long history of acting deviantly which includes pedophila, wife swapping and group sex. And numerous instances of this have been documented in perpetuity on the Internet with the actual names of those agents who were convicted of some the aforesaid offenses.

This should give a really warm feeling to those citizens who were under the delusion that the FBI was actually an organization that could be trusted to protect the interests of the American people. To anyone who knows the truth about this organization, considering the FBI as a protector of American civil rights is positively laughable. And there is no longer any question that this agency has aided & abetted a coverup in regard to the attacks on 9-11, having seized physical proof that 9-11 was an inside job and either destroyed it, or kept it hidden from the public eye.

Americans are still waiting to see the footage of the so called 757 that hit the Pentagon. Footage from the two dozen or so cameras that the FBI confiscated tapes from, yet never showed to the public. Why not? Why not show us the tapes of the 757 hitting the Pentagon and getting back some badly needed public credibility? Because the tapes don't show a 757 hitting the Pentagon and the FBI is well aware of this. While there is no way to know exactly what these tapes will show, based on the forensic evidence gathered at the crash site, it's more than likely that these videos would show a cruise missile slamming into the "only reinforced" section of the Pentagon.

And the FBI's never bothered to acknowledge that three of the four black boxes were found at the World Trade Center, even though several credible sources have said that A. they were and B. the FBI seized all of them.

So why haven't more FBI agents come forward with this information? Because they have seen what's happened to their fellow comrades who blew the whistle on FBI corruption and don't want their lives destroyed in the same way. To the FBI silence truly is golden. To the rest of us it just smacks of a precedent setting criminal conspiracy in which the FBI was not used to solve these crimes, but instead to obfuscate the situation by aiding and abetting those who perpetrated the attacks on 9-11 (hint -- one of them resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.) Can you guess who it is?

As for those who've questioned why the mainstream media has never bothered to answer the hard questions regarding 9-11, they like staying employed. If any of them were to rock the Bush Adminstration's applecart, they'd find themselves on the unemployment line and blackballed from the news industry in a hurry.

Just ask Dan Rather. He is still stinging from losing his job over reporting a truthful account of George W. Bush's being AWOL during his time in the National Guard. It's not like Rather lied or anything. He just attacked a member of the Bush Crime Family and was able to document his allegations. That is simply not allowed. You can say whatever you want about the Bushs -- Just don't be able to prove it. Otherwise you end up like Michael Boren Williams and Margie Schoedinger (one who's now deceased and the other who's hiding out in another country having been warned by the elder Bush to leave the USA or die).

And the FBI's no different.

I am familiar with a significant number of FBI agents (and for that matter agents working for other federal agencies) who've had their lives destroyed when reporting crimes committed by other agents within this organization.

In the FBI the belief that thou shalt not rat out their colleagues appears to be more important than the exposing and punishing of corrupt agents within the Bureau. Given this disturbing situation is it any wonder why the FBI has become one of the largest and most dangerous criminal organizations in America, known more for its violations of the Bill Of Rights, than its protection of them?

It's clear from the way that government whistleblowers are treated, that the basic ideology of these organizations is to destroy any persons who expose their corruption. Seen as traitors, whistleblowers have no recourse other than to deal as best they can with the vicious COINTELPRO tactics meted out to them by their former employers and colleagues, who systematically destroy their reputations, relationships and abilities to earn a living.

There's no longer any question that this is exactly how the FBI and its criminal bretheren operate. The real issue is when are Congress and The US Justice Department going to stop covering up for these organizations and prosecute them when they violate the civil rights of their own employees? (And for that matter those American citizens who've been targeted for the US Intelligence community's COINTELPRO tactics.)


Last update: February 05, 2007

Ex-agent wins lawsuit against FBI


Jurors said the FBI retaliated against the female agent, who filed a discrimination complaint in 1998.


By Dan Browning, Star Tribune

Federal jurors hugged former FBI agent Jane Turner on Monday after awarding her $565,000 in damages and finding that the agency had retaliated against her for filing a 1998 sex-discrimination complaint.

"I think you were the very best FBI agent," juror Mashima Dickens told Turner, who investigated child sex-abuse crimes. "Looking at the way you were treated, I just said you were screwed left and right," Dickens said, tears rolling down her cheeks.

"I just want to tell you I have nothing but the utmost respect for you," juror Renee Anderle said as she hugged Turner in the hallway outside Chief U.S. District Judge James Rosenbaum's courtroom in Minneapolis.

"This is vindication," said Turner, 55, of St. Paul. "We spoke truth to power, and we won."

But Turner said she could never repair the damage done to her by her colleagues in the FBI, an organization she had dreamed of joining since she read Nancy Drew detective novels at age 12.

"I'm dead in their eyes because I betrayed them. And that's what's so sad," Turner said.

The government's attorneys declined to comment on the verdict in the trial, which began Jan. 24. Stephen Kohn, one of Turner's attorneys and president of the National Whistleblower Center in Washington, called it historic. "I think it's the largest jury verdict in a civil rights case against the FBI for an individual plaintiff," he said.

The jury of six women and four men awarded Turner damages of $60,000 in lost wages and $505,000 for emotional distress, loss of reputation and similar injuries.

Rosenbaum will reduce the non-wage damages to the statutory limit of $300,000, said Robert Hill, of Eden Prairie, another of Turner's attorneys.

Turner had a noteworthy career. After joining the FBI in 1978, she helped capture Christopher Boyce, a Soviet spy, and solved some horrendous child-sex abuse and murder cases on North Dakota Indian reservations.

Records show that she received superior or exceptional job ratings until after her supervisor, Craig Welken, was interviewed in 1999 about a sex-discrimination complaint she had filed the previous year. Her ratings plummeted, which led to a transfer from Minot, N.D., to a desk job in Minneapolis.

Jurors decided that the negative job reviews were retaliation for filing the internal discrimination complaint, but that the transfer was not.

About a month after Turner filed the complaint against Welken, a task force was being formed to investigate a child pornographer who had confessed in an Internet chat room to murdering his 7-year-old daughter. The killer, Larry Froistad, recanted his confession, and the U.S. attorney in North Dakota at the time, the late John Schneider, wanted Turner's help. Welken resisted initially, but said he gave in because Schneider was "unrelenting."

Schneider later credited Turner in an e-mail with solving the Froistad case.

Martha Fagg, one of two assistant U.S. attorneys from Iowa who represented the FBI, argued that Turner had basically stopped working after the Froistad case, and that the transfer to Minneapolis was designed to help her get back on track.

"In my opinion, she was using the EEO [Equal Employment Opportunity] process not as a shield, but as a sword," Fagg said.

However, Turner's attorneys introduced evidence that she kept up her casework and solved some especially tough cases while she was being downgraded on her reviews. Two assistant U.S. attorneys testified that they never saw Turner slack off.

Turner's attorneys plan to file for compensation. Kohn said the final bill will be "well over $1 million to taxpayers in a case that should have been resolved at a fraction of the cost years ago."

Turner still has a complaint pending against the FBI with the U.S. inspector general's office. She reported that a fellow agent had brought back memorabilia from the World Trade Center in Manhattan after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Turner said she was being run out of the FBI after that, so she retired in 2003.

©2007 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

How The FBI Uses Local Police And The Media To Overtly Attack Those Americans Whom They Target

The following, is a letter written by a member of the Redwood Summer Justice Project, regarding the FBI's use of the media and Oakland, CA Police to attack environmental activists in a criminal campaign to smear their reputations. There was no due process of law in this instance and numerous violations of the US Constitution took place at the direction of the FBI and the Oakland Police Department.

I have long been targeted by the FBI, NSA and The Department Of Homeland Security for the same despicable tactics, and violations of due process of law, as have myriad others whom these fascist organizations were unable to legally arrest -- despite their use of COINTELPRO entrapment tactics. While Homeland Security has only been around since the 9-11 attacks, they have quickly established a reputation for the use of intimidation tactics and shown a propensity towards violating civil rights.

All of the aforementioned government agencies are so wicked in the ways in which they violate both civil and human rights, that the accounts of those targeted for them need to be retold over and over again, until the American people understand that these agencies simply do not belong in a country that purports to respect the civil liberties of all its citizens -- something that the FBI, NSA and Homeland Security clearly do not! And their "broken record" cry of violating civil rights as a result of the war on terror is now beginning to fall on deaf ears, as the American people continue to learn of the Bush Adminstration's betrayal of them in its attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon September 11th, 2001.

To those who say that something like this could never happen, may I remind you of Adolf Hitler's attack on the German Reichstag Building which he blamed on the Russians and then used to defend his rational for declaring war on Russia.

With war mongers like Hitler and George W. Bush there are always "methods to their madness." The fact that they are quite mad is what should be of concern to all people. George W. Bush, like Adolf Hitler, General Franco, Benito Musolini, and Joseph Stalin, is quite obviously criminally insane, with the deaths of more than 650,000 people on his hands as of early 2007.


The following letter illustrates the FBI's use of the Oakland, CA Police Department and US Media to mislead the public in regard to ecological activists Judi Bari and Daryl Cherney, both of whom were seriously injured back in 1990 when a bomb that the FBI planted in their station wagon exploded. Judi and Daryl sued the FBI claiming that this organization had conspired to destroy the Earth First! movement, and won a 4.4 million dollar judgement against the FBI. Judi had died prior to witnessing her victory, but her name lives on in immortality as the Mother of the Earth First! movement; something that given their vicious attempts to destroy her, must truly stick in the FBI's craw.


"Dear Friends and Supporters,

Since our last mailing to you, we learned of a spate of violent attacks and attempted frame-ups of environmental activists around the country. As we talked with the targeted activists, we couldn’t escape the feeling that it was exactly this atmosphere of stepped-up violence, threats of violence and law enforcement complicity that had led up to the car bomb attack on Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney in 1990.

We need to alert you to the attacks on these courageous environmental activists as they continue to stand up against increasingly violent attempts to scare them off and to neutralize effective grassroots environmental protection movements nationwide. (See "The REAL Eco-Terrorism," linked from home page.) Equally important, we have much progress to report on Judi and Darryl’s lawsuit against the FBI— the civil rights case you have so steadfastly supported at every turn. We think you’ll agree that recent events are stunning. Your support for the case is more important now that ever.


The Appellate Court Hearing

After languishing in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals for nearly a year, on April 15th we had our day in court to refute the Oakland Police Department’s appeal of Judge Claudia Wilken’s qualified immunity ruling. Wilken’s October, 1997 decision had swept away the Oakland Police claims to immunity from prosecution and cleared our way to trial.

The three-judge appellate panel showed no patience with Oakland’s assertion that police had the right to act on the basis of FBI lies despite overwhelming physical evidence to the contrary. Oakland hardly even defended their position, underlining the fact that the appeal was only a procedural delaying tactic with no hope or basis for success. Once the appeal is resolved, Judge Wilken will set a date for trial.


Mystery of the Missing Documents: The Plot Thickens

While waiting for the appeals court hearing, we fought for and won the right to continue discovery against the FBI. One of many suspicious anomalies in the FBI’s main bombing file is that the numbers on most of the documents have been crossed out and new numbers written in. With whole blocks of numbers missing, this renumbering has caused us to suspect that the FBI is hiding documents from us."

Jim Marino Speaking Here:

The aforementioned is important because it documents how the FBI will routinely lie to local police and media in efforts to illegally target a person or group whom the FBI cannot legally arrest. It's clear that this is what the FBI did in efforts to destroy the Earth First! movement and activist Judi Bari. Even more concerning were the despicable tactics that the FBI used in its attempt to obfuscate the situation, in efforts to prevent Judi and her team of lawyers from building their case against the FBI.

Feeding false information to the Oakland PD and local media was clearly a desperate tactic on the part of the FBI, who was well aware of its guilt in this situation, and looking to misdirect attention away from themselves. Below is further evidence that the FBI will also obstruct justice in a case in which it finds itself the defendant by either destroying evidence, or misplacing it so that the prosecution will never have access to it.

The FBI is also notorious for excluding exculpatory evidence in federal cases that they are involved in, in what can only be seen as a deliberate attempt to obstruct justice by preventing a jury from hearing information that would help to exonerate a defendant.

Perhaps the most disturbing illustration of this concerns a Native American man by the name of Leonard Peltier. Peltier was the head of the AIM movement (American Indian Movement) in the 1970's and targeted by the FBI for its COINTELPRO operations, in efforts to destroy the AIM movement. The FBI is no stranger to these types of tactics, having used them on numerous other civil rights groups including the Socialist Worker's Party, the Puerto Rican Independence Movement, and the Black Panther Party.

Peltier was framed for the murders of two FBI agents at the Wounded Knee Indian Reservation, in the early 1970's. His trial was merely a formality, since the FBI deliberately held back more than 6000 pages of information that Peltier's defense team believes would have exonerated him.

As the case against Peltier became mainstream news, and questions about FBI impropriety surfaced, the Bureau in an attempt to justify what it had done, took out full page ads in newspapers claiming that Leonard Peltier was a murderer who had killed two of their own colleagues. However, the add was seen as exactly what it was -- a pathetic attempt by the FBI to coverup its COINTELPRO operations against the American Indian Movement and obvious frameup of Leonard Peltier.

Even the ballistics report was falsified in the case of Peltier, which to this day his legal team claims never proved that Peltier had fired the gun which killed the two agents. And the FBI has never acknowledged why it held back the thousands of pages of information that Peltier's defense team requested during the discovery stages of the trial. It's clear that if the FBI had furnished Peltier's defense team with this information their case against him would unraveled faster than a cheap piece of twine.

As it stands, Peltier is an innocent man, wrongly convicted and imprisoned for a crime that he did not commit. More than 30 years after his bogus conviction, Leonard Peltier is still behind bars, having been denied the right to live his life.

The FBI's attack on Judy Bari, Darryl Cherney and the Earth First! movement is yet another example of what this fascist agency really is -- a covert terrorist and enforcer of the United States Military/Industrial Complex's status quo.

In this particular situation, rather than admitting to its culpability, the FBI instead chose to destroy the reputations of two innocent people and an entire group of environmental activists. This is just further evidence of the complete fraud that the FBI has become (if in fact it was ever anything but the covert terrorist political arm of the US Shadow Government that it is today).

Tanya Brannon's letter regarding Judi Bari and Earth First! continues below:

" In May, we were finally able to depose the FBI file clerks who had worked on the bombing file. None of the clerks we questioned was able to account for the renumbering. In fact, one explained, there are only two situations that would call for documents to be renumbered, neither of which applied in our case. Moreover, both of the clerks testified that they personally had not changed the numbers on the documents.

Besides the "renumbering" hanky-panky, the FBI also claims that certain documents are simply and inexplicably "missing" from the file. In depositions an FBI file supervisor let slip that the procedure is that two copies of all documents are kept in the file. This unexpected revelation makes the disappearance of the documents all the more suspicious; one copy might somehow be misplaced, but the likelihood of both copies dematerializing is virtually nil. Hopefully, these important admissions will move the court to demand that the FBI quit lying and cough up what are likely key and incriminating documents in our case.

... And on Other Fronts

As always, just as we were making significant progress on the legal front, the disruption and disinformation intensified. An all-out campaign was unleashed, attempting nothing less than to rewrite the theory of the bombing case on the eve of our hearing in the Court of Appeals. It began with the clever use of local media to hype a wild news story from a smalltown fringe conspiracy magazine speculating that Judi was bombed by a personal associate with no connection to her political organizing.

By far the most offensive tactic was a media event staged on May 24th, the ninth anniversary of the bombing. The group presented the Mendocino County district attorney with a bogus "petition" demanding he open a new investigation into one of Judi’s personal associates as a suspect in the Oakland bombing. They then made a photo-op presentation to the DA of the "evidence"; i.e., the conspiracy article he’d already read and rejected as "unsubstantiated conjecture, speculation and innuendo." Obviously, the real target of the petition was not the DA at all, but the press.

Difficult as it has been at times, we have refused to be drawn off course, but have continued the real work of developing the case against the FBI, consulting with activists who are being similarly targeted, and continuing our grassroots organizing to stop both the corporate destruction of the earth and the cynical attempts to under-mine that opposition.

To that end, we have launched a petition to newly inaugurated Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, a longtime supporter of the case and of the fight to save the Headwaters Forest. The petition (enclosed) is a call for full disclosure of police investigative materials, an independent investigation of the bombing, and disciplinary action against officers who acted improperly in the investigation of Bari, Cherney and Earth First! Please distribute and circulate this call for justice in the bombing case.

We have also formed a Redwood Summer Justice Project advisory board, listed on the first page of this letter, to guide us as we get closer to a victory in the court. We are frankly awed at the level of commitment and experience we can now call on as we fight the good fight against government repression of dissent.

You know that all of this work is incredibly expensive. The most recent round of depositions alone cost almost $6,000. Once again we ask you to stand with us, just as you always have, in our pursuit of justice for Judi Bari — for Darryl Cherney and Earth First! — for all activists everywhere who dare to risk their lives to preserve our rights.

Please send your tax deductible donation today. We’re counting on you.


¡Que viva Judi Bari!

Tanya Brannan"

Some Very Pertinent Yet Disturbing Quotes Regarding 9-11 And Other Conspiracies

"In the size of the lie there is always contained a certain
factor of credibility, since the great masses of the people....
will more easily fall victim to a great lie than to a small one."

-- Hitler, Mein Kampf.


"If you tell a big enough Lie, and keep on repeating it, in the
end people will come to believe it."

-- Josef Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda chief


"If our government had merely done nothing, and allowed normal
procedures to happen on that morning of 9/11, the twin towers
would still be standing, and thousands of dead Americans would
still be alive. That is treason!"

-- Retired Air Force Colonel Robert M. Bowman,
former director of the U.S. "Star Wars" space defense



"We to this day don't know why NORAD told us what they told us,
It was just so far from the truth."

-- 9/11 Commission Chair Thomas H. Kean


"As of 21 days after the attack, the fires were still burning
and molten steel was still running"

-- Leslie Robertson, the Chief Structural Engineer for the WTC



"Everybody knows that corruption thrives in secret places, and
avoids public places, and we believe it a fair presumption that
secrecy means impropriety."

-- Woodrow Wilson Former US President


"The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence
that it is not utterly absurd."

-- Bertrand Russell, British mathematician, philosopher


"He who conceals a useful truth is equally guilty with
the propagator of an injurious falsehood."

-- Augustine, Christian philosopher


"It can be held certain that information that is withheld or
suppressed contains truths that are detrimental to the persons
involved in the suppression."

-- J. Edgar Hoover


"The individual is handicapped by coming face-to-face with a
conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists."

-- J. Edgar Hoover


"The essence of the lie implies, in fact, that the liar is
actually in complete possession of the truth which he is
hiding."

-- Jean-Paul Sartre


"It can reasonably be extrapolated that if the entire public
were exposed to independent 9/11 research, about 90 percent
would support a new investigation of the events of that
fateful day."

-- Zogby Poll: Over 70 Million American Adults
Support New 9/11 Investigation



"The Republican Party has been reduced to one principle – its
own power. It protects the Bush regime from accountability and
covers up its lies and misdeeds. Under the myths and lies that
enshroud 9/11, the Democrats have collapsed as an opposition
party."

-- Paul Craig Roberts

Monday, February 26, 2007

Another Government Whistleblower Gets Arrested For Exposing The Truth

I recently posted the article of a woman who goes by the pen name of Elena Cook; a woman who wrote an excellent article on Lyme Disease and its origins as a biological weapon. In July of 2006, she was arrested as a result of her article.

It's clear that the US Government does not want to be seen for the monster that it truly is, and its agents will mount very vicious and aggressive attacks on any persons (including those like Elena who even live in other countries) who attempt to expose it for what it is. The FBI and its COINTELPRO tactics are a prime example of this type of subterfuge. And I am well aware of these attacks first hand, experiencing the same types of COINTELPRO tactics used to demonize me with the public, while attempting to smear my good name and destroy my reputation and relationships. This is what the FBI and other subversive organizations like it were created for -- to get around the laws and the US Constitution while Congress and the Justice Department either defend these agencies' despicable behavior, or simply refuse to acknowledge it.

Elena reported that her computer had been hacked into by the US Military (even as she was living in Great Britain), her children threatened, and a close friend of hers nearly run down by a car in an attempted hit and run. Her mother also died mysteriously while Elena was wrongfully incarcerated. She was arrested based on concerns for her mental health (the arrest prompted completely as a result of her statement that Lyme Disease is a biological weapon). She also mentioned the fact that a disproportionate number of men working within the hierachy of the US Centers For Disease Control and National Institutes Of Health have biological warfare backgrounds. Is it any wonder why these organizations are known for circulating disinformation in regard to the origins of Lyme Disease, and also underreporting the numbers of new cases each year? ( In fact grossly underreporting these cases.)

She also mentioned one of these men by name; someone whom I am personally familiar with -- Dr. Edward McSweegan. McSweegan became infamous for posting derogatory and misleading information on Lyme Disease message boards around the globe in efforts to obfuscate the investigations being independently conducted by researchers looking into the root causes of Lyme Disease. McSweegan also became a bane to Karen Forschner, cofounder of the Connecticut based Lyme Disease Foundation. Forschner reported that McSweegan routinely harassed her and her cofounder husband, Tom, who started the LDF after the death of their 5 year old son Jamie, who suffered life ending complications from congenital (he was born with Lyme) chronic Lyme Disease. Lyme Disease can be sexually transmitted from one partner to another and from the mother to her unborn child. This has been documented on many occasions.

However, when Elena presented the psychiatrist (who was appointed to attend to her) with irrefutable evidence in regard to Lyme Disease and its bioweapon origins, she was completely ignored -- treated as if the evidence did not even exist at all. This is typical of a government coverup in which officials use the medical community to destroy the reputations of good people in efforts to obfuscate any investigations into government criminality.

I have experienced this first hand in regard to the FEDS' attacks on me. And they have used several physicians (all guilty of fraud) in their attempts to entrap me. The FEDS have failed to do so and now remain more desperate than ever to use psywarfare against me in their attempts to drive me to commit suicide. They will fail here as well. However, that does not mean that they will not attempt to murder me in a way in which they have plausible deniability. They have done this many times in the past to a great number of people, and I see no reason for them to change their strategy against me, since they have spent millions attempting to illegally entrap me and have come up empty.

They will just wait until the situation cools down some and then attempt to finish what they started nearly three decades ago. It will not be easy for them any longer though, since I made sure to go public as soon as I learned that it was the FEDS who were behind my harassment. When you learn this, the best that you can do is to go public and make yourself as well known as possible. It makes it far more difficult for the FEDS to institutionalize or murder you, since people know who you are and that your life is being threatened on a regular basis. If you suddenly disappear or die, everyone is going to know that it was the FEDS who were responsible.

My best advice to anyone being targeted by a branch of the US Federal Government is to go public as fast as you can, and stay away from the medical profession at all costs, since any doctor can be easily coerced by the FEDS' into seeing you under false pretenses in attempts to entrap you.

The FEDS are a truly evil entity and in time most if not all Americans will begin to realize it.

As a survivor of the FBI's COINTELPRO tactics and the bioweapon chronic Lyme Disease, I am well within my rights as an American to expose corruption within this government, as are anyother persons who are subjected to such outrageous violations of both civil and human rights. And that is exactly the reason that I created this Website. As a result, I must deal with the FEDS' daily attacks by way of directed energy weapons and psychological warfare -- punishment for telling the public the truth about an inherently corrupted US Government.

The following is Elena's account of what she has been subjected to at the hands of the US Military and British Government, in her attempts to expose the truth about the US Military's creation of the biological weapon that Americans have come to know as Lyme Disease. Lyme Disease now exists in myriad strains around the world. Today roughly 300 strains have been documented, but there are far more yet to be discovered.

I highly recommend that all visitors to this Website read the following article, since it is further evidence of the extent of the corruption within the US Military/Industrial Complex, and the devastating effects that it has on countries around the globe. If you are a government whistleblower in this day and age you are at risk of either losing your freedoms or in more diar instances your life. That is the price that we pay for telling the unpopular truths about governments that have become a complete and utter fraud to their own people.

And in the case of the US Federal Government, one which uses its Intelligence community to illegally monitor by way of spy satellites and remote neural monitoring technology, millions of American citizens who have no idea that they are being watched 24 hours a day, even within the privacy of their own bedrooms and bathrooms. And yes, the situation is that bad.


Statement regarding my Detention
by Elena Cook
7 July 2006


(Nb- Elena Cook is a pen name. While many in the patients' movement know my real name, I am asking that people do not use it in material circulated about me on the internet any longer as it will only expose my children to further harassment and danger. Thank you.)

I am writing this statement to inform my friends in the international Lyme Disease patients' movement and in the UK-based campaign "Illness Denied" about the events around my recent detention. However, some of what I am about to write has implications far beyond these movements, as it concerns an attack on civil rights in general.

Background to the Events

In January of this year I, together with some colleagues, organised a protest outside a public lecture on Gulf War Syndrome by Professor Simon Wessely. Wessely is notorious in Britain and abroad for his insistence that Gulf War syndrome, ME/chronic fatigue syndrome, and many other illnesses are not real llnesses at all, but simply "illness beliefs". We believe that by ignoring mountains of evidence about the physical causes of these syndromes, he and his colleagues are personally responsible for suffering on a massive scale.

On the day of the protest, and again some weeks later when we set up a campaign called "Illness Denied" (www.illnessdenied.org.uk), I noticed many unusual problems with my land and mobile phones. A Gulf War veteran who has campaigned for many years on GWS told me quite matter-of-factly that "it's probably tapped".

Wessely regularly acts as adviser to the Ministry of Defence, to the American Dept of Defence (DoD), and to NATO on health matters. He is currently head of the King's Centre for Military Health Research at London's King's College Hospital.

Many of my colleagues in the Lyme movement know that I have been researching the conflicts of interest of the "Steere camp"* of Lyme doctors, especially as regards their connections with the US biowarfare establishment, for some time. I have been very open about this work and written about my findings, and those of others, in the public domain (see list of links below). As a result of this work I have become the target of literally thousands of libellous and hate-filled messages placed anonymously on the internet by a tiny handful of individuals associated with the Steere camp.

Incredible as it sounds, some leading Steere camp doctors (for example Dr Edward McSweegan, former Lyme Program Officer at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland, and Dr John Nowakowski of NY Medical College), have a habit of using the internet to distribute libellous messages targetting doctors of the opposing camp or patient activists, as well as giving out dangerous misinformation regarding this disease. Both men have a history of using false names to hide their true identities while placing messages on internet Lyme forums.

In my case there have also been anonymous death threats sent to me both publicly and privately, suggesting that "cars come up on the sidewalk", and similar themes.

Some months after the Wessely demo I was involved in discussions with others in the Lyme movement about the use of darkfield microscopy for rapid detection of the Lyme disease bacteria in a simple blood smear. This technique has been used with apparent success by a number of European doctors, but is vehemently ridiculed by the Steere camp.

The European doctors have recorded seeing the Lyme-causing bacteria through their darkfield microscopes, both in its familiar spiral-shaped form, and also in its cell wall-deficient or "L-forms". The latter are specially resistant against the body's immune system and against antibiotics.

Around this time my friend Mark Stroud, a British Lyme patient and engineer, set up the website http://www.lyme-diagnosis.org.uk/ in which he put detailed instructions for converting an ordinary microscope for optimal darkfield viewing of the bacteria. He believes that anyone with access to a reasonable quality microscope could copy what he has done, without any special technical knowledge. He hoped to encourage doctors to try this technique, as a simple, inexpensive way to increase detection of the borrelia microbes that cause Lyme. Because it is known that Lyme disease is one of the causes of ME ("chronic fatigue syndrome"), and also mimics many other conditions, such as MS, motor neurone disease/ALS etc, Mark believes that this technique could potentially help large numbers of people identify the true cause of their illness and get proper treatment.

Around this time both I and several colleagues began to experience severe problems with our communications. These included problems with land and mobile phones, and computer hacking. I had my firewall logs examined by two separate IT experts who both found evidence that the attempts were conducted by machines registered to the US Navy, Marine Corps, and Defense Intelligence Agency. My colleagues found the same sources in their firewalls too. One friend found that her dial-up account was being targeted by a US military computer every half hour on the half hour. When she tried to time her internet sessions to avoid these times, she then found that the timing , though still half-hourly, was altered to fit in with the times she was logging in.

One of the most sinister things that happened during this period was that the name of the engineer who had designed the microscope site was sent to my two mobile phones using a mechanism that only I should have been able to use. No one else has access to my phones.

Finally in late April the harassment culminated with a threat placed on an internet Lyme group directed at my children. The same day I reported it to the police, a close friend in England had to leap out of the way to avoid an oncoming car, speeding the wrong way down a pedestrianised lane in her local shopping precinct.

Arrest

On 8 May 2006
, three police officers, two doctors, two social workers and a community psychiatric nurse arrived without warning at my door. They had a warrant for my arrest. One of them, Dr. Peter Ellis, did most of the talking. As I found out later, he is a GP who has undergone a course in psychiatry which qualifies him to remove people's liberty. Dr. Ellis questioned me briefly about the hacking, and the threat to my children.

Though he questioned me about the events, Dr. Ellis made it very clear that he was not interested in the events themselves. He barely glanced at a print-out I showed him of the threat to my children, and would not look at the firewall logs. Then he announced that I was to be detained under Section Two of the Mental Health Act of 1983..

I asked the group why I was being detained, and whether they had any evidence that I was a danger to others or to myself, which I believe is the normal basis for locking someone up in a mental hospital. At that point a social worker suggested that I was very thin and that I might be trying to harm myself by not eating.

I would like to emphasise that I am absolutely not suicidal, have never deliberately stopped eating in my life, nor have I ever suffered from anorexia. My medical notes confirm that when I was weighed later that day, though not fat, my weight was well within the normal range for my height. As I remarked later to a friend, there are many women out there much slimmer than me, and they are on the cover of magazines, not detained in acute psychiatric wards.

I was given no time to pack or to get in touch with a lawyer, but forced out in the pouring rain into an ambulance which took me to a locked unit at Central Middlesex Hospital. I spent 30 days in there under appalling conditions My fellow inmates included some very violent and disturbed individuals, who had been transferred from medium security units, committed GBH etc.

Detention
I have to say that the treatment that I saw meted out to mentally ill patients in Pond Ward, Central Middlesex Hospital, was a disgrace. I have written in detail about it here at http://www.lyme-rage.info/elena/pondward.html. I am now working with a patients' group to help highlight some of the issues involved. If as a result of my efforts some improvement occurs in the lot of the patients, then at least some good will have come out of my detention. It needs to be remembered that those incarcerated there- even those who have committed acts of violence - are ill people who need help and empathy - not criminals who deserve punishment. Sadly too many of the staff that I met while in there did not seem to grasp this simple concept.

Dr. Maya Ranger, a consultant psychiatrist who, it seems, had recently arrived at the hospital to take up a locum post, was placed in charge of my care. She immediately diagnosed me with "Delusional disorder". I asked her in a ward round what was the basis of her diagnosis. She explained that it was three things:
That I disagree with the views of Dr Susan O'Connell. O'Connell is the UK "expert" on Lyme Disease, who believes that Lyme is hard to catch, is easily ruled out by blood tests, and almost always curable with a simple 3-week antibiotic course.

That I believe that Lyme disease is connected with biowarfare issues.

That I believe that my computer was hacked by the US military.

I informed Dr. Ranger that there are tens of thousands of people, including the dozens of doctors and other healthcare professionals belonging to the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society, who also disagree with the views of Dr O'Connell. Dr. Ranger did not want to know.

I informed her that Public Law 107-116 in the US acknowledged that the blood tests are not sensitive enough to rule out Lyme disease, although it is not being properly enforced. Dr Ranger did not want to know.
She said, "Blood tests are used to rule out many conditions, why should they be no good in Lyme?" I informed her that Lyme was a very complex disease and in fact there are a few dozen reasons why the blood tests cannot be relied upon. She did not want to know.

I offered Dr Ranger a whole number of documents providing evidence that Lyme is indeed a biowarfare-related issue. For example, I told her about Michael Carroll's book "Lab 257", recently published in the US, which has the endorsement of two former Governors. I also mentioned that it was discussed in the Lancet recently, that a leak from the Atlanta-based Center for Disease Control (CDC) to the Associated Press last year confirmed it, and that British scientists had acknowledged that our top biowarfare facility at Porton Down is studying Lyme disease, at an international conference devoted to the prevention of bioterrorism. I told her I could provide her with many more pieces of evidence. Dr Ranger did not want to know.

I offered Dr Ranger a copy of my firewall logs and those of my colleagues, which she could take to the IT expert of her choice, to verify that the IP addresses listed for suspected hack attacks did indeed belong to US military machines. She refused to take any documents from me. Neither would she take any notice of the dozens of pages of evidence on these and other subjects being sent in to her on my behalf by my friends and colleagues, including doctors, patient advocacy workers and journalists. She acknowledged nothing, and was permanently unavailable - even to a member of the House of Lords who had kindly contacted her on my behalf.

But Dr. Ranger did not want to know, remaining firm and unshakeable in her conviction that, like God, she knew everything already - even about subjects of which she had no experience.

In psychiatry a delusion is defined as "a false belief, rigidly held, in the face of incontrovertible evidence that the belief is wrong". I asked Dr Ranger to provide me, in writing, with the "incontrovertible evidence" I was supposedly ignoring. She said she could not do that as she had no time.

Dr. Ranger also told me that she did not believe a threat had been put on the internet against my children, even though the threat is in the public domain. A printout of it was sent to her by my friends, and I myself had showed it to Dr Ellis when he arrived at my home with the police. She ignored detailed material sent to her about Dr McSweegan, whom I have reason to believe is one of the Steere camp people who has harassed and threatened me, whilst hiding behind false internet names, since 2003.

McSweegan is a biowarfare specialist who worked at the Naval Medical Research Institute before he became the Lyme officer at the NIH, America's top federal health agency. Though moved from that post in the 1990's for his overt harassment of the director of the Lyme Disease Foundation - a woman who had lost her five year old child to Lyme disease - he nevertheless retains a senior position at NIH. He has a biography on the internet, and articles about him by CBS and other major news outlets are readily available by Google search. However Dr Ranger said she saw no reason to accept that Dr. McSweegan exists (!)

During my stay Dr. Ranger was obsessed with the idea of forcing me to take Risperidone, a powerful psychotropic drug. I was frightened to take this drug, which has substantial side effects, and is intended to correct a chemical imbalance in the brain of psychotic patients.

Further, even the less serious side effects of the drug, which include drowsiness, blurred vision, inability to concentrate, etc.. would have seriously hampered me in preparing for the tribunal to which I had appealed against my detention. Many of the other inmates of the unit were on similar drugs. Some had speech so slurred by the drugs it was impossible to understand them, and others were so sedated they looked and moved like zombies.

Dr. Ranger ignored the recommendation of the tribunal panel that I not be forced to have medication in advance of their sitting, and continued to do everything she could to force me to take Risperidone. Even after an independent consultant psychiatrist was called in by my lawyers, who assessed me and found nothing wrong with my mental health, she would not give up. She called me in her office and told me I had a "choice". I could take Risperidone orally, or I would be physically pinned down by several members of staff and forcibly injected in my backside. This is regularly done in that unit to control patients who are violent. She arranged, with the help of Dr Ellis, to transfer my status to "Section 3", which gave her the legal power to forcibly drug me, as well as to detain me a further 6 months without review, on the basis that I continued to hold on to my beliefs about Lyme disease and the hacking.

However, Dr Ranger was only able to force me to have one dose of Risperidone before she was made to back down by the threat of an injunction from my solicitors. On 7 June the tribunal was held. I was fortunate in that, while Dr Ranger did not bother to read the documents I and my friends and collegaues had sent her, the panel, which consisted of a consultant psychiatrist, a solicitor and a lay person, did. The testimony of the independent psychiatrist carried great weight.

He wrote that:

"The admission notes and Part 1 summary state that on admission, the only abnormality found was the presence of 'delusions'. Specifically, {Ms. Cook's] mood, speech, form of thought, perception and cognition were all within the normal range, and there was no evidence of self neglect..

"...it is my opinion that [Ms. Cook's] beliefs about Lyme disease are not morbid in their origin, are not held in the face of evidence and reason to the contrary - there is at least as much in favour of her beliefs - and are not out of context with her culture, and therefore cannot be classed as delusional."

Regarding the issue of hacking, he wrote:

"In this case, the truth of her belief seems to be reasonably established. In coming to her belief, she investigated an all too common problem and the results of her investigations revealed involvement by a Department of Defense computer...She is anything but alone in worrying about computer hacking by government organisations and, of course, it has been admitted by the US government that since 9-11 this kind of activity has been authorised as part of the Homeland Defense strategy."

He concluded: "It is my opinion that there is no evidence to substantiate a diagnosis of mental disorder."

During the tribunal, Dr Ranger showed extreme arrogance and even tried to pretend that she had not forced me to have Risperidone against my will. However, the panel members were well aware of the facts. She also made outrageously false statements about me. I don't know whether she got these from third parties or invented them herself.

Dr. Ranger also claimed she had spoken to those who were sending in material on my behalf. My understanding is that no one got past her secretary - not even the Member of the House of Lords. If anyone did actually manage to speak to her, I am interested to know.

I am certain that if Dr Ranger had got her way, she would have fed me steadyingly increasing doses of Risperidone in her attempt to "cure" me of my beliefs about Lyme disease until she had turned me into a cabbage.

While I was in hospital, I got the news that my mother had suddenly become ill and been rushed to casualty. She died a few days later of renal failure. I had to beg for the right to visit her in her last few days, and even then was only allowed to go accompanied by an escort in case I escaped. The fact that my mother had to die in this undignified way, is one more shameful consequence of the harassment against me, which should weigh on the conscience of those responsible. But I don't think they have one.

Every patient on the unit is allocated a "named nurse", supposedly so they can be secure in the knowledge they are getting continuity of care. My "named nurse" shouted at me when I asked on her shift if I could visit my dying mother, saying "You can't expect us to facilitate this every day!" After I told her I would make an official complaint against her, she seemed remorseful and one day she actually sought me out to ask if I would like to go and see my mother. However, by then it was too late as she was already dead.

My named nurse was required to write a report for the tribunal. She wrote that she recommended that no one pay attention to any material being sent in by my friends and supporters substantiating my beliefs.

I am limited in what I can say about my children due to the gagging rules of the Family Court in Britain. Suffice it to say that my detention has had a deeply traumatising effect on my children. I am sure that Dr. Ranger, Dr. Ellis and other parties involved in my detention neither see, nor care about that.

At the time of writing, Dr Ranger continues to harass me by writing letters to various authorities insisting that the tribunal was wrong and that she is right. She is aware that I will pursue my complaints aginst her and the hospital Trust for the treatment I endured when I was under their "care". I find it incredible that she was part of a team which published on "nidotherapy". This is a newly-invented therapy which aims to help the recovery of mental patients by optimising their environment. Given that Pond Ward was a filthy, dangerous place with no hot water half the time I was there, and serious maltreatment of patients occurring on a regular basis, perhaps Dr Ranger needs to evaluate the kind of "nidotherapy" she is presiding over right now.

Conclusion
It is sobering to think that in a "democracy", the simple fact of doing peaceful research on medical issues can lead to you and your family being threatened, your computer hacked, your colleagues harassed (including an incident that may have been attempted murder), and then when you complain about it, you can be labelled delusional and committed to a mental asylum.

I feel that my experience raises very serious issues about the powers that psychiatrists, social workers, and other authorities have in our society to repress others on the basis of their political beliefs. I accept that there are mentally ill people who really do suffer from paranoia, which makes them imagine that the US army, CIA etc is after them, and that psychiatrists see such cases all the time. However, in all fairness, it has to be said that such patients do not usually come in armed with computer firewall logs, do not have testimony from IT experts substantiating their allegations, nor are their psychiatrists swamped with material sent in from round the world to corroborate their "delusions". They do not have members of the House of Lords advocating on their behalf, and they do not get streams of letters and cards wishing them good luck in their struggle.
So, I do not have an explanation for the behaviour of Dr Peter Ellis and Dr Maya Ranger, except to say how incompetent and unprofessional they both are.

The news from the US is that George Bush has arrogated to himself the right to tap or hack virtually the entire country. He claims that new post-9-11 legislation makes this legal. The American civil liberties movement say it is not.

I don't know what will be the outcome of this debate. But I do know that whatever it will be, the US government and military did not, and do not, have any legal mandate to hack the computers of peaceful British citizens living in the UK.

To those responsible for the serious threats and harassment that I and my colleagues have endured - I would like to ask them just what they think they have achieved? I realise that to see me declared insane and locked up for reporting their harassment must have seemed like the pinnacle of their achievement, for those who harassed me and threatened my children. But I want them to know this - there is now more interest than ever before in the topics they were hoping to suppress.

I repeat: more interest than ever before.

I feel overwhelmed by the amount of support I received from the patients' movement when I was in detention. People, some very ill themselves, put aside their own pain and commitments and worked for hours on end to get me out of Central Middlesex. Busy doctors, scientists and journalists took time out to help me. People for whom, because of neurological deficits, writing is itself a difficult task, took time to write me long letters.

Some took it upon themselves to phone me everyday to offer me moral and also practical support. One friend repeatedly took time off work to come and see me even though he lives the other side of London. I was also fortunate to have a very sharp, hard-hitting team of solicitors who did not let Dr Ranger get away with any of her nonsense. I cannot thank everyone enough for what they have done.

There will always be cowards who try to hide their heads in the sand at the first whiff of danger. In my view, the worst type of coward is the one who, in his rush to protect himself from the fire, throws you into it, in order to give him a few more seconds to run away. I am aware that there were individuals in the British Lyme movement who tried to distance themselves from me and my colleagues once they realised we were being targeted by the US military, and made defamatory remarks implying that we had sought trouble and got it. I recommend we ignore the cowards. If keeping our mouths shut and our heads down is such a great strategy, why has it not worked up till now?

It is now clear that there are enough people out there who do have the courage to think about and face issues even when they are controversial or call into question ideas we take for granted - that we live in a democracy, that public health authorities always act in our best interests, that governments and the military are there to protect us, that soldiers would not be abandoned by the country for which they fought if they became ill as a result of their military service; that psychiatrists in the west never diagnose and treat people on the basis of their political beliefs; that the science of medicine is never subordinated to politics or the profit needs of corporate giants. I believe that the recent events will only serve to focus people's minds more than ever on these issues.

People have posed me the question that, as my children have been threatened as a result of my work, and a colleague experienced what may have been an attempt on her life, why do I not now stop it? This is a very hard question for me.

Today is the anniversary of the London bombings of July 2005. We are hearing repeatedly on the radio and TV the message that we must not give in to fear, and not let terrorists win.

Well, all I can say is this. I do not want to let terrorists win either.

Elena Cook

Footnote
* (The Steere camp of Lyme doctors are those who, like Prof. Allen Steere, maintain that Lyme is a hard-to-catch, easily cured disease, which almost never becomes chronic or neurologically disabling.They are opposed by doctors of the International Lyme & Associated Diseases Society (ILADS), which believes the opposite. The Steere camp has always received the lion's share of government funds and support in the US and much of western Europe. What is interesting is just how many of their leading doctors and scientists just happen to be biowarfare experts, or members of the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), an elite infectious diseases squad founded in the fifties for the purpose of waging offensive biowarfare.

Of course not all the Steere camp doctors are biowarfaremen. Some seem to be far more interested in serving the interests of the powerful US insurance industry, which tries to limit the number of people diagnosed and treated for Lyme disease, as the treatment can be expensive, especially if the condition was not treated early on. Others are tied up with vaccine and test-kit makers who have their own motives for limiting the numbers diagnosed. and of course, some like Steere himself, have connections with all of these interests.
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