def werent the smartest thieves i've ever heard of. shoulda pulled out his baton and went ninja style on him. or gave em some taser prongs to the testes.

Cops Who Flash Banged Infant’s Crib Are Blaming the Baby
Nearly a year has passed since a Habersham County SWAT team stormed into the Phonesavanh residence, and very nearly killed their 19 month old child.



by Joshua Krause | The Daily Sheeple | May 21, 2015

Nearly a year has passed since a Habersham County SWAT team stormed into the Phonesavanh residence, and very nearly killed their 19 month old child. The no-knock raid was prompted by an anonymous tip which suggested there were drugs in the house. As the officers forced their way into the home, they lobbed a flash grenade which wound up landing in the crib where baby “bou-bou” was sleeping. As it erupted, the infant suffered severe burns and had to be taken to the hospital, and placed in a medically induced coma.

To any sane person, the sheriff’s department would be responsible for the damage inflicted on this child. Not only were there no drugs in the house, but the suspect they were looking for was found elsewhere. And despite their claims that they had the house under surveillance for two days prior to the raid, somehow they had no idea that there were children who lived there.

Still, the family had to fight the county tooth and nail to have their $1 million in medical bills reimbursed. Last month they settled with the county, and received $964,000, half of which will be given to them now, and the rest will be given to baby after he turns 18. While it’s great to hear that the family is getting something out of this, it’s shocking to see how defiant the sheriff’s department was, right to the very end. They never once admitted culpability for their gross negligence, and in a bizarre twist, their defense statement in court basically blamed the infant for his own injuries.

William Norman Grigg from the Pro Libertate blog read through the lengthy document, and sifted through the legalese for our benefit. It’s almost unbelievable how far the sheriff’s department was willing to go to avoid paying the family whose child they burned alive.

The act of sleeping in a room about to be breached by a SWAT team constituted “criminal” conduct on the part of the infant. At the very least, the infant was fully liable for the nearly fatal injuries inflicted on him when Habersham County Sheriff’s Deputy Charles Long blindly heaved a flash-bang grenade – a “destructive device,” as described by the ATF, that when detonated burns at 2,000-3,500 degrees Fahrenheit – into the crib.

Merely by being in that room, Bou-Bou had assumed the risk of coming under attack by a SWAT team. By impeding the trajectory of that grenade, rather than fleeing from his crib, Bou-Bou failed to “avoid the consequences” of that attack.

In any case, Bou-Bou, along with his parents and his siblings, are fully and exclusively to blame for the injuries that nearly killed the child and left the family with more than one million dollars in medical bills. The SWAT team that invaded the home in Cornelia, Georgia on the basis of a bogus anonymous tip that a $50 drug transaction had occurred there is legally blameless.

This is the defense presented by Haberham County Sheriff Joey Terrell and his comrades in their reply to a federal lawsuit filed last February on behalf of Bou-Bou Phonesavanh and his family.

Can you believe that? It gets much worse from here. When photographic evidence of the baby’s horrific injuries were shown in court, the defendants denied that the photograph “accurately depicts the injuries allegedly sustained.” The statement goes on to the blame the parents and the baby because the damages caused to the child were “directly and proximately caused by the contributory and comparative negligence of the plaintiffs and their failure to exercise ordinary care.”

And as a last-ditch effort to avoid paying the bill, the sheriff’s department invoked the principle of “laches,” which in the legal world, is a kind of use it or lose it statement. It basically means that you don’t have the right to sue, if you waited a long period of time in the hopes that future circumstances would favor your case. It doesn’t apply in this case at all because the family almost immediately filed a notice with the court after the incident.

The origins and usage of that obscure and archaic legal term do offer some insight about the way Bou-Bou’s would-be murderers see themselves, and their victim.

“Laches” is a term embodying the ancient legal maxim that “Equity favors the vigilant, and not those who have slumbered on their rights.” Defendants who appeal to this oft-cited and little-applied concept are accusing plaintiffs of subjecting them to a form of “legal ambush.”

What Sheriff Joey and his cornpone chekists are claiming, in effect, is that while he was sleeping, Baby Bou-Bou ambushed them.

How low can one police department go?

i was thinking the same thing, caught her at 7am and apparently she was pushing him since the day before. she musta been shmokin those reefers!

not voting against barry is a serious offense. surprised she didnt give him the death penalty or atleast chop his pipe off.

(Reuters) - A Maryland mother was found early on Friday pushing her dead 3-year-old boy on a park swing, authorities said.

Deputies responded to a call around 7 a.m. to check on a woman who witnesses said had been pushing a child for hours on a swing at Wills Memorial Park in La Plata, about 35 miles (55 km) south of Washington, D.C., said Charles County Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Diane Richardson.

One witness told deputies she found it strange that the woman had been pushing the child for an unusually long period of time, possibly since the day before, Richardson said.

When the officers arrived they found the 24-year-old woman still pushing the child in the swing, and they realized immediately that the boy was dead, Richardson said.

The child had no signs of obvious trauma, she said, and had been dead for at least several hours.

The office of the chief medical examiner in Baltimore will perform an autopsy on the boy.

The mother, who was not identified, was transported to a nearby hospital for medical tests, police said.

The investigation is ongoing.

(Reporting by John Clarke in Washington; Editing by Daniel Wallis)

Washington State Police Officer Shoots Two Men Accused of Stealing Beer
Officer told authorities the men had no weapons but attacked him with a skateboard...

by Victoria Cavaliere | Reuters | May 22, 2015

A police officer in the Washington state capital of Olympia shot and wounded two unarmed black men suspected of trying to steal beer from a supermarket on Thursday, law enforcement said, prompting protests in the city.

The two brothers, aged 21 and 24, were hospitalized, one in critical condition with multiple gunshot wounds, Olympia Police Chief Ronnie Roberts told a news conference.

Officer Ryan Donald, who had been with the Olympia Police Department for three years, told authorities the men had no weapons but attacked him with a skateboard, and that he had issued a verbal warning before opening fire.

The incident follows a series of fatal police confrontations across the United States that have put law enforcement agencies under scrutiny over the use of force, particularly against minorities.

Read more

must have thought that skateboard was a deadly weapon, too bad they didnt have the MRAPS.

2 planes hit, 3 buildings fell. government was running drills that day simulating terror attacks of which planes were flying into buildings. hmmmmmmm. just happaned to find a hijackers passport in the rubble. hmmmm. guvmint says not to bring it up because you will hurt the family members feelings, but yet most of the families dont believe the official story and want it to be reinvestigated. hmmmmm plane hits pentagon and miraculously no wreckage of a plane was never found. hmmmmm. over 2,000 scientists and physicists all signed on a document saying there is no way the buildings would have fell the way they did being jet fuel doesnt burn hot enough to melt those think steel beams. hmmmm. buildings collapsed in on themselves and fell at the rate of gravity, meaning the floors underneath were already taken out. hmmmmm. explosions coming out of the buildings under where it was collapsing. hmmmmm. The 8-story WTC 6 lay between the North Tower and WTC 7. WTC 6 was evidently damaged before either tower fell and had an unexplained crater that went to the lowest basement level. The basement of the building appears to have experienced an explosion at the exact moment the South Tower was hit by a plane. In this photo the rubble of the North Tower is on the left and the remains of WTC 7 are on the lower right.

The destruction of WTC 6 is one of the many unexplained questions of 9-11. This 8-story building suffered a huge crater in its center which went all the way down to sub-basement levels. What caused the huge crater in the middle of WTC 6?





This infrared image shows the large and deep crater in the center of WTC 6 (lower left). There is no explanation for the deep crater that goes into the sublevels of the 8-story building.

WTC 6 was damaged prior to the collapse of the South Tower; damage that can be seen in photos taken by Bill Biggart. In 2002, I asked CNN about the timing of the explosion indicated by the light plume rising in the lower left hand corner of the photo below and was told that it occurred at 9:03 a.m. Although the archivist had no reason to lie, it seems that the CNN footage was taken as the South Tower collapsed. The footage can be seen in its complete context at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZBhWRzt-aA



The mystery plume seen rising over WTC 6 evidently occured as the second tower began collapsing. It appears to be a sandy-colored plume rising from the area of the crater seen in WTC 6. The plume appears to be rising from the exact area of the huge crater.

NAHHHHH i guess its all just BS.

‘Conspiracy Theorists’ Are Causing Militants To Abandon ISIS

Radicals complain recruits are turning away as they discover Western intelligence controls extremist groups



A report in the official propaganda magazine of ISIS this month bemoans the fact that the terror group is losing members because of so called ‘conspiracy theories’ that Western intelligence manipulates and controls extremists for its own agenda.

The International Business Times reports that the magazine, Dabiq, condemns conspiracy theorists, referring to their ideas and beliefs as “sinful”.

“If the mujahedeen liberated territory occupied by the kuffar [infidels], they would say that the kuffar allowed them to do so because kafir [disbelievers] interests’ necessitated a prolonged war,” the article states.

“According to these theorists, almost all the events of the world were somehow linked back to the kuffar, their intelligence agencies, research, technology, and co-conspirators!” the extremist rag proclaims.

“Conspiracy theories have thereby become an excuse to abandon jihad.” the piece, entitled Conspiracy Theory Shirk (Sin), declares.

InfoWars has long highlighted how Al Qaeda and ISIS are, at the very least, used by intelligence agencies in a grand game of geopolitical chess. It is indisputable that Al Qaeda was seeded by the CIA and Saudi intelligence in the late seventies and early eighties.

Clearly, the ISIS propaganda piece was published before it was revealed this week (by Western intelligence) that Osama Bin Laden himself was an avid conspiracy theorist.

According to newly declassified US government documents, around half of Bin Laden’s reading list was made up of titles about general political and intelligence conspiracies, alternative 9/11 theories, as well as literature on secret societies such as the Illuminati.

“In terms of the materials that are there, some of the things that we’ve found to be of note were that bin Laden was probably an avid conspiracy theorist,” an anonymous senior intelligence official told Buzzfeed. “Of the 38 full-length English-language books he had in his possession, about half of them were conspiracy theory books.”

As Infowars noted, Bin Laden being obsessed with literature which disputes the official narrative that he had masterminded the 9/11 attacks makes little sense. If this was the case, Bin Laden would have surely considered the books to be utter nonsense.

It is of course, possible that the reading list is a complete fabrication, among with much of the Bin Laden story line to date. Indeed, that explanation would fit neatly with the ISIS claim that conspiracies are having a detrimental affect on their recruiting drive.

The Dabiq article appears among material praising the failed attack on the ‘draw Mohammed’ Texas cartoon contest, as well as a piece justifying the enslavement and rape of Yazidi women.

Elsewhere in the magazine, the group attempts to lure would be fighters to Iraq and Syria by claiming that IS has its own healthcare system, complete with newly built colleges to study medicine.

The publication also has an article penned by British photojournalist John Cantlie, who is being held hostage by the terror group. In a narrative clearly appealing to ISIS fighters, Cantile slams US foreign policy, and warns that ISIS is growing exponentially.

—————————————————————-

Steve Watson is a London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.com, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham, and a Bachelor Of Arts Degree in Literature and Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University.



http://www.infowars.com/conspiracy-theorists-are-causing-militants-to-abandon-isis/

way i see it is, if they're shooting anything other than people, im happy. not all cops are bad. he probably just took a couple minutes out of his day to show that all cops arent abusive d1ckh3ads. im sure he didnt spend his whole workday at the park.

Hoops!

Caught on camera: anonymous NYPD cops beat kids... at basketball!

by Adan Salazar | Infowars.com | May 22, 2015

Shocking footage has emerged of two New York City police officers unleashing a brutal smack down on a bunch of kids… during a game of basketball.

An NYPD van can be seen parked in the background, as two unidentified officers engage a group of teens with layups, crossovers and three-point shots.

“They really cooked us,” one person who was at the game commented on social media.

Others who viewed the video, which was uploaded to Facebook, were pleased the officers were doing their best to salvage their tarnished reputation, which has been damaged in part by media reports that overstate the frequency of police shootings of minorities.

“Nice to see cops doin’ something good for once,” another Facebook user remarked.

The video has been shared over 75 thousand times and has amassed over three million views in just under four days.

“This is an example of the goodwill police can cultivate every day, under the radar,” notes Uproxx.com.

“It’s also a textbook way to engage the communities where police officers are often feared, and sadly, living in fear themselves. Pickup basketball may not erase crime, but it will go a long way toward bridging part of the perception gap between law enforcement in the news and law enforcement in real time.”

Just last week, an officer in South Carolina also made headlines after he stopped to play a game of football with some neighborhood kids.

thanks rome

Jake Tapper's name wiped from Clinton Foundation website
Written By Scott Sutton Posted: 05/20/2015, 04:17pm

CNN anchor Jake Tapper’s name pulled a Houdini late Tuesday afternoon, disappearing from the Clinton Foundation’s website without a trace.

As USA Today reports, Tapper’s name was listed on the website until late Tuesday afternoon as a “speaker” for a Clinton Global Initiative event in Denver from June 8-10.

USA Today said that when it asked CNN about why Tapper’s name was on the website, the Clinton Foundation “swiftly removed” it.

Below is a screenshot of the listing.

Screen Shot 2015-05-20 at 5.05.17 PM

Per USA Today:

Tapper wouldn’t comment on the record. A CNN spokesperson, who asked not to be named, said Tapper was improperly listed as a speaker on the foundation website; he is scheduled to interview former president Clinton at the event and later moderate a panel discussion. The spokesperson said the network-approved interview will be televised. There will be no restrictions on the questions, and Tapper will not be paid by the foundation. Other details are still being negotiated.

It’s no wonder why Tapper’s name was removed from the website. Just last week, ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos got in trouble for failing to disclose donations to the Clinton Foundation totaling $75,000. Stephanopoulos used to be a top aide for Bill Clinton when he was in the White House, and many decried the failure to disclose the donations as an ethical breach.

Stephanopoulos has since withdrawn from a moderating position at Republican presidential primary debates. CNN is reportedly scheduled to host three three Republican prsidential primary debates.

Tapper’s past reveals a liberal-leaning bias, with a stint writing at the liberal news site Salon between 2000 and 2003 and also a previous job as a spokesperson for a Democratic congresswoman who would later become Chelsea Clinton’s mother-in-law.

However, Tapper has has been revered for his ability to steer clear of partisan politics, and rarely, if ever, has had an issue of projecting bias.

As USA Today reports, conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, who is scheduled to moderate one of CNN’s Republican debates, said that Tapper is “the equal of any journalist at work today when it comes to fairness, intellect, integrity and seriousness. I’d be honored to work with him anytime, anywhere.”

im pretty sure theyre not looking in anyones windows. point is it goes against the 4th amendment. collecting everyones phone records and email is a warrantless search and seizure. they have no probable cause to collect EVERYONES data. government abuses everything else im sure they wouldnt mind abusing this. not too mention it has failed to stop any terror attacks. and it was going on before 9/11 and failed to stop that from happening.

meaning?

In a Reddit AMA session Thursday, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden praised Kentucky Senator Rand Paul's 10-hour, 31-minute attempt to slow down a vote on renewing the Patriot Act.

"It represents a sea change from a few years ago, when intrusive new surveillance laws were passed without any kind of meaningful opposition or debate," Snowden wrote. "Whatever you think about Rand Paul or his politics, it's important to remember that when he took the floor to say 'No' to any length of reauthorization of the Patriot Act, he was speaking for the majority of Americans–more than 60% of whom want to see this kind of mass surveillance reformed or ended. He was joined by several other senators who disagree with the Senate Majority leader's efforts to sneak through a reauthorization of what courts just weeks ago declared was a comprehensively unlawful program, and if you notice that yours did not take to the floor with him, you should call them right now (1-920-END-4-215) and ask them to vote against any extension of the Patriot Act, because the final vote is being forced during the dark of a holiday weekend to shield them from criticism."

Anyone surprised to hear that praise coming from Snowden hasn't paid attention to his embrace of libertarian philosophy and politics–or the warmth returned by American libertarians. When Paul's father ran for president, Snowden gave then-Texas Representative Ron Paul two donations of $250. Earlier this year, a video Q&A with Snowden kicked off the annual Students for Liberty conference. Snowden effectively played warm-up for Ron Paul–but not before being awarded an honorary alumnus prize.

Anyone surprised to hear that praise coming from Snowden hasn't paid attention to his embrace of libertarian philosophy and politics.

Ron Paul, meanwhile, has consistently praised Snowden as a hero who should be welcomed home to America.

"They really wanted to blackball him, to destroy him," Paul joked at the conference, "so they said he donated to the Ron Paul campaign!"

Rand Paul has not gone that far in praise for Snowden, but he's been far ahead of his Senate colleagues. While some of them called Snowden a traitor, Paul called his leaks an act of "civil disobedience." In Wednesday's marathon speech, Paul made multiple, non-judgmental references to Snowden, crediting him with exposing abuses of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act.

Paul said less about his Senate partner from Kentucky, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. "If Paul is your Senator, then Mitch McConnell is also from your state," wrote Snowden in the AMA. "He's the one spearheading the effort to reauthorize the same program the Second Circuit just ruled is unlawful. Don't send an email, make his phone ring."

The 2012 action-thriller "Zero Dark Thirty" captivated millions of Americans with its intense depiction of the hunt for Osama bin Laden and the dramatic raid to kill the Al Qaeda leader. The Oscar-nominated film was lauded for its gritty authenticity and steady, deliberate pacing.

It also placed viewers in the middle of an event that is still an intense topic of fascination for the American public, with director Kathryn Bigelow calling the death of bin Laden "one of the great stories of our time."

That's exactly what her film was — a story, not a precise document of the events that culminated in bin Laden's killing. And that story was partly influenced by the Central Intelligence Agency, which gave Bigelow and her producers unprecedented access to the agency's classified documents on the intelligence that led to both the finding of bin Laden and the raid on the Al Qaeda leader's compound.

That cooperation, a subject of controversy ever since the film's release, is explored in "Secrets, Politics and Torture," a documentary on PBS' "Frontline" program that aired Tuesday.

The documentary accuses the CIA, which had been heavily criticized for its use of waterboarding and other forms of torture in its treatment of Al Qaeda suspects, of using Bigelow to push its own agenda — to show that torture yielded actionable intelligence, that waterboarding got a suspect to give up information that led the CIA to the most wanted terrorist on earth. "Zero Dark Thirty" includes a dramatic scene of a suspect being waterboarded and then giving up information that many years later leads to bin Laden's location.

That account was questioned in 2013 and 2014 by investigators working for the Senate Intelligence Committee, which also issued a lengthy report in December that challenged the CIA's assertions on the effectiveness of torture.

In fact, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, then the chair of the intelligence committee, was so incensed by "Zero Dark Thirty's" depiction of torture's effectiveness that she walked out of an advance screening of the movie after only 15 to 20 minutes.

"I couldn't handle it because it's so false," she told "Frontline."

"The movie left the American people with the impression that torture worked and that without it we never would have been able to trace the trail back to Abbottabad and to find bin Laden," former Bush administration counterterrorism official Richard Clarke told "Frontline."

And former Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colorado), who was a member of the intelligence committee, calls the movie "a form of propaganda, so that the general public believes this is what happened when in fact the facts don't prove that to be the case."

When controversy first stirred after the film's release, Bigelow wrote an op-ed article in The Los Angeles Times to answer her critics and to emphasize that she personally did not condone the use of torture. She added (emphasis ours):

Experts disagree sharply on the facts and particulars of the intelligence hunt, and doubtlessly that debate will continue. As for what I personally believe, which has been the subject of inquiries, accusations and speculation, I think Osama bin Laden was found due to ingenious detective work. Torture was, however, as we all know, employed in the early years of the hunt. That doesn't mean it was the key to finding Bin Laden. It means it is a part of the story we couldn't ignore. War, obviously, isn't pretty, and we were not interested in portraying this military action as free of moral consequences.

A representative for Bigelow told Business Insider that the film was made independently and relied on a variety of source materials. So the question remains: Just how much of the narrative in "Zero Dark Thirty" is the result of the CIA's unprecedented degree of cooperation with Bigelow, and its attempts to get the film to promote the agency's preferred version of events?

When contacted by Business Insider, producers for "Frontline" said they did not reach out to Bigelow for an interview. Asked whether director Michael Kirk had any evidence that the CIA's cooperation with Bigelow was more about spinning her than just correcting any perceived inaccuracies in Bigelow's script, the producers responded:

We carefully reviewed the many e-mails about the interactions between the CIA and the Zero Dark Thirty filmmakers. These documents, as well as our reporting, depict a close relationship between the agency and the filmmakers, including a discussion about what should be included in the film. A number of the documents are available here: http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/tag/zero-dark-thirty/. In addition, as you probably know, there are a multitude of sources and public statements that show the CIA's position that their interrogation program led to bin Laden, a storyline the film depicts.

After the film was released, reports emerged about the extent of the CIA's cooperation with the filmmakers, and some lawmakers in both parties and commentators were outraged that top-level access on "the most classified mission" in history was given to a Hollywood director.

The cooperation went all the way up to the top of the government — including Leon Panetta, then the CIA director, and Michael Vickers, then the undersecretary of defense for intelligence. According to a Pentagon inspector general's report: "Leon Panetta was fully cooperating with the movie project and that several CIA staff used White House-approved talking points to talk to Mr. Boal [the producer of Zero Dark Thirty] about the intelligence that led to UBL's [Usama bin Laden's] location."

Later, it was reported that the inspector general tried to suppress details of that cooperation, as revealed by the Project on Government Oversight.


more media propaganda

yupp i agree 100%, IMO ALL gun laws federal or state are unconstitutional. first off the 2nd amendment it is an inalienable right. inalienable - unable to be taken away or given up by the possessor. and at the end of the 2nd amendment it says "shall not be infringed" it doesnt say "can be infringed if convicted of a crime"

shall
SHal,SHəl/
verb
modal verb: shall

1.
(in the first person) expressing the future tense.
"this time next week I shall be in Scotland"
2.
expressing a strong assertion or intention.
"they shall succeed"

meaning no matter what for any reason 2A is not to be taken away or put limits upon.

even in the old days i've read somewhere, if you were found guilty of a murder you served about 15 years in jail. upon release you received a rifle, a 20 dollar piece of gold and a horse. that was to help you get a fresh start once out of prison.

In the 19th century when a prisoner was released he was given a horse, a gun and a $20 gold piece. http://www.oocities.org/three_strikes_legal/prison_reform_articles.htm

Summarizing the tactics which the CIA dispatch recommended:

Claim that it would be impossible for so many people would keep quiet about such a big conspiracy

Have people friendly to the CIA attack the claims, and point back to “official” reports

Claim that eyewitness testimony is unreliable

Claim that this is all old news, as “no significant new evidence has emerged”

Ignore conspiracy claims unless discussion about them is already too active

Claim that it’s irresponsible to speculate

Accuse theorists of being wedded to and infatuated with their theories

Accuse theorists of being politically motivated

Accuse theorists of having financial interests in promoting conspiracy theories

In other words, the CIA’s clandestine services unit created the arguments for attacking conspiracy theories as unreliable in the 1960s as part of its psychological warfare operations.
But Aren’t Conspiracy Theories – In Fact – Nuts?

Forget Western history and CIA dispatches … aren’t conspiracy theorists nutty?

In fact, conspiracies are so common that judges are trained to look at conspiracy allegations as just another legal claim to be disproven or proven based on the specific evidence:

Federal and all 50 state’s codes include specific statutes addressing conspiracy, and providing the punishment for people who commit conspiracies.



But let’s examine what the people trained to weigh evidence and reach conclusions think about “conspiracies”. Let’s look at what American judges think.



Searching Westlaw, one of the 2 primary legal research networks which attorneys and judges use to research the law, I searched for court decisions including the word “Conspiracy”. This is such a common term in lawsuits that it overwhelmed Westlaw.



Specifically, I got the following message:

“Your query has been intercepted because it may retrieve a large number of documents.”

From experience, I know that this means that there were potentially millions or many hundreds of thousands of cases which use the term. There were so many cases, that Westlaw could not even start processing the request.



So I searched again, using the phrase “Guilty of Conspiracy”. I hoped that this would not only narrow my search sufficiently that Westlaw could handle it, but would give me cases where the judge actually found the defendant guilty of a conspiracy. This pulled up exactly 10,000 cases — which is the maximum number of results which Westlaw can give at one time. In other words, there were more than 10,000 cases using the phrase “Guilty of Conspiracy” (maybe there’s a way to change my settings to get more than 10,000 results, but I haven’t found it yet).



Moreover, as any attorney can confirm, usually only appeal court decisions are published in the Westlaw database. In other words, trial court decisions are rarely published; the only decisions normally published are those of the courts which hear appeals of the trial. Because only a very small fraction of the cases which go to trial are appealed, this logically means that the number of guilty verdicts in conspiracy cases at trial must be much, much larger than 10,000.



Moreover, “Guilty of Conspiracy” is only one of many possible search phrases to use to find cases where the defendant was found guilty of a lawsuit for conspiracy. Searching on Google, I got 3,170,000 results (as of yesterday) under the term “Guilty of Conspiracy”, 669,000 results for the search term “Convictions for Conspiracy”, and 743,000 results for “Convicted for Conspiracy”.



Of course, many types of conspiracies are called other things altogether. For example, a long-accepted legal doctrine makes it illegal for two or more companies to conspire to fix prices, which is called “Price Fixing” (1,180,000 results).



Given the above, I would extrapolate that there have been hundreds of thousands of convictions for criminal or civil conspiracy in the United States.



Finally, many crimes go unreported or unsolved, and the perpetrators are never caught. Therefore, the actual number of conspiracies committed in the U.S. must be even higher.



In other words, conspiracies are committed all the time in the U.S., and many of the conspirators are caught and found guilty by American courts. Remember, Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was a conspiracy theory.



Indeed, conspiracy is a very well-recognized crime in American law, taught to every first-year law school student as part of their basic curriculum. Telling a judge that someone has a “conspiracy theory” would be like telling him that someone is claiming that he trespassed on their property, or committed assault, or stole his car. It is a fundamental legal concept.



Obviously, many conspiracy allegations are false (if you see a judge at a dinner party, ask him to tell you some of the crazy conspiracy allegations which were made in his court). Obviously, people will either win or lose in court depending on whether or not they can prove their claim with the available evidence. But not all allegations of trespass, assault, or theft are true, either.



Proving a claim of conspiracy is no different from proving any other legal claim, and the mere label “conspiracy” is taken no less seriously by judges.

It’s not only Madoff. The heads of Enron were found guilty of conspiracy, as was the head of Adelphia. Numerous lower-level government officials have been found guilty of conspiracy. See this, this, this, this and this.

Time Magazine’s financial columnist Justin Fox writes:

Some financial market conspiracies are real …



Most good investigative reporters are conspiracy theorists, by the way.

And what about the NSA and the tech companies that have cooperated with them?
But Our Leaders Wouldn’t Do That

While people might admit that corporate executives and low-level government officials might have engaged in conspiracies – they may be strongly opposed to considering that the wealthiest or most powerful might possibly have done so.

But powerful insiders have long admitted to conspiracies. For example, Obama’s Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Cass Sunstein, wrote:

Of course some conspiracy theories, under our definition, have turned out to be true. The Watergate hotel room used by Democratic National Committee was, in fact, bugged by Republican officials, operating at the behest of the White House. In the 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency did, in fact, administer LSD and related drugs under Project MKULTRA, in an effort to investigate the possibility of “mind control.” Operation Northwoods, a rumored plan by the Department of Defense to simulate acts of terrorism and to blame them on Cuba, really was proposed by high-level officials ….

But Someone Would Have Spilled the Beans

A common defense to people trying sidetrack investigations into potential conspiracies is to say that “someone would have spilled the beans” if there were really a conspiracy.

But famed whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg explains:

It is a commonplace that “you can’t keep secrets in Washington” or “in a democracy, no matter how sensitive the secret, you’re likely to read it the next day in the New York Times.” These truisms are flatly false. They are in fact cover stories, ways of flattering and misleading journalists and their readers, part of the process of keeping secrets well. Of course eventually many secrets do get out that wouldn’t in a fully totalitarian society. But the fact is that the overwhelming majority of secrets do not leak to the American public. This is true even when the information withheld is well known to an enemy and when it is clearly essential to the functioning of the congressional war power and to any democratic control of foreign policy. The reality unknown to the public and to most members of Congress and the press is that secrets that would be of the greatest import to many of them can be kept from them reliably for decades by the executive branch, even though they are known to thousands of insiders.

History proves Ellsberg right. For example:

One hundred and thirty thousand (130,000) people from the U.S., UK and Canada worked on the Manhattan Project. But it was kept secret for years

A BBC documentary shows that:

There was “a planned coup in the USA in 1933 by a group of right-wing American businessmen . . . . The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea, Maxwell Hse & George Bush’s Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression”

Moreover, “the tycoons told General Butler the American people would accept the new government because they controlled all the newspapers.” Have you ever heard of this conspiracy before? It was certainly a very large one. And if the conspirators controlled the newspapers then, how much worse is it today with media consolidation?

7 out of the 8 giant, money center banks went bankrupt in the 1980′s during the “Latin American Crisis”, and the government’s response was to cover up their insolvency. That’s a cover up lasting several decades

Banks have been involved in systematic criminal behavior, and have manipulated every single market

Governments have been covering up nuclear meltdowns for fifty years to protect the nuclear industry. Governments have colluded to cover up the severity of numerous other environmental accidents. For many years, Texas officials intentionally under-reported the amount of radiation in drinking water to avoid having to report violations

The government’s spying on Americans began before 9/11 (confirmed here and here. And see this.) But the public didn’t learn about it until many years later. Indeed, the the New York Times delayed the story so that it would not affect the outcome of the 2004 presidential election

The decision to launch the Iraq war was made before 9/11. Indeed, former CIA director George Tenet said that the White House wanted to invade Iraq long before 9/11, and inserted “crap” in its justifications for invading Iraq. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill – who sat on the National Security Council – also says that Bush planned the Iraq war before 9/11. And top British officials say that the U.S. discussed Iraq regime change one month after Bush took office. Dick Cheney apparently even made Iraqi’s oil fields a national security priority before 9/11. And it has now been shown that a handful of people were responsible for willfully ignoring the evidence that Iraq lacked weapons of mass destruction. These facts have only been publicly disclosed recently. Indeed, Tom Brokaw said, “All wars are based on propaganda.” A concerted effort to produce propaganda is a conspiracy

Moreover, high-level government officials and insiders have admitted to dramatic conspiracies after the fact, including:

Supporting terrorists to promote geopolitical goals

Supporting false flag terror

The admissions did not occur until many decades after the events.

These examples show that it is possible to keep conspiracies secret for a long time, without anyone “spilling the beans”.

In addition, to anyone who knows how covert military operations work, it is obvious that segmentation on a “need-to-know basis”, along with deference to command hierarchy, means that a couple of top dogs can call the shots and most people helping won’t even know the big picture at the time they are participating.

Moreover, those who think that co-conspirators will brag about their deeds forget that people in the military or intelligence or who have huge sums of money on the line can be very disciplined. They are not likely to go to the bar and spill the beans like a down-on-their-luck, second-rate alcoholic robber might do.

Finally, people who carry out covert operations may do so for ideological reasons — believing that the “ends justify the means”. Never underestimate the conviction of an ideologue.
Conclusion

The bottom line is that some conspiracy claims are nutty and some are true. Each has to be judged on its own facts.

Humans have a tendency to try to explain random events through seeing patterns … that’s how our brains our wired. Therefore, we have to test our theories of connection and causality against the cold, hard facts.

On the other hand, the old saying by Lord Acton is true:

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.

Those who operate without checks and balances – and without the disinfectant sunlight of public scrutiny and accountability – tend to act in their own best interests … and the little guy gets hurt.

The early Greeks knew it, as did those who forced the king to sign the Magna Carta, the Founding Fathers and the father of modern economics. We should remember this important tradition of Western civilization.

Postscript: The ridicule of all conspiracy theories is really just an attempt to diffuse criticism of the powerful.

The wealthy are not worse than other people … but they are not necessarily better either. Powerful leaders may not be bad people … or they could be sociopaths.

We must judge each by his or her actions, and not by preconceived stereotypes that they are all saints acting in our best interest or all scheming criminals.

And see ...
The Troll’s Guide to Internet Disruption