Chapter 320: The Second Settlement

Thursday, September 7 (Continued) to Saturday, September 30, 2006

The initial media coverage was excited, uninformed reporting of what they could see, but it only took the reporters a few minutes to learn the essential facts. All the Rangers and cops knew the situation, and they hadn't been too concerned about protecting the CIA. Somewhat the reverse, actually. So from breakfast time on the east coast, and through the nation's breakfasts as each time zone got up, America learned that, "Early this morning, the CIA duped Delta Force and a company of the 75th Rangers into launching a deadly, unprovoked military assault on the family residence of Felicity and Steven Anderson, Vanessa and Archibald Williams, and their three daughters; claiming it was to capture a highly dangerous terrorist. It seems the CIA thought Mark Anderson was living with his family, and they tricked the Army into using deadly force to recapture him.

^-- "The assault was aborted when the two helicopters that the Delta Force soldiers were to hot-rope from collided, killing the four pilots and three people on the ground. The Delta team members onboard suffered extensive injuries but no fatalities from their falls. It's too soon to be sure, but it seems the CIA has committed an appalling act of deception and violence upon two families that have suffered so much already..."

Pictures of the huge crater in our driveway and the wrecked wall and gate told a graphic tale of how much explosive power had been ready to be used against us, but the best pictures were of all the bullet damage inside my living room and kitchen. The bastards had strafed a private home, and would likely have killed anyone inside those rooms. The Anderson and Williams families had been cowering inoffensively in their rumpus room the whole time, so the strafing had been totally unprovoked! The network commentators were outraged that such a thing had happened.

It was extremely biased, one-sided reporting. Yay!

Not long after that, the parents and girls gave an interview playing up how TERRIFIED they'd been. Mom saying, "We KNEW we were going to die. There were dozens of soldiers all around our property, helicopters flying overhead, loud explosions and machinegun fire. We were praying our hearts out, bawling and telling ourselves how much we loved each other. It was the most terrible time of our lives. We knew soldiers were going to burst into the room any moment and spray us all with bullets. How can parents protect their children when the Government sends the Army to attack? We were helpless and terrified."

Similar comments were made by everyone else in the families, firmly establishing that they'd been terrified and believed their lives were going to end in bloody violence.

The reporters naturally asked, "Why would the CIA think Mark was living here?"

"I can explain that," said Mom. "When we agreed to drop our lawsuit, one of the things the Government legally promised to do was to stop spying on us. They had to go away and leave us to get on with our lives and to recover from their kidnapping and killing Mark. Yesterday morning at breakfast time I had a sudden idea of testing them to see whether they were breaking their word by still spying on us. I took a bowl of dry cereal to Mark's old study and emptied it into the trash bin and left the bowl on his desk. Ten minutes later I went back to fetch the empty bowl.

^-- "I thought they might send us an angry letter demanding to know whether Mark was here, or maybe a couple of agents would knock on the door. Remember that if Mark was alive he'd have immunity under the contract they signed, so he couldn't be arrested for anything, not that he's ever committed a crime. I never expected the CIA would be so criminal as to charge in with half the Army to try to kidnap Mark AGAIN! It was just a bowl of cereal, for goodness sake!"

The media laughed at the cereal story and howled about the second kidnapping attempt. It was a GREAT story.

Dad said, "If the CIA honestly thought Mark was here, all they had to do was get some of the local cops to come and have a look, not do the criminal things they did. The Government can't stop themselves from being criminals. There are so many criminals in the Government it HAS to be the fault of the asshole in charge."

The media also liked the burning trucks sub-story too. The fire made for Great TV: the four soldiers rushing around trying to save their trucks, failing, the fire engulfing both trucks, the burned-out wrecks afterward, and the meaning of it all: the firebombing was interpreted as a protest by the public against the Army's attack on the Andersons.

That was a correct interpretation as far as I was concerned, but I'd done it for more than a mere protest. It proved "The Public" was on the side of the Andersons, to serve as a warning that "The American People" weren't going to stand for the Government's mistreatment of my families. The politicians should hopefully realize that they shouldn't mess with us because The Public wouldn't stand for it. My firebombing attack also meant that if there is ever another fiasco like this one, my stealing some guns and shooting the attackers might plausibly be seen as an act of The Public.

Most of the TV commentaries about the trucks being burned were positive. The talking-heads all went "tsk, tsk" (or words to that effect) over the idea of people throwing fire bombs, but they also made comments like, "The Andersons are very popular in their community after having so generously included 80,000 of them in their lawsuit's settlement. The Anderson's original request was that their community be given three times as much as the Anderson's were asking for themselves, so it's little wonder that the public chose to express their outrage in this way. Shameful, but understandable."

^

The CIA was in deep shit and under pressure:

• The Ranger and Delta commanders were only too happy to say they'd been asked to do the illegal kidnapping job by the CIA.

• Four CIA observation team members were in custody, with their IDs clearly identifying them as CIA. They were saying "no comment" to everything, which wasn't doing anything to help the CIA's public relations image.

• Senior Democrat politicians, and some Republican ones (those with eyes to their long-term political survival), were baying for a full investigation into the CIA's practices and for heads to roll, not necessarily in that order.

• The media was having a field day castigating, ridiculing and abusing the CIA. As I had known it would, the seven deaths had considerably upped the stakes for the incident. No one could say, "Oh well, no harm done," then walk away. That the pilots had been innocent dupes added to the public outrage at the CIA. The file's talking about using extreme interrogative techniques on children didn't do the CIA any favors either.

• The White House was LIVID. Mom and Dad had quickly gone on TV to state that, "The Government breached the terms of our settlement agreement. That means they're put back on the list of defendants for our $242 trillion lawsuit. We will also be filing suit against the CIA for their arranging the military assault on our home and for attempted kidnapping. In addition, if Majestic Countdown is listening, would he or she please try to uncover more of the dishonest dealings of this Administration. They need to be taught a lesson about honesty and integrity."

The Majestic Countdown appeal was broadcast over and over again by all the networks and picked up by all the papers. They wanted to make sure he got the message because he was VERY good for ratings and circulation.

The appeal resulted in an immediately flurry of emails to the networks claiming to be from Majestic Countdown, the vast majority of which were obviously not because their tones were very different from the previous emails. Regardless of their source, a couple of the emails were interesting and did make for pretty reasonable TV later. We were new to the leak business, and didn't realize the need to set up an authentication code. We did realize it after the networks reported getting so many fakes.

Mom and Dad's comment about the lawsuit restarting resulted in a panic among many Benton County residents, fearful that the settlement agreement's being "canceled" (they thought), meant they had to give their $25,000 back. Many of them were no longer in a position where they could do that. People being people, that worry persisted for many days despite reassurances that the money couldn't be claimed back. A lot of them who had previously been saving their money decided to spend it REALLY quickly instead, to play safe.

The White House hated the idea of having the Federal Government put back on the list of defendants for our huge lawsuit, but the settlement agreement was clear that Mom and Dad had the right to do so if the Government breached any of the terms, so to stop itself from being roped back into the lawsuit, the Government had to claim it hadn't breached anything.

There was no arguing with the reality of what had happened, and there was no arguing with the fact that the Army was an agent of the Government (using "agent" in the legal sense here, meaning "someone who acts for". The Army definitely acts for the Government. They're legally prohibited from acting for anyone else). But if the Government could prove that the Army had been duped into acting for someone not-the-Government, then it might be able to get a court to rule that there'd been no intentional breach, and therefore no legal breach. So the Government pressured the CIA to make the whole fiasco unofficial. That suited the CIA, because it'd been thinking of doing that anyway. Certainly no one wanted to take responsibility for it.

In the afternoon, the CIA came out and said, "The operation was the result of one man's delusion. He was acting unofficially and on his own authority. It was not a CIA operation, but a misuse of CIA resources. If he hadn't been killed by the helicopter crashing on him, we'd be taking legal action against him."

The parents waited long enough for a White House spokesperson to confirm that they were also blaming a solo renegade, then they sent copies of the satchel's file to all the usual media.

Two facts killed the CIA's stupid excuse:

1. The NSA had participated, so the Army, CIA and NSA were all involved. That was too many government organizations for it not to be a government operation.

2. The file mentioned the active involvement of LOTS of CIA people, some of whom were at levels higher than the scapegoat (who'd already been scraped off our driveway). The top named guy was Associate Director for Military Support (AD/MS), who reports to the Director. Something that involved so many people and went all the way up to the second tier of management was NOT the work of a solo delusional.

The CIA had assumed the file had been destroyed under the chopper by the fire and Hellfire explosion. They were horrified that it was perfectly intact.

Prof had put a covering letter with the media release, saying, "A member of the public found it some distance away shortly after explosion at the front of our home, and handed it to us. We opened it in the presence of a senior member of the Corvallis police force about three hours after the military attack started. There was no time for anyone to invent the hundreds of verifiable details, so it is authentic."

The CIA was VERY eager to get the file back as some of the handwritten pages were the originals and could be used to discover the otherwise unnamed identities of some senior authors, who were staring down the barrels of possible criminal convictions, a threat that Vanessa was trumpeting very loudly. One of her long-term tactics is to get criminal prosecutions taken against Government employees who break the law, and she wanted everyone to know it. Prosecuting government criminals was why the +50%-on-sentences law had been passed.

The CIA tried to get an urgent court order for the file's return, but they just made fools of themselves. Prof had not released the file until the CIA had publicly declared that the operation was totally unofficial, therefore the file about the operation couldn't be an official secret. The judge said he would not rule on the return of the file until after the legality of the operation had been determined. If it was an illegal operation, its paperwork would not be protected. With a smile on his face, the judge ordered Prof to keep the original file safe until such time as the judge made his ruling. Prof happily agreed.

Not only had the file ruined the CIA's stupid excuse, but it also very clearly stated that the NSA had been checking our internet activity and that the CIA had posted two surveillance teams to spy on us, both of which couldn't have been clearer breaches of the settlement agreement. There was no possibility of their claiming a crime was being investigated because the file made it very clear that the purpose of getting hold of Mark Anderson was to interrogate him about the Fort Dodge events. There was no mention of any crime, and anything to do with Fort Dodge can't have been considered my committing a crime because I'd been given immunity for all my past activities. The most the CIA could have legally done, had they accidentally stumbled on the fact that Mark was home, was send him a letter politely asking him if he'd tell them what he'd been up to. They'd overshot badly.

It was now only a month to the $242 trillion lawsuit's court date. There was no chance of our losing it, as the Government had already admitted that Mark had been kidnapped in breach of his Fourth Amendment rights. The President had even publicly apologized for the errors in judgment of the DHS and CIA agents involved. The only issue with the trial was over the amount of damages. The Government (as represented by the CIA, NSA and Army) had just proved themselves yet again to be willing to commit crimes, and the Federal Government had proved itself willing to lie about it, so everyone expected the jury to not only have less than zero sympathy for the Government's position, but be positively eager to punish it as much as possible.

By the way, the Army had committed crimes too. They were duped into them, but that was not a sufficient excuse. They had what is legally known as "a duty of care," and they'd failed to take sufficient care. They had, for example, taken the CIA's word that this situation was one where "time was of the essence", permitting arrest before a warrant was obtained, even though there'd been a whole day in which to obtain a warrant.

We filed suit against the NSA and its sole named employee for breaching our Fourth Amendment rights (their monitoring our internet traffic was also protected by the very useful Fourth), but we hadn't yet decided whether to legally attack the Army. We should, as Vanessa's tactic was to punish every Government employee who broke the law. That why she'd formed the Mark Anderson Foundation, and her motivation certainly still applied when we were the victims. If enough Government-employed criminal were tried and convicted, or civilly sued for large enough sums, then other Government employees would think twice before breaking the law. Even if only 10% of Government employees could be made honest enough to whistle blow, then many more dishonest schemes would be uncovered, and more employees would be scared into being honest. If the 10% became 20%, that'd then become 40%, etc. There'd be an outbreak of morality, and it'd be that much harder for anyone to conspire to be dishonest. The whole honesty concept might snowball, hopefully rolling upward to where it was most needed.

However, the parents were reluctant to file suit against the Army. It had been duped, whereas the CIA and NSA had willingly broken laws. The Army did generally try to be held reasonably accountable for its actions. It wasn't perfect - the Pat Tillman fratricide cover-up being a disgusting example of multilevel accountability failures within the 75th Rangers - but it mostly did try to do the right thing. Whereas the CIA, NSA, DHS and Federal Government all insisted on being unaccountable, both organizationally and personally, and they'd lie about it ten different ways from Sunday even in circumstances where everyone knew they were lying. They didn't care about being known as liars, just so long as they kept their power.

The Army was, legally speaking, on thin ice because of the aid it'd provided the CIA. It is generally against the law for the military to act so unilaterally in a civil matter because of a law called the "Posse Comitatus Act". That prohibits the military from being used to enforce the law within America. However, there's also the "Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act", which obviously allows the exact opposite, but only in specific instances. Initially that was drug interdiction, but terrorism is such a popular catch-cry these days that it's been added to the list of acceptable causes. The trouble for the Army was that there had been no terrorists at our home and the Army hadn't taken sufficient care to make sure there were before proceeding with its assault. If its actions were found in court not to be covered by the Military Cooperation Act then the Army would go from "thin ice" to "deep shit". That we chose not to sue the Army saved it from that legal risk. Theoretically the Government itself could have, and even should have, pursued that legal point to its resolution, but that was never going to happen. The Government has recently been increasing the civil power of the armed forces, so certainly wasn't going to create a reason to restrain them.

^

[To jump ahead a little. The Army learned from their mistake - trusting the CIA - and they were willing to be held accountable for their assault on our home, so Vanessa ended up doing a deal with them. The Army publicly apologized for their illegal attack on our home, and Vanessa sentenced them to "Community Service". She, through the Mark Anderson Foundation, would call on them in cases she thought appropriate for Army help (the whole Army, not just the 75th Rangers, Deltas or 160th SOAR). It might be with transportation, maybe construction, maybe medical - whatever Vanessa called for. She would phone a contact person, tell him what she wanted, and he'd arrange to get it done pronto. The Army had attacked our home with one day's notice, so the rule was that they had to jump to do whatever Vanessa wanted within one day, unless she wasn't in a hurry or there were acceptable extenuating circumstances.

When Vanessa decided they'd paid back "enough", she'd tell them their "sentence" had finished. "Enough" was Vanessa's opinion of the damage they'd caused to our home, the terror they'd caused everyone, and the forfeit value of all the vehicles used in the commission of their crime. Given that a Hercules C-130J is worth $66 million new, plus the much cheaper items of the two helicopters, the plane that'd flown the Deltas to Fort Lewis, and the trucks; Vanessa was going to be getting a LOT of service out of the Army. They knew that, and they agreed to it. Going to court would probably cost them more, and they thought Vanessa's idea was a worthwhile one. (The C-130J was actually a USAF plane used because the Rangers had a heavy load, but the plane's ownership was a distinction that made no difference; the Army accepted the extent of their responsibility.)

The deal caused a significant amount of public amusement and got us some respect. For the Army too, because Vanessa praised, "The Rangers on the day, up to the Generals that I've dealt with since, all admitted doing wrong the moment it was clear that they had.

^-- "The Rangers quickly released the private guards we'd hired and helped to secure the CIA spies, including chasing down the two that were trying to run away rather than stay to take responsibility for their actions. None of the Rangers tried to run away. I bet it never occurred to them. Unlike the CIA, the Rangers aren't criminals.

^-- "The Generals apologized to me the moment they walked in the door. We've spent more time talking about how to prevent such things happening in the future than we have arguing over how they'll make good. They immediately accepted that they had an obligation to do so.

^-- "It's a pleasure to deal with people who're willing to admit their mistakes and take their lumps for the good of improving the organization they work for. They make a strong moral contrast to the CIA, NSA, DHS and the Bush Administration, who'll lie repeatedly to avoid being held accountable for their actions."

Vanessa particularly liked her "community service" sentence as she'll be able to use it to generate good publicity every time she calls the Army in to help the victims of Government abuse.]