Freedom Scribe Blogging on issues of Constitutional freedom.

Please note that my copyright notice is null and void for this post.  Anyone who wishes to borrow the text of this letter to use on behalf of Cele Castillo is welcome – and even urged – to do so.

The whole story, in Cele’s own words.

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The Honorable Eric Holder

United States Attorney General

U.S. Department of Justice

950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW

Washington, D.C. 20530-0001

Re: Prosecutorial Misconduct

USA vs. Celerino Castillo, III

SA: 08-CR-00193 (1) – WRF

No. 08- 51144 USA vs. CASTILLO

Dear Attorney General Holder:

I have recently read in the news media about your unprecedented reversal of conviction in the corruption case concerning Senator Ted Stevens, and I applaud your action.  It was very apparent that there was prosecutorial misconduct that did indeed take place in that case.

However, I have recently become cognizant of a similar – and quite possibly even a far worse – example of prosecutorial misconduct, and as an American citizen, I am urgently requesting your assistance in getting to the bottom of this ugly situation.

Mr. Celerino “Cele” Castillo, III, a resident of my own state of Texas, is best remembered for being a whistleblower during the Iran-Contra investigation.  Mr. Castillo submitted his testimony to the House Select Committee for Intelligence and went before a federal grand jury in Washington D.C, to testify to CIA involvement in murder, torture, drug trafficking, and arms smuggling.

After his retirement from the DEA, Mr. Castillo became an educator and an activist for several civil rights organizations, such as People for Peace and Justice, Veterans for Peace, and Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.

On March 06, 2008, Mr. Castillo was arrested by ATF agents in San Antonio, Texas.  The charges were filed by U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton for the Western District of Texas.  After eight months, Mr. Castillo’s charges were dismissed under Poke v. U.S.

However, prior to Mr. Castillo’s charges being dismissed, he was told that he was required to plead guilty to new charges of “Selling Guns without a License and Aiding and Abetting.”  ATF agents telephoned Mr. Castillo’s elderly mother on literally a daily basis, threatening this elderly lady with never seeing her son again, until Mr. Castillo pled guilty and was sentenced to 37 months of incarceration.  Such tactics on the parts of the ATF agents in question were at best, disgusting – and at worst, even criminal.  That is, said tactics certainly appear to be felony extortion in my personal view, and I cannot see any other interpretation at this time.

Mr. Castillo was initially ordered to surrender for his term of incarceration on March 05, 2009, but he discovered soon after his sentencing that his attorney, Robert “Eddie” de la Garza, had been under investigation by the state bar throughout his case – and Mr. de la Garza had failed to advise the court that he was in the process of being suspended.  There was a massive issue of conflict of interest on the part of Mr. de la Garza also, because the same agents involved in Mr. Castillo’s case were also involved with another case involving Mr. de la Garza’s son, Andrew de la Garza, who had been arrested by ATF a short time prior on quite similar charges to Mr. Castillo’s.

The judge in Mr. Castillo’s case has extended Mr. Castillo’s required surrender date until July 20, 2009, so that he may have ample time to prepare this case with his new public defender.

On April 10, 2009, Mr. Castillo and his new public defender filed nine counts of Prosecutorial Misconduct and Outrageous Government Conduct related to his case.  The complaints were filed with the Office of the Inspector General and the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, and therefore should be readily available for your review.

I do strongly believe that the prosecutorial misconduct involved in Mr. Castillo’s case was even more severe than that which was involved in Senator Ted Stevens’ case, as I do very strongly suspect that Mr. de la Garza’s son’s predicament was actually used by the ATF agents involved in both cases to blackmail Mr. de la Garza, Mr. Castillo’s defense attorney, into giving Mr. Castillo the worst possible legal advice – in other words, pressuring Mr. Castillo’s attorney to advise him in the strongest terms to plead guilty even though it was never in Mr. Castillo’s best interest to do so.  Put still another way, this situation certainly does make it appear that this was felony extortion again, which I am sure you will agree is never acceptable conduct for anyone, let alone someone in the legal or law enforcement professions.

In light of these facts, I am respectfully requesting an immediate, thorough and very urgent inquiry into the manner in which Mr. Castillo’s case was prosecuted, and I also feel that time is of extremely crucial importance in this matter.  Cele Castillo is one of the last surviving credible witnesses to the government agency abuses that took place during the Iran Contra years, and as a former deep cover DEA agent, the very unfortunate reality is that he will be placed in extremely grave personal danger from the moment he enters the U.S. prison system on July 20th, 2009.

I hope to hear from you concerning this matter at your very earliest convenience.

Respectfully yours,

Kathryn A. Graham

Hooks, Texas

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Posted under Civil Rights, Freedom, Injustice, Politics, Uncategorized

If you are like most Americans, you’ve been scratching your head over the last decade or two asking yourself what the hell has happened to your country.  After reading about the recent poll numbers showing that churchgoers approve far more often of torture than do their non-church-going friends, I started doing a little bit of serious research into this matter.

I stumbled into an absolute cess pool of “Dominionism” and “Christian Nationalism” that still has me wanting to bow down before the porcelain god and lose my supper.  If you can stomach it, do some reading.  You will discover that a group of Christian fanatics has deliberately hijacked your country and attempted (and is still attempting) to turn it into the most repressive of theocracies.

Said idiots have even tried to rewrite history, claiming that our founding fathers were exclusively Christian.  Off the top of my head, I can name three who weren’t.  Two were Deists, and Ben Franklin, the old goat, was a member of the naughty Hellfire Club.  Jefferson converted a time or two to a relatively mild brand of Episcopalianism, but he always came back to Deism.  I think his flirtation with Christianity was probably just good for business.  So the very idea that we were founded as an exclusively Christian nation is just ridiculous.

Personally, I have a difficult time believing that any woman buys into this Dominionist garbage.  Submit to your husband?  Sorry, gents, but I’ve yet to meet a male that could run his own life efficiently, let alone mine.  These groups supposedly aren’t opposed to birth control – not like the Catholics are – but they don’t want to talk about it either, not even in countries where the birth rate is actually killing folks left and right.  It certainly seems that keeping the little lady barefoot and pregnant is the only way they know to keep her under control.  And spreading disease in poor countries is one way to keep them from ever becoming a “problem” for you.

Unfortunately, I’ve studied enough psychology to recognize a massive male inferiority complex when I see one.  And that tracks on the torture issue as well – apart from clinical sadists, the only folks who would derive satisfaction from torturing a helpless prisoner would be those who were feeling awfully helpless themselves at the time.  Torture must have been very empowering for a certain type of crippled personality.

Incidentally, John Ashcroft was an Assembly of God type, which means he was definitely a Dominionist.  Assembly of God and Pentecostal churches were among the first to accept Dominionist philosophy right after the turn of the last century, and they were followed by most of the evangelical and charismatic churches.  Personally, I am not surprised.  Any group that calls falling down in the floor, foaming at the mouth and making unintelligible animal noises “speaking in tongues” is collectively fruitier than nutcakes in my admittedly biased view.

Back to Ashcroft, the poor SOB was so totally threatened by femininity that he spent $8,000 of taxpayer money to drape the bare breast of a classical statue of Lady Justice.  You’ve really got to feel sorry for a heterosexual guy that goes through life worried that he might catch a glimpse of female skin.

Kind of reminds you of some Muslim fanatics you’ve read about, doesn’t it.  Brand just doesn’t matter – a nut is a nut is a nut . . .

Fanatics have always been the most dangerous of human beings.  Fanatics account for Muslim extremists blowing themselves up with disturbing regularity and trying to take a lot of folks with them.  Fanatics recently bombed Gaza back into the stone age, creating even more Muslim extremists just itching to don high explosive fashion.  Fanatics are the reason Steve Rosen, caught red-handed in espionage against the United States of America, has just walked free to do it again – by fanatics in this case, I refer to the “Amen” corner of Congress and the White House, those folks who believe that Israel can do no wrong at all, no matter what, not ever – it makes one wonder what sort of guilt is behind this blindness.

Fact:  Of all our so-called allies, Israel has the most active and damaging espionage program against the United States.  Fact, not fiction, and incontrovertible.  But Israel can still do no wrong.

I don’t hate Jews at all.  I don’t hate anybody at all these days, and Jews least of all.  Hell, I literally grew up around the entertainment and apparel industries – kind of hard indeed to hate those folks when they helped raise you.  But I never met a single individual who could do no wrong – and as for a whole nation, let’s not even go there.

The fanatics few want to talk about in this country are actually part and parcel of the “Amen” corner problem, because right along with Pat Robertson, those Dominionists and Christian Nationalists think we just have to prevent one single acre of the Holy Land from falling into Muslim hands, and they are cheerfully willing to shed many gallons of American blood to prevent it.  Of course, they find it easy to ignore several million Palestinians who absolutely have to live somewhere, and given the xenophobia endemic to this sort of Christian, it is likely they have some sort of “final solution” in mind for those poor unfortunates even if the Israelis don’t.

How ironic, and how tragic.

And it is ironic indeed that this very hard right wing crew has just handed over western civilization to some of the most rabid socialists imaginable.  Genuine conservatives and small government folks can’t stomach these religious wingnuts at all, and so the GOP has self-destructed messily from the inside – and it has done it almost overnight in historical terms.  As a political party, the GOP is completely washed up.  Finished.  John McCain’s choice of fruitcake Sarah Palin for a running mate only drove a stake through the heart of an already rotting corpse.

No doubt the GOP is hoping that Obama’s socialist programs will worsen things economically in the United States to the point that the populace will accept anything else.  Hell, Rush Limbaugh suicidally stated on national radio that he actually wanted Obama to fail.  On the other hand, I do think this is a once in a lifetime opportunity for advocates of genuine freedom to fill a power vacuum at the very top of American politics, and I hope Ron Paul is listening.

If we libertarians can get our act together – and getting libertarians to work together has been compared to herding cats – but if we can get our act together in the next four years, we have a real chance now to change the landscape of American politics forever.

I, for one, simply will not live in a Christian theocracy.  I am a practicing Pagan, and my life wouldn’t be worth two cents in such a regime, so I will fight these idiots to my dying breath – with words if I can, and with blood if necessary – and I absolutely guarantee I won’t die alone.  Not all Pagans are pacifists.  Not all Pagans are liberals.  I might add that gentle martyrdom is just about the brain dead dumbest idea the Christians ever came up with – right up there with “turn the other cheek.”

Perhaps it is time for the worst domestic enemies of our Constitution that have crawled out from under slimy rocks at any time in the past two centuries to find that out.

Posted under Civil Rights, Freedom, Politics

A recent article I spied on the CNN news site made me start thinking, very hard, about the state of religion in the United States.  According to a recent poll:

More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified. Only 42 percent of people who “seldom or never” go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Even though I am not personally a Christian, and I have not been since I was a child, I found those figures extremely shocking – until I began to think about my own experiences with American Protestant Christianity, especially during a recent and particularly difficult year I spent in southeastern Kansas.

Like anyone who lives in the United States, I cannot avoid having some friends who are of the Protestant Christian persuasion, and of those friends that I know very well, there are several that I do respect highly on the grounds of morality, kindness, compassion and charity – including, but not limited to, a specific couple living in southeastern Kansas and at least one man living and caring for his mother in Kansas City, Missouri – right in the heart of the American Midwest.  However, in my experience, such individuals are sadly the exception and not at all the rule for Christians, and this does seem especially true of a particular type of self-styled Christian living in the American Midwest.

The overwhelmingly vocal majority of American Protestant Christians seem to be xenophobic to an absurd degree.  In case you don’t speak English very well, xenophobic is a term that encompasses, among other traits, racism.  If it doesn’t look like you, and if it doesn’t talk like you, it really isn’t fully human and doesn’t deserve the compassion or kindness we would show to one of “our own.”

The term xenophobic doesn’t only refer to race, however.  It literally translates more or less as fear of difference, fear of outsiders or fear of that which is foreign or alien.  Xenophobes are the folks who would love to see illegal immigrants – most of them starving and desperately looking for work – very badly treated or even killed.  Sadly, they are mostly getting their wish these days.

My own personal experience has mostly been with those self-styled Christians who honestly believe that Pagans and/or Witches are devil-worshippers and would like to see all of us dead.  My life and property have been threatened by this sort of Christian on numerous occasions over the last 35 years – and even the lives of my innocent pets.  Knowing what I do know of the purported teachings of Jesus of Nazareth – and my childhood education certainly did not neglect Sunday School – it is more than clear to me that these self-styled Christians have absolutely no idea at all what their faith is even about.

In fact, the only sane response to their behavior toward me over the years can be summed up very succinctly in three one-syllable words, “Lock and load.”

Christianity, because it teaches that life is just a temporary phase on the way to eternal reward or punishment, has always been a faith that lends itself all too easily to cults.  Christians take up monetary collections during their services – shaming even the very poor into giving what they cannot afford – and if you think that isn’t a lucrative practice, just visit your nearest Baptist church on Sunday morning and do the math.  Christian leaders have extremely lucrative reasons to try to control every facet of their followers’ lives from bank accounts to sex lives – and that is the very definition of a cult.  Yet because they call themselves Christian, we dare not say so.

The unfortunate truth is that Christian fanatics have been committing crimes (on this continent) in the name of their faith since the murdered women of Salem, Massachusetts, in the late 17th Century, and even before – they like to call these murdered Salem women Witches, and that somehow makes it all right.  The women involved could not possibly have been modern Witches, as what we called Wicca or Witchcraft today did not even exist at the time.  The play/movie, The Crucible, appears to show that a jealous wife used a slave’s Caribbean Voodoo and the town’s witchcraft hysteria to bring about the multiple murders of her perceived rivals – all in the name of devout Christianity.  I don’t know how accurate the story is, but it certainly rings true.

Today, the Christian cults’ modus operandi seems to be more along the lines of blowing up abortion clinics and threatening President Obama because he is black and – oh, horrors – has the middle name of “Hussein.”

I don’t happen to think Obama is the new messiah as some American folks seem to think.  In fact, I have some very serious issues with the man.  My issues with our current president, however, are political in nature and have zero to do with Obama personally or with his race.

When a religion forfeits its moral compass – as any advocate of torture has surely done, whether the victim of torture is to be Muslim or not, even terrorist or not – and when said religion teaches fear and cruelty instead of faith and love, it no longer deserves the label – or the constitutional protections – of religion.

The Taliban do not deserve the label of Muslim, and neither do the hate-mongers of Al Qaeda.  Why should these sick sects of Christians infesting our Midwest be any different?  I have no more desire to live under a Christian Taliban than under a Muslim one, and in either case, I will defend my life and freedom with my blood.  Nor will I ever allow torture to be done in my name.  If it takes the rest of my life, I will not cease from advocating the trial and punishment of those who ordered, those who justified, and those who carried out torture in the last administration.  If we do not punish them, it may happen again, and that is unthinkable.

I suspect that most Americans would still agree with me.

Posted under Civil Rights, Freedom, Injustice, Politics