Soldiers' Courts a trend ignored at Ft. Hood

Wounded warriors who suffer maddening injuries such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or Traumatic Brain Injury are shunted to special courts in communities from Buffalo, New York, to Los Angeles, California.

They have been established in San Antonio, Austin, and Harris County.

The concept seems to go nowhere in Bell County, where the legal community has turned a deaf ear on all arguments that soldiers who have seen heavy combat are very prone to take the law into their own hands, and their cases handled by judges who are former Judge Advocate General officers willing to work with the Army on discharge and treatment issues.

Here is a report of a case of one such warrior who returned stateside and found himself in a world of trouble at Ft. Carson, Colorado - http://cdn.csgazette.biz/soldiers/day3.html

Hearings - More than 10,000 men raped in military

Male rape outnumbers that of females

Experts see possible murder, suicide connection in figures

Patriot Guard members protect funeral procession from fundamentalist harassment

Washington – While the incidence of rape of female members of the U.S. Armed Forces is the highest in the world, the little-known, underreported fact is that more than 10,000 men were raped while on active duty during the year 2010.

Those are the cases that victims reported. The truth is, the Pentagon estimates that about 62,941 men were brutalized through sexual means in acts of violence that can only be described as rape, though politically correct, legalistic terms preclude the use of the term.

Only about 17 percent of male rape victims reported their experience.

According to testimony before the Senate Armed Forces Subcommittee on Personnel presented on March 13 of this year, Brian Lewis, a third class petty officer in the U.S. Navy, was “told by a commander not to report it, and later was diagnosed with a personality disorder and discharged.”

The significant factor is that these figures were tabulated before the government lifted the ban on homosexuality, not after.

Knowledgeablepersons speculate that the trauma of homosexual rape, offenses thatwere by the very definition of don't ask, don't tell meant to be keptoff the official record, may lead to acts of suicide, exponentiallyhigher in recent years, and soldier on soldier violence. (click here for a previous report)

“Indeed,whether or not such outrageous male sexual assault estimates are10,700 or 62,941, these crimes would be traumatizing to their victimsand their colleagues, and could be a significant cause for themassive increase in military suicides – and revengeful violence. (click here to read a report published in Watchdog Wire.com)

“A Center for Deployment Psychology (CDP) report notes that, 'Historically the suicide rates have been lower in the military than those rates found in the general population,'” said Dr. Judith A Reisman, Ph.D., and Thomas R. Hampson, in a recent article.

Thereis a known causal connection between sexual trauma and suicide,according to numerous published reports. (click this link for a report)

'When the enemy is angry, irritate him' – Sun Tsu

Video of an incident of bullying

...government is the servant and not the master of the people...The people...do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know...Chapter 552.01, Open Record, Texas Govt. Code (click here to read the law)

Temple – These people are wrong, and they know it. It shows.

City and County officials hereabouts, police and prosecutors, judges and lawyers, are extremely fearful that the people will see that.

A soldier – a Master Sergeant, a native of the city and a 15-year veteran of the Profession of Arms – is busy showing all this to We The People, his neighbors, in an effort to make us all aware that, as a material fact of our lives, most of what passes as the official record of the actions of police and lawyers who work for We The People is extremely murky – in fact, downright abstruse, often completely unavailable.

M/Sgt. C.J. Grisham is using a video camera, a computer, an assault rifle, and a pistol to demonstrate his point. He furthermore wants to burn it in by using the official record of arrest, the all-important affidavit of probable cause, dispatcher tapes, and Dashcam video to memorialize in an appearance in County Court-at-Law, that, though it's not against the law to carry a rifle in this state, it's against the law to upset people when you do it...

...against the peace and dignity of The People of the State of Texas.

His war experience is that of military intelligence, and he has been involved in the art, the practice, of counterintelligence in a protracted war of counterinsurgency against war lords and religious zealots, followers of a Prophet, the bitter enemies of a rival sect, in two very problematic areas of the world – Iraq and Afghanistan.

He's at home, now – a warrior returned from the field, a man who admits he is beset by the invisible scars of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder - and on a Saturday morning in March, he decided to take a 10-mile hike with his son, a Boy Scout.

Dressed in black, a red bandana tucked under his boonie hat, which he had draped across his neck to shield it from the sun, he carried an AR-15 on a single-point sling, suspended from his chest, locked and loaded. That's how he marched into hell that Saturday, around noon. 

High Noon.

His .45 caliber semiautomatic pistol he concealed under the untucked tail of his black t-shirt, where he carried it lawfully, along with a concealed carry handgun license he obtained from the State of Texas.

It is a matter of record that all this alarmed someone, a citizen, according to the Temple Police Department, who called the 9-1-1 dispatcher to complain, and three officers responded to a location on Prairieview Road, a lonely stretch of rural blacktop near the airport, not far from a rather genteel area of apartments and single family dwellings, industrial locations, and strip malls.

What happened then is a well-documented matter of record, a skirmish, a battle in the culture war between statists and constitutionalists.

It is an event recorded with the Sergeant's personal video camera, which he handed off to his son when Officer Ermis began to manhandle him.

The veteran policeman, shouting and jerking the sergeant around by his shoulders, cuffed his hands behind his back, taking the rifle and handing it to a fellow officer.

Neither of them made any apparent move to disarm the weapon, remove the magazine from the lower receiver, clear a round from its firing chamber. One shudders to think.

Sgt. Grisham is just as voluble, yelling at Ermis about filing a civil suit. The tension is escalated by turns, building on layers of adrenalin and bile, their voices becoming louder and louder in the strophe and anti-strophe, as it was acted out for the cameras – with never a dull moment to spare.

As he disarmed the veteran soldier, Patrolman Ermis confiscated his weapons and arrested him, not for carrying them loaded, openly, but for alarming folks by doing so.

So far, the sergeant hasn't gotten his firearms back.

The People of the State of Texas still have those weapons, kept under lock and key, to serve as key evidence to be used against C.J. Grisham, the alleged Enemy of The People Of The State.

Every record of these events, every scrap of paper and audio impulse recorded on microchips, is under a total, all-out embargo imposed by The People Of The State, The City of Temple, The County of Bell.

So far, We The People have obtained an arrest and offense report, the storied and hallowed “first page” police blotter information law enforcement types all across the Lone Star State are so loathe to bestow upon ordinary citizens who do not serve as the town criers for the mercantile class and the duly elected pezzonovante, both small-bore and .50-caliber. I'm talking about the ink-stained wretches folks call The Working Press, or their first cousins, the dudes and dudettes with the big, black cameras and satellite trucks, The Media. After much consultation and flurries of e-mails, We The People have alsoobtained copies of the Affidavit of Probable Cause, an instrument which clearly shows Unto The Court that C.J. Grisham got onsomebody's last nerve, got loud about it, behaved in an angry manner,and went to jail for his alleged crime.(click here for a previous report)

You had best believe the operative words are LOUD and ANGRY. That will do it, every time, when you are dealing with the constabulary on all continents, sailing right round on Seven Great Oceans, We The People will warrant, attest, affirm and SWEAR OUR LOUD.

Naturally, all these items have official claw marks - all over them.

Challenged by citizen journalists, The People Of The State have sought an opinion from the Attorney General, who concurs with their reticence by venturing the opinion that, should We The People learn the truth, it will prejudice We The People, and somehow spoil the chances of The People of the State for convicting M/Sgt. C.J. Grisham for his actions, the act of rudely displaying a firearm to his fellow citizens, thereby causing alarm.

Who knows, they may have to go plumb to Georgetown – maybe Brenham, or even downtown Bryan – to find a panel of veniremen who have not heard of the Saturday morning Battle of the AR-15 carried on the Boy Scout hike.

Hoo-Wah.

The alleged offense is a Class B Misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of not more than $2,000 or six months in the local hoosegow – or both.

Seriousbidness, the equivalent of driving drunk, The People of the Statedon't take it lightly. The Sergeant and his attorney may have the9-1-1 recordings and Dashcam tapes to use as exculpatory evidence,but they cannot distribute them on the Internet, according to aruling by a Visiting Judge. Ta-Da!(click here for a previous report)

If anyone ever doubted that the video camera is as potent a weapon of war as the nasty-looking little black plastic battle carbines they call Assault Rifles, all the foregoing should clear that up - forever.

Here is an abbreviated account of the contest in creative urination that has subsequently ensued between We The People and The People of the State over these weighty issues.

The whole world is watching.

In an August 2011 opinion, Asst. Atty. Gen. Bob Davis assured the City Attorney of Fort Worth that it's proper to withhold an affidavit of probable cause if it “would interfere with the detection, investigation, or prosecution of crime. See Houston Chronicle Publ'g Co. v. City of Houston, 531 S.W.2d 177 (Tex. Civ. App.--Houston [14th Dist.] 1975) (court delineates law enforcement interests that are present in active cases), writ ref'd n.r.e. per curiam, 536 S.W.2d 559 (Tex 1976).”

One wonders. In this case, the defendant made a complete video record of his own arrest, and published it to the world – long and loud.

On April 1, Glenn Shoemaker, the Records Custodian of the Bell County Communications Center wrote County Attorney Darrell Guess, asking, “I have received a request from Kurt Glass, attorney for Christopher Grisham (Cause 2C1302656) for all information related to this incident. Do you wish that I file a request with the Attorney General's office to withhold this information, since it is a pending prosecution?”

Mr. Guess replied, “That would be our preferred practice.”

On the same day, Mr. Shoemaker wrote the AG's office, saying “The County believes the information should not be released based on section 552.108, pending prosecution.”

As if by magic, 10 days later, Asst. Atty. Gen. Sean Nottingham (!) of the Open Records Division wrote back on April 11, saying “You inform us the Bell County District Attorney's Office (the "district attorney's office") objects to disclosure of the submitted information because its release would interfere with a pending criminal prosecution. Based on your representation, we conclude the submitted information may be withheld on behalf of the district attorney's office under section 552.108(a)(1)of the Government Code. See Houston Chronicle Pub1'g Co. v. City of Houston,531S.W.2d 177(Tex.Civ.App.-Houston [14thDist.] 1975)(courtdelineates law enforcement interests present in active cases), writ ref'd n.r.e. per curium, 536 S.W.2d 559 (Tex. 1976).

“This letter ruling is limited to the particular information at issue in this request and limited to the facts as presented to us; therefore, this ruling must not be relied upon as a previous determination regarding any other information or any other circumstances.” Though the request for an AG's opinion was made by the County Attorney's office, for some reason, the Open Records Division referred to the District Attorney's office in its response.

It's as common as can be, this minuet regarding the 10 days an attorney has to seek the opinion of the AG's office, and their subsequent denial – or sometimes favorable ruling – either allowing, or disallowing a release of the records that belong, by and Act of the Legislature to We The People, and not the public officials who make decisions as to what it's good for We The People to KNOW and when We The People should GET ACQUAINTED with the facts.

- The Legendary 

The wrath of God leans down to kiss Earth good night

Snapped in an ice cream parlor window on Cleburne's W. Henderson Street at sundown

BULLETIN: According to broadcasters, emergency officials are expecting a death toll of at least 40 more persons... 

Cleburne – For the second time in a week, climatic forces much greater than the affairs of man brushed the planet's surface and killed with impunity.

In the Oklahoma City area, 37 people perished, many of them children, during an afternoon of utter hell as giant rotary clouds plowed through buildings, threw vehicles and debris hundreds of feet through the air, and caused entire structures to collapse on their occupants.

As the line of wrathful mammatus (literally, breast) clouds advanced from the northwest, they swept Johnson, Bosque, Hamilton and Coryell Counties with the threat of severe damage.

Below, a storm chaser's video of a series of funnel clouds menacing Moore, Oklahoma, a community in the Oklahoma City area.

Suicide up, VA benefit processing way, way down...

Of the crises facing American troops today, suicide ranks among the most emotionally wrenching — and baffling. Over the course of nearly 12 years and two wars, suicide among active-duty troops has risen steadily, hitting a record of 350 in 2012. That total was twice as many as a decade before and surpassed not only the number of American troops killed in Afghanistan but also the number who died in transportation accidents last year.

Even with the withdrawal from Iraq and the pullback in Afghanistan, the rate of suicide within the military has continued to rise significantly faster than within the general population, where it is also rising. In 2002, the military’s suicide rate was 10.3 per 100,000 troops, well below the comparable civilian rate. But today the rates are nearly the same, above 18 per 100,000 people.

And according to some experts, the military may be undercounting the problem because of the way it calculates its suicide rate....the most recent Pentagon report of suicides (click here) found that half of the troops who killed themselves in 2011 had experienced the failure of an intimate relationship and about a quarter had received diagnoses of substance abuse.

Studies have also found that certain patterns of suicide among civilians seem intensified within the military. Among civilians, young white males are one of the most likely groups to kill themselves. In the military that group, which is disproportionately represented, is even more likely to commit suicide. Among civilians, firearms are the most common means; in the military, as might be expected, guns are used even more often, in 6 of every 10 instances. - The New York Times

West IED charge one of hundreds filed nationwide

A violation of the Internal Revenue Code

“Everybody's going nowhere, baby; they're only fighting for the chance to be last. There's nothing with going nowhere, baby, but we should be going nowhere fast...” - a song from “Streets Of Fire,” by screenwriter Walter Hill.

Waco – Bryce Ashley Reed, the dismissed – and seemingly disgraced - West paramedic who was arrested by ATF agents in the middle of the night and arraigned in federal Magistrate Court in secret, is charged with a violation of the U.S. Tax code.

He has yet to have his day in open court, a postponement of a bail hearing arrived at “by agreement,” said his attorney, Jonathan Sibley, who is hired by the Court at $125 per hour, according to documents on file.

The arrangement is allowed under a Title 18 Code section that provides 3 days of leeway upon motion of the Government and up to 5 days on a defense motion if “the attorney for the Government or upon the officers' own motion if there is a serious risk that the defendant (a) will flee or (b) will obstruct or attempt to obstruct justice, or threaten, injure or attempt to threaten, injure, or intimidate a prospective witness or juror.”

Mrs. Brittany Reed is known to have blurted out at a community meeting held on the evening of the day of Mr. Reed's arrest that agents interrogated the couple for many hours after a pre-dawn-early morning raid, and stated that “if he gets out on bail, he will kill himself.”

Possession of an unregistered explosive device is equated with possession of an unregistered firearm under the provisions of 26 U.S. Code Section 5861 (d), according to the Tax Code, which code also requires in another section that manufacturers of firearms pay a $1,000 fee and dealers a $500 fee annually in order to legally register their products.

He'sonly one of hundreds of people similarly charged with possession of an IED (improvised explosive devices) since President Obama declared detection of such violations a national priority on Februrary 26 –the 20th anniversary of the 1993 truck bomb attack on the World Trade Center. Largely symbolic, that terroristic attack was against a symbol of America's competence – one of the nation's temples of high finance.(click)

Obviously, the powers that be in the executive departments of the U.S. Government are now sweating the possibility of violent attacks on the nation's infrastructure in agriculture and transportation.

Google IED arrests, and you will see numerous hits on http://mugshots.com/search.html?x=0&y=0&q=arrests+for+improvised+explosive+device for Americans booked for the same offense on that day, and on the days that follow, often in conjunction with other charges.

SAC Robert Champion BATFE, Dallas

For instance, the ATF's Dallas Special Agent in Charge, Robert Champion,who ramrodded the 30-day, multi-million dollar investigation of the explosion at West Fertilizer Co., joined the FBI and Assistant U.S.Attorney in the announcement that agents arrested Midland land surveyor Steven Leonard Prewitt following a lengthy undercover operation on May 2. Mr. Prewitt had led undercover agents on a tourof rural properties in two other west Texas counties where he proudly displayed and demonstrated IED's and caches of bomb-making materials.(click here)

Mr. Champion re-emphasized last week that in their ruling that the tragic events are of an “undetermined” cause, authorities are not prepared to maintain any connection between the charges filed against Mr. Reed and the fire and explosion at West Fertilizer Co.

Uzbekistani activist Fazliddin Kurbanov is charged with helping to raise moneyfor terrorist organizations based in his native land, as well as instructing fellow insurgents on how to make IED's, possession of the deadly devices, and the makings for more of them. He is charged in U.S. District Court in Idaho.(click)

Police in Tempe, Arizona, arrested a high school student for possession of an explosive device, and charged him under the same statute.(click)

Look up the President's declaration, and you will read that terrorists are poised to begin the kind of attacks U.S. Forces have countered in Iraq and Afghanistan – in the streets and along the transportation corridors of American cities and rural locations.

“They employ the most recent and successful tactics, and procedures gained from experience in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world,” saith Mr. Obama in his declaration. There were in excess of 4,000 such attacks worldwide during 2011, according to the White House statement.

Part of planned strategy calls for “Conducting multi-mode data analysis of IED patterns, trends, and tactics, techniques, and procedures to anticipate future IED threat evolutions ...”

Clearly, Old Blue, the federal hound, has his ear to the ground.

According to an affidavit of probable cause filed by Agent Douglas J. Kunze, the Sheriff's Office was called to “a residence in Abbott, McLennan County, Texas...(and) it was determined that the destructive device components had been in the possession of Bryce Ashley Reed.”

They “included a galvanized metal pipe that was 3.5 inches in length by 1.5 inches in diameter. Attached to the pipe were two galvanized end caps, one of which contained a drilled hole approximately 1/8 inch in diameter. Additionally, the canisters contained an unknown amount of hobby fuse, a lighter, a digital scale, plastic spoon, six coils of metal ribbon and several pounds of chemical powders in individual bags...”

The agent listed Potassium Nitrate, aluminum powder, Red Iron Oxide, Ammonium Perchlorate, Potassium Perchlorate, Sulfur powder, Air Float Charcoal and Eckart 10890 German Dark Aluminum as components thus stored.

For additional information on Mr. Reed, click here

There is some confusion as to whether the explosive device was assembled, or if there were only components stashed at the Abbott residence. According to Chief Deputy Matt Cawthon, the device picked up by the Sheriff's Officers was fully assembled.

“After further investigation, it was determined that the resident had unwittingly taken possession of the components from REED on April 26, 2013.” The fire and explosion occurred April 17.

Arguably, Mr. Reed may have come under suspicion due to his extremely voluble and somewhat argumentative inclination to discuss the tragedy and his role in its aftermath. He was reportedly a first responder who took command of a radio communications center while EMT's and firemen helped clear bodies of those who perished from the wreckage and rushed survivors to medical attention.

A blog entry on a KXAN website published in Austin related how he suddenly took a perch standing on a coffee table at the Czech Inn, where he admonished survivors and their families they were "in the right place," to “stay where you are,” or he might very possibly find himself at the blast site clearing their remains from the wreckage.

The somewhat astonished broadcast reporter wrote that he gave interviews to press and broadcasters alike in the motel's parking lot while other members of the Volunteer Fire Department maintained a stony, stoic silence to all comers.

Very definitely, it is a cultural thing, the difference between those who see playing with explosives, as well as carrying handguns and owning assault rifles, as a total no no, while certain personalities from more rural settings see no problem with any of it.

They include relatives of highly placed elected officials, who maintain it's only a boys-will-be-boys phenomenon, long observed when country boys and girls get it on down on the farm.

Explosion cause at West Fertilizer Co. “undetermined”

Blast centered in seed and fertilizer room

West – As camera operators and reporterss from 19 broadcast outlets and at least 40 print media publications listened, the overall mood of the lawmen looking into the fire and explosion disaster at West was somber, their affect sober and extremely matter of fact.

The nation's top arson investigators, who have spent 20 thousand personal hours over a month's time and gone through a million dollar budget, excluding state and local officers staff time, have drawn a blank.

The cause of the fire and explosion that rocked a seismograph at Lake Whitney in two separate blasts milliseconds apart is considered undetermined at this time.

The quest is far from over.

The exhaustive process has considered 280 leads, examined 260 pieces of evidence, and the investigation is still ongoing, according to officials of the State Fire Marshal's Office and the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, who will leave behind 18 investigators from multiple agencies for the duration – or, that is, until the matter is resolved.

In their labors, they have eliminated a spontaneous ignition, an anhydrous ammonium leak, smoking, a malfunction in the 480-volt electrical system that powered the plant's various conveyors and mixers, and a weather event.

The factors that have not been eliminated are a malfunction in the buildings' 120-volt electrical system, a possibly overcharged and exploded battery in a golf cart parked among the bins in the seed and fertilizer room – or an intentionally set fire.

A brake pad from the golf cart was found 2.5 miles distant, along with a piece of plastic determined to have been a part of the apparatus.

A clue to the intensity of the blast is that only two pieces of the golf cart have been found, both among items hurled the farthest from the blast's epicenter. They are thus considered to have come from the area nearest the center of the explosion.

Mr. Robert Champion. Special Agent in Charge of the Dallas ATF office, said authorities will not speculate that the arrest of former EMT Bryce Reed for possession of an explosive device had any connection to the explosion at the West Fertilizer Co.

Propelling the debris was a shock wave from the twin explosions – one smaller, the other larger, according to the seismograph – caused by the sudden ignitiion of 28 to 34 tons of ammonium nitrate with an equivalent blast power of 15 to 20 thousand pounds of TNT, according to Kelly Kistner, Assistant State Fire Marshal of the Texas Bureau of Insurance.

The explosion left untouched about 100 additional tons loaded on a rail car, as well as 20 to 30 tons in the building – all of it stored in wooden bins.

To make these determinations, investigators excavated a crater some 94 feet in diameter and 10 feet in depth, and used laser transits with GPS positioning capability that will in the months to come be used to construct a 3D model of the blast zone that may be viewed from all angles, rotated, and examined at will.

According to Agent Ryan Hoback, the information presented is the conclusion of the first phase of the investigation – the scene excavation.

The 30-day investigation ranks with that of the Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building or the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon.

Most ATF investigations last only 3 to 7 days, said Robert R. Champion of the ATF's Dallas office.

A correspondent from a national news network asked “Is that the best family and friends can expect – for now – or for the foreseeable future?”

An ATF agent bristled, attempted to answer, his voice grinding down to a halt, and the last question had been asked and answered.

Standing in the crowd, listening with intensity, Sheriff Parnell McNamara and Chief Deputy Matt Cawthon missed not a word.

Both have vowed to leave no stone unturned in their quest to find the cause and the reason for the tragedy at the West Fertilizer Co. which left 15 persons dead, hundreds injured, and even hundreds more homeless, searching for a solution to a terrible problem that appeared as suddenly and as violently as an afternoon thunderstorm.

Here's how fast it happened: At 7:29 p.m., the fire was reported; at 7:37 dispatchers sent first responders. They arrived at 7:38; at 7:41, the call went out for additional units, and at 7:51 the twin explosions rocked central Texas, hurling 15 souls into eternity - 12 of them first responders.

To hear an edited audio of the presentation, one need only click here:
https://soundcloud.com/the-legendary/undetermined-cause-of-west