Vanderboegh: In re Keeku

For our sins, my fellow gunnies, and those of ATF Special Agent Jody Keeku, David Olofson goes to prison today.

Our sins are those of omission.

Keeku's are sins of commission.

Which is worse is for God and history to judge.

I have just finished reading for tenth time an affidavit by Candice Marie Olofson, David's wife, which describes in detail the despicable, gestapo-like actions of Ms. Jody Keeku, Special Agent, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in the events surrounding the railroading of her husband on bogus automatic weapons charges.

You will find the link here; please take the time to read the affidavit.

Ms. Keeku's actions are consistent with the long line of ATF dog-shooting, cat-stomping, children-scaring, rights-violating, and occasionally deadly force-misadventuring that we have come to recognize as the hallmark of federal guncop behavior. Her actions in the Olofson and Red's Trading Post cases show a certain arrogant brutishness that is unfortunately typical of female ATF agents. (It was, after all, a female agent who stomped the kitten to death in the Pennsylvania gun show promoter case.) In an agency that has been demonstrably racist and sexist since its inception (from the testimony and lawsuits of former agents), perhaps they think they have to out-macho the testosterone-before-brains types who have risen in the ATF hierarchy since the expansion of the agency in "counter-terrorist" '90s.

If I may, I'd like to make a prediction. The Olofson case has so galvanized the understandable outrage of the armed citizenry at Ms. Keeku's brand of "our tax dollars at work" (and thereby convinced us that there is no justice available anymore in the federal system, that indeed the rule of law no longer applies to the selected victims of ATF abuse), that there will soon be an active and growing list of her fellow ATF agents who will curse her name and wish mightily that her mother had never swapped spit with her father.

This is not a new phenomenon. Meet some other folks who have, in their time, disgraced the organization they were supposed to represent and made their comrades-in-arms despise them.

Meet former Army Sergeant Charles Grainor:

The ringleader in the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal in Iraq, Granor and his lover, Pfc. Lynndie England, decided to snap a few personal photos of the raucous high times they had at work.

You remember, surely. In one photo, Granor appears to be giving a thumbs-up signal as he stands behind a pile of naked Iraqis. In another photo, he is clenching a fist and has his arm cocked as if preparing to punch a hooded prisoner. He was also accused of jumping on prisoners and stomping on their hands and feet.

Those pictures are estimated to have gotten hundreds more American soldiers killed in the understandable Arab outrage that followed their release. They disgraced their uniform, and real soldiers, brave men and women, who serve today in Iraq still curse their names.

As one historian stated:

Even if the Abu Ghraib photographs in a short-term perspective had minimal political or policy repercussions, they nevertheless dealt a fatal blow to the United States' mission in Iraq. Not only were these photographs bound to alienate much of the Arab world, but also, in a long-term perspective, to percolate into the mind of Americans, and to create their own autonomous frame of reference in the sense that the heretofore banned sight of American soldiers in the role of sadistic dominators has become an integral part of our understanding of the US war on terror. -- Anden-Papadopoulos, K. (2006, June) "Abu Ghraib Revisited: News Narratives, Visual Culture, and the Power of Photography" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Dresden International Congress Centre, Dresden, Germany Online

Meet Lon Tomohisa Horiuchi, aka "Hooch":


The sniper, Lon Horiuchi, was a West Point graduate armed with state-of-the--art sniping equipment and trained to be accurate to within a quarter inch at 200 yards. He claims he missed Kevin and hit Vicki by accident. But Bo Gritz, the former Green Beret commander who eventually negotiated Randy Weaver’s surrender, said that after he became a negotiator the FBI showed him a psychological profile of the family prepared for the Marshals Service before the siege that described Vicki as the "dominant member" of the family. "Vicki was the maternal head of the family," Gritz told the Spokane Spokesmar-Review. "I believe Vicki was shot purposely by the sniper as a priority target....The profile said, if you get a chance, take Vicki Weaver out." -- Alan Bock, "Ambush at Ruby Ridge -- How government agents set Randy Weaver up and took his family down," Reason Magazine, October 1993.

A 1976 graduate of West Point, "Hooch" was the FBI sniper who shot and killed Vicki Weaver at Ruby Ridge while she held her new baby in her arms. Fired brass was also recovered from his sniper position at the Waco butchery.

In 1997, Boundary County, Idaho Prosecutor Denise Woodbury, with the help of special prosecutor Stephen Yagman, charged Horiuchi in state court with involuntary manslaughter. Horiuchi successfully petitioned to remove the case to federal court, where the case was dismissed by U.S. District Judge Edward Lodge on May 14, 1998, who cited the supremacy clause of the Constitution which grants immunity to federal officers acting in the scope of their employment.[The decision to dismiss the charges was reversed by an en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit, which held that enough uncertainty about the facts of the case existed for Horiuchi to stand trial on state manslaughter charges. Ultimately, the then-sitting Boundary County Prosecutor, Brett Benson, who had defeated Woodbury in the 2000 election, decided to drop the charges because he felt it was unlikely the state could prove the case and too much time had passed. Yagman, the special prosecutor, responded that he "could not disagree more with this decision than I do." The 9th Circuit granted Boundary County's motion to dismiss the case against Horiuchi on September 14, 2001. The surviving Weaver family received $3.1M in 1995 to settle the civil suit brought against the BATF for wrongful deaths. Harris received $380,000 in 2000. -- Wikipedia

Back in the late '90s I chanced to talk with an FBI special agent who was then approaching retirement. It was a large social occasion, yet we both needed no introduction. He knew of me and I knew of him. We talked about many things and at first he was very guarded. I broke the ice with a discussion of what he knew about the 1963 Birmingham Church bombing case, and what exactly the FBI informant in that case had said about his providing the dynamite to the bombers.

Eventually we got around to the subjects of Ruby Ridge, Waco and the badly misnamed "Hostage Rescue Team."

His eyes flashed and his face tightened, "Those motherf - - -rs ruined the Bureau. F---ing cowboys." He continued in that vein at some length. He felt that the entire ethos of the FBI that he had been trained in had been irreparably harmed by the "those militarized motherf - - -rs." He was happy to be retiring, he said, just to be out from under the cloud of "being looked at like I was some sort of baby killer because I was an FBI agent."

I've had an identical conversation with a retired ATF agent about "Waco Jim" Cavanaugh.

There are other examples in history of this "bad apple" archetype. Lt. William Calley springs to mind. But you get the point. The actions of one soldier or agent become the (perhaps) unfair standard upon which all are judged. And this gets other people killed, not merely sneered at.

"Ask not . . ."

So we can expect that the sins of commission of Jody Keeku will be visited upon her fellow agents at some point.

And they will curse her bitterly for it.

But what of our sins of omission?

They are these:

- That we allowed a monstrous, unconstitutional cancer to grow upon the body republic, an agency called by acronym shorthand the ATF, fed by our tax dollars, nurtured by our failure to act, by our complacency and moral cowardice.

- Shoved back from our God-given, inalienable rights for 70 years, we complied, grumbling, BUT NEVER ACTING, never shoving back. We never insisted upon those rights. We have, by our inaction, allowed tyrannical bitches like Jody Keeku to flourish on our tax dollars, terrorizing innocent men, women and children like the Olofsons.

You want to know who empowered Jody Keeku?

Look in the bloody mirror.

David Olofson goes to prison today. And he goes there because of us as much as Jody Keeku.

Who's next?

Ask not for whom the bell tolls, the poet wrote.

It tolls for thee.

Mike Vanderboegh
PO Box 926
Pinson, AL 35126
GeorgeMason1776@aol.com