The FBI saga

The FBI Saga Eric Pepke 10 March 2019 After the events in The Guilt Phase Saga, my torture-addled brain was struggling to make sense of everything. The day before I was to see my lawyer to discuss sentencing, two individuals showed up to help me. The fact they were so unaware of the boon they gave made it even more delightful. I was taken out of the holding cell. The auxiliary room was in use, so they rousted the insulin nurse from her room. She did not look too happy about that. I sat down alone with the two figures inside. They introduced themselves as Scooby & Shaggy. Those aren't their real names. The APWA doesn't like real names, so I'm calling them Benson & Hedges instead. The interrogation lasted a couple of hours. I remember that they had me taken to the holding cell one or two times, I guess to talk tactics against me; they always looked smug when I got back. I remember details vividly, but my direct memory of the entire sequence was impaired (hippocampus damage from the sleep deprivation?) I've had to reconstruct the overall sequence mostly from pairwise contextual comparisons, as I do not have a transcript. Not that it matters, as it would mean much the same in any order, but I hope I get it right. Blanchard and Morgan said they were trying to track down someone in Lubbock, Texas. Mutt & Jeff said he styled himself Mohammad in Texas or Mohammad from Texas; I can't remember which. Pons & Fleishman said he also used some cop-sounding name I can't remember. Donnie and Marie said my name was in the real name field of his Yahoo account. This was the first I had heard Yahoo had a real name field. Steve and Edie said the Lubbock FBI found out I was in jail and sent the Professor and Mary Ann to talk to me. Flatt and Scruggs didn't play Good Cop/Bad Cop. Jack and Jill both started of as Good Cops and slowly metastasized into Bad Cops. Confusingly, Peaches and Herb went back and forth a lot. That is probably recommended in the Big Pig Book. I told Martin & Lewis I had nothing to do with anything. Timmy and Lassie pretended to accept that. Then Mork and Mindy asked if I, given my computer skills, could help McMillan and Wife figure it out. Sigfried and Roy said they had visited the Cary cop who had my file. Hans and Franz said he had told them to say hi, which I thought was pretty weird. Rocky and Bullwinkle asked if I had known anybody who, back in 2002 or 2003 when Beany and Cecil said the account had been created, had it in for me. I told Fred and Ginger my political writings were all over the internet, and I did not pull punches. I'm sure I had a lot of enemies. I asked Heckle and Jekyll if they had seen my discovery with so many of my writings downloaded from the internet. Hansel and Gretel said they had and had read one about software development. Black and Decker said this ostensible Man from Lubbock was writing things over USENET they did not like. Haldeman and Ehrlichman said he said he wanted to establish a caliphate from Texas and was telling men they should behead women with kitchen knives and many other things. Now USENET is just words, plain ASCII text. Last millennium people sometimes coded images and music into ASCII, but that is very old hat. In any event, Donald and Daisy were talking mainly about plain speech. I wondered what business the FBI had interrogating people over words. Then Rosencranz and Guildenstern accused me of writing those words. I was deeply offended at the idea I would be using USENET that long into the new millennium. That's a geek joke. Literalists like Smith and Wesson need know I hadn't in a decade and a half. There is no point - it would be like installing a crank starter on a new car. I said I was Jewish. Statler and Waldorf got quiet for a moment. But then Hatfield and McCoy manfully recovered and said I was pretending to be an Islamic terrorist in Lubbock, Texas downloading child pornography and so on and so I said that was absurd and asked to see the impressive sheaf of papers Sylvester and Tweety had. I pointed out I had a distinct style and was willing to bet it was different. Like Winston Smith, I held the paper in my hands. I found a quote. I pointed out that I used the Oxford comma, unlike the paper, and the paper had usages I never used. I saw crossposting to alt.atheism, which I remembered from the 1990s. There were also some newsgroups I had never heard of. Boris and Natasha said they were for Russians to discuss nudism. (This is a thing?) I pointed out I was in North Carolina and didn't even know where Lubbock, Texas was. Leopold and Loeb started screaming that with my computer skills, I could make it look as if I were in Lubbock, Texas. Bonnie and Clyde then said I must have done it, because the posts in question had stopped before I was arrested. Butch and Sundance with nostril-gaping smugness, "It fits!" Then Lenny and Squiggy asked, "Could you have pretended to be him?" I intuited that was a trap. If I said "yes," they would claim I had admitted to doing it. If I said "no," they would insist it would have been possible for me to have done it if I had tried. So I said that I have never tried, which is true. I later learned this is definitely in The Big Pig Book. The Sun magazine offers free subscriptions to prisoners. They do not seem to want to renew mine no matter how many times I ask, but when they did send me some, there was an interview with Richard Leo ("The Whole Truth," issue 499, 2017). "The police then start to work on cutting out the suspect's conditional words. I might have, I could have. Maybe. Probably. The interrogation continues for hours." page 12 Chico and The Man gave some more reasons I must be guilty. Click and Clack asked why I had "entertained them" for hours, with the self-same supercilious smugness. Apparently, Hatfield and McCoy had decided only an evil, er, typer would have agreed to their request for help. Peabody and Sherman also noted that I thought the writing style might be different even before I read it! If I said someone else had different fingerprints, they must all be mine. Laurel and Hardy were obviously not familiar with a little thing I like to call "literacy." Gilbert and Sullivan also tried to insult my intelligence. The Captain and Tenille said I was bragging when I said my writing style was unusual and not likely to resemble another's. Jekyll and Hyde said if I were as smart as I thought I was, I wouldn't have had so many jobs over the years. I guess Tango and Cash thought everybody wanted to be steady as a rock and twice as smart. Simon and Simon obviously couldn't imagine not having sex with the same red heifer every day their whole lives. Bob and Ray said I must be itching to confess, and if I did not, my problems would be "a thousand times worse." Unless Tom and Jerry were planning to resurrect me repeatedly for 10,000 years, it is hard to see how Barnum and Bailey could make good on the threat. It seemed beyond the capacity even of the mighty, mighty Toodie and Muldoon of the FBI. Mickey and Minnie expressed a willingness to come back the next day if I told the jail staff, even though it was a long drive. I imagine Jim and Tammy would, as a nice country drive is probably better even than wearing a dress and illegally wiretapping a civil rights leader in the hopes of some hot Negro action, as Uncle J. Edgar used to do. Besides, there are no civil rights leaders anymore - nobody cares. I shook my head and said I had nothing to do with anything they said. I can't remember if it was Henny Penny or Chicken Little who screamed "Sure you did!" with a vein popping out of his neck, but I was glad Beavis and Butthead were risking an accident (cerebero-vascular would have been most favorite) for me. Bait and Switch were members of the Stanislavsky school of method acting; that's for sure! Ok. I'm trying to have some fun with this, but only because it is so terrifying. It should be obvious this goes well beyond me. About an hour after they were popping their veins, I realized my personal importance had vanished into insignificance. I was only important as an observer, reporter, and writer. I had to tell the American people. They had broken my cognitive log jam. I leave the details as an exercise for the reader. I put all the needed information into the Guilt Phase Saga, like Agatha Christie had a reputation for doing even when she didn't. The details don't matter as much as the general story anyway. The key is the discovery. My political writings weren't busy work to bulk up an otherwise thin case. They were what the prosecution had been all about from the get go. As I knew, this was about speech, not the "speech" of child pornography, but political speech, the kind everybody thinks the First Amendment protects. Without a law library, I did not know yet how furiously the Supreme Court hates criticism of the government. In the early 20th century, there were hardly any rights at all. See Schenk v. US, 250 US 616 (1919) and Abrams v. US, 249 US 47 (1919). It was only in the late 1960s, see Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 US 444 (1969) and the 1970s, see National Socialist Party v. Skokie, 432 US 45 (1977) that significant progress was made. Of course, the early two cases denied Jews the right to persuade people to think and the later two upheld for the KKK and Nazis to spread hate. What this says about American values is left as an exercise for the reader. Schenk was publishing pamphlets encouraging people to think about whether to volunteer for World War I. Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said, "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater, and causing a panic." A lot of people paraphrase this, including the Supreme Court. Most of the time, they leave out "falsely." This is called the "clear and present danger" exception. It's hard to see how it could be applied to a pamphlet, but never mind. Doubtless it is what gives the Islamic Terrorist nonsense its punch. One is supposed to think of a terrible person who flies airplanes into buildings, like all Jews, er, I mean Muslims are supposed to do, at least in Duck and Cover's fertile and febrile imagination. Never mind that after 9/11 I drove to New York on my own nickel to volunteer. In all of Stop and Frisk's rantings about the Man from Lubbock, if indeed he existed, there was no mention of any crimes or plans. It was just ranting as I had seen thousands of people do since I got online in the 1970s. (Really PLATO FSU/Sarasota High.) It was all just words. But even if you crank the paranoid, hysterical rantings up to 11, it doesn't matter. When I told them I was a Jew, Barnes and Barnes didn't back down. Instead, they became even more aggressive and eager to nail me. It is certainly possible to say I'm not a Real Jew®. People do that a lot to me (and other prisoners), including the closest thing I had to a rabbi. I don't even defend myself. I find no dishonor in being in the position Spinoza was, and it gives me better leverage to criticize Jews, including their eagerness to kick other Jews to the curb. Still, Stop and Frisk accepted it and became even more enraged over what they had to believe was a PARODY, the same kind of thing MAD Magazine does every month. Given that the government had already physically tortured me into pleading guilty to a bogus charge, this is no laughing matter and idle threat. 97 months (or 97,000, given their "thousand" claim) is what the government considers an appropriate punishment for satire, and there seems to be no opposition by or recourse from the courts. This is what the government is entitled to do to anybody they do not like, including you. It might, however, seem impolitic for the government to admit they imprison people for criticizing them. So take a page from every demagogue throughout history. Don't reason or provide evidence or afford due process or any of that nonsense. As R.F. Laird said in theboomerbible.com, that can lead to thought, and thought is the enemy of happiness. Just shriek at the top of your lungs the most emotive drivel you can muster. It doesn't matter if it has nothing to do with reality. Everyone will be so busy being alarmed that nobody will notice. TERRORISM! Aaaiiieee! MISOGYNY! Aaahoooga! Aaahooga! BEHEADING! Gaaah! CHILD PORNOGRAPHY! Hooka dooka! ATHEISM! Deedle deedle queep! THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING! Homina homina homina. AND THEY'RE ALL NUDE! Rhubarb rhubarb! This is Hitler 101, people, and it never fails. The government just piled it on me. It's easier to list what they didn't smear than to enumerate what they did. Even the Texas part evokes images of child abusers (alleged) in Waco. I'm sure burning children with concentrated flammable war chemicals followed by an incendiary chaser is something the FBI is most proud of. They missed a couple. They didn't accuse me of witchcraft, but even the Bureau of Prisons recognizes Wicca as a religion. I also think that many Americans have come to realize that witches cannot make hens lay cubical eggs by looking at them funny. It was not always the case. The satanic ritual abuse feeding frenzy before Geraldo Riveras star dimmed and televangelists had tripped quite literally over their own genitalia destroyed the lives of thousands of people. I also suppose if they had realized I was Jewish earlier, they would have accused me of slaughtering Gentile babies for blood to make Passover matzohs. That's always a crowd-pleaser. But there wasn't much they left off, and I am indebted to Beavis and Butthead for putting the government's strategy in such a clear light. Again, I do not matter. I doubt if anybody cares if I live or die, and I feel dead already. What matters is the flushing of the United States constitution. Cagney and Lacey had broken my cognitive log jam, and I could think and write. Thus enlightened, I tuned my thoughts to my rapidly dwindling supply of what I stupidly thought were friends and how I was going to be able to get out with enough information to publish. Kibbles and Bits had done me a favor, but then it was time to move on.