At this point, never mind Bayard... concentrate on Scott Caplan. There is plausible reason to believe that he's guilty of multiple counts of filing false corporate documents as well as violating various FAA regulations, all of which could get him jail time and disbarment.

You'd better believe that if he was a liberal activist --or someone who might have represented a Muslim at some point--his office would've been shut down by an army of police with warrants and subpoenas in hand.

Sec. Bradbury should act immediately in order to preserve any evidence that might be going into the shredder right now, and this crook should be in front of a grand jury asap.

John

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Times that this subject has come up and people get in conversations about it, I get the impression that the 'news' part of it, to them is, not the specific facts but the fact that 'it could happen here.'

There's a sense of this don't-look-at-the-man-behind-the-curtain in Jeff's earlier post: No Apologies, No Mistakes, No WMD -- Jeff Alworth "I know we're an Oregon-focused blog, so I try to stay away from national politics and foreign policy. But when wars are waged, they affect us at home."

We cannot "stay away." We are affected "at home" in our everyday life (and death), by congress blinking in D.C. There is such a gulf of misunderstanding to cross in order to talk about this around the watercooler, in the cafes, with people you meet who don't get what the news means. On a dozen different occasions in the last couple years, a dozen different people have volunteered 'a retired CIA guy lives there,' around Portland, when we would be talking about housing or property developments or something. For petesake, hundreds of 'locals' kept two years of war-work they did secret, for the Manhattan Project at Hanford, right up the river.

Those years in the 1940s, the Hanford employment might have amounted to a couple percent of the Washington's total state income, and that's a big chunk. I have heard stories from Jack Abramowitz, who managed costs at Boeing in the '40s and invented Learning Curve theory from it, (which takes on the order of billion-$ in a year's time under one person's gaze before the statistical effect of cost savings by human learning is detectable).

There has been a pork-barrel of dollars through the Dept.of Defense, (invented in 1947, you recall, replacing the Dept. of War in the Constitution; Sept.11, 1947, the Pentagon cornerstone laying, if you like ironic), dollars on the order of trillion-$, fed into Washington's state economy. The early chunkchecks to Boeing is what bought the computers that were 'around' in Seattle environs for Gates and Allen to play with as teenagers. In 1970-days, a computer system for a business was on the order of a $10 million cost -- the computers in the first internet -- and not many businesses had one, let alone local regions and economies of the country. (When c.1970 "mini-computers" under $1 million started, I left the 'big iron' market and was installing computers in smaller companies -- the newspaper typesetting system at The Oregonian, 1972, for example. But all along the way, the mother's milk of computer tech, right here 'at home,' has been 'military defense' dollars.)

I mean, to me the importance of this post is seeing it as a factual instance of the longer wider pattern, which it takes several instances to see the scope of, and (this) one more gives me hope and help to close the communications gap between me and people. Because, I've noticed, people's reaction to some things I say is like I'm too goofy to hold a conversation with. 'Tinfoil hat brigade,' was the wording, I think. In one earlier comment on this blog, I mentioned that Albany's Wah Chang is a significant manufacturer of land mines, getting on the order of billion-$DoD for it, and keeping Albanians dutifully employed. And one response was like 'Really? They make land mines in Oregon? How come I didn't know that?'

It is no surprise CIA airplane dealings go on around here, when you know Evergreen Airlines in McMinnville was flying worldwide missions out of that nondescript airport since before Vietnam. In Korean War days The Company was running Flying Tigers missions over the Himalayas, and Evergreen Airlines was an offshoot. The background on all this is here, a link to "The Secret Team," a real book (free!), (also, suppressed!), by Fletcher Prouty, on the history of the CIA by someone who was present and involved at the conception. The precedents in the book make Abu Ghraib no surprise, Osama and Saddam no surprise, media false stories and WMD lies no surprise, I mean, it is the reality thing, the real deal, for people who may have missed it in a cloud of cannabis smoke, which is the exact reverse of the finger-pointing charges that are usually made the other way -- the stoners saying the rocket scientists sound like they are high and wacky, and maybe too paranoid. But it is not deluded paranoia to see an attorney in downtown Portland laundering airplane records for the CIA. These are our neighbors, living right next door. Who are the two PPD officers right now on the JTTF assignment and who gets their reports and gives them orders? These are the issues of our community government, right in our City Council chambers.

Another aspect of the military-industrial complex 'at home' in our daily life (and death), is seen in connecting the facts that Oregon is the highest unemployment state and Oregon is the only state without a military base.
Or, in the cutting taxes/raising taxes partisan political brawling, consider the wider numbers. On $50,000 wages in the 20% bracket, (fed.income tax), the $10,000 check to Uncle Sam goes half to the Pentagon. The upper middle class worker, (the $50K head of household doesn't think of themself as 'upper' middle class, but they are; median, remember, is $30K), pays $5000 taxes to the Pentagon for things like invading Iraq on a lie or stealth lawyers in Portland not upholding justice, and then scream 'Immoral sin!' before they will pay 1% more ($500) state income taxes in a state with no sales tax. What's wrong with this picture is that it turns out Oregon has no schools but the kids have good long career prospects going around the world killing people. 'Long' if they don't get killed themselves, that is.

The real insanity is that if our congressional representatives cut the CIA and Pentagon to zero -- just zero out the DoD line item and Mr. and Mrs. $50K get a $5000 tax relief, (now that's Blumenauer bringing home the bacon) -- there. would. be. no. effect. on. national. security. There is no bogeyman. There is no 'enemies massing at the border.' Oh, there are places where 'the people' disagree with America, but 'they' are not coming to get us. (Even if 'they' were, paying for hundreds of military bases and millions of mercenaries around the world is not the way to stop 'them.') Not the communists, for forty years. Not the oil terrorists today. These 'threats to national security' are inventions. Figments. Made-up excuses for getting tax money out of us and jobs for jocks. If there are armies massed at the border to march in and fly in and take over America (as if), then let's see some satellite photos of the camps. And if there are missiles aimed at us, then what do we need soldiers and bullets and armored SUVs for? Diplomacy, statecraft, and good will works, and is cheaper. And the strongest 'national security' is citizens learned in the ways of the world and human nature and history. (And science, got to get in a plug for science.) The most dangerous enemy to American national security is us, our own people, going totalitarian on us. Either way -- being foreign brainwashed by idealistic communist false promises or being domestic brainwashed by consumer advertising into wage enslavement -- the strongest protective 'security' is educated citizens keeping in touch, sharing information, thinking for themselves, staying vigilant against brainwashers and mass media liars.

Anyway, that's some of the way I see it -- we took the wrong path after WW II, (with a false guide, the CIA, pointing us this way), and have had no national security ever since. I see more, (actually, I've got it traced back to Lewis and Clark who started it all when they didn't understand the natives saying 'humans can't own the land, or the water, or the air, with printed paper money; humans own with their labor, ('sweat equity'), done in good health, which no one can take away'; but I'm not as bad as Thom Hartmann, who drags us 200 years farther back, to 1628, for a better view of our modern world, link here), but I'm trying to write shorter comments. Because people are telling me it's too long and hard to read and study and learn when I don't put in any juicy sex and spurting blood.

Do, though, read Prouty's book, "The Secret Team," (and see www.prouty.org), if you happen to get a chance, in order to have a backstory context for the Torture Airlines in Portland internationale. Read, read, read. (But don't read long stuff on the screen -- print it out to read it. Maybe next time I can tell about the case of radiation poisoning rash I got from reading monitors too much. Besides, printout paper is a local industry; buy Oregon products.)

In my own reading opportunities I'm grinding through Mike Ruppert's "Crossing the Rubicon", which is choked with (CIA) facts. Ruppert explains that brothers John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles "designed" the CIA. (Not in his book but elsewhere I was intrigued to learn the Dulleses were the p.r. firm for the 1948 Dewey campaign, who planted in the Chicago Tribune the false headline "Dewey Defeats Truman" which appears in that famous photo of Truman, elected, holding that newspaper high over his head.) From "Crossing the Rubicon": After the assassination of JFK in 1963, Allen Dulles became the staff director and lead investigator of the Warren Commission .... When asked about how he could have offered the Warren Report, full of inconsistencies, to the American people with a straight face, Dulles is reported to have said, "The American people don't read."

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as long as they're paying the taxes, let 'em stay...we need all the money we can get.

I think focusing on Caplan and his law firm is exactly what needs to be done. I've written a little about one of the partners of the firm here

They're definitely not progressives. Caplan is returning calls to a reporter friend of mine who's organization has assigned her the story, and he's told her that he will talk to Leonard T. Bayard and ask him to call her. That's totally wierd, if you ask me. What are they gonna do, get some old fart to call and pretend he runs some international marketing company.

If Caplan knowingly falsified state incorporation papers, he can be fined $1,000 and six months in jail.

I think we think our state can't investigate this because it's the CIA. The whole reason they moved the operation from Massachusetts to Oregon is because state offficials and congress people started sniffing around.

Maybe they'll move it from Oregon to another state, but I say a snowball rolling down the hill just gets bigger.

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Maybe the infernal optimism trying to meet the transaction half way, Ruppert's site has up a first digest of his full-bandwidth, heart-dagger book, Crossing the Rubicon -- Simplifying the case against Dick Cheney, by Michael Kane, to wit: January 18, 2005 (FTW) - In an argument of over 600 pages and 1,000 footnotes, Crossing the Rubicon makes the case for official complicity within the U.S. government and names Dick Cheney as the prime suspect in the crimes of 9/11. ...

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