Posted on 05/29/2015 4:51:25 AM PDT by don-o
Have you seen this? Saw blurb yesterday, found origin this morning.
all propaganda has bit of truth interspersed.
Russian source>
“Obama Massacres Innocent Waco Bikers Over Putin Fears”
http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1870.htm
But they are right about the Cassacks being under the radar screen on biker listings in US. Just search and you will see.
I will be very interested to see the results of the bond hearings scheduled next week. I logically expect there will be more releases, especially of the independent and non-affiliated... (like the three Vice Grips Club members who were released recently); and there no doubt should be. I have a spreadsheet of those arrested that I am trying to update with Club Affiliation, when released, etc.
They did not arrest everyone who was initially detained at the scene and the affidavit shows five who were “unarrested.” So there were a lot of arrests, but still some discretion involved in those initial hours. I can see that they had to detain / arrest a large number that day. Reports say there were ~70 Cossacks and 100 Bandidos present, so the 170 number initially does not seem suspicious. [Not using LE source, the Cossack witness said there were about 70 Cossacks and then about 100 Bandidos rolled in.]
Rubber stamped affidavits — again, the first day they would not have had time to produce 170 separate narratives. As the LE spokesman said, they are going to be charged with RICO and we are going to send a message that outlaw gang activity will not be tolerated. [words to that effect, not a direct quote.]
No matter which judge approved those initial arrests, as the days passed, the bond could have been reduced; the implication is that the prosecutor agrees with the charges and has legal basis for it.
The message might be something like:
A meeting of The Confederation of Clubs and Independents is not just a group of recreational bikers. If you associate with outlaw MC gangs you are in fact associated with outlaw MC gangs. . . especially at a crime scene where murder and mayhem have just occurred. Waco does not intend to turn into Baltimore, where rival gangs shoot each other on the streets.
Recreational bikers know that association. Every club site I have looked at (not many but enough to get the picture) makes the hierarchy and rules pretty clear. Advice ranges from ~ if you want to form a club you will go to the main MC club in your territory ~ [paraphrasing but the following is pretty close] ~if you don’t want to get your teeth kicked in ~ ~ and if you don’t know where to find them, you aren’t ready ~
But if the above is the message Waco intended to be sent, it is lost on many posters here. Riding means being free to ride. But that effectively means riding with the permission of the gangs. Some others believe it is time and beyond time for legitimate bike clubs to stop any and all affiliation with the outlaw gangs, and it defies logic why they won’t do so since they are the majority.
The wall of silence . . . I am not in TX, maybe the news cycle has passed it by . . . which should not be the case because people are still clearly interested.
Any legal proceedings are public record, but they are not on-line in that County. I appreciate it when FReepers post news of the cases.
Yes, it is troubling as a precedent for “guilt by association”, which is one reason there is so much interest.
Trouble had been brewing and threatened to escalate. LE had been called to Twin Peaks at prior meetings (think he said about the last couple months) to break up fights, and asked TP to stop hosting the event. Other places do post — no colors or something similar so it does not seem an unreasonable request. [Dispatch records would show the calls in case anyone wants to look it up.]
It does indeed take time to sort out who shot whom. I was thinking, if I were in charge of the information management (which is actually spread out among different LE organizations), how I would approach it.
In addition to the interviews done ahead of time, there are 170 interviews of the ones arrested. The information has to be cross-checked against other testimony and forensic evidence. Follow-up interviews have to be conducted based upon that analysis.
Compare interview 1 to interviews 2 . . . 170;
compare interview 2 to interviews 3 . . . 179; etc.
To do it right, it would be tedious and time-consuming.
I am not at all surprised they are not “done” with the investigation in a couple weeks and doubt they will be any time soon.
The issue today is how long they will stay in jail. I guess for the truly guilty, at least it will count for “time served.” For those with no individual culpability other than association with outlaws . . . I hope we will see more of them released this week. Personally I hope a release condition is to refrain from any association with criminal gangs . . .
I try to be logical and reasoned, which makes this sound mealy-mouthed. I am like many here, troubled.
Excessive criminal behavior causes LE response. Indeed, it can become excessive LE response. BUT the excessive criminal behavior is what started it in this case. IMHO.
RICO would not exist as a remedy against criminal gangs, if criminal gangs had not come into being and terrorized communities . .
And Servus, of course.
I know the Soviets in the past and foreign spies often infiltrate gangs like this, and even the police in places like LA. So, your explanation would make sense.
That’s how I read it.
Sniper brass. In my hypothesis, fired by the SWAT snipers on over watch at the Cossacks who were shoving the U/C biker/cop out the door onto the parking lot.
A meeting of The Confederation of Clubs and Independents is not just a group of recreational bikers. If you associate with outlaw MC gangs you are in fact associated with outlaw MC gangs. . . especially at a crime scene where murder and mayhem have just occurred. Waco does not intend to turn into Baltimore, where rival gangs shoot each other on the streets.
The law under which the 170 are being held requires at least one overt act. Are you going to allow that merely being in a location where some criminals have gathered with non-criminals for a publicized gathering of interested parties is an overt act?
There is a vast difference between an unwise act and an illegal act.
don-o again thanks. I am in hopes that someone with legal knowledge of RICO can inform us. I am not saying I agree with the RICO charges, nor if they can legally stand. I observed, that the DA must have legal support for that course of action.
So, what should Waco do? In order to not be a Baltimore, where gang members shoot other gang members and innocent people in the streets? Asking!
I ask that question in good faith of those who comment on this and other threads. What is Waco to do, so as not to descend into a Baltimore?
RICO is a law that can certainly be misused and misapplied. Who gets to define what a criminal enterprise is? Depending upon who is in charge, it could range from all the actual dangerous criminal gangs like the Mafia and recent spawns, to Operation Rescue and the 4-H Sewing Club. Yes, I get that. It is sad and scary when citizens cannot trust their government.
At least in this case, the Bandidos et al have been defined as a criminal enterprise, and that seems incontrovertible. The ones arrested could or should have known that the Bandidos lead the Confederation of Clubs and Independents. There seems to be some justification to using RICO in this situation, even though I understand the personal hardship imposed upon those who did nothing wrong — EXCEPT to associate with a criminal enterprise — and they can indeed have been presumed to know that it was a criminal enterprise. SO the biker culture has apparently come to terms with the rules the Outlaw Gangs impose on the rest of them. Maybe they just all thought, OK I am innocent, I do not push drugs, etc. so no problem with me accepting the Bandido hierarchy over Texas (unless one is a Cossack or Scimitar, etc.) Nothing can happen to me, I am as pure as the driven snow! I am a family man! I have a job!
BUT ordinary policing can only ensure law and order when the citizenry is by and large, law abiding.
Our wonderful Constitution which intends to protect our freedoms to live our own individual lives in peace, is predicated on a civil society.
WHEN law abiding citizens accept biker gangs as a part of their normal associations . . . either LE can ignore border counties going third world to cartel influence, ignore meth etc. drug enterprises -— or at some point it has to realize, as we do, that if you want a FREE civilized society, the majority have to be governed by the ethic of work and family, and not prey upon others, and not engage in criminal behavior, and not wink at criminal behavior.
Would it not be so easy, if we could just blame LE??? The problem goes so much deeper that. Deeper even than the misuse of RICO to apply to 4-H sewing clubs. A society which gives up civilized behavior CANNOT expect order by normal means of policing. Policing only works for a civilized society.
THAT is what is the most scary to me. If we could put it on LE and solve the problem, oh how much easier than the actual solution requires.
Servus.
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."
I completely understand the justifications you posit; I just don't buy them.
Precedents are being established. We need our eyes to be wide open.
Few do.
“I completely understand the justifications you posit; I just don’t buy them.
Precedents are being established. We need our eyes to be wide open.”
Indeed. Wide open.
I see that too. But my line in the sand is not drawn at outlaw bikers; but as you see I do agree with the release of the others, like yesterday, or two weeks ago. Even though they should / could have known about the outlaw association.
And hopefully hence forth will disavow all association with the outlaw gangs and indeed ride free.
And I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep. Thanks fellow Freepers. Keep the information flowing, and do not shoot other Freepers. The aim is TRUTH. Servus.
and please let me know what Waco should do, so as to not turn into a Baltimore, yet still respect the rights of free citizens, and without caving in to biker outlaws. To me that is not an easy task, any action or inaction is subject to criticism. IF the LE response in Waco was so egregious, what SHOULD they have done, and isn’t that a fair question?? Let me know because I want to know. I want to know how we can have a free citizenry which is our Constitutional due, without being subject to wanton criminality, or LE response to same. IOW it is easy to complain especially after the fact, just let me know what LE SHOULD have done at Waco. What Waco SHOULD do in order to not become Baltimore. Thankfully they do not want to become Baltimore and have the civil and LE commitment to the contrary. SO JUST WHAT SHOULD THEY DO, and JUST ASKING!. No one wants out of control LE. Waco does not want to be Baltimore either. I mean, if it were easy none of us would have to worry about it but in fact it is NOT easy to guarantee freedom of association and etc. when criminal gangs decide to use public fora otherwise. Just saying, just asking, just praying for our Great Country.
Pretty easy, actually. The officer in command needs to step forward and own up. He needs to say he gave the order to fire. Absent such a one my suspicion of police marksmen out of control is correct. If that is the case the mayor needs to fire whoever was in charge of this CF now. Whoever thought placing police shooters at a public meeting of bikers was a good idea needs to find a new line of work. As egos will allow none of the above I suspect this will be drawn out for as long as the patience of the least of us will allow. We, out here in flyover country are watching, however and so far this is strike one.
That's just silly. Photographs are used as evidence often. So often even Arlo Guthrie made fun of it in the song Alice's Restaurant (...27 8X10 full color glossy photographs with circles and arrows on them and a paragraph on the back...to be used as evidence against us...
One does not develop an hypothesis from whole cloth. One develops an hypothesis BECAUSE there ARE indeed facts, which support evidence, that an hypothesis is true.
Nope, sorry, wrong.
I use the scientific method daily, and that just isn't how it works.
You have a phenomenon. You come up with possible ways to explain that phenomenon, often a bunch of them. Then you use facts (evidence) to eliminate those which just do not explain the phenomenon in light of the evidence you have.
Any surviving hypotheses are put to the test with either newly gathered evidence (facts, because if they aren't facts, they aren't evidence), or design an experiment to discern if particular causative agents could have been factors.
But you start with ideas to explain something. Those ideas, from a police ambush to space aliens to your (nonexistent) Aunt Sally, will be eliminated in turn by facts, or degraded in status based on probabilities. Of the above (admittedly a false trichotomy, but this is hypothetical) we can eliminate your Aunt Sally, because she doesn't exist. We can grossly lower the probability of space aliens because documentation of such creatures is problematical at best, and there were no accounts of such violations of Texas airspace, nor any witnesses who could place them at the scene. That leaves police.
Now, the original list was not complete enough to be workable, but this is hypothetical, which has the same root as a hypothesis.
That hypothesis could be put to the test by the introduction of more information, and while it may not completely fit, it invites the formation of other hypotheses which account for the presence of a multi-agency task force, the discharge of police firearms, pictures of evidence markers outside the parking area at a distance where engagement with handguns would not be optimal, but at which tactical rifles with optics or just good iron sights would be highly effective.
We can hypothesize about why those evidence cones are there, but most likely they are marking accumulations of expended cartridges (brass) from weapons fired from those locations. From that we can deduce that it is likely that police of some stripe were occupying those positions and did, indeed, fire their weapons.
Not likely they were in for a round of skeet, and the positions where the evidence cones are situated would have had advantageous views of the locations in the parking lot where dead bikers accumulated.
For whatever reason, it is likely that rounds fired by police from those locations account for at least some of the dead and wounded in the parking lot.
See how easy that is?
No "whole cloth" involved, Watson. Just simple deduction.
That does not account for motive, malice, or forethought, nor does it indicate a conspiracy, because those are things which cannot be discerned from the physical evidence.
Certainly, some planning occurred (the police were too well dressed for a tactical occasion for it not to have), the angle formed by the positions marked with cones isn't a complete 'L' shape, but there may be more evidence cones we haven't seen. That idea gets shelved waiting for more information.
Who fired at who and why? Well, you can't tell why from the pics, nor who fired first, but at least some of the who is evident.
Two legs of the classic three are present--means and opportunity. Only motive remains in question.
Given that police fired into the parking area, the question of Why? is raised.
That remains to be sorted out.
Possibilities include anything from a pre-planned ambush to attempting to rescue an undercover agent (likely wired if present) whose cover was blown, to attempting to stop violence as a third party, to a stupendous, five star f**k-up. With multiple agencies involved, possibly accustomed to different ROE, the idea someone started shooting and the others chimed in is plausible.
Hopefully, the remainder of the evidence will not be doctored nor edited to try to justify an ambush or screw-up, but that, too is a possibility. Considering other factors (effective sequestration of all present by blanket arrests and ridiculous bail, along with confiscation of any devices capable of providing a recording of events, failure to immediately release video exonerating police, and conflicting and changing official statements), to name a few, things which are indicative of a lack of candor on the part of officials, the idea of a world class foul-up is the nice end of the likely possibilities. And that's my Hypothesis. Now, we will see if it stands up to the test of applied facts and testimony. YMMV.
I see you agonizing over “what is to be done?” I come at it from “what may not be done.”
This is what the Bill of Rights to the Constitution is all about.
“I use the scientific method daily”
You have a phenomenon. With the scientific method the laws of physics apply, and hypotheses are not generated from whole cloth, but using a rational basis. Experiments are designed to test the hypothesis in a controlled setting, such experiments being repeatable. Etc.
The event we are discussing is a unique event in space-time.
It is an historical event, albeit a recent one.
The problems are not the same. The initial approach is not the same. There is indeed a lot of overlap in the terminology, causing misunderstanding. Logic, deduction, the rules of physics etc. apply to both types of problems.
Unlike scientific experiments, it is a non-repeatable event because even if the same people were put back there, the number of people and interactions would likely not play out in the exact same sequence, like replaying video. In addition, some of the people who were there are now dead.
Without a rational basis for an hypothesis, there would be an uncountable large number of possible hypotheses because the events played out as a results of decisions or reactions of a large number of people interacting with each other in non-predictable ways.
So one starts not with an hypotheses, but with information.
Information comes from sources. I don’t think we need to quibble about terminology, I have just been trying to explain the flow from sources of information along the way to establishing evidence, which is then applied to support or contradict an hypothesis. You did the same thing, you just named the photo as evidence, when in reality you processed it... [A photo by itself is a source of information. You have to document where and when it was taken, then you analyze it for facts. The body is here, etc. Then you analyze it compared to other facts from other sources of information. Where were the cops? Are these evidence cones? Then you draw your circles and arrows and along with your explanation of these facts in context, you submit your evidence.]
You conclude “For whatever reason, it is likely that rounds fired by police from those locations account for at least some of the dead and wounded in the parking lot.”
In addition there is the statement from LE that they did indeed fire. Presumably they hit some of the dead or wounded.
Now, you move to the motive of LE since they admittedly and provably fired into the parking lot.
This brings in (among others) the hypothetical scenario of the undercover cop in the bathroom —> LE fire to cover his withdrawal. I have not seen a source of information to support this hypothetical. Conservativetreehouse concluded that the cop with the beard (who has appeared circled in red on photos posted on FR) was likely not the undercover cop if there was one. He also comments on the blood in the bathroom . .
I have seen other sources of information which are not evaluated in your hypothetical motives about why the police fired into the parking lot.
Which is why I say, one starts with the sources of information (and evaluates them in context to each other), and not with an hypothesis, or in this case a hypothetical explanation of why the police shot. These other sources of information related to this specific event provide assertions which if true, are facts which can be established by forensic evidence. The caliber of round that shot Richie in the head, for example.
—
The historical proof standard demands not only evaluating all available source information, but searching for other sources; it demands that conflicting source information be explained as a part of the proof evaluation of the hypothesis.
We know we do not have all available information, but there is source information you have not included, which leads to the hypothesis that LE started firing after shots were fired between gang members. I do not start with an hypothesis, I follow the information where it leads.
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Given the speed of events, the complexity of the crime scene (e.g. all the rounds fired), the sheer amount of testimonial and forensic results, I would not be surprised if there were some LE “mistakes”. It would take a huge human data / information management effort for everything to come out “clean”. I would be surprised if the Waco PD or the County Sheriff have the staffing and experience to accomplish that, even with no intentional messing with evidence.
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Nothing wrong with sharing ideas and possible explanations. One reason I turn to FR is the posting of source information and FReepers’ analysis of it. Hypothesis development and evaluation is an iterative process; insights from others are valuable.
—
We all want the Truth, some of us approach it from different angles. I do not see a basis of source information related to this event which implies the hypothetical of the cop in the bath-room, an ambush, etc.
Servus.
“what may not be done.”
Indeed. Some administrations and judges try to turn the Constitution into play-do. I could not believe that Reno was not fired — must have known too much.
One may also not create a criminal gang and terrorize communities, yet they do.
So your question seems to be, is RICO constitutional? or is this implementation of it an overreach?
It is the latter - Overreach and misapplication.
And, I think they know this.
The hypothetical cop in the bathroom (undercover, wearing possibly a wire and false colors) is one possible explanation for how the police might have been jizzed up enough to start shooting. Adrenalin runs high when people are expecting trouble, and more so when they have a reason to believe it is going down.
Any commotion would spike that, with or without an undercover operative, but the fight in the bathroom would be explained as well if there was a U/c with blown cover inside.
For whatever reason, active conflict spilled into the parking lot (usually because bikers will not risk establishments and take their differences out the door to sort out--that's ingrained, especially in a crowd that frequents establishments where alcohol is served.)
If there was a wired undercover involved, the discovery of the wire or his ID had likely been heard on a tactical channel.
If not, the commotion was still enough to cause an adrenalin spike among those who were ready to fire on trouble, and snipers were likely looking at the scene through their optics to get a better view.
Either could have been enough increase in tension for a round to be inadvertently touched off, and then the whole bunch would join in. It happens.
Maybe that wasn't the case at all, and the response was to someone shooting in the parking lot, to stop the shooter...which could have led to more drawing weapons and returning fire, although there is no evidence that happened (bullet holes, broken vehicle glass, etc.).
We're back in the stage where you brainstorm as many possible scenarios as you can, and when you have those ducks in a row, and introduce new evidence (which I guarantee will be scrutinized at this late date) well, you find some of those ducks won't fly and eliminate unsupported scenarios.
The delay in providing the public with information showing police to be in the clear likely means that they are not, or are burying Brady Material in order to make charges stick and themselves look better.
The longer they wait, the more people will doubt what they bring forth, and the more heavily it will be scrutinized.
Sequestering all 170 arrested by keeping bail at 1 million dollars doesn't add credibility, either, but reeks of squeezing people for information regardless of whether they were in the parking lot or inside the building.
I still wonder who are the owners of the commercial incarceration facility, and whether they might have a conflict of interest.
Maybe not, but that is KILLING their Harleys.
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