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Today's Top News
Montana AG Probing American Police Force Deal
Could the party be over for American Police Force?
Montana Attorney General Steve Bullock is investigating the
mysterious security contractor's deal to run an empty jail in the tiny
town of Hardin, reports the Billings Gazette. And he doesn't appear to be messing around.
In a nine-page letter sent late yesterday afternoon to Becky Shay -- the former Gazette reporter who recently signed on as APF's public relations director -- Bullock said he's probing whether APF may be violating Montana's Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Act.
Specifically, Bullock wants proof for many of the statements on APF's website which have been called into question by media reports in recent days -- such as the claims that the company frequently has contracts with the U.S. government, and has operations in all 50 states.
Bullock also has asked for a copy of the contract between APF and Hardin, which the town has so far declined to make public, and has asked that APF disclose any lawsuits filed against it or Michael Hilton -- the APF official who led the negotiations with Hardin, and whose lengthy criminal record and alleged history of alcoholism has intensified concerns about the deal. Bullock also wants any correspondence between APF and any government agency that has accused the company of being deceptive.
Bullock sent a separate letter to Al Peterson and a second official with the Two Rivers Authority (TRA), Hardin's economic development agency which signed the deal with APF. Peterson didn't respond to the Gazette's request for comment, but asked yesterday by TPMmuckraker about the deal, he replied: "What have we got to lose?"
More on this to come...
Late Update: We've now obtained the letters from Bullock to APG to TRA. You can read them here.
The letter to TRA asks for all documents relating to the APF deal,
and also, for information on "[a]ll direct or indirect interests
Authority board members or their immediate families
in American Police Force (including without limitation its officers, affiliates, or agents)."
In a conciliatory note, Bullock adds: "In writing, I also wish to express my understanding of your concern for your community and the pressure you are under to fill the unoccupied facility."
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15 Comments so far
Show AllLooking back over the past year at the peaks of extremism - in politics with Sarah Palin, Israel, in broadcasting with the over the top rhetoric and lies of talk radio who shall go unnamed, the torture Guantanamo and other detainees are subjected to, the ongoing situation in New Orleans, etc. - and now this... the festering seems to be airing more blatantly all the time.
Astrigents, plenty of flushing, carve out the rot.
I thank heaven for the Muckraker, Institute for Public Accuracy, National Security Archives, so many damn good reporters and Common Dreams... scalpels, Sunshine and hydrogen peroxide for the oozing contusions of the system.
Health, long life and an ever exponentially expanding public paying attention wished to all!
Mercenary prison & police force?
That fits nicely with those two judges in Pennsylvania who were paid millions under the table to send kids to a contract prison.
And these cases are just the ones that have been exposed.
Free Enterprise - the Great American Value System.
"In writing, I also wish to express my understanding of your concern for your community and the pressure you are under to fill the unoccupied facility."
Hey, maybe they can find another corrupt judge or two who will find teenagers guilty of anything under the sun to fill this privately-owned facility.
Kudos to Montana Attorney General Steve Bullock!
The "American Police Force" is Blackwater renamed to eliminate public concern over their credibility.
"Michael Hilton" (not his real name), is not the leader of the "American Police Force" and is just a go-between between himself and the real leaders (US Government (Obama) and Eric Prince, founder and CEO of Blackwater)
Blackwater, run by Eric Prince, is the biggest contractor the US has used for security in Iraq and has conducted many illegal activities, including killing innocent civilians and having the state department covering it up.
Blackwater should be booted out of Hardin, Montana immediately and kicked out of our country (they are based out of North Carolina).
I have been posting on this website for three years that I have been followed 24/7 for three years , a victim of vigilante fusion center harrassment.
Florida is a right wing , militant, police state.
I bet money that Texas, Newyork , Georgia and Ohio are also police states.
Follow the fusion centers. 72 of them and a million spys on the payroll.
One jail in Montana, a tip of the iceburg.
More proof the fish rots from the head. If the leaders truck with thugs, the thuggery will trickle down.
But almost everybody here, trusts a big federal government to do the right thing. I and my fellow Libertarians and Anti-Federalists, however, want it cut down by 90%. If you want to build it up after that, by constructing libraries, schools and hospitals, then I'm all for it. But right now, we are well on the road to a 1937 Berlin. All that is missing so far is the gas-trains and the ovens.
I don't want to pay for domestic mercenary armies who are not governed by the people. (They are governed by bloodthirsty CEO's and unelected-by-the-people, corporate board members.)
If you're not arming yourself, and you live in the US, you're the first one who will board the train.
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
It's not 1937 in Berlin.It's 2009 in America, and screwed up as the place is, it's not in any danger of being taken over by fascists.The real thing isn't funny, and we have a long, long way to go before we get there.But just in case, I'll load up a few cylinders, and fire off some rounds with my 1847 Navy Colt.Great fun! Death to logs! I'm ready!
I hope you're right - But I don't think so.
Wake up and look around.
I would never try to stop any citizen from doing so, but I don't think that millions more Americans arming themselves with guns will or even can, at this point, thwart the deepening tyranny of our come-to-be, hi-tech-armed corporate-fascist state.
I think too many Americans have already been hoodwinked, for too long, into voluntarily boarding the national death train to make personal firearms anything but an impotent comforting endgame gesture.
I think that the historical Thomas Jefferson would agree (with me) that the USA Death Train can only be stopped now, not by guns but by better ends and means than even he himself initially laid out; by the firepower of millions of people of deeper conscience no longer remaining silent.
But this, I think, would mean more honest reckonings than we present Americans seem capable of. It would mean admitting how our nation first came about; how we first moralized against and then finally shot our way out-of British oppression, all the while murdering our way into a Native American land which we didn't own, thence to create - for the Natives - an even worse form of oppression than the British had imposed on us.
I like and in general agree with your ideally civilized version of Libertarian values, TJ. But it's not so simple for humans to get their normative, let alone behavioral, shit together.
And that's probably because what we like to call our good conscience continues, seemingly as a matter of hard-wiring, to a always sit on top of an equally instructive but suppressed bad conscience.
Calico Cat,
Very, Very Good post.
I have a somewhat different perspective on American History, though not entirely different than yours. I wouldn't use the word "Murder" because it is not descriptive enough. I would favor the term: "Cultural Extermination". I see no difference between the Invasion of the colonist's settlements into Indian Lands from 1587 "the Lost Roanoke Colony" for four hundred years, to the invasion of the Israeli settlements into Palestine going on today. Wouldn't you agree? Both situations involve two worlds colliding and the choice forced upon the occupied to either "assimilate into the new society or be exterminated." This was, believe it or not, Thomas Jefferson's position on the Indians as he presided over the two biggest failures of the founders: Slavery and the Native American's continual conflict with illegal settlers. In both cases of the US and Israel, the abused losing Nation is holding on to a despised Religion or way of life that is incompatible with the new invading colonists. Vastly outnumbered by migrating encroachers who are hungry for cheap land, their tragic fate is all but assured.
I think that we have atoned somewhat as a people by establishing very valuable tribal reservations on lands such as now exist all up and down the Colorado River, which tribes sell water rights, and lease farmland back to farming companies at great profit. The Indian enterprises are all tax free. Many tribes have private jets, though that's never mentioned in the media. I'm not sure what good it does to dwell on our ancient screw-ups that none of us had anything to do with.
Government school history mostly says we got those lands from britain, France and Spain, which is technically correct. With few exceptions, since tribes didn't believe in titled land ownership, they never attended most of those treaties. A noticeable exception was a half-breed named McGillivray, Chief of the Creek Nation who was trained in European law and managed through threat of unified tribal war to achieve the 1790 treaty of New York. But although the congress ratified it, they would not enforce it later. Washington, Jefferson and General Henry Knox, did everything they could to make it a success and protect the tribes with US troops. The greedy settlers of Georgia ignored it, the congress did nothing, and the Creeks were overrun.
We have a long history of the congress being corrupted into profitable schemes by big biz. The Congress is the body which is most dysfunctional in the US imho. Most Americans know this.
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
The AFP "leader" has quite a little record and definitely should not be permitted to be a member of any law enforcement business or government agency; much less a leader. Allow him his right to vote, whatever it's worth. After all, it can't be worse than it is with most voters anyway. But he and likes have no right at all to be a part of law enforcement. Sure, law enforcement agencies of the U.S., Canada, etcetera are corrupt and otherwise incompetent in terms of the most important issues our societies have, but we don't need to add more.
The article closes with, "..., Bullock adds: "In writing, I also wish to express my understanding of your concern for your community and the pressure you are under to fill the unoccupied facility."". Pressure to fill empty jails? Ha ha ha ... You're kidding right? No? Then why? Oh, ha, this is a story line for a movie comedy someone wants to eventually have produced, right? Heh, it'd surely sell plenty of tickets. Seems like a flash-back of the GW Bush administration's doings.
It'd be great if we didn't need jails at all, but people feel pressure to fill empty ones. That's quite interesting. Are these desiring people taxpayers, for why would they want to have their money spent on things that aren't needed and which they don't really benefit from at all? They have to be very or awfully dumb!
Maybe Hardin should import some criminals so that the town can pretend that there's a real need for hiring people to operate the jail. (And why not hire unemployed locals who need income?!) You need some kind of justification for spending (wasting) taxpayers' dollars and you don't jail innocent people. Right? No? Hardin plans otherwise; jailing innocent people to justify paying a swindler-run company to operate the jail, perhaps to make Hardin seem less boring, more exciting, in the eyes or minds of other dumb people? Quite weird, but then it's also amusing entertainment. When is the comedy movie to be produced and is Tom Hanks one of the leading actors?
The people of Hardin should FIRE the town official who's trying to waste money on operating the jail that evidently can remain empty without any danger to the town's population. I'd vote for this if I was a resident there. The person obviously can't be trusted with managing other people's finances or town security. FIRE his ass and chase him out of town, or tar his house while he's inside such that he can't get out. Either of those actions could be both interesting and amusing to do. Or jail him in the empty jail and provide occasional visits from alternating town residents to supply him with some toilet paper, emptying his personal waste bucket, ya know, latrine duty chores, and some food; without any need to pay a company or anyone for this. They could also wash his bed sheets and pillow case ... once in a while. Heh, Jesus (of Nazareth) said to look after prisoners and it's a good idea, even for clowns like this so-called town official of Hardin. The people there should really keep a careful eye on him. Before they know what hits them, he'll be wanting to pay yet more criminals to come to Hardin in order to supposedly justify getting his name in the local newspaper more often than it's been mentioned or unmentioned there, so far. He'll evidently need to import criminals in order to pretend that it's justified to hire AFP and its criminal leader for operating the (for now anyway) empty jail.
Is it really embarrassing for a town to have an empty jail, even if it's the town's sole jail? Seems to me that it's then time to sing Hallelluah ("Hallelujah, Halleluyah, or Alleluia", or "Halleluya", or ..., i.e., "[Let us] praise"), instead.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallelujah
The town "official" evidently disagrees and he must be awfully bored in life, so he should try for Rudy Giuliani's former job, as former mayor of NYC, instead of screwing up Hardin. Or he could try in L.A. Maybe then he wouldn't be so bored that he'd try to fill empty jails with ghost prisoners. The man's evidently desperate ... for some quack reason.