Oh The Times Have Come

    

     From the veil of Ebola hanging over the world like some modern-day Captain Trips to Tony Stewart intentionally running over and killing a 20-year-old on a desolate off-off Broadway dirt track to Robin Williams taking himself out, the black cape of Death continues being a major presence on the scene and in the Dog Days of the summer of 2014.  There’s something in the air going around taking names; everyone seems to be peering anxiously over their shoulders, tracing indentations through all the psychic shrapnel flying and wondering where exactly the next bomb is going to detonate in the shadow of Sirius.

    

     As we keep our heads down, let’s roll back the summers to a muggy Saturday August night in Arkansas some 27 years ago, when two other young men were sacrificed on the altar of Empire, and we can fix a point where some of this particular darkness began to overspill onto the recent historical radar that’s propelled us all into this warped manifest destiny.  On the night of Saturday, August 22, 1987, Don Henry and Kevin Ives had decided to engage in a typical (if illegal) Arkansas ritual: deer hunting at night.  Probably they were doing it more just to blow off steam before the first day of senior year in high school.  Just after 4 a.m., in the little town of Alexander, 25 miles south of Little Rock in Saline County, a Union-Pacific train headed north seemingly was the cause of ending their lives.  But as we’ll see, nothing here is what it appears to be on the surface.  Add in the fact that there was ZERO intention of any law enforcement agency or media outlet involved to dig out the real truth of what happened that night, and you have the makings of what should have been the largest scandal in the history of the United States.  It was also one that crossed all political parties and boundary lines, because the naked nature of this kind of evil in our midst doesn’t care whether it calls itself Republican or Democrat.  It is the Predator class, and the echoes of this August nightmare would be felt reverberating down the years, touching even the blueprints for the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11.  Blueprints of chaos.

    

     As the Union-Pacific engine, lights on the “bright” setting, topped Bryant Hill and descended, the engineer Stephen Shroyer noticed something dark about 10-15 train car lengths distant covering the rails, something that looked like a tarp, large enough to be covering something that appeared to be two young bodies laid out across the tracks.  At 55 miles per hour and at this weight, he had no time even at this distance.  He hit the whistle and the brake at once, but moments later he, brakeman Danny DeLamar, and conductor Jerry Tomlin all felt the sickening thud of impact.  They had also noticed in the timeless seconds beforehand, that despite the shrill whistle, the shuddering vibration and the ear-splitting roar at such a point blank range filling their silent world, neither body so much as flinched. 

    

     As Shroyer stayed in the compartment to contact the railroad authorities on the radio, DeLamar and Tomlin got out and braced themselves for the gore they knew was waiting back there on the tracks.  The first signs they came upon were three toes, then more and more along nearly a quarter of a mile of track.  The largest remains found were the head and chest of the blond boy, the one that had been lying second in their line of sight on the tracks.  The first, darker-headed one was even more dismembered.  But through their shock, a disturbing element entered their minds, nearly unbidden.  Neither man spoke to the other about it, but both eerily noted the fact that there was something wrong here.  Something wrong with the blood.

    

     Tomlin especially noticed this.  Since childhood he had been a hunter, and had observed many times how fresh blood flowed and acted; on the ground, on carcasses.  This was different.  Finally reaching the main parts of the bodies no more than ten minutes after impact, the blood should have been different.  For one, there should have been more of it.  And the color was off, too.  Even in the dark, this blood had a different viscosity, a different sheen.  This blood was almost purple, Tomlin thought.  Old blood.

    

     “Out there that night,” Tomlin said, “I kind of smelled a rat.”

    

     Interstate 30 cuts a diagonal across Arkansas, and from the era of bootleg whiskey, police had noted its importance to contraband shipments of all kinds connecting to Dallas, Miami, and Los Angeles.  By the mid-1980s, with George H.W. Bush in the White House, the name of the game was cocaine, the governor was a man named Bill Clinton, and one of the preferred delivery methods was by air.  And this would be where little Saline County entered the picture as drop site du jour.  An hour by car in any direction got you access to half the state’s population.  Just two hours got you to a little airstrip at Mena, the Intermountain Regional Airport by name, stomping ground of the then number one drug-runner in arguably all the world outside of the Medellin cartel, Barry Seal. 

     Barry Seal, third from left, with some ‘Operation 40’ friends like Frank Sturgis (Watergate), Felix Rodriguez (murderer of Che Guevara), Porter Goss (CIA, 9/11), William Seymour (JFK assassination), and David Morales (RFK assassination), somewhere in Mexico City, sometime before the JFK assassination.  An extremely rare photo unearthed by Daniel Hopsicker.  But before we reach too far ahead of ourselves, let’s get back on track – on the train tracks.

    

    

     The Saline police had often taken complaints from nearby neighbors about low-flying planes buzzing their homes at night with their lights off, complaints that had spanned months, if not years.  It soon became common knowledge that these planes were completing drug and money drops in and out of Mena dotting the surrounding environs, ranging from the crisscrossing topography of train tracks to the open fields.  Even more importantly, information began leaking that the two boys that night had stumbled upon one of these drops and had met with fatal consequences.  Linda Ives, mother of Kevin, received personal testimony from one of the emergency techs that first responded, that the blood of both boys was dark and tar-like, indicating that both had been dead for some time before the train got to them.  In her capacity as teller at a local credit union, she heard plenty; story after story that the boys had been murdered for seeing something they shouldn’t have.

    

     Despite these extenuating circumstances, Fahmy Malak, the state medical examiner, ruled the deaths accidental.  His ruling stated that after ingesting massive amounts of marijuana, the two fell asleep on the tracks in identical positions.  His position was supported by Governor Clinton and his director of the Arkansas Department of Health, Joycelyn Elders, real name Minnie Lee Jones, who would go on to become Surgeon General of the U.S. before having to resign in disgrace in 1994. 

       

     Both extensively covered up for the oversights and corruption of Malak across more than 20 cases where his “expertise” had been questioned, to the extent that both the L.A. Times and the news show 20/20 called his work “gross malfeasance.”  Two of these cases included calling someone shot five times in the head a suicide and a decapitation a “death by natural causes.”

    

     Linda Ives refused to take this lying down and called in a second opinion.  But first she had to get around some very mysterious, very typical stonewalling, including refusals to obey court orders and turn over documents and test results on the part of the Arkansas State Crime Lab.  “The Little Rock Crime Lab refused to supply us with things we needed to get a second autopsy done – defying a court order.  So we called the State Attorney General’s office.  They said that it was illegal for the Lab to defy our court order, but that they would not intervene in any way.  When I asked – given that they would not help enforce the court order – what recourse I had, they said ‘none,’” Linda Ives remembered.

    

     Still, the loudness and the tenacity of her crusade finally resulted in a second grand jury investigation, which ruled the deaths not accidental, but criminal.  The second autopsy, done by noted Atlanta forensic pathologist Dr. Joseph Burton, found that Kevin had received several crushing blows to the face, shattering multiple bones, that fit the pattern distribution of a rifle butt that the boys had been carrying, also found at the scene.  Don had been stabbed in the back multiple times.  Also somehow missing from the official investigation was fiber evidence from the tarp, itself also now officially “missing.”  It should be noted that none of these highly interesting factoids were mentioned by Malak throughout the course of his multiple, “in depth” investigations.

    

     “There were witnesses to my son’s murder,” Linda Ives goes on to say, “witnesses that have passed FBI polygraphs placing government officials on the tracks with those boys before they were murdered.  And all this is corroborated by other witnesses.”  Among them was Sharlene Wilson, a DEA informant and witness for the Saline County Drug Task Force that stated other kids were in the woods on the night of the murders but that they got away.  Another 18-year-old came forward in 1993 and claimed by deposition he had witnessed the murders that night in the woods when he was 12. 

    

     State police investigator from Mena, Russell Welch, also verified that the boys’ murders were linked to Mena drug trafficking; his information coming from numerous informants on the streets and behind bars.  The boys were in the wrong place at the wrong time and happened to witness one of the drops, which were delivered in specially designed pallets that were parachuted down and rigged to burst open upon impact for quick recovery.

     “It’s all true,” Linda Ives to this day still states. And all she asks you to do is talk to Jean Duffey, which brings us to the next part of our story.

    

     Jean Duffey is the consummate doesn’t-play-well-with-others personality, especially when they’re corrupt to the core.  Maybe not so great an attribute when you’re a high school algebra teacher outside Houston, Texas where she resides today.  But when you’re the prosecuting attorney for the federally funded Drug Task Force in Saline County, Arkansas, as she was in another lifetime, it makes you invaluable.  It makes you a hero.  In this case it also makes you the object of smear campaigns, death threats, and the very real possibility of being arrested and/or run out of town, as she effectively was.  But not before discovering the closest narrative we have today to what happened that night so many hot August moons ago.

    

     The day she was put in charge her superiors walked in and told her under no circumstances was she to use the Task Force to investigate any public officials.  She was staffed with seven undercover agents.  They repeatedly couldn’t get too far above street-level buying, but when they started connecting public officials to protecting the drug dealers, one name came up early and often: Dan Harmon. 

    

     “My undercover investigators’ jobs were to make drug buys and work their way up to drug suppliers.  That’s who we were after.  But the connections began to lead almost immediately to public officials, who were either protecting the drug trade or actively involved in the drug trade themselves,” said Duffey.  “And the person whose name came up most often was also the person who had been the special prosecutor in the initial grand jury investigation into the Train Deaths.”  Dan Harmon.

    

     About three months after they were up and running, one of Duffey’s agents came to her and asked if they could reopen the Train Deaths case, then nearly two-and-a-half years old and increasingly starting to feature dead witnesses.  Duffey, at her prosecutorial best, asked him to make a case for why they should get involved in something other investigations had come up with nothing on.  First, because it’s drug-related he said, and second, all the other investigations have been cover-ups.  So the Task Force agents proceeded to unearth startling evidence previously ignored.  The more information she gathered, the more the smear campaign grew, led by local media and Dan Harmon.  Orders for her arrest were sent out and her investigation was all but shut down.  After all this and death threats too, she fled the state.

    

     Duffey, smiling, says: “Today I realize, after working with the FBI for eighteen months in March of 1995, what the basis was for Dan Harmon’s viciousness.  I now know that Dan Harmon was on the tracks with the boys the night they were murdered.”

    
     This, from the notes of Detective John Brown with the Saline County sheriff’s office in conjunction with Duffey, is the closest we’ll ever come to what actually happened:  Brown had been working with an investigative reporter who put him in touch with a pilot that only went by the name of Joe, who claimed to have been a CIA operative.  Joe told John that on several occasions he had flown the Saline County drop, known as “A-12,” and that he took orders only from CIA operatives out of Mena.  The claims Joe made about Mena/CIA drug drops in Saline County suddenly ended the years of bewilderment and confusion and made sense of everything. Without knowing anything at all about this Joe person, Duffey had made a judgment about the credibility of his information based on the logic of his claims. The reporter who initially developed Joe as an informant had some doubts about his credibility, so Duffey set out to make her own determination, and asked John what he knew.
    
     John said Joe gave him an accurate description of the landmarks approaching the tracks and described railroad lights that hung horizontally over the tracks under which the train passed. John drove the area and walked the tracks. Joe's description fit everything except the lights. There were no such lights that hung over the tracks horizontally, so John filed Joe in his own drawer of interesting-but-not-good-information. 

     It was some weeks later that John was visiting with Linda and Larry Ives and just happened to tell them about Joe. Larry had been an engineer on that very run for years and up until three weeks before Kevin and Don were murdered. It was, in fact, Larry's old crew that ran over the boys. When John told Linda and Larry about the lights, Larry told John that in 1987, the lights were exactly like Joe had described them. John took Joe out of his bad-information file and began communicating with him again.
    
     Later, Joe and Duffey developed a rapport, and he told her that "A-12" drop number 46 was a money drop that came up missing. He said the cops and officials in charge of picking up the drop, including Dan Harmon and Pulaski county narcotics officers Kirk Lane and Jay Campbell, hid out for subsequent drops to see who might try to steal another. Joe said Kevin and Don were in the area of drop number 50 and were ambushed. They were beaten and killed (witnesses place these two officers beating up two boys at a little grocery store right by where the boys’ bodies were found) and placed on the tracks. She passed this story on to the FBI agent who was in the process of having polygraphs administered. A few weeks later, Duffey was told by the agent that Joe's story had been verified through the polygraph tests. (The agent also told Linda Ives that the only people failing the polygraphs were cops.)  As a side note, Lane and Campbell both happened to be good friends with Clinton pal and drug dealer Dan Lasater. 
    
     Joe is adamant that Barry Seal was working with the CIA drug smuggling operations headquartered at Mena, and although Seal was assassinated a year before Kevin and Don were murdered, the drug drop they stumbled upon was originally part of Seal's operation.  And the circle closes.

     Let’s listen in on the important tail end of a conversation between long-time reporter and investigator Daniel Hopsicker and Jean Duffey herself.  Between these lines lies the ultimate destination of exactly where those moonlit Arkansas train tracks lead, and what it means for all of us.  Hopsicker:  "But you clearly believe the people responsible for those two boys' deaths were working for someone else?"

"Yes."

"And that they were involved in a criminal enterprise of surprising scope and sweep?"

"Yes."

"Where does that lead you to speculate?"

"As a prosecuting attorney I had to stick to the facts. But prior to getting to a jury I'm allowed to speculate, and process all the information I have from whatever direction it comes. What in my opinion has been involved is a CIA or rogue CIA operation, conducted by the CIA or CIA operatives. To smuggle drugs into the United States from South America, using Barry Seal's drug smuggling operation in Mena.

Duffey stopped a moment, surprised, I believe, at the thoughts she was voicing. Then she continued. 

"I believe there is a possibility that Oliver North was involved with the National Security Council; that Oliver North was working for ... .

A noise startled her. She stopped. I called for the cameraman, in some exasperation, to stop tape. Jean looked at me, and although we had been having a conversation for over an hour now, it was as if she saw me for the first time.

"I have not talked about this before," she protested.

"But everyone else has," I answered.

"I'm not the one to answer questions about Oliver North smuggling drugs in the Iran/Contra affair," she stated tentatively.

Then, I witnessed something that felt extraordinary. I watched as she let herself go ... Her voice grew stronger as she continued: "Again, sticking to the facts, I know that when North was before Congress in the Congressional Hearings about the Iran/Contra affair, two questions came up about Mena Arkansas. And both times, the investigation went into closed door session ...

"Now, if Oliver North had not been involved in Mena, wouldn't he have simply said, 'No, I don't know anything about Mena?"

"Why did the committee go behind closed doors? That's a fact that can't be ignored."

"This is an opinion now I'm asking for," I told her. "If Oliver North, or someone on Oliver North's level, had not been involved in Mena, there would not have been a Mena, would there?"

"That's a reasonable assumption that I would have to agree with."

"And if there had been no Mena, there would have been no train track deaths either, would there?"

She blinked. I wasn't sure if she knew where I was leading with these questions, but she sensed it was somewhere she wanted to think very closely about first.

"That's not as clear cut," she said slowly. "There could still have been the murders."

"Let me try it this way," I said. "Was even a powerful drug smuggler like Barry Seal big enough to have conducted a drug smuggling operation with the regularity to provoke citizen complaints about low flying aircraft?"

"Probably not. And in fact, it wasn't until the time frame after Oliver North got involved in Mena that there was so much drug activity, low flying planes, over those train tracks."

I took a deep breath. "So, does it seem at all possible to you, that if Oliver North had not been charged with flying guns to the contras and bringing back cocaine that could be then sold to finance the contra war, that those two boys might still be alive today?"

There was a long silence. Then, almost in a whisper, she replied. "It seems apparent that they would be."


     It’s around this point that I need to make you aware of a couple of things.  Remember Trooper Russell Welch of the Arkansas State Police mentioned before?  He was also hip deep in Mena, and assigned to investigate Barry Seal in the early ‘80s, after Seal had made the small Intermountain Regional Airport his home turf.  Not long after poking around issues such as Seal and his CIA ties, Welch was dosed with high-grade, military inhalation anthrax, of the Fort Detrick, fine-milled variety upon opening a letter.

      

     Raise your hand if you remember that this also happened to be the modus operandi of repercussions for anyone in the Congress or Senate that didn’t go along with the railroading (pardon the pun) through of the original Patriot Act.  Also remember we were told that this was just the next wave by Al-Qaeda in their dastardly terror attacks post-9/11.  Except, oops, mid-East operatives probably couldn’t get their hands on something only available to highest-paygrade military intelligence spooks in this country, as it turns out.  Oh well, that fact was on page 29, small print column Z of your hot-off-the-presses “All the news that’s fit to print” edition, right?  Kinda funny how those terrorism-delivery systems don’t change over the decades, isn’t it?

      

     The inescapable conclusion to all this is that the Bush Sr. White House, which had in reality been in force since the first Reagan term, colluded with a little-known-at-the-time Arkansas governor to create and run the largest drug smuggling/arms smuggling/money laundering operation in history, which in turn helped prop up the bogus economy of the good old USA, the world’s do-gooder Policeman which really turned out to be, surprise, the world’s number one Narco-terrorist.  All of which goes to show that, just like my Daddy said, Republicans and Democrats? There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between ‘em.  And hey, Clinton came from way out of left field to become President in 1992, remember?  He’d made his bones, as they say.  And just look at how buddy buddy those two sworn enemies have been ever since…why, that Clinton’s like a son of ours…

      

     I did promise one more thing too, didn’t I?  Something about the Oklahoma City bombing.  It turns out that, funny thing, you’re gonna laugh when you hear this…all the remaining records, sealed documents, depositions, evidence photographs, you name it, pertaining to all the federal Mena, Iran/Contra, and Arkansas investigations…all those statements about drugs and corruption in high places and murders to silence witnesses…they were all moved to the Murrah Federal building just weeks before the bombing happened.  Subsequently, of course, all were lost. 

     Plus, lots of children were killed in that daycare.  Because, as you’ve seen in this space numerous times, when you can sacrifice lots of children AND get rid of incriminating evidence, well, that’s what they call a win-win for the transhumanists.  Tracing more connections, it’s incredibly interesting how the Army, at a cordoned-off area of its Camp Gruber-Braggs in Oklahoma, had a yellow Ryder truck being prepared for – something – in early April of 1995.

      
     I could also alert you to the fact that Sergeant Robert Louis Harding, the pilot who took this picture in his ultralight, mysteriously crashed in it and died just days after releasing it.  Roughly the same timeline that saw the Murrah Federal building come tumbling down thanks to aforesaid Ryder Truck as well as some perfectly placed internal cutter charges – sound familiar?  Amazing how that modus operandi, that Standard Operating Procedure, (OKC as a dry run for the 9/11 World Trade Centers) gives them away every time… it can be Welch being poisoned just like senators, it can be remote takeover being beta-tested on EgyptAir Flight 990 two years before 9/11.  These people plan things in advance for DECADES, nothing is ever left to chance, and they leave their fingerprints everywhere.  They control all media so they don’t have to worry about ever being called out on anything.  The only things keeping them in check are an armed populace, and the Internet.  You could argue that the Internet leaking information everywhere at once is the ONLY reason so many worldwide pedophile rings, from Sandusky to Savile to the current Westminster UK revelations, are being played up in the mainstream.  The media has to appear to be on the side of the 99%, so as to be able to bamboozle us to an even greater degree in the future.  You must always learn to think two moves ahead at least.    

     I could go on about how Oklahoma City bombing suspect “John Doe. No.2” Hussein al Husseni was one of the baggage handlers at Boston’s Logan Airport the morning of 9/11… or how (and listen to this) in 1989 a black Muslim convert named Melvin Lattimore, now going by the name of “Mujahid Menepta” was released from prison doing time for a violent bank robbery if he agreed to become an FBI informant.  In 1993 authorities noted his credit cards were used for the first World Trade Center bombing.
      
     According to PBS, LA Weekly and others, Melvin Lattimore took Timothy Mcveigh and other various OKC co-conspirators in 1995 to a motel in Junction City, Kansas called “Dreamland.”  To this day the former owners will swear to you that Lattimore used to loiter in their lobby for hours on end.  Lattimore was also witnessed driving around Mcveigh and two other neo-Nazi types in Oklahoma City just days before the April 19^th bombing.  But the spookiest thing of all is, 6 years later, Lattimore brings Zacharius Moussaoui and Mohammed Atta to the very SAME motel – “Dreamland” – in the summer of 2001.  Ah, but this is all another story for another time that now only serves to illustrate to you just how deep and dark the rabbit hole goes, and how this story of trafficking never really ends.  We’ve all been living in an Empire of Bushes and Clintons since the 1970s ended, and with the prospects for 2016, there’s no real end in sight, is there?  “Dreamland” is also conveniently no more, torn down on… wait for it…  April 19^th, 2011.

    
     The trafficking is in guns, drugs, child flesh and blackmail and false flag operations, but the names, the ways of doing “business as usual,” stay the same.  You didn’t think these people would willingly go gently into that good night after all this, did you?  They’re locked at the hip and determined to bring the world hurtling into the madness of the “other.”  It’s business as usual as means to an end, or, as the late psychonaut Terence McKenna put it: “Right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien.”

     Or is it easier to think people reach this level of dehumanization of their own accord?  And if you're in the woods late at night this August, spare a thought for Don Henry and Kevin Ives, and the state of our Republic as we all look for meaning in the celestial in these waning Dog Star days.