Wearing Fascists' Scorn As A Badge of Honor for Four Decades

Upon reading the local KKK-style hate websites' latest rants, I was reminded of the first piece of hate mail that I ever received (I was thirteen years old), after writing a letter to the Editor of Linn's Stamp News supporting postage stamps for Robert Kennedy and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The same indicia of emotional instability and delusional tendencies in that right-winger's hate letter are seen daily on the local hate websites (and formerly on "Talk of the Town," which turned into a hate site and was rightly shut down by the St. Augustine Record in 2006).

Now, I've been wearing fascists' scorn as a badge of honor now for about 40 years. So in response to the fetid, futile, furious attacks and non sequiturs from the hate sites, I have posted Matt Wald's article below (New York Times, 1992) regarding the sadistic treatment accorded just one of my whistleblower clients in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. I was never intimidated by crooked sheriffs, sadistic managers or others of their "ilk."

Neither I am not intimidated by the haters, hiding behind anonymity.

Violation of one person's rights violates all of our rights.

In the immortal words of Pastor Martin Niemoller about Nazi Germany:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Political prosecution of THOMAS G. MANUEL should make us all pause and thank God that the June 11, 2008 FBI tape transcript has been released to the public.

What kind of person would ignore the transcript and hector for MANUEL's incarceration or defenestration(like the carping harpies on the racist, sexist, misogynist, anti-Semitic, homophobic hate sites)?

All decent, thinking citizens need to stop, look and listen. Has an injustice been done here? If so, we must right that wrong and investigate SHERIFF SHOAR and GEORGE McCLURE.

To Attorney General Eric Holder, the FBI and U.S. Attorney: please make sure we get this right, for as our United States Supreme Court has said:

"The United States Attorney is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all; and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal case is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done."

Berger v. United States, 295 U.S. 78, 85, 55 S.Ct. 629, 633 (1935).

In the words of the ancient equitable maxim: Let justice be done though the heavens fall." (Fiat justitia ruat caelum).