The Significance of June 28, Part 3

FROM DEFENDING THE U.S. CONSTITUTION TO “HITLER’S GERMANY”

by Walter Francis Fitzpatrick, III

(Jul. 7, 2012) — [Editor’s Note:  The following is the third part in our series on the importance of the date of June 28 in the lives of LCDR Walter Francis Fitzpatrick, III and those who were serving with him on the USS Mars on June 28, 1988, when the ship’s captain, Michael Nordeen, lost his brother, Capt. William Edward Nordeen, to a terrorist attack in Athens, Greece.

Following the events of that day, a contingent from the Mars was sent to Athens to assist Capt. William Nordeen’s family.  Shortly thereafter, a new admiral, John Bitoff, was assigned to Fitzpatrick’s chain of command.  Fourteen months later, Bitoff accused Fitzpatrick of stealing the money used to pay for the ship’s escorts who traveled to Greece.  Fitzpatrick was court-martialed and a “confession letter” placed in his file bearing a signature that was not his.

To this day, the U.S. Navy refuses to address Fitzpatrick’s assertions that he did not sign the letter and that the charges brought against him were fabricated.  The Navy has not responded to The Post & Email’s request for information about Fitzpatrick’s court-martial.

Part 1 describes the events leading up to Fitzpatrick’s notification that his captain’s brother had been killed, while Part 2 details the immediate aftermath.

Despite the court-martial, Fitzpatrick received an honorable discharge in 1994.  June 28 has assumed additional significance in Fitzpatrick’s life in the exposure of government corruption, particularly in the state of Tennessee, and for the United States as a whole.]

As it so happened, in the course of my life – and you know what’s been going on here locally in the last three years – as the court dates have come about, it just so happened that on the 28th of June of 2010, I was called into the courtroom for an arraignment hearing.  I stood that day before Carroll Lee Ross, who is one of the district court judges in the Tenth Judicial District of Tennessee.  I wore my service dress whites on that day as well for a number of reasons, and one of them was as a remembrance of Captain William Edward Nordeen.

Carroll Lee Ross treated me as if I was nothing.  I couldn’t speak…you’ve heard the story about what happened that day; you wrote about it.

John Bitoff was a political admiral and wanted me out of the Navy, so that began that part of my life which I’ve been participating in ever since, and we’ve talked about all of the ramifications that that’s caused in my life.  That’s what began my looking at the military discipline system.  One of the things that I realized before leaving the military, retiring in 1994, is that we don’t use grand juries.  I needed to understand how John Bitoff could bring a charge against an innocent man and have all of this work…I needed to be able to explain it to myself and explain it to my kids, for goodness sakes…I’d done nothing wrong!  Talk about bewildering…he was accusing me of stealing the money that was used for the funeral trip to pay tribute to Capt. William Edward Nordeen as I’ve just described to you…He charged me with stealing the money used for that trip...that’s what he said!

Not only did he know where the money went, but this thing was documented six different ways to Sunday.  The guy who put part of that report together was Brad Ableson, the command chaplain, and was part of that contingent that went to Arlington, VA.  We used $10,600 and some cents to send these people, and it was Morale, Recreation and Welfare (MWR) money that the crew had approved.  We had the money in the MWR account and we put this to a vote of the ship, and it was a resounding, united “yes” vote.  It was everybody wanting to do something to respect and honor this man who had been taken away as a father and a husband…he was still very young, only 50 years old.  This was a real tragedy, so the ship said, “Yes, absolutely.”  It was completely reported, completely up-front.  We were being praised by very senior naval officials who found out that the contingent of people had been sent by the ship to act in the way that we had acted.

It was 14 months after that that John Bitoff took it and converted that whole event into a criminal event.  And he made it all up.  He had to rig the court-martial and at the end of the court-martial he had a confession crafted by my defense counsel, who was working for John Bitoff; and the defense counsel, Kevin Anderson, forged my name to it, misspelled my name, forgot the Roman numeral “III” at the end.  That’s what John Bitoff did; that’s his legacy.

It was through that time that I was trying to restore my name when I started paying attention to how a judicial system works, and somewhere in that process, it became evident to me…When I was at boot camp as a seaman recruit, which is how I began my career – I was enlisted before as an officer, and then I got through my years as an enlisted man and went to the Naval Academy – and you see this in the movie “Crimson Tide” with Gene Hackman, Denzell Washington – it’s about the USS Alabama, a submarine, which is home-ported out of just north of Silverdale, WA, where I lived.  In the movie, there’s a scene where you have Gene Hackman, the commanding officer of the USS Alabama, instructing his executive officer, Denzell Washingon – “We don’t practice democracy; we just defend it.”  And you hear this all through your career:  “You are here to defend the Constitution with your life, but the Constitution doesn’t protect you. You don’t have the same privileges and the rights.  You’re a second-class citizen when you join the military, because the Constitution does not protect you as it protects every other citizen who is not in the military in the rest of the United States.”  Most people don’t know that, which is one reason why The Jaghunter stood up and I’ve been trying to talk about how the military discipline system works.

When the Congress first put the military discipline system into place – and this goes back to our first Congress – what they were doing was passing a bill of attainder.  Attainder is the crime that’s committed when the state punishes an individual of the state directly, without the permission, examination or inspection of something called a jury.  In the Fifth Amendment, there are two juries that get to take a look at a criminal case, and it’s the 1) grand jury; and 2) trial jury.  In the military, we don’t use juries, and that’s one of the points that I came to understand.  It became clear to me that now I had an answer and I could explain to anyone why the Constitution doesn’t protect us.  Where’s the defect?  The discipline system that’s used to discipline us doesn’t allow us due process.  The military makes it look as if there’s due process, but there’s not.

That was the knowledge that I came to as I began to learn about the grand jury and what role it plays, how important it is, and what it means because it’s been taken away from us.  It means that the Constitution doesn’t protect us.  They can do whatever they want to us.  They can practice attainder.  That’s what they did to Terry Lakin.  A lot of this is at The Jaghunter, which is coming up on its tenth anniversary in August.  If I get my personal computer back and an internet connection, I will start getting back into that routine.  That’s how this all came about.

Back in the summer of 2009, after the treason complaint was brought against Mr. Obama, Tim Harrington called me up one day and we were talking about issues regarding the grand jury.  That’s when I started to pursue treason complaints against Mr. Obama by going to a federal grand jury and then our attempt was to go to a state grand jury.  You know the rest of that saga with regard to the state grand juries and what we found here in Tennessee.

So on that journey, of which so many people have been a part, on the 28th of June of 2010, I appeared in uniform with Carroll Ross, and he said that he told me I couldn’t file papers, I couldn’t do any more investigation of the grand jury; I couldn’t request anything, I couldn’t approach the judge or anyone else.  That was his pronouncement on the 28th.  That was the day when he made fun of me because I was “The Jaghunter.”  He held up the full-page article in the Advocate & Democrat that appeared on February 4, 2010, and he was mocking me.  He was sitting next to Martha Cook, and they were having a joke-fest up there, using me as the object of their derision.

Serendipitously, I appeared before FBI Special Agent Roxane West on the 28th of June of 2011.  A year ago, I went to the Federal Bureau of Investigation to report as much as we knew about the corruption here in Tennessee.  So the date is significant in my mind for a lot of reasons, but it was one of the dates that we know for sure that the federal government was put on notice that there was something terribly wrong here in Tennessee.  And it was on the 28th of June of 2011 that the first question out of Roxane West’s mouth was, “Are you a ‘sovereign?'” and I said, “Excuse me, but what do you mean?  What is it that you mean when you use that word?”  She described to me what she and the FBI described as a “sovereign:”  “Extreme patriot, extreme militiaman, right-wing extreme militia, twisted patriot, somebody who was intent upon taking over the government of the state or country by force of arms…”  So she ran all these by me, and I said, “No, that’s not me.”

We talked for three hours.  At the end of the first half-hour, she said to me, “OK, I believe you.”  As you know, I have spoken with other FBI agents at length, and I told them the same thing: “I’m not a ‘sovereign.'”

You know where we stood a year ago:  not nearly where we stand today, but there was enough information a year ago to have the FBI come in here and take a look at what’s going on in Tennessee state, and they refused.  Going back 17 months from there to February 2010 when I filed a complaint with the Court of the Judiciary, if they had answered us with information that was responsive to the concerns that we had about the scope and operation of the grand jury – had either the state acted properly or the feds acted properly, Darren Huff would not be in a federal prison today.  More than that, they ginned up an event, created a crime…this is why I’m so sensitive to this.  This is what John Bitoff did.  I’ve seen this before.  They converted an innocent act into a crime and said I was the leader of it.  “PJ Foggy,” this William L. Bryan clown…and, by the way, going over my notes here, I see that Michael Thomasson said the same thing:  that there were people who were coming on April 20, 2010…Michael Thomasson was one of the instigators of all of this.  In the early part of April, he said that “Fitzpatrick is going to come back, and there are people supporting him…”  He was creating a situation that was never intended.  So Michael Thomasson, along with Barton Gellman from the TIME Magazine group and all the people that he was working with; Bill Poovey from the Associated Press and Pam Sohn from the Chattanooga Times Free Press, were all working with the federal government, and the federal government, playing on the fact that they had a sympathetic and cooperative press, made up the events of the 20th of April, and that’s why Darren Huff is locked up today and why a lot of bad stuff has happened to me.  And all the time, they were putting together a curriculum…while I was sitting there talking to Roxane West on June 28, 2011 and she said, “The FBI doesn’t believe you’re a sovereign,” they were putting together a training curriculum using as one of the foci of that training program the events of the 20th of April wherein they describe me as the leader of a militia group coming in with guns and bombs to kidnap, to kill, to basically take over government and do all of the things that they say that sovereigns are up to doing.  These people are monsters.

[Editor’s Note:  In response to the first part of our report on Fitzpatrick’s hearing on June 28, 2012, in which Assistant District Attorney General Paul D. Rush is mentioned, one of our readers asked:

That Paul Rush is motivated by the P&E brings the next question, what other places or persons influence him?  If I had his computer would I find emails from “PJ Foggy”? Eric Holder ? Anyone from the WH?  Anyone from the DNC? Any other party members of military ?]

[Additional Editor’s Note:  Darren Huff has recently been moved to a federal prison in Oklahoma, far from his wife and family in Georgia.]

I’m reacting in a way that you’d react if you were hit by lightning twice in your life.  Back in 1988, ’89, and ’90, John Bitoff took this very respectful, traditional, appropriate act of memorializing a man who was killed in the line of duty in such a violent way, and he converted that into a criminal act.  We sent people to the funeral, and we reported everything.  One of the things that happened throughout the course of the court-martial was that the report in which we accounted for every penny of MWR money – that report, and all copies of it, were scooped up by Admiral Bitoff’s attorney, Timothy Zeller, and he locked them in his safe.  I’ve sent these documents to you.  It’s very clear.  They talk about it in their exchanges back and forth.  But when it came time for me to get my hands on it and put it down on a table as I’m trying to defend myself against these bogus charges that Bitoff brought against me, it’s gone.  Tim Zeller took it into his possession, put it in a safe, and that report has never been seen to this day.  It’s gone. 

This was my first taste of how government works against its people.  The last people I ever thought were going to betray me were the officers to whom I was reporting on the group staff.  I’m supposed to trust these people with my life; if we get into combat, we just happen to end up on the same ship or on the same command someplace.  And these people turned against me, and for what?  Well, John Bitoff, because of his political acumen and background, because of his having gotten his hands so dirty as he climbed the ladder on the back of another admiral, said, “No, Fitzpatrick is a problem.  He’s a Boy Scout.  We can’t have this guy elevating in rank.  He has to be tossed out.”  So John Bitoff took an act which was completely innocent and lawful and done in public, took all the records that he needed to, and took the law into his own hands.  He committed an act of treason against one of his fellow officers.  That’s what John Bitoff did.  We have other senior military commanders today in uniform who are doing exactly the same thing.  You can quote me on this:  One of the men in uniform today who is just like John Bitoff is four-star General Martin Dempsey.  I’ve already named him several times as a man who is committing treason against this country.  We have senior military commanders who are no more respectful of the United States Constitution than is Mr. Obama.

And now, with regard to the judges, our federal and state law enforcement, because of the way their government is running, they can arrest you at any time and they can make up a case against you; they can make it stick.  In their government, it’s just like Germany in the late 1930s and early ’40s. It’s Hitler’s Germany.  That’s exactly what we have going on here.  And it’s not just Obama’s administration; this has been going on for tens of years, and it includes, many, many of our presidents.  That’s what we see happening here.  So it’s very easy for me to have a violent reaction when I see this kind of betrayal being visited upon other people in our country. And now you take a look at the breadth of the betrayal…holy smokes!