Undue Process

Kafkaesque At Best

Undue Process

By Alfred Lehmberg

My life since 1996, comparatively, has been marked by few regrets, little failure, frequent success, satisfying achievement, and an abundance of self-actualizing—even peak—experiences.  This literary piece in defense of Suffolk County, New York's John Ford is but one of those peak experiences.  I've been inordinately blessed.

Not so John Ford.  Since 1996, he's occupied a prison cell—of one sort or another—in that self-same Suffolk County.  It is a fatuous understatement to say that he does not belong there.  Still, he is there—as if frozen in amber—an especially unjust amber.

A difference between us?   Well, I've never tried to seriously investigate the personal and professional affairs of a career white-collar criminal!  I've never been in that—very well connected—career criminal's scurvy crosshairs!  ...But for that, John Ford—a retired court officer, master degree holder, and community pillar/activist—was in line for every pleasure I took, every achievement I made, and every experiential summit I climbed. 

Ford did without.  Family.  Fellowship.  Occupation.  Love.  Purpose.  Achievement... He did without these things at the behest and whim of monsters. ...What is that loss worth one wonders.

See, one presumes that even in a "just society" Law Enforcement can make "mistakes."  Forgetting, a moment, that Ford's case is much worse than a mere "errant incarceration," what reasonable conclusions can be drawn?  

To wit: that the "powers being" presumably knew the innocence of John Ford and exerted a criminal will to seal off his threat to them. One can barely conceive of an injustice as large as this one visited on a 21st Century American white man and a Republican one at that... such a colossal abrogation of Civil Rights!  Black, Brown and Red and Semitic can identify, eh?  These can relate.

Yes, we all understand that the "due process" presumed can be a wishful thinking.  You bet. 

Indeed, this tragedy of "Undue Process" is visited on the innocent daily.  Hourly—by the minute, reader, in the endured tyranny of a predatory class able to prime a jurisprudent pump of wholesale courts!   Verily, and with no surcease! That "curve" likely accelerates unsettlingly, too.  I digress.

Picture it.  The righteous—if wholly defenseless—"little guy" takes on the black-hearted and criminal scoundrel that is the "big guy"... ...is then summarily hamstrung, torpedoed below the waterline, and cocooned, in the corporeal like the hapless victim of Sigourney Weaver's Alien... for eighteen long years now.  Goliath falls only in the movies, friends and neighbors.  ...Time slithered on.

Society and culture just got worse in those eighteen years, eh... a result of the unjust proclivities of any "big-guy"?  Righteous "little guys" only win in the movies, as stated above, so as to mollify us, the viewer, that it could be any other way.  It usually isn't.

See reader, John Ford was denied "due process" and "due process" denial has to mean something! 

There has to be—must be—a rule of rational law restoring.  It is the rank and file's only protection against a legion of ubiquitous psychopaths trying to feed on the honest citizen at every turn. 

"Whistleblowers" on high-level chicanery and eager criminality should not be arbitrarily jailed or blown up in their cars!  This was the case with our Mr. Ford, and recently with regard to one Michael Hastings!   He's a reporter investigating corrupt military brass and the bleak mechanisms of a National Security State, a State perhaps as black as can be described by Richard Dolan in two volumes of United States History on same...  ...I digress, again...

Though, verily, too much "official murder" or "wrongful incarceration" and the "rank and file" get restive and restless... sans a reasonable rest from same, eh?  Folks, the suffering rank and file of the 1930s cheered bank robbers there for a while... They had reason to!

"WAIT!  ...What the HELL we talkin' 'bout!   ...Isn't this America"?

There are cognitive consequences to necessitated maturity, reader.  I'm a career military and retired vet at 67 who graduated Summa from an accredited University.  I was to teach in under-funded "projects" schools. I've seen mud, blood, and clear primary references...Was it ever America?  One begins to suspect that it was not...

Put it together yourself, Nation.

By all accounts, the "accused" John Ford has an altogether efficacious history to the very moment of his alleged crime. His "accuser"—the late John Powell—and in suspicious contrast, is associated over a period of many years with tremendous graft, vast political corruption, and an open-ended racketeering enterprise for which he later pleads "no contest"... AND IS CONVICTED!  That's right!  Convicted!  Little bells should be going off at this point!

Ford, you see, was—at this exact time—relentlessly "Investigating" Powell... for a reason only important, reader, in that it is used later as a "reason" to institutionalize him—seal him away from the very light of day.  

It remains: Powell could bear NO investigation of his person—or privilege—for any reason, of any type... and so had a zero tolerance for same!  Does everyone get that; it's a key point.  For Powell's criminal career to continue, Ford had to be decidedly guilty—almost overnight—of something!  He had to be stopped!

The accused Ford was a tax paying and law abiding "boy scout." The accuser Powell was, clearly, a psychopathic career criminal eventually pleading "no defense" to a whole series of serious serial crimes...  Black and white very seldom delineates themselves so plainly, do they?  They do here.  They.  Do.  Here.

No, the circumstantial brilliance of John's seeming innocence should be a red flag to the rest of us. How can we—in good conscience—let anything like this circumstantial travesty go... so blithely... so casually... without some investigation ensuring that no injustice has been done when the situation seems so right for same?!  Were it you, reader, eh?

Let me tell you something you sons of bitches of purloined privilege (...who know who they are, reader; Chillax... don't be offended, yourself, where you've no reason to be, but wear, assuredly, the shoe befitting and a pox on you for good measure if you are!); you imperil YOURSELVES with this disrespectful complacency regarding John Ford!

Let a corrupt "machine" grind the lawful individual—any of you—in its arbitrary gears with easy impunity, and you WILL, eventually and with certainty, be ground yourself in those same tyrannical gears! If not you—your children, or your children's children... and with certainty, remember!  That goes for all of us.  All.  Of.  Us.  Ask Mussolini.

You'd want it done for you, reader, I restate, were it you framed, convicted, and institutionalized.  ...Bad enough guilty, intolerable where guiltless.  Am I right or am I right?

Sincerely, I am shocked, appalled, and disgusted at the silence and indifference of the ufological community regarding the plight of John Ford.  ...Scared too. 

See, were I myself to fall afoul of "secret systems" and "toxic campaigns" or made to endure that same cruel "undue process" Ford endures, I presume I could expect a similar "bupkis" from my contemporaries.  Tough for me and John...  Though, the reader could expect that same "bupkis" don't forget.  Gravy's Goose and Gander abide.

OK, you don't agree that Ford's "blameless."  You look around to see that "vast conspiracy" necessary to freeze him away: everybody "Key" in local Government... to include Political Functionaries, Medical Personnel and Psychiatric Facilities... District Attorneys... police departments and SWAT teams, perhaps even John Ford's personal attorney John Rouse a potential ringer for the other side (WTF!)... yes.

Too many people involved, by half, must equal events and occurrences too unlikely to be happening at all... Ford's guilty.  Cut!  Print!  Waiter!  Check!  

Moreover, wholly uninformed, you may have thought that Ford always was a loon and a crackpot! Perhaps the reader nurses some pathetic high-school thing regarding his appearance, demeanor, politics, or interest in UFOs. Stop, eh? These insipid and uninformed irrelevancies distract from the egregious issue!

Sans quotes, Google "crookhaven brookhaven powell", my contentious friends, and read what John Powell, Ford's accuser, was up to "back in the day"... where Ford, on the other hand?  Ford was a bona fide Saint minus the slightest qualification against same! Verily, perhaps even, by now, driven to a psychotropic drug-induced and "situational process" schizophrenia—over eighteen years later—Ford has been egregiously wronged.  

No evidence he's a danger to himself or others... or crazy, remember.  Though, if it had been me rather than Ford, I'm certain they'd have provoked an abundant reason to keep me locked up by now.  I digress again.

An issue is raised, thereby...

The issue? That in a LAWFUL pursuit of reasonable goals we've all paid lip-service to—for truth-seeking "reach" aspiring to productive "grasp"—John Ford, a good "everyman," has fallen afoul of an obfuscating, prevaricating, and wholly criminal political machine bigger than the "City's" legendary Boss Tweed!  This grievous machine, perhaps near the root of a teasing, ubiquitous, historical, and even obvious conspiracy, has contrived, with prejudice, to silence one of its more inconvenient citizens!  Such has been so.

Not so?  Suffolk County, reader, is historically awash with a rank corruption!  IOW, Criminal conspiracies of the type required to keep an innocent man in prison are historic in Suffolk County... Google it.  Suffolk County is legendary with regard to graft.  Google.  It. 

To sum up, John Ford, a "social pillar" remember, is unfairly wiped out, "gouged" below the water line, sucker-punched, stripped of all armor, and at the mercy of that which has worked passionately, reader, to amass a steaming pile of patently ridiculous and specious "proofs" to an unwieldy contrary!  These "proofs" are rooted in his belief in the existence of UFOs, one... and two, that he has ever been approached by sundry Government Intelligence Agencies—all the preceding to the effect that John Ford was EVER capable of serial murder, a danger to himself, or a danger to others! Stuff and gravid nonsense!

...You're next, reader; though, why wait 'till it's too late to speak up when all it would take now is a strident word... ...where blood will perhaps be required later on?  Verily.  I make no predictions; that's the lesson of history!

John's overdue for Medicare, eh?  Plus he has never-no-not-one-time-ever demonstrated that he was a danger to himself or others.  No.  John Ford only ever demonstrated that he was an educated, honored, honoring, principled, and retired court officer—wounded in the line of duty and decorated for same—with a great reputation (plus an accredited MS Degree) who supported his Mother in his home!  His antagonist, John Powell, to reiterate, was a criminal entrepreneur at the head of a gargantuan, corrupt, and obscenely canted local government in the state of New York and subsequently CONVICTED for enormous crimes... resulting, by the way, in no record of hard jail-time this writer can find... ...apart from a few cushy months in a rich white man's "country club"...

"John Ford's Crazy!"  Yeah, ...what if he is?

We'll overlook for a moment that sixteen years of the worst food, spotty health care, chronic stress, deliberate institutionalized harassment, and mood-poisoning drugs... would make a psychotic or schizophrenic out of me!  Ford, in interview though, seems pretty lucid to this retired Military Officer who has commanded Service Schools.  People close to him report him sane... But let's say he is crazy, eh?

...Hot flash for the remotely interested?  Being crazy is not against the law. No, not until you become a danger to yourself or others. Even then you are in a whole other category emphasizing treatment over punishment. ...An eye to eventual release when prudent and never an eye to ongoing confinement out of hand, at all costs, costs that John Ford seems to suffer?

Additionally? A *belief* in the reality of UFOs should not be justified as contributing evidence of pathology. *Believing* in UFOs is not evidence of sickness and shall not mean you're harboring a pathology.  Neither, reader, is it evidence of a pathology if you've perhaps been lead to believe that you were being contacted by the Intelligence Agencies alluded to earlier.  It's not germane.   The hard requirement to be a danger to self or others remains unsupported even as Ford is institutionally harassed to provide the excuse needed to keep him in an unjust and authoritarian hell against his will.  None dare call it torture, reader.   Well... I will!

Ford remains imprisoned...

Yeah...Yeah! What if John Ford really is unbalanced or a few chops short of the old mixed grill?  The short story, remember, is that "crazy" is not a crime and, therefore, a non-issue.

On the other hand, what if he is being persecuted for honest, sincere, and justified PASSIONS which all of us would feel if any of us had gotten too near the top of Ford's strident and obstreperous —if lawful!— uphill investigation into Long Island UFOs!  These are UFOs experienced by more persons than just John Ford, eh?  Thousands! Indeed, the reader must begin to perceive that the former doesn't matter and the latter matters most!

It remains Ford was investigating a bona fide and overweening conspiracy: corrupt institutional entities by citation, history, tradition, and conviction—entities unable to bear any investigation of their activities!  That's the public record folks and fellow motes!  ...See where the "vast conspiracy" dismissed earlier is possible, reader?  Even likely!

Consider. The corrupt Suffolk County machine was so unrelentingly dirty that even a "third-rate" investigation into that "machine's" involvement with UFOs might expose its vast criminality!  Ford's was a first rate!

...Yes, I'm betting Ford's sleuthing was top drawer, far from third rate!  Verily, it could be argued that John Powell's vast criminal enterprise began to break down concurrent with John Ford's interest in it!  This is Ford's "crime," reader, to aspire to be a hero for a laudable creed and Mother's country... ...and he rots in prison for it, still!

Verily, the conditions, occurrences, and events surrounding the confinement of John Ford begs a SECOND or even THIRD (...fourth!) look at his plight! A look he will not get if we accept the word of the "Ford hounding", and likely, unethical machine confining him so wrongfully today, still!  

John Ford was a proverbial community pillar and highly educated court officer... ...an officer bereft of any record but a sterling one! Additionally, he was a man who was ruthlessly implicated in heinous crime by a known and subsequently convicted crime boss that Ford was furiously investigating! Also public record!  Do the math, reader!

Him now, you later. ....And given suggestive trends currently? ...Probably sooner than you'd think.

Free John Ford, hell! …RESTORE John Ford, and save yourself in one sweet bargain!!

Closing... ...Suffolk County New York, stomping John Ford's Civil and Human Rights daily for sixteen long and miserable years... ...owes John Ford one hell of a lot of money in purloined retirements and damages.  "Wrath of God" money! We all understand that...

...If Ford dies now, when it seems he might even be released re-pensioned?  I'm betting: Suffolk County killed him.

Could it be argued they've not done worse?  I suspect that it cannot, at least not in a truthful way worthy of truth seekers... and not in New York's Suffolk County.  The State should never be able to reach out with impunity and destroy citizens who threaten a criminality in that State.  ...Seems Suffolk County did just that as regards John Ford.  They'd do it with you?  That seems reasonable if you're honest with yourself.

They won't... Still... Suffolk should settle reasonably with Ford!  Let him end his days with some comfort and dignity.  Don't wrong him further for the sins of scurvy Fathers.

Don't wrong him for new sins of your own.  Expiate!  Atone! 

Restore John Ford!