FBI Probes Lab in Okla. City Bombing

[newyawker99]

The FBI internal affairs office is investigating the crime lab's chief of scientific analysis about his conduct in the Oklahoma City bombing case, according to people familiar with the investigation.

The Associated Press reported last spring that a transcript of a Justice Department interview showed that FBI scientific analysis unit chief Steven Burmeister initially had alleged in 1995 that his lab colleagues performed shoddy work in Timothy McVeigh's case, but then retracted several statements before appearing as a prosecution witness at the trial.

AP also reported that lawyers for some FBI lab employees sent a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2001, just days before McVeigh was executed for the April 1995 bombing, alleging Burmeister may have been pressured to give false testimony in the case. No action was taken and the allegation was never divulged to McVeigh's lawyers.

The revelation about Burmeister, however, became an issue in the Oklahoma state murder trial of McVeigh conspirator Terry Nichols this spring. Burmeister had given key testimony against McVeigh and was originally slated to be a prosecution witness in the new trial for Nichols, whom Oklahoma prosecutors want to put to death.


OKC bombing

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1. Is AP dredging up old news for a purpose or is this something new?

http://americanfreepress.net/05_11_03/False_Testimony/false_testimony.html

False Testimony In McVeigh Case

Evidence Tampering, Perjury Alleged by FBI Lab Workers;

Proof Withheld from Defense

Accusations are beginning to surface that the FBI tampered with evidence concerning the case of OKC bomber Timothy McVeigh and “co-conspirator” Terry Nichols.
Exclusive To American Free Press

By Mike Blair

As Oklahoma brings Terry Nichols, the convicted accomplice in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, to trial on state charges, lawyers are discovering that the federal prosecution of alleged “lone bomber” Timothy McVeigh was in many respects a sham.

Prosecutors believe that the FBI not only tampered with evidence but also may have rigged the trial of McVeigh in 1997. The FBI concealed what it had done right up to the point when the Gulf War I veteran was executed in 2001.

Ten days before McVeigh’s execution, lawyers for employees of the FBI laboratory, which processed physical evidence for the prosecution of McVeigh, wrote an urgent letter to Attorney General John Ash croft citing evidence that Steven Burmeister, now chief of the lab’s scientific analysis, may have given false testimony about key forensic data.

The FBI did not divulge the letter to McVeigh’s attorneys and later retrieved all copies of the document from the lawyers by offering their clients a cash settlement
(snip)

[WoodrowFan]

2. Still Quoting that Neo-Nazi Source

The FBI lab may have screwed up, but the American Free Press is still a genuine Neo-Nazi source not worth quoting. The are the most recent successor of The Spotlight, the former paper put out by the liberty lobby, and they promote the Barnes Review, which is one of the main Holocaust denial promoters.

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3. Shoot down the mesenger, frankly any group with over three people.......

could be suspect if they are some kind of agency or organization
Cross checking sources is only part even. The best dissinformation is when information is 90%+ true but leaves the kernal lead away from what is seeking to be hid.

I am just reading what comes up on

If you have some site or source which discribes and disseminates who is credible and why please post

Here try this article if you don't like that source

http://www.crimemagazine.com/tainting_evidence.htm
Tainting Evidence:
Inside the Scandals at the FBI Crime Lab
by John F. Kelly and Phillip K. Wearne

(snip)
But if scientific crime-fighting is fallible and flawed, those problems rarely come to light. One exception was in July 1994, when U.S. Today and the Gannett News Service published a survey. Believing that the claim that the bloody glove found on O. J. Simpson's estate had been planted was far-fetched, the newspaper trawled legal and media databases for comparative cases. They found 85 instances since 1974 in which prosecutors had knowingly or unknowingly used tainted evidence that had convicted the innocent or freed the guilty. In the same period, 48 people sentenced to death were freed after convictions were found to be based on fabricated evidence or because exonerating or exculpatory evidence was withheld.

These were just the known cases, cases that for one reason or another had come to light or made the news. "In the United States we take science as gospel," said Ray Taylor, a San Antonio-based lawyer and forensic pathology expert, commenting on the survey. "The public perception is that faking science is rare. The truth is it happens all the time."

The tip of this iceberg has been some shocking individual examples. Fred Salem Zain was a police forensic expert in West Virginia and Texas for nearly 15 years. Hired as a chemist by West Virginia State police crime lab in 1979, he testified as an expert in dozens of rape and murder cases about tests he had never done and results he had never obtained. Despite complaints, nothing was done. Colleagues taped a magician's wand to one of Zain's laboratory machines in frustration. In 1989, Zain became head of serology at the Bexar County Medical Examiner's office in San Antonio. When asked to review Zain’s work, the Dallas forensic specialist I. C. Stone found rampant fraud and falsification. In one case, Zain had testified about blood evidence when no blood had been found; in other cases he reported performing tests his lab was incapable of doing. Zain was fired. At the last count, five men jailed for rape and murder have had their convictions overturned as a result.

West Texas pathologist Ralph R. Erdmann, who worked as a contract medical examiner in 40 counties, faked more than 100 autopsies on unexamined bodies, and falsified dozens of toxicology and blood reports. Dozens of other autopsies were botched. In one case he lost a head. Then there was Louise Robbins, a college anthropology professor who claimed the ability to match a footprint on any surface to the person who made it. Robbins appeared as an expert witness for over a decade in more than 20 criminal cases throughout North America before her claims were thoroughly debunked. Her testimony helped put more than a dozen people behind bars, including an Ohio man who spent six years on death row before his conviction was overturned on appeal.
(snip)

[WoodrowFan]

4. Shoot down the mesenger

If the messenger is wearing a Nazi uniform, you're damn right I will. And any group of three people being suspect? If they're wearing Klan hoods, you bet!

The far right, which is a danger to democracy and not just to liberals, mixes more "acceptable" stories in with the more extreme in the hopes that the naive will come to accept the more extreme stories along with the more reasonable. They are doing it with the repuke party now, Ann Coulter would have been banished as a nutjob a few decades ago, now she's acceptable, and so is the idea that dissent is treason.

I never denied that the lab had problems, but asking me to accept the "reporting" from a source that works for a holocaust-denying rw racist source like the paper you seem so fond of citing? FORGET IT. Reading the American Free Press for bits of reliable news is like asking Goebbels for the weather report. There are better sources.

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5. And listening to Corporate News isn't

Where are the WMD from Iraq? Though I know many people distort a lot of things. By your reasoning it would occur to me (my opinion only) that all documents and evidence that came out of Germany after WW II should be ignored because a Nazi might have had something to do with it. Much of the documentation that convicted many of them was created by there very own hands.

That’s like a cop driving down the street and seeing a robbery going on, decides to turn the other way because he might see something evil. This kind of ideal seems ignorant. Looking at many sources from many different views helps one try to figure out what is going on. Staying a field of the flock is not always the correct way to do something, but then working with a consensus often hinders individual investigation and dissemination.

Another example would be the US government, they have used and continue to stock nuclear weapons, which I think are inherently evil, knowing I cannot change any that by myself, I have to stay with the group consensus, but still can have my own beliefs about it and yet also not trying find a cave somewhere to hide from that percieved evil.

http://www.mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq32.html
Why The Media Lies
The Corporate Structure of The Mass Media

by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
(snip)
That the media has failed to accurately portray the real nature of Western foreign policy to the public, playing instead the subservient role of a propaganda machine for elite interests, is therefore quite obvious. The question that then remains is, why does the media – conventionally believed to be critical of the establishment - behave in a way that conforms to the false picture presented by the government and corporate elite of their own policies? The anwer is simple: in a nutshell, the mass media is the establishment.

To begin our analysis then, we will discuss a propaganda model of the mass media. It is thus useful to begin with what is arguably the most thorough model of the media - that proposed by Edward Herman (Professor Emeritus of Finance at Wharton School in the University of Pennsylvania) and Noam Chomsky (Institute Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT), both of whom are leading critics of US foreign policy.<5>

There are particularly pertinent reasons to begin with their model - the primary one being that it is arguably the most thoroughly researched and empirically verified model available. Herman and Chomsky’s landmark study, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, comes under the recommendation of America’s leading national media watchdog and research group, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR). It is also recommended as an essential resource for media literacy by the Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy (GRIID), affiliated with the US-based Community Media Centre (CMC).<6> The Oxford-based research and publishing group Corporate Watch (not to be confused with the US-based organisation of the same name), which works in cooperation with a variety of other human rights and environmentalist organisations, describes the study as “one of the most incisive critiques of the media’s role in society”.<7> The respected journal Publisher’s Weekly gives the following review of Manufacturing Consent:

“Herman of Wharton and Chomsky of MIT lucidly document their argument that America’s government and its corporate giants exercise control over what we read, see and hear. The authors identify the forces that they contend make the national media propagandistic - the major three being the motivation for profit through ad revenue, the media’s close links to and often ownership by corporations, and their acceptance of information from biased sources. In five case studies, the writers show how TV, newspapers and radio distort world events… Extensive evidence is calmly presented, and in the end an indictment against the guardians of our freedom is substantiated. A disturbing picture emerges of a news system that panders to the interest of America’s privileged and neglects its duties when the concerns of minority groups and the underclass are at stake.”
(snip)

on edit: that is funny "asking Goebbels for the weather report", sort of like asking * for a military assessment.

Many groups keep their eyes on others, my first post in thread was only a reference that this an old story, not trying to give them credit, It was ‘so why are they digging this old stuff up now?’