Time for 15 euro nations to throw in their cards

The cost of saving Europe is getting too high, and considering the direction the Eurocrats’ philosophy is taking, it’s better just to walk away.

One warning sign was the vehement opposition to the proles ever having a say in how their country or their continent is run.   Never mind that the Greek right wing had half the debt hidden with accounting trickery and derivatives so the public never had a say or notice that the debt was being run up that high.   They should just be stuck with the debt because the elites that want to enslave them say so.  That is the right wing thinking.

Personally, I emphatically agree with the “doctorine of odious debt” and strongly believe that it should be international law.   If somebody like a dictator runs up a huge tab without a mandate, I don’t accept that that there is any moral or ethical basis why the public should be bound by that evil collusion.

It needs to be held to situations where it is appropriate, and the banks colluding with a prior Greek government to run up a tab with no mandate, off the books, is well across the line.

Now another angle is that S & P is being condemned for threatening to downgrade even Germany and France.

S & P, Moody’s and Fitch should be condemned for not having already downgraded Germany and France.

These ratings agencies need to decide if they are in the public relations business or the ratings business.   If they are supposed to be publicists generating good buzz for everybody they should go work for Kim Kardashian and leave serious work to somebody else.

The traditional ineptitude of ratings agencies among other things makes market crashes worse as occurred in 2008.

In 2008 some seriously defective instruments that were given AAA ratings suffered serious losses.    Some of these packages of instruments were intentionally designed to fail and the banks selling them were shorting them at the same time.

Ratings should not be a rubber stamp.

But getting back to the recent story, the real news is not the threatened downgrades, but that the politicians and bureaucrats think that ratings agencies shouldn’t tell the truth because it might affect the markets.

God forbid a ray of truth might get through.

At the same time, half the financial press are writing on the impending market disaster while the other half write glowing nonsense about how the markets are certain to rise and we face eternal prosperity.  The direction that the politicians, bureaucrats and media are taking is Orwellian and I don’t like it.   Europe is regressing 80 years and the US is turning into the Republic of Americastan.

I take it the French have thrown veracity on the rubbish heap along with liberty, fraternity and equality.  The Germans have never espoused those values so I can’t accuse them of abandoning anything.

So there you have it.  If you are in favor of truth, justice and democracy you are an enemy of the Reich…er..European Union.   Framed that way, I know which side I’m on.

Footnote suggestion: start turning ratings hard instead of issuing them in inscrutable ways that look more like religion or astrology.

The European Union’s magic numbers were debt no more than 60% of GDP and deficit no more than 3%.   But that level will already cause significant debt stress.

The GDP is not the best figure to use.  As shown in the US, governments face significant resistance to raising taxes.  They also face significant resistance to reducing programs, any programs.  The result is often inertia.  That means that comparing the debt to the government budget is a more appropriate ratio.  The GDP is irrelevant unless the government can access more of it.  And which sounds more ominous, that the debt is 60% of GDP or that it is 240% of the annual budget?

But using GDP comparisons for a moment, as that is all that has been publicly developed, the idea that the 60%/3% should reflect a AAA rating is ridiculous.

The idea that a government is inherently a more reliable debtor is a dangerous misconception.   A government controls its’ own process in a way that no other debtor can.   A government can immunize itself from execution against assets and unceremoniously give you the heave ho.

Giving a government that is badly in debt a AAA rating because it is a government is incorrect.

If I were making the credit ratings I wouldn’t give a government with the 60%/3% debt ratios better than a BBB.

The US present debt and deficit? A BBB-…maybe. For any other country I’d put that in single or double B.

Have hard lines that result in automatic downgrades without debate, analysis or equivocating and it will help straighten things out.   There’s no need for a field that is mostly numbers to be all soft analysis.

Problems in handling Wikileaks and the freedom of speech

The biggest challenge that Wikileaks poses is how to handle the issue without impeding important freedoms and especially, without getting in the way of legitimate whistleblowers.

The concept of a whistleblower is inherently tied to misfeasance.   If there is no wrongdoing you aren’t a whistleblower, just a spy or a gossip.

There also needs to be a distinction made between Wikileaks and journalism.   A journalist will take a Watergate story and run whereever it leads, and should be able to, but a journalist that solicits any and all information without regard to the public interest (once famously noted by a judge to be distinct from an interested public), is just a criminal, a spy.

Wikileaks actively solicits treason.  It is a criminal organization.   It has published some things in the past that ought to have been published by somebody but that does not change the fact that the core mission of the organization is to solicit treason.    It is not a journalistic organization.

There need to be protections in the event of disclosure being in the public interest and that should be a relatively low threshold.   For that public interest to hold there should be an element of misconduct, which again should be broad to include for instance negligence,

I note that whistleblower protections in the United States are not nearly as strong as they should be, for legitimate whistleblowers.

We do not want to give governments too much control over the flow of information.  One of the deficiencies of the present Canadian government is that government funded scientists are not allowed to give interviews or otherwise disclose information to the public without first getting the approval of politicians.   The ruling party has used this occasionally to suppress research that shows their policies are misconceived.

A balance needs to be struck so that our society does not become more Orwellian than it already is, but others don’t for instance know our bargaining positions in important negotiations or our assessments of important organizations and people.   That needs to be a low test, but an objective test.   Just because somebody disagrees with a policy doesn’t make it misconduct.

I think that the first mistake that the US government made in response to the recent Wikileaks was not telling the press organizations involved that if they published anything from the leaks without prior approval that those involved would be prosecuted for espionage or other appropriate offence.  If they had transfered the same information to a foreign power they would be charged with treason, so why should they be exempt for providing the information to everybody, which is even worse?

For the foreign press that would not cooperate, they should have been told in advance that if they published without permission they would be banned from the United States, any assets in the States seized, and they would be pursued and prosecuted if possible as any other criminal or terrorist organization.

The government has put itself in a dilemma by allowing media organizations to do what Wikileaks has done without any threat of repercussions.   They should have been threatening to prosecute everybody publishing the information at the outset.

The ideal resolution would probably be to have a court structure for the press [including foreign press] analogous in some ways to the courts that consider police wiretaps.  Real journalists with stories from sources that might receive state disapproval could apply to a court for directions and approval for running certain types of stories, and if they have made the appropriate amount of disclosure to the court of what they propose to publish and argue an objective public interest in the information being released, and the court agrees [perhaps on terms or in part], then the journalist in question would be exempt from prosecution or sanctions for publication to the extent that they have been faithful in their presentation and in following any court directions, and their source protected.

Little if anything recently published by Wikileaks would pass the above test.  The public interest [as opposed to an interested public] is not concerned with curiousity or philosophical disapproval.   The public interest is in things like mis-spent or misappropriated public money, cover-ups such as the massacre of civilians or of the FDA overruling its’ own scientists when they say a drug doesn’t work, that kind of thing.  Objective misconduct.

Wikileaks criminal charge farce gets worse

Now one of the women involved in the criminal charges is claiming that the sexual relations between the two parties were voluntary.  There seems to have been some issue of a broken condom.

The other one seems to be a borderline personality stalker type, publicly and aggressively pursuing him.

In her complaint she goes on at great length about how on a few occasions the Wikileaks founder ignored her, including after the alleged rape.   She would be, I think, the first rape victim in history to complain that her attacker repeatedly ignored her.

What seems to have triggered the whole kafuffle is that the two women found out about each other.  Until then there wasn’t an issue.   The purspose of the initial police station visit apparently was to see if they could force Assange to get an STD test.

The actual charge in Sweden is apparently something that they call “sex by surprise”.   While everybody outside of Sweden seems indistinct what that means, a lot of people are saying that carries a typical fine of 5000 Kroner, about $700.   That isn’t going to cover 10% of the cost of the extradition, airfare and hearing.

If there is a lesson in all this, it is if you become rich and famous, stay away from the crazy types of the opposite sex that are inevitably going to pursue you.  If they feel jilted they may slash your tires or burn your house down or make false criminal allegations against you.   It really isn’t worth the headache.

Unless of course the woman was sent by somebody to create a problem, but then I would have expected the set up to be more tight and professional.   I think that the authorities were opportunistic in milking something that they ordinarily wouldn’t bother pursuing for all that it was worth.   Assange really doesn’t belong on the same list as people for whom $25 million rewards are offered for those allegations.   Maybe for what he has actually done, but not for the collateral attack.

Look at enough victim statements and you will often see a complainant with an agenda, where the alleged crime seems to almost be an afterthought while they blather on about something else.

I’ve half wondered if the whole thing was something concocted between Assange and his associates to give his releases more buzz.   Most of what I’ve heard about them sounds banal and none of them are top secret clearance.    Cables about people’s eating and drinking habits and petty squabbles reduces and degrades diplomacy to reality TV but a bunch of cloak and dagger nonsense makes this act of sabotage look more important [which should increase both interest and donations].

Wikileaks sets back real whistleblowers

A few good whistleblowers now and again are good for democracy.

Wikileaks on the other hand has become little more than vandalism.

People that are affected will  avoid having frank discussions about important things.  The last thing that the world needs is for communication to become even more superficial because anything committed to writing has to be so politically correct that it can’t offend anybody, i.e., devoid of content.     Communication that is both true and important would always be offensive to somebody.

Wikileaks has done some things that I see as falling within the whistleblower mandate, such as publishing information showing a US gunship mowing down unarmed civilians.   Cover-ups ought to be outed.

Indiscriminately dumping information on the other hand is just wrong.

I have to wonder if a foreign intelligence service is behind the site.   Now foreign agencies can act on information published online without having to admit if they had a hand in securing it.

The end result of publishing many documents that aren’t a smoking gun for any government misconduct is that it is going to be made a lot harder for real whistleblowers in the future.

Interesting issues in recent murder cases

Zahra Baker’s body was found reportedly dismembered, with the family being the culprits and having taken various steps to conceal the death.

The real issue no doubt is going to be, what crime they actually committed.

The defence which has been leaked out is that the girl was found dead and then was dismembered.   That is a singularly idiotic thing to do with a dead body- it can result in a murder charge where none was necessary and decomposition may prevent a valid defence from being maintained.

I can see some premise for it though- both the father and the step-mother are known fraud artists and if there is any way that they could receive, for example, social benefits, they may have wished to conceal the death in order to continue receiving benefits.  That tactic is not uncommon although it is generally employed with e.g. taking the social security cheques of the elderly.

On the other hand, the move to destroy certain evidence makes one wonder.

The delay in reporting the “disappearance” is suspect but the wrongful motivation is ambiguous.   It seems that three days before the reported disappearance, the birth mother made contact and wanted to speak to the daughter.  So they had to contrive something or fess up.

It will be an interesting case.

In the Chandra Levy case, justice was probably done although the verdict is suspect.   The only evidence tieing the suspect to the crime was an alleged confession to a cellmate.    Criminal informants have a great incentive to come up with such allegations in order to bargain with authorities and are already known to be dishonest.  Many wrongful convictions have resulted from bogus confessions, and some of the rats are very polished at making up stories to serve their own interests.   The only times when an alleged jailhouse confession should be accepted is when the informant is, apart from some act of stupidity, an otherwise impeccable citizen, or when the information passed on is not notorious and could only be known by the perpetrator (in which case you have to look in to the whereabouts of the informant and whether he has other contacts that could be guilty).

It is quite plausible that the accused was guilty given his past history, but I have my doubts that I could have agreed that it was proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

I suspect that this was what might be called a “compensation conviction”.   The accused had been convicted of two rapes (which probably means 20 or more performed) and only got ten years.   That’s somebody you bury in prison.  He was otherwise set to be released this year with obvious consequences.   I can’t say that I’m heartbroken that he’s going away.   It would be better though to improve sentencing provisions so that some later jury doesn’t decide to fix a mistake later by glossing over a weak case.

Bear in mind that if there is some other psycho out there that did this thing, it will be far harder to put him away for it and nobody’s looking.

In these cases that are iffy, we should always remember the Dugard case.   The facts were unusual and the police were right to not trust the stepfather at the time.  The profile of the attack, extremely brazen and in front of him, is atypical (which is likely in part why the outcome was atypical).   The first thing that one would suspect in such a case was that the claim looked ad hoc and improbable.

But the police at the time handled it more appropriately than most would, although their tunnel vision may (or may not) have cost them the opportunity to find the girl much earlier.   The police in most jurisdictions would put the suspect in a cell with a professional liar, who would inevitably claim a confession whether one was made or not in return for a lesser sentence or other privileges.    Then you get something like the Morin case in Canada.

The primary lesson of the Dugard case as I see it is, no wonder what the percentages are, wait for the evidence.  If you start creating it then you could have a wrongful conviction based on instinct and knowing that when a kid goes missing it is more often not the parents.

In some cases there may be other options.

In the Kyron Hormon case, there is a divorce action between the parents.  Proving death will be difficult.   Kidnapping is possible.  There is the interesting issue of what you do when you can probably prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there has been either murder or kidnapping but can’t prove either individually beyond a reasonable doubt, and neither is an included offence of the other.

I suspect obstruction could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

There may however be another option.

In the divorce action, Mr. Hormon can probably get an order for Ms. Harmon to produce the child and disclose his whereabouts.

If she doesn’t, the case looks strong enough to me for contempt of court.

In most jurisdictions, the court can keep a party in contempt of court in jail until they purge their contempt.

She could potentially be given, in effect, a life sentence already.

TSA, making everybody less safe

One of the things that Obama has done that most annoy me is that he’s done nothing to slow down the Bush administration’s priority  of turning America into a police state.

How long before we have soldiers at every corner asking for our papers?  It would would make us safer, wouldn’t it comrades?

Sure 911 was dramatic, but, get over it.  Sure it was 3,000 people but we probably had more immigrants than that and more babies than that arrive the same day.  That’s too bad.   The government is supposed to be looking after 300 million live people, not 3,000 dead ones.  I feel bad for them.  But we have to move on.  We can’t paralyse our society on the theoretical chance that something bad could happen.  In an open society it is always possible that something bad could happen.  But between births and immigration they’re all replaced the same day.   We don’t ban cars because 30,000-40,000 people die in them every year.  And ultimately, everybody will pass on one way or the other regardless of what we do.  Life has to be about life.

It seems that the only thing that matters anymore is preventing, not the probability, but the possibility of a major attack.

I’m concerned that activities like training all schools in lockdown procedures is counterproductive.    It creates the possibility of doing something in the mind of potential aggressors.  It affirms them as a target and raises their profile in that context.  That makes everybody less safe.

The TSA process has never caught anybody that was a threat and probably won’t.

Worse, it is likely to give people ideas.   Ideas are the true enemy here.  Leave the bad guys with tunnel vision.  We can’t protect everything.

Here’s an idea for you, for instance.   I see the article out there about a TSA agent busting some guy’s urostomy bag.   Now they are going to stay away from urostomy bags, and probably a few other things besides.   Never mind telling people that they can’t take their mouthwash on a plane.  Now every terrorist in the world knows that he can get liquids on a plane in something that looks like a passable urostomy bag.

Other published exceptions are going to get wheels turning in unfriendly minds.

These are things that probably nobody would have thought of otherwise.

Exposure to the x-rays is going to be a health issue, especially for frequent business flyers.  They would be advised to keep the number of their trips down and they will.

And the procedures do not address the main security risk at airports, baggage handlers.   Baggage handlers in many airports steal luggage or from luggage with impunity.  If they take something out, they could put something in.   The airlines hide behind policies of not paying for losses and don’t do anything, although you would think from a security standpoint that a dirty baggage handler ought to be a very high priority.    I note that one of the leads in the Lockerbie case that was never properly followed up was a break in at a baggage area.

Meanwhile, the administration continues various Bush policies that increase the probability of an attack.

Memo to Obama: start acting like a Democrat.  You’re more like Bush than Clinton and not in the same league as Carter.

Charging Amanda Knox with slander??

The more the Italian authorities do on this Knox trial, the more they make the girl look innocent.

When you’ve got somebody sentenced to life for murder, you don’t pursue them for slander, jay-walking, etc.   It’s malicious and a waste of public money.

If on the other hand the whole purpose was always to have a sensationalist story to take the public eye off the ruling party’s “bonga bonga” scandal and stories about Berlusconi pursuing underage girls, then it makes perfect sense.

The prosecution’s whole premise was unnecessarily preposterous and I have no doubt, let alone a reasonable one, that the storyline constructed by the prosecution was only intended to be sensationalist because it sure couldn’t be true.

It is wildly implausible that the police could get anybody to confess to such a preposterous story without extreme coercion and quite apart from the issue of her innocence of any involvement, on which I have no opinion, I believe that Amanda Knox’s confession was coerced and more likely than not she was beaten or physically intimidated as part of that.

Again, it is the Italians’ whole conduct in this matter that suggests to me a lack of faith in their case.   If you have faith in your case you don’t have to try to prejudice the trier of fact with sensationalist nonsense and you certainly don’t engage in a side attack on the defendant thats presumed only function is to deplete the resources of the defendant of resources for appeal and independent investigation.

If the state is in the right, why are they acting so guilty?

Khadr fiasco and red herrings

The Khadr fiasco is one of the weirder episodes in the whole “war on terror”, maybe 2% of which effort has been about going after terrorists and the remainder about deposing the governments of two oil-rich nations and replacing them with people perceived to be more friendly.

If he has indeed constructed IEDs with the intention of targeting civilians, which is admitted as part of the plea agreement, then he’s at least guilty of something.  You would have thought that would have been the focus, rather than the preposterous outrage at a soldier being killed in a war by somebody defending himself.   The comments from his legal team indicate that he doesn’t actually agree with everything that he’s signed for as part of the plea bargain so I am not clear on which portions he agrees to and which are state embellishment.

Suppose it is 2035 and America has been weakened to the point where it is taken over by a corrupt puppet government that enforces Sharia law on all.  You become a member of a resistance, but before you ever firing a shot, the home that you are in is attacked by foreign forces that wound you and kill everybody else inside including at least one family member.   You hear the people that have shot you approaching closer.  Not knowing whether you live or die if you just lie there, do you A. just lie down and wait for the attackers to come in and thank them for liberating you; B. Lob out a hand grenade; or C. Lob out a hand grenade and take a bead with the nearest weapon you can find and start taking head shots?

My guess is most of us would choose C.

That is fairly analogous to the situation that Khadr found himself in, with the additional point that as he had been brought into the conflict as a child he didn’t have a whole lot of choice about the situation he found himself in.

Quite apart from Al Queda connections or anything else, it is trivially obvious that Khadr was entitled to defend himself when the house he was in was attacked, even if he wasn’t a child soldier. You can’t really have any respect for a person in that situation that doesn’t fight back.

As for anybody fighting being required to wear a uniform or be an “unlawful combatant”, the various military conventions that exist have become a farce, in effect requiring weaker parties to give up.  The people responsible for the American Revolution didn’t follow the now generally accepted military code and can hardly be faulted for not doing so.   Unless a much weaker party in a conflict has nuclear weapons, their only remedy is guerrilla action.   Prohibiting guerrilla action does little more than codify “might makes right” into law and provide for victor’s justice.   If you don’t want to be shot in somebody else’s country, you have the relatively simple remedy of not invading it.

Bringing the widow of the dead soldier into the trial is a shameful display.  No doubt the soldier was not a bad man per se, but he did sign up for something that allowed him to be used as a mercenary in an economically motivated invasion.  He could have been an accountant or something.  There isn’t a draft anymore.   Is this what the future holds, invading forces broadcasting propaganda messages from the widows of deceased invaders condemning defenders for their “crimes” and holding show trials?  It’s repugnant and offensively stupid.

There is a problem with Khadr’s fanaticism, but that should be saved for dealing with actual crimes.  We don’t like in the world of Tom Cruise’s “Minority Report” where people get imprisoned for their future crimes.    A psychiatrist testifying about the hatred this man has is missing the point.  He’s either committed a crime or he hasn’t, and anybody you torture is going to hate you and want revenge.

The most valuable intelligence that he can offer is about the point of view that makes that kind of violence possible.

In the meantime he should be a prisoner of war and if after release he does something stupid then he should suffer the consequences.  He can reasonably be held as a prisoner of war without any ridiculous show trials.   Conventions against child soldiers being treated the same as other soldiers aren’t really equipped for this kind of situation.  If you put a “child soldier” through enforced brain-washing, even if it is characterized (perhaps accurately) as deprograming, there is an issue whether that is a greater abuse than imprisonment.  Then there is the problem of what to do with a former child soldier who is now an adult.   There is also the reality that “rehabilitation” is something of an urban myth.   It hardly ever works.

Arranging for Khadr to be met by moderate Muslim clerics would be a good start.  They can out Al Queda as heretics.   It really has to come from a Muslim that one cannot engage in barbarism and still be a good Muslim, a non-Muslim trying to teach a fanatic about the true meaning of Islam is going to have a credibility problem.

The larger issue is how to eliminate the motivation for conflict in others.  Khadr is just one soldier.

One of the primary problems with the initial US approach to the middle east has been the same approach used with questionable success in Latin America until the 1990′s- install a criminal thug who is loyal to the US rather than his own country, and give him enough firepower to maintain his grip.  Overwhelming opposition in Iraq prevented the designated criminal who was parachuted in from taking over Iraq, but the effort was superficially successful in Afghanistan.   [And the inherent problem with Afghanistan's corruption problem is that the whole point was to install a corrupt government.  Corruption isn't like a light switch that goes on and off when you want it to.]

The Latin America model didn’t work very well in Latin America, even with the same religion.   The first attempt to use it in the middle east, overthrowing Iran’s democratically elected government and replacing it with the corrupt Shaw, directly resulted in much of the present middle east conflict and Islamic extremism.

Helping the Japanese and Germans develop fully independent systems with the highest standards on the other hand turned formerly powerful enemies into powerful allies.  There is something to be learned there.  With the cultural and religious conflict, using the Latin America model in the middle east is probably the worst possible choice.

Fight for the minds of the Khadrs of the world is the way to win the fight, but that will take more than just weapons and propaganda.   Trying to sell the Afghans and their sympathizers with salvation through Karzai is snake oil and everybody knows it.  Whether he is much of an improvement over the Taliban from the perspective of a local is debatable.

Using the US analogy above raises another point.  What would happen if the US were in the same position as Afghanistan is now?  An external enemy tends to unite people against the common enemy and gloss over their differences.   If the US were resisting invaders you’d have avowed Marxists handing fresh ammo clips to Tea Party members.   There wouldn’t be any room for cracks and any ideological differences would be moot until the enemy was defeated in any event.   We can’t afford to generate that kind of solidarity in an enemy.

While constricting enemy space etc. the US has to find ways to allow enough ideological space for cracks to develop in the Taliban/ Al Queda front.  That isn’t easy.

The central problem isn’t a military problem, it is that the US doesn’t have anything on the table.    The position in a nutshell is “accept the second most corrupt government on earth and that you will be subservient to another culture and religion or we shoot”.  There really isn’t any way to sugar-coat that.   It is as good as taking out ads on Afghan television saying “bring it on”.

The great strategist Von Clausewitz said that “war is politics by other means”, but the flip side of that is that politics can be war by other means.

As despicable as the Taliban and Al Queda are, we really don’t want to have to take them all out to a man.  And we’ve flipped far worse into responsible world citizens in the past.  The core underlying problem though is that the political approach taken has always been disasterous in the past and fixing deficiencies on the battlefield doesn’t fix that.

As long as middle east policy is always about what American corporations want instead of what the middle east people want, there’s always going to be another Khadr.   Are we going to imprison them all after show trials, or rethink this?

West Memphis Three again

Further to my last entry, it may be that evidence of tire tracks or drag marks got obliterated by the cretins that came on the crime scene, but one would think that even the investigating officers there wouldn’t be that thick.

Unless the perp was really close by the options that are obvious are that the victims would have either walked, been dragged or driven, as an eight year old weighs enough that the perpetrator wouldn’t be able to carry even one very far unless he was amazingly fit.  Walking seems unlikely in the circumstances, with search parties out looking for them and all.

But if there was no evidence of bringing them in, the next thing you look at is who had a boat or access to a boat and if any boats were stolen in the relevant time frame.

The strength of the river current would also be important because it would reflect on the strategy of the perpetrator.   The ideal stealth strategy would be to be able to use no engine power and drift with the current.

A boat would help explain one of the unusual features of the scene, the clothing wrapped around sticks that were stuck into the bank.  If the perpetrator doesn’t want to set foot on the bank, which could leave a clue, but doesn’t want clothing to float downstream to get attention (possibly right ahead of himself), then he doesn’t really have a lot of options other than wrapping it around something fixed.   If he throws it up on the bank it may attract attention too quickly and the anti-forensics effect of putting the clothing in running murky water would be lost.

The potential suspect that jumps out as the first person I would have put on the polygraph is the junior probation officer that was somehow at the crime scene that said something like “It looks like Damien Echols finally killed somebody”.   If he knew anything about the history of Damien Echols, he would know that it would be highly remote chance of that being true.  He did however successfully sidetrack the investigation for 17 years so far.  And why was he there?  The last thing that you would think that a cop would want would be some wanna-be who is a probation officer for minors trampling over your crime scene and offering unsolicited opinions.

There was no appropriate reason why a probation officer for minors would be hanging out at a murder scene.  That job description is however the ideal job positon for someone who prays on children- a position where vulnerable children who may have become accustomed to abuse are presented with an authority figure that they have to obey or receive adult-like consequences.  Really the ideal position for somebody that preys on children.

For a perpetrator to insert himself into an investigation and even try to misdirect an investigation is not unheard of.

I can’t say that he’d good for it, but I’d really like to know if he has any alibi, or lived in the area, or had access to a boat.  I would have given him the same initial attention that they gave Echols.    A big difference now though is that the perpetrator has had 17 years to screw up again.   A person that could do that, or who couldn’t not do that, has done something else, probably lots of things, and probably been caught for some.   Not infrequently when there is a wrongful conviction, if the actual culprit is discovered it is somebody with a long history of problems with the law.