Please ignore, disregard, delete, glossover, etc, the following if you have no interest in loss of rights and freedoms. I apologize in advance to those who have no interest, are affronted or who have no disk space for such thoughts. The following web site has an interesting 10 part series on abuse of power by the Department of Justice. Please review it if you are concerned about your freedoms. http://www.post-gazette.com/win/schedule.asp Out of control Legal rules have changed, allowing federal agents, prosecutors to bypass basic rights November 22, 1998 By Bill Moushey, Post-Gazette Staff Writer Loren Pogue has served eight years of a 22-year federal prison sentence on drug conspiracy and money laundering charges. Pogue, a Missouri native, never bought drugs, never sold them, never held them, never used them, never smuggled them, never even saw them. But because federal prosecutors allowed a paid government informant to lie about Pogue's involvement in the sale of a parcel of land to supposed drug smugglers, he was convicted. Under tough federal sentencing guidelines, a judge had no choice but to give the Air Force veteran what might effectively be a death sentence. Pogue — father of 27 children, 15 of them adopted — is 65. He doesn't expect to leave prison alive, and as details later in this story will show, he is baffled that the government he served for more than 30 years worked so hard to betray him. In another case, hundreds of miles away, federal agents interrogated businessman Dale Brown for four hours at a Houston, Texas, warehouse. When he tried to leave, they stopped him. When he asked for a lawyer, they refused to get him one. After Brown finally was charged in a government sting called Operation Lightning Strike, federal prosecutors denied that the warehouse interrogation had even happened. They said the dozen others who reported the same coercive tactics in the sting were making it up, too. Federal sting operations are supposed to snare criminals, but in Operation Lightning Strike, federal agents spent millions of dollars entrapping innocent people who worked on the periphery of the U.S. space program. The evidence against them was contrived. The guilty pleas were coerced. Those who fought the charges won.