A message that Eric Holder understands perfectly well: No more free William Colbys.

William Colby when he was CIA station chief in Saigon.

"But I'm a superstitious man. And if some unlucky accident should befall him - If he should get shot in the head by a police officer, or if he should hang himself in his jail cell - or if he's struck by a bolt of lightning, them I'm going to blame some of the people in this room, and that I do not forgive." -- Don Vito Corleone to the other dons of the Five Families, The Godfather.

In a comment to a previous post on "Zorro" I indicated that there would be "No more free William Colbys" either. I see from my email that this requires some explication.

In an article on the controversy about the Waco FLIR tape and the evidence that FBI or Delta shooters were killing Davidians as they fled the fire out the back of Mt. Carmel (See Mike McNulty's two documentaries on Waco -- Waco: The Rules of Engagement and Waco: A New Revelation), Texas-based lefty journalist Dick Reavis discusses Gordon Novel and how the Davidian defense counsel received the assistance of William Colby, former director of the CIA.

Shortly after Novel claims a team sent by Colby helped him with the FLIR tape analysis, his body washed up on the banks of Maryland's Wicomico River after he had been missing for nine days. The Baltimore, MD medical examiner's office in Baltimore concluded that the seventy-six-year-old Colby had fallen out of his canoe as the result of a heart attack or stroke, suffered hypothermia, and drowned.

Colby had a summer home in Rock Point, Maryland on the banks of the Wicomico River, a tributary of the Potomac. April 27, 1996 was a cold, blustery night, an odd time for Colby, who was 76, to go canoeing for the winds were gusting up to 25 miles per hour.

Colby's canoe was spotted the next day on a sand bar -- without Colby.

A US Coast Guard investigator who searched Colby's home said that Colby had left his radio and computer on when he went canoeing, saying "There were dinner items on the table." The house was unlocked.

Colby was alone in the house that night, for his wife was visiting her mother in Texas. There are differing press accounts of what Bill Colby told his wife in a phone call earlier in the evening:

The Associated Press reported that Colby told her he didn't feel well but was going canoeing anyway--The Guardian reported that he phoned his wife to say he was going to eat dinner, take a hot shower, and hit the sack. A third newspaper account stated Colby told his wife he wasn't feeling well and yet went canoeing nonetheless, but the article didn't state whether or not Colby conveyed to wife that he was going canoeing.

The day Colby's canoe was found Coast Guard crews started to search the Wicomico for his body. The Coast Guard ultimately scoured the river for eight days with divers, sonar equipment, and drag-lines, and dogs rummaged the river's banks--Colby's body was never recovered. Then on May 6, Colby's body washed ashore close to where his canoe had originally been spotted--it's odd that Colby's body materialized so close to the canoe even though the Coast Guard had scoured the vicinity with divers, sonar, and drag lines.

The Associated Press reported that Colby's body was clad in khaki pants, a blue and white shirt, and a red windbreaker, but he wasn't wearing shoes. So if the Associated Press' account of Colby's canoeing apparel was accurate, and the Maryland medical examiner's account was accurate, Colby went canoeing on a cold, blustery night without shoes--it was cold enough for him to wear a windbreaker and yet he opted not to wear shoes.

Missing from the account was his life jacket. He wasn't wearing one, despite the fact that his wife insisted that he never went out on the water without one, the result of his experiences in the OSS during World War II.

Now Gordon Novel is not the most veracious of witnesses. Yet Mike McNulty verified that Novel did have help of some kind with the FLIR analysis, and it is certain (I have been told by someone who is familiar with both the men and the case) that Gordon Novel and the CIA of the William Colby era were, as he claimed, "a mutual admiration society."

Certainly Novel had acted as a cut-out in the CIA's secret war with the FBI for years, and he both despised and was despised in turn by agents of the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

I have personally confirmed that Colby and Novel knew each other. Certainly Bill Colby had been involved in a lot of controversies -- both seen and unseen -- over his career and thus had made a lot of enemies. So if he was killed -- as seems likely to me -- then the list of suspects is a long one.

But his list of friends was long as well, and it happens that I have known a couple of them over the years and neither of them believed that Bill Colby died in a canoe accident.

But even if the list of enemies is long, and you're working your search for suspects backward from the date of Colby's death, the first thing you notice is that last people that Bill Colby both pissed off and frightened -- a bad combination -- were the Clintonistas responsible for the Waco massacre and its cover-up.

I do know this: the man I received information about Andreas Carl Strassmeier from -- the Virginia driver's license and Social Security number provided him by Vincent Petruskie, a CIA employee -- the information that pulled me into the private investigation of the OKC bombing, was a friend of Bill Colby's and he was perfectly happy to embarrass the Clintonistas and the FBI through the cut-out of an Alabama militia leader.

And it wasn't just the Waco tape that placed Colby on the White House mortal enemies' list. At the time of his death, Bill Colby was still a world-traveler and consultant to many corporations. He had recently became an editor of a financial newsletter, Strategic Investment, which covered the Vince Foster "suicide" in detail.

Its editors hired three renowned handwriting experts to investigate Foster's suicide note, which hadn't been found when his briefcase was first searched, but later materialized, torn into pieces, with no fingerprints on any of the pieces. Upon comparing this document with others of Foster's writings, these experts declared it was a forgery, and a not very good one at that.

So, the Clintonistas had good reason to want him dead.

I tell you all of this to get to this point:

When we become concerned that the Clintonista cover-up artists of the 90s (one of whom is now the nation's "top cop", Eric Holder) might take retaliatory actions against the several ATF whistleblowers who are now threatening to make that agency's many scandals an item of public discussion, it is important to remind them that we are in a new day.

Just as there will be no more free Katrinas and no more free Wacos, just as there will be no more free Oklahoma Citys and no free stolen elections, there will be no more free Bill Colbys.

They understand exactly what I'm talking about, even if some of you, gentle readers, do not.

So if the Holder crowd -- the Obamanoid Clintonista Cabal -- is tempted to fall back on old habits and make the "Zorros" and the "Waldos" who threaten the exposure of their wrongdoing go away in a traffic "accident" or while canoeing they had best understand one thing up front -- There will be no more FREE William Colbys either.

Unfortunately these are the kinds of unpleasant topics which must be discussed when the "cops" are in fact criminals themselves. If the rule of law no longer protects the people, it no longer protects criminals operating under color of law either.

So, if you are an "official" scofflaw, it is still safer to mend your ways and to stick to the rule of law, even if you and your administration are both embarrassed by it. Better to be embarrassed than terminally embarrassed.

Mike
III