MN's Ramsey Co. Sheriff Fletcher made up stories of local terrorist groups so that he and his Dept would receive much more pay
and could abuse their own citizens. There are two kids sitting in prison based on Fletcher's lies ? Shameful.
The deputies who knew of Fletcher's actions should have spoken out. If I was taxpayer of Ramsey Co I would demand answers from the Mayor and City Council members as well as the head of MN's FBI. They had to have known of his actions.
Remember the house raids of the young people in MInneapolis just before the RNC ? Eight of them faced many hearings and a trial, which ended up in 3 taking plea bargins and the rest dismissed. For two years, their lives were turned up on end and there was much money spent to defend them.
It is really shameful of the two young men sent to prison after being talked into buying supplies for making molotov cocktails by undercover agents.
What is hard for me is that hundreds of us wrote our city council members, and our state Reps to call for an investigation into Sheriff Fletcher's rogue shenanigans.
None of them called for investigation.
**** Here is a really great investigative story of County Sheriff created lies and his own little secret army. This corruption should be investigated.
http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/news/2011/01/21/those-33-t ...
BY KAREN HOLLISH, TC DAILY PLANET
January 21, 2011
Just weeks into the new Ramsey County Sheriff administration, we finally know why former sheriff Bob Fletcher ignored Minnesota Data Practices requests for the 78 Terrorism Information Briefs he boasted about preparing and disseminating since 2005.
"They never existed," Randy Gustafson, the new public information officer for Sheriff Matt Bostrom, said in a telephone interview on January 19. "It is a very big lie."
While Gustafson was looking for answers to the Daily Planet's October 20 Data Practices Act request, he discovered that some of Fletcher's most shocking figures, such as his claims that Ramsey County citizens were threatened by 22 domestic and 11 international terrorist groups in 2009, had been made up, too.
"I think that they came from an active imagination," Gustafson said.
"I think the number," he added, "just kind of sounded like a good number."
Gustafson, whose official response to the Daily Planet's request can be read here, said he had to prod some of his new colleagues to get this information. He speculated that Fletcher, as well as Fletcher's employees who supposedly did this anti-terrorism work, had a self-serving reason to stretch the truth.
"What they told the county board was a little bit exaggerated," Gustafson said, "but if they hadn't worded it that way it wouldn't have justified the thousands of dollars of salaries they were getting."
Bob's "secret little army"
Sources within the department said Fletcher's anti-terrorism unit was shrouded in secrecy.
One of the few descriptions of it can be found on this contentious 2005 e-democracy thread, in which Gary Olding, who identified himself as the leader of the department's Weapons of Mass Destruction - Prevention, Research, and Preparedness Unit, stepped in to describe his work.
"We conduct investigations, surveillance, and develop informants to preempt and solve crimes involving weapons of mass destruction and terrorism before they occur," Olding wrote.
But if one of the unit's crowning achievements was supposedly the creation and distribution of dozens of Terrorism Information Briefs -- which never existed -- just how did Olding and his team members spend their time?
Olding, who left his post a week after Fletcher was gone, didn't respond to the Daily Planet's requests for an interview. His 2009 salary, according to this searchable database on the Pioneer Press website, was $92,380.52.
Just how that public money was spent, and exactly how many people worked underneath Olding, remains unknown.
One deputy who's been with the department for more than ten years described Olding's WMD unit as "Bob's secret little army." At least a half-dozen deputies worked in it, said the deputy, who asked that his name not be printed for fear of retaliation. (City Pages' Matt Snyders documented some of that retaliation in a 2009 article.)
"They existed because they carried out Bob's little secret war," he said, "and his secret war was to create a story, get him in the paper and get him reelected."
An example of the "secret war," he said, was the department's infiltration into activist groups that planned to protest the 2008 RNC convention.
The day-to-day work of the unit's members may have been more mundane, according to what Gustafson has already learned in his short time on the job. Much of the unit's "research" into groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and Animal Liberation Front happened through virtual channels, he said.
.. click on link to read more..
***************
Fletcher and the RNC in 2008. ( how much support did the FBI give this rogue Sheriff ?)
"Bob's secret little army" did get around in the run-up to the 2008 Republican National Convention. His office spent hundreds of thousands of dollars chasing anarchists in the year before the convention, culminating in a middle-of-the-night raid on the headquarters of the RNC Welcoming Committee before the convention, and raids on private homes, in collaboration with the FBI.
Fletcher's investigation started after he viewed a satirical video by the RNC Welcoming Committee, according to a report by the Center for Investigative Reporting published in MinnPost:
"Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher and his team would cite the video among other things in later warrant affidavits as a basis for his probe into the Welcoming Committee when police stormed the group's headquarters just before the convention began as thousands of reporters and more Republican delegates converged on St. Paul.
"But court affidavits ignored something crucial. The Molotov cocktail in the video is phony and lands in a barbecue grill lighting charcoals ablaze as an outdoor chef smiles thankfully. The bolt cutters are passed to another individual beyond the fence who uses them harmlessly as hedge clippers. ...
"The film was a juvenile satire of popular anarchist imagery, but police allowed their fear and enthusiasm for fighting terrorism to prevail."
Fletcher's anti-terrorism crusade led him to clash repeatedly with St. Paul police over RNC security.
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