Yeah, well, Nuff is wrong a lot. You shouldn't listen to Nuff so much.
They shot 15 bullets, one of which nailed him in the aѕѕ, at an unarmed man while he was fleeing from them. The officers then picked up their shell casings, put them in their pockets, and failed to file a "shots fired" report, and then lied about the incident when asked. At the time the shots were fired, they had no clue that he was a drug smuggler. None. They were charged with firing on an unarmed man and then covering it up. Those are the facts of the case.
There were no bleeding heart liberals who pushed the issue. The US Attorney's office for the Western District of Texas could not be considered liberal in any way, even by the most rabid conservative, regardless of which litmus test you choose to apply.
Many people view this case as a fiasco perpetuated by the government. Those who believe that have been royally duped. They've had the wool pulled over their eyes. They have been lied to, and because those lies fit within their own agenda and beliefs, they fall for it, hard. They swallowed the hook, line, sinker and a large section of the fishin' pole.
And, quite honestly, it illustrates the danger of getting most or all of your news "facts" from sources with which you agree. The facts of the case are clear, concise and straightforward, and to the prosecuting attorney, fellow Border Control Agents who testified against the men, and West Texas the jury, it was a clear cut case of unlawful use of force.
Almost immediately after the verdict, with the help of reporters and activists promoting and blatantly embellishing the defense's version of the case, the two convicted agents were transformed into martyrs for the battle against illegal immigration. Instead of rogue officers who shot a fleeing, unarmed suspect and then lied about it, they became stand-up cops (nay, true life heroes!) who were OMG forced to shoot an OMG armed drug dealer and then sent to prison by a legal system run amok. OMG!
Within months of the conviction, they had become the center of a dubious political crusade that would energize the furthest reaches of the right, dominate one of CNN's most popular news programs, and persuade a quarter of the U.S. House of Representatives, and one prominent, very liberal Democratic senator, to reject the findings of a federal court.
How did you get duped? How did Ramos and Compean get reinvented as right-wing heroes? The answer lies in the way many Americans get their information, from a fragmented alternative news media that makes it easier than ever to tune out opposing views and inconvenient truths. When people seek "facts" only from sources with which they agree, it's possible for demonstrable and provable untruths to enter the mainstream narrative and remain there, unchallenged. They believe it to be true, no reason to challenge it, therefor it is true.
The ballad of Ramos and Compean is a story that one side (the Right Wing) of America's polarized culture has gotten all wrong, and that much of the other side (the Left Wing), and the rest of the country, for that matter, has never even heard. Until this things got blown out of proportion, the mainstream media didn't bother to report it, because it wasn't newsworthy. It was a simple case of excessive force.
There are five major players in the transformation of Ramos and Compean from cops who tried to cover up a bad shooting into martyred heroes of the great conservative pushback against illegal immigration. The most important of them is Lou Dobbs, the host of CNN's "Lou Dobbs Tonight." Three other players, journalist Sara A. Carter, activist Andy Ramirez and Border Patrol union official T.J. Bonner, are previously obscure figures who gained instant notoriety and were given great weight as experts once they appeared on Dobbs' show. The fifth is Jerome Corsi, the conservative commentator who coauthored the book, "Unfit for Command," that launched the Swift-boating of John Kerry. Corsi pushed the cause of Ramos and Compean on the Internet while Dobbs was pushing it on TV.
Lou Dobbs, whose show straddles the line between news and advocacy, has nearly doubled his ratings in the past two years by taking a strong stand against illegal immigration. Almost nightly, he includes an opinionated segment on immigration.
Dobbs set the tone for his approach to the Ramos and Compean case with his first segment about the agents. He introduced a short interview with Ramos by saying, "Support is flooding in from all across the country tonight for two Border Patrol agents in Texas who could be sentenced to 20 years in prison for shooting a Mexican drug smuggler. Amazingly, federal prosecutors allowed the smuggler to walk free." Of coourse, the case was not about shooting a drug smuggler, nor did the government let the smuggler walk free, but those are merely inconvenient truths to Dobbs.
The next day, Dobbs ended a second segment on the agents with one of his famous audience polls. The question for viewers was, "Do you believe the Justice Department should be giving immunity to illegal alien drug smugglers in order to prosecute U.S. Border Patrol agents for breaking administrative regulations? ... Yes or no."
Go get 'em Lou.
Activist Andy Ramirez is the chairman of the Friends of the Border Patrol, a California-based Minutemen-like organization. He is also listed by the John Birch Society Speakers' Bureau as a speaker for hire. He is the flip site of the 'Free And Open Border' coin. He became nearly a regular on Dobbs' show, and others, as a spokesman for the families of the guards. Weeks before the original sentencing date, Ramirez finally found a mainsteam media reporter who would listen to his version of the shooting from the defense's point of view.
The mainstream reporter he found was Sara Carter, who then worked for the prestigious and illustrious Inland Valley Daily Bulletin (note the sarcasm), the fringe suburban Los Angeles newspaper based out of Ontario, CA. Carter had written several sympathetic stories about activists like the Minutemen and had begun quoting Ramirez on border issues in February 2005. Carter published a 2600 word article (which has since been removed from the Daily Bulletin's archives), headlined "Convicted Border Agent Tells His Story," largely based on an interview with Ignacio Ramos. It is an uncritical, breathless rehearsal of the defense's claims. It includes two important and exculpatory assertions that conflict with the testimony of other witnesses at trial.
In the third sentence of her article, Carter writes, "Ramos' fellow agent, Jose Alonso Compean, was lying on the ground behind him, banged up and bloody from a scuffle with the much-bigger smuggler moments earlier. Suddenly the smuggler turned toward the pursuing Ramos, gun in hand." Turns out, that's a lie. It's even different than Compean's own testimony. The suspect had no gun, nor did they every think he did, and Compean was on the ground and bloody because he fell down when trying to tackle the suspect. But people read it, and they believed it, because it was printed in the paper.
Days later, Carter appeared on the O'Reilly Factor. The next day Dobbs did a piece on it, and the day after that she appeared on his show. After that, he continued to present Carter's version of the story, regardless of the evidence presented and sworn to in court.
Another thing in Carter's story that is noteworthy is one of the "facts" that people love to grab onto, and is one that gets reported often. She described Ramos as "a former nominee for Border Patrol Agent of the Year." That contention, which quickly became a talking point for backers of Ramos and Compean, and is constantly used to invoke outrage at the injustice of it all, is technically correct, but blatantly disingenuous. A pre-sentencing investigation by the government showed that Ramos was nominated by a fellow officer at the Fabens Border Patrol Station after his arrest for the shooting.
Sara Carter, who much like Ted Baxter waiting for The Network to call, now works for the Washington Times, and continues to champion the cause of the border guard, albeit with a little more oversight from her editors, among other important issues of the day. Way to go, Ted.
But other than Dobbs, no one has gotten the screen time of T.J. Bonner, the the president of the National Border Patrol Council, the union that represents Border Patrol agents. Bonner, who was quoted in Carter's initial article and in numerous other print accounts, has appeared or been quoted on Dobbs' show countless times.
Bonner and the NBPC have helped circulate the now-widespread claim that Aldrete-Davila, the victim of the shooting, was indicted for drug smuggling and that his indictment was subsequently tossed out in exchange for testimony friendly to the prosecution. That's a blatant lie. He and other supporters of the agents have also used the rumor of a "sealed indictment", and then its expungement, to help convince the Right that the prosecution of the agents was illegitimate. In a written statement, Bonner and the NBPC states, "In October of 2005, Aldrete-Davila was indicted for smuggling about 1,000 pounds of marijuana. The sealed indictment was subsequently expunged." That's also a lie.
There is no law that allows, nor is there even a procedure for, the expungement of a federal indictment. Whoops.
When that tiny little fact was pointed out to Bonner, he went on Dobbs' show and said, "It's probable but not provable [that it happened]. A lot of stuff has disappeared or been covered up." He heard about the indictment and expungement from confidential sources he can't disclose. Yeah, right. Even Dobbs showed a little disappointment at his newfound golden boy cash cow at that point.
In order to cover his aѕѕ, Bonner then made widespread claims that the fellow officers and Border Patrol supervisors lied on the stand, and that the US Attorney's Office suborned their perjury. Not only that, he took it one step further, claiming that investigators had tricked the agents into providing false statements, then used a threat of prosecution to force them to support the government's theory of the case.
When asked if he had any evidence for this, Bonner said he did not. "It's just the way they work."
Lou Dobbs garners nearly a million viewers a night, and he and guests like Bonner have been primarily responsible for the right's reshaping of the Ramos and Compean story. The case, however, has also been a focus of right-wing obsession on the Internet. Reporter Jerome Corsi has been instrumental in advancing the narrative on the Web. A reporter for WorldNetDaily, Corsi is best-known for his role in the Swift-boat movement. His latest book is The Late Great USA: The Coming Merger With Mexico and Canada, a long conspiracy theory in which he claims to expose secret plans for a "North American Union" that would combine the three countries into one.
The man's job is to sell books.
Corsi's most important contribution to the reworked conservative version of the Ramos and Compean case is to attempt to absolve the agents of a coverup. But the two agents absolutely covered up the incident, and admitted to doing so. Compean hid some of the shell casings and asked a third agent returning to the scene later that day to dispose of the rest. Neither Ramos nor Compean ever reported the shooting. They were arrested a month later, and then only because America's border with Mexico is like a very long and skinny small town. Aldrete-Davila's mother is friends with the mother-in-law of Rene Sanchez, a Border Patrol agent in Arizona. After hearing about the incident from his mother-in-law, Sanchez sent a report to the Department of Homeland Security in Washington, which then dispatched a special agent to Texas to investigate.
The reality is, the incident was only discovered, and the agents prosecuted, because one Border Patrol Agent, hundreds of miles away in Arizona, heard about it through his mother-in-law, because of a phone call between two middle-aged women who had grown up together in a village in Mexico. In Corsi's version, however, Ramos and Compean's supervisors knew about the shooting as soon as it happened, and were in fact present at the time it happened.
People who believe these two officers are unjustly persecuted heroes have been duped. Duped into believing a revised version of current events that were revised as they were happening. And they were not revised by the mainstream press, but by the oh, so exalted undercover alternative news media, which also has their own agenda. It is a testament to the notion that if you look hard enough, or look in the right place, you will find the facts to support what you believe, regardless of whether or not they are true.
