|
|
|
|
 |
Chapter 13: OUR BIGGEST PROBLEM "THE FIRST STEP IN SOLVING A PROBLEM IS IDENTIFYING IT. U.S. Army study guide for leadership, 1965
Throughout the Vietnam War, the American Armed Forces never lost one significant battle. Yet, the frequently defeated North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and Viet Cong (VC) are often said by Geraldo Revera and other opinion leaders of the timewho now proclaim OJs guiltto have "defeated the American Army." Some say we were beaten at home with relentless, award-winning repetition of the idea that we could not win. The object of all wars is to convince the enemy that "resistance is futile." Whichever side is first to believe it, loses. The side left in charge wins. To the extent that North America saw the men who fought in U.S. uniforms (that includes 5,000 Canadians) demonized by our mass media as racist mass murderers, resistance was, indeed, futile. My first book was dedicated to Dennis Hammond, a friend who was killed in captivity by the VC after they forced him to beg for the privilege of "coming home." Thats why a bumper sticker on my car says, "POW/MIA, YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN," and, "BOYCOTT JANE FONDA, AMERICAN TRAITOR BITCH." You remember how Geraldos war buddy, Jane, posed with NVA guns and said of U.S. bomber pilots, "I wish I had one of those murderers in my sights!" Dennis was listed, at the time, as MIA, because the Viet Cong would not list him as a prisoner. I followed every televised second of Janes visits with POWs in 1992, hoping for a glimpse of him alive and well. Not even his body came home. The only people who gave a shit were his family, his friends and the helpless villagers he extended his tour of duty with the Marines to protect from the VC, the real mass murderers. Nobody who mattered gave a shit about them, either. To say that I care about the image of Vietnam War vets is a colossal understatement. David Riley, another childhood friend who joined the Marines, died in action. I also lost good and honorable friends whom I soldiered with in the Army. If anyone thinks I want a racist ex-Marine to be the murderer of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson, they dont know me. The last person I want found guilty of those crimes is a fellow Vietnam vetunless he did it. This is where Dables letter about the cheerful POW and his "Attitude" tape kicked off the chain of events leading to Judges call for Trille to apologize to Tiger. No one asked to see Trilles offending words in context that she offered to show all of us. For those of us whod witnessed Tigers knack for rearranging such words to serve her ends, there was no need. For those of us who saw no justification for the use such words under any circumstances, there was no excuse. To learn the truth, one had to grant the possibility that Trille might be as smart as we werea proposition that no Judge, no Tiger, no Lion, no Bear and no Bull Id ever met would seriously consider. Thus, it was preordained that nothing would change. Was there a lesson in this? I thought so.
Kim had two sign-off lines that always stayed with me after Id finished her letters. "Those who choose security over freedom, deserve neither freedom nor security," was the one she used for her "Selective Listening" letter. I dont know why she chose it, but it describes to me the hidden forces at work in the O.J. Simpson case, with the tide of popular opinion in favor of a lawless justice system swamping the sand castles of freedom. I had a long way to go before I could be as certain of O.J.s innocence as were Trille and Hargrove, who had worked out the timeline that cleared him. That was a separate issue from his Constitutional rights to be free and secure in his own home before there was reasonable cause for police to enter his property and do what was done to produce evidence of guilt. From then on, "selective listening" was all the real killer needed to make a badly flawed frame-up stick, if he was as good at planting false ideas as he was in planting other false evidence. All the killer had to know to insure that he would get that selective ear, were a few basics about history, psychology, personality types and the nature of prejudice.
Before we move on, I must remind you of Matlock, the mild-mannered lawyer who found my use of the r-word so repugnant that he excoriated me and demanded that I remove his name from my mailing list. The number of people in the country who felt the way he did made a real murder investigation of Mark Fuhrman impossible. The instant race was mentioned as a possible factor in the murders, the police investigation or the news reports, the person who attempted to make it an issue became the subject of the same hostility I received from Matlock. Matlock, who didnt know the whole story and didnt want to, never got the letter from Judge admitting that he thought my charges of racism against Lion might be true. There were enough "Judges" aroundespecially on legal talk shows like "Geraldo" to maintain the status quo. Selective hearing had taken hold and the statistical advantage was with those who chose not to hear a meaningful word about Euro-American racism in the case of "The People v. O.J. Simpson." It was fine for O.J.s defenders to accuse a white cop of planting evidence. But to say that he may have planted the rare, size 12 shoeprints after killing two beautiful white people in military style, was a non-starter for most folks. Indeed, Fuhrmans military records, which might have shown his aptitude and experience in taking human lives the way Ron and Nicoles lives were taken, was sealed by Judge Ito. We know about Fuhrmans attitude on that score only because the ruling of the North Carolina judge who heard the defense request for the McKinnys tapes was overturned on appeal. Most tellingly, no one out to make a buck would have been crazy enough to publish a book entitled, Iago in Brentwood: How Mark Fuhrman Got Away With Murder. Even those who believed the r-word applied to him, were angered by the suggestion that it could mean something. To raise the level of relevance to that of a motive for murder was to raise their level of angry rejection. For Judge, the last-minute photo evidence in the civil case of O.J. wearing the shoes that left the bloody shoeprints, and the identification of the blood-drops next to them, was enough to tell him that the civil jury made a wise decision. Fuhrman didnt have to lie about making those shoeprints because nobody asked. No one even bothered to check his shoe size. O.J.s criminal defense team, pursuing a multi-pronged strategy to create reasonable doubt, made no attempt to crack Fuhrmans alibi. Unlike O.J., Fuhrman was not required to testify in the civil trial. Instead, Fuhrmans theories, and everything else useful to the plaintiffs that he said about his discoveries at Bundy and Rockingham, went straight into evidence in the civil trial without attributionas if God Almighty had done the detectives work. With all of that coming after Fuhrman was permitted to take the Fifth because of his perjured testimony in O.J.s first trial, why wouldnt hearsay or other tainted evidence be allowed in the second? The "search for truth" was over. It started with rare shoeprints and Fuhrmans theory that the killer was bleeding from his left hand. It ended with the tainted "discovery" of a bloody glove and a cut on O.J.s finger. As Hhhana observes in her letter to Matlock, who apparently didnt get her message to Judge, you have to start with the basics....
|
Contact the author: Jasper Garrison 
Send comments/suggestions |
for Adobe PDF
version of Chapters