28 August 2001. Thanks to Anonymous.
This is Day 1 of Jim Bell's testimony at his trial in Western Washington District Court, Tacoma, WA. Bell was convicted on two counts of interstate stalking and sentenced on August 24, 2001 to 10 years in prison and fined $10,000; see: http://cryptome.org/jdb-hit.htm
Additional Bell testimony will be posted in the near future.
Typographical errors are in the original.
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
WESTERN DISTRICT OF WASHINGTON
AT TACOMA
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, ) Docket No. CR00-5731JET
)
Plaintiff, ) Tacoma, Washington
) April 6, 2001
v. )
)
JAMES DALTON BELL, )
)
Defendant. )
VOLUME 1
TRANSCRIPT OF TESTIMONY OF JAMES DALTON BELL
BEFORE THE HONORABLE JACK E. TANNER
SENIOR UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE, and a Jury
APPEARANCES:
For the Plaintiff: ROBB LONDON
Assistant United States Attorney
601 Union Street, Suite 5100
Seattle, Washington 98101
For the Defendant: ROBERT M. LEEN
Attorney At Law
Two Union Square
601 Union Street, Suite 4610
Seattle, Washington 98101-3903
Court Reporter: Julaine V. Ryen
Post Office Box 885
Tacoma, Washington 98401-0885
(253) 593-6591
Proceedings recorded by mechanical stenography, transcript
Produced by Reporter on computer.
I N D E X
TESTIMONY OF JAMES DALTON BELL:
Direct ...................... 3
EXHIBITS: Admitted
A-1 54
A-3 56
A-4 60
A-5 61
AFTERNOON SESSION
(Defendant present.)
* * * * *
(Jury present.)
THE COURT: Defendant, first witness.
MR. LEEN: Thank you, Your Honor.
We would call the defendant, James Bell.
THE COURT: Okay.
THE CLERK: Raise your right hand.
JAMES DALTON BELL, DEFANDANT, SWORN
THE CLERK: Please state your full name and spell your
last name.
THE WITNESS: My name is James Dalton Bell, spelled B-
e-l-l.
DIRECT EXAMINATION
BY MR. LEEN:
Q. Good afternoon, Mr. Bell.
Would you please tell the jury how old you are?
A. Well, as of today, I’m exactly 43 years old.
Q. Mr. Bell, I would like to ask you to tell the jury a little
bit about your background. Where were you born?
A. I was born in Ohio, 1958. The city was Akron. Well,
actually, it was a suburb called Cayahoga Falls. And my
father worked at, I believe it was, Goodyear, I think, or a
rubber – a tire company. Needless to say, I don’t remember
very much about that time. But I guess it was a nice place
to live. I drove back by there on the way back from one
year in college and drove by the place my parents lived
before I was born.
Q. Mr. Bell, where did you go to high school?
A. Shawnee Mission North High School in Kansas. It’s in the
northeastern portion of Kansas. Shawnee Mission is sort of
like a general term for a large number of little towns that
have eventually run together. So it’s – I guess it’s sort
of like the Seattle area where all these little, these – you
know Redmond and Bel- -- I’m not local, by the way. I’m
from Vancouver, so I don’t know the local area. But the
whole place basically ran together years ago, and Shawnee
Mission is the general term for a rather large area in the
southwest of Kansas.
Q. Where did you go to college, sir?
A. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It’s a fairly well-
known technical college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which
is right across the Charles River from Boston. MIT has been
around for well over a hundred years, and it teaches science
and technology. Its motto is mens et manus, mens meaning
science, and manus meaning engineering. I went there in
1976 to get a degree, and the degree I eventually received
from there is chemistry, but I’ve also taken, from MIT, in
addition to all the regular chemistry courses that were
required, plus many more that weren’t required, I have taken
courses in electronics, material science, silicon for
semiconductors, and so forth. Physics, many courses in
physics. Computer software, computer hardware. Optics.
Acoustics. Various other technical areas. I pretty much
took a lot of courses. Some people focus on a particular
area. I took courses in virtually every area that I could
spare the time for.
MIT was a great place. The reason it was such a great place,
frankly, is because when I got there, virtually everybody
there, in a sense, was like me. I could have an intelligent
conversation with virtually anybody there on virtually any
technical subject that I could think of. Everybody there had
a substantial amount to add because of the amount of reading
they did.
Q. After you graduated from MIT, where did you go?
A. Well, toward the end of my college career, of course, I –
there was a week where they had career day, and, of course,
all the company – you know, companies had sent
representatives and agencies, and so forth, to interview
various budding graduates, and I, of course, went to career
day, and I wanted to find out where I could find a job. So
I went to the career day and I, I interviewed with a number
of people, a number of Companies.
I interviewed with General Electric, in fact, and talked to
them and explained my electronics background. My very
extensive electronics background. Building computer
hardware, electronic circuitry, things called op-amps and
SCRs, triacs, transistors, FETS, that kind of thing. And
they were interested in me for the electronics background,
but they were also interested in me primarily because I had
the chemistry degree, and the combination of being – having
an extreme amount of knowledge in electronics and an extreme
amount of knowledge in chemistry is rather rare. People
don’t usually have multiple areas where they have large
degree experience.
In any case –
Q. Did you take a job with someone?
A. Yes, I did. One of the other organizations I interviewed
with was a company called Intel – I’m sure you’ve heard of
it. They are a big company now, but at the time they were
rather small and they were primarily, of course, in Silicon
Valley, California, Santa Clara. They had a facility in
Phoenix, I think, but one of their facilities, or sets of
facilities, was in Beaverton, Oregon.
Well, I interviewed with them, and one of the interviewers,
after having heard what my background is in both chemistry
and electronics, because Intel does both chemistry and
electronics because they build chips, they were very
interested to find out that I knew all this material about
chemistry and electronics. So the guy asked me, “Well, if
you were to work for Intel, where would you want to work?
We have three facilities,” he said, “Phoenix, California,
and Beaverton, Oregon.” And I said, “Well, frankly, I would
rather not go to California.” And the guy looked at me, and
he laughed a bit, and he said, “Yeah, I know what you mean.”
He says, “Well, how about Oregon?” I said, “Yeah.” I know
a friend, I have an MIT friend who has inadvertently lured
me to Oregon by all the wonderful stories I’ve heard about
i. And I said, “Yeah, I would love to see Oregon.”
Well, he scheduled a trip where I visited – I visited
Oregon, and I – a few weeks later, so that – before I had
made – or actually, after I had made the trip, I believe, an
odd thing happened. Mount St. Helen’s blew. And I
sheepishly called the guy back, he was back in Oregon at the
time, and I said, “Do I still have a job?” And he said,
“Yeah, our place missed most of the ash.”
So, yeah, I worked for Intel. I went –
Q. How long did you work for Intel, sir?
A. I worked for Intel approximately 18 months. I was a, what’s
called a product engineer for a particular silicon chip. I
believe – I can’t recall the ac- -- the code name – excuse
me. It eventually turned out to be something called the
2186 integraded RAM. It’s a combination of static ROM and
dynamic RAM. I realize that’s a technical subject, but it
was an innovated thing at the time, and I was to be the
person to design the program to test those chips coming off
the line and the manufacturing process.
Q. Did you eventually leave Intel and take up a different
employment?
A. Yes.
Q. Would you tell the jury where you worked next?
A. Yes. Excuse me, I’m sorry. I blow the whistle. (Witness
has a drink of water.)
Yes. At the very beginning of 1982 I had an opportunity,
because I had been building circuitry, hobby circuitry for my
own, to build a device which acted, in effect, as an
electronic disk. As you probably know, a physical disk on a
computer is a metal platter that’s covered with magnetic
particles and it spins and data is read and written with a
head that moves back and forth. That’s slow. And I built it
for my own purposes, for my own hobby, a board that used a
whole bunch of memory, and it was activated by software to
look like a very fast hard disk, maybe a hundred times faster
than an ordinary hard disk and a thousand times faster than a
floppy disk. And if you recall the time frame, hard disks
back then, hardly anybody had them. Floppy disks were very
slow and didn’t hold much data.
I built this board, and on my own I developed a product, or
the idea for a product, and I intended to go into business
for myself, and early 1982 the time was right, and Intel had
– was going to drop the particular product that I was going
to design -- or not design, but to be a product engineer for,
so that was an appropriate time for me to quit. I didn’t
want to cause any trouble when I – when I left, and the
opportunity arose, that chip was no longer going to be
manufactured.
Q. So did you start your own business?
A. Yes, I did. The company name was Semidisk Systems. The
term semidisk comes from – semi is short, in this day, for
semiconductor, and disk, of course, which is a hard or
floppy disk. Semidisk Systems built these products for
various different kinds of computers for a number of years.
It was a very small company. It was about, at most, like
five employees at any one time, and I was the head guy and,
you know, I was sort of the boss. I didn’t really want to
be boss, but by default I became boss.
And we built these products. We sold thousands – well, two
or three or four thousand total. At the time it was about a
three thousand – or two thousand to three thousand dollar
product, and it eventually, of course, as prices dropped it
went down to five hundred and so forth. We sold thousands.
We sold them to government agencies and sold them to large
corporations. We sold them to Japan, England, France. Many
to Australia. Literally all around the world. These were
computer boards. You know what a computer board looks like.
It plugs right into a bus on a computer. Very simple to
install, and the software made it easy to install.
Q. Did the company eventually go out of business?
A. Yes. In 1992, semiconductor memory prices plateaued.
Normally they go down in a rather predictable fashion.
Semiconductor prices stopped going down for a number of
years, for reasons I suspected but didn’t really understand.
And the company, because it was – the hard disks were
becoming very common and available, just simply couldn’t
turn a profit on making these products. And the hard disks
were getting much, much faster also. So it made it harder
to sell this product in place of hard disks or a floppy – or
not in place of, but augment a hard disk or floppy.
Q. What did you do after the business folded.
A. Well, the simple term for it, frankly, is unemployed. I
made a little bit of money in the company, and for a few
years I – I just did a little bit of electronic consulting
work. If people had a computer or hardware problem. This
was very informal. I wasn’t like a – I didn’t like have a
telephone directory listing or anything like that. I built
products, -- that I prototyped. I didn’t really have a
really good follow on idea for a product, frankly.
Q. Did you incur any tax liability as a result of your business
going out of – folding, going out of business?
A. The company itself, no. It was a corporation, and I think –
I really – I really honestly don’t recall. It’s been about,
you know, ten years or so. I think – it basically just
folded, you know, it went out of business.
Q. We heard from Agent Gordon that you owed a considerable sum
of money in back taxes. Do you know how you incurred that
liability?
A. I have a theory. I had developed, frankly, in the ‘80s,
sort of a phobia for handling – how shall I say? – large
accounting money. I don’t know how to describe it. I
couldn’t deal with it. I – frankly, it was a rather, a
rather painful closing of my company, and – and the loss of
something to do bothered me quite a bit, and I found it very
difficult to deal with large scale financial matters. I
still have a lot of trouble doing that kind of thing. I
really – I really can’t touch it.
Q. So are you saying that that was – the failure to pay
quarterly taxes or keep personal records was what caused you
to have tax liability?
A. I think so. I believe that was it.
Q. Did you become aware of the fact that the federal
government, the IRS, was demanding back taxes from you?
A. Over the years, the middle ‘90s, frankly, I had a pile of
things that – most of which I hadn’t even opened. I was – I
was sort of, how shall I say, passively terrified. I
couldn’t deal with it. I couldn’t handle it. I might have
been under – maybe I wasn’t able to afford it at some point.
I just couldn’t – I couldn’t approach it. I realize that,
that doesn’t make sense.
If – I don’t know if you know anything about phobias, but a
phobia is a fear, and I had, frankly, an irrational fear of
that kind of thing and I just couldn’t deal with it. I don’t
have an irrational fear of anything else – snakes, spiders,
heights, you name it; being outside, being closed up, that
kind of thing. But that’s the one phobia I had at that time,
and I think that was probably linked, probably, to the
folding of that company that I had.
Q. Did the government tell you that they were – that they had
assessed you a certain sum of money and they were asking for
payment?
A. Like I said, I had a pile of stuff that wasn’t opened. I
knew –
Q. So are you saying you don’t know?
A. Really, I don’t – I don’t know the details. I knew in
general terms that whole thing had to be handled, but I just
didn’t know how much of a problem it had actually become,
and I just couldn’t deal with it.
Q. At some point, did the IRS take action against you?
A. Well, in February of 1997, they seized my car. And I
believe that was in retaliation for my participation in an
organization. It was my – it wasn’t even a participation.
It was my attendance at an organization called Multnomah
County Common Law Court.
Q. Before we go to that, let me ask you, was this – in 1997, in
February, when the IRS seized your vehicle, was that the
first formal action that you were aware that they took
against you? To seize assets to pay back taxes.
A. It’s possible in the past they may have taken money from,
from a bank account or something, or bank accounts. Like I
said, a lot of my papers were simply unopened. I was so
terrified of even thinking of that. And, of course, as it
got more, it got worse. And I just couldn’t deal.
Q. So let’s go back to the – now let’s go to the Multnomah
County Common Law Court. When did you first become involved
in their group?
A. Well, it was – I think it was late 1996. I had heard about
it frequently mentioned on local, what are called bulletin
board echoes, discussion groups. It was over in Portland,
and I was in Vancouver, Washington, so it was across the
Columbia River.
Q. I didn’t ask you, how did you ever get to Vancouver, and
your parents living there, also? The last time we knew
about your parents, they were living in Shawnee Mission,
Kansas.
A. Oh, you want to know about my parents?
Q. When did they move to Vancouver?
A. My parents moved to Vancouver in the summer of 19, I believe
it was, 89.
Q. Was that because you were there, or was it independent of
that?
A. Well, they had bought a house that I was living in.
Q. All right.
14
A. And I was – I need to explain the situation.
When I moved out to Oregon in 1980, my sister had graduated
from Brown University three years earlier. She had then gone
to dental school to become a dentist in Kansas City.
Shortly, oh, 1982 or 1983 or something – ’83 – she began her
residency, if you know what that is for doctors and dentists,
at the – I’m trying to recall the name – Portland Hos- -- or
Hospital, and she came out to be a resident there, and she
moved into the same apartment complex that I lived in, a
place called Kalevale Village on 185th Street in a place
called Aloha, Oregon, which is actually just to the west of
Beaverton which is just to the west of Portland, Oregon.
So she moved out there, and after a few years, she married a
man, and, of course, shortly after that children happened,
and when – as you know, when grand – when children have
children, the grandparents generally want to see them. So
around 1989, my parents moved out into the house with me in
Vancouver, Washington.
Q. What are your parents’ names?
A. Sam and Lou Bell. Samuel and Lou Bell.
Q. And your sister?
A. Lou Ann Bell, or Louise Ann Bell. Or excuse me – I’m sorry.
Her last name now is Wadlin. Her married name is Wadlin.
Q. So there were the four of you, two children, and mom and
dad?
A. No, no.
Q. In the family growing up, or were there brothers and
sisters?
A. Two, yeah. Myself and my sister, Louise Ann Bell.
Q. Now, at some point – we’re up to a point in time, I think,
where you told us about your phobias and –
A. Uh-huh.
Q. – you told us about the folding of your business and your
free-lancing. Why have you – what are your politics at the
point in time where you’re getting involved with the
Multnomah County Common Law Court? What are your political
views?
A. Well, ever since about, oh, earlier than 19 – about 1975,
I’ve been a libertarian. I don’t know if anybody has ever
heard of libertarian politics.
Q. What is a libertarian to you, sir?
A. A libertarian is a person that believes in individual
freedom and liberty, a minimum of laws and controls and
restrictions. The primary intent of libertarianism is what
is called the noninitiation of force or – and fraud. That
is to say, it’s jokingly referred to, the rights of my fist
end at your nose. That is to say, I can’t initiate force or
violence against you and you can’t do it against me, and
there’s a fraud component. I can’t initiate fraud against
you and you can’t initiate fraud against me. Other than
that, there isn’t the need, frankly, for stacks and stacks
of law books; the details, the restrictions, the controls,
and that kind of thing. That’s the principle of libertarian
politics.
Q. Are you actually a member of the Libertarian party?
A. A dues paying member? I believe, as of right now I might
be. I paid my dues for last year. I don’t know when the
expiration date on the dues is, but I have been a member for
well, I haven’t been a dues paying member, but I’ve been a
libertarian fully since about ’75.
Q. When you vote for presidential candidates, do you vote on
the libertarian ticket?
A. Every year since or including 1980, yes.
Q. Now, what about the Multnomah County Common Law Court was
consistent with your views or libertarianism?
A. Well, at the time – well, again, I was reading about it on
the local computer networks. I really didn’t at the time
have enough time to visit frequently; and, in fact, there
was previous testimony that said I was there for maybe three
visits, and that’s probably about right, I was there for
three visits. And the same guy said that he had been there
for 24 visits, and I think there were – I mean, I don’t know
how many total meetings there were, but it was – would have
been probably about that. I don’t know. But I was there
for probably three times. Mostly visiting.
And let me – and let me also explain that a number of the
very same people that I had gotten to know over the previous
ten or fifteen years in libertarian politics also visited
this meeting.
And, by the way, it was in a pizza joint, and if you know
anything about me and pizza, well, I would visit anything in
a pizza joint, you know. And so I – I – again, I went over
there just to see what it was like.
Q. Now, did you meet a man named Steve Wilson at the Multnomah
County Common Law Court?
A. Yes, I did.
Q. Did you – did a relationship or a communication develop
between the two of you?
A. Unfortunately, it did. One of the reasons why I went over
to the organization, or to the meeting once, is because I
had been reading over, at least the previous year or two,
indication of complaints, not merely in the mainstream
press, but in the alternative press over the Internet, the
fact that governments would try to infiltrate these
organizations to make them do things that people wouldn’t
want to do; incite violence or incite law breaking. So I
was sort of concerned when that organization was formed, not
because of the organization itself, but I was afraid that
the government was going to try to co-op them or control
them or turn them into a publicity issue later and use that
to scare the public.
Q. Why was that of a concern to you?
A. Well, in general terms, because I think that it’s improper
for a government to infiltrate a political party or an
organization designed to debate and discuss political and
social issues. It’s simply improper. And while I did go
over there – excuse me. (Witness has a drink of water.)
While I did go over there just to see how things were going
in general terms, I wanted to go over to also see if there
was sny indication of any of that kind of infiltration going
on.
Q. Prior to this you had written an essay that has been
referred to as Association – Assassination Politics, is that
correct?
A. Yes. I –
Q. When did you write that article?
A. Well, I started debating the concept – not really debating -
- thinking about the concept in very, very early ’95, or
even perhaps as late – or late ’94. Just thinking about a
concept that, frankly, is a little too complicated to
describe here. You will get a copy, I think, in at least
one exhibit. And I thought about it and started debating
it, individual bits and pieces, in the very early 1995 on
various areas on a network called Fidonet. Fidonet isn’t
really like Internet, it’s not nearly as big. It tends to
be sort of local, and I would have debates with people,
ideas – debating ideas.
I started writing the essay itself, I think, in about April
or May of 1995. I wrote part of one. I didn’t really intend
to write it as a full thing, I just wrote a long article, a
fairly long article. Not long – well, medium-sized article.
It looked good. I published it, I debated it. And people
wanted to debate it, they wanted to discuss it.
Q. Why, in relationship to this Cypherpunks, why would they be
interested in this essay?
A. Well, the Cypherpunks itself came – or the connection to the
Cypherpunks actually came a few months later. When I first
started writing that essay, I was actually posting it to the
FIDOnet, which is a different thing. It’s a much smaller
network. Back then, of course, most people – well, they
just barely heard of the Internet. Fidonet was a much older
– well, it was something that existed since about 1984 and
was what people had to do when the Internet was not
available. It used to be, if you recall, eight or nine
years ago, you couldn’t get an Internet account. I’ll give
you an example.
I first used the Internet in 1978 or ’79, but once I left
MIT, I couldn’t use Internet at all because there was no way
to connect to it. There weren’t modems or contacts.
In the absence of something called the Internet, people had
developed from the cult Fidonet. Fidonet was a whole bundle
– a whole bunch of what are called computer bulletin board
systems. Think of it as a person. My computer is sitting on
a shelf, let’s say – well, I didn’t do this, but let’s say it
were me. My computer is sitting on a shelf with a telephone
line. This computer would be a bulletin board system.
People could call it up over a single modem line, upload
messages, download messages; upload messages, download, all
day. Only one person could talk at one time, only one person
could call in. Well, that made it harder to use.
These FIDOnet systems were a breakthrough. They were
designed so these computers would call each other about two
or three o’clock in the morning and exchange data. This
would happen all night. So that I could upload a message to
a particular area on the system on a particular subject on a
particular area, like geology. I would ask the question,
what is a, you know, an augen gneiss, which is a particular
kind of rock, let’s say. And at night, two o’clock in the
morning, all these Fidonet systems talk to each other, and
eventually all that message gets out to every area literally
in the North America, and eventually the world, and the
answers came back.
It wasn’t like the Internet. It wasn’t like, really, real
time like now; it was sort of like overnight. It was like
FedEx, which by today’s standard is slow.
So Fidonet is the area I first started posting the essay to.
And that was where the debates occurred, and people wanted to
debate the concept ane –
Q. What was so interesting about a concept of an essay called
Assassination Politics? What was the interesting aspect of
it, as far as you were concerned?
21
A. Okay. As I said in probably the very first paragraph or
two, the title “Assassination Politics” sort of – it’s at
least half of a joke. That is to say, as somebody pointed
out many months later, it’s really sort of the end of
politics as we know it. The elimination of what I call
hierarchical power structures.
We have hierarchical power structures today. We have, let’s
say, a president or a king or a dictator on top. We have his
work – you know, lieutenants, you might say. Below him, more
workers. It’s like a pyramid. At the top is one guy. The
pyramid, as it goes down, it gets bigger. And most of us are
at the bottom of this pyramid. It’s the top of the pyramid,
and we are all – most of us are at the bottom.
That’s how people have been controlled for at least 3,000
years. Society used to work in hunter/gatherer groups,
families. That wasn’t pyramidal. Organizations – as groups
built up, you had kings and Pharaohs, and so forth, and their
work – their lieutenants, and so forth. We are now in a
situation of virtually everything is a hierarchical power
structure. Hierarchical power structure in companies, in
religious organizations like the Catholic Church.
Q. Let’s focus on, what was so interesting about a political
theory that had as its central premise killing people in
power?
A. That’s – that’s a rather crude – that’s a rather crude way
of looking at it, if you read the essay. The key here is to
be able to replace the current political system with
something that protects people, where they need to be
protected. The example I use is to recognize the fact that
in the 20th century, over 150 million people died in wars
primarily caused by government, initiated by government,
where people didn’t have an animus toward each other.
In World War I, if you know anything about history, it was
caused by the assassination of the Archduke Francis
Ferdinand. The people of Germany didn’t hat the people of
England. France didn’t hate the people of Russia, or
anything like that. One guy got killed, and the power
structure, they had to act, they had to – it’s called saber –
it was called saber rattling at the time. You know, you
rattle your saber to remind the other guy that he was
potentially a target if they acted.
So over the last hundred years, 150 million people have died
in various wars that have been caused by governments. World
War II was caused by government. Americans didn’t just –
didn’t hate Germans in 1938. Italians didn’t hate – well, I
don’t know – French in 1930. The Japanese didn’t hate
Americans. Russians primarily didn’t hate Americans. These
are people – ordinary people did not want, or did not ask for
those wars. They simply happened. And I believed they
happened for political reasons.
Korea, for example. People of North and South Korea, what is
now, they didn’t initiate those wars. It was a power
structure – a power struggle between America and Russia. We
get along just fine now with Russian people. I know three –
I’ve met three Russian people within the last four months,
and they are nice guys. I would love to have them as
neighbors. I like to talk to them. They can speak English;
I can’t speak Russian.
People, ordinary people, you and me, can get along just fine
if we don’t – if we aren’t part of a pyramidal power
structure that’s fighting another. A country fighting
another. When those fights occur, ordinary people die.
Q. How does your political paper, Assassination Politics, solve
that problem or contribute to world peace?
The paper, of course, itself doesn’t solve a thing. Ink on
paper is just that, but all ideas in history – well, up till
– or after the invention of paper have been written down.
People had a chance to discuss, debate them, read about them,
talk about them, and so forth.
Once I wrote down my idea – the idea in principle is rather
provocative, and it was intended as a food for thought; a
what if? What could be do? And the idea in general worked
something like this:
What if you didn’t like somebody who was threatening you? I
don't mean the individual perhaps threatening you, but
threatening to invade your land or threatening to attack your
people. A good example of an easily hateable dictator right
now is Saddam Hussein. Everybody knows that he is and has
been the dictator of Iraq for many years, at least 20 years.
Ten years ago, we, our county, and many other countries,
spent 80 billion dollars in something called Desert Storm.
Eighty billion, that’s billion with a “B.” That’s an eight
with ten zeroes behind it. That’s a lot of money. And many
Americans and other soldiers went to Iraq, and fortunately
not many of them died. But one of the things that didn’t
happen is that Saddam Hussein, he wasn’t taken out of power.
He continues to threaten Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey,
Russia. Any country next to him.
The American public was under the impression in Desert Storm
that we were going to actually take out Saddam Hussein so he
wouldn’t be a problem. His problem right now, he primarily
threatens his own people, and yet for ten years he starved
his people and he’s attacked his people. He’s murdered his
people. And that problem wasn’t solved in 1990. Despite the
heroism of American soldiers, it didn’t happen.
Q. Mr. Bell, that’s not the situation in the United States.
Let’s talk about taking out Senator Hillary Clinton.
A. Hold on.
Q. If someone doesn’t like her.
A. I apologize, but remember, I wrote my essay not for America,
but for the world. I was not addressing specifically
American issues or American people. I was addressing people
like the people who were murdered in ’76 in Uganda, or
approximately; ’79 to ’80 in Cambodia; the Rwanda affair a
few years ago in Africa. Various clan wars in Southeast
Asia. I was addressing a lot of issues that have, frankly,
no immediate direction, connection to America. If you – I
could talk about America, if you want.
Q. Let’s focus our talk. I understand your – what you just
said, but let’s focus on someone who might read your essay
and think that you were advocating the death of public
officials, or someone as simple as their boss at work,
because they didn’t like that their pay was cut ten percent.
A. Okay. Give me a more specific in your question.
Q. Okay. I just read on – I just saw on the news today that, I
think, Agilent Company, a publicly traded corporation, they
cut everybody’s salary ten percent. So let’s say I come
home from work and, you know, I’m an Agilent manager; and I
say, my God, I just lost – I’m pissed. I think I will use
this essay that Mr. Bell has created and put up a thousand
dollars and see if someone will take out the chairman of
Agilent, you know. Isn’t that really a potential
consequence of your essay if it was actually put into play?
A. It’s hard – first off, let me say, it’s complicated. The
way society is set up today, and the way society would be
set up under this kind of system eventually, should it come
into place, are dramatically different. So it’s very hard
to just simplistically say, what happens if you add the
following? If you – have you ever seen a movie – there was
a movie years ago about what would happen if America got one
F15 jet fighter in World War II and it would mow down all
the German fighters. What’s interesting to think about,
that shows you the inconsistency. An F15 fighter doesn’t
fight against, you know, T38 trainers or Messrs. Schmidts or
something. It would outclass them.
It’s – it’s a – the point I’m trying to make is, you can’t
just insert a whole new system in a little portion of our
current system. It would appear to have contradiction.
I don’t believe there is a contradiction there. I can
discuss concepts in general, but I wasn’t specifically
addressing, adding this concept to a tiny fraction of
today’s society. Particularly, simply that today’s society
in America. America is – America might, arguably, be the
last place that it’s needed compared to a lot of other
places. I wasn’t really focusing on America. I’m an
American, so I know the American system.
Q. Well, Mr. Bell, no one is saying you can’t write whatever
you want. I’m just asking you, isn’t it possible under your
– this track that you put out, that if I didn’t like my
boss, I could get maybe a thousand dollars, or maybe get a
couple other employees to put up a like a nice sizeable
bounty of $20,000, and someone who wanted $20,000 and really
didn’t care too much about taking someone else’s life would
use this type of plan, if it were actually implemented, to
kill someone? And you could do it so that no one would know
that I put up the thousand dollars and no one would know who
he was, and therefore get away with murder?
A. Only quite hypothetically. As I – my essay, I mean, it also
explained, is literally only the first literally few months
of discussion of this concept. I discussed it in advance –
or I continued to discuss the concept for a number of years
afterwards, going into a lot of detail about issues of
exactly the kind my attorney is addressing. Because people
noticed and asked questions about the impli- – the concept,
the idea of an implementation. And, of course, I understood
that people under – had concerns of detail – about details.
And I had those discussions, and I made – I made clear that
I believed that society would change to a system that was
more – instead of that hierarchial power structure I
mentioned, a flat power structure, where more or less we’re
all – we’re basically equal people, and there isn’t a king
or a prince or a dictator at the top. It’s a, you might
say, a flat society where individuals, there aren’t – there
aren’t such a thing as a prominent politician.
Q. So are you advocating anarchy, the absence of government?
A. That’s – the problem with – I understand the question, and I
understand what the word “anarchy” means. The problem here
is, and let me explain. People confuse anarchy with chaos.
There’s an old libertarian expression that describes what
true anarchy would be, if opposed to chaos. Anarchy is the
lack of orders, not the lack of order.
Excuse me for a moment.
When people think of the word “anarchy,” they think of wild
in the streets. You know, burning, looting, pillaging, that
kind of thing. That’s half – that happens, of course, when,
for example, there is no central government. For example,
if the governmnet fails and everybody can suddenly do what
they want, that often, or sometimes happens. It doesn’t
always, though, by the way. It does not always happen.
However, that’s usually a very transient phenomenon. People
have lived for thousands of years in small hunter-gatherer
groups without a pyramidal structure, lack of orders, you
know, lack of a big system. If you live with your family
and three or five or six other families on a plane in Africa
4000 years ago, you might say that is anarchy. That is to
say, there is no king. You don’t have a king. You have 30
or 40 people you live with. There’s no king, no dictator,
because there aren’t enough people to have a dictator.
That’s anarchy.
Now, the question – what happened over centuries or
millenia, I guess, as people get into larger groups,
societies – cities, for example – the concentration of
people has made it necessary to have some kind of overall
structure. Technology has not been available to control
that system without having these kings and princes and their
levels of politics down below them.
So getting back to your original question about anarchy. I
don’t advocate chaos, you know. Certainly not. I don’t – I
don’t believe there should be a lack of order. I believe,
however, there should be a lack of orders. Orders from the
king to his lieutenants, the princes, and finally the sword
poked into the ribs of a slave. There should be a lack of
orders.
Q. Let me ask you this question: Your essay uses as its
central premise the concept of encryption. What is
encryption?
A. Well, the more common term is codes and ciphers, and I know
a substantial about – amount about the history of codes and
cypher – well, ciphers. The oldest ciphers were literally
three – two or three thousands years ago. One called, I
think, Caesar’s cipher involved wrapping a tape of paper
around a cylinder and writing on it and then pulling it off
and then putting it in a bag, and only if you had another
cylinder exactly the same size and you could wrap it back on
there could you read the message, “Hello, there. This is
Caesar. Attack it in May,” or something, that kind of
thing.
As technology progressed, more sophisticated codes and
ciphers were developed. They were called the cull
substitution of ciphers. For example, everywhere in the
message you see a T why don’t you put a Z. Everywhere in
the message you want a C – a Q, put an M. That’s called a
substitution cipher.
There’s also what are called transposition ciphers, where
you take your message and you, with some pattern, you move
letters to different places so you end with a jumble of
text. The result is, of course, that I know – assuming you
and I know how we want to do the cipher ahead of time, we
can talk about it. When we eventually get far away, I can
send you a message that was developed using this code
system, and yet you can, in effect, undo what I did, and you
could see, when you undo what I did, the message that I
originally intended to send.
Q. What’s the purpose of this cipher?
A. Well, cipher – actually, traditionally, the first uses of
ciphers, I believe, were commercial. People had to – they
didn’t have telephones, they didn’t have telegraphs. They
didn’t have regular mail or reliable mail delivery. If you
wanted to send something from London to Paris 200 years ago,
it might go by mail, but you don’t – literally, anybody
could read it, as they can today, to some extent. And a
businessman in London might want to say to a businessman in
Paris, I want to buy your something or another, here’s what
I want to offer for a price. And so literally codes
probably go back almost as long as writing, a thousand or
two thousand years. But they’ve gotten – they got somewhat
more sophisticated in the late 1800s, and they became
extremely sophisticated, particularly publicly, in about
1975.
Q. What’s the significance of encryption when it comes to the
use of computers?
A. The old encryption systems, codes and ciphers, like I
mentioned before, the substitution or transposition are
easily cracked. You can – if you have enough message or
volume, you can look at things and figure out – an
intelligent person can look through, figure out patterns,
figure out whether or not letters are being substituted or
transposed. And with enough volume, they can go back and
they could figure out what the message was, even if they
don’t know how you encrypted it.
Computers, starting about 1975, a new system of encryption
was developed called public key, and interestingly enough,
it was developed partly at MIT where I was in about 1976.
And the concept in general was a very sophistical
mathematical algorithm.
Q. What’s an algorism?
A. Well, a formula, a procedure for dealing with a number. An
algorithm, I call – let’s say call plus three is to simply
take a number and add three to it. So if I take three and I
add three to it, it’s six. If I take four and add three to
it, it’s seven. An algorithm is simply a mathematical
series of instructions.
It’s like instructing how to bake a cake. You know what the
ingredients are, eggs and mix and milk and whatever. A
recipe is sort of like a list of ingredients, an algorithm,
an instruction manual, and it tells you to mix it up in
certain order, it tells you to put it in the oven at a
certain temperature, and you take it out at a certain time,
and the result you get is a cake. It’s a – it’s an
algorithm for a cake, you might say, plus a materials list.
That’s called a recipe.
Q. Can you tell us about al- -- tell us about encryption,
though, on the computers. I interrupted you. I apologize.
A. Yes. Thank you.
A very substantial breakthrough was made in encryption in
about the 1976-’77 time frame. Unlike older systems that
did – that used very simple modifications, the public key
systems that were invented during that time frame were –
involved large – huge numbers of thousands of digits, and
it’s hard to imagine what a thousand digit number looks
like. I mean, it’s there, but you don’t use them for
anything in real life. I mean, you know about billions and
trillions and maybe even quadrillions, but you don’t think
of a ten – or a thousand digit number. But in fact in this
encryption, text is turned into numbers and it’s operated on
using thousand digits – or a thousand bit keys. A bit is
like a zero one, a computer digit, you might say.
A computer can take a piece of text, anything you want, not
just text, but any file, any file in your computer, modify
it using a complicated algorithm, and turn it into what’s
called a cipher text, a cryptic version. Now, it’s very
complicated. Nobody in this room, including me, really
understands the math that involved – the mathematics
involved. I have a degree in chemistry and electronics and
so forth. I don’t do the higher mathematics that, generally
speaking, that was involved in the ’75, ’76.
I will mention one thing. In – well, about January 31st or
so of 1977, I was returning to MIT from – after my first
semester break and I saw something posted on the mathematics
department bulletin board that at the time I didn’t realize
the significance of, but I later realized, I later found out
what it was. If you’ve been at colleges, they have bulletin
boards, things that people walk by and they post things.
Test results, problem sets, and that kind of thing. What I
saw about that time, January 31st, ’77 – and the reason I
remember that so clearly is because of the significance
later developed. What I saw was a very complicated
instruction for dealing with numbers using what’s called
exponentiation, taking to the power, multiplication, and
what’s called modulo addition, which is – or division, which
is very complex, and I won’t attempt to explain it here. I
barely understand it myself, which is why I don’t want to –
I don’t want to embarrass myself trying to explain that.
This was a multi-page document, I would say probably 20
pages. It turns out what this document was, it was the
first public revelation, exposure to the public of a
particular system called RSA. RSA stands for Revest,
Chimar, and Adelman. There’s a person named Ron Rivest, who
was MIT; Adi Shamir, who I believe is Israeli; and I think
it was Leonard Adleman, and he might have been in California
at the time. I don’t really know. They developed a system
of an actual implementation of what’s called public key
encryption, which was very, very sophisticated and solved an
extraordinarily important problem that had been plaguing the
cryptography ever since its invention thousands of years
before. And let me explain what that serious problem is.
If I want to send secret messages to you, for whatever
reason – maybe because I’m a businessman, I want to sell
something to you and you’re far away – we can agree on a
method – we can agree on a method of encryption, but we have
to get together. I have to get up to you and I have to say,
well, here’s the way I’m going to scramble my text and
here’s the way you’re going to scramble your text, so we
know when we get back here, when we get away from each
other, maybe ten miles, a hundred miles, a thousand miles,
we have to know when we get a message in, we have to know
how to deal with it and turn it in to unencrypted, plain
text, they call it. The problem is, we have to get
together, and we might not be able to get together. And
particularly in the modern world.
Suppose I want to communicate which a guy in Sydney,
Australia. I have never gone to Sydney, Australia. That
guy in Sydney, Australia, has never been to America. Let’s
say I pick up the phone, and I say to him, let’s communicate
in writing by encryption, and I will say, well, my key is,
you know, one five seven two A Q B F, whatever. Well, what
the problem with that is, what if that line was bugged?
Somebody was listening to that line and they know, awe,
that’s his key, and they can decrypt at that point literally
everything that he and I send. We would have to physically
get together and we would have to exchange keys to come back
to actually have a system that was secure.
There’s a problem with that, though. My luggage could be
rifled, could be tampered with. Once that key is exposed, I
can’t be assured that my communication is secured.
So, since I – or encryption has had its problem ever since –
or a thousand, two thousand years ago. Ultimately you have
to get together and agree on an encryption method, and if
you don’t, the system simply won’t work.
In 1975, there was a concept about what’s called public key
encryption, and the way I like to explain it, an analyogy
is, imagine a lock box, a metal box, let’s say, with a key
on it, and you open it up with a key and you can put
something in and you can close it and send it to somebody
else. Encryption is sort of like a locked box.
Well, what if there were two keys on it? Not like ordinary
keys you and I know, keys to open your door, keys to open a
safe, keys to do – to start a car. What if there were two
keys? One key did nothing else but lock the box closed, and
the other key did nothing else than open the box. Okay.
Two keys, they’re different keys. They have no relationship
with each other, other than the fact one closes the box and
locks it and the other key opens the box and opens it.
Q. So is this the principle of public key encryption?
A. Effectively, yes. It’s based on the concept that you could
have what’s called a private key, which only you know, and
you use it to encrypt things, and everybody else in the
world knows it. That’s called your public key. Your public
key is the thing that opens up that box. And so you can
send something – well, somebody can send something to you,
close it with the close key. When you receive it, you open
it up with the open key. And you might be the only one that
has the open key and everybody else has the close key.
The system can be reversed, and it’s something called
authentication of messages, to verify that the message was
from me as opposed to somebody else.
Q. I think we’re getting a little too deep now.
A. I understand.
Q. But as I understand it, the principle has revolutionized the
idea of encryption?
A. Yes, that’s right, because it made it possible for you to
communicate with your best friend in Moscow or Sidney or
Thailand or France. Without ever having met him, you can
tell him your open key over the telephone, you might say,
mathematically, and he can tell you, and nobody else knows
what the close key is. So you can send him messages and he
can send you messages, and despite the fact that everybody
knows both of your and his public key, nobody else can
decrypt the message because nobody else has the private key.
Q. Well, how does this work – why is this interesting, or why
is it relevant to Assassination Politics?
A. Excuse me.
The relevance has to do with – let me explain it.
An article that appeared in the June of 1993, I believe, in
the magazine Scientific American, it discussed a concept of
what are called blind signatures, which dealt with – I
realize it’s rather sophisticated, but it basically means
ways of verifying electronically that I’m me and that you’re
you and that when I send you things, I’m not accidently
sending them to somebody who doesn’t – who isn’t supposed to
get it, and when you send it to me, you know that I am who I
am.
This particular kind of encryption system with public key
principles is sufficient – or can be sufficiently
sophisticated that literally the most important, or most
powerful code breakers with the biggest computer systems in
the world cannot break it for thousands of years, given the
fact that they key length is sufficiently long. That’s very
important, and that is why – and it is a – it is probably an
essential element in the actual implementation of a system
based on my essay.
The reason my, my essay had been frequently discussed on an
area, again, called Cypherpunks, or Cyphco, where they were
primarily talking about codes, ciphers, electronic
technology and such, is because the people who could
understand the concept of my essay had – generally speaking,
would help do the three things. Computers, of course, and
how to use them. That’s one thing. Computers, hard disks,
key boards, screens. But also, networking. That is, me
talk to you or my computer talk to your computer.
The third thing that it had to have is encryption, good
encryption that literally nobody in the world can break.
That’s essential, because otherwise, people would figure out
what’s going on and the system wouldn’t work. So, you know,
you have to know – well, you don’t have to. It helps if you
know computers, networking, and encryption.
Q. Well, Mr. Bell, let me ask you this. Isn’t it true that
taking this premise that you had, using public key
encryption, you used it in an essay, a political essay, to
say that this could be used and directed so that it would be
– while it’s not legal to kill anyone else, this is a way
that you could literally get away with murder?
A. Generally speaking, that’s the concept, put in a nutshell.
Now, again, it’s a concept, an idea, a what if. It was
intended for debate and discussion, and large amounts of
debate and discussion have already occurred, in fact, as
early as the middle of 1995 and since then.
Q. Did you ever try to kill anybody using this?
A. No. Again, it’s – it would require tens or hundreds of
thousands of hours of programming time. Lots of people
would have to – to implement this system would require a lot
more than just one person. I can assure you of that. It
would be like – the total amount of work would be roughly
the same amount of work that Microsoft – well – puts into a
program called Words for Windows.
Q. But they made Words for Windows, so aren’t you saying that
you have a plan here, that you have written a blueprint so
that if people wanted to kill people, they could do it?
A. No. You use the term “blueprint,” and let me point out.
Blueprint is a plan of a building. It has walls and a floor
and so forth. It tells you, the builder, exactly every step
to take to build the building.
What I wrote is not a blueprint. My – what I wrote, put in
architectural terms, like Mr. Leen has put it in –
Q. Let me ask you this –
A. Excuse me, Mr. Leen.
Q. Let me ask you this, sir. In 1930, I think, or maybe even
earlier, in the late 1800s, H.G. Wells talked about a flight
to the moon. Seventy or eighty years later they actually
flew to the moon. Are you saying that’s the difference
between what you have written and the implementation?
A. I think H.G. Wells actually wrote this material much earlier
than 1930, but pardon me.
Yes. There were in fact stories about getting to the moon
back in 1900. In fact, one of the earliest movies ever made
shows people in Victorian costumes getting into a shell that
goes into a cannon and gets shot into the moon. That was
1910 or ’20. It was an idea. It eventually turned into
real technology, but at that time it was sort of like a what
if? Could we go to the moon? And, of course, at the time,
99.9 percent of the public would have said, awe, that’s
science fiction, or whatever they called it. I think the
term was called fantasy back then. It was –
Q. Are you saying that what you wrote is as far removed from
implementation as The Cannon Ball, which was written in
1910, was going to the moon, as when we actually landed on
the moon in 1969?
A. In terms of years – well, in terms of years, of course, the
time period between H.G. Wells and the 1969 landing on the
moon – which I observed in a house in California,
interesting enough – that was about 70 years, I think.
Things go a lot faster in the computer arena, but I didn’t
expect things to happen for – well, five or ten years at
minimum, probably fifteen to twenty years at – possible.
Q. Let’s move on. I think we – I think that you have discussed
that.
Did you – did you post this anonymously or did you actual
use your name? Did you accept authorship of what you had
written?
A. I put my name on every page. It says Jim Bell. I
intentionally did that. I wasn’t hiding anything. I – I
was willing and anxious to debate it with all comers, people
who wanted to talk, people who wanted – mostly over the
Internet, but up close, in various political meetings, that
kind of thing. Just in general. Peoplw who understood
enough about the technology to understand the computers and
the networking and encryption. And, yeah, I did engage in a
large number of discussions over the Internet subsequent to
the writing of the essay. And there were very interesting
and fascinating discussions.
Q. Now let’s get back to the Multnomah County Common Law Court.
A. Yes.
Q. There is some email evidence that’s been introduced. And
also we saw a video excerpt where you are telling the
Multnomah County Common Law Court, I think I have a solution
to your enforcement pollicies. And I believe that, from
what we saw, the Multnomah County Common Law Court, at least
when you were there, was trying in absentia certain IRS
agents by disgruntled individuals who felt that the IRS had
either illegally acted or had confiscated their property
improperly. And you at that meeting said, “I think I have
an enforcement mechanism and I would like you to read my
essay now.”
Would you comment on that?
A. Well, like I said, it would have taken ten years to
implement. It was not like a – it wasn’t – I wasn’t saying,
do this and you can start tomorrow. I was wanting to
increase the size of the debate on the subject. I was there
because it was an organization of people who might be
receptive to the theory, the concept, the – well, again, I
hesitate to use the word fantasy. It’s a – it’s a – it’s a
sketch, you might say. It’s the difference between a
blueprint of a house and a sketch. I can draw a sketch with
a house or roof, you know, a chimney or something. That’s a
sketch. It doesn’t show you how you build the house, it
just shows you what it looks like. A person who has never
seen a house might even be able to sketch a house.
I wasn’t trying to propose that this system was operational
or would be in the near future. I was trying to make it
topical for this organization. To explain why I thought
that they should take the time to read what at the time was
a ten-part essay that, I don’t know, had 20,000 words, or
I’m not even sure what the count is.
Q. Weren’t you trying to proselytize a political ideas which
would lead to the overthrow of the government as we know it
now?
A. Well, I was – I was talking about a political idea, and that
was the fundamental concept. I wouldn’t exactly say it
overthrows the government. That has undercurrents and so
forth, overtones. I would say that it replaces the current
system. Not – and again, I emphasize, we’re not talking
about America specifically. Potentially we’re talking –
we’re not – we’re talking about the entire world.
Replacement of all the countries that have systems which –
which many people, most people will agree, many of them are
dramatically worse, even, than our own.
Q. But all government is structured, isn’t it? It’s
hierachical, as you said.
A. Yes, that’s exactly right. I believe that there are genuine
reasons that that’s been the way things have been developed
over hundreds of thousands of years. I think that absent a
breakthrough in the way societies are structured, that is
the way society has to – or societies have to form, and
that’s why every society virtually we have on the face of
the earth is based on that concept.
Q. Well, why, why were you mentioning specifically – and I’m
not going to say the word “targeting” because I think that
might be a misperception of your writings – but why were you
mentioning tax collectors as a, perhaps, someone, some group
that this theory, in theory, if it was applied, would be the
focus of?
A. Well, I needed to explain it to the person who reads it in a
way that he can understand. The average person who read it
might wonder, well, who are we talking about here? How do
you change society? What changes have to be made?
Reference to tax collectors, of course, is in reference to
the fact that, well, quite literally, tax collectors have
been mentioned since, including the Bible, as being a not
particularly well-loved set of people, for reasons which I
think are rather clear under the circumstances. But
fundamentally, if you change society in any substantial way,
a lot of changing of society has to do with how the society
governs itself, and a lot of that has to do with how that
governing costs money. Any society that governs – or a
society that governs itself has to raise a certain amount of
money for the kinds of services, of public services that it
provides. A society that provides virtually no public
services doesn’t have to raise hardly any money. A society
that either produces huge amount of public services or
spends money on people who really don’t produce, but just
are upon the public payroll, they have to provide a large
amount of money.
Q. Let me ask you this question. To paraphrase or to steal a
phrase from Bill Gates, were you trying to cut off their
air?
A. I was – I wasn’t actively trying to cut off their air. I
was – you might say, I was – I was describing the idea that,
were it to be implemented at some point in the mid to – mid
future, years down the road, would in fact cut off their
air.
Q. Did it surprise you that an IRS agent might find this
something alarming?
A. In a certain sense they will find it alarming. In the sense
that if they want to – if they are, let’s say, 25 years old
and their job is with the IRS, if they want – if they want
to have a job for the next 40 years and a pension for 20 to
30 years after that, they might be very concerned about the
possibility that somebody would replace that system of
governing with something totally different that makes their
job totally unnecessary and their pension totally
unavailable.
Now, to the people – people are, of course, for good reason,
self-interested. Everybody is interest in their own well-
being and the well-being of the people that they love. A
person who learns of a system to make something – to make
their ability to make money in the future impossible might
be scared. Suppose I somehow invented a method to make cars
for ten dollars. Well, anybody who worked for Ford or GM or
Chrysler would be terrified. They would lose their job, you
know.
Computers used to cost five to ten thousand dollars each.
If suddenly they could start making computers for $500 each,
a very large amount of the people that are employed making
$10,000 computers, frankly, would have to be fired if
computers got down to 500. Fortunately, that drop in price
has occurred over a period of 20 years, so things adjust
over time.
But a change in the way things are done to – to make
commodities dramatically cheaper puts people out of work,
quite literally. If I could make good steak for ten cents a
pound, I would – I would be shake – the farmers of America
would be shaking in their boots. They – they have very
fixed, high fixed costs. Is the very fact that I propose –
let’s say I propose a concept that allows me to make steaks
at ten cents a pound, anybody who – any farmer who reads
about that would be scared.
Q. Well, but this was not an economic fear, this was
potentially a life-threatening fear that your article was
directed to. Would you comment on that?
A. I think it was – I think, in general terms, it was an
economic fear, not directly life threatening. What I mean
is this:
Anybody who has a job now, they can quit and get another
job. They don’t have to worry about that if they are
willing to quit their job. Even – again, we’re talking ten
to twenty years in the future, probably. You know,
earliest. So it isn’t like they can’t change jobs or get
out of the system. It was a provocative essay, and it does
mention, frankly, death and killing and so forth.
But that wasn’t the fundamental issue involved. The
fundamental issue was to make it unnecessary to have that
kind of system that raises huge amounts of money that
governments don’t really have to have.
We do not have to spend 300 billion dollars a year, this
country doesn’t, on our military. Military people just –
excuse me; I’m sorry – that’s not necessary, I don’t
believe.
Q. Well, this was your political philosophy, is that correct?
A. Well, my political philosophy, of course, is libertarianism.
This was a political concept, an idea, a proposal. Well,
not really. A proposal in the same way that the, as you
pointed out, the Jules Verne or the H.G. Wells for going to
the moon idea was to space craft.
Q. But my original question was, do you – it certainly
shouldn’t have surprised you that governmental officials,
and particularly IRS officials, would – might find some
threat in these – in this essay.
A. I would say they had reason to, to worry, just simply in the
sense that their way of life would eventually end.
Q. Did there come a time that you believed you began to be put
under surveillance?
A. Not myself personally at the time did I know, but one of the
things that I took to that Multnomah County Common Law Court
meeting was a small device, electronic device, I made called
a field strength meter.
Q. What is that, sir, briefly?
A. An analogy, a sound strength meter is to sound like a radio
signal or a field strenth meter is to radio. It is a little
device that if you bring your transmitter, like a cell phone
or a walkie-talkie or something like that, if it detects
emanations, radio signals, it could do whatever you want,
buzz or vibrate or beep or whatever, warning you that there
is something nearby. It’s what – it’s a way of just finding
out if a transmitter is nearby.
Q. All right. And is that – you brought one of these to the
meeting with you?
A. Yes. I made one – actually, I have made several over many
years. I – again, I have an extensive electronic
background. I built this device a few years back, or before
that. And I was concerned that maybe this organization was
going to be infiltrated, and I figured as long as I’ve
showed up, I would try to figure out if there was any
surreptitious recording or monitoring going on.
The concept would be basically this. If I have this in my
pocket, and I walk up to somebody who has a hidden
microphone, let’s say, or, for that matter, a cell phone
they have out openly, if that device is transmitting at the
time, it will – it will activate. The activation could be a
beep or a buzz or a vibration, if I don’t want it to make a
noise. But basically I made mine vibrate a little bit. It
had a little bit of monitor with an offset cam, and the idea
was if I walked up to somebody who was wearing a bug, I
would know.
Q. Did you find someone with such a bug at one of these
meetings?
A. Yes, I did. I – I must say, I do not recall the specific
date of the meeting, but the person I shortly, within
minutes after, I determined the guy’s name was – well, he
was going under the name of Steve Wilson. We heard in this
case he was actually IRS Agent Steve Walsh.
Q. Is that the man who was testifying as one of the first or
second government witnesses in the case?
A. Yes, that was him.
Q. And did you subsequently have communications with him
outside the Multnomah County Common Law Court?
A. Well, both in and outside the – the meeting itself. The
meeting for the Multnomah County Common Law Court at the
time occurred in a place called Stark Street Pizza. Again,
another pizza joint. It was in a room that was specifically
dedicated for third-party organizations to come and have
their meetings, and it was some – I don’t know if you know,
some places have that kind of thing. They want to attract
customers, and one of the things they like to do is attract
meetings of dozens of people who buy pizza and beer and so
forth. And that was where the thing was occurring.
Q. Did he subsequently contact you over the Internet?
A. Yes. In fact, he did.
Q. I would like the clerk to show you A-1 through A-4. She
will bring it to you.
A. Yes, I see it.
Q. The first, A-1, what is it dated?
A. It’s dated January 31st, 1997.
Q. From?
A. It’s from me, Jim Bell, and it has my email address
jimbell@pacifier.com.
Q. And who is it to?
A. This is email address swils@cybernw.com. I recognize the
cyber northwest dot com as the site cybernw.
Q. Is that the address, as you knew it at the time, for Steve
Wilson?
A. Yes. At the time.
Q. And what was that communications – what was that email
about? Would you read from it?
A. Excuse me. I have looked at the title so far. I have to
read the whole thing.
Q. Yes.
A. I apologize.
Okay, the –
Q. Read the relevant portions, sir.
A. I was quoting in this message a message that Mr. Wilson had
sent to me previously. He says, quote, “I didn’t get a
chance last night to say thanks for the disk, because I was
busy being a juror.”
Q. What disk is he talking about?
A. I had filled out, or I had – I had made many copies of my
essay and put it on floppy disks.
Q. So AP, or Assassination Politics, was on floppy disk?
A. That’s right. I made a number of copies, five or ten or
something, and I had taken them with me to the meeting and I
had handed them out to people, and Mr. Wilson was one of the
people that I handed it to.
Q. What was the date of this email, by the way?
A. January 31st, 1997.
Q. So when he says the other night, so sometime in late January
of 1997 is when this meeting that he is talking about took
place?
A. Excuse me, let me read this again.
Well, it refers to “last night” in the quotation I quoted
from him. And he said that on 1/31/97, so, yeah, it was
probably a meeting on 1/30/97, I believe.
Q. So he says – I didn’t mean to interrupt you, but I just
wanted to set the context – he was serving as a juror. Had
you ever served as a juror on the Multnomah County Common
Law Court?
A. Once. I happened to show up, and these people select jurors
from the people who come in. Just ordinary meeting members.
Of course, I – I was happy to serve as a juror.
Q. Did he serve as juror also?
A. Well, there was 12 other jurors on the jury that I served
on. I think that – I think he was one of those.
Q. So read the email, the relevant email message that he wrote
to you.
A. Okay. I already – let me read the whole thing. The part
that I quote from his previous message is the following:
Q. Did it have carets?
A. Yes, it has those – well, I will turn it around. Those
carets indicate this is a quoted portion of the message.
This is the portion of the message that Mr. Wilson – or I
don’t know whether to refer to him as Mr. Wilson or Mr.
Walsh. We now know his name actually is Walsh. I’m going
to call him Wilson because that’s the way he addressed
himself to me.
He said, quote, “I didn’t get a chance last night to say
thanks for the disk, because I was busy being a juror. I
only took a quick look at ‘Assassination Politics’ today –
it looks interesting – When I get some time, I’ll read it
carefully. Maybe we can discuss it at the next meeting.”
Q. Now, what did you say? Did you write back to him?
A. My response to him, in this message, is this:
“It’s an essay that I’ve been circulating on USEnet and
various Internet lists and FIDOnet echoes for more than the
last year. While it wasn’t originally intended to be used
as an enforcement device for commonlaw verdicts, it would be
relatively straightforward to fund rewards based on jury
verdicts. This would allow totally-anonymous enforcement,
avoiding most clashes with the status-quo legal system.
“Keep in mind that in a smoothly-functioning commonlaw-court
system, the vast majority of offenses will be dealt with
purely with fines; very few people would actually get
killed, and those people would be the ones who were really
serious offenders or repeat offenders, and didn’t pay their
fines, etc.”
Q. All right. So in this particular variation of your theory,
you were going to let common law courts decide who should be
targeted for killing?
A. With the proviso that we’re talking ten years into the
future at least. That was the idea. Instead of – or
allowing courts – I don’t – I’m not specifically referring
to common law courts. I mean, I don’t subscribe to most of
those beliefs, or I don’t know most of their beliefs, but
basically that was the concept, and I wanted to interest the
people in the area in just reading my essay, and to do that
I have to make topic. When you want someone to read
something, one of the things you do is you say, hey, it fits
into what you already discussed and what you are interested
in. I wanted to make it topical to this group of people.
Q. So he initiated a communication to you, or did you start the
communications with him, do you recall?
A. I’m virtually certain that he started communicating with me.
I believe I had put my email address on the disks that I was
handing out; because I wanted to participate in discussions.
Q. And that is jbell@pacifier.com?
A. Actually, jimbell@pacifier.com, with no space between the
Jim and the Bell.
MR. LEEN: I offer A-1.
MR. LONDON: No objection.
The COURT: A-1 is admitted.
(Exhibit No. A-1 was admitted.)
Q. (By Mr. Leen) Now let’s go to the next email. What is it
dated. Just put it down.
A. Put it under the stack here.
The next one is dated the 3rd of February. Monday, the 3rd
of February 1997.
Q. So this is three days later?
A. Yes, that’s right.
Q. And what is the – who is this particular email from and who
is it to?
A. It’s from me, jimbell@pacifier.com, and it’s to
swils@cybernw.com. From me to Steve Wilson.
Q. Are you replying to one of his emails in this or are you
initiating the email?
A. No, I’m definitely replying. There’s a quoted section here
that – that I’m referring to here.
Q. Did it have the carets?
A. Yes, it has those carets.
Q. What has he said to you in that email?
A. It says, one line, it says “Jim.” Two lines down it says,
“I had a little more time to look over AP. I had a couple
questions/comments to throw out to you.
“My biggest question has to do with the organization that
oversees the system.”
And then I respond to that with about a – well, I guess –
hold on.
This is a one-page note. It continues on until it seems to
stop in the middle, and it says page 1 of 3. And I –
Q. Look at the next one then. Is the next one the same email
series?
A. Yes.
Q. A-3.
A. A-3 seems to have the first page – excuse me. And it – yes,
it includes the first page. And it goes on to the second
page.
Q. All right. So you respond to that, and you explain how it
will be implemented or overseen.
A. Yes. I wrote approximately two pages here.
Q. Is there any response to that by –
MR. LEEN: I would offer A-3, then.
THE COURT: A-3 is admitted.
(Exhibit No. A-3 was admitted.)
MR. LONDON: This one I haven’t seen. I don’t have a
copy.
MR. LEEN: I will show it in a minute. Let’s just wait
on that.
Q. (By Mr. Leen) What about A-4; what does A-4 say? And
what’s the date of A-4?
A. The date of A-4 is the 15th of February 1997.
Q. So now this is about two weeks after you first met – first
started corresponding with email?
A. Assuming I had – I – I don’t recall that we did correspond
before approximately the 31st of January, but as far as I
know, this was the beginning.
Q. All right.
A. You wanted to know the date here.
Q. Yes. You said February 15th?
A. February 15th.
Q. And this is from you, again, to Mr. Wilson, his email
address.
A. Yes. Both mine and his email addresses are here.
Q. What is Mr. Wilson saying in his portion of the email?
A. He says – well, the quotation from his material is, “Jim.
Thanks for the info. Personally, I think the Government,”
in parens, it says, “(such as it is)” close parens, “has
gotten away with too much for way too long. But it’s like
that old saying, ‘everyone talks about weather, but no one
does anything about it.’ Everyone knows the government is
dysfunctional, corrupt and abusing the citizens – there is a
solid majority in this country that distrusts and dislikes
our Government,” in parens, it says “(although not much of
an agreement on a solution).” Out of parens.
Q. All right. Did you respond to that?
A. There is a second quoted portion.
Q. Just a second.
A. He continues.
Q. Read the second part.
A. He continues in the second paragraph. “That’s why I was
interested in the Common Law Court. It seemed to me that
finally there was an avenue for those of us who wanted to do
something! Louis Whispell is an obvious example of someone
who was blatantly terrorized by the IRS. But in listening
to Chuck Stuart and Jeff Weakley, they say that enforcement
of the verdicts is up to Louis. While I hope he succeeds, I
think you’re right, the de-facto system will just view us as
irrelevant.”
Q. Was that the end of the message from him?
A. That’s the end of the – that’s the end of the portion of the
message that I quoted when I responded to him.
Q. And what did you respond? How long did your response – does
it run?
A. Rather substantially. About two pages here.
Q. Could you summarize briefly what you told him in response?
A. Well, I – I have to read it first, and that will take a
minute. Believe me, this is a –
THE COURT: Let’s take a 15-minute recess.
The jury is cautioned, please do not discuss the case among
yourself or with anyone else over the recess. Please go to the
jury room.
(Jury excused at 2:40 p.m.)
THE COURT: Mr. Leen, the defendant is charged with
five counts.
MR. LEEN: I understand, Your Honor.
THE COURT: It doesn’t include any worldwide
conspiracy.
MR. LEEN: Your Honor, the defense in the case –
THE COURT: Never mind.
MR. LEEN: I will move along.
THE COURT: I call it to your attention.
Let’s have questions and answers.
MR. LEEN: Yes, sir.
THE COURT: Instead of narratives.
MR. LEEN: Yes, sir.
THE COURT: Okay?
Fifteen minutes.
(Recessed at 2:45 p.m.)
(Jury not present; 3:10 p.m.)
THE COURT: Are we ready?
THE CLERK: Yes, Your Honor.
THE COURT: Call the jury.
THE WITNESS: What exhibit are we on?
MR. LEEN: You were looking at A-4, I think. I’m just
going to ask you some brief questions about those two exhibits.
(Jury present; 3:12 p.m.)
THE COURT: The jury has returned. Continue direct
examination.
MR. LEEN: Yes, Your Honor. Thank you.
Q. (By Mr. Leen) Mr. Bell, at the – when we recessed you were
looking at A-4.
A. Yes.
Q. Is that an email correspondence exchange between you and Mr.
Wilson?
A. Yes. That is apparently my response to Mr. Wilson’s email.
Q. And what date is that, sir?
A. My response appears to be dated 15th of February ’97. And
according to the quotation, the date of the original
quotation on my message, or the portion of the message that
was sent – that was – quotes his message, Mr. Wilson – I’m
sorry if I’m destroying that. He apparently responded or
sent a message to me on the 5th of February. My response
was on the 15th of February.
MR. LEEN: I offer A-4.
MR. LONDON: No objection.
THE COURT: It’s admitted.
(Exhibit No. A-4 was admitted.)
Q. (By Mr. Leen) Now A-5, look at that for a second, please.
What’s the date that – is that the other email exchange
between the two of you?
A. Yes. Jimbell@pacifier.com and to Steve Wilson.
Q. And what’s the date of your response to this email from Mr.
Wilson?
A. 28th of April 1997.
Q. So we have some emails –
MR. LEEN: I offer A-5.
THE COURT: A-5 is admitted.
(Exhibit No. A-5 was admitted.)
Q. (By Mr. Leen) So the two of you were exchanging emails at
least from January 31st to April 28th, is that correct, sir?
A. That’s right.
Q. Were there other contacts that you had with Mr. Wilson other
than through email and other than through the common law
court?
A. Yes. I believe – well, he did talk to me outside the Stark
Street Plaza a few times.
Q. Did he talk to you on the phone at all?
A. Yes, he did. I think – I don’t recall how many times, but a
few times.
Q. Did he ever ask you to do anything illegal?
A. Yes. Outside –
Q. What did he ask you to do that was illegal?
A. He apparently knew I was a ham radio operator, and he asked
me if he knew how I could get ahold of a transmitter for an
FM pirate radio station that he was considering building.
Q. Did you agree to do that or not?
A. Oh, no. That’s illegal.
Q. Now, other than – after Mr. Wilson, sometime in 1997, your
house was searched, is that correct?
A. Yes. On April 1st, 1997.
Q. So this was before the last of the email exchange, is that
correct?
A. Yes. The search was before, was about a month before the
last – well, I don’t know whether it’s the last email
exchange. It’s the last one here.
Q. You were exchanging email with him after the search.
A. That’s right.
Q. When did you – other than Mr. Wilson, who we’ve talk about,
who is really Special Agent Walsh, was there any other
surveillance that you felt was taking place against you
during – from ’97 though 1998?
A. I later – well, excuse me.
Q. Yes or no?
A. I now believe that there was indeed surveillance at the
time. It wasn’t clear from where it came.
Q. But you believed you were under surveillance?
A. Well, given –
Q. Yes or no?
A. Yes, I did.
Q. And subsequent to 1998, did you believe that you were under
surveillance?
A. I would say subsequent. During 1998, I was – particularly
on a particular day I was definitely under surveillance.
Q. Did you believe that there was surveillance from houses
adjacent to where you were living?
A. I strongly suspected that as of late ’97, and I continue to
suspect that to today.
Q. Did you tell – did you tell anybody in the media about this?
A. In July of 1998, very shortly after I had been rearrested on
a probation revocation violation, I called John Branton, of
the Columbian, and I made very specific accusations of
government spying against me.
Q. And was that the James Branton who testified here the other
day?
A. John Branton. Yes, that was him. The reporter from the
Vancouver Columbian newspaper.
Q. Did you outline for him why you believed you were under
surveillance and from what sources?
A. Not in a great – the why, not a great deal of detail as to
why, because my communications with him were limited to 15-
minute phone calls. But I told him what I thought and where
I thought the surveillance was occurring from.
Q. Now, in 1997, you entered a guilty plea. Is that right?
A. That’s right.
Q. And that was – what was it specifically that you had done to
the IRS office in Portland?
A. Are you referring to the plea, or are you referring to what
I actually did?
Q. What did you actually do?
A. Okay. It was actually Vancouver.
Q. I’m sorry, Vancouver. I apologize.
A. In – I don’t recall the exact date. It may have been March
17th or 18th.
Q. Of 1997?
A. About two months after I discovered that Steve Wilson was –
almost two months after – was infiltrating the Multnomah
County Common Law Court, and approximately a month after
they had seized my car, I injected a small amount of
nontoxic but smelly material into the federal building in
Vancouver, Washington, late at night.
Q. And did you admit that you did that in the guilty plea?
A. Yes, I did.
Q. And were you punished for that?
A. Well, I was – I was definitely punished for that.
Q. And were you also prosecuted for using false IDs – excuse me
– false social security numbers?
A. Yes, I was – well, that was part of the charges.
Q. And what was – what did you specifically do with social
security numbers?
A. It turns out I didn’t really do what I said I did on the
plea agreement. Let me explain.
I have never believed, or haven’t believed – for 15 years or
more. I haven’t believed in the use of social security
numbers as a general means of identification. During
particularly the ‘80s and the early ‘90s, organizations
would ask people – of course, me, being a person – for a
social security number as an identifier, as a way of
tracking data, and my response has been, for 20 years, I’ve
said, well, I really don’t feel comfortable using that.
Could you --- do you really have to have a social security
number or could you just have an identifier for me that’s
unique to your organization and mine? And almost always
when I’ve talked to these people they say, well, we just
need a number to put – to type into the machine that the
software says we have to type it in. So I said, okay, I’m
going to give you a number. This is not my social security
number. It is what I call my ID number. You can use this
to communicate with me and store records. I don’t tell them
it’s my social security number because it isn’t. But in the
plea agreement that I signed three-and-a-half years ago,
they charge me with using false social security numbers.
Q. Were you working back in 1996, 1997?
A. Yes. I had gotten a job with a company called Control Tech
in Vancouver, Washington, which is an electronics design and
manufacturing company with about – well, I don’t know what
it had; it has now about 30 employees, 30, 40 employees.
Q. Did you use your correct social security number when – for
purposes of payroll?
A. As it turned – I found out I – I had swapped two digits. I
don’t recall which particular two digits were swapped, but I
used my social security number so infrequently that I, I – I
had gotten the number wrong. Two digits were reversed.
Q. Did it cause – was money withheld? Did you pay taxes?
A. Money was withheld. I claimed the standard deduction, as I
recall. That’s all I – I think.
Q. Did you file a tax return during those years?
A. Well, I, I had not been filing tax returns for a few years,
just again associated with my phobia about dealing with this
problem. But I eventually did file the tax return for ’97.
Or ’90 – excuse me, ’96.
Q. All right. In 1988 your house was searched again, is that
correct?
A. Yes, that’s right.
Q. And as a result of that, your supervised – your supervised
release was violated, is that correct?
A. That’s the term they used. Basically they are saying that
in my probationary period they – I did – I did something,
they say, that I shouldn’t have done.
Q. And you went back to jail.
A. That’s right.
Q. For how long?
A. Well, waiting for –
Q. Altogether, how long did you serve?
A. Approximately 22 months.
Q. Now, is that – now, how long did you serve as a result of
your ’97 conviction?
A. The original conviction, I served 11 months?
Q. And the supervised release violation?
A. That was, again, 22 months all tolled, I believe.
Q. So approximately another 11 months, is that what you’re
saying? Or 11 and 22?
A. Eleven months first, and then twenty-two months afterwards.
Q. So when were you finally released completely from supervised
release and from prison?
A. It was in April of 19 – or excuse me, of 2000.
Q. All right. Now, at this point, there has been introduced
evidence that you had communications while in prison with
reporters where you expressed great anger at the IRS and
expressed that you were going to not let the matter drop.
Is that – is that a fair summary of what your attitude was?
A. Basically, yes, for a lot of reasons which haven’t yet been
discussed here.
Q. I understand. Now, why, why did you feel this way?
A. Well, for one thing, I – the plea agreement was coerced in a
phony – it did include a couple – well, a couple things that
I had done. It may have been a mistake, but they didn’t
fulfill the terms of the agreement, and apparently didn’t
intend to, and in fact specific portions of this agreement
were violated intentionally repeatedly by various government
people.
Q. And what specific government officials violated the
agreement?
A. Well, one of them is present in this courtroom. His name is
Jeff Gordon, and he’s sitting at the prosecution’s table on
the right.
Q. All right. Anyone else?
A. Well, I believe a probation person named Leslie Spier. I
believe it’s spelled S-p-I-e-r, but I’m not absolutely
certain about that.
Q. All right. Anyone else?
A. The prosecutor Robb London, who is to the left of Mr. –
well, my left of Mr. Gordon, sitting at the prosecution
table.
Q. Now, was Mr. London involved in your 1997 prosecution?
A. He eventually was. The initial prosecutor in that charge
was named Annmarie Levine, who I heard later on went to work
for Microsoft in defending against their antitrust case.
Q. Did she – so she wasn’t involved in your ’98 case?
A. No. I believe – well, I don’t know when she left service,
but she wasn’t then there.
Q. Mr. London was involved in your ’98 case?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. ’98 violation.
A. Yes, that’s right.
Q. So do you feel that Mr. London has violated any – done
anything improper?
A. Oh, very much so. Very much so.
Q. So, Mr. London, Ms. Levine, Ms. Spier.
A. Um-hmm.
Q. And Mr. Gordon. Now –
A. Basically, yeah.
Q. – anyone else that you had felt who worked for the
government, either the U.S. Attorney’s office, the
judiciary, probation office, or federal law enforcement, did
you feel had done anything improper, other than those
people?
A. Well –
Q. As of your release on – in April of 2000?
A. Well, I have to think about this for a moment. That covers
a lot of territory.
I think there was probably a substantial amount of violation
beyond what I was aware of, but I’m not aware of the names
of the people responsible for all of the violations. Those
are the main names of the responsible parties, that I’m
aware of.
Q. In particular, is there – we’ve heard mention of a man named
Ryan Thomas Lund.
A. That’s right.
Q. Now, did you have a – when you were incarcerated in 1997,
was there an altercation between you and he?
A. Yes, there was.
Q. Could you briefly explain to the jury what that altercation
was?
A. Well, there was – I should – I should mention the – well,
okay, I will answer your question.
On November 25th, 1997, Mr. Ryan Thomas Lund assaulted me, I
believe for purposes of extorting my agreement to got
through with the plea agreement that had been previously
signed.
Q. Now, when you say assaulted you, you mean beat you up?
A. It wasn’t as serious as that. He was actually trying to
fake a fight, to make it look like a fight had occurred.
To explain that, I need to explain that the policy of SeaTac
FDC, Federal Detention Center, is, when there appears to be
a fight or an altercation or an assault, they put everybody
in a place called shoe. Think of it as solitary
confinement, you know. They call it the hole, basically.
The reason they put everybody in, not just the perpetrator,
but the victim, is because at the time they don’t
necessarily know who the person guilty is, you know. The
victim may be a victim, and they don’t know, the perpetrator
could be – they don’t know that. In addition, of course,
even if they knew, the person who did the assault might
actually have friends, other inmates, who would victimize
the victim further if he wasn’t put in the hole immediately.
So they have this policy that says whenever they appear to
have an altercation of any kind, they put people in the
hole.
Q. Why would this altercation and having you put in the hole in
some manner make your guilty plea, where you told Judge
Burgess it was voluntary, why – why would that affect the
voluntariness of that agreement?
A. Because of – well, I had become aware – excuse me. I had
previously signed this plea agreement. I had become aware
of violations before the date of my original intended
sentencing.
Q. So are you saying the procedure is that you enter your
guilty plea and enter into a plea agreement, and then some
period of time elapses and then you’re supposed to be
sentenced?
A. Yes. The plea agreement – again, I do not recall the exact
date.
Q. That’s all right. But that’s the chronology of events. So
are you saying that between the time that you entered into
the plea agreement, where you told the judge that you were
doing it voluntarily, and the time that you were sentenced,
this situation happened with Ryan Lund?
A. That’s true. But I should add that the original scheduled
sentencing date passed, and I was actually sentenced at
least – about a month and a half after I was originally
scheduled to be sentenced.
Q. Now, at any time did you indicate to anyone that you wanted
to withdraw your guilty plea before you sentencing?
A. Oh, yes.
Q. Who did you indicate that to?
A. Well, my attorney at the time. His name is Peter Avenia.
It’s spelled A-v-e-n-I-a. I told him that I wanted
withdraw.
Q. Did he file a motion to withdraw your guilty plea?
A. No, not that I recall.
Q. Did you notify the court or anyone else other than Mr.
Avenia that you wanted to withdraw your guilty plea?
A. Well, I think I told many other inmates. I probably told my
parents over a telephone that was monitored by the jail. I
believe my attorney, Avenia, at that point had maybe a
paralegal – I don’t know whether I talked to – I can’t even
recall her name. Maybe I talked to her as well. Those
people.
Q. Did you tell the judge at the time of sentencing that you
wanted to withdraw your guilty plea?
A. Well, my eventual sentencing was November – or December
12th, 1997, and, no, I didn’t tell him.
Q. Well, did you feel – at the time that you were sentenced,
did you feel that the altercation with Ryan Lund had
anything to do with your decision not to seek to withdraw
your guilty plea?
A. Well, yes. I had told Avenia the last week of October that
I wanted to withdraw my guilty plea, and the assault by Lund
occurred November 25th, about six o’clock in the afternoon.
And that is what made me accept, or not withdraw from this
agreement.
Q. And why is that, sir?
A. Well, I was scared, actually. I – I felt absolutely,
totally, positively certain that Mr. Lund had been put up to
it by someone in the government.
Q. Why?
A. That’s an involved question, and I will try to answer.
The incident itself occurred. I was in a TV room on the
second floor of an area in the SeaTac. Lund was coming down
the hall. I was inside of two other inmates. I had not
made any contact with Lund for the four days since I had
first met him, and he hadn’t tried to contact me.
He was looking in the other TV room for somebody, I didn’t
know who, and then he opened the door and he walked over to
the TV. And at that point he asked people what we wanted to
watch, and I said, I just very passively – he asked one
person, and I very passively answered another thing, I want
to watch the news, and so forth. At which point he started
turning everything that I said into an argument. I mean, I
thought it was theatrical. I – I – it looked like he was
picking a fight, literally. I didn’t really care what we
watched, but he looked like he was on a mission.
Q. Mr. Bell, let’s assume he was picking a fight with you
because he just didn’t like you. Why did you conclude that
this was an act or something that was directed by some
government agent?
A. Well, in the midst of the assault that followed, as he
knocked out of the door of the TV room, he said something
about, you had better take the deal they’re offering you.
Q. All right. Did you – so that’s the basis – that’s the
germination of where you felt it was from the government?
A. No, actually it wasn’t.
Q. Well, where did you begin to think that Mr. Lund was put up
to this by whom you eventually put in you writings, the case
agent on Ryan Lund’s case, Mike McNall?
A. Okay, Let me explain. I first met Ryan Thomas Lund in the
basement, literally, of this very building on the morning of
November 21st, 1997. He – I was put into his cell. People
down there wait to come up here in cells. I was put into a
cell and he had some paper with him, and he was an inmate –
well, he was dressed in street clothes, not – the jail gives
me this. He was in street clothes, and they put me into a
cell, and he had a fax copy of his, what’s called
information. Think of it like a charge. A claim –
Q. A criminal complaint?
A. Well, at the time I think it was an infor- -- well, I don’t
want to be too technical since you’re laymen. Basically a
complaint, yeah.
Q. Okay.
A. I don’t recall if it was an information or a complaint. But
there are two things they are called. I don’t know the
technical details.
Q. All right. So why was the possession of this and the fact
that he was in street clothes, why did that make you feel
that something was unusual?
A. Well, the first thing that was unusual was the fact that he
had a copy, a fax copy of his complaint with him. I had
substantial experience at the time going to and from SeaTac
facility, and one thing the policy was, the marshals who
were responsible for this – and you see a few of them around
here doing their job – they virtually never allow anybody to
have paper in those cells downstairs. You might ask what’s
wrong with that. Well, I will tell you why in general
terms.
Sometimes inmates want to keep their paper secret from other
inmates. They may be an informant or they may have done
something they are embarrassed by. They have – the marshals
have a general policy that says that you do not get paper
when you are waiting in the cell, particularly if you have –
if you are in with another inmate. They don’t let you do
that. Even a single piece of paper like that, they do not
allow that.
The only time I have ever seen it done otherwise is
literally a few days ago, when they were kind enough to let
me take a paper in a cell that I was alone in, absolutely
alone, for preparation of trial work. Nobody was there.
Most of the time having paper might not be a problem. These
people are ultra cautious and they wouldn’t allow anybody to
have paper in a cell with somebody else. They wouldn’t have
allowed that.
Q. So that struck you as unusual?
A. Oh, immediately.
Q. And then he had this fight with you, and you heard him say,
“You should take the deal.”
A. Well, there was a lot more that made me very suspicious of
him.
Q. But what made you feel that particularly it was Mike McNall
that was behind it all?
A. That’s two years later. I had already established in many
different ways over the next few days that Mr. Lund was a
government informant, but I did not know at that time who he
was working with on the government. That is to say, I saw
his paper, but I didn’t necessarily see who he had been
associated with, the person who prosecuted him or the
investigator.
Two years later, however, when I was released from prison
the last time, on April of 2000, I went into a substantial
amount of research to try to find out about the Ryan Lund
incident, and one of the things I – among the things I did
was I literally purchased his court paperwork. You may not
be aware that court paperwork is legally purchasable. I can
get copies of it. I bought two court case files, one from
the Tacoma court and one from the Seattle court, of two
cases that Lund was involved in. One was criminal –
Q. Did you do this legally?
A. Oh, yes. It’s available to anybody. I think I wrote a
check or something like that, and anybody can do it. You
can do it, he can do it. Anybody who walks in or mails a
letter can.
Q. So you bought his entire criminal file?
A. For that particular charge, yes, and also a civil case that
was assoc- -- I thought associated with it.
Q. And in this civil case, was he a plaintiff or defendant?
A. He was a plaintiff. Ryan Lund had sued SeaTac,
interestingly enough, for a slip and fall accident that
occurred, I believe, on December 15th, 1997, three days
after I eventually pled guilty to – to the charge that I – I
had signed the plea agreement to.
Q. So what were your – what were your conclusions after you
read these two files?
A. Well, after – after I read the files, I was at that point
absolutely certain, if I wasn’t before – and for many
reasons that haven’t been mentioned up till now, I was
absolutely certain before. But I verified in the file that,
yes, Mr. Lund virtually had to be an informant and that he
had been doing something for the government at the time.
Q. So one of the things in your email is a discussion of his
points and his range, his sentence range should have been
around ten years and he got a sentence of maybe 27 months.
Is that what caused you to believe that he was an informant?
A. Well, no, no. I – I – I knew he was – well, I knew he was
an informant from probably five minutes after I met him in
the basement here on this November 21st, 1997. But with
respect to the documents I got, there was a substantial
discrepancy between the time that he should have gotten as a
four-time violent felon with two drug convictions, a sawed-
off shotgun conviction, I think a car theft. He had
previous convictions for assaulting or intimidating
witnesses, or in a certain cases. He had a long criminal
history. Four felonies, four serious felonies.
Q. So you felt that the sentence he ultimately got was some
kind of quid pro quo for something?
A. Oh, yes, absolutely.
Q. now, this civil suit. What was the result of this civil
suit and what did you conclude?
A. Well, I purchased the case file in about September of 2000,
and it didn’t really say what the answer I wanted – or it
said the two parties, the government and Ryan Lund, motioned
to have the case dismissed because of a settlement, which
means they agreed to solve it. But it didn’t say the amount
of money they agreed to pay or, if any, to Ryan Lund. He
had asked originally for a million dollars. The settlement,
or the answer, the last pages I got simply said, case
dismissed because of a settlement with the right to reopen
it if the parties do not actually carry through with the
settlement.
Q. Well, do you know whether he got either a million dollars or
maybe a penny or nothing?
A. I have no idea.
Q. Why – okay. So what else did you do to investigate Ryan
Lund other than look at the two files?
A. I did a great deal of investigation on this.
Ryan Lund had told me a number of things and showed me a
number of things in the paperwork and about his case that
made – well, that – I had already known, five minutes after
I met him I knew he was a foreman in a plan of some kind.
But he also told me a lot of things about his criminal
record in front of cameras and microphones down there. He
told me he was guilty of the crime of which he was being
charged at that point in front of cameras, a camera and a
microphone. He told me things about how he had been
arrested and how he had been moved from a place – Eugene,
Oregon, which is substantially south of Portland, all the
way to this courthouse.
Q. Well, rather than going into all of the things that you –
that he told you, how many hours did you spend after you
were released from prison investigating Ryan Lund and seeing
who might have been the person who had made the deal with
him?
A. Oh, on Lund alone, many dozens of hours spread over a period
of months. Buying the court file, for example. Lund was a
Vancouver, Washington, local. I’m from Vancouver,
Washington. I went to the Clark County Courthouse and I
bought certain copies of criminal case files for Ryan Lund
that they had there. I called up a place called Clackamas
County, Oregon, Courthouse, which is just south of Portland,
and I bought – or – and I asked the clerk about various
convictions he had in the past. I asked Multnomah County,
that’s Or- -- or Portland, Multnomah County Court, and I
asked them about things there. I found in some of my
paperwork that he had a parole officer with a Hispanic name
in Portland, and I tried calling him a few times but I never
got an answer. I was just going to ask him about Ryan
Lund’s criminal history, his convictions and so forth.
Q. Did you look up Ryan Lund through databases with tags and
addresses? We’ve seen a lot of that type of stuff
introduced into evidence.
A. Oh, yes, definitely. First off, one thing is I filed a
Freedom of Information Act request with the U.S. Marshal’s
Service in Washington, D.C., because I was told that I could
do that. I asked to find out whenever Ryan Lund had been
moved back and forth by the marshals, and the marshals do
that job. And I figured – I was told that information is
publicly available. You can get it on anybody. You can get
it on me, if you want. So I did.
Q. What’s the purpose of this research?
A. There was a discrepancy, a very serious discrepancy, in Mr.
Lund’s appearance, and I don’t mean physical appearance. I
mean the fact that he appeared at the – Tacoma here, this
courthouse, on November 21st, 1997, when I first met him,
when I was put in his cell.
Q. I’m saying, but why? Let’s just say that you’re right, he
was an informant and he did get a quid pro quo for doing
something for the government. In 2000, in April of 2000,
why did you want to know this information? What were you
going to do with it?
A. I was going to expose it all. I was talking to two
newspaper reporters, a guy named John Branton of the
Vancouver Columbian newspaper, and another guy named John
Painter of the Portland Oregonian. In addition, I was
talking to an Internet journalist named Declan McCullagh.
Q. Is that the gentleman who testified the other day?
A. Yes, that’s right. And he is in the audience, in fact.
Q. And what were you going to expose?
A. An assault on me for the purpose of forcing me to accept a
phony crooked plea agreement that was broken probably within
days of the date it was signed by me.
Q. And why would you – why did you think that the government
would go through such elaborate, difficult, and illegal
methods to get you to plead guilty to something or to
maintain your guilty plea?
A. Well, the guilty plea – or the guilty – when the plea
agreement was originally offered to me, in approximately
late June of ’97, I was told by my attorney then, Mr.
Avenia, that it was offered by the prosecution but the
government investigators did not like it at all. They hated
what it was giving me. It was giving me 11 months. They
hated that. They really were – they were very opposed to
that.
Q. Why was that? Did they want more time?
A. Oh, yes. Very much more time.
Q. Who was the case agent on your prosecution in ’97?
A. I believe Jeff Gordon was. I don’t know if there was any
others that were associated with it, but it’s been a long
time.
Excuse me.
Q. So you wanted to expose this illegal conspiracy.
A. That’s right. Well, I don’t tend to use the word conspiracy
very often, but under the circumstances, I – well, okay. I
think it would apply in this case.
Q. Did you want revenge?
A. Generally speaking, I find I never wanted revenge on
anything in my entire life. I wanted the exposure in the
news media as to what happened to me. Excuse me. I wanted
it exposed, what happened to me.
Q. And why would you think that anyone would think that was
newsworthy?
A. Most people would assume that prisoners aren’t normally
assaulted to get them to continue to agree to a plea
agreement. Most of you wouldn’t believe that if you heard
it, I don’t think.
Q. Did you find that most people didn’t believe your
accusations?
A. Let me see how to explain this. This is not a thing of
believe or disbelieve. They didn’t disbelieve it, but they
– they agreed with me. I was the first one to say it. My
amount of proof at the time was very inadequate. There was
a lot of research that had to be done, a lot of
investigation. And I was apparently the one who was going
to have to do it because in jmy phone calls with John
Branton of the Columbian in 1998, many of them in July, I
believe, shortly after I was rearrested, it was, ho hum, you
know, we’re not interested. We don’t want to bother with
it. Or he listened to my complaints, and he hardly did
anything to check them out. And under the circumstances, I
guess that was reasonable because he was just a crime
reporter and all he did was he goes – he goes to the
courthouse locally and he writes some stories. He wasn’t an
investigative reporter.
Q. So did you eventually figure out Mike McNall was the case
agent for the Ryan Lund prosecution?
A. Oh, yes. The criminal case file that I had purchased – the
criminal case file was from the Tacoma court. I purchased
it, and I looked through it very carefully, and, yes, Mike
McNall was listed as the – well, the person who participated
in the search warrant of Lund’s case and the person who
wrote up the application, I believe, for the search warrant.
Q. Well, other than the fact that the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, and Firearms is a Treasury law enforcement agency
and IRS is a Treasury law enforcement agency, why would you
think that there would be any connection between Mike
McNall, who was in charge of the prosecution, from law
enforcement standpoint, of Ryan Lund, and Jeff Gordon, who
was handling your prosecution back in 1997 when you wanted
to withdraw the plea agreement? Why would you feel there
was any connection between the two?
A. Well, in the original search of my residence, April 1st,
1997, was attended by about 30 – well, I don’t know – maybe
30 federal agents from IRS, DEA, FBI, even the Environmental
Protection Agency, and U.S. Marshals. I, I may have
forgotten one or two, but there were about 30 federal
agents, and the ATF was one of those agencies that showed
up. Since they’re both Treasury, it’s reasonable to assume
that there’s a connection.
But again, I – that was based on all the people that had
shown up on April 1st. I remembered that, and it was
obviously some suspected connection.
Q. Well, you felt there was a connection.
A. Oh, yes, very much so.
Q. So what did you do to try to prove that there was a
connection?
A. Well, I – like I said, I investigated Lund dramatically. I
did a lot of the research to get his court file to find out
who he –
Q. Other than – you’ve told us about Ryan Lund. What did you
do regarding Mike McNall and what did you do regarding Jeff
Gordon to find out if there was a connection at – to connect
the dots between these two?
A. Well, unfortunately, it’s so hard in this case to connect
the dots. I felt that there was probably an association,
but it might have been something that didn’t have a paper
trail, you understand. One person called on another person
on the phone and say, you know, “Can you do this?” and it
might not have left a record. So it wasn’t like I felt that
there was a clear provable connection at the moment because
I’m an individual. I’m not a – I investigate as an
individual, not as a government agency. I knew I couldn’t
immediately prove the connection, but I believed that there
was a connection.
I did a lot of research in the summer of 2000 on various
issues.
Q. Well, you’re a trained scientist, is that correct?
A. Most of my training is in the scientific field and
engineering.
Q. And you know what a hypothesis is.
A. That’s right.
Q. What was your hypothesis about all of this?
A. Well, about – with respect to Ryan Lund, I believe that he
had been moved up to meet me on that particular day in the
cell in this building for the purposes of getting him to
know me, connecting me, the government informant with the
other guy. I believe that nothing was done for four days.
And I believe that at some point Ryan Lund got a phone call
or letter, probably a phone call – actually made a phone
call outside to his – I don’t know what they call that? – a
handler, a government connection between an informant and a
–
Q. The case agent who is responsible for him?
A. It might have – it might have been. Not being really
familiar with how the agents do their job, I would assume
that he would have been the person to contact, Ryan Lund.
But, of course, I know that government’s a big organization.
They have thousands and thousands of people.
Q. So you felt that he had contacted someone, and you didn’t
know who at that point, but now you’re telling me that you
think it was Mike McNall.
A. Yeah.
Q. Okay. So tell us the rest – let me here, for the jury’s
sake, the rest of your hypothesis that you were trying to
prove.
A. Well, I had a – again, I had a theory that on November 25th,
Ryan Lund had made a call based on prearrangement – an
informant, of course, is probably given a way of contacting
his – the people who are running him, and I think he did
make the call and I think he talked to somebody. And that
somebody, I believe, even though this recording was almost
certainly not recorded, I believe that person said something
like, there’s a felon inmate there and we would like you to
have him – or we would like – we would like this guy put in
the hole. Okay? In solitary confinement. That will make
us very happy, Mr. Lund. Understood? And, of course, Lund
would say, sure. And Lund, of course, knowing the policy of
SeaTac Federal Detention Center, he knew that if there was
any kind of, well, altercation, fight, assault, whatever, he
knew that were he to start that, both he and I would
immediately be directed straight to the hole, which in fact
is what happened.
Q. You testified to that aspect of it, but what is the rest of
the hypothesis? Where does the connection between Gordon
and McNall fit in?
A. Well, since they are both Department of Treasury, the ATF
and the IRS, or whatever the organization currently is, I
figured that they were working together. Jeff Gordon had a
task to do and Mike McNall had an informant that he – or the
BATF had an informant they were running. And informants are
at least fairly numerous, but if a government person wants
something to happen in a prison or something, they have to
find, I guess, an inmate that is positioned, you might say,
to do that job. And it’s possible that the IRS did not have
somebody, per se, in SeaTAC FDC ready, willing, and able to
do that, but BATF had a guy who was just ready to be – or
who could be arrested at a moment’s notice down in – near
Eugene, Oregon, and brought up to handle a task that they
wanted to accomplish.
Q. Now, are you saying that Jeff Gordon had somehow or another
asked Mike McNall to have his informant do this? Is that
the theory?
A. Whether it was – I mean, whether it was Jeff Gordon
personally or one of the many other of his associates –
well, frankly, again, I was in jail at the time. I don’t
have personal knowledge of their communication 150 miles
away in Portland, Oregon. But I believe that in general it
was those organizations which were interested in having me
put in the hole for purposes of keeping me away from the
telephone, my attorney, calling home, that kind of thing,
because there’s virtually no phones in the hole you can get
except once a week. In regular population in this jail you
can call almost any time you want. Except, of course, at
nighttime or when you are locked down.
Q. Mr. Bell, if the government, if the government agent, Mr.
Gordon, was distressed, because apparently, according to
you, the government had offered you a better deal than he
wanted you to receive, what would be his interest in having
you go through with the plea agreement when, if you just
revoked it, then you would get more time?
A. That’s a good question. I hope – I think I have a
satisfactory answer for that, I hope.
The deal they offered was apparently all they could get, and
based on what I believe subsequently, or I have learned
subsequently, I believe that they couldn’t afford to have a
trial in this case because they were using undercover
evidence that they didn’t want to expose.
You see, let me explain. Sometimes you might learn
something that you might be able to use but you don’t want
to admit having gotten the information in the first place.
For example, you know, 40 years ago Martin Luther King’s
bedroom was bugged by the FBI or something. Well, what if
they heard that a murder occurred in the bedroom by two
totally unrelated people? Are they going to admit that they
bugged Martin Luther Kings’ bedrooma nd expose their entire
bugging operation to thousands of Americans or hundreds of
Americans at the time just to prosecute a murder? Probably
not. And my theory here is that they couldn’t – at the time
they couldn’t – they couldn’t afford prosecution because
they had surreptitious evidence taken and they knew that all
they could do is have a deal, and they didn’t want to go
back and have a trial.
Q. So you felt that you were the subject of illegal
surveillance because of what reason?
A. Well, that’s certainly a different – okay. The first –
well, the first – well, I thought it was illegal
surveillance when Steve Wilson was bugging me and the common
law court. The next, and, frankly, outrageous example of
surveillance was in the days between, I think, the third
Thursday of June – excuse me – June 1998 and Fathers’ – or
Fathers’ Day Sunday, which is June 22rd, 1998.
Q. All right.
A. This was two-and-a-half months after I had first – had
gotten out of prison on the original charge. I was on
probation.
Q. Why were they – why were they expending res- -- what was
your theory as to why they were expending these resources on
you, or did you feel that this was just something that the
government did as a matter of course?
A. At the time I, I really didn’t know. At the moment it
happened, I didn’t know why they were doing what they were
doing. They were – they were following me and some of my
family members around Vancouver, Washington. There was an
instance where I had gone to a very small libertarian group
meeting at a place called Smokey’s Pizza in a place called
Orchards, Washington, which is a little bit northeast of
Vancouver. It was the third Thursday of June. It was seven
o’clock, and I was at the meeting with other people, and –
yeah. And I had gone there by way of bus. I didn’t have a
car, of course. And during the last leg of the bus trip,
there was this bald man who was on the trip as well. He was
– he looked rather interesting. I mean, in terms of what I
thought he was.
About four or five hundred yards before the bus even got
where – to Smokey’s Pizza in Orchards, he stood up from
across – diagonally across, and he walked over to the bus
driver, and I was sitting right beside the bus driver, and
he said to the bus driver, “Where – can you tell me where
Smokey’s Pizza is?”
Okay. We were on a bus, on the last leg of the journey.
Why was he going to Smokey’s Pizza? And he was 400 yards
away and he didn’t know where Smokey’s Pizza was. Most
people have cars, I didn’t. Most people don’t go to places
by bus if they don’t know where they are, you understand?
You know, you do not take a bus to a place you don’t know
where it is. This guy was standing up in front of me asking
the guy, where is Smokey’s Pizza, my destination.
Q. So you felt he was some kind – this was some kind of effort
to alert you to something or to – or the man had
inadvertently said something he shouldn’t, or what did you
think?
A. No, I don’t think he in- -- he didn’t do it for purposes of
alerting me. I – or – I don’t think it was inadvertently
said. I think the purpose of this was this. Let me
explain. He, of course, if he was who I eventually believe
he was, he doesn’t want to make it look like he was
following me. Do you understand? If you’re going in a
relatively rural area with a bus and one person gets off and
the other – another person follows, guess what happens? The
person who goes off first thinks, or I’m thinking, I’m being
followed. Well, he obviously wanted to get off, or
eventually at the time he got off at the same stop I did.
But he probably wanted to be able to sort of show me that he
knew he wanted to get off at Smokey’s Pizza before I
demonstrated I wanted to get off at Smokey’s Pizza.
Q. How would he have known that you were going to Smokey’s
Pizza?
A. Well, if he was a government agent who was assigned to
follow me, the reason he knew was because this was a group
of libertarians, that we had literally been meeting together
for ten years. Very small, close – I shouldn’t say close
knit. With respect to this meeting, was very close knit.
We rarely got anybody other than those four or five people,
or families of people. Sometimes, but very rarely.
So when – excuse me. So we just didn’t often get that. An
extra person.
Q. Is this before or after Steve Wilson met you at that
location?
A. Oh, that was a year. The incident I just described is a
year – about a year after Steve Wilson met me at – I believe
we haven’t mentioned the Steve Wilson –
Q. Didn’t you say that he did – at one point did you say that
he met you at Smokey’s Pizza?
A. Well, the common law court meeting was at a place called
Stark Street Pizza in Portland.
Q. Okay.
A. The Smoke – the Smokey’s Pizza was in Orchards, Oregon – or
Orchards, Washington, and he – and Steve Wilson also met me
at Orchards, Washington –
Q. My question to you is, is this before or after he had met
you there?
A. The – the – the men following me on the bus was June of ’98.
The Steve Wilson thing there was a year earlier. More than
a year earlier, actually. May of ’97.
Q. So you felt that this man was conducting surveillance of
you.
A. I believe so, because if he was following me, he had to have
been following me for a reason, and presumably he’s not just
there to look at me. He was there to do something in
addition to that. But at the time, when – when he and I
left the bus, I didn’t know for sure – I felt fairly
confident that he was following me at that point. The very
fact that he would say, “Where is Smokey’s Pizza?”
immediately –
Q. Okay.
A. – said this guy doesn’t know where he’s going. I said,
that’s weird.
Q. Now, let’s move ahead a little bit. You have this theory
that you believe – your truly believe this. You truly
believe the government has been engaged in a pattern of
illegal behavior towards you for several years at this
point, by the time you are released from prison in April of
2000.
A. Oh, well –
Q. You firmly – you firmly believe that to be true?
A. They are probably arguing –
Q. I’m not asking you what they believe.
A. Okay.
Q. I’m asking you what you believe.
A. There has been a substantial amount, I believe, of illegal
activity, illegal survellance, including the Ryan Lund
assault, some threats previous to the Ryan Lund assault at
Pierce County Jail and Kitsap County Jail in ’97, and
surveillance, illegal surveillance in other ways.
Q. And you believed that your home was under surveillance from
next door neighbors.
A. As odd as it may sound, I believe you.
Q. You believed that your – that when you were driving with
John Copp, he testified that your – that his car was being
watched, followed by an airplane.
A. Yes. And, in fact, I have a – an exhibit here that I have
drawn up over lunch that describes – which I can describe
the route we took and what we saw, and so forth and so on.
But, yes.
Q. And John Copp testified to why he thought that the two of
you were under surveillance, also, didn’t he?
A. Yes, that’s right. That’s what he said. He was convinced
that we were under surveillance. He was the person,
actually, who first spotted the airplane that night. The
sky was black, the airplane had lights on.
Q. What I’m saying is, but when you were released in April of
2000 from prison, you, personally, Jim Bell, were convinced
that the government had engaged in a pattern of illegal
activity and illegal surveillance – maybe legal, also – of
you, but that they were watching you and that there was a
coordinated effort to cover up the fact that you had been
assaulted at the directions of a government agent.
A. I was and am absolutely convinced of it, totally and
completely.
Q. Now, if you believe that to be so, what was your reason for
trying to personally contact Jeff Gordon at his home rather
than anyplace else?
A. Well, I was actually threatened with arrest through another
attorney, a Mr. Solovy who represents – who represented me.
Q. Is that the same Mr. Solovy who we saw that fax where you
wrote that note on it?
A. I don’t think it was a fax, but, yes, I wrote – it was a
letter to Mr. Solovy, my attorney, and I had written the
letter, and I believe I had faxed it to him and I kept the
original. Yes, that Mr. Solovy.
Q. Okay. So – okay. So my question to you is, why were you
wanting to contact Jeff – first of all, why were you trying
to find out where Jeff Gordon lived, and they why were you
trying to contact him at his home?
A. Well, I believe that this illegal activity has been going on
since – again, certainly since Steve Wilson infiltrated the
Multnomah County Common Law Court, and many other instances.
I thought that Jeff Gordon either was personally responsible
for this or in fact was one of many government agencies who
were a part of this activity, that he certainly should have
– would have or should have known about this, and I wanted
to talk to him. And I also wanted to talk to Mike McNall,
who appeared to me to be the case agent for Ryan Lund,
because he was the one who participated in the search of
Ryan Lund’s house on July 2nd, 1997. He was the one who
wrote up the application for the search warrant a couple
days earlier. He was the one – well, he – the paperwork in
the case showed that he was the main federal agent
associated with that case and Mike McNall.
Q. Well, why would speaking to him at his home be any more
effective than either talking to him on the phone or talking
to him at his office?
A. I believed that it’s conceivable – more than conceivable –
that the communication between Mike –- or between Ryan Lund
and whoever asked him to put me in the hole, occurred – one
person talking to another person over a phone that might not
have been monitored or recorded. In other words, quite
literally there would be no evidence of the fact that
somebody called Ryan Lund – or excuse me – Ryan Lund called
somebody. You can’t call into the jail. And I thought that
– I thought that Mike McNall would know who it is or he
would know who contacted – who was contacted by Ryan Lund.
Why I wanted to go to him personally at his residence?
Well, if there was illegal activity going on, that I
suspected for a number of – for a few years, it’s possible
that it was either a rogue operation or a few people who
just sort of got together and did things. And if I were to
have visited him at the official office, everybody else
around him would be alerted that Jim Bell was talking to
Mike McNall, and Mike McNall might not be willing to tell me
something that he might be, well, willing to tell me if
nobody else was around. And if I were to call into the
agency and say, “My name is Jim Bell. I would like to talk
to Mike McNall,” that, of course, would be a red flag. And
if Mike McNall wasn’t the person who was responsible for
Lund’s activities, calling in for him would be literally
pointless.
Q. Did you ever try?
A. No, I didn’t.
Q. So how do you know it would have been pointless?
A. My assessment of the situation, I concluded that. I knew
that if I tried, the moment I tried it would wave a red
flag, and once you have waved a red flag, you can’t unwave
the flag. I didn’t –
Q. Could you call from a pay phone and use a phony name?
A. Could I? Well, in hindsight, I suppose I could, but it
could be – it could be that those lines are monitored at his
organization, and it’s possible that I would – that in
asking him the question, somebody else in his organization
would also find out that – and, well, that he was being
contacted about Ryan Lund. And, in addition, even if I
said, I asked about Ryan Lund, that itself would raise some
warning flag, particularly if Ryan Lund was in fact what I
thought, a government informer. They get very touchy about
their own informers, I suspect. And they’re not going to
ask – answer questions about their informers.
He may have been an informant – correction. He might be an
informant doing something for the government and he just
assaulted me as an extra little thing that he did one day.
He was – may have had a bigger fish to fry somewhere else.
But somebody who said, oh, we need – or somebody said, we
need Bell in the hole. Lund is convenient, let’s ask him.
Q. So are you saying that the real purpose of all of this was
to show that Ryan Lund had done this at the direction of
someone else; that was really what you were trying to prove?
A. That’s true. And also potentially to identify, if possible,
the person responsible.
Q. Okay. But when you went to – now, turning to Scott Mueller.
Scott Mueller was a name that you – you knew it as a
different name originally. It came to you from John Young,
is that correct?
A. Yes. Let me explain. The Mueller thing has literally
nothing to do with the – any of the other stuff in this
case. I subscribe to an area called Crypherpunks, which I
believe has been discussed. It’s an Internet mailing list.
Messages come in and I can respond. We do favors for each
other. We will ask questions, ask for information, check
out information, whatever. One day a message appeared on
the Cypherpunks list from a person named John Young, a
person who I had never physically met. I had never called
him up.
Q. Did you know of him?
A. Oh, yes, I knew, because he was another person who posted or
was interested in the Cypherpunks list. I knew him as a
subscriber, or course.
Q. Did you know what his – did you know that he had this
philosophy that there should be no such thing as government
secrets?
A. I really – generally speaking, yes. He ran a site which
clearly indicated that – that he wouldn’t have run if he
didn’t believe what you just said.
Q. And that he also believed that the names of government
operatives and their personal addresses should be posted on
the Internet?
A. Yes. In fact, I seem to recall, one of the things that was
posted on his site was something that came from a – I don’t
know – a Japanese secret service or Japanese version of the
CIA, a list of a hundred of their alleged operatives. It
was posted on his site. I don’t recall where he got it.
Basically it was like outing a hundred members of the
Japanese version of the CIA. That’s all in a day’s work
for, I guess, for people like Mr. Young.
Q. Did you assist him in this, in this belief he had by going
to Mr. Mueller’s residence and putting where he lived, the
vehicles that he had, the friends that he had, the license
plates and his telephone number? Weren’t you assisting him
in doing that?
A. Well, he didn’t request assistance, and I – and frankly, I
didn’t even offer assistance. I simply took the information
that he had posted, a single page, which I believe has been
entered into evidence in the prosecution, and I took that
information, and I happened to have an Oregon DMV database –
actually a number of them – and I looked through that Oregon
DMV database for the name that, according to the file that
Mr. – I guess Mr. Young – understand, when something appears
on the list that says, let’s say, John Young, I can’t know
who actually sent it. Although the first, first
approximation, I would assume it’s John Young.
Excuse me.
I took that name and I ran it through. I looked through the
Oregon DMV list. The first search I did is, the name was
Deforest X. Mueller. That’s all it said, Deforest X.
Mueller. I said, well, gee, Deforest is a rare name, so –
relatively, so I searched the Oregon DMV database for every
Deforest that appeared in – as a registered owner of a
vehicle or as a license plate owner, you know, registered –
a registered driver or registered vehicle owner.
Q. For the sake of time, Mr. Bell, let’s skip by all of the
exhausting things you did. What was your ultimate
conclusion by running all of these different databases,
spending hours and hours of researching?
A. Well, it wasn’t all –
Q. What was your –
A. The Mueller thing was simply to verify the truth or the
falsity, not to vari – to gather information as to the truth
or falsity of the theory that maybe this guy had something
to do with the CIA. I found a few things which made it
rather substantially more interesting than it started out
being.
Q. Okay. So there were anomalies and curiosities that made you
think, maybe in fact he is a CIA operative?
A. Possibly. I thought he might have been possibly a very low-
level CIA employee. I don’t mean somebody who’s a spy or
anything. I just mean a local guy who just –
Q. Well, you didn’t know. He could have been, for that matter,
the deputy director of the CIA, for all you knew.
A. Well, I wouldn’t think they would put him in Bend, Oregon,
but –
Q. But you really didn’t know.
A. That’s true. I had – and, of course, I’m fully aware, and I
have been for years, of course, that literally anything can
be typed into a computer. You could put a message that says
Jim Bell, CIA Director. Insert whatever name you wanted.
People can type anything they want. The existence of that
name on – in that database is by no means proof of the truth
of the allegation. The only thing I recall hearing or
reading in the message was that the database came from a
governmental orgaization, I believe called ISTAC – I-S-T-A-
C. It’s an acronym that I don’t know, or don’t know what it
stands for. So it was a government database that listed
this guy, the name.
Q. Did you confirm that?
A. No.
Q. Did you rely on the fact that John Young had typed it on the
Internet?
A. Well, it didn’t – I didn’t know whether a person
specifically named John Young typed it. The message simply
appeared in a name that sounded familiar – or was familiar,
John Young.
Q. And you accepted it as true?
A. No.
Q. Well, you –
A. I asked a whole lot – let me explain. Let me be completely
accurate here.
For the purpose – I accepted that, the assertion that this
information was collected from the government, open –
perfectly open database, and that it said what it was
printed out to say. As for whether or not the information
of that printout was actually correct, no, I didn’t accept
it as being true. I – it was, as far as I was concerned, it
was a mystery. At that point it was a mystery.
I don’t know if any of you have ever gone to Bend? Maybe
you haven’t, but I – I went to Bend many times in the mid
‘80s for caving purposes, for spelunking. I hadn’t been to
Bend for ten years. And Bend is not the kind of place that
I would suspect them to put a federal government agency.
Now, John Young wouldn’t have known what Bend, Oregon, was.
I knew it as, ten years ago, as a small town. So it was a
mystery why anybody would be listed with a little initial
cia and a name and an address in Bend, Oregon. It didn’t
make sense.
Q. So ultimately you went to Bend, Oregon, and took photographs
of this house.
A. Yes. But the reason – the reason I actually went, as
opposed to what I had initially done, go through the
database, is I found very interesting and curious
inconsistencies and problems, well, with the data that came
through. Let me give you an example. The name –
Q. Let me just ask you, did the databases that you were
accessing in the Internet, you were accessing, were you
hacking into computers or was this publicly accessible
information?
A. Oh, absolutely publicly accessible. I did access a number
of sites that drew maps. If any of you know the Internet,
you know there are various sites that will allow you to type
in an address, and it will print out a map for you, full
color with roads and everything. Well, they are publicly
available, free. Anyone of you can access it. It’s just
like – it’s like being able to have a map of the entire
United States, just by typing it in the computer. It’s
publicly accessible.
I didn’t – you know, despite the fact that I’m somewhat of a
– I’m sort of a computer nerd, I have never attempted to try
to get into any computer system illegally in my entire life.
And the only time I inadvertently got into somebody’s
account, about 23 years ago at MIT, the only reason I got in
inadvertently is because the system had been mistakenly
programmed, so when the guy hung up without logging off, the
next guy, who I wads, called in, I got logged in under his
name. I found that out, and I immediately logged out. That
was an inadvertent thing, 23 years ago, I guess, probably.
Q. So you’re not a hacker?
A. Well, you’re raising a – I’m sorry, you sort of hit a hot
bud here.
When I went to MIT, the term “hacker” referred to anybody
who is expert in anything. That’s because ---
Q. As the term is used today.
A. Well, as the term is misused today, tends to use – to refer
pejoratively to somebody who likes to break into computer
systems and erase data and modify things, do bad things.
The term “cracker” is, because they crack the system, they
break into it, that’s sort of the preferred term on the
Internet now. Those are – crackers are the people who like
to do illegal things. Hacker, I would like to think –
unfortunately, because of its abuse, its hard to say – is
sort of just simply a general purpose term for a person who
is familiar with the concept and the technology.
Q. Have you – in your search of Mr. Mueller or any of these
searches that you did in connection with the matters that
you are on trial on, did you go into any computers that
required passwords and log one which weren’t appropriate for
you to do so?
A. Oh, I’ve never done anything like that.
Q. So this is all publicly accessible information?
A. Yes, it is, publicly accessible.
Q. So as a result of all of your searches, maps, checking, DMV,
you ultimately determined, or at least felt, that this
gentleman was actually a CIA operative?
A. No. Because all – well, what I had determined through the
database search was there are inconsistencies in the name,
the domain Deforest X. Mueller, which is as it appeared in
the message claiming to be from ISTAC. And I found a – the
name in the database, the DMV, was Scott Deforest Mueller,
not Deforest X. Mueller; Scott Deforest. In other words,
the guy had sort of slightly modified – or I assumed he had
– sort of slightly modified the name. A different first
name, of course, and shifted the – or the middle name was
shifted to the first, and the X was added. And so – and
that seemed rather odd to me, it seemed vaguely like you
might expect a very low-level CIA person to do.
In addition, I found a car registered in the database for a
Deforest Scott Mueller. No Scott Deforest Mueller. And
that reversal of the first and the second names looked odd,
again.
In addition, in the same – at the same address that Mr.
Mueller was at, there was a guy – listed a person, John Ashe
and, I believe, an Anna Ashe. And they were at the same
address – same address during, I guess, the same year, but
it wasn'’ clear if they were the same or different people.
And at one point I thought, well, maybe that’s an alias or
something.
Q. Would it be fair to say that you spent tens, if not
hundreds, of hours on this project, including traveling to
Bend to check out your various suspicions?
A. No. On the computer, probably only about two to three
hours.
Q. Okay.
A. As to driving to Bend, that – that was a – that was mostly a
sight-seeing trip, and I could – I would have done that
anyway. I mean, I have a long history with John Copp of
just driving out in the wilderness, in the boonies. We’ve
done that for years. Literally drive 50 or 100 miles and
camp or – on forest roads, if you have driven on forest
roads. We do that. That’s one of the things we do. And
driving to Bend, I guess, is a hundred miles away or –
that’s, to him, he likes to drive. He’s been a cab driver
in the past and he’s been a cop in the past, and he drives
for fun, really. So going to Bend –
Q. As a result of all that, though, there was an email where
you sent back to John Young that you have “outed” Scott
Mueller, or Deforest X. Mueller, or whatever various names
he has, and sent back all of this personal information about
him which was then posted on a website.
A. Well, I concluded from all the different discrepancies, and
there were a number of different discrepancies, that made it
look like a genuine – like a genuine name, Scott Deforest
Mueller, had been changed in so many different ways and
adjusted and – and the name of the Anna Ashe and John Ashe,
I concluded that some very low-level government person was
making these word games or name games in his business or his
life, and that it probably was somebody who wanted a certain
level of security or privacy, and it may have been a very –
a very, very low-level employee of some agency, possibly the
CIA. I – that was one possibility. I didn’t know for sure.
And that’s what – it was the discrepancies that got me
curious enough to want me – to want to go to Bend, Oregon,
as I hadn’t been there for ten years, and I wanted to see
how Bend, Oregon, had built up over the years.
Q. You heard him testify he doesn’t work for the CIA and he’s a
real estate broker. So at this –
A. Yes.
Q. – point do you think he’s lying or do you think he works for
the CIA?
A. I think he’s probably telling the truth.
Q. So you were wrong.
A. Well, in saying – well –
Q. You were mistaken?
A. The one thing that I said, of all the email exchanges
saying, quote, something like I “outed” the CIA guy, that
conclusion, which at that point was really only preliminary,
appears to be wrong. But if you look at the way I worded
all of my searching, I didn’t conclude the truth of the
original assertion, I merely tried to collect data to verify
and to show the inconsistencies and to basically figure out
what really went on, why – or what’s going on, who’s there,
what’s happening.
Q. Do you feel you acted irresponsible?
THE COURT: That’s enough, counsel. The jury is going
to go home.
Please do not discuss the case over the weekend among
yourselves or with anyone else. 9:30 Monday morning.
(Jury excused, 4:30 p.m.)
THE COURT: Nobody is to leave the courtroom until the
jury has cleared the corridor.
Anything to take up?
MR. LEEN: No, Your Honor.
MR. LONDON: No, Your Honor.
MR. LEEN: Oh, Your Honor, one matter.
THE WITNESS: Discovery notes.
MR. LEEN: There is one matter.
Your Honor, we would need for Mr. Bell to be able to have
his discovery notes, which are in the counselor’s office at
FDC pursuant to the court’s order, we would need another
court order allowing Mr. – allowing his counselor to give
the notes to the marshal so that he can bring them to court.
THE COURT: What notes?
MR. LEEN: Mr. Bell’s notes of the discovery that he
reviewed in the counselor’s office. The court entered an
order saying that Mr. Bell could review discovery in the
counselor's office at FDC and could take notes when he was
in the counselor’s office, but he was not allowed to bring
the discovery or his notes back to the cell with him. And
when he wanted to bring them to court, he was told by his
counselor there needed to be a court order authorizing her
to release those to the marshals so they could be brought to
court for his review.
THE COURT: There is not going to be a court order.
MR. LEEN: The defendant does need those notes, Your
Honor, to assist in his testimony.
THE COURT: There will not be a court order.
MR. LEEN: Yes, sir.
MR. LONDON: Does he – may I ask for clarification?
Does he have access to his notes when he’s at SeaTac?
THE DEFENDANT: No.
MR. LONDON: When he’s at SeaTac, at the FDC, can he go
n that room –
MR. LEEN: When he’s in the counselor’s office he has
access to his notes.
THE DEFENDANT: No. No, I actually don’t.
MR. LEEN: Okay.
THE DEFENDANT: They’re else – I sealed them in an
envelope with the discovery that I looked at to generate the
notes, but I do not have access to that material, and I
haven’t since I last looked at that discovery material
approximately a week ago.
MR. LEEN: Mr. Bell, if you ask the counselor to see
your notes when you went to the room, would she let you see
them?
THE DEFENDANT: The counselor is not frequently there,
I couldn’t – most of the time I couldn’t even ask her for it
anyway. It is very unlikely – she probably is not going to
be there on the weekend.
MR. LEEN: She doesn’t work there on the weekend, I
would indicate, Your Honor. She works Monday through
Friday. I just was clarifying that point.
THE COURT: I will tell you one more time, there will
not be a court order. At this time.
MR. LEEN: Yes, sir.
Have a nice weekend, Your Honor.
THE COURT: Anything else to take up?
MR. LONDON: No, Your Honor. It is late. I don’t know
if this is a time for Mr. Leen and I to do instructions
conference with the court, but we could do that Monday
morning as easily.
THE COURT: Well, the instructions, if we ever finish
the testimony, other than the one that says he has a
constitutional right not to testify, will stand as they are.
MR. LONDON: Well, Mr. Leen has a couple of objections.
THE COURT: I haven’t heard anything to the contrary.
MR. LONDON: Well, pretrial Mr. Leen filed some
objections to two of our instructions. I have since looked
at those instructions and am prepared and willing to make
some modifications in them that I think are acceptable.
THE COURT: Well, bring them; up when you – does the
court have them?
MR. LONDON: Not yet. I will – you know, now that
we’re going over the weekend, I can alter them myself. I
will bring them Monday.
THE COURT: That’s all.
MR. LEEN: Your Honor, I – nothing more. 9:30 Monday
morning?
THE COURT: That’s when we will be there.
Court’s in recess.
(Recessed at 4:35 p.m.)
C E R T I F I C A T E
I certify that the foregoing is a correct transcript from
the record of proceedings in the above-entitled matter.
_________________________________ July 2, 2001__
JULIANE V. RYEN Date