I figured, before the time my thesis was published (most of it was written by 1997, the year of the McVeigh trial), that I could conduct a year-long surveillance and compilation of evidence for about the middle of six figures.
Two principles of conducting historical investigations are that, first, the longer a period of time passes between an historical incident and the present, the less first-hand sources the investigator will find.
The last person I helped depose (for another person's dissertation) regarding the bombing was a former deputy sheriff who helped clean up the mess left when 4800 pounds (estimated) of ammonium nitrate went off. He deposed that there were federal authorities who were denying access to the Sheriff's Department to certain places in the destroyed building, and it was his opinion that there had been a second blast. "Rusty" is now deceased.
I asked him if he thought justice had been done by the execution of McVeigh. "They ain't got all of 'em" was his answer.
The second principle is simple and inexorable: the longer after the incident, the more expensive it will be to conduct the investigation.
I got a couple of nibbles about funding, but I gave up thinking about it for good when I quit truck driving to try once more at a musical career (which worked), because the price would have been seven figures by then. I don't really LIKE investigation, because even when you catch the bad guys with the goods, the best you really get to feel is grim satisfaction, and more often than not they end up getting away anyway!
I should quote Napoleon Bonaparte here, who once said (and I paraphrase, because you generally won't want to read it in French), "It doesn't matter if you suppress the truth. You can just delay its release until nobody cares any more."
There is one other obstacle to citizen-investigators: the news industry is by no means transparent, and neither the mainstream media nor the "alternative" press want any input from non-imbedded journalists unless the photos are breaking news, and not always then.
In my last investigation, in 2016, my team had the goods on Energy Transfer Partners, the pipeline company that drilled the Dakota Access Pipeline under the Missouri River in Sioux territory. We had definitive aerial photosurveillance footage and a 30-year pipeline expert to explain it.
And Obama was still President, and it was HIS Department of the Army (Army Corps of Engineers) which had mandated an environmental assessment before drilling could continue. ETP was criminally defying this, and on 29 January 2017 Trump, in one of his earliest moves, negated the USACE mandate and fired the Assistant Secretary of the Army who had made it.
Everyone from NBC through TruthOut, the Young Turks (who eventually took credit for "breaking" the story that the pipeline was finished "57 days ahead of schedule"), and US Senator Carper, stonewalled us.
Hence, sometimes, even when you've got the definitive evidence, and it's current and timely, and you don't even have to pay to get it, it's out of your hands.
Thank you, ACitizen,
William P. Homans, aka Watermelon Slim
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