Michael Hollingsworth
Infowars
September 30, 2009
Today started not unlike any other. Except that one of my friends emailed me a story about how a company called American Police Force has moved into a town south of me called Hardin, and how they were “taking over that jail that was built and never opened”. Now most Montanans are aware of this financial OOPS that was this modern jail. It was built, and never opened because it was not built to specs in accordance with prisoner housing requirements pursuant to Montana State Law.
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The new prison facility in Hardin, Montana. |
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When I started reading the KULR 8 news stations reports on this “American Police Force”, it immediately made me suspicious as that is totally against the idea of police. Our police are hired and mandated by the local governments they are local to. They are required to go to what’s called POST, or Peace Officer’s Standards of Training. This school is mandatory by Montana Law prior to be appointed as a “sworn peace officer”.
With these concerns in mind, I started making phone calls. I started with Becky Shay, who was the Billings Gazette reporter who initially broke the story. I spent an hour and a half with her and talked about all of the details. She and I had a positive talk where she assured me that she was “thankful for the chance to be able to talk to people like me.” I was appalled to hear that this company had “no intention of revealing who their parent company is”. Ms. Shay confided in me that she went from a reporter’s salary and conditions “driving a ‘99 Dodge Intrepid with a broken tie rod and bad front brakes”, to “a brand new black SUV that she doesn’t have to pay the gas bill for”. My jaw was on the floor. Story breaker straight to the being the mouth of the beast…
Ms. Shay also told me that there are people in Hardin that are so grateful for APF’s presence, that they literally opened their homes to her if she needed a place to say. Now this SOUNDS great and all, but it also sounded very manufactured. This conversation went down as if Ms. Shay was trying to sell me something. I read some things about how APF arrived in Hardin, Montana with the words: Hardin Police on the door. This is IMPERSONATING A POLICE OFFICER. They had NO RIGHT to bear that title. They are NOT sworn as peace officers. They have NO AUTHORITY!
It was shortly before I ended this call on a positive note, that Ms. Shay expressed a GREAT interest in talking to Alex. I told her that I would be contacting the AJ show. I was told by her that I was TOTALLY 100% OK’d to use ALL of the content in any further correspondence. I then called Mr. Al Pedersen who is the Executive Director of Two Rivers Authority, the financial entity that is in charge of attempting to rebuild Hardin’s infrastructure. I asked Mr. Pedersen to elaborate how a private military company could move into a town, take over a prison that did not meet Montana Code, and dare to emblazon “Hardin Police” on their doors…Mr. Pedersen cursed me out, and hung up on me. I called him back, got his voicemail, and left the message that since he could not see fit to talk to me civilly, that I would be calling all of my elected officials as well as CNN and CSPAN. No reply.
I then proceeded to call KULR8 news in Billings, Montana. They expressed concern about how a near 20 year career reporter could simply sell out and go to work for the very company SHE ousted! The person I spoke to said, “she got herself a bigger paycheck, can’t fault her for that!”. This person also conceded that it was a sell out situation, and was sick. I than called the Office of the Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer. The person who answered the phone assured me that Gov. Schweitzer was watching this situation and would see to it that there was NOTHING illegal or unconstitutional going on, and that his office would NOT allow these people to overstep any legal boundaries. They didn’t want to talk about how the APF showed up labelled as “police”. This conversation was abruptly ended by the intern.
I then called the Office of Max Baucus’ Billings location who denied any knowledge. Although Schweitzer, Baucus, and Mt Senator Jon Tester were sued by Two Rivers Authority to allow this prison to be used by a private entity…wherein a judge overturned Montana Law in order to allow this prison to be used privately without disclosing where the prisoners are coming from, or their nature. This company is known to be affiliated with Blackwater Security now known as XE, as well as other PMC’s.
For more information or to post Montanna news tips please go to.
http://freedomvideousa.forumwise.com/
#1 by Pancho on 11/15/2009 - 10:10 AM
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For some reason, a Google alert just brought this story up this morning for the first time.
I find the conversation with Al Peterson recounted to be very interesting, if it’s true. Unfortunately, a great many of the things written here aren’t true or accurate, starting with Peterson’s name.
The jail was not opened because it didn’t meet “Montana specs.” It didn’t open because it was built in violation of state laws regarding importation of prisoners, for instance. The design was horrible, but that was because the promoters could make more on a crappy design that on a useful one.
The name of the “parent company” wasn’t revealed because there wasn’t any “parent company.” This was a scam put together by a single, transparent con man who bilked about five people for the seed money he used to run the scam.
The scam was so foolish that it took me all of two hours to largely prove it was a hustle on September 10th, the morning the first story appeared in the media. Michael Hilton claimed he had a DC address which he did not occupy, he had a website entirely full of bogus material, he claimed they had been around for, variously, 107 years and 25 years, when they’d only registered the corporation at a small private home six months earlier, and the website four months earlier.
He made many other ridiculous claims in his first public statements on 9/9, including that he as the APF could transport a “brigade” of special forces to anywhere in the world in 72 hours. That would probably be an impossible task for the US government. He also claimed he would build homeless and animal shelters for free, raise tens of millions for a “training facility” in the middle of nowhere, quadruple the size of the empty jail which was already too big for any available prisoner population and would have been impossible to staff, and, for good measure, he would “feed the hungry” in Hardin, with (non-existent) police delivering food to those who couldn’t come and get it and distribute free computers to the local schools.
Now it would seem that anyone with even a room-temperature IQ would have seen through that, but no one on the Hardin city council did so, no one on its industrial authority board did so, its attorney didn’t, and neither did its economic development director. Many of them had been wined and dined in Santa Ana as they “negotiated” the jail contract with the non-existent APF, Hilton using money he’d bilked from others to pay for it.
Hilton invented a logo for the non-existent Hardin “Police Department,” and included a figure from his native country, Serbia. That set conspiracy theorists into a dither. He could have as well included a Girl Scout logo, but that wouldn’t have sold as well with the “black helicopter” crowd. WIld and completely untrue tales of Hilton and his two hired drivers morphing into a platoon of mercenaries building gates to the tiny city, “pulling people over,” forcing flu vaccinations on people, etc. , were endlessly repeated on nutcase sites such as Prison Planet.
Alex Jones even traveled to Hardin and was unable to observe in person that this was all complete horse manure, as he shriekingly fed the “NWO” and “FEMA concentration camps” flames. The story was too stupid, convenient and useful to debunk.
Max Baucus and Jon Tester were never sued so this jail could be operated as “a private entity.” In fact a suit was filed and settled long before Tester was elected, to get the jail authority to import prisoners. Schweitzer was on the suit only because he was the head of state government. Baucus didn’t know anything about this because there wasn’t anything to know. As soon as word got out in April about the preceeding ridiculous jail proposal, to import Guantanamo detainees, he, Tester and Congressman Reberg all turned thumbs down on it.
The judge in the ’07-08 case didn’t give an order that would allow the would-be jail operators to refuse to disclose where prisoners would be coming from, he merely opened the way to import from other states.
Hilton and his imaginary “APF” or “APPF” had zero relationship to Blackwater (Xe) or any other entity. A very small amount of material on the APF website had been stolen from Blackwater. Hilton’s web builder had also stolen a version of Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero,” but it didn’t have anything to do with symphonies, and he stole a page of “military weapons available for sale” from Airsoft: That’s right. He was an “arms merchant” “selling” bb and paintball guns, and none of the conspiracy theorists noticed, so delighted were they in groundless speculations about a “national police force.” Some wacked out fundamentalist Christians also posted to blogs claiming that Hilton and the APF were portents that signaled the Second Coming of Christ. Woo-woo!
Jones and his ilk took credit for “exposing” Hilton when I and a colleague had actually done so three weeks earlier, and well after I had supplied the regional press with dozens of pages of cases where Hilton had been sued for fraud, eviction, breach of contract, and had filed false bankrupty actions to forestall evictions for non-payment of rent. I also included some of his criminal convictions.
Almost six weeks after the right wing conspiracy theorists’ first claims, nine weeks after I’d debunked Hilton and his APF, not one of the “precious bodily fluids and Area 51″ sets, to the best of my knowledge, has apologized for being included as just another bunch of doofuses who were taken in by this third-rate con man.
After all, Hilton is not the only “man behind the curtain.”