Class action marks 10th anniversary of the Landslide FBI raid.

Brian Rothery, Ireland, Coordinator of the Operation Ore Group Action

There may be no better way to tell the story of this great travesty than by first showing a very brief video clip. [eidtor: You man also view this video at its original site at http://www.obu-investigators.com/images/raid.wmv]

These military type raids were the direct result of false information fed by American authorities, mainly the FBI and USPIS (US Postal Service) to the British police and via Interpol to police forces all around the world. The false information concerned what it was that the FBI allegedly found on the subscriber database of the notorious Landslide computers at Fort Worth Dallas when they raided them on 8 September 1998. Today, as this is written, it is the 10th anniversary of that fateful event which was to ruin the lives of many thousands worldwide.

Another outcome is a class action against the British police, of which I am the coordinator. Called the 'Operation Ore Group Action' (a class action is a group action over here), this is about to reach the High Court in London, United Kingdom. When our case reaches the court, worldwide reverberations of that event of ten years earlier should be heard and, if there is any justice there, they should roll back on America, where the travesty originated. The test appeal, a 'sample appeal', will hopefully be followed by a raft of appeals and claims for compensation for false arrests, convictions, cautions accepted under intimidation and much more. The group action team will be presenting new evidence secured in America, never before shown to the defence. It is hoped that after the group action is underway, charges of perverting the course of justice will be brought against the British police and their 'experts'.

Operation Ore was the extraordinary British response to the notorious Landslide case, but where the US authorities arrested only a little over 100 in America in connection with Landslide, the British, acting on false information from the US authorities, went after over 7,000, ruining most of them and their families. While the British were the worst by far in their response to the Landslide information, the US authorities through Interpol released the names of some 250,000 alleged subscribers to Landslide to the police forces of around 60 countries. One quarter of a million men and their families were thus affected by this travesty. Based on our estimate of British men who committed suicide as a result of the Landslide-originated police raids, thousands may have committed suicide worldwide.

After the British class action commences, it is planned to expand it worldwide. The main plank of the class action is based on prosecution evidence, never before shown to the defence, which we, the action team, have obtained by travelling secretly to Fort Worth Texas. This includes both the Landslide records and the relevant FBI files. We will also be exposing lies told by the US authorities.

The massive credit card fraud which we have uncovered has been up to now hidden or denied by the police. The British police are expected to claim that the US authorities hid this from them, but it was immediately apparent once we secured the evidence. The evidence has also provided clear proof that serious lies were told about its contents. None of this will be good news for certain individuals in the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS), the FBI and Terri Moore, a First Assistant in the Dallas County District Attorney's Office. In a show trial Terri Moore gained new political status by prosecuting Thomas Reidy, the owner of Landslide, and obtaining an initial ridiculous 1300 year prison sentence for him, later 'mercifully' reduced to 180 years. I must be clear that our business in the class action concerns the thousands of men and their families wrongly damaged by the US-supplied false information, in operations such as Ore, not in clearing Reidy, but we have unearthed much key evidence that casts doubt upon, and contradicts, key FBI and USPIS evidence used against him, and exposes downright lies. In our 'Fort Worth raid' to secure the suppressed evidence, we even obtained an FBI video made on the day of the 1998 Landslide raid that shows the FBI interfering with the evidence on the day while still on the premises - for example accessing and viewing the records online.

Now, lest some readers feel that our action is an example of democracy and justice at work, let me throw some cold water. First we are not there yet and second it is a miracle that we are where we are at all. Our situation is very similar to that of RSOL and its friends. Most, if not virtually all of those who are in our class action are broken and bankrupted. Just about all lost their jobs and businesses and many lost their spouses and families. Only mothers stood by a few. When I evolved into the position of originator and coordinator of the action, at first I could not find a solicitor to take it on. You have to reach lawyers through solicitors over here. It was so toxic that the legal profession did not want to touch it, reflecting the attitude of all the defence lawyers that had let their clients down during the Ore trials by either not mounting a proper defence or forcing them into plea bargaining to accept a 'caution' and registration (and ruin). Not one lawyer demanded to see the suppressed prosecution evidence that we were forced to mount a dangerous expedition to Texas to secure. One excuse the police gave for not producing it was that it contained 'awful images'. It actually contained list upon list of fraudulent credit card transactions. There was supposed to be a 'Click Here Child Porn' banner gateway that was used in court before shocked juries to convict hundreds and trumpeted over the media to shame all the accused. There was no such banner. The police swore there was no fraud. The database was rife with fraud.
Let me pause briefly to explain how the Landslide con worked. I should say the 'con using Landslide' as Reidy tried to stop it but failed. Making it as simple as possible, a small group of criminal webmasters around the world, bought lists of stolen credit cards and in a sophisticated almost 'laundering' mode used the Landslide commission system to rob innocent card owners. They set up fake web sites and registered them on the portal of Landslide, so that if a transaction clicked through to their sites, they received an automatic payment from the portal owner, Landslide. Most of these sites had no images as they were fakes, but to reduce the number of complaints about fraud they charged small amounts only for each access, say $29, and gave the sites nasty child porn names - 'Sexy Lolitas' and so on. If you were bold enough to complain to the cops about a $29 'Sexy Lolitas' transaction they would probably raid you. Many of the transactions were made from countries such as Brazil, which the card owner had never visited. Many of the $29 paid for 'memberships' were for sites that the card owner did not then visit. Some were even multiple memberships for the same site, all obviously fraudulent, but accepted apparently unquestioningly by the British police. Suffice it to say that once we had secured the evidence our forensics experts pored over it.

Returning to our trials and tribulations. We began with broken and bankrupted individuals, but eventually in 2006 I had the good fortune to find a good British human rights solicitor prepared to take on the class action. At that point, knowing we had to give him the material to fight with, we secured the evidence in a secret trip to Texas. The next problem was that, although our solicitor was about to provide a huge amount of pro bono support for expert witnesses, his own team and a good lawyer, we still needed to put up a substantial amount of money, the total of which I won't reveal here but will do so after our appeal.

At this point, we began to experience a police backlash and a program of intimidation. One activist who had pre-dated me had his web site shut down and was returned to prison for 7 months. It will be familiar to RSOL readers when I say that several potential key activists cannot be seen to be working for what we believe to be justice for fear of being returned to prison by their parole officers. The web site for the campaign became Inquisition 21st Centruy, which I edit. Apart from being a retired journalist, I had two other advantages: I was somewhat outside the jurisdiction as I live in Ireland and I was not affected by Ore or one of its sister raids, such as the one in Ireland. However, that said, neither I nor the web site were to escape. In late 2006, within hours of announcing that were back from America having secured the prosecution evidence, Google de-listed the Inquisition 21 web site, greatly restricting our attempts to raise the substantial initial sum needed to begin the class action. This however was still just the beginning. The first expert witnesses I approached rejected the case immediately. All worked for the police and risked any future work by supporting us. We had one excellent expert who had formerly worked for the police but changed sides when he became disillusioned with their malpractices. Shortly after we announced him, he was arrested, tried and convicted of perjury for 'miss describing' his qualifications. He received a suspended sentence, but it temporarily wrecked his work and his chances of representing us. Ironically, he was again raided by an over-confident police force for a second time and our privileged evidence (our actual case against the police) seized, so that they now knew our hand. The High Court ruled the raid to have been unlawful, ordered the return of the material, and in effect restored the status of our expert.

The Inquisition 21 web site, de-listed by Google for 7 months, was also hit with illegal material in what was possibly an attempt to discredit me and the class action. Complaints sent to the British 'independent police complaints authority' were either ignored or brushed off. Recently a second active member was raided and his laptop with more of our evidence seized.

It should be clear from all this that it's almost impossible to put right a miscarriage of justice once the police and prosecution have been involved in it. When that miscarriage of justice involves going against a current moral ideology, such as sex abuse, it is even more likely to be impossible to put right. Over the years that we struggled to get permission to appeal the Operation Ore travesty, we received little or no assistance from the media and none from a single member of parliament (MP). On the contrary when we began we faced a hostile and at times vicious media. That we have turned that around completely is a considerable success. In addition to all this, there is no witness protection program for those who try to report police crimes to the police. The key message here has to be that the justice system is flawed and programmed to reject attempts to put right miscarriages of justice - indeed, the greater the miscarriage, the greater it seems, in the words of Lord Denning, is the 'awful vista' that one must accept by admitting the truth.

So where are we? Mainly in a wonderful place in one of the few countries where the police state has not yet quite enveloped the Judiciary. We have managed to obtain the evidence, forensically examine it and get a professional team to present our submission to the Judiciary, where it is at least now beyond the reach of the police and prosecution, and where an august body will eventually give their verdict on it.