Andy Thibault

Andy Thibault

Cool Justice
What Would Philip K. Dick Say?
By ANDY THIBAULT, Columnist
Law Tribune Newspapers
April 25, 2005

"Everything the government tells you," visionary author Philip K. Dick said in the 1950's, "is a lie."

During the Eisenhower years, Dick said, "We feared that the entire country was turning into one person and a whole set of clones (although in those days the word `clone' was unknown to us)."

He made the point in a short story, The Mold Of Yancy. This was around the time Dick wrote The Minority Report, the story made into a film decades later in which the government uses super psychics to identify and arrest citizens who will likely commit crimes.

Nowadays, I use Philip K. Dick as a frame of reference when I try to discern the antics of certain federal law enforcement officials. We're far beyond George Orwell's 1984 and I think we need Philip K. Dick to show us the way. My secondary guide in this endeavor is a Yale-trained economist who somehow spends much of his life jousting with the FBI.

Stephen P. Dresch, Ph.D., is Libertarian in spirit [and a member of the American Civil Liberties Union] who spent the late 1960's in New Haven studying economics, politics and philosophy. Over the years he became an expert witness in tort actions involving business loss. By the time I met Dresch - about eight years ago - he was working as a forensic economist and investigator. He could make big scores at will solving cases for corporations and insurance companies. He preferred, though, to confront government agencies that shut down investigations for political reasons - whether they were of Democratic Administrations for money-laundering or Republican Administrations for covering up botched terrorism probes. I have never met a more relentless and talented person than Dresch. He is truly dangerous.

Thus, I had to laugh when the FBI announced in the early days of April that it had "discovered" blasting caps and other explosive materials at the former Kansas home of convicted Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols.

A month earlier, Dresch had told Congress, the FBI and other agencies about the explosives cache. He sent me and many others copies of his letters and memos contemporaneously. Dresch noted ominously in these reports - which included a detailed description of the explosive materials -- that the anniversaries of Waco and OKC are April 19. Significantly, Dresch's prison sources asserted that the explosives were supplied to Nichols by an FBI informant. This could mean the FBI itself provided critical components of the OKC bomb.

It took the FBI about four weeks to respond to Dresch. About the time two agents interviewed Dresch -- on April 1 for 4 ½ hours - other agents attempted to seize the mail of one of his colleagues without a warrant.

Curiously, the FBI issued two contradictory statements after the explosives were found: It was (1. - "An anonymous tip; don't know the source." (2. - "Not the result of a tip but of a continuing investigation." Why would the government try to deny it had the information all along? This seems to be part of the pattern of denial in connection with the OKC bombing. Relatives of victims of the bombing -- some of whom are represented by attorney Richard Bieder of Bridgeport, have argued that Terry Nichols' friend Timothy McVeigh was just one player among many as the government failed to act on prior knowledge of the bombing.

Some of Dresch's prison sources, meanwhile, fear retaliation because neo- Nazis and skinheads at their facility are big fans of Nichols. It would be convenient for the government to have these sources moved into the general population of their prison.

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