American Leviathan (Part Two)

"They won't let me testify. I told the cops that you saved my life and they just acted like I was crazy.... They got it all backwards." - Sin City

You may be familiar with the case of attorney Richard Hamlin, who claims his life was threatened by a generational Satanic cult to which his wife Susan belonged. If you only know it from corporate journalism, then something like this, which appeared October 26 in the Sacramento Bee, must be close to the sum of your knowledge:

A well-known veteran defense attorney and former Sacramento County prosecutor, Richard Hamlin is charged with 18 felony counts of torture, spousal abuse, making death threats, negligent discharge of a handgun and child endangerment. If convicted, the 45-year-old faces a life term in prison.

In opening statements to the jury of eight women and four men, Deputy District Attorney Vicki Ashworth said the case had nothing to do with conspiracies or devil worshippers.

"This case is about domestic violence and abuse," Ashworth said. No one else connected with the case has been charged.

But there's more, of course.

There's much worth reading regarding the case you won't find in the mainstream press, which is lazily playing to the state-sponsored consensus that conspiracies and ritual abuse simply do not exist, and for the defense to argue they do is to invite either a conviction or a ruling of criminal insanity. I won't reproduce all the material here, but three sites that should be of interest to those who know enough to maintain an open mind concerning such allegations are the official site for Hamlin's trial defense, Virginia McCullough's extensive coverage at Newsmakingnews.com, and this thread on the RI discussion board, to which Hamlin's brother Bradley is contribuing.

The case against Richard Hamlin follows upon a retraction by wife Susan of her February, 2004 confession to police of having sexually abused three of her four children and conspiring with members of a Satanic cult, including her father, Dr Sydney Siemer, to ritually murder her husband. (The police report can be read here. From the report of Deputy Murphy of the El Dorado County Sherriff's Office:

Susan originally told me that she is a Satanist and has ritually molested their four children, including digital penetration, under the instruction of her father (Sydney Siemer). Susan said her whole family is involved in a Satanic cult and that her father had raped her when she was a young girl and "passed her around to whoever else wanted to rape her."

Susan said there are child porn and snuff film tapes in her dad's house in Fresno and in a self storage center in Indio (Southern California). Susan said she started molesting her kids in 1996 and that her dad Sidney taught her how to put her kids in a "trance like or hyper relaxed stage." ... When we asked Susan if any of her kids knew about these incidents, she replied that in kindergarten in EDH, _____'s teacher had asked him to complete the sentence "I WISH MY MOM ____." _____ completed the sentence by telling the teacher "WOULD STOP LICKING ME."

Detective Hoagland, Lensing and I then re-interviewed Susan alone while tape-recording the interview. Susan waived her miranda rights and again made the same statement and confession during questioning.

Two letters Susan sent her father in 2003 are reproduced by Virginia McCullough here. The first, addressed "Dear Dad" and signed "Your baby," was composed while she struggled to make sense of childhood memories suggestive of abuse. Significantly, not all the memories are those she'd lately recovered: "One memory that I never really gave a second thought to in the past, but that has begun to cause more concern for me lately, is one that you could shed some light on for me. I don't need help reconstructing the memory -- that has always been very clear in my mind." (That particular memory concerned his molestation of her young friend during a sleep over. In Richard's open letter he writes that the friend has been found and will testify in his defense.) Siemer responded with an application prohibiting harassment and an application for a temporary restraining order. Susan's next letter was simply addressed to "Sid," and is far more assertive:

The first clue you had was in your kitchen when I mentioned that I had so many gaps in my memories of childhood. We were specifically talking about when we lived on Colonial. I was in junior high and high school. You got such an odd look on your face. You were studying my expression to see if I was just stupid, or if I was doing a really good job of playing along with the secret. I was really convincing, wasn't I? You were worried for only a second though, and recovered very well with your comment about Mom's "multiple" suicide attempts during that period in my life. Of course I would want to put those little unpleasantness out of my mind, you told me. The problem is that the version of the family myth that I was told was limited to only one such attempt? and, now even that is in question since I have recently learned that, upon her release from the hospital a day or two later, she went to the YWCA ?a shelter for abused women, where she stayed for approx. 2 weeks.

And all the while I kept remembering more and more....

McCullough adds that "individuals who wish to remain unidentified have said that Dr. Sid Siemer is a high ranking member of a CIA sanctioned child molestation ring called "The Finders" and also a senior member of the Order of the Trapezoid, consisting of worshippers of the Temple of Set."

The case gets weirder, and yet more familiar.

Did you catch the reference to Indio in the police report? Does Indio sound familiar? Does Indio sound like Casolaro? At one stage in his research into the guns and drugs and worse nexus that dominates America's parapolitical life, Danny Casolaro considered calling his book "Indio."

The man who led Casolaro into the world of the Octopus was Michael Riconosciuto, who claimed to have been research director of a joint venture of the Cabazon Indian tribe of Indio and spook-heavy security giant Wackenhut, where he modified PROMIS software on behalf of the US government which had stolen it from the Inslaw Corporation, in order to create a "back door" with which to spy into the files of PROMIS's client nations.

As Riconosciuto stated in his sworn affidavit on the Inslaw case, filed March 21, 1991, "the sovereign immunity that is accorded the Cabazons...made it feasible to pursue on the reservation the development and/or manufacture of materials whose development or manufacture would be subject to stringent controls off the reservation."

Last March 30, Riconosciuto sent a Letter of Judicial Notification to the Chief Judge of the Superior Court in El Dorado, with regard to the Hamlin case, though he will not be permitted to testify. He has informed the Hamlin defense that "Dr. Siemer worked on illegal biological warfare research for the CIA and US Intelligence groups in Indio in 1982." Richard's brother Bradley has posted that Siemer "doesn't deny working for any particular place, but Susan denied in court that Sid had worked in Indio, CA where supposedly her worst abuse took place--during the time of the whole Indian Cabazon Wackenhut controversy was going down.... Again, when asked, Sid freely admitted that he had worked in Indio during the 80s. So even between Sid and Susan they can't keep their story straight." Yet he adds that "Susan Hamlin was the first person to mention Indio. That's rock solid. We have it in writing. She said her father took her to Indio, California and torturted her in a cold storage facility. When I looked into Sid and his friend Wayne Reeder who was supposed to also be there at the time...the Cabazon situation popped up." Wayne Reeder, an "alleged CIA operative" writes Kenn Thomas and Jim Keith in The Octopus, was a business partner to both Dr John P Nichols, who developed the Cabazon venture, and Neal Bush, defaulting on over 14 million dollars to the Silverado and the San Marino Savings and Loan companies.

If you're wondering where Ted Gunderson may be in all of this, you don't know Ted Gunderson. But more interesting is the question, where was Ted Gunderson? Bradley Hamlin writes that "I was already looking into Indio/Cabazon before I contacted Ted, but one of the very strange 'coincidences' that happened was finding out that Gunderson was there in Indio, too, during the same time period. I had no idea he was there until after I contacted him! Very strange."

Very strange. And not just this story, and not just Gunderson's mercurial knack for choosing his spots. There are too many threads to have been woven together by chance. And too many bodies.

Cheri Seymour wrote in The Last Circle, her samizdat sequel to Casolaro's manuscript, the sole copy of which was stolen at the scene of his murder, that "according to Riconosciuto, they [the circle about CIA op Robert Booth Nichols, Casolaro's highest placed source on the Octopus] all called themselves 'The Chosen Ones,' wore skull and crossbones rings, and shared a common interest, if you could call it that, in the old German SS occultism, its tribal and inner circle rites."

Should we call it an octopus, or something worse? Can this thing possibly have only eight tentacles?

Readers of The Sacramento Bee are likely to call all of this a paranoid delusion. Especially since Gary Webb doesn't job in Sacramento anymore.