The Berster Case: False Narrative & Kunstler’s Defense

The Vermont trial of an alleged terrorist revealed the danger of guilt by association and how disinformation creates a false narrative. 

GREG GUMA

 In the 1970s Kristina Berster was part of the anti-war movement in West Germany and joined an alternative therapy project, the Socialist Patients Collective. But when a political crackdown on dissent swept the country, she became a fugitive. She and members of her group were accused of criminal association. 

        Years later, tired of life underground and fearful about her future, she tried to cross the US border into Vermont to seek asylum. And got caught. Labelled a terrorist by the media and charged with conspiracy, she was technically innocent until proven guilty. But after an extensive FBI disinformation campaign she was widely considered a terrorist until proven otherwise. 

        By September 1978 former Chicago Seven lawyer William Kunstler had taken the case. Along with other defense attorneys and the Berster Defense Committee, he dug in at the Burlington home I shared with Doreen Kraft, Robin Lloyd and our infant son Jesse. Bill eventually moved into a spare bedroom. Evenings were often filled with fascinating group dinners and wide-ranging chats. 

        Over the next weeks we also underwent an immersive course in courtroom dynamics and Bill’s blend of legal jujitsu and theatrics. So compelling were the issues, so high the stakes, that I began to devote most of my time to the case. — Greg Guma 

DOCUMENTARY PREVIEW

Kunstler’s Defense, excerpt from a film in development, 

based on an intimate interview with legendary lawyer

William Kunstler during his defense of Kristina Berster

Bill Kunstler with Jesse Lloyd Guma

False Narrative: Eight Chapters

(Click to read)

On the Line

Guilt by Association

On with the Trial

The Defendant Speaks (Sort of)

The Therapeutic State

The Crackdown

Staging Terror

Managing Perceptions

False Narrative 8: Managing Perceptions

The 1978 trial of Kristina Berster revealed the danger of guilt by association and how disinformation creates a false narrative.  

Vermont endured a manufactured terrorist scare, an attempt to warp public perceptions. The FBI lied, so did the prosecutor. Anyone who supported the defendant was a target. 

Vermont Cynic satire, Nov. 30, 1978

By Greg Guma

Chapter Eight

Managing Perceptions

The jury went out on a Monday afternoon. By the next day it was obvious that a verdict wouldn’t come easily. Jurors were snagged on at least two issues: Kristina’s fear and the justification for her actions. Was sneaking across the border necessary to avoid West German repression? They couldn’t decide, and looked to the judge for guidance.

Facing the possibility of a hung jury on the third day of deliberations, Coffrin called them back and read an expanded definition of the “necessity defense.” Fear of harm, he said, could only be a defense if the harm would follow immediately. Having a gun to your head, or facing a tiger, would be enough. But just having a tiger in the neighborhood was no excuse for crossing a border illegally.

But that didn’t settle it. The jury remained stuck. They asked about the meaning of the conspiracy charge and listened to testimony excerpts. By Friday afternoon they had broken Vermont’s record for the length of a jury deliberation.

The verdict, finally delivered by the exhausted group at sundown on October 27, 1978 was a split decision. Felony and misdemeanor conviction, but acquittal on the conspiracy charge. US Attorney Gray didn’t consider this a victory. The jurors had sent a message through their delay and mixed verdict that they were looking for a middle path. 

Thwarted in court, Gray went to the press and broke the agreement he had made earlier with the defense. He revealed that Kristina once lived in South Yemen. While forced to admit that didn’t prove she was a terrorist, he suggested that it did tend to disprove her innocence of terrorist affiliations. Faced with an unfavorable verdict, he had turned back to a desperate line of defense — guilt by association, plus a racist dog whistle. Presumably, he also understood the potential impact of such a last-minute revelation: a renewed crackdown in West Germany, where the authorities and right-wing press were watching the case and viewed South Yemen as a terrorist training ground.

The trial ended as it began, with front page headlines and twisted facts. Kristina remained a pawn of governments, imprisoned without bail, interrogated by agents from two continents, and labeled by both to justify extreme tactics. In Vermont, the rhetoric had softened. But beyond the state line the smear campaign rolled on. In New York City, a banner headline the day after Berster’s conviction trumpeted, “No Asylum for Terrorist.” 

That’s how perception management works: When in doubt, just keep lying.

But the story didn’t end there. First of all, the jury had reached some surprising conclusions. Members said afterward that they found Kristina’s situation compelling and hoped that a guilty verdict on minor charges wouldn’t prevent her from winning asylum. The following February, the Judge sentenced her to a nine month jail term, all but two weeks she had already served. Remarking that her story of persecution and flight was credible, Judge Coffrin called for leniency.

It was a strange turn of events, leading some of us to think she might soon be free. But that was not to be. The Immigration and Naturalization Service had begun deportation proceedings.

Gray briefly also considered whether to convene a grand jury and seek new charges for perjury and conspiracy. Kunstler countered by filing a protest with the judge about how probation officials were conducting the pre-sentence investigation. Moved from Vermont to New York City, Kristina had been questioned without her lawyers present. 

        After the trial, I was one of several spokespersons for Kristina and the Defense Committee. Quoted extensively in a Nov. 29 UPI report, I restated Kunstler’s view “that they are asking questions that are irrelevant and that the information is being passed on to the West German authorities.” The next day, a satire appeared in The Vermont Cynic, UVM’s student newspaper. News of her New York transfer apparently hadn’t reached the campus yet.

BERSTER BREAKS OUT, shouted the headline. The story was a black comic tale of escape and death. “Aided by darkness and near blizzard conditions,” it began,  “a small group calling themselves the Green Mountain Boys sprung Kristina from the Chittenden County Correctional Center, where she was being held. Authorities confirmed the incident last night, and said at least two people died in the audacious pre-dawn move.” 

“Prison guard Mike Moskovitz was brought down by a hail of bullets fired by Burlington police as he pursued the gang into the woods surrounding the facility,” the story continued. “Left dead at the scene were two of the gang which sprung Ms. Berster. One of the victims is reported to be left writer Greg Guma, a member of the Kristina Berster Defense Committee, and another body has been temporarily lost by police in the snow drifts in Tuesday’s storm.

“When notified of the incident, the FBI immediately issued a “shoot to kill order.”

In the fantasy, Berster and the Boys made their way to Cavendish, where they sought asylum “in the closely-guarded estate of exiled Soviet author Alexander Solzenytsyn.” (He did live there but his home wasn’t guarded.) Kunstler vowed to defend Berster again, using the necessity defense. “She was being mishandled in jail and had no choice but to escape. Maybe this time Judge Coffrin will listen to me.”   

It was clever enough, just “fake news,” back when it was mostly harmless. But Berster supporters couldn’t fully enjoy it. I just wondered why I was the first to die. 

The defendant herself was skeptical that the US would ever allow her to stay, particularly not as long as that meant defying a close ally. The way she saw it, no one represented US interests in Europe more forcefully at the time than the Federal Republic of Germany. From monetary policy and trade to the stationing of nuclear missiles, it was to Western Europe what Iran, until the Shah fled, was to the Persian Gulf — a regional policeman. But West Germany had also committed itself to a policy of “counterterrorism” overkill that threatened civil liberties.

As the 1970s ended, repression was being legalized globally. After the kidnapping of Italy’s Aldo Moro produced a NATO alert throughout Europe, West Germany took the lead. Other countries, including the US, followed suit with their own commando units and “grassroots” networks of spies. In such a world, what to make of the Kristina Berster case? At the time few people suspected the whole truth. To some, it looked like a human rights issue. Victimized by shifting international politics, a student activist whose only crime was crossing a border to seek asylum had spent almost two years in prison, in Germany and then the US. He was essentially a political prisoner.

But there was even more to it. Berster’s case demonstrated how a government crusade against terrorism can become an excuse for self-serving propaganda, threatening anyone who actively attempts to change the way a society is run – from civil libertarians, lawyers and prison reformers to anti-nuclear protesters and feminists. Across the country, despite claims that the excesses of COINTELPRO were over, new reports were surfacing of harassment, covert agents provoking violence in nonviolent groups, wiretapping, political grand juries, and illegal surveillance. At the decade ended a chill set in, and terrorism became an excuse for virtually any tactic the government found effective. Like an unseen virus, demonization and repression were spreading. 

Returning to West Germany in late 1979, Kristina Berster was freed after the original charges against her were dropped. A “complex arrangement” was worked out between the two governments, making it possible for her to voluntarily return without a deportation order. She went back to school, continued her prison reform work, and eventually became a psychologist.

But her US misadventure revealed a few things — for example, that public officials, working with intelligence agents, were ready to lie in court and sanction illegal surveillance, and that some media outlets could be manipulated to distribute rumors and false narratives. Though the evidence remained circumstantial, it also appeared that Vermont had experienced a manufactured terrorist scare, an attempt to warp public perceptions for political advantage. The FBI had lied, so had the prosecutor. Anyone who supported the defendant was targeted for surveillance. There was even a simulated terrorist “siege,” a staged media event that played in the government’s false narrative.

It looked very much like a covert operation to influence public opinion, what would soon be named “perception management” by the Department of Defense. Basically, this involves both conveying and denying information, as circumstances require, “to influence emotions, motives, and objective reasoning.” That was the DoD’s definition, founded in a Pentagon document. The goal is to influence the perceptions of enemies, but sometimes also friends, and ultimately to provoke the behavior you want. 

As the Defense Department puts it, “Perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover and deception, and psychological operations.” 

In the Reagan years the same tactics were euphemistically labeled “public diplomacy,” and expanded to explicitly include domestic disinformation during the Bush I administration. In those days it was mainly about stoking fear of communism, Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, Qaddafi in Libya, and anyone else on the Reagan and Bush hit lists. 

Clinton modifications were added in Directive 68, which still made no distinction between what could be done abroad and at home. When Bush II took office, the name was changed again, this time to “strategic influence.”

Unmasking such covert operations can have high costs, like being watched, losing your job, or worse. In this case, at least the victim was set free and the true story did get out — to some extent. National outlets ignored the verdict, of course. But the Village Voice did buy my feature story, and then send a “kill fee” shortly before publication. In other words, they paid me not to run it. A shorter version later appeared in WIN, the War Resisters League monthly. 

Alex Cockburn gave two main reasons for the Voice’s late decision to back out: the suggestion that Andreas Baader might have been murdered in jail, and, more to the point, an ownership change. Australian press magnate Rupert Murdoch had just bought a controlling stake in the parent corporation. 

Back in Burlington, Jim Martin, the editor who fired me, lasted only a few months. Before the end of the year I was back, this time as co-editor. And a government “perception management” campaign had been derailed. Enough people had seen through the fog of information war. But the battle was just beginning.

NEXT: MAY DAY & THE FIRST RED SCARE

Greg’s investigation of covert operations and perception management continues in another eight-part series on the infamous MKULTRA program: Unwitting: The Secret War on William Pierce.

Staff of the Vanguard Press outside our College Street office. Greg is behind the hat. The weekly hosted a crew of hungry young journalists, activists and thinkers who shook up the status quo. An alternative newspaper wasn’t a political movement, but the dividing line was less than obvious.

False Narrative: Eight Chapters

On the Line

Guilt by Association

On with the Trial

The Defendant Speaks (Sort of)

The Therapeutic State

The Crackdown

Staging Terror

Managing Perceptions

False Narrative 7: Staging Terror

Reality was being skewed by the counter-terrorist narrative. Was anyone who defended Kristina Berster considered dangerous? Did preparedness include manufacturing threats? 

Her Vermont trial was revealing the danger of guilt by association and how disinformation creates a false narrative. 

Fake terrorists staged a siege for the cameras at the Follett House, a local landmark.

By Greg Guma

Chapter Seven

Staging Terror

From the start Kristina Berster was handled with an eye on her propaganda value. Shaping the narrative began on the very first day. After that, she was not permitted to make public statements and gave just one pre-trial interview. Yet officials and media outlets felt free to imply she was dangerous, capable of virtually anything if released on bail. Even in the hands of the professionals, they suggested, the risks were real and large.

Initially, most journalists accepted the official version without asking too many questions. After all, some of the government’s actions did appear to support it. Why else the unique security arrangements, the high bail, a 24-hour guard for the judge, metal detectors, and armed officers on the courthouse roof? But the security was so intense that local reporters eventually began to focus on that. In most of the country the mere threat of terrorism was convincing enough to make any precautions sound reasonable. But once some Vermont journalists directly observed the defendant, a small, fair-haired woman with a mild demeanor and open smile, the security procedures began to look like overkill.

As the coverage began to change and a few reporters reconsidered their initial assumptions, the public also gave the case a second look. News reports began to describe Berster as a fugitive, an activist, or simply as a West German charged with border violations. Some headlines referred to her on a first name basis. Yesterday’s terrorist was beginning to look like a human being, one who might even be innocent — at least of terrorism.

Favorable coverage, with headlines like “Berster Says She Wanted to Start a New Life Here,” did not mesh well with the scenario mapped out the previous July. But the intelligence community had other ways to reinforce public fears and justify their position. On the day Kunstler tried to subpoena FBI Director Webster, for example, a “confidential memorandum” was selectively released by the Burlington Police Department to UPI. Allegedly, new information had been forwarded to the police by the US Marshall, who apparently received it from the Bureau.

The memo warned that two Colombian terrorists were expected to attend the trial, and potentially disrupt it. Security throughout the city was tightened, and experts flew in from New Orleans and New York. The latest “threat” hit the press simultaneously with the Webster subpoena, reinforcing the idea that foreign terrorism loomed over the Green Mountains. But nothing and no one materialized.

That ploy was small potatoes when compared with the “simulation” staged the following week: A live-action terrorist siege, complete with bank robbery, hostages and a SWAT-style police unit called the Threat Management Team. Just as Kristina took the witness stand for her third and final day, the performing “terrorists” made their escape from the Chittenden Bank and fled to the Follett House, an historic building overlooking the city’s waterfront. 

Local “threat managers” arrived promptly, provoking “fire” from the “terrorists” as bewildered bystanders tried to understand what was happening. Was it real, or had they stumbled on a new action movie in production?

Police fired convincing blanks as the “terrorists” held their hostages in the cupola of the old building. Negotiations between the cops and robbers continued into early afternoon, following the common real-life pattern. The bad guys were ultimately “talked out.” By this time news of the exercise and attendant media coverage had reached the courtroom.

Judge Coffrin was “fit to be tied,” said a clerk. He warned jurors to avoid all news media that evening — especially television.

At 6 p.m. Bill Felling, a reporter with the local CBS affiliate, read his account of the siege. The tone was light, but he labeled the event a “terrorist” exercise. The coverage included action-packed footage, made possible by the advance warning provided to the area’s largest TV station. The previous evening a WCAX reporter had taken a call from Sergeant Kevin Scully, a local specialist in security. Scully provided the tip that the station could get a great story if a camera crew showed up at precisely 10 a.m.

Once Felling finished his report, anchorman Mickey Gallagher turned to the next item — the Berster trial. Juxtaposing a “terrorist incident” and the trial of a “suspected terrorist” was as logical as it was tasteless and opportunistic. The local daily newspaper followed suit. The next day the B-section of the Burlington Free Press carried four prominent photos of the “siege” beside two Berster stories. The main head, “Berster Testimony Refuted,” described not only the court action but the intended impact of the media event.

I no longer needed much to stimulate suspicion. Those sympathetic to the defendant were clearly being watched. There had been an unsolved break-in at our house, still being used by the Defense Committee. And when I flew to New York to speak about the case and conduct research, the first familiar face in the airport terminal was a US Marshall who handled security at the trial.

“What brings you to the city?” I asked as I passed him. 

“Just waiting,” he mumbled. For me? I wondered.

Many of Berster’s supporters came to believe that the Follett House siege was purposely staged to influence with the trial. But it might be just an unfortunate coincidence. To find out which, it would be necessary to follow the advice Deep Throat gave Watergate reporter Bob Woodward: “Follow the money.”

The trail began with then-Sergeant Scully, the local cop who turned up whenever activists gathered. He denied what he could, and claimed that the date of the “siege” was determined locally. But that contradicted the normal protocol, in which the US Army Corps of Engineers sets the date.

Scully did admit one thing: there had been a last-minute change in the timing. Originally, the exercise was scheduled for July 20, but canceled late due to “conflicting commitments” of local team members. It sounded fishy. Berster was arrested four days before.

How was the final date selected? Scully claimed that decision was made sometime in August. But Colonel Patrick Dalager, Provost Marshall of the New England Corps of Engineers, remembered it differently. “They scheduled it during the first week in September,” he recalled. As the person who ran the training, he was in a position to know. Dalager was an FBI academy graduate and co-author of the Army’s manual on “terrorism directed against the military.” His basic argument was that local police agencies were the only means of protecting Army Corps projects from vandalism, terrorism, or other kinds of violence.

Dalager was candid about the funding source, although he insisted that the juxtaposition of the exercise and the trial was purely coincidental. The money, he explained, came from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), which had been funding programs to protect corporate facilities from potential terrorists since the early 1970s. LEAA also managed the computerized storage of intelligence information, helping to end a long tradition of federal non-involvement in local law enforcement.

And so, LEAA, part of the post-COINTEL “terrorist control” network, provided seed money for the siege and enlisted local police to play terrorists for the local press. Meanwhile, the FBI leaked rumors of a possible terrorist attack by South Americans. The casual consumer of news might well assume that the two were related. And if not, the mere threat of violence was enough to justify intensified security measures.

How far did it go? Was the FBI’s terrorist simulation a device to reinforce the anti-nuclear terrorist scenarios being promoted by LEAA and their private sector partners? Was anyone who defended Kristina considered a potential terrorist by association? Did anti-terrorism preparedness include manufacturing threats? That wasn’t possible to prove, but reports of surveillance and infiltration were accumulating across the country.

In any case, reality was being skewed in Burlington by the government’s terrorist narrative. Like the scare created by Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds, the local “siege” looked authentic enough for some people to complete a circuit of fear and suspicion. The Berster case was certainly real, the FBI did claim she was a terrorist, and the local media said terrorists might be on the way to town. So, why not a violent robbery and hostage seige?

As the list of coincidences grew, the government’s ability to mold mass perceptions looked more formidable than ever. Yet not all the media was playing ball anymore. Immediately after the verdict, one daily paper ran an editorial in support of Kristina’s plea for political asylum. Another printed an ironic cartoon. These breaks with conventional wisdom, despite planted stories and disinformation, reflected a change in public attitudes. Originally, most newspapers reported news about Kristina Berster as if she was guilty before trial. Now they were telling a different story.

In the editorial cartoon, Berster stood before Judge Coffrin. The caption had the judge saying, “Will the dangerous terrorist – I mean, the defendant – step forward and tell the court why she can’t get a fair trial.” It was apt, but at this stage not enough to counteract months of disinformation.

Next: Managing Perceptions

The War Resister’s League covered the case after The Village Voice backed out.

False Narrative: Eight Chapters

On the Line

Guilt by Association

On with the Trial

The Defendant Speaks (Sort of)

The Therapeutic State

The Crackdown

Staging Terror

Managing Perceptions

False Narrative is based on material that will appear in Strange Enough To Be True: Life / Stories 

False Narrative 6: The Crackdown

 In the 1970s constitutional rights in West Germany were seriously eroded by repressive laws, censorship and a job ban. Dissent was no longer being tolerated. The prescription for crisis was prior censorship, confiscations, blacklisting, detention, a Radical Decree, and much more.

By Greg Guma

Chapter Six

The Crackdown

Despite the growing risks facing her in West Germany, Kristina Berster continued to fight for small improvements like allowing prisoners to see and hear one another. But reforms faced new obstacles. Not only did public sentiment harden against the Red Army; the Right, prodded by the Springer newspaper chain, pushed through more repressive laws. 

A Decree on Radicals, passed in 1972, denied “a position of civil service…if the candidate has been politically active in either an extreme rightist or leftist group.” Any doubt about a person’s support for the “free democratic basic order” would henceforth be sufficient grounds for blacklisting. It was an effective job ban in a country with 16 percent of workers in this sector.

The Decree also permitted the executive branch to create political isolation without directly banning political parties. Instead, it created a category of “constitutional enemies.” Acts no longer had to be proven; the job ban punished attitudes, and the enemies list extended to “sympathizers” who were indifferent to or critical of the state’s war on terrorism.

A prominent target was writer Heinrich Boll, who had criticized the demagoguery of the Springer press. One of the country’s leading authors, he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his ironic novels on Post World War II Germany and its changing psychology. Nevertheless, conservatives tried to ban his books and the police harassed his son. His hate mail was signed, he once said sardonically, while the complimentary notes were apt to be anonymous.

By this time, Kristina and her co-defendants became convinced that a fair trial was impossible. There was considerable evidence that the outcome was rigged: exclusion orders against their lawyers, poor treatment of prisoners, new repressive laws and right-wing propaganda. In an open letter to the court they announced that they weren’t showing up, and instead intended to hold a counter-trial at which they could present themselves for public judgment. A huge audience, traveling from across Western Europe, attended the event. But many left confused.

Disagreement erupted over the use of violence. Many who attended were attracted to it; Berster rejected the idea. Nevertheless, she was also persuaded that the official trial wouldn’t be just, and stuck with those who decided not to appear.

She didn’t believe she would have to become a fugitive — at first. But when “wanted” posters went up it seemed clear that she wouldn’t be free for long if she remained in West Germany. By 1973 the national mood was grim, much akin to the repressive climate of the Nixon years, especially when the anti-war movement splintered and the country reeled from police violence and politically-motivated assassinations. By the time Bacchus, the informer whose testimony had originally implicated Kristina, recanted she was out of the city, living on the edge, cut off from family and friends.

Maybe leaving had been a mistake, she thought. But it was too late to turn back.

Five years later, while Berster was in Montreal looking for a way into the US, a German lawyer back home was being convicted of “conspiracy” for assisting his clients to maintain their identities. Kurt Groenwold, who had defended Red Army Faction leaders during the intervening years, was sentenced to two years in jail because his assistant provided support for the suspects. Defending “enemies of the state” in anything but a perfunctory manner had become grounds for a conspiracy charge.

It was the first in a series of similar cases. The court rejected Groenwold’s argument that his clients had the right to determine the nature of their own defense. Such a defense would “promote the ideas of the defendants.” And those ideas were apparently too dangerous to be heard.

The new crackdown on left-leaning lawyers was not a surprise. German attorneys had already been disbarred and indicted on similar charges. This served as a major incentive for William Kunstler to take Kristina’s case after she was caught at the border. Groenwold’s conviction reminded Kunstler of what had happened to Kristina’s first attorney.

After an early attempt to disbar lawyers in 1971, the federal parliament had passed amendments pointedly labeled “Lex Baader-Meinhof.” They provided prosecutors with legal grounds to bar overly-aggressive lawyers, to limit the number of lawyers on a case, and to exclude defendants from their own trials if the court believed that “they willfully caused their own unfitness.”

On March 11, 1975, Groenwold was excluded from the Baader-Meinhof trial. Three months later he was disbarred. He had “only been disbarred,” he thought, “perhaps because of my wealthy family associations…I have been lucky for now.” But criticism of the constitution or government had become a crime, and lawyers could now be jailed for objecting to prison conditions.

“Always the so-called liberals and social democrats come to power and make the state bigger and more powerful,” said Groenwold. “They think that if they do the work of the fascists, then the fascists will never come to power. But always, the fascists eventually come to power and then the social democrats are arrested by the very policemen they hired.”

In 1978, the Bertrand Russell Tribunal concluded that constitutional rights in Germany were being seriously eroded by repressive laws, censorship and a job ban. Perhaps those chilling effects were the price of its national preoccupation with order. In any case, dissent was no longer being tolerated. The prescription for social crisis was prior censorship, confiscations, blacklisting, detention, the Radical Decree, and much more.

There was also an unanticipated side effect: a new generation of terrorists. Even Andreas Baader, locked up for five years by the time former SS official Hans Martin Schleyer was murdered, disapproved of such actions. On the eve of his own mysterious death from gunshot wounds, Baader told a chancellery official that he had never approved of, and would never approve of, terrorism in its current form of brutal actions against uninvolved citizens.

By then, however, both the state and its enemies had gone beyond symbolic bombings and police riots. Despite protests from former Red Army supporters that terrorism provided an excuse for more repression, the violence of the new generation continued, capturing the imagination of disaffected young people. Danny Cohn-Bendit, who had moved to Germany from France after the 1968 student uprising there, concluded that the German Left was trapped in a battle that was a product of German society itself.

None of this made it into the court record during the Berster trial. It was one of several ironies of her situation. Rejecting the violence that had enveloped her homeland, she had left Germany only to be haunted by its specter, then exploited by the US intelligence community to justify excessive counter-terrorist tactics. 

Guilt by association was a cheap shot. But it made good copy and provided a flexible excuse for almost any tactic in response.

Next Week: Staging Terror

False Narrative: Eight Chapters

On the Line

Guilt by Association

On with the Trial

The Defendant Speaks (Sort of)

The Therapeutic State

The Crackdown

Staging Terror

Managing Perceptions