Please excuse the bad gramer and or mis-spelling... I was blessed to have never finished 8th grade.

My name is William Howard Bartlett,III and I am an activist as well as a Hip-Hop producer and vocalist starting to gain international recognition.
Last year the Bloomington, Indiana Police visited my house and asked me to come with them and submit a handwriting analysis and a DNA sample. They said that they were investigating a hate-crime in which someone was writing threatening letters to various activists in our town and using my house as the return address on the envelope. They said that there was some kind of 'bodily fluid' on these letters as well. That was the excuse for requesting the DNA sample.
I refused because i knew for a fact that no one at our address had done anything like that..so i was immediately suspicious of the police motives. I suspect it is a potential that JTTF had something to do with it, and that something along the line of the old COINTEL program is alive today.

I got an attorney and went very high-profile to the point of walking around town with a sign that read, "FBI Stop harassing innocent people". I even went to the FBI office in Bloomington and told them what was going on and that i suspected i was being framed and that i was weary to hand over a writing analysis and DNA sample to a corrupt system known for repeat dishonesty and manipulation. I was concerned that this information could be abused and used to fabricate evidence in something greater. I told the FBI that I had nothing to hide, that I was strongly against violent actions as a means of political progression, and if they wanted to ask me anything that I was not afraid of dishonesty. That it is dishonesty which I am very concerned about.

They had me and my family sit in a room for about an hour and then came back and said they did not know anything about our current situation but that I was a 'suspect' in a so-called 'ELF' arson that had occurred the previous year. The sad thing is that this arson gave the FBI a blank check to investigate a good portion of people in the city of Bloomington.. and the investigations continue.

Hate Crime set-up?

There were a few things that clued me into the likelihood of this being directed at me and that it was not a genuine investigation:

1)When the Police came to my house.. they had blocked the street off with orange cones. My neighbor later told me that she was driving home during this episode and that the police had set up a "seatbelt check point" a block in either direction of my house during the 'investigation'.

2)When i opened the door they asked for my ID. I gave it to them and I asked what was going on.. They then told me they were investigating a hate crime.. etc..etc and that the return addresses on the letters were my address, but that the name above my address was 'Richard' ( there was never anyone at my house by the name of Richard ) They said they didn't think whoever sent the letters would have put their real name on it. Why the hell would they put a fake name and a real return address i asked. The police did not answer and then asked me to come downtown and submit a handwriting analysis and a DNA sample.
Now if they were really doing a true investigation wouldn't they have asked if any other adults lived at the house? If they assumed that the name on the letters was false and they checked my ID at the door..wouldn't they also ask if any other people lived at the house? No they simply checked my ID and asked me to come downtown and submit this private information that could be abused. Even though there were 3 other people living at our house.

3)After getting an attorney and turning myself and family into a walking protest ( which was no fun for us and very humiliating ) We started experiencing other forms of harassment such as regular prank phone calls in the middle of the night. Sudden rumors being spread around town that i was doing Crystal Meth, or that I had lost my mind.
It should also be mentioned that this all happened one week before I was to begin training at the local community radio station where i had plans to host a show focusing on critical thinking. Promoting thought and investigation outside of Left and Right wing thought constructs in the face of political dramas and media stimuli.

After a month of hell and fear the police dropped me as a suspect. They told my attourney that they had come to the conclusion that I would have to be 'an idiot to send out the letters with my real address and a fake name.'

I do not know why this all happened and am left to guess as the FBI and police are never transparent.
I have thought that perhaps they needed a regional scape-goat to justify the Homeland Security budget in a City/County where most of the population is opposed to the War, Homeland Security, and run-away capitalism in general.

I worked with Turkish Kurdish refugees in 1995 helping to educate the American Left on the real plight of the Kurds. I have also traveled around the world and to countries like Sri-Lanka, & the Maldives. This all could have easily been used to paint up some kind of picture in the media after i was sitting somewhere with no rights facing fabricated Terrorist Plot charges, or even dead after being an unwilling participant in some scripted explosion. My DNA and handwriting analysis could be used as some form of "evidence" as well.

I know that the above is a horrid thought but nothing made any sense in this experience and it was handled in such a sloppy manner on the part of the police that I have been left to assume, using productive and deductive logic. Either way the police were up to NO GOOD. I do not think I reacted the way they thought, and perhaps that is why the events took a different direction?? I do not know.

These thoughts along with a fear that i would wish upon no person led my wife, children, and self to leave our town and move to a Mennonite Community in rural Illinois where we currently reside.

I just read in the news today that a so-called American member of so-called Al Quaida has released a videotape threatening an attack on L.A. and Melbourne, AU.
This bothers me as i am flying to L.A. in 3 weeks to catch a flight to Australia.
I am going to Australia because i was invited by the organizers of a large music festival happening outside of Sydney in late Sept. to perform and to speak on some discussion panels in relation to underground music production.
I look forward to seeing Australia and meeting fun new people who are into music...

However i still have fears as a result of last year's nightmare that some authorities may wish that my music career not go any further as i use the Right to speak freely to encourage critical thinking in our age of 'crisis' and not to be led to conclusions but instead to look at the roots of problems instead of reacting to given problems. I observe that the powers that be seem far more concerned with HOW people are thinking as opposed to WHAT people are thinking or doing.

I am very suspicious of the validity surrounding the terrorist attacks that have occurred over the last few years as well as the 'threats' that have been reported. From 9-11 onward i have observed that each attack is used to justify something horrible on the part of the responding government. Be it wars and conquest, or changing domestic policy more and more towards a fear based police state. So everyone that i have talked with who is against the imperialist frenzy of western governments along with globalization in it's current incarnation have all agreed that violent action, or terrorist actions only serve to justify the propaganda machine of the rising police state. Thus the "old" revolutionary tactic of using para-military force, or violent acts of sabotage in defending from or responding to abusive power should be shunned. I also very much agree with this and feel that anyone who commits terrorist attacks is no friend of liberation. That is why i question the validity of some of the attacks that have occurred and threats that the so-called intelligence agencies have reported to the press.

I am posting this in hopes that my concerns may be documented and that if my concerns have any validity that the potential outcome may be changed as a result of this documentation.
I hope that forums like this do not have to become more and more the place for preemptive defense against potential set-ups and police manipulation. Thanks for taking the time to read this..

Our battle is a struggle between fact and fiction, truth and ignorance. It is a struggle to confront within each other the dangerous imaginations of nationalism, capital, class, and hierarchy. And even those are secondary effects of drives. Ours is the struggle to identify those drives in root form within our selves..to understand them..to change them. A search within our selves and a sharing with each other of ideas and solutions. Our battle is not one of force, violence, or destruction. The rulers of imaginary truth are the masters of violence and we can never win that playing field.

Forward motion,
William H. Bartlett