Prosecutor Jennifer Joyce, a Member of Missouri's "Barack Obama Truth Squad"

"As a citizen, I believe that elections should be about issues. I also have enormous respect for our First Amendment and freedom of speech. My sole purpose in participating in this initiative [Missouri's "Barack Obama Truth Squad"] is about getting truthful information to the voters. This has never been or never will be about prosecuting people."---Prosecutor Jennifer Joyce, a member of Missouri's "Barack Obama Truth Squad"

On 9-26-o8, I reported that Missouri television station KMOV TV had reported that the Obama Campaign was asking Missouri prosecutors and sheriffs who have joined Missouri's "Barack Obama Truth Squad" to "target anyone who lies" about Senator Obama and "violates Missouri ethics laws."

It does not appear that there are actually any plans to prosecute people who, in the opinion of the "Barack Obama Truth Squad," tell lies about Senator Obama.

American prosecutors are public officials who are required to enforce the laws equally. If prosecutors who belong to "The Barack Obama Truth Squad" only protected Democrats against libel, they would become a political police like the KGB, the "sword and shield" of the Communist Party.

The KGB enforced libel laws only when dissidents criticized the Communist Party. Article 70 of the Soviet Constitution was called Anti-Soviet Agitation and Propaganda. The "sword and shield" of the Communist Party didn't protect dissidents when the Communist Party libelled them.

Missouri prosecutors and sheriffs would be violating a federal civil rights law if they used "the color of their office" to deprive people of free speech:

Every person who, under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory or the District of Columbia, subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States or other person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress, except that in any action brought against a judicial officer for an act or omission taken in such officer’s judicial capacity, injunctive relief shall not be granted unless a declaratory decree was violated or declaratory relief was unavailable. For the purposes of this section, any Act of Congress applicable exclusively to the District of Columbia shall be considered to be a statute of the District of Columbia.

I think that some people might be intimidated by the KMOV TV report. It is hard to know if the TV station or the prosecutors were trying to imply that the "Barack Obama Truth Squad" was going to prosecute "anyone who lies" about Senator Obama and "violates Missouri ethics laws." It was the news announcer who used this language, but the clips of the prosecutors appeared to support it.

It is still not clear to me what ethics laws would justify targeting "anyone who lies" about Senator Obama. The news announcer didn't explain that, and a Missouri prosecutor didn't address the issue of "ethics laws" when she responded to allegations that she would prosecute "anyone who told lies" about Senator Obama.

St. Louis Circuit prosecutor Jennifer Joyce is one of the "Barack Obama Truth Squad" prosecutors who was interviewed on KMOV TV.

Joyce (9-27-08) responded and clarified what she means:

As a citizen, I believe that elections should be about issues. I also have enormous respect for our First Amendment and freedom of speech. My sole purpose in participating in this initiative is about getting truthful information to the voters. This has never been or never will be about prosecuting people.

Clearly there are those who are attempting to twist the purpose of this initiative for their own benefit. This attack is a great example of how the truth is distorted in campaigns and what we’re trying to stand up against.

That's good, but I notice that Senator Obama didn't unleash any "Truth Squads" to counter slander when his minister Rev. Wright told his congregation that the American government made AIDS to kill black people. Senator Obama didn't denounce this KGB-inspired lie until Rev Wright's slander was plastered all over TV and youtube and became an embarrassment to him.

Senator Obama says that he didn't know that Rev. Wright was telling this lie about AIDS. If that is true, why doesn't Senator Obama pound a stake into this KGB lie once and for all by telling the whole world where it came from?

If Senator Obama were to stand up on national television and tell our people---especially young black boy and girls---the whole history of this KGB lie, I would seriously consider voting for him. But I don't think he will do this, because he has supported communist radicals and probably doesn't want to annoy them.

In 1987 the KGB-controlled Soviet media even slandered a friend of mine named Brent Anderson who became critically ill with AIDS in China. A Soviet newspaper wrote that Brent Anderson was a biological weapon against the USSR who had been sent by the CIA to China to give the Chinese AIDS "because China has a long border with the Soviet Union."

At that point, the State Department complained about these lies, and the KGB finally halted the AIDS propaganda campaign.

In 1992, the chief of Russia's foreign intelligence service--in a burst of glasnost' followed by a clumsy lie--admitted before an audience of Russian college students who were being recruited for the Russian intelligence service that the KGB made up this lie.

The Russian newspaper Izvestiya (3-19-92) reported:

[Russian foreign intelligence chief Yevgeni Primakov] mentioned the well known articles printed a few years ago in our central newspapers about AIDS supposedly originating from secret Pentagon laboratories. According to Yevgeni Primakov, the articles exposing US scientists' 'crafty' plots were fabricated in KGB offices. [For the motives behind Primakov's frank admission see here.]

This crackpot KGB "science," which is reminiscent of Stalin's belief in Lysenkoism, was a big embarrassment to honest scientists in the former USSR; and they disavowed the KGB's AIDS theory in November 1987, a few weeks after Brent died of AIDS.

The New York Times (11-5-87) reported:

Soviet scientists have disavowed charges in the Soviet-sponsored press that the AIDS virus was artificially cultivated at a secret American military base.

The scientists, Roald Sagdeyev and Vitali Goldansky, publicly distanced the Soviet Academy of Sciences from the accusations about American responsibility for acquired immune deficiency syndrome. They said they had protested the appearance of Soviet articles that repeated those contentions.

The disavowal was contained in Izvestia, the Soviet government newspaper, on Friday. The timing of the article by the scientists suggested that it had been written in response to complaints raised by Secretary of State George P. Shultz in an Oct. 23 meeting with Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, about Soviet discussion of the AIDS issue. Mr. Shultz told Mr. Gorbachev that Moscow had been peddling ''bum dope'' on the subject.

According to the medical and scientific community who study AIDS, this KGB-inspired crackpot "scientific" conspiracy theory endangers the health and lives of black people:

More than 20 years after the AIDS epidemic arrived in the United States, a significant proportion of African Americans embrace the theory that government scientists created the disease to control or wipe out their communities, according to a study released today by Rand Corp. and Oregon State University.

That belief markedly hurts efforts to prevent the spread of the disease among black Americans, the study's authors and activists said

....Phill Wilson, executive director of the Black AIDS Institute in Los Angeles, said past discrimination is no longer an excuse for embracing conspiracies that allow HIV to fester.

"It's a huge barrier to HIV prevention in black communities," Wilson said. "There's an issue around conspiracy theory and urban myths. Thus we have an epidemic raging out of control, and African Americans are being disproportionately impacted in every single sense."

"The whole notion of conspiracy theories and misinformation . . . removes personal responsibility," Wilson said. "If there is this boogeyman, people say, 'Why should I use condoms? Why should I use clean needles?' And if I'm an organization, 'Why should I bother with educating my folks?'