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Hi,
I'm Steve, a resident of Santa Cruz, CA, and a recent AP article about happenings in town caught my attention. It ran in the Contra Costa Times and San Francisco Chronicle (though strangely, I can't find it in the online edition of the local Santa Cruz Sentinel). As many recall, Santa Cruz recently made news when our city council, led by Mayor Emily Reilly, issued a statement condemning the actions of the Bush Administration in the leadup to the Iraq war and requesting that an investigation be made as a prelude to possible impeachment. The AP article, dated Oct. 16, details some vaguely suspicious events that took place around Mayor Reilly's bakery (Mayor Reilly has a bakery) in the weeks following that statement:
- "a sophisticated burglar pried moulding off a window at Emily's Good Things to Eat bakery, evaded a motion detector and stole an old computer hard drive and the hard-drive backup."
- "Emily's Good Things To Eat bakery was visited by an agent of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, who introduced himself, showed his identification, and looked around. He asked if they used artificial coloring (heavens no!) or if they transported anything across the state lines (they've been known to mail cookie-grams)."
Like I said, vaguely suspicious. Emily thinks it's coincidence, and urges us not to "dwell on the possibility of conspiracy". No mention of whether anything but the storage media was taken in the burglary. The FDA is still looking into the reason for their agent's visit. But this isn't the scary part. The thing about this situation that made my blood run cold is this; what if the most cynical possible "conspiracy theory" version of the story is the true one? What if a team of feds broke into "Emily's Good Things to Eat" in the dead of night and made off with her computer equipment leaving no trace and sending no notification? What if these same spooks sent an inoccuous FDA agent (or even one of their own dressed up as one) just to check things out and make sure nothing suspicious was being done in reaction to the breakin? This chain of events seems unlikely to me (it's just too much effort on their part), but the frightening thing is that all this Gestapo shit could have gone on without anybody breaking a law! It's one thing to read about the implications of the Patriot Act. It's quite another to watch events unfolding in your own town and have to wonder...
SF Chronicle: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2003/10/16/state1914EDT0136.DTL
I originally found the Contra Costa Times link off dailyrotten.com, a site that shouldn't be underestimated as a source of legitimate news.