Scott Ritter: A Tipping Point Toward Chaos

[Octafish]

10. Where were the FEDs when one of their own was using the Internet to troll for minors?

US Attorney John Atchison promised what he thought was the 5-year old girl's mother he wouldn' t hurt the child -- stating he'd done it before. In reality, he was corresponding with an undercover deputy in Michigan. He showed up at the airport with toys. Originally from Alabama, the guy was a riser in the Dixie GOP. Like so many of the evil ilk, after his arrest he tried suicide in jail, the second time successfully.

I wondered if Atchison was friends with Bob Riley, Mark Fuller and the rest of the Alabama Old GOP Boys? What turned up:

The Strange Tale of a Pedophile in the U.S. Justice Department

Legal Schnauzer, WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2010

The U.S. Department of Justice generated plenty of strange stories during the George W. Bush years. But one of the strangest involved John David "Roy" Atchison, an assistant U.S. attorney in Pensacola, Florida, who committed suicide after being caught in a pedophilia sting in Detroit.

Atchison's sad story has many connections to Birmingham and Alabama. And it raises this question: How did a guy with a shaky work record and a history of run-ins with the law get hired by the world's supposedly foremost crime-fighting organization? Did Atchison attain his lofty position because he had connections to powerful figures in the Alabama legal world?

Investigative journalist Margie Burns examines these questions, and much more, in a series of posts about the Atchison case at her blog, margieburns.com.

Burns begins with the actions that turned Atchison into a national figure in fall 2007:

This is not the story of a man who engaged in pedophilia for years or decades before being caught. It is the story of a man whipsawed by the strain of living up to a high-achieving family rooted in Birmingham, Ala., whose high-functioning connections assisted him for years in developing a career for which he turned out not to be suited. On Sept. 16, 2007, Assistant U.S. Attorney John David Roy Atchison, serving as a federal prosecutor in the Northern District of Florida, was arrested on credible charges of basically pedophilia. Atchison committed suicide in federal prison Oct. 5.

A dead pedophile might not sound like a tragedy. But Atchison was thought to be participating in a pedophile ring, and his death removed a useful informant from law enforcement resources. The question of how he was enabled to kill himself rather than being preserved for justice is one of the loose ends left hanging in his case.

CONTINUED 'though I wish it didn't...

http://legalschnauzer.blogspot.com/2010/09/strange-tale-of-pedophile-in-us-justice.html

Margie Burns detailed how the guy rose up through the GOP ranks, warts and all.

When this is the kind of person putting people behind bars on behalf of Uncle Sam, a political associate of the right wing GOP, it makes it easier to understand how a whistleblower like Ritter -- one of the few in government to oppose Bush's Iraq WMD claims -- could be set up as a child predator. Others in government service to oppose the war were similarly endangered, Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife Valerie Plame was exposed as a CIA undercover operative and State Department official John J. Kokal fell to his death from the State Department roof after voicing opposition to the war.