Infamous 'Inslaw' Case Has Wa. State Connection
The wife of a key player in the Inslaw software scandal is being investigated for child abuse, raising questions of intimidation by the government officials, Citizens for Overt Action reported in its spring newsletter.
Bobbi Riconosciuto of Shelton, Wash. is under investigation for what state officials say was her role in a methamphetamine lab allegedly operated by her husband, Michael, reported COA, a Seattle-based political activist group. Michael Riconosciuto is a former US government operative who got tangled up in the Justice Department's alleged plan to sell pirated copies of an Inslaw software program to Canada, Iraq and other countries. The PROMIS program, originally designed by Inslaw to track law-enforcement cases, later was adapted by federal officials to monitor the movements of political dissidents and international terrorists.
In 1988, a federal court ruled that Justice Department officials "stole" the software from the Washington, DC-based computer company. What has followed has been a cavalcade of lawsuits, allegations of criminal activity and stories about shady intelligence community activities.
Danny Casolaro, a Virginia freelance reporter who was trying to connect the Inslaw case to Iran-contra, the October Surprise, BCCI and other Reagan-era scandals into an overarching "Octopus" mega-conspiracy, was found dead with slashed wrists in a West Virginia hotel room Aug. 10, 1991. The official ruling of suicide, made without a thorough police investigation, has been called highly suspect by Casolaro's family and friends.
After Michael Riconosciuto went public with his knowledge of the Justice Department's dealings with the Inslaw software, federal officials charged him with manufacturing meth. After he was convicted, Bobbi Riconosciuto lost custody of her children and now faces neglect charges in Mason County for allegedly exposing her kids to the alleged drug lab.
COA is calling on people to ask Gov. Mike Lowry to open a state investigation into the Bobbi Riconosciuto case.
Reported extensively in the investigative print media, the Inslaw case has made barely a ripple over the years in mainstream publications. For more background, see the May/June 1992 issue of Mother Jones.
Keeping alive what has become an annual tradition, Project Censored recently released its list of the Top 10 underreported national news stories of last year. The stories were covered, but not very aggressively by the well-financed, mainstream print and broadcast media - the people you'd think would have the resources to conduct investigative reporting.
Here's a summary of the stories and the publications that helped shine some light on them, as reported in the May/June edition of the Utne Reader. (All publication dates are from 1992):
2) In the December 1991 Multinational Monitor, corporate gadfly Russell Mokhiber responds to a Washington Post column that accused young black males of committing most of the crime in Washington, DC, by revealing dangerous environmental crimes perpetrated by corporations based in the nation's capital.
3) As introduced into the mainstream by Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko, George Bush's Gulf War went beyond the killing of more than 100,000 Iraqi soldiers; the battle tripled the death rate of Iraqi children by wiping out public facilities and cutting food and medical supplies. Discussion of the deaths of Iraqi civilians quickly was drowned out by Bush's incessant Saddam-bashing and "victory" celebrations.
4 & 5) The United States' arming and coddling of Saddam Hussein during the Reagan and Bush presidencies and the following cover-up made news in several out-of-the-mainstream publications, including World Press Review (September), The Human Quest (July/August) and War and Peace Digest (August).
6) In These Times (May 20) and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting's Extra! (September) tells of the failure of the Reagan-Bush prohibitively priced, prohibitively wasteful War on Drugs.
7) The Nation (March 23) and The Progressive (May) lead the investigation into Dan Quayle's now-defunct Council on Competitiveness and how - behind closed doors - it detoothed environmental, labor and other reforms, sometimes to the benefit of Bush and Quayle associates.
8) In its summer edition, Issues in Science and Technology tells how the US government classified an average of more than 19,000 documents every day in 1992.
9) A report by the Center for the Study of Commercialization in Washington, DC, describes how advertising corrupts the news media.
10) In its March/April issue, Mother Jones sheds some light on the US Defense Department's "black budget," a secret, $36 billion stash that grew out of control during the '80s without any congressional oversight or approval.
From 1950 to 1990, the US government - through research and development funds, direct and indirect subsidies, and regulatory relief - has supported the nuclear power industry to the tune of about $475 billion, Environmental Action reported in its spring issue.
The staggering figure, in 1990 dollars, was released in a recent Greenpeace report, "Fiscal Fission: The Economic Failure of Nuclear Power."
The report tells how 65 percent of all federal energy-related R&D dollars spent from 1948 to 1990 supported nuclear power projects. The $33 billion (1982 dollars) dwarfs the $8.8 billion that went to fossil fuels, $5.6 billion to renewable energy and $3 billion for energy conservation projects.
Nuclear power, which advocates in the 1950s said would be "too cheap to meter," is now more costly on
average than most other energy forms, including cutting-edge wind power technology. Still incalculable are the ultimate costs to dispose of an estimated 60,000 tons of spent uranium fuel rods already generated by the more than 100 commercial nuclear plants in the US.
The Greenpeace report also tells how, altogether, the federal government has handed nuclear power interests $97 billion in direct subsidies and as much as $376 billion in "indirect" support from 1950-1990. Such as:
"The nuclear industry would absolutely not have gotten off the ground without federal support," Environmental Action quotes Steve Cohn, a Knox College (Ill.) economics professor and nuclear industry researcher. "The government has bent over backwards to do everything it could whenever there was a problem."
Economic and environmental realities finally have started to catch up with the nuclear power industry. Shutdown recently were Trojan plant near Rainier, Ore., the Rancho Seco plant near Sacramento, Calif., the Yankee Rowe plant in Massachusetts and a handful of others. Last year, however, Congress passed and George Bush signed into law an energy bill that has pumped new hope into the nuclear industry. The law greatly streamlines the licensing process for new nuke plants, while limiting the opportunity for public review of any new plants.
Investigative Digest is compiled by Free Press staff.
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