The 'Weirder' Side Of News!

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Here's one I'm keeping an eye on. With the distances involved, it's a strange story.
The BBC are always reluctant to deep-dive into incidents like this one, but they do offer the bare bones.

Retired Met police officers charged with child sex offences

'Two retired Metropolitan Police officers have been charged with child sex offences, as part of an
investigation into a serving Met chief inspector who was found dead.

The Met said the charges follow an investigation into Richard Watkinson. His death is being treated as
unexplained but not suspicious.


Chief Inspector Richard Watkinson, 49. Charged with thousands of indecent images of children,
three counts of making indecent photos of a child discovered in a secret room in his house.
He was also charged with voyeurism and two counts of misconduct in public office.

Jack Addis, 63, from Perthshire, and Jeremy Laxton, 62, from Lincolnshire, will appear at Westminster
Magistrates' Court on 9 February. Ch Insp Watkinson, 49 was a serving chief inspector for neighbourhood
policing in the West Area Command Unit. He had been suspended from duty following his arrest

He was found dead in Buckinghamshire on 12 January, the same day the Met says he was due to be charged
with conspiracy to distribute or show indecent images of children, three counts of making indecent photos of a
child, voyeurism and two counts of misconduct in public office. An inquest into Ch Insp Watkinson's death has
opened and adjourned.

Cmdr Jon Savell from the Met's professional standards team said: "Ch Insp Watkinson was facing extremely
serious and concerning charges, as the result of a painstaking and thorough police investigation. "Before this
matter came to light, we had no previous information about these allegations or to indicate the officer posed
any risk to the public. "He had not faced any other criminal or conduct matters during his Met career."...'

BBC:

So odd that a country with the master spies of the intel world (IMO) and their agencies along with FIVE EYES has such evil going on for decades, centuries. Certainly makes ya wonder and I've heard that if any such child exploitation let alone child sacrifice starts leading back to the Royal family by direct or indirect (aristocrat) connections, then the case must be buried by any means necessary. That said, not much different across the pond.

Over here in the USSA... though not new, but weird that so many such cases & stories are popping up a lot...

Former Navy SEAL and CIA special agent James Dennis Smith Jr faced up to 40 years in prison for trafficking drugs from Central America to the US in his private plane. Instead, he was sentenced to a mere 18 months, got released early after just 9, and promptly disappeared.




Court Listener Docs (Most are locked & sealed on PACER)

How a celebrated Navy SEAL and CIA operative became a big-time drug smuggler in SC

James Dennis “J.D.” Smith was a decorated SEAL who led raids in enemy territory and a CIA operative cited by the agency.

But after years in government service, from about 2012 to 2017 when he was a civilian, he led a different life. He used his SEAL and CIA covert skills to avoid the law as he flew his twin-engine Cessna with cargoes of marijuana from California to South Carolina and other states. He transported thousands of pounds of the drug and was paid up to $350 per pound. 

After his 2017 arrest, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency seized hundreds of thousands of dollars from him. Agents found guns galore — 12 pistols, five shotguns and an AK-47 assault rifle. He and fellow traffickers stashed the weed — some of it labeled medical marijuana from California, law agents said — in storage units here and there.
Last week, Smith, 52, was sentenced in federal court for his secret life.

How did he go from celebrated SEAL to a big league drug smuggler?

The simple answer: love of danger and its adrenaline rush, says his lawyer, Greg Harris of Columbia.
“He had been molded and trained to expect chaos, catastrophe and adrenaline. When he came back from war, and the expectation was not fulfilled, he actively sought the rushes that he used to experience on a daily basis,” Harris wrote in a court brief.

“Eventually, he turned back to covert, high-risk activity. Only this time, instead of flying to austere CIA outposts in Afghanistan, he was flying marijuana across the country he previously risked his life to protect,” Harris wrote. “His conduct was by and large a means of facilitating the only lifestyle he knew: high-risk, dangerous, and clandestine.”
There’s an even more complex answer — an answer so compelling that it recently helped get a federal judge and federal prosecutors to recommend mercy and save Smith from a 10- or 20-year or more sentence for his marijuana crimes.



Court’s reasoning for sentence

Earlier this week in Columbia, as U.S. District Judge Mary Lewis prepared to sentence Smith, she looked across the federal courtroom and said, “This is not something that I have ever seen before.”

A minute later, Lewis gave Smith 18 months in federal prison — an unusually light sentence. He had already served 7 months in jail after his arrest four years ago in a Charlotte airport, so he will have about a year to serve in prison. Others being sentenced for similar crimes — conspiracy to deal in large quantities of marijuana and having a gun — might have served decades.

At the hearing, Lewis said she considered various factors: Smith had no criminal record. He was pleading guilty, sparing taxpayers a trial’s cost. He had fully cooperated with DEA and law enforcement, providing evidence about South Carolina traffickers and major suppliers in California that led to their arrests and convictions. And he was a decorated veteran with a Bronze Star for valor, meaning, for an action in a combat situation.

Smith’s combat record included being a SEAL team leader in Iraq in dozens of nighttime raids in the early 2000s, where he killed and captured Iraqis, according to court records.

“He blew the doors off of houses and was the first to run inside; and (as a combat medic) he has saved the lives of both Americans and Iraqis who became casualties of war,” according to court records. He later roamed Afghanistan with CIA teams stalking the enemy.

Above all, there was testimony from Amy Meyers, a Florida psychologist who has treated Smith.

Meyers, who said she has counseled some 1,000 of America’s special operations combat veterans, told the judge what she’s learned in therapy sessions with these veterans about how their kind of close-up violent warfare devastates their personal lives.

The “ceaseless, high-tempo combat” and special forces’ soldiers’ “experiences at war arguably defy what humans are biologically and evolutionarily built for,” said Meyers. “We are not meant to watch our friends die, often all at once. We are not meant to kill, and we are not meant to risk our lives every day.... It is simply inhuman.”
Many Special Forces operators develop Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and Smith had “one of the most severe and debilitating presentations of PTSD I have seen,” Meyers said in a transcript of her remarks made available to The State.

Smith’s symptoms included severe depression, suicidal thoughts, panic attacks, paranoia, memory loss, impaired judgment, interpersonal difficulties, impaired impulse control and many other symptoms resulting from his PTSD, Meyers told the judge.

“His poor judgment and poor decision-making that led to flying that (marijuana) was a result of his PTSD,” she said.

Smith did not smuggle marijuana in his plane just for the adrenaline rush, she said. Combat had given him powerful feelings of being indestructible, indifference to his fate and guilt for having survived so much violence where his friends died.

Smith’s guilt includes being ashamed of the Bronze Star he won in a combat action where he killed a young boy. “Killing the boy was part of his duty to kill armed enemy. He did not describe it as heroic,” she said. “He casually told me he wishes he had died that day because it would have been more honorable .... He sees himself as a monster for fulfilling the exact duties that earned him the prestigious Bronze Star.”

“The Navy told him he was a war hero and he felt he was a villain. This is beyond guilty. It is moral injury and it profoundly exemplifies his shame — shame for who he believes he has become,” Meyers said.

With two failed marriages and estranged children due at least in part to his prolonged absences at war, Smith believed he was a failure on a personal level too, she said.

Using his plane to smuggle large loads of marijuana gave Smith a positive purpose in life, Meyers said, because he had learned that in some medical cases, it was helping relieve suffering of the sick and dying.

Marijuana smuggling also gave him a sense of retaliating against a country for which he had sacrificed everything and now had found himself without family or friends and “mentally ill and unemployable,” Meyers said.

Early life and drug arrest

In an Oklahoma high school, Smith — who was born in 1969 — was a good student and good athlete, competing on football team and wrestling, according to evidence in his case and court records.

Out of high school, he joined the Marines, then the Navy and became a SEAL serving for 16 years, including in combat situations in Iraq. He took specialized combat medic courses and was recognized for saving lives. As a CIA operative, he participated in strike missions in Afghanistan. After the CIA, he worked security for American billionaires such as the Koch brothers, according to a filing by Smith’s lawyer.

Around 2014, out of the service and out of the private security business he worked for — Smith fell into marijuana smuggling, transporting thousands of pounds much of it medical marijuana, around the country from California, in duffel bags.

It was in South Carolina in 2014 that the Richland County Sheriff’s Department first became aware of a marijuana trafficking operation involving two Columbia area brothers, Carl and Byron Rye, according to court records.

“In cases like this, when we realize it’s more than just Richland County, we have to make a decision — do we get the smaller fish, or do we get bigger fish? This case is an example of that. We went for the bigger fish,” said Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott. “These cases take a lot of work and they can stretch for years.”

Story continues: How a celebrated Navy SEAL and CIA operative became a big-time drug smuggler in SC



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Sounds like his expertise was needed elsewhere to fetch those "bigger fish." Sheep-dipped again for his next assignment.