Extortion charges against Wiebo Ludwig dropped by RCMP!

A RadicalPress Exclusive Report

By Arthur Topham

January 9, 2010

RadicalPress.com editor and publisher Arthur Topham, in a short interview with Ben Ludwig, son of Wiebo Ludwig, on Saturday morning, January 9th, 2010 was informed that Wiebo Ludwig, contrary to reports in the mainstream media, has not been formally charged by the RCMP with “extortion” as reported in the msm on Friday, January 8th.

The RCMP have a time limit of 24 hours in which to lay formal charges and according to Ben Ludwig they didn’t do so. At the time of the conversation, Ben told Topham that his Mother, Mamie Ludwig, had gone to pick her husband up from the police station in Grande Prairie.

In a subsequent call only minutes after the interview Ben informed RadicalPress.com that his father was now safely home and the charges against him were not forthcoming.

Close to a decade has passed since the Radical Press last covered the grotesque tale of the harassment and victimization of the Ludwig Christian Community known as Trickle Creek farm as a reporter for the now defunct alternative newspaper, The Radical.

Editor’s note: It was in my January, 2001 edition of the newspaper that I ran a feature length article on the Ludwig story and manner in which the RCMP, the media and the vigilante groups in the area had acted throughout the course of the investigation leading up to the arrest, trial and subsequent imprisonment of Wiebo Ludwig. It’s not a pretty picture but a vivid example of how the state and its complicit media, aided and abetted by the corporate interests involved, conspire to create scapegoats out of decent, innocent people in order to cover up for their own ineptitude and crimes committed against the environment and people who become victims of industrial pollution and poisoning.

In the interests of telling the truth about Wiebo Ludwig and the Trickle Creek Christian Community I am again publishing this important article. It has never seen the light of day on the Internet prior to now. Please feel free to pass this document on to any interested party.

Arthur Topham

Pub/Ed

RadicalPress.com

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from The Radical VOL.3 NO.5 JANUARY 2001

CANADA’S JUSTICE SYSTEM – SANCTUARY OR TYRANNY
The Case of Wiebo Ludwig and the Trickle Creek Christian Community

“I see my light come shining from the West unto the East
Any day now, any day now I shall be released.”
-Bob Dylan, I Shall Be Released, 1967

By Arthur Topham
Radical Reporter
©RadicalPress.com

The Setting

There  is a belief held by the native American Sioux people that at the beginning of each new cycle of Creation a buffalo is placed in the West in order to hold back the waters. With each passing year one hair falls out of the buffalo and with each passing Age one of the buffalo’s legs  falls off. When all the hair and the four legs have fallen off the cycle will be complete and the waters will again rush in and signal the end. Strangely enough there is a similar belief contained within the Hindu mythology. What is also of interest is the fact that both the American Indian and the Hindu believe that in our present age the buffalo is now standing on only one leg and is pretty much bald.

To say therefore that we’re living in an apocalyptic period of increasing social injustice may soon prove to be an understatement. The longstanding notion that our hard-won democratic institutions are shielding us from foreign threat is no longer valid as we witness our emergence into the 21st Century and, along with it, an increasingly unprecedented and unabashed assault on our basic human rights and economic freedoms. What makes it striking though is not that it’s sources stem from international financial and corporate interests, but more importantly and much closer to home it seems, from within the very institutions of our own domestic governments; entities ostensibly created to prevent just such occurrences from ever manifesting.

Aided and abetted by megalithic media monopolies, domestic (and soon to be foreign U.N.) military and police units, and a select assortment of traitorous citizens who’ve succumbed to the overt financial pressures of greed and survival, thus making them willing pawns in the game of “power-over” those who resist their efforts, Canadian citizens are now finding themselves strangers in a strange land whenever and wherever they insist that justice be meted out in a fair and equable manner.

The ways and means of achieving such an overall, suppressive system of slavery is not new, only the tactics have changed due to the increased development and use of more sophisticated mind-control techniques, surveillance systems and high-tech gadgetry. Of fundamental importance to the successful completion of their nefarious plan though is the maintenance of a vehicle or medium for disseminating the Orwellian Newspeak that comprises the daily dispensation of media deceit called “news.”

Legitimate dissent, it appears, has now become illegitimate – a bastard child of a once virgin system of justice and a naive and complacent populace no longer deemed expedient in a New World Order of corporate philistines out to conquer the globe. Peaceful protest is no longer considered an acceptable form of political expression by the corporate business sector, nor, as the following article will hopefully show, is it deemed such by our governments or our courts. Instead of having the rights and freedoms that are supposedly “guaranteed” under our suspect “Constitution”, an increasing number of politically aware citizens are being subjected to a new, raw, unexpurgated version of growing police harassment and violence often attended by a treasonous and surreptitious forgery of fact by both media representatives and a lackey police force. Such overt behaviour is quickly becoming a growing threat to all  who still believe in the principles of justice, liberty and freedom and the ensuing thought of a corporate-controlled government combined with a partial judiciary acting at the behest of financial interests, rather than a dedication to upholding the sovereignty of one law for all, is most abhorrent.

Still, for all the subterfuge within the mainstream media, the alternative, independent media is rife with growing reports of these sorts of terrorist tactics that western governments are inflicting upon their own citizens in order to quell dissent. A prime example of such corporate, police and government parole-perpetrated propaganda against protesters involves one of the leading figures within the environmental movement in Canada – the Reverend Wiebo Ludwig – along with the extended family who comprise the Christian Community known as Trickle Creek Farm located in the northwestern region of Alberta’s Peace River district near the towns of Hythe and Beaverlodge.

The community of Trickle Creek (numbering 35 at the moment) [Editor's note: This figure is likely much higher today ten years later.] has been carrying on a protracted and bitter struggle with the giant Alberta oil & gas industry over the poisoning of their air, water and soil for over a decade. Flaring of toxic gases from oil and gas wells that surround their farmlands became an urgent, life-threatening concern when the community suddenly began experiencing the negative effects that such practices were having on their unborn children and livestock. Mother’s were aborting or giving birth to abnormal, still-born babies and animals were dying and aborting. Children and adults began suffering from a litany of skin rashes and flu-like symptoms that eventually forced this  peaceful, God-fearing community to seek out the cause of their ill-fortune. It didn’t take too long for them to realize what and who was responsible for their sickness but that in itself turned out to be only the first step in what later became a long and arduous battle to seek redress.

Young Women and Mothers from Trickle Creek Christian Community circa 1998

After years of struggling to have the problem of oil and gas pollution recognized as a legitimate threat to all life-forms and in dire need of stringent safety regulations, the bubble of blacked-out information finally burst when a growing wave of protest culminated in a series of attacks upon oil and gas installations in the areas affected by the toxic emissions. The RCMP ended up launching an investigation and in the process of attempting to come up with a suspect they themselves fell prey to using illegal means such as faking a phony explosion of a well-site in order to incite fear and uncertainty into a region where levels of paranoia were already rampant. The numbers of incidents of police collusion with the corporate oil and gas sector and governmental bodies associated with the Alberta government must unfortunately, because of space restraints, remain a separate issue for another time.

In the process of trying to expose the toxic practices of a obscenely bloated and arrogant oil industry that’s been habitually trampling over citizens’ rights for generations the members of Trickle Creek found themselves victims in new and wondrous ways. Some residents of the surrounding  municipalities, consisting mainly of farmers and oil workers directly or indirectly dependent upon the oil and gas industry for their livelihood, turned on the Trickle Creek community with a vengeance. After the unfortunate shooting of Karman Willis during a trespassing incident in June of 1999, they formed an ad hoc group of self-appointed vigilantes who dubbed themselves the West County Concerned Citizens (WCCC) led by spokesman Brian Peterson. Once up this organization began a smear and disinformation campaign against the Ludwig and Boonsta families that is ongoing to this day. As one reads through the various assessments carried out by Corrections Canada after Wiebo Ludwig’s imprisonment, it becomes readily apparent that the negative effects of these smear tactics permeate much of what is accepted as truth and fact by the RCMP, the parole board, and the general public. All of this deception ultimately played a crucial role in prohibiting the early release of Wiebo Ludwig.

When Wiebo Ludwig and Richard Boonstra’s controversial trial ended both men were sentenced on April 26, 2000 to prison terms based on circumstantial evidence that they had participated in the blowing up of a Suncor oil well north of Hinton, Alberta. Richard Boonstra was given a short jail sentence but Wiebo Ludwig, pumped up by the prosecution, police and the media as the prime instigator of all the bombings, received a sentence of 2 years 4 months in federal prison. He is currently serving time in a minimum security jail known as the Grande Cache Institution located about a hundred miles north of Hinton, Alberta. I went to visit Wiebo Ludwig on Saturday, October 21 to discuss his situation, in particular, the refusal by Corrections Canada to allow him out on accelerated parole. While I was there I also met his wife Mamie Lou, two of their children and grandchildren and their close friends and in-laws Richard and Lois Boonstra.

Richard Boonsra and the younger men of Trickle Creek farm outstanding in their field

During the course of our amicable meeting I was presented with a number of official documents and letters related to the subject of Wiebo’s parole. After returning home I read through the lengthy Intake and Community assessments that were recorded by Corrections Canada parole officers only to discover that they had been liberally seasoned with a large amount of police and “community”   (read WCCC) input. Taken at face value the accusations contained in these documents portrayed a rather frightening picture of Wiebo Ludwig and the community of which he is a father, grandfather and spiritual Elder. Had I only these government documents as a reference it would have been virtually impossible to come up with a reasonable and unbiased sense of who Wiebo Ludwig really was. I say this in retrospect though because it was only after reading through the equally lengthy rebuttals to these government assessments, later submitted to the parole board by both the Reverend Ludwig and the rest of the resident members, that it became glaringly obvious that the Trickle Creek community was confronting yet another head on the Hydra of Corporate Globalization, this latest menace taking on the shape-shifting form of none other than Corrections Canada itself.

It’s not easy to perceive just how the parole board fashions its assessment data in order to achieve a preconceived agenda but it must be borne in mind that the mainstream press gets much of its information from police and parole officer reports and then adds its own sinister twist to the supposed “facts” that appear in official documents thus projecting an image to the general public that, upon closer examination, reveals an almost unbelievable bias toward the institutions and values of which it too is an integral part. In  doing so the media becomes a willing agent, both complicit in and guilty of, forging lies and half-truths in order to assist its counter-parts in the global scheme for world domination.

The oil and gas industry wants Wiebo Ludwig in jail. The West County Concerned Citizens (known locally as the “WKKK” because of their overt, antagonistic actions against Trickle Creek) want Wiebo Ludwig in jail. The Alberta government, which draws its economic breath from out of the black, porous, subterranean lungs of oil and gas lying beneath its troubled landscape, also wants Wiebo Ludwig locked up and silent, a grim and sphinx-like reminder of what lies in store for those who dare to challenge an industry that feeds the voracious belly of an antiquated industrial system long overdue for radical change.

Once in the clutches of Correction Canada the agents of persecution aligned with the oil industry knew that it was essential to portray to the public and the parole board a picture of Wiebo Ludwig that was in keeping with the RCMP’s and the WCCC’s preconceived and concocted image of a man who they wanted the public to view as an egotistical, domineering, violent, sexist, tyrant. It therefore became necessary to paint such a picture into the framework of Corrections Canada’s bureaucrat assessment process. That is what was done using unsubstantiated allegations, half-truths, twisted logic, gossip and out and out lies. Once the maligning by parole assessors was complete, the media was given this distorted palate containing a potpourri of darkly-coloured images depicting a man wholly out of keeping with his basic persona. They then proceeded to use these false images with willing intent, malice and premeditated editorial malediction. That is what this article is all about: the subversion of truth for the sake of greed, power and injustice.

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