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Originally Posted by OBW
Isn't this a testimony that was posted some years back? One that had a view of certain parts of California that we generally had no insight into. And therefore no way to verify or refute. He may have been everything he says, but it is so over the top in some ways that it is difficult to process as not at least a little bit of self-aggrandizement. I do want to believe it because it seems a little bit like a Forrest Gump story — true stories collected together and made to reside in one person's history. Just too much in one place to be taken seriously — at least without some corroboration. And because of that, hard to accept as entirely true.
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This was also my gripe with the Lily Hsu testimony of WWII-era mainland China. How much of it could be independently corroborated? How much was perhaps manipulated or misremembered history in order to cast things in the best light for the tale-teller?
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Originally Posted by Dave
I was in Santa Cruz in the very beginning and I never met or saw Doug Krieger. His statement is pure nonsense.
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Krieger's testimony (and Hsu's) probably should be held at arms' length until matched by independently verifiable info. And that is not easy... La Cosa Nostra has nothing on the LCM - it's "omerta" all the way to the grave. Silence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omert%C3%A0
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Omertà is an extreme form of loyalty and solidarity in the face of [external or outside] authority. One of its absolute tenets is that it is deeply demeaning and shameful to betray even one's deadliest enemy to the authorities. For this reason, many Mafia-related crimes go unsolved. Observers of the Mafia debate whether omertà should best be understood as an expression of social consensus surrounding the Mafia or whether it is instead a pragmatic response based primarily on fear, as implied by a popular Sicilian proverb Cu è surdu, orbu e taci, campa cent'anni 'mpaci ("He who is deaf, blind, and silent will live a hundred years in peace")..
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A testimony may be useful if it can be seen in relation to what little we do know. (And I say this with Lily Hsu as well).