Thursday, May 11, 2006

HOLD EVERYTHING

For the past six hours, this blog led off with a now-cancelled post about General Michael Hayden. Some words of explanation are in order.

My post discussed a website (I will not name it here; nor will I link to it) erected by an individual who goes by the name of Kevin Furlong. This person claims that his former wife -- whom I will here call Erika -- had an adulterous affair with General Michael Hayden, Bush's current choice to become CIA Director.

There were allegations of blackmail and favoritism. There were documents. There were plentiful nude photographs.

I did not endorse the claims made on Furlong's site. But I must confess that, on first reading, the claims struck me as probably having some basis in fact. The writing on that site dripped with venom. Only a wronged husband, I felt, could be so vitriolic.

The accusations against Hayden stood in sharp contrast to the well-known tale of General Kevin Byrnes, who had been relieved of his command following charges of adultery.

Furlong's website forced me to choose between two explanations:

1. Either Furlong was deeply mentally ill and had concocted the whole story, or

2. Furlong really did become infuriated and vindictive when his wife had an affair with General Michael Hayden.

Alas, after checking Furlong's "internet trail," I cannot discount option 1.

Readers should understand that Furlong has been making these claims for years. This isn't something that popped up simply because Hayden entered the news.

In the course of promulgating the tale, Kevin Furlong had assumed various false names and personas. For a while, he posed as "Julie." He has also contributed to a personal journal (see here) using other nicks, such as "Wanda." These entries speak of Furlong visiting an Air Force Base to hand out flyers to promote his website.

Apparently, this person has behaved in a bizarre fashion on usenet. (As you probably know, lots of weird stuff happens on the newsgroups.) Most troubling of all is this May 29, 2003 post to the alt.autism group, in which one of the participants claims to have been 'cyber stalked' by Kevin. Not only that:
Kevin is also responsible for the "hate shrine", http://www.***.com/, which was devoted to Miss. Erika *** by Kevin/Julie's alias "Kevin Furlong". This person has also been verified by police to not be a real person, whilst Miss. Erika ***, the target of the abuse, is a real person.

Miss. Erika ***'s photographs were displayed on the page, with numerous horrendous accusations against her. As a member of the armed services, it is of great concern that she had her naked photographs displayed on a web page, including photographs of her having sex with another man.

The problem was that the alias "Kevin Furlong" suggested that Miss. Erika *** was his wife. This is not true. Indeed, Erika *** states that she has never met the man.
(The redactions are mine.) I have no idea how the fellow who posted these words acquired this information, or if it is correct. For all I know, those words might have been written by Kevin himself, after he had drifted into another persona. The accusations and counter-accusations on any given newsgroup are usually not worth following, particularly if the group was formed to discuss a mental illness.

But I've seen enough. Kevin Furlong -- if that really is his name -- may indeed suffer from some sort of disorder which renders him unable to discern imagination from reality. (Some evidence suggests that "Kevin" may actually be a woman.)

Why would this person fixate on General Hayden at a time when the man was not in the news? And how did this person acquire so much personal data (phone numbers, addresses) concerning Emily and her alleged paramours? I have no idea. All I know is this: When I first visited the site in question, I believed the author to be merely vindictive, not seriously unbalanced.

I'm glad I simply said that these claims deserve investigation. Frankly, after the recent news stories about Wilkes, Goss and Cunningham, anything seemed possible. Compared to the hookergate revelations, Furlong's accusations against Hayden seemed relatively tame.

I will remove the original post, and offer apologies to both the lady in question and to General Hayden -- whose nomination I still strongly oppose.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good that you came back and retracted your original post, but I would not necessarily take my eyes off Furlong if I were you. Perhaps he is a disinfo specialist. Or he could just be a true loony as you suggest. Jeff Wells, proprietor of the Rigorous Intuition blog might be interested in this kind of thing, even though the stories propogated by Furlong are apparently false. It may fit into another pattern instead, almost as interesting.

Anonymous said...

Furlong is apparently a a cyber-stalker. But, that doesn't mean his accusations are false. What he has against emErika, and what his relationship to her ever was, I don't know. I'm not even sure that the videos and stills were actually her (since you took them down before I finished "studying" them). But, at least some of what he put on his website sounded very authentic. How he got this stuff is an open question. The only real relevance to us (apart from her Monica techniques, which in my view are always relevant) is this: would her alleged affair with Hayden derail his takeover of US intelligence services. I'd prefer it if the sexual affairs of consenting adults stayed out of public view, but it was the Rep's who made the rules on that stuff. Let them live by those rules.

sunny said...

It should not be difficult to find out who, if anybody, Erica **** was married to, and the circumstances of any divorce that may have ensued. This would go a long way toward refuting, or bolstering, "Kevin Furlong", as the case may be.

Joseph Cannon said...

Anon, I sort of agree with all that you said. There is something genuinely weird going on here, and right now I don't know what it is.

That said, people with emotional and mental difficulties can still be extremely clever and convincing. The field of "Satanic Ritual Abuse" was rife with such individuals. Some of them were persuasive enough to take well-trained professionals in the fields of psychology and psychiatry.

If I was taken in by such a person -- well, it was only for six hours.

gary said...

People's motivations are often complex. It seems clear that Furlong was married to Erika however; his site contains the official documents concerning the investigation of the sodomy and adultery investigation. The military confirms they were married.

gary said...

Former Spook has a post on this today with official documents:

http://formerspook.blogspot.com/2006/05/closing-books.html

gary said...

My last word (hopefully) on this story:

http://coverthistory.blogspot.com/2006/05/new-developments-in-captain-amerika.html

Joseph Cannon said...

All right. I am now persuaded that Kevin exists. He is male. He really was married to a woman named Erika.

And -- who knows? -- she really may have had something to do with Michael Hayden.

But when the only person making the claim acts in such a bizarre fashion, we can do little more than shrug our shoulders.

I thought Kevin might actually be a female because on usenet and elsewhere, he has posed as one. I have no idea what he hoped to accomplish through such tactics.

Anonymous said...

I was unable to get on CampCasey to post, but this was a thread from their email notice. Great post.

Back at you. Please share widely on net and blogoshere and ask folks to comment with their support!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=2621813&mesg_id=2621813

Here was the press release that accompanied that wonderful billboard.

http://www.carlsheeler.com/press_release_challenge_whitehouse_on_war.asp

Thanks.

Carl
Sheeler for US Senate
www.carlsheeler.com

Anonymous said...

Ok, first get your facts straight the Furlongs, Kevin and Erika, were married back in the day. He asked for the divorce, maybe, and SHE made the pictures public record. It was her that introduced these pictures with the court. All this is available in the Travis County Courthouse. Mr. Furlong is not the person responsible for making the website available. There is an individual in another country who has decided to make these pictures available for the world to see. Mr. Furlong is not responsible for this. He in fact is a sane man. Captain AmErika is the crazy person here.

Anonymous said...

Hello. Want more information about Kevin Furlong? Try here:

http://www.toxicpink.net/

I am sure you can figure out just how easy it was to determine that Kevin Furlong and Julie Wilkinson were the same person. After all, Julie Wilkinson used a myriad of different identities so as to launch smear campaigns against others, and on top of leaving a clear paper trail to link these 2 sites, had even gone so far as to link directly to the "explicit" section of the CaptainAmErika site straight from her own blog, at the now defunct link http://www.allthegrrlshateher.com/captainamerika.html

I'm sure you can find some nice caches of all of that.

What on earth happened to Captain-Amerika.com? Most likely the same thing that happened to all of the other sites:

http://www.captainamerika.com/
http://www.capt-amerika.com/
http://www.falkeep.net/
http://www.captainamerika.net/
http://www.furlong.com/
http://www.kevin.furlong.com/

How many times is this guy going to recreate the same site?

Maryland Military police have for a very long time wanted to catch the person who is behind all of this. If it was a simple matter of it being Kevin Furlong, they would have got it by now.

Yes, Kevin Furlong was married to Erika Furlong. But Kevin Furlong is not the person who wrote that site. Julie Wilkinson is. And of course Julie Wilkinson is not her real name either.

This is not so much a smear against Michael Hayden as it is a smear against Erika. Erika obviously rejected someone at some point, and I seriously doubt it was her ex husband. More like someone who has been stalking her and sitting outside her window.

Thanks for picking up on my alt.autism post by the way. At the time, people didn't believe me much, but it looks somewhat more obvious now. You can also see posts from Julie Wilkinson there too.

Anonymous said...

Whoa. Adrian is still at it after almost 4 years. I am Julie Wilkinson, I'm a real person. I know of Kevin Furlong but never met him. I posted some stuff on my website years ago for him and wrote a lot of mean things about Adrian and Bonnie. I've apologized but as the years go by the story gets more and more fantastical. When Gen. Hayden was first reported as top pick for the CIA I just knew that stuff was going to be linked back to me regarding Kevin and his ex-wife and the affair, but seriously, that was years ago. I don't know how else to get Adrian to shut up about it, as taking everything down, apologizing profusely for the meanness and everything else hasn't worked.