out of thin air

Boulder's Ward Churchill and police department seem to share a mutual deductive reasoning process; is it JonBenet's unsolved murder, attitude or the altitude? --

Churchill: Smallpox theory common knowledge
by Felisa Cardona and Kevin Vaughan
The Denver Post
03/23/2009

"...Churchill, long a controversial figure in the ethnic studies world, burst into the public consciousness in early 2005 just as he was to deliver a speech at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. The student newspaper, in an article about his talk, wrote about an obscure essay of his in which he referred to the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as "Little Eichmanns" — a reference to an infamous Nazi.

The university ultimately fired Churchill in 2007 after a committee found that he had "committed serious, repeated and deliberate research misconduct." That committee concluded that Churchill's voluminous writings were rife with problems, that he plagiarized the work of others and fabricated some material.

Churchill filed suit, alleging that he was fired for the essay in a move that violated his free speech rights. The crux of his argument is that numerous complaints had been lodged over the years about his scholarship that were never investigated by the university; only after the essay generated controversy did CU officials look into his work..

Michael Radelet, the chair of the sociology department at the University of Colorado Boulder, testified this morning that when Churchill's conduct first came into question in 2005 he feared that he would be "railroaded." ...

Radelet himself examined one of Churchill's smallpox claims — that "strong circumstantial evidence" existed to show that explorer John Smith intentionally spread the disease among the Wampanoag tribe in the early 1600s. But when Radelet examined the book Churchill cited as a source he found nothing to back the claim, except that Smith was in New England and disliked Indians...

Radelet said by Churchill's way of thinking, he could be a suspect in the murder of JonBenet Ramsey because he was in Boulder in 1996 and he hated the Miss America Pageant.

"It's the same amount of evidence, the same amount of circumstantial evidence that the Boulder police have on me for killing JonBenet Ramsey," Radelet said..."