The ballad of Ramos and Compean

There are five major players in the transformation of Ramos and Compean from cops who tried to cover up a bad shooting into martyred heroes of the great conservative pushback against illegal immigration. The most important of them is Lou Dobbs, the host of CNN's "Lou Dobbs Tonight." Three other players -- journalist Sara A. Carter, activist Andy Ramirez and union official T.J. Bonner -- are previously obscure figures who appeared on Dobbs' show. The fifth is Jerome Corsi, the conservative commentator who coauthored the book, "Unfit for Command," that launched the Swift-boating of John Kerry. Corsi pushed the cause of Ramos and Compean on the Internet while Dobbs was pushing it on TV. All of them have served as megaphones for the right-wing's counter-narrative of the case.

Lou Dobbs, whose show straddles the line between news and advocacy, has nearly doubled his ratings in the past two years by taking a strong stand against illegal immigration. Almost nightly, he includes an opinionated segment on immigration under such rubrics as "Border Betrayal" and "Busted Border." As soon as he noticed the Ramos and Compean story in August 2006, he became the prime mover in its coverage. His program has so far featured more than 100 segments on the Ramos and Compean case, including interviews with both agents that have been clipped and rebroadcast in other episodes.

Dobbs set the tone for his approach to the Ramos and Compean case with his first segment about the agents, on Aug. 9, 2006. (CNN did not respond to a request for an interview with Dobbs.) He introduced a short interview with Ignacio Ramos by saying, "Support is flooding in from all across the country tonight for two Border Patrol agents in Texas who could be sentenced to 20 years in prison for shooting a Mexican drug smuggler. Amazingly, federal prosecutors allowed the smuggler to walk free." The next day, Dobbs ended a second segment on the agents with one of his famous audience polls. The question for viewers was, "Do you believe the Justice Department should be giving immunity to illegal alien drug smugglers in order to prosecute U.S. Border Patrol agents for breaking administrative regulations? ... Yes or no."

Dobbs has been an unwavering champion of the agents ever since. But the reinvention of Ramos and Compean really begins with Andy Ramirez, without whom Lou Dobbs would never have known the agents' names.

The California-based chairman of the Friends of the Border Patrol, a Minutemen-like organization, Ramirez is also affiliated with the far-right, anti-communist John Birch Society. Since April 2007, he has been listed by the JBS speakers' bureau as a speaker for hire.

In an interview with Salon, Ramirez says he became a spokesman for the agents' families soon after he was contacted by Ignacio Ramos' aunt in the spring of 2005. In the summer of 2006, mere weeks before Ramos and Compean were due to be sentenced (the sentencing date was later changed), he found a mainstream media reporter willing to retell the shooting of Aldrete-Davila from the defense's point of view.

Ramirez had long been a source for reporter Sara Carter, who then worked for an obscure daily paper on the fringes of the Los Angeles suburbs, the Ontario, Calif.-based Inland Valley Daily Bulletin. Carter had written several sympathetic stories about activists like the Minutemen and had begun quoting Ramirez on border issues in February 2005. (Carter, who now works for the Washington Times, did not respond to phone and e-mail requests for an interview.)

On Aug. 5, 2006, Carter published a 2,600-word article, headlined "Convicted Border Agent Tells His Story," largely based on an interview with Ignacio Ramos. It is an uncritical, breathless rehearsal of the defense's claims that says the agents' conviction "appears to fly in the face of the Border Patrol's own edicts." It includes two important and exculpatory assertions that conflict with the testimony of other witnesses at trial.

At trial, the defense claimed that the agents had believed that Aldrete-Davila might have had a gun, though on the stand the agents identified the alleged object in the victim's hand only as something "shiny." The agents also offered conflicting testimony on whether Compean was on the ground when Ramos fired the shot that hit Aldrete-Davila. In the third sentence of her article, Carter writes, "Ramos' fellow agent, Jose Alonso Compean, was lying on the ground behind him, banged up and bloody from a scuffle with the much-bigger smuggler moments earlier. Suddenly the smuggler turned toward the pursuing Ramos, gun in hand."

If Compean had indeed been lying on the ground when Ramos fired, or if the fleeing suspect had been waving a gun, it's not likely that either Border Patrol agent would be serving more than a decade in federal prison. David Klinger, an associate professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and an expert in officer-involved shootings, has not formed an opinion on the Ramos-Compean case. He points out, however, that the standard for judging a law enforcement officer's use of deadly force is probable cause. The suspect doesn't actually have to have a gun -- all that matters is that the officer has, as the Supreme Court determined in Tennessee v. Garner (1985), "probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others." And, Klinger says, the scenario painted by Carter, with Compean on the ground, could have given Ramos probable cause to shoot if true.

Carter's story had other problems as well. Notably, she described Ramos as "a former nominee for Border Patrol Agent of the Year." That contention, which quickly became a talking point for backers of Ramos and Compean, is technically correct but disingenuous. A pre-sentencing investigation by the government showed that Ramos was nominated by a small group at the Fabens Border Patrol Station after his arrest for the shooting.

Within days after Carter's story appeared in the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, media attention snowballed, and Ramos and Compean were on their way to becoming a national right-wing cause célèbre. On Aug. 8, Carter appeared on Fox News' "O'Reilly Factor"; on Aug. 9, CNN's Lou Dobbs presented his first piece on it, and a day later Carter made her first appearance on his show. Dobbs then did a segment on the agents every day for a week. The version of the case that Dobbs would present his audience again and again over the next year was based on Carter's article, not the facts that the jury had seen at trial in El Paso.

Carter did not appear on Dobbs's show again but continued writing widely circulated stories on the case. Ramirez has been on Dobbs' show five times and has been a frequent source for other media accounts of the case. He was a principal source for a long feature published in the official magazine of the John Birch Society, the New American, in September 2006, which influenced much ensuing coverage of Ramos and Compean.

Neither Andy Ramirez nor Sara Carter, however, have gotten the screen time of T.J. Bonner, the president of the National Border Patrol Council, a union that represents Border Patrol agents. Bonner, who was quoted in Carter's initial article and in numerous other print accounts, has appeared or been quoted on Dobbs' show 17 times.

Bonner and the NBPC have helped circulate the now-widespread claim that Aldrete-Davila, the victim of the shooting, was indicted for drug smuggling and that his indictment was subsequently tossed out in exchange for testimony friendly to the prosecution. Supporters of the agents have used the rumor of a "sealed indictment" to help convince the right that the prosecution of the agents was illegitimate.

Next page: "A lot of stuff has disappeared or been covered up"