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Long-running attack campaign against this and other publications will have to go somewhere else

Winner's attack dog booted off Internet groups

by Eric Jackson

Former US Air Force intelligence officer Donald K. Winner, who has in his own name and through proxies been waging a long-running vilification campaign against The Panama News and this reporter, Noriegaville and its owner Okke Ornstein and several email discussion groups that have eclipsed the ones he controls seems to have lost ground in recent weeks. The most recent setback is the banning of one of the moderators of some of his email groups, Clyde Jenkins, from the Panama Current Event and World discussion group. Some smaller discussion groups have followed suit.

Jenkins and Winner had been running a years-long vilification campaign, falsely accusing Ornstein of wife beating and this reporter of pedophilia. As to the latter allegation, Jenkins recently admitted that it was groundless: "The only reason I did was to give you an object lesson of what it's like when you start accusing people falsely. I don't believe that anyone took it seriously as I think they understood my purpose in doing so," Jenkins wrote in a Panama CEW posting nearly three years after he first made the charge. He never did specify any false story on this reporter's part.

But meanwhile, Ornstein published a rather scurrilous article in retaliation for years of unsubstantiated accusations of domestic violence, insinuating pedophilia on Jenkins's part. For that Jenkins has brought criminal defamation charges against Ornstein, and the former's use of postings from the Panama CEW group as evidence to support that charge was the immediate reason for his expulsion.

For many years, Jenkins referred to this reporter in dozens of postings on Panama CEW as "You Ethically Handicapped Piece of Shit" --- sans any specific allegation of unethical conduct.

Jenkins's boss Don Winner, for his part, with the active collaboration of his real estate partner Rob Askew falsely accused this reporter on the Zonelink email discussion group of seeking to obtain information about nerve gas and promote terrorism on the Internet. Winner made the bogus allegation and Zonelink owner Askew prohibited any reply, telling this reporter in an email that Winner had won the "argument." Winner's weapons of mass destruction claim came as an effort to discredit a story about how somebody is monitoring the attempts of veterans of the Tropical Test Center and their relatives to seek information and establish contacts among themselves and sending them intimidating emails. (It is unlikely that anyone other than the US government would have the technological means and motive to do such a thing, but nobody is claiming credit for the intimidation campaign, by which people have received emails warning them to cease and desist from seeking information or contacts.)

Winner's attempts to eliminate independent English-language journalism and discussion groups have met with ever less success in recent months and have become more extreme. He showed up at Ornstein's home in Arraijan armed with a stun gun and a camera, and after a confrontation and a wild car chase ended up with a corregidor's order to stay away from the Ornstein home for his effort. He has since accused Ornstein of trying to kill him in the car chase and of criminal defamation.

Winner has also, in collaboration with a friend of his, mounted a legal and media campaign accusing one of the people who led an electronic walkout from an email group that he controls of business fraud.

The bottom line, though, is that Winner's email groups and website are falling ever farther behind in readership among Panama's English-speaking residents.

The upper-end fishing boat business
Blades lashes out at tourism reporting
Will the return of traffic save Avenida Central?

El Mercadito
De facto urban renewal

Competition by vilification and litigation loses ground
Business & Economy Briefs