Webb may stretching too far, here. Organ “harvesting” has been well known in China, but nothing recent about Haiti turns up on a web search.

Absent links, this may be conjecture giving way to dark imaginings…

In the late 1970s the legal system of the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) was comprised of more than thirty semi-autonomous regional U.S. Attorneys (USA) offices. Each had a computer system to track case management for prosecutions, investigations, and civil litigations. The problem was that they used as many as seven different programming languages. This made the transmission and sharing of information between offices virtually impossible. The computers in the USA’s office in San Francisco could not read files sent from the USA in New York. The genius of Hamilton and Inslaw was to create a software program that could access files in any number of databases and programming languages and translate and then unify them into one consistent file. Promis was the Rosetta stone of computer languages. Inslaw won a $10 million, three-year contract in March 1982 to install a 16-bit architecture version of Promis, which the government had the right to use but not the right to modify without paying license fees to Inslaw, on government computers in the 22 largest U.S. Attorneys’ Offices. In April 1983, the second year of the three-year contract, the government modified Inslaw’s contract in order to obtain delivery of a 32-bit architecture version of Promis, which the government could not even use without paying license fees. In modifying the contract, the government promised to pay license fees if it decided to substitute the 32-bit version for the 16-bit version. In May 1983, the month following Inslaw’s delivery of the 32-bit version of Promis, the government reneged on its contractual agreement to pay license fees and simultaneously began to find fault with Inslaw’s implementation services as justification for withholding services payments. The Justice Department thereafter withheld $1.77 million in services payments forcing Inslaw to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February 1985. In January 1988, following several weeks of trial in 1987, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court issued fully litigated findings of fact that the Justice Department “took, converted, stole” the 32-bit version of Promis “through trickery, fraud and deceit,” implemented the 32-bit version of Promis in the 44 largest U.S. Attorneys Offices, and then tried to force INSLAW out of business in order to incapacitate INSLAW from litigating the Justice Department’s theft of Promis. The Bankruptcy Court imposed a compulsory license on the 44 largest U.S. Attorneys Offices for the perpetual use of the 32-bit version of Promis and issued a permanent injunction against any further dissemination of Promis by the government except under license from Inslaw. Subsequent appeals by the government saw the original rulings overturned on legal, not factual, grounds. Legal actions in the case continue to this day. Hamilton told FTW that none of the uses described above had anything to do with any licensing agreements for the software’s use to track terrorists, intelligence matters or worldwide financial transactions. The paper tracking of the refinements in Promis after the legal dispute erupted between INSLAW and the Reagan administration, verifies that at least one version of Promis was given… Read more »