Newtown school shooting story already being changed by the media to eliminate eyewitness reports of a second shooter
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
(NaturalNews) The national media is ablaze today with coverage of the tragic elementary school shooting in Newtown, CT, where 27 people have reportedly been killed, including 18 children.
As always, when violent shootings take place, honest journalists are forced to ask the question: “Does this fit the pattern of other staged shootings?”
One of the most important red flags of a staged shooting is a second gunman, indicating the shooting was coordinated and planned. There are often mind control elements at work in many of these shootings. The Aurora “Batman” shooter James Holmes, for example, was a graduate student actually working on mind control technologies funded by the U.S. government. There were also chemical mind control elements linked to Jared Lee Loughner, the shooter of Congresswomen Giffords in Arizona in 2011.
According to multiple eyewitness reports from Aurora, Colorado, including at least one caught on camera by mainstream media news reports in Colorado, James Holmes did not operate alone. There was a second shooter involved. But the media quickly eliminated any mention of a second shooter from its coverage, resorting to the typical cover story of a “lone gunman.”
Today, the exact same thing is happening with the Newton, CT school shooting.
Eyewitness reports of a second shooter now being “scrubbed” from the news
As the story of this shooting was first breaking, the news was reporting a second gunman.
FoxNews reported that this second gunman was “led out of the woods by officers” and then questioned. The original source of this report was the Connecticut Post.
A local CBS affiliate was also reporting the existence of a second gunman and said “Police believe there may be a second gunman and are looking for a red or maroon van with its back window blown out…”
A local CT CBS affiliate was also reporting, “CBS News reports that a potential second shooter is in custody and that SWAT is now investigating the home of the suspect. A witness tells WFSB-TV that a second man was taken out of the woods in handcuffs wearing a black jacket and camouflage pants and telling parents on the scene, ‘I did not do it.'”
But the more recent stories being put out by the media are scrubbing any mention of a second gunman and going with the “lone gunman” explanation, which holds about as much water as the “lone gunman” explanation of the JFK assassination.
“A lone gunman killed 27 people at an elementary school here, including 18 children, in a terrifying early Friday morning shooting spree,” reports USA Today. It makes no mention whatsoever of a second gunman.
NBC News is also now chiming in with the “lone gunman” version of the story, eliminating any mention of a second gunman from its coverage of the tragic event.
Another story authored by NBC News carries the title, “26 dead after lone gunman assaults Connecticut elementary school.” Once again, no mention of a second gunman as reported by eyewitnesses.
When key elements of the story keeps changing, something is fishy
Journalists are trained to ask questions, and one of the questions I have right now is: Why was the second gunman suddenly dropped from media coverage after the first few hours of this story developing?
And why is there always a second gunman in these recent mass shootings that seem to be engineered to maximize emotional shock value due to the sheer horror of all the innocent deaths?
This story is continuing to develop, and we’ll keep asking questions here on Natural News. Our hearts and prayers go out to the children and families impacted by this violent tragedy. Given the terrible loss of life that has taken place here, shouldn’t we all seek to get to the bottom of WHY these shootings all seem to fit a common pattern of multiple mind-controlled shooters followed by an almost immediate media cover-up of the facts?
For the sake of those children who were killed today, I want to get to the bottom of this and expose the REAL story, for the purpose of stopping this violence from targeting yet more innocents in the future.
My long-distance interest in the Sandy Hook events is based on ongoing work with a team of anti-pedophile journalists and activists who for over a decade have tracked and exposed American pedophile rings from Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam) to Beijing, China.
In all cases so far, our team discovered that these frontline pedophiles supply children for sexual services to VIPs traveling in Asia, including diplomats from the highest levels of the White House and State Department, top executives of major corporations, and heads of universities and aid agencies. Nearly all the patrons involved in this cruel pastime have backgrounds in US intelligence the CIA, NSA or State Department intelligence. The individuals are from diverse religious backgrounds Catholic, Jewish and Orthodox – while the core facilitators are often priests with Jesuit order, and to a lesser degree Franciscans and Benedictines.
At an orphanage in Cambodia, it took three years for our multinational team against death threats from armed policemen and undisguised hostility from NGOs to realize the expulsion of a pedophile coven, which included a former US ambassador to the United Nations, the celebrated head of a new media program at an Ivy League campus and a renowned correspondent based at the Tokyo American Club. When the police shut down their strong-encryption computer center and satellite uplink, used for sweetheart messaging and exporting child-porn videos, the American pedophiles stripped out all the programs, rendering a room of Apple computers inoperable. Later, at a celebration for the “liberation” of the orphans from the grip of these abusive men and their compliant wives, the teachers told me that the average age of the boys and girls who had been invited to sleep over at weekend parties was “10 years old.”
One member of our team who resided in Cambodia suffered an “accident” in a cowardly act of retaliation by that viscous coven with all the fingers on both hands broken and bleeding from his ears as he lay unconscious along a highway. It’s taken our brave friend three years to regain his formidable intellectual powers as a former political speechwriter. I use the term “coven” because these predators work as families parents, children and grandchildren indoctrinated from infancy that inflicting trauma on helpless children is life’s greatest pleasure.
Pedophilia is a psychiatric illness that is spreading worldwide because the globalist elite, much like a deranged fraternity from hazing hell, use it to control their peers and underlings through the commission of shameful and often lethal crimes. The photos are enough to prevent defection, informing to the police or sending leaks to the media.
The American power elite’s predilection for young boys has always been a privilege as shown in past scandals involving White House pages. One of the first postwar American ambassadors to Tokyo was a voracious pursuer of teenage boys inside gay bath houses frequented by rightwing Japanese militarists, the very same war criminals who had committed unspeakable atrocities against civilians for example converting Christian boys schools into male brothels. The shared lust of the former soldiers from both sides corrupted and ultimately reversed the attempt by a victorious Allied Supreme Command to transform Japan into a peaceful democracy. Authoritarian perversion remains in command.
In recent years with the rise of Internet file-sharing, a major shift in pedophile profiles has appeared in the increasingly lower age of pedophiles. It is shocking that college-age men, who should be involved in same-age affairs (with either sex we are not being judgmental about preference) are instead eager to abduct kids who are barely out of infancy and videotape brutal rape scenes to share with their online fellows. Today, young men of college age serve as procurers, pimps and producers of child porn for their sugar daddies.
These younger pedophiles, at least while in Asia, are often studying abroad on US government fellowships, CIA grants or working for Soros-funded NGOs. In Beijing, I had a verbal sparring match with a young American video producer who was making a documentary on child abductions by Chinese adoption rings. He had no intention of saving kids from these criminals, since his stated ambition was to launch a pornography industry in China. This was the son of a leading faculty member at a Connecticut prep school, which sponsors troubled boys and prepares them for a life of male prostitution with dormitory screenings of videos showing the gang rape of preteen girls with the knowledge and sometimes approval of teachers, according to testimony submitted to court.
After first being a victim of sexual assault and then acting as a perpetrator against younger boys or girls, many of these young men develop passive-aggressive personalities. When challenged, they tend react with suppressed rage under a blank expression and then get their revenge with a strange prank against their accusers.
Many women might nod in agreement that men are awful creatures, but from our experience in Southeast Asia, there are also many female predators. On an early-morning visit to a Peace Corps camp on the Laotian border, a friend in the U.S. Army was stunned to discover that every American women all graduates of elite East Coast colleges was asleep with a 12-to-14 girl tucked inside her bed. Americans are not alone in this sickness of mind and body Europeans, Australians and Japanese are among the notorious child molesters. Sexual domination of weaker individuals, especially children who cannot defend their rights, is a hallmark of imperialism.
There is one more element involved in the pedophile industry: the organized crime groups that finance the purchase or kidnapping of children. These gangsters are not just low-life elements but also include professional gangsters – “businessmen” with connections to politicians and bankers.
A point that needs mentioning is that during youth, I spent a summer at a prep school in Connecticut on a National Science Foundation program but it had nothing to do with MK-ULTRA.
Mind Control in Connecticut: Catcher in the Rye
In 1942, at the start of World War II, the Jesuit order opened Fairfield University in southern Connecticut. The new Catholic college was erected on the country estate of Brewster Jennings, then chairman of the Socony Mobil Oil Company, which after a series of mergers became ExxonMobil. After serving as a naval officer in World War I, the Hartford-born oil executive graduated from Yale and became closely associated with the OSS and CIA. He founded the Avalon Foundation, since renamed the Mellon Foundation, which has funded pacification programs inside American society. (Outed spy Valerie Plame worked under cover at the Brewster Jennings “brass plate” company, which acted as the CIA’s counter-proliferation department.) Although the information remains classified, it had to be OSS chief Bill Donovan who prompted the formation of Fairfield University as an intelligence training center for potential CIA recruits vetted from the elite preparatory schools in Connecticut.
During the war in Europe, a non-commissioned office of Russian Jewish descent assigned to U.S. Defense Intelligence worked on Operation Paperclip (the transport of Nazi scientists to U.S. laboratories) and Project Artichoke (smuggling German Jews into Palestine in support of a Zionist state). His name was J.D. “Jerry” Salinger. Later, he served in the Counter-Intelligence Corps, debriefing and reassigning Nazi officers, including those who had conducted psychiatric experiments on prisoners of war.
At war’s end, Salinger lived in Tarrytown, New York, but was soon ordered to move across the state border to Stamford, Connecticut, close to Fairfield University. He resided in a converted barn, out of public view, presumably to continue his special area of intelligence work, the field testing of the MK-ULTRA methods refined by the sadistically clinical Dr. Sidney Gottlieb (the pseudonym of Joseph Schieder), who ran the main mind-control lab at Jesuit-run Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., which is also a finishing school for diplomats in the State Department.
In the Connecticut countryside during his “lost years”, Salinger penned “The Catcher in the Rye”, which contains the command code-words for MK-ULTRA assassins. The protagonist Holden Caulfield is a study of a paranoiac passive-aggressive character, whose favorite expression is: “You’re killing me.”
CIA Partners with Organized Crime in New England
Around 1950, while Salinger was in Stamford, the CIA recruited a South Boston convict nicknamed “Whitey” Bulger to supply young runaways for mind-control experiments under the fast-expanding MK-ULTRA programs being set up at 44 universities across the United States. The centers for the New England drug experiments were probably the Whiting Forensic Facility at the Connecticut Valley Hospital in Middleford, Connecticut, and Bridgewater Hospital in Massachusetts, the region’s psychiatric facilities for the criminally insane.
With CIA backing, Bulger built up his Winter Hill Gang, composed mainly of Irishmen, who strong-armed their way to control over the Boston’s gambling scene and drug trafficking. While little is known about the political activities of the Bulger gang, its rise to crime dominance coincided with the expansion of weapons smuggling into Northern Ireland in support of the IRA. A parallel cross-Atlantic traffic in drugs (and illegal immigration in the reverse direction) began at the same time. The predominantly Irish political machine of Boston from the Prohibition Era smuggling tycoon Joseph Kennedy Sr, to House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill gave their blessings to the flourishing organized crime network and voiced support for the patriotic IRA “freedom fighters,” who returned the favor to Washington with murderous attacks on American-loathing British figures such as Lord Montbatten.
Connecticut, under control of the Patriciarca crime family, was off-limits to Bulger. The day-to-day operations of the Sicilian immigrants were run by Bill Grasso, head of the clan that later produced Connecticut’s first female governor.
Starting in the 1980s, the DOJ, FBI and CIA launched an all-out war against the Patriciarca mob in order to install their puppet Whitey Bulger as crime boss of New England. FBI agent John Connelly took credit for infiltrating and busting up the Patriarca clan, but later he was exposed as a mole for Bulger. By the early 1990s, Bulger set up his Jai Alai Associates, a betting syndicate based in Connecticut and Florida. Finally, all of New England was safe for CIA smuggling, support for terrorism, money-laundering and mind-control operations.
Whitey Bulger
In 2011, Bulger made headlines with his arrest in Malibu, California, where he had lived for more than a decade “undetected” despite being on the FBI “most wanted” list – on a long vacation thanks to his relationship with the CIA. If there was one point of irritation, however, between the Irish mobster and his controllers, it was his opposition to drug use by teenagers. After seeing first-hand how MK-ULTRA had destroyed the minds of his young recruits, Bulger ordered his gang members never to sell drugs to teenagers. Even a ruthless mobster has more decency that the self-styled “patriots” who run the intelligence services.
Whatever its genteel image of colonial homes and autumnal foliage, Connecticut has a sleazy underside embedded in its servant pool, welfare households and the chronic unemployed. Bridgeport, with its low-income Puerto Rican population, is a major center for prostitution and recruitment of prostitutes for VIP clients in New York and the nation’s capital.
The pedophile rings have a social-economic hierarchy at the top are the VIP clients, then the intermediaries, often Catholic priests or social-services managers, further down the ladder the operatives losers recruited from prep schools and college campuses – and finally the supply itself – money-hungry willing parents and the unwillingly abducted children.
Newtown, like Fairfield and Stamford, is part of the Diocese of Bridgeport, which got into legal trouble in 2001 due to lawsuits by 23 victims of pedophilia committed by priests. Bishop Edward Egan, then diocese head, was a protector of sexual offender priests, sending them to other areas when parental complaints reached the ears of the police. After the plaintiffs won an out-of-court settlement, the Diocese petitioned the US Supreme Court to quash the thousands of documents detailing the beastly sex crimes. In 2009 Opus Dei honcho Justice Antonin Scalia determined that the court records should not be made public.
In this past year’s pedophile scandal at Penn State, another Opus Dei leader, former FBI director Louis Freeh, was hired as a consultant by the Nittany Lions football team. His whitewash report put most of the blame on head coach Joe Paterno, while suppressing the names and backgrounds of the wealthy and powerful boosters who were provided sexual services from the young football players. In Connecticut, the Vatican had an interest in wiping the slate clean, and so did the CIA. The clean slate turned out to be a bloody mess.
Agency-Spawned Pedophiles
The MK-ULTRA program that reached into campuses across Connecticut quickly created a human garbage heap of wrecked minds and twisted souls. The child abuse and drugs routinely administered to young trainees led to a permanent social fixture of sadism and sexual abuse throughout New England from the gutter up to the governing class.
In 2011, a Newtown resident named Edwin Wilson was arrested for having a months-long sexual relationship with a 4-year-old girl and producing child-porn videos of their sexual encounters. The arrest was a part of a wide crackdown order the state attorney general, Richard Blumenthal which boosted his successful campaign in the U.S. Senate race. Other cases included: a 24-year-old Hispanic male in Hartford who shot videos of sex with a pre-teen girl; a DJ in Plainfield arraigned on similar charges, an older theater and film teacher accused of using Taft school’s equipment to make kiddie porn the list goes on in sickening detail. Fairfield University, where MK-ULTRA was implanted into New England, recently saw two staffers implicated in the rape of 23 Haitian boys during the earthquake relief effort.
Adam Lanza fits the profile of a pedophile-ring recruit young enough to approach children at the local schools and in the churches, possessing the computer skills to produce child-porn videos and typically passive-aggressive in personality. The Lanzas attended the Saint Rosa of Lima Church, where eight child parishioners were among the shooting victims. Santa Rosa is the very same order that sponsors the western-state hospital that employed Michael Jackson’s physician Dr. Conrad Murray. As in the case of Jackson’s Neverland, after a child-sex experiment blossoms, it must be shut down.
The Lone Gun-Boy Theory
Nancy Lanza kept an arsenal of firearms, and ordered her son to be constantly under watch by older boys. She must have had good reason for being armed to the teeth. Judging from her hoard of rifles and hand guns, she was expecting an all-out assault from a coven of pedophiles, not an attack by a single shooter. The lone gun-boy theory is sheer nonsense her son may have been an accomplice in giving the assailants access to his home but ended up murdered as a patsy.
The coven is larger and more powerful than Mrs. Lanza could ever have imagined. Sexual violation is the key to creating intelligence agents and assassins who are impervious to reason and mercy, lacking any original thoughts or moral qualms. Plus a supply of children is needed in Congress and the White House to entertain the satraps and moguls from Colombian drug lords to Israeli weapons dealers and French money launderers, not to mention America’s own homegrown pervs.
If the culprits had been Adam Lanza and his pals, then their response to grounding would have been something like posting photos and addresses of naked children. The method of the shooting point-blank execution-style gun shots indicate that the assailants were professional hit men, probably allied with the Winter Hill Gang.
The Sandy Hook assault happened probably because of a split between competing institutions and diverging policies. On one hand, the gangland figures who cooperated with CIA mind-control program that promoted child-sex as a means of ensuring obedience and secrecy were being challenged by politicians playing up parental demands to clean up the scandalous child-sex problem in Connecticut.
The dirty FBI agent John Connelly was more of a double agent and go-between for the Feds and not simply a Winter Hill mole as portraying at his sentencing. The arrest of Whitey Bulger was a pure-and-simple double-cross by the FBI and CIA, who had used him as an ally in MK-ULTRA and informant for more than a half-century. In his ambitious drive to win a U.S. senatorial seat, state attorney general and now Senator Blumenthal broke the basic rules of mob cooperation. And now that has led to a war on the streets and in the schools.
Unlike the Sicilian crime families who went down easy, the fighting Irish criminals can be counted on to put up a street battle with the same flair as in the movie “The Gangs of New York.” The gangsters have no shortage of allies in the pimps, drug dealers, pedophiles, punks and deranged freaks who have been caught up in the sudden dragnet. The police are outnumbered and easily outgunned. It’s happened before, as in Fort Apache in the South Bronx. Sandy Hook is just the first installment of a payback. If the Feds push any harder, then Bridgeport and Boston will soon be looking like Belfast during the troubles or Beirut in the bad old days.
Stop Drugging the Kids
The mass media is under pressure to cover up the incident with sympathetic blather instead of a sustained probe. Forensic evidence is being literally buried. America is moving on where to, nobody knows. The politicians and cops are now silent and glum. Relying on arrests and wiretapping, they have forgotten that the fight against crime begins with addressing social justice, economic fairness and education and in some unfortunate cases, psychiatric care.
I am Adam Lanza’s Doctor by Rima E Laibow, MD
Was a Senate seat worth the lives of all those children and teachers? Blumenthal, who paints himself as a clone of the erstwhile New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, will have to live with that question for the remainder of his life. Is the CIA satisfied that its mind-control techniques that have created hordes of homicidal monsters from Iraq to Libya and now Connecticut?
Richard Blumenthal
The lesson of Sandy Hook is that mind-control cannot itself be controlled. Programmed killers are like robots without power-off switches. The process of transforming innocent children into robots through sexual abuse is inhumane and a crime. Whatever MK-ULTRA is called today – since we know it still exists after seeing the Abu Ghraib Prison photos – it must be shut down forever or the murderous nightmare will go on and on. And mind-altering drugs are not just for sinister purposes, since at least 60 percent of U.S. children are on a pharmaceutical dosages long before they can learn how to think. Even parents act as mind-controllers against their own kids.
Now, with the investigation terminated, comes the diversionary exercise of “gun control”, a national effort led by Joe Biden, a member of the Knights of Malta, a politician with an intelligence background who is sworn to protect the interests of the Vatican. Say it ain’t so, Joe. Leave intact the right of armed self-defense or the gangsters will take over everything, but get rid of the drugs and end the mind control and America will be a safer place, especially for its children.
Yoichi Shimatsu, a science writer based in Hong Kong, provides herbal therapy and health counseling to the victims of the Fukushima radiation crisis.
“[My staff] and I hope the people of Newtown don’t have it crash on their head later.” –Connecticut Medical Examiner D. Wayne Carver II, MD, December 15, 2012
Inconsistencies and anomalies abound when one turns an analytical eye to news of the Newtown school massacre. The public’s general acceptance of the event’s validity and faith in its resolution suggests a deepened credulousness borne from a world where almost all news and information is electronically mediated and controlled. The condition is reinforced through the corporate media’s unwillingness to push hard questions vis-à-vis Connecticut and federal authorities who together bottlenecked information while invoking prior restraint through threats of prosecutorial action against journalists and the broader citizenry seeking to interpret the event on social media.
Along these lines on December 19 the Connecticut State Police assigned individual personnel to each of the 26 families who lost a loved one at Sandy Hook Elementary. “The families have requested no press interviews,” State Police assert on their behalf, “and we are asking that this request be honored.[1] The de facto gag order will be in effect until the investigation concludes—now forecast to be “several months away” even though lone gunman Adam Lanza has been confirmed as the sole culprit.[2]
With the exception of an unusual and apparently contrived appearance by Emilie Parker’s alleged father, victims’ family members have been almost wholly absent from public scrutiny.[3] What can be gleaned from this and similar coverage raises many more questions and glaring inconsistencies than answers. While it sounds like an outrageous claim, one is left to inquire whether the Sandy Hook shooting ever took place—at least in the way law enforcement authorities and the nation’s news media have described.
The Accidental Medical Examiner An especially important yet greatly underreported feature of the Sandy Hook affair is the wholly bizarre performance of Connecticut’s top medical examiner H. Wayne Carver II at a December 15 press conference. Carver’s unusual remarks and behavior warrant close consideration because in light of his professional notoriety they appear remarkably amateurish and out of character.
H. Wayne Carver II has an extremely self-assured, almost swaggering presence in Connecticut state administration. In early 2012 Carver threatened to vacate his position because of state budget cuts and streamlining measures that threatened his professional autonomy over the projects and personnel he oversaw. Along these lines the pathologist has gone to excessive lengths to demonstrate his findings and expert opinion in court proceedings. For example, in a famous criminal case Carver “put a euthanized pig through a wood chipper so jurors could match striations on the bone fragments with the few ounces of evidence that prosecutors said were on the remains of the victim.”[4] One would therefore expect Carver to be in his element while identifying and verifying the exact ways in which Sandy Hook’s children and teachers met their violent demise.
Yet the H. Wayne Carver who showed up to the December 15 press conference is an almost entirely different man, appearing apprehensive and uncertain, as if he is at a significant remove from the postmortem operation he had overseen. The multiple gaffes, discrepancies, and hedges in response to reporters’ astute questions suggest that he is either under coercion or an imposter. While the latter sounds untenable it would go a long way in explaining his sub-pedestrian grasp of medical procedures and terminology.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zE0OT5od9DA With this in mind extended excerpts from this exchange are worthy of recounting here in print. Carver is accompanied by Connecticut State Police Lieutenant H. Paul Vance and additional Connecticut State Police personnel. The reporters are off-screen and thus unidentified so I have assigned them simple numerical identification based on what can be discerned of their voices.
Reporter #1: So the rifle was the primary weapon? H. Wayne Carver: Yes. Reporter #1: [Inaudible] Carver: Uh (pause). Question was what caliber were these bullets. And I know—I probably know more about firearms than most pathologists but if I say it in court they yell at me and don’t make me answer [sic]—so [nervous laughter]. I’ll let the police do that for you. Reporter #2: Doctor can you tell us about the nature of the wounds. Were they at very close range? Were the children shot at from across the room? Carver: Uhm, I only did seven of the autopsies. The victims I had ranged from three to eleven wounds apiece and I only saw two of them with close range shooting. Uh, but that’s, uh y’know, a sample. Uh, I really don’t have detailed information on the rest of the injuries. [Given that Carver is Connecticut’s top coroner and in charge of the entire postmortem this is a startling admission.-JT] Reporter #3: But you said that the long rifle was used? Carver: Yes. Reporter #3: But the long rifle was discovered in the car. State Police Lieutenant Vance: That’s not correct, sir. Unidentified reporter #4: How many bullets or bullet fragments did you find in the autopsy. Can you tell us that? Carver: Oh. I’m lucky I can tell you how many I found. I don’t know. There were lots of them, OK? This type of weapon is not, uh … the bullets are designed in such a fashion that the energy—this is very clinical. I shouldn’t be saying this. But the energy is deposited in the tissue so the bullet stays in [the tissue]. [In fact, the Bushmaster .223 Connecticut police finally claimed was used in the shooting is designed for long range field use and utilizes high velocity bullets averaging 3,000 feet-per-second, the energy of which even at considerable distance would penetrate several bodies before finally coming to rest in tissue.] Reporter #5: How close were the injuries? Carver: Uh, all the ones (pause). I believe say, yes [sic]. Reporter #6: In what shape were the bodies when the families were brought to check [inaudible]. Carver: Uh, we did not bring the bodies and the families into contact. We took pictures of them, uhm, of their facial features. We have, uh, uh—it’s easier on the families when you do that. Un, there is, uh, a time and place for the up close and personal in the grieving process, but to accomplish this we thought it would be best to do it this way and, uh, you can sort of, uh … You can control a situation depending on the photographer, and I have very good photographers. Uh, but uh— Reporter #7: Do you know the difference of the time of death between the mother in the house and the bodies recovered [in the school]. Carver: Uh, no, I don’t. Sorry [shakes head excitedly] I don’t! [embarrassed laugh] Reporter #8: Did the gunman kill himself with the rifle? Carver: No. I—I don’t know yet. I’ll-I’ll examine him tomorrow morning. But, but I don’t think so. [Why has Carver left arguably the most important specimen for last? And why doesn’t he think Lanza didn’t commit suicide with the rifle?] Reporter #9: In terms of the children, were they all found in one classroom or— Carver: Uhm … [inaudible] [Turns to Lieutenant Vance] Paul and company will deal with that. Reporter #9: What? Carver: Paul and company will deal with that. Lieutenant Vance is going to handle that one. Reporter #10: Was there any evidence of a struggle? Any bruises? Carver: No. Reporter #11: The nature of the shooting; is there any sense that there was a lot of care taken with precision [inaudible] or randomly? Carver: [Exhales while glancing upward, as if frustrated] Both. It’s a very difficult question to answer … You’d think after thousands of people I’ve seen shot but I … It’s … If I attempted to answer it in court there’d be an objection and then they’d win—[nervous laughter]. [Who would win? Why does an expert whose routine job as a public employee is to provide impartial medical opinion concerned with winning and losing in court? Further, Carver is not in court but rather at a press conference.] Reporter #12: Doctor, can you discuss the fatal injuries to the adults? Carver: Ah, they were similar to those of the children. Reporter #13: Doctor, the children you had autopsied, where in the bodies were they hit? Carver: Uhm [pause]. All over. All over. Reporter #14: Were [the students] sitting at their desks or were they running away when this happened? Carver: I’ll let the guys who—the scene guys talk—address that issue. I, uh, obviously I was at the scene. Obviously I’m very experienced in that. But there are people who are, uh, the number one professionals in that. I’ll let them—let that [voice trails off]. Reporter [#15]: How many boys and how many girls [were killed]? Carver: [Slowly shaking his head] I don’t know.
(Added information from research about the CT Medical Examiner.
More Unanswered Questions and Inconsistencies In addition to Carver’s remarks several additional chronological and evidentiary contradictions in the official version of the Sandy Hook shooting are cause for serious consideration and leave doubt in terms of how the event transpired vis-à-vis the way authorities and major media outlets have presented it. It is now well known that early on journalists reported that Adam Lanza’s brother Ryan Lanza was reported to be the gunman, and that pistols were used in the shooting rather than a rifle. Yet these are merely the tip of the iceberg.
When Did the Gunman Arrive?
After Adam Lanza fatally shot and killed his mother at his residence, he drove himself to the elementary school campus, arriving one half hour after classes had commenced. Dressed in black, Lanza proceeds completely unnoticed through an oddly vacant parking lot with a military style rifle and shoots his way through double glass doors and a brand new yet apparently poorly engineered security system. Further, initial press accounts suggest how no school personnel or students heard gunshots and no 911 calls are made until after Lanza begins firing inside the facility. “It was a lovely day,” Sandy Hook fourth grade teacher Theodore Varga said. And then, suddenly and unfathomably, gunshots rang out. “I can’t even remember how many,” Varga said.[5] The recollection contrasts sharply with an updated version of Lanza’s arrival where at 9:30AM he
walked up to the front entrance and fired at least a half dozen rounds into the glass doors. The thunderous sound of Lanza blowing an opening big enough to walk through the locked school door caused Principal Dawn Hochsprung and school psychologist Mary Scherlach to bolt from a nearby meeting room to investigate. He shot and killed them both as they ran toward him.
Breaching the school’s security system in such a way would have likely triggered some automatic alert of school personnel. Further, why would the school’s administrators run toward an armed man who has just noisily blasted his way into the building? Two other staff members attending the meeting with Hocksprung and Scherlach sustained injuries “in the hail of bullets” but returned to the aforementioned meeting room and managed a call to 911.[6] This contrasted with earlier reports where the first 911 call claimed students “were trapped in a classroom with the adult shooter who had two guns.”[7] Recordings of the first police dispatch following the 911 call at 9:35:50 indicate that someone “thinks there’s someone shooting in the building.”[8] There is a clear distinction between potentially hearing shots somewhere in the building and being almost mortally caught in a “hail of bullets.”
How did the gunman fire so many shots in such little time?
According to Dr. Carver and State Police, Lanza shot each victim between 3 and 11 times during a 5 to 7 minute span. If one is to average this out to 7 bullets per individual—excluding misses—Lanza shot 182 times, or once every two seconds. Yet according to the official story Lanza was the sole assassin and armed with only one weapon. Thus if misses and changing the gun’s 30-shot magazine at least 6 times are added to the equation Lanza must have been averaging about one shot per second—extremely skilled use of a single firearm for a young man with absolutely no military training and who was on the verge of being institutionalized. Still, an accurate rendering of the event is even more difficult to arrive at because the chief medical examiner admittedly has no idea exactly how the children were shot or whether a struggle ensued.
Where is the Photo and Video Evidence?
Photographic and video evidence is at once profuse yet lacking in terms of its capacity to demonstrate that a mass shooting took place on the scale described by authorities. For example, in an era of ubiquitous video surveillance of public buildings especially no visual evidence of Lanza’s violent entry has emerged. And while studio snapshots of the Sandy Hook victims abound there is little if any eyewitness testimony of anyone who’s observed the corpses except for Carver and his staff, and they appear almost as confused about the conditions of the deceased as any layperson watching televised coverage of the event. Nor are there any routine eyewitness, photo or video evidence of the crime scene’s aftermath—broken glass, blasted security locks and doors, bullet casings and holes, bloodied walls and floors—all of which are common in such investigations and reportage.
Why Were Medical Personnel Turned Away From the Crime Scene?
Oddly enough medical personnel are forced to set up their operation not at the school where the dead and injured lay, but rather at the fire station several hundred feet away. This flies in the face of standard medical operating procedure where personnel are situated as close to the scene as possible. There is no doubt that the school had ample room to accommodate such personnel. Yet medical responders who rushed to Sandy Hill Elementary upon receiving word of the tragedy were denied entry to the school and forced to set up primary and secondary triages off school grounds and wait for the injured to be brought to them. Shortly after the shooting “as other ambulances from neighboring communities rolled up, sirens blaring, the first responders slowly realized that their training would be tragically underutilized on this horrible day. ‘You may not be able to save everybody, but you damn well try,’” 44 year old emergency medical technician James Wolff told NBC News. “’And when (we) didn’t have the opportunity to put our skills into action, it’s difficult.’”[9]
In light of this, who were the qualified medical practitioners pronounced the 20 children and 7 adults dead? Who decided that none could be revived? Carver and his staff are apparently the only medical personnel to have attended to the victims—yet this was in the postmortem conducted several hours later. Such slipshod handling of the crime scene leaves the State of Connecticut open to a potential array of hefty civil claims by families of the slain.
Did a mass evacuation of the school take place?
Sandy Hook Elementary is attended by 600 students. Yet there is no photographic or video evidence of an evacuation on this scale. Instead, limited video and photographic imagery suggest that a limited evacuation of perhaps at most several dozen students occurred.
A highky A highly circulated photo depicts students walking in a single file formation with their hands on each others’ shoulders and eyes shut. Yet this was the image of a drill that took place prior to the event itself.[10] Most other photos are portraits of individual children. Despite aerial video footage of the event documenting law enforcement scouring the scene and apprehending one or more suspects in the wooded area nearby the school,[11] there is no such evidence that a mass exodus of children from the school transpired once law enforcement pronounced Sandy Hook secure. Nor are there videos or photos of several hundred students and their parents at the oft-referenced fire station nearby where students were routed for parent pick up.
Sound Bite Prism and the Will to Believe Outside of a handful of citizen journalists and alternative media commentators Sandy Hill’s dramatically shifting factual and circumstantial terrain has escaped serious critique because it is presented through major media’s carefully constructed prism of select sound bites alongside a widespread and longstanding cultural impulse to accept the pronouncements of experts, be they bemused physicians, high ranking law enforcement officers, or political leaders demonstrating emotionally-grounded concern. Political scientist W. Lance Bennett calls this the news media’s “authority-disorder bias.” “Whether the world is returned to a safe, normal place,” Bennett writes, “or whether the very idea of a normal world is called into question, the news is preoccupied with order, along with related questions of whether authorities are capable of establishing or restoring it.”[12]
Despite Carver’s bizarre performance and law enforcement authorities’ inability to settle on and relay simple facts, media management’s impulse to assure audiences and readerships of the Newtown community’s inevitable adjustment to its trauma and loss with the aid of the government’s protective oversight—however incompetent that may be—far surpasses a willingness to undermine this now almost universal news media narrative with messy questions and suggestions of intrigue. This well-worn script is one the public has been conditioned to accept. If few people relied on such media to develop their world view this would hardly be a concern. Yet this is regrettably not the case.
The Sandy Hook tragedy was on a far larger scale than the past year’s numerous slaughters, including the Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting and the Batman theater shooting in Colorado. It also included glaringly illogical exercises and pronouncements by authorities alongside remarkably unusual evidentiary fissures indistinguishable by an American political imagination cultivated to believe that the corporate, government and military’s sophisticated system of organized crime is largely confined to Hollywood-style storylines while really existing malfeasance and crises are without exception returned to normalcy.
If recent history is a prelude the likelihood of citizens collectively assessing and questioning Sandy Hook is limited even given the event’s overtly superficial trappings. While the incident is ostensibly being handled by Connecticut law enforcement, early reports indicate how federal authorities were on the scene as the 911 call was received. Regardless of where one stands on the Second Amendment and gun control, it is not unreasonable to suggest the Obama administration complicity or direct oversight of an incident that has in very short order sparked a national debate on the very topic—and not coincidentally remains a key piece of Obama’s political platform.
The move to railroad this program through with the aid of major media and an irrefutable barrage of children’s portraits, “heartfelt” platitudes and ostensible tears neutralizes a quest for genuine evidence, reasoned observation and in the case of Newtown honest and responsible law enforcement. Moreover, to suggest that Obama is not capable of deploying such techniques to achieve political ends is to similarly place ones faith in image and interpretation above substance and established fact, the exact inclination that in sum has brought America to such an impasse.
[8] RadioMan911TV, “Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting Newtown Police / Fire and CT State Police,” Youtube, December 14, 2012. At several points in this recording audio is scrambled, particularly following apprehension of a second shooting suspect outside the school, suggesting a purposeful attempt to withhold vital information.
[12] W. Lance Bennett, News: The Politics of Illusion 9th Edition, Boston: Longman, 2012, 47. Andrew Whooley provided suggestions and research for this article.
Thursday, December 20th, 2012 | Posted by Niall Bradley
The massacre of 20 children and 7 adults at the Sandy Hook elementary school last Friday was one more in a long line of atrocious mass murders committed in the USA. By now, five days later, an official version of events has more or less solidified to explain the chain of events. The familiar ‘lone gunman’ narrative has once more stoked the hot-button issue of gun control and left the general population as clueless as ever as to why people suddenly ‘go postal’ and target the most vulnerable members of society.
On closer inspection, however, there is clearly more to many of these mass shootings than meets the eye. Very often the earliest reports present information that directly contradicts key foundations of the final ‘official’ analysis of events. Granted, confusion is natural when a story breaks, but some of the initial reports conflict so completely with the lone gunman narrative that I’m going to compile them here and then try to put this tragedy in a more objective context. In his speech at the Sandy Hook Interfaith Prayer Vigil in Newtown, Connecticut on Sunday night, President Obama quoted the following biblical passage:
“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” ~ 2 Corinthians 4:18
The traumatised Newtown community deserves the facts without the spin. Everyone touched by this brutal event deserves to know what really happened, so let’s fix our eyes on what remains unseen… A 20-year-old ‘tech geek’ named Adam Lanza is supposed to have snapped early last Friday, December 14th, shot dead his mother Nancy Lanza, loaded her car up with her guns and ammo, then driven it across town to his former school, the Sandy Hook Elementary School, shot dead 27 people in two classrooms and an adjoining hallway, then turned one of his guns on himself. That’s how most will now remember the shooting, but is that actually what happened? All the child victims were first-graders between the ages of 6 and 7. If there’s any saving grace to be found in this event, it’s that it was all over within minutes. Police were reportedly on the scene “instantaneously”, according to Connecticut State Police Commander, Lt. Vance and by then the shooting had ended. Listed among the slain school teachers and administrative staff was the school principal, 47-year-old Dawn Hochsprung. Right here we encounter our first problem:
The Newtown Bee December 14, 2012 Sandy Hook School Principal Dawn Hochsprung told The Bee that a masked man entered the school with a rifle and started shooting multiple shots – more than she could count – that went “on and on.”
How could the principal have survived to give this statement to local press describing what happened … if she was one of the first to be killed? Incidentally, The Newtown Bee‘s article was taken down on Monday December 17th. Of course, a plausible explanation is that a reporter mistook another teacher for the principal.
We were initially told that two handguns – a Glock and a Sig Sauer – were found next to the body of the dead shooter, while a third weapon, a .223-caliber rifle was also recovered “in the trunk of a car” later, in the school’s parking lot. All of the weapons were allegedly legally bought and registered in Nancy Lanza’s name. The car was later identified as a black Honda, also registered in her name. More weapons have since been introduced to the story but we’ll get back to those later on.
Besides anonymous ‘law enforcement officials’ telling the media that Adam Lanza was a former pupil at the school, they also said his mother was currently a teacher there, that she was found among the dead and that her son had specifically sought out her classroom first. But when it emerged that teaching staff at the school had never heard of a Nancy Lanza, it was suggested that she was a substitute teacher whose name therefore mightn’t appear on staff lists.
But this claim too has disappeared down the memory hole because it’s now known that Nancy had no connection with the school. Adam Lanza was in fact home-schooled. Nancy Lanza has since been painted as a “survivalist” who loved firearms, taught her sons how to shoot and was “stockpiling” because she was “worried about economic collapse.”
Daily Mail, UK December 16, 2012 Last night it also emerged Nancy was a member of the Doomsday Preppers movement, which believes people should prepare for end of the world. Her former sister-in-law Marsha said she had turned her home ‘into a fortress’. She added: ‘Nancy had a survivalist philosophy which is why she was stockpiling guns. She had them for defense. ‘She was stockpiling food. She grew up on a farm in New Hampshire. She was skilled with guns. We talked about preppers and preparing for the economy collapsing.’
It’s not difficult to see that their efforts to insinuate that Nancy Lanza was somehow responsible for this massacre by being an irresponsible mother also serve to rile the large contingent of gun owners in the country, particularly the far-right who see a conspiracy on the government’s part to “take back our guns.” More on that later, but for now I just want to note that all of the Lanza family members seemed to live more or less normal middle-class lives. Yes, the parents were divorced, but it was apparently amicable and both put their own needs second to those of their children (and anyway, divorce in the US these days is decidedly ‘normal middle class’).
Despite “family insiders” claiming that he was a “deeply disturbed kid”, Adam Lanza, like so many other alleged ‘lone(r) gunmen’ before him, does not fit the profile of a mass-murdering maniac. His 24-year-old brother, Ryan Lanza, said he hadn’t seen his brother since 2010. This fact brings into question Ryan’s claim that his younger brother may have had his identity card on his person at the school shooting. Although perhaps the question that needs to be asked here is, why would a person bother to carry identification with them after going to the trouble of dressing up in a bullet-proof vest, mask and black camouflage gear and going on a killing spree …
The live emergency services audio feed from the scene reveals some interesting observations from first responders that have been completely overlooked by the mainstream media. Note that the unedited version lasts over two hours, so the abridged version I’m going to quote from has a compressed sequence of events that are not in real time. In this abridged version, we hear at 1.38′ a report that gunfire is still being heard, even though the shooting was supposed to have ended by the time police arrived. The next report at 2.35′ says that the shooting has stopped and the school is “in lockdown”. At 3.23′, the police relay a teacher’s report that she saw “two shadows running past the gym”. This is followed by another officer on the scene who says, “Yeh, we got ‘em, they’re coming at me! … [inaudible] … coming up the driveway real slowly!” That same officer at 5.40′ says he has them “proned out”, which presumably means he has apprehended them and they are laid out on the ground, before another officer comes on to say, “be aware that we do have a second [inaudible] …”
Later on, at 19.10′, an officer who sounds out of breath, like he’s just given chase, reports what I think sounds like “these guys” followed certainly by “multiple weapons, including long rifles and shotgun”. If these were found so early on, why were they not included in the initial press reports which stated that three firearms had been found – the above mentioned Glock, Sig Sauer and Bushmaster AR-15 rifle? Further conflicting, and possibly planted evidence was thrown into the mix by ‘law enforcement officials’ when they published video footage of a long weapon being retrieved from the trunk of a car. Look closely and you’ll see that it’s a shotgun, not a rifle. In addition, this ‘discovery’ was made late in the day (it’s dark outside), while the Bushmaster rifle was first reported found “in the trunk of a car” much earlier in the day. This would logically suggest that the rifle and shotgun were found in the trunks of two different cars. Besides the above two suspects “proned out” in front of the school, another suspected gunman was apprehended after he gave chase, this time in the woods next to the school:
The police are clearly chasing someone whom they appear to apprehend in the middle of the woods next to the school, a fact confirmed by several eyewitnesses:
This fleeing suspect, wearing camouflage gear, a bulletproof vest and armed with four guns, has since disappeared from media coverage. Who was this person and how did he know what “it” was when he protested that “I didn’t do it”?
Perhaps most astonishingly, this suspect arrested in the woods was named in an Associated Press report as 24-year-old Ryan Lanza. The original report has long since vanished of course, but you can see it referenced here. This was despite the fact that Ryan had already been named as the deceased suspect inside the school, lying next to two handguns.
Ryan Lanza was actually at work in Hoboken, New Jersey, that morning when his name and photo began circulating in the media. And so, for most of Friday, the ‘lone shooter’ was erroneously reported as “Ryan Lanza, confirmed dead.” At the same time, we were being told that Ryan’s girlfriend and a room-mate were reported missing, also from Hoboken, New Jersey.
So this isn’t just a case of mistaken identity, as later claimed when it was suggested that Adam had a piece of identification belonging to his brother on his person. Not one, but BOTH Lanza brothers were being placed by ‘law enforcement officials’ at the scene of the shooting. It could be that Ryan’s quick reflexes to leave his workplace to get on a bus to go back to his apartment while protesting innocence via his Facebook page may have saved his life.
Now remember, all of this confusion somehow resulted from a single guy going into a school and shooting children and teachers and then shooting himself, all within three to five minutes. Surely it should have been fairly easy to rapidly and concretely identify the details of such a crime and a rough layout of the scene? What it’s starting to look like is that the Lanzas were framed for this mass shooting in advance. Long before any suspects were named, and even as we were being told that Nancy Lanza was among the dead at the school, we were told that police were investigating a murder in … Hoboken, New Jersey, where a body had been found at the home of … Ryan Lanza! An older “confirmed” version of events had RYAN, not Adam, travelling to Hoboken that morning to murder his father before going to the school in Newtown, Connecticut. Other variants had Ryan OR Adam going to both their divorced parents’ homes and killing them before going to the school.
The narrative has now settled on the younger brother killing his mother in Newtown then going to the school. So what about the rest of it? Do we just put it down to ‘keen’ journalism that was having a field day last Friday as media outlets sought to bring us the latest ‘breaking news’? Confusion and ‘Chinese whispers’ undoubtedly play a part in the early stages of national media events, but I think back to those news anchors reading scripts about Osama Bin Laden within minutes of the first plane being hit on 9/11 and I think, ‘Wait a minute!’ All these misleading reports had to have been issued by someone or some people “confirming” to Associated Press and other media outlets that the Ryans’s father had been murdered [he wasn’t even aware that the shooting at the school had taken place until journalists turned up on his doorstep], or that Ryan’s girlfriend had gone missing from Hoboken, or that either Ryan or Adam were pulled out of the adjacent woods in handcuffs yelling “I DIDN’T DO IT” to assembled parents. These aren’t just ‘little details’ that can be confused for other details, these are detailed narratives. So how, or why, would any member of the press come up with such details? They strike me as a set of alternative scenarios that might have found their way into the official narrative had facts on the ground turned out differently.
Watch this snippet of State Police Lt. Paul Vance at the press conference he gave the day after the shootings. His answer is as bizarre as it is revealing. When asked whether Nancy Lanza had any connection with the school, he replied defensively about something that is both unrelated and arguably the most significant fact that completely undermines the official narrative: the arrest of a second gunman in the woods:
Most of the initial mainstream media reports have since been rewritten to fit ‘new’ facts proclaimed by ‘law enforcement officials’. Here’s an example from Business Insider. The following excerpts are the opening paragraphs from the ‘same’ article, one earlier original version, followed by the later revised version:
The massacre […] was reportedly perpetrated with a .233 caliber rifle, a Glock pistol and a Sig Sauer pistol. The Bushmaster rifle was found in the trunk of the shooter’s car. The Sig Sauer and Glock pistols were the only weapons used in the shooting, according to CBS. Now the question is what kind of magazine would allow a shooter to fire “100″ rounds in such a short period.
Indeed, I was wondering the same thing. How could two pistols do so much damage? The report was updated as follows:
The massacre in Connecticut that’s taken the lives of at least 26 people was reportedly perpetrated with a .223 caliber rifle, a Glock pistol and a Sig Sauer pistol, according to NBC: The shooter was using one Sig Sauer and one Glock pistol, according to CNN. Later details emerged that the primary weapon was the Bushmaster “assault-style” rifle. Altogether, though, it doesn’t matter what type of weapon the shooter used. The bottom line is that it was likely a magazine fed, semi-automatic, with enough rounds to shoot “100 shots” in a matter of minutes, as quoted in USA Today.
What actually happened may not matter to some, but surely a journalist’s role is to at least try to find out?
This Associated Press/Newsday article on Saturday, December 15th, reported that “Only the rifle was used on the victims“, a statement that is supported by Dr. H. Wayne Carver II, Connecticut state’s chief medical examiner. Of the seven autopsies he personally performed on Sandy Hook victims, all of them had “three to 11 wounds apiece”. He also said that the ‘gunman’ used a military-style rifle rigged to quickly reload, and that the ‘shooter’ was able to reload so quickly because he had “taped two magazines together.” Even before the State Chief Medical Examiner had given these statements, it had been stated that spent shell casings from .233-caliber (rifle) bullets were found inside the school. So all the victims’ wounds were the result of rifle-fire, specifically from “the rifle”, the one we were told in early reports was found in the trunk of a car in the parking lot! This is simply not credible.
Remember that only “the rifle” was used on all the victims. If only this rifle was used, and if we try to make this claim fit into the (admittedly fluid) official version of events, then the alleged lone gunman would have had to leave the school, place the rifle back in his trunk, then return inside the school and shoot himself. No one reported any such maneuver on the part of any gunman or gunmen. What we do have, however, is live emergency services radio feed in which we hear that two men have been apprehended and are “proned out” AND live video footage supported by eyewitness testimony showing what appears to be a THIRD man being arrested by police in the woods.
We can see how the authorities’ hands are tied because they need to fit all the facts into the usual ‘lone gunman’ narrative. For that, there can only be ONE rifle and a couple of handguns. The problem is that they have already claimed to find that solitary Bushmaster rifle in the trunk of a car in the school parking lot, so the earliest police reports of a cache of long arms being found inside the school will no longer fit with the lone gunman narrative, especially as they’re now saying that he had already opened fire as he burst into the school.
Could “scrawny” 20-year-old Adam Lanza have stormed the school, solo Rambo-style, while carrying “multiple long arms, including rifles and shotguns”? Only one person was wounded. Everyone else who was shot was killed. How could Adam Lanza achieve such deadly accuracy, in such a short length of recorded time?
Initial reports put the beginning of the shooting in the school administrators’ office, where someone, reportedly the school principal, had a confrontation with the gunman(men). We know this because someone supposedly turned on the school intercom system, alerting the teaching staff to the loud swearing and commotion in the principal’s office and probably saving many more children from being gunned down as teachers took measures to hide the children in closets.
Similarly heavily armed men wearing black combat gear from head to toe… their job is to kill ‘terrorists’ to keep us safe, which they do by terrorising us all
One brave teacher, Kaitlin Roig, bundled a bunch of children into a bathroom and locked the door. What’s interesting about her testimony to ABC News is that when police arrived and asked her to open the door, she refused, saying that “if they were really cops, they’d know where to find keys to open the door.” In addition, she requested that they slide their badges under the door.
Now, this is generally a smart thing to do in any and all interactions with the police, especially in the U.S. But to have the wherewithal to do so under such traumatic circumstances strongly suggests that Ms. Roig had logically deduced by that point that multiple perpetrators were involved, and that they were either impersonating police officers or were indistinguishable from SWAT team police commandos, either in the way they dressed or the way they behaved upon entering the building. It also reminds us just how narrow the time window of the actual shooting was. The shooting appears to have barely ended when men knocked on that bathroom door and told Ms. Roig they were police.
There are also conflicting reports about how the gunmen entered the building. We were told initially that they came in through the main front entrance and proceeded straight to the administrators’/principal’s offices. But Sandy Hook elementary school has a security system with a video monitor, which allows staff to screen visitors before buzzing them in. A “masked gunman dressed in black tactical combat gear” from head to toe would kinda raise red flags, don’t you think?
Another possible anomaly is that Victoria Soto, one of the teachers killed at the school, appears to have had an ‘in memoriam’ Facebook page created in her name four days before the shooting.
Regarding this alleged ‘LIBOR scandal’ connection between this shooting and the Aurora theater shooting, there is as yet zero evidence to support the claim that either father of Lanza or Holmes were going to testify to anyone about anything, so for now this must remain just another rumor. I rather think that this is being spread to create the impression of a direct link that can be easily refuted, as in a straw man argument. The obvious and direct link staring everyone in the face is that the official accounts of these events are hocus-pocus. The glaring connection between these two shootings, the Sikh Temple shooting and the Fort Hood shooting is that multiple gunmen were reported at the time by eyewitnesses, but they are now all officially claimed to have been carried out by ‘lone gunmen’. This logically tells us that the real perpetrators are being protected with cover stories of what really happened because if the truth were known, some section of the U.S. government would be implicated.
Wade Michael Page, the ‘lone gunman’ in the Sikh Temple shooting in Wisconsin in August this year, was a highly decorated U.S. army psychological operations specialist, according to the Pentagon. But what happened to the three other gunmen seen by witnesses? It can’t surely be coincidence that Wade was (former?) military psy-ops. The thought has crossed my mind more than once during the aftermath of the Connecticut shooting. Others too have suggested this was a ‘false-flag’ event, or that Lanza was some sort of Manchurian Candidate.
But maybe there’s a simpler explanation (albeit more outrageous) than that? Was that really Adam Lanza they found inside the school? Do we even know for a fact that one of the gunmen was found dead inside the school? What we have instead are reports of two or three masked gunmen, apparently all dressed similarly in black tactical gear from head to toe, being wilfully forgotten about at best, or protected by the Federal Government at worst. Based on the authorities’ persistent but futile efforts to connect the Lanzas to this school, the multiple eyewitness reports of two shooters, the Connecticut State Medical Examiner’s report that all the victims were riddled with bullets from a rifle that we’re simultaneously being asked to believe was in the trunk of a car the whole time, similar reports of multiple shooters in previous mass shootings in recent years and the media focusing the emotional outcry onto the hot-button topic of gun control … I’m left wondering if this was actually the work of some highly trained professional hit team?
Was the massacre at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, a psy-op, using what amounts to a ‘death squad’ and a carefully planned mission to terrorise people on behalf of the government, in combination with perception management to shape the narrative and vector the emotional fallout?
Gun control isn’t really the issue here. Control – period – is the issue. The U.S. government would long since have taken measures, quietly, to limit the supply of weapons, the 2nd Amendment of the constitution be damned (it’s “just a goddamned piece of paper“, remember?), if it was really concerned with limiting civilian access to weapons. That we’ve seen gun sales increase in the last few days to the point where Wal-Mart is all out of assault rifles is wholly unsurprising.
The psychopaths in power have absolutely no compunction about using state terrorism, in this case organising the deliberate massacre of innocent children, to control people. In effect, this is little different from what the U.S. government calls counter-insurgency or counter-terrorism in foreign countries, where it attacks innocent civilians to create the impression that they were killed by ‘communists’, ‘terrorists’, ‘insurgents’ or ‘militants’, with the aim of generating public support for the illusion that the common people need a strong, ruthless government to protect them from the ‘evil-doers’. When the common people buy into this manipulation, the end result, as history shows repeatedly, is an overt and brutal police state.
Newtown school shooting story already being changed by the media to eliminate eyewitness reports of a second shooter by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
(NaturalNews) The national media is ablaze today with coverage of the tragic elementary school shooting in Newtown, CT, where 27 people have reportedly been killed, including 18 children.
As always, when violent shootings take place, honest journalists are forced to ask the question: “Does this fit the pattern of other staged shootings?”
One of the most important red flags of a staged shooting is a second gunman, indicating the shooting was coordinated and planned. There are often mind control elements at work in many of these shootings. The Aurora “Batman” shooter James Holmes, for example, was a graduate student actually working on mind control technologies funded by the U.S. government. There were also chemical mind control elements linked to Jared Lee Loughner, the shooter of Congresswomen Giffords in Arizona in 2011.
According to multiple eyewitness reports from Aurora, Colorado, including at least one caught on camera by mainstream media news reports in Colorado, James Holmes did not operate alone. There was a second shooter involved. But the media quickly eliminated any mention of a second shooter from its coverage, resorting to the typical cover story of a “lone gunman.”
Today, the exact same thing is happening with the Newton, CT school shooting.
Eyewitness reports of a second shooter now being “scrubbed” from the news
As the story of this shooting was first breaking, the news was reporting a second gunman.
FoxNews reported that this second gunman was “led out of the woods by officers” and then questioned. The original source of this report was the Connecticut Post.
A local CBS affiliate was also reporting the existence of a second gunman and said “Police believe there may be a second gunman and are looking for a red or maroon van with its back window blown out…”
A local CT CBS affiliate was also reporting, “CBS News reports that a potential second shooter is in custody and that SWAT is now investigating the home of the suspect. A witness tells WFSB-TV that a second man was taken out of the woods in handcuffs wearing a black jacket and camouflage pants and telling parents on the scene, ‘I did not do it.'”
But the more recent stories being put out by the media are scrubbing any mention of a second gunman and going with the “lone gunman” explanation, which holds about as much water as the “lone gunman” explanation of the JFK assassination.
“A lone gunman killed 27 people at an elementary school here, including 18 children, in a terrifying early Friday morning shooting spree,” reports USA Today. It makes no mention whatsoever of a second gunman.
NBC News is also now chiming in with the “lone gunman” version of the story, eliminating any mention of a second gunman from its coverage of the tragic event.
Another story authored by NBC News carries the title, “26 dead after lone gunman assaults Connecticut elementary school.” Once again, no mention of a second gunman as reported by eyewitnesses.
When key elements of the story keeps changing, something is fishy
Journalists are trained to ask questions, and one of the questions I have right now is: Why was the second gunman suddenly dropped from media coverage after the first few hours of this story developing?
And why is there always a second gunman in these recent mass shootings that seem to be engineered to maximize emotional shock value due to the sheer horror of all the innocent deaths?
This story is continuing to develop, and we’ll keep asking questions here on Natural News. Our hearts and prayers go out to the children and families impacted by this violent tragedy. Given the terrible loss of life that has taken place here, shouldn’t we all seek to get to the bottom of WHY these shootings all seem to fit a common pattern of multiple mind-controlled shooters followed by an almost immediate media cover-up of the facts?
For the sake of those children who were killed today, I want to get to the bottom of this and expose the REAL story, for the purpose of stopping this violence from targeting yet more innocents in the future.
(Activist Post) It’s time to admit that we live in a false economy. Smoke and mirrors are used to make us believe the economy is real, but it’s all an elaborate illusion.
Out of one side of the establishment’s mouth we hear excitement about “green shoots”, and out of the other side comes breathless warnings of fiscal cliffs and the urgent need for unlimited bailouts by the Fed. We hear the people begging for jobs and the politicians promising them, but politicians can’t create jobs. We see people camped out to buy stuff on Black Friday indicating the consumer economy is seemingly thriving, only to find out everything was bought on credit.
The corporate media does their best to distract us from seeing anything real. We see the media glorify Kim Kardashian who got rich by being famous, and became famous merely by being rich. She got front page coverage on Huffington Post this week because her cat died. Enough said.
Meanwhile the financial media makes the economy seem complicated and they ban anyone who speaks truthfully about the economy from their airwaves.
Is it any wonder why people are angry and confused about the economy? Well, hopefully these signs that we live in a false economy will help clear up some of that confusion.
1. Fake Jobs: It’s not just that the “official” unemployment numbers are a fraud, the actual jobs are fake as well. Ask yourself how many professions actually produce something of value? 80% of jobs could disappear tomorrow and it wouldn’t affect basic human survival or happiness in the least. Yes, in our society we need money to survive – and jobs equal money – but that doesn’t mean a “job” has any actual benefit to society. More on this in the next point…
2. Problems Create Jobs, Not Solutions: We can’t fix real problems, because it would destroy more fake jobs. We can’t end the wars and bring all of the personnel home when the jobless rate is already suffering. We can’t end the War on Drugs because where would the DEA agents, prison guards, the court system, parole officers, and the rest of their support staff work. We can’t simplify the tax code because the bookkeepers, CPAs, accounting professors, and tax attorneys would be unemployed. We cannot reduce the bureaucracy of government or streamline healthcare because paper pushers have few other notable skills. We can’t stop spying on Americans because it now employs millions of people. We can’t restrict the Wall Street casino, or hardly anyone will be left with a job. Finally, what will happen to university jobs when people either realize their product is not worth the cost or they discover they can get the same education online for nearly free? In other words, we need these manufactured problems to create phony employment.
3. Money Has No Value: Money is the biggest illusion of all. Our money is loaned into existence with arbitrary interest rates by a private monopoly. It is an IOU. It only has value because a law says it has value, and that value fluctuates based on how much supply is in the economy which, again, is controlled by a for-profit monopoly. It’s actual value is zero since it is just a piece of paper with fancy ink on it. The only things with real value to humans are skills (labor), tools and materials, food and water, and energy.
4. The Fed Now Buys 90% of the Nation’s Debt: Speaking of money, the Federal Reserve loans money to the US government who issues bonds to cover their spending. Those bonds are sold on the open market through auctions to investors who believe in the ability of the United States to make good on those bonds. Apparently, the US has no more investors because the Fed is now buying 90% of new Treasury bonds. This is called monetizing debt, or, essentially, monetizing money. That’s what a Ponzi scheme does. This acts to keep interest rates artificially low because they’d have to raise them to attract outside “investors”. In layman terms, our whole monetary system is a paper tiger, a house of cards, or whatever metaphor you want to use for fake.
5. What is the Value of Anything? The price discovery mechanism, or the process to determine the value of an asset in the marketplace, has become so convoluted that determining the genuine value of anything has become nearly impossible. Between government subsidizes for things like food, fuel, education, housing, insurance and even cars; taxes, regulations and laws; the manipulation of the value of money and interest rates; Wall Street gambling on commodities; what is the real value of something? For example, why does an ounce of marijuana (a weed that can grow anywhere) cost up to $500? Is that the real value based on labor and materials, and supply and demand? Of course not. Its value is inflated mainly due to laws and regulations.
6. Failure is Rewarded: You know we live in a false economy when failure is rewarded and success is penalized. Citizens everywhere are being told they need to tighten their belts, work harder so we can bailout the failed government, banks, insurance companies and even car companies. And when we work harder and achieve some success, they tax it heavily to indefinitely pay for these fraudulent institutions. Yet this infinite money creation and taxation is light years from solving the root cause of the problem. The reality is that the banks’ solutions are the problem, enriching the investor class at the expense of the middle class. Global bankers are playing with taxpayer money – and the money of many future generations – in a global casino royale that is destined to fail so they can take the people’s assets. They are all-in; but their money is fake, and our assets put at risk are real.
7. Corporate entities have the same rights as humans, but not the same punishments: When the Supreme Court ruled that corporations have free-speech rights of people, it was one of the final nails in the coffin of the republic. Monied interests can now openly finance elections and buy the legislation they need to operate with impunity. Corporations may be comprised of humans, but they are not subjected to the same standard of humanity. It was profoundly argued in the article What if BP Were a Human Being? that judged by common standards of morality, decency, and previously agreed-upon definitions of criminality, BP would be judged a psychopathic killer … and immortal. Ditto for the rest leading the predatory corporate pack; the most obvious being defense contractors. And since these corporations are now joined at the hip with government itself, what does that make government? By changing definitions, they are attempting to change reality. But that still doesn’t make it the truth.
8. People buy things they don’t need with money they don’t have: In a type of trickle-down debt whirlpool, the government’s rampant spending without sufficient assets to back it up is mirrored in the behavior of the American consumer. Despite inflation, rising unemployment, and a continued collapse in real estate, it hasn’t stopped credit spending. The Associated Press just reported that for the month of October: Americans swiped their credit cards more often in October and borrowed more to attend school and buy cars. The increases drove U.S. consumer debt to an all-time high.
The Federal Reserve said Friday that consumers increased their borrowing by $14.2 billion in October from September. Total borrowing rose to a record $2.75 trillion.
Borrowing in the category that covers autos and student loans increased by $10.8 billion. Borrowing on credit cards rose by $3.4 billion, only the second monthly increase in the past five months. (Source) Most troubling is the type of borrowing highlighted. The worst possible borrowing would be these negative-return investments such as student loans, credit cards, and cars. It is magical thinking taken to the highest degree.
9. Entrepreneurs are punished: It has become nearly impossible to make a simple living on your own. America has become a land filled with bureaucratic red tape that actively thwarts small business creation and criminalizes independence. There is perhaps no better example of this than the attacks waged against the ultimate entrepreneurial endeavor of self-reliance: the family farm. Through collectivist models such as Agenda 21, long-running family farms are being shut down and supplanted with “protected zones.” In the most recent case, a family oyster farm was shut down based on provably false scientific data that aimed to demonstrate negative environmental and economic impacts. It was completely fake, ending an 80-year local business that generated 50,000 tourists per year and employed 30 full-time local residents. In many of these cases the federally stolen property winds up in the hands of developers who have no interest in a true local economy. It is an inherent part of any false economy to create dependence where none should exist at all. A five-minute video that can be seen here sums up the American economy of illusions and the death of the American Dream.
10. Engineered Slavery: Do you think slavery died in the 1800s? Think again. Economic hitmen (lenders) have successfully enslaved-by-debt everything from nations, entire industries, state and local governments and nearly every person on the planet. And they bought your servitude with money they never had, they simply created it out of thin air. Even if an individual doesn’t have any bank financing or credit cards, they still pay the private Federal Reserve through inflation and income taxes. As author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins, would say: the time has come for the banks to collect their “pound of flesh” from average citizens by way of higher taxes, less social services, and taking your pensions — “austerity.” For an enlightening explanation of how economic hitmen work their dark magic please watch this video. If you’re still confused, see these 10 signs you might be a slave. Another, more obvious, form of engineered slavery is prison labor. Laws and regulations are specifically created to add to the prison population which enriches the corporations that own them, while local communities actually become poorer and more dangerous (source).
As George Carlin said, “It’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.” It would be bad enough if it were contained to only one country, but we are now experiencing a global collective dreaming that fantasizes about a government figuring things out just in the nick of time. However, in the real world, the collapse has begun in earnest. Until we are committed to counter the 10 points above, we will remain in the grip of an hallucination. However, there are encouraging signs through protests worldwide, alternative currency movements, and myriad creative solutions in the most affected countries like Iceland, Greece, and Spain that people are beginning to shake off their sleep, look in the mirror and realize that the dream economy they have been sold was designed to make them seek solutions in entirely the wrong direction.
Obama’s warmaking appetite exceeds all his predecessors and then some. He’s already waging
multiple direct and proxy wars.
His rhetoric about winding them down rings hollow. He wants to make the most of the next four years.
No targeted country left behind reflects his agenda. He’s ravaging the world multiple countries at a time. He’s out-of-control. He governs like a serial killer.
He plans more war on Iran, perhaps Lebanon, and full-scale intervention against Syria. He has other targets in mind. He’s insatiable. Africa dreaming explains what’s on his mind.
On December 15, 2006, the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) was authorized. On February 6, 2007, it was announced. On October 1, 2007, it was established, and on October 1, 2008, it became operational.
It’s based in Stuttgart, Germany, not Africa. It’s responsible for warmaking and military relations throughout the continent. It’s comprised of 53 countries. Many potential targets are represented.
Washington wants the entire continent colonized and controlled. It’s resource rich. It has large amounts of oil, gas, water, gold, silver, diamonds, iron, cobalt, uranium, copper, bauxite, manganese, other valued minerals, and rich agricultural land.
In early July 2009, Obama visited sub-Saharan Africa. He signaled his intentions. In Accra, Ghana, he said:
“We have a responsibility to support those who act responsibly and to isolate those who don’t, and that is exactly what America will do.” He said Ghana and other African governments must achieve “good governance.”
His message was clear. Open the continent to Western investment and development. Privatize, privatize, privatize. Forget about providing healthcare, education, and other vital services.
Give US and other Western corporate predators free reign. Play the game the way Washington demands or suffer the consequences. Ghana got the message. Why else would Obama show up.
Libya didn’t. Gaddafi paid with his life. The country became another NATO trophy. Africa’s most developed country became a charnel house.
Egypt’s on the boil. Morsi is Washington’s man in Cairo. Street protests strongly contest his dictatorial governance. As long as he maintains US support, he can rule any way he wishes.
On December 7, the Wall Street Journal headlined “Terror Fight Shifts to Africa,” saying:
Obama may ask Congress to wage America’s war on terror against Mali, Nigeria, Libya, “and possibly other countries where militants have loose or nonexistent ties to al Qaeda’s Pakistan headquarters.”
Washington’s war on Libya created out-of-control violence and instability. Tribes, rebel gangs, and green resistance fighters battle for dominance. Puppet leaders America installed have little or no authority. No end of conflict looms.
Mali’s late March military coup appears fallout from Libya. It may be replicated elsewhere in North Africa and other areas. Niger’s endangered.
There’s more involved than meets the eye, including controlling regional resources. Besides oil, Libya, Mali, and Niger have valuable uranium deposits. Washington seeks control.
In October, EU Foreign Affairs and Security Policy head, Catherine Ashton, was involved in developing a Mali mission within 30 days. According to EU diplomats, it involves deploying 150 European military experts to train Malian and other African forces over a four to six month period.
On October 12, the Security Council approved an international military mission to Mali. Ban Ki-moon was enlisted to help develop military intervention plans. Finalizing them was planned for end of November.
France drafted the UN resolution. It was Washington’s lead attack dog on Libya. It may have the same role on Mali. In late March, monsoon season starts. Expect something early next year in advance. African troops will be involved.
Germany agreed to participate. Britain likely also. Washington remains in charge. Whatever is coming will be another Obama war. Officially it’s because Islamists seized power in northern Mali. The area replicates France in size.
Before his ouster, Gaddafi was a stabilizing force. Investments and mediation efforts prevented conflict between governing authorities and Tuareg rebels.
Things change a year ago. Heavy armed rebels mobilized. In March 2012, Long-time Malian President Amadou Toumani Toure was deposed.
Local Islamists controlled northern areas with Tauregs. Islamists with Al Qaeda ties drove them out. According to the Wall Street Journal, Obama wants congressional approval to intervene. With or without it, he’ll do what he wants.
US special forces and drone attacks may be planned. Operations may be similar to Washington’s proxy wars on Somalia and Yemen.
Progressive media claims they’ll be ‘tougher’ on Obama now | Glenn Greenwald
Barack Obama in the Oval Office. Photograph: Pete Souza/AP
Monday 3 December 2012
Given the rationale they have embraced, is there any reason to believe this will happen, or that it will matter if it does?
Last week, the Huffington Post’s media reporter, Michael Calderone, wrote a long article on the widespread perception that MSNBC isn’t so much a progressive network as it is “simply pro-Obama”. Citing a new Pew study that found that MSNBC was actually more negative toward Romney than even Fox News was against Obama “and offered mostly positive coverage about Obama” – most remarkably, during the last week of the campaign, MSNBC did not air a single story critical of Obama: not one – Calderone wrote: “post-election, the question is whether MSNBC continues cheering Obama on – or takes him on.” On Sunday, Politico’s media reporter, Dylan Byers, set out in search of an answer to that question, not regarding MSNBC specifically but “progressive media” generally. Here’s the crux of what he found:
“For the better part of four years, progressive media has had President Barack Obama’s back. “Now that he’s won re-election, it is faced with a choice: Should the left continue always to play the loyal attack dog against the GOP, blaming the opposition at all hours of the news cycle for intransigence? Or, should it redirect some of that energy on the president, holding him to his promises and encouraging him to be a more outspoken champion of liberal causes? “Already, there are rumblings of change. “In the days and weeks following Obama’s victory, progressive voices, primarily in print media, have made efforts to push the president on key parts of the unfinished liberal agenda – including climate change, drone strikes, troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, the closing of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, civil liberties and gun control. . . . “‘Liberals in the media are going to be tougher on Obama and more respectful at the same time,’ Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker’s chief political commentator and a former speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, told POLITICO. ‘He was the champion of our side, he vanquished the foe….. [but] now liberals don’t have to worry about hurting his chances for re-election, so they can be tougher in urging him to do what he should be doing.'”
[I want to focus on this claim that media progressives will now be “tougher” on Obama, but first, an aside: Hendrik Hertzberg proclaims that they will now be even “more respectful” of Obama than they have been. Short of formally beatifying him, or perhaps transferring all their worldly possessions to him, is that even physically possible? Is there a reverence ritual that has been left unperformed, swooning praise left to be lavished upon him, heinous acts by him that have not yet been acquiesced to if not affirmatively sanctioned in the name of keeping him empowered? That media progressives will try to find ways to be even “more respectful” to the president is nothing short of scary.] As for the vow that media progressives will now criticize Obama more and hold him more accountable, permit me to say that I simply do not believe this will happen. This is not because I think those who are taking this vow are being dishonest – they may very well have convinced themselves that they mean it – but because the rationalization they have explicitly adopted and vigorously advocated precludes any change in behavior. Over the past four years, they have justified their supine, obsequious posture toward the nation’s most powerful political official by appealing to the imperatives of electoral politics: namely, it’s vital to support rather than undermine Obama so as to not help Republicans win elections. Why won’t that same mindset operate now to suppress criticisms of the Democratic leader? It’s true that Obama himself will no longer run in an election. But any minute now, we’re going to be hearing that the 2014 midterm elections are right around the corner and are of Crucial Significance. Using their reasoning, won’t it be the case that those who devote their efforts to criticizing Obama and “holding accountable” the Democrats will be effectively helping the Republicans win that election? Won’t Obama critics stand accused of trying to keep the Speaker’s gavel in the hands of the Tea Party rather than returning it to Nancy Pelosi, or of trying to hand Senate control over to Mitch McConnell (or, soon enough, of trying to give the White House to Marco Rubio instead of Hillary Clinton)? Once one decides in the name of electoral expediency to abdicate their primary duty as a citizen and especially as a journalist – namely, to hold accountable those who wield the greatest political power – then this becomes a permanent abdication. That’s because US politics is essentially one permanent, never-ending election. The 2012 votes were barely counted before the politicalmediabegan chatteringabout 2016, and MSNBC is already – as one of its prime time hosts put it – “gearing up” for the 2014 midterm. I’ve described before how the permanent election cycle is the most potent weapon for keeping the citizenry (and media) distracted by reality-TV-show-type trivialities and horse-race excitement in lieu of focus on what the government is actually doing. But the other significant benefit of having all political disputes viewed through a partisan electoral prism is that it keeps partisans focused only on the evils of the other party and steadfastly loyal to their own. The desire to influence election outcomes in favor of one’s own party subsumes any sense that political officials from one’s own party should be checked in how they exercise their power. How is it rationally possible that those who have embraced this reasoning can – or should – change behavior in light of the looming Incredibly Important 2014 midterm election and then the 2016 election after that? Former MSNBC host and frequent Obama critic Cenk Uygur – who, in one of the most remarkable media events ever, was removed by MSNBC as prime-time host in favor of individual who literally vowednever to criticize the president under any circumstances – told the Huffington Post that it was hard to see how this would happen:
“‘Should MSNBC take a more aggressive stance with President Obama after the elections to make sure he follows through on his progressive promises? Of course,’ Uygur said in a follow-up email. ‘Will they? Probably not. They’ve been leaning back on their criticism of Democrats for so long, that I’m not sure they know how to, or care to, hold them accountable.'”
If sustained criticisms of the president should have been suppressed in deference to the 2012 election, then I simply don’t see why the same mindset won’t apply to the 2014 and 2016 elections. But let’s assume for the sake of argument that I’m wrong here, and that the “progressive media” really is gearing up to change behavior and unleash a torrent of demands and criticisms aimed at Obama. Here’s my primary question about that: why would that matter? Once you vow unconditional, permanent loyalty to a politician and a party – once you demonstrate that you will support them no matter what they do – why would you possibly expect that they will do anything but ignore you? A rational politician, by definition, pays attention to those whose support is conditional and uncertain, not to those who loudly proclaim that it is a solemn duty to support that politician and his party under all circumstances. That’s just the basic rules governing how power works, of negotiations and politics: those who eagerly renounce all their leverage make themselves inconsequential and impotent. What Hertzberg and his Obama-loyal media comrades mean by “getting tougher” with Obama is some version of this message:
I’d really appreciate it if you did X, Y and Z, and strongly believe you should, but even if you don’t, you should know that I’m going to be there for you and your party: cheering for you, raising money, demanding that everyone else support you, doing everything in my ability to keep you empowered.
Why would anyone believe that posture will affect anything? Once the choice is made to lock oneself into a state of permanent, unbreakable partisan loyalty, based on the lesser-evil justification, then one renders oneself completely powerless. I’m not arguing here against that choice. Whatever one thinks of the lesser-of-two-evils rationale, it’s at least cogent and rational. The debate over that choice has already been hashed out and there’s no point in repeating it here. But whatever one thinks of it, there are costs and benefits to that choice, and one should be honest about both. The benefit, which its proponents endlessly tout, is that it prevents the empowerment of the “greater evil”: the GOP. But there’s a significant cost to that choice that they almost never acknowledge: namely, to announce ahead of time that you will always lend your unlimited support to a particular party no matter what it does is to instruct politicians to ignore you, to disregard all of your beliefs and grievances and efforts to “get tough” and hold them accountable. It should be said that there are other ways to impose genuine accountability besides making one’s electoral support uncertain. One way is to engage in political protest movements outside the electoral process, of the type that forced Lyndon Johnson out of the 1968 race in protest of his Vietnam war, or even the Tea Party protests that put genuine fear in the hearts of political elites. But progressive media figures, for the most part, want nothing to do with street protests. There was, and is, a genuine, powerful movement devoted to protesting the political class on populist grounds – the Occupy movement – and most of them treated it with a mixture of condescension and scorn, largely because they couldn’t figure out how it might help Obama and the Democratic Party win elections. Nobody should hold their breath waiting for Hendrik Hertzberg and other similar progressive media figures to start supporting protest movements against the policies of the Democratic Party which they claim to find so objectionable. Another possibility is waging a battle within the Party against those perpetrating policies to which one objects by, for instance, challenging the Party’s establishment candidates in primaries. That is how the Tea Party was able to force the GOP to pay more heed to their agenda. But establishment progressives regard the Tea Party’s tactic with contempt because it was guilty of the most grievous sin – it undermined the Party’s ability to maximize its electoral success – and would never dream of posing a similar challenge to their own party’s establishment. I know from experience, having worked for several years on a project to recruit and empower primary challenges to awful Democratic incumbents, that any project that might cost the Democrats even a single seat in Congress will be met with anger and recrimination by establishment progressives. So, even if it actually happens, what Hertzberg and company are really talking about with their tough-talking vows to “be tougher” on Obama are empty gestures. “Demands” of politicians unaccompanied by a strategy to wield power are inherently inconsequential. There are truly few things I’d like to see more than progressives holding Obama accountable and trying to compel him to change behavior, but their past conduct – and especially the reasoning they offered to justify it – leaves little reason to believe that this can or will happen. Doing that requires a radical change in how one thinks about political priorities and, even more so, one’s own functions and duties as a journalist. Do you see any serious grappling with those questions in the giddy, triumphant, self-congratulatory progressive media? One final point: most of the people interviewed in the new Politico article (including from media figures who have been quite critical of Obama) all agree that the “progressive media” suppressed legitimate criticisms of Obama in order to help him and the Democrats win the election. As the Nation’s publisher, Katrina vanden Huevel, accurately put it to Politico (with a statement that is a strong contender for Understatement of the Year):
“‘MSNBC, with all due respect, has not been that strong in terms of talking about closing Guantanamo, about militarization, about this administration’s civil liberties record,’ Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor and publisher of The Nation, told POLITICO. ‘We may address alternative approaches to those issues, but they won’t be the talking points on MSNBC that night.'”
The Huffington Post article expressed the same idea:
“MSNBC’s afternoon and primetime hosts kept their sights on Romney and the Republicans during the election cycle, while spending considerably less time holding Obama accountable on issues like civilian casualties from drone strikes, use of executive power and the Afghanistan conflict, the nation’s longest-ever war, which escalated under the current White House. Instead, the network’s top partisan hosts –- with the exception of former Republican Rep. Joe Scarborough –- seemed to circle the wagons around the Democratic president during his reelection bid.”
If you think about it, this is actually an extraordinary indictment of these media outlets. What could possibly be worse for a media outlet – even one with acknowledged political leanings – than purposely to suppress and ignore criticisms of the nation’s most powerful political officials in the name of keeping one’s favorite politicians in power? Recall the controversy – and the endlessprogressive mockery – that erupted when Rush Limbaugh admitted after the 2006 midterm election that he had “carried water” for the GOP by suppressing criticisms of it because he wanted to help them win the election:
“The way I feel is this: I feel liberated, and I’m going to tell you as plainly as I can why. I no longer am going to have to carry the water for people who I don’t think deserve having their water carried. Now, you might say, ‘Well, why have you been doing it?’ Because the stakes are high! Even though the Republican Party let us down, to me they represent a far better future for my beliefs and therefore the country’s than the Democrat [sic] Party does and liberalism.”
Is this not the same confession, grounded in the same mentality, expressed in that Politico article from many stars of “progressive media”? Ultimately, it’s not actually that difficult to maintain and express these two simultaneous ideas:
(1) as a journalist, I’m now going to tell you about some truly heinous policies that President Obama, as the nation’s most powerful political official – as well as the Democratic Party, in control of the bulk of the US government – are embracing; as a citizen and an opinionist, I believe we should do everything possible to oppose these heinous policies loudly and effectively; and (2) now that an election is about to happen, I believe, as a citizen and an opinionist, that President Obama and the Democratic Party should win the election because their opponents are worse.
But so monomaniacally obsessed were many members of the progressive media that idea (1) was completely ignored and suppressed in favor of idea (2) – not in the days or weeks before the election, but for years. There is never any justification for those who work in media or hold themselves out as journalists – as opposed to, say, those who are party apparatchiks – to refrain from holding the nation’s most powerful political leaders accountable. That is the core function of journalism – and citizenship. I genuinely hope they’re serious and sincere with their vows to change this conduct, but it is very difficult to see how that can happen given the precepts to which they have so steadfastly committed themselves.
Update on AP/Iran story
Regarding the two columns I wrote last week about AP’s depicting of an absurd graph as evidence of Iran’s work toward a nuclear weapon: the AP reporter responsible for that story, George Jahn, has written a new article admitting that “a leaked diagram suggesting that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon is scientifically flawed”, but Jahn nonetheless insists that the graph somehow “still supports suspicions that Tehran is trying to build a bomb, especially when combined with other documents that remain secret.” This post says all that needs to be said about that. Meanwhile, the graph, by design, is now being touted by Fox News and John Bolton to scare people about Iran’s supposed nuclear weapons program.
U.S. Foreign Policy disguises self-interest as altruism. When we see oil and humanitarian crisis, we act: Iraq, Libya, and now Uganda.
Since at least 1997 the abhorrent Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has murdered at least 2,400, kidnapped at least 3,400, and displaced at least 300,000. LRA is an ideological group, led by batshit crazy polygamist preacher and self-proclaimed “Spokesman of God” Joseph Kony, which seeks a theocratic state in Uganda based on the Ten Commandments and local traditions. Reports indicate that Kony and his dispicable cronies have been hiding for years. However, last week President Obama announced that, without consulting congress, he has authorized the deployment of some 100 ”combat-equipped U.S. forces” to the country in order to fight and hopefully kill or capture the vicious militant who has an international warrant for by DealDropDown”>crimes against humanity. With regards to the nearly two decades of atrocity, Obama pointed it out. “These forces will act as advisers to partner forces that have the goal of removing from the battlefield Joseph Kony and other senior leadership of the LRA,” Obama said. “They will only be providing information, advice and assistance to partner nation forces, and they will not themselves engage LRA forces unless necessary for self-defense.”
No doubt Uganda needs help; they are one of the world’s poorest nations (17th) and have failed thus far to combat the LRA effectively enough to stop them. It’s a good thing that we’re fighting this monster, but for a humanitarian crisis that has been ongoing for almost two decades, that has been the scourge of a nation and a domestic terror threat rivaling the worst guerillas in Africa, it took us this long?
Earlier this year, at least 2.5 billion barrels of crude oil were discovered along Uganda’s border. The Economist reports that the country expects to earn $2 billion a year beginning in 2015.
A week ago today, three Ugandan government officials resigned, and President Yoweri Museveni addressed the nation concerning what the New York Times called “mounting corruption scandals, particularly in the country’s nascent oil sector.”
Speaking at a public oil debate entiled “Fighting the Oil Curse,” Jackson Wabyoona, activist and president of Bunyoro Local Oil and Gas Advocacy, said, “Well connected officials and business people who had prior information on the oil discovery took advantage of the situation to acquire land from unsuspecting peasants while some of our people become landless.” Mr. Wabyoona added the compensation rates were “insufficient” to enable the original landowners, who are now landless, to live a better life.
The fact that oil was discovered earlier this year was at best a footnote in most news outlets. I did not find any journalistic output that points out the striking coincidence that we picked the year when oil was discovered in Uganda to assist in stablization (and I apologize in advance if it exists).
Libya, along with being plagued by Muammar Gadaffi’s injustice, is also the site of massive oil reserves: the largest in Africa. And again, Gadaffi’s atrocious human rights record didn’t begin in the months or years before our invasion there. It had been happening for decades.
On a sidenote, Rush Limbaugh had some infuriating, grossly misinformed comments about the invasion. “Lord’s Resistance Army are Christians,” said Limbaugh on his radio program. ”They are fighting the by DealDropDown”>Muslims in Sudan. And Obama has sent troops, United States troops to remove them from the battlefield, which means kill them.”
In other words, “Obama is a muslim and hates Christians and look at me by DealDropDown”>connecting the dots like a preschooler at playtime.” It’s not that simple, obviously. LRA are Christians the same way al-Qaeda are Muslims – that is, they are among the most selective distorters of doctrines that otherwise preach peace and acceptance.
What is clear: decision-making in U.S. foreign policy, long touted by our officials as humanitarian and altruistic, is deeply entrenched in economic factors, such as energy consumption.
Comments from NB:
I don’t think folks are fooled by t his anymore. But what else can one do to stop it? It is all tied to money, access to resources for survival. If you pull the plug on this type of militarism look at the stakes. Folks are trying to keep “food on their families”.
How does a militarized culture do anything else than make all that it takes to create more and more wars?? It’s a doomed Empire built on aggression, terrorism, devastation of the planet and other human life wasted, annihilated and consider “collateral damage.” What can turn this around??
The entire economic system is based on war or war profiteering. Jobs are bought and sold in congress, a congress that would dare not to vote against war/wars/invasions/aggression/ so-called humanitarian intervention. What other road can the United States of America take. They went from a small colony, to sea to shining sea, to the world, to outer space. I mean what? What territory that is uncharted that can still be charted and claimed by the US hegemonic rulers?? It is what it is.
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