Carnahan had been making a run for a U.S. Senate seat, challenging Republican incumbent John Ashcroft in what the L.A. Times described as “one of the tightest, fiercest – and most closely watched – Senate races in the country.” (2) Just before his campaign was abruptly ended, “a few recent polls ha[d] showed him with a slight edge,” (1) breaking a months long deadlock.

Carnahan had some pretty nutty ideas for a would-be Senator, though. He had doubled funding for public schools during his eight years as governor, and had “championed one of the most generous public health insurance plans in the nation, extending free coverage to all children in families with incomes up to three times the poverty line.” (2) Perhaps craziest of all, Carnahan had actually commuted the death sentence of a man scheduled for execution.

There were, inevitably it seems, some curious facts about the crash that took Carnahan’s life (attributed by official reports to inclement weather). One initial account, for example, noted that “residents of rural Jefferson County reported hearing a loud explosion … and at least one reported seeing a fireball against the stormy sky.” (1) That would tend to indicate that the plane was destroyed in the air, before it ‘crashed’ to the ground. If so, that would also explain why “NTSB investigators have found a football-sized piece of the plane’s engine more than a quarter-mile from most of the plane’s wreckage, something agency spokeswoman Carol Carmody called unusual.” (3)

It would also explain why authorities had initially said that “they would not identify the wreckage – or any bodies they might recover – until [Tuesday] morning,” (1) though by the next day, the story being reported was that “up to 50 investigators from several agencies spent Tuesday combing the rocky gully where the plane crashed. The search for aircraft parts and human remains is expected to continue for several days.” (2) You would think that if the plane was intact when it ‘crashed,’ pretty much all the wreckage and remains would be in one spot, and wouldn’t really be all that hard to find. Go figure.

The press noted that Carnahan’s death “was an eerie echo for Missouri of a 1976 plane crash that killed Senate hopeful Jerry Litton as he flew to a celebration after winning the Democratic primary.” (2) I guess those Republicans in Missouri really play hardball. There was another eerie echo as well, of another flight that ended tragically on October 16th. That was the day that U.S. Representatives Hale Boggs and Nicholas Begich caught their last plane flight as well, in 1972.

Boggs was, for those who have forgotten, a member of the notorious Warren Committee and later one of the most outspoken critics of the infamous report issued by that committee. Boggs had questioned the preposterous single bullet theory and had openly accused J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI of running a massive wiretapping and blackmail operation to pressure Congress into accepting the report’s patently bogus findings. His flight allegedly disappeared over Alaska and was, by official reports anyway, never recovered. In an interesting side note, the young man who gave Boggs a lift to the airport that fateful day was none other than William Jefferson Clinton. (4) Small world.

The Carnahan story, by the way, has something of a happy ending (though not for the Carnahan family, which also lost the governor’s son in the crash). The people of Missouri, possibly sensing that something wasn’t quite right about Carnahan’s untimely death, defied expectations and chose to elect the corpse rather than the incumbent. Hats off to the good people of Missouri.

While we’re on the subject of untimely deaths, I should probably mention another that occurred just weeks ago. Remember when some guy ran his truck into author Steven King not long ago and banged Spooky Steve up pretty good? And remember how Steve was really pissed off about it, and how he thought that the courts let the guy off way too easy? Damned if that guy didn’t turn up dead in his home of unknown causes. Shit happens, I guess.

On a completely different topic, did you see where another blatantly fraudulent Hollywood ‘liberal’ exposed his true fascist leanings? We’re talking here, of course, about Martin “I’m not the president, I just play him on TV, though I was offered the Green Party candidacy before they ended up going with Ralph” Sheen.

Sheen took a lead role in lobbying for the defeat of California’s Proposition 36, a perfectly sensible initiative that would put non-violent drug offenders into treatment rather then sending them to prison. Bad idea, said the honorary chairman of the ‘No on 36’ campaign. No, Sheen thinks we should just keep stuffing bodies into our already grotesquely bloated prisons for the ‘crime’ of ingesting drugs that do not have state approval, though his own drug ingesting son has received, shall we say, rather lax treatment from the California courts.

Quite a progressive stance the ‘liberal’ actor has taken. I haven’t really seen anything quite like it since Warren “I’m so fucking liberal that I once made a movie about the Russian Revolution” Beatty rose to lead the applause for the repellent Elia Kazan at last year’s Oscar ceremony, shortly after his movie Bulworth established him as Hollywood’s leading ‘liberal.’ That, of course, came just in time to confirm his credentials in the event he was called upon to campaign for president.

It’s good to know there’s no shortage of phony liberals to prop up as presidential hopefuls. That way, we don’t have to worry about any truly progressive-minded politicians sneaking into office. Before moving on, it should be noted that Sheen’s over-hyped television show, The West Wing, ranks as some of the most thinly transparent state propaganda to masquerade as entertainment programming since The FBI hit the airwaves.

I mean, are we really supposed to believe that the White House is full of decent, caring men and women struggling mightily to do what’s right for the country and the people? You mean they’re not a bunch of depraved, conscienceless corporate stooges? What the hell was I thinking? And it must be true, since the show employs any number of ‘former’ White House officials as writers and advisers, to ensure accuracy of course.

But enough about that. What I really wanted to talk about was how badly I’ve been getting ripped off every time I run to the store for a pack of smokes. That is in part due to the actions of another phony Hollywood ‘liberal,’ Rob “I’m not really a meathead, I just played one on TV” Reiner, who lobbied to get a massive tax imposed on cigarettes, allegedly to strike a major blow to the tobacco companies.

Another major contributing factor has been the numerous lawsuits filed by the state against the tobacco lords, leading to massive monetary judgments. All of this is supposed to demonstrate that the government is getting serious about cracking down on the merchants of death, a scenario that would perhaps be a little more credible were it not for the fact that the tobacco giants, along with the country’s other corporate cartels, pretty much are the government. How then are we to explain the seeming contradiction of the state attacking one of its own?

The answer lies in a basic principle of economics. For those fortunate enough not to have suffered through an economics course, the discipline maintains that the ‘free market’ will magically determine an equilibrium price for every commodity, based on competition and on relative levels of supply and demand.

If supply exceeds demand, prices will be driven down. When demand exceeds available supplies, prices go up. The market will therefore determine the optimal price of the commodity, preventing – among other things – price gouging by unscrupulous suppliers of goods and services. That is how the magical free market is supposed to work; there are a few problems with the concept, however.

First of all, economics rather piously touts itself as a ‘positive’ science, to distance itself from the behavioral sciences, which are derisively referred to as ‘normative’ sciences. Economics is, in other words, supposedly a real science, built on a foundation of irrefutable natural laws, as opposed to those pseudo-sciences based on ‘norms’ of human behavior.

In truth though, those natural laws – which essentially state that supply will always be finite, while human greed will always be infinite – are not laws at all, but value judgments. Economics is actually not a science at all, but a philosophy, and one based on a decidedly depraved view of human nature.

While it may be true that human greed certainly appears in modern-day America to know no bounds, that is the result of decades of state propaganda and educational and psychological indoctrination. Anthropological evidence (Oops, I forgot – that’s one of those bullshit normative sciences, isn’t it?) has long suggested that unbridled greed is not in fact a universal feature of humanity.

The ‘science’ of economics essentially takes a human characteristic that is the result of socialization by the capitalist state, and portrays that as a natural law that justifies the very existence of that state. A pretty ballsy scam actually, but that really has little to do with the main point I was trying to make.

The point here is that even if we accept the pseudo-science of economics at face value, the system does not work if a product has an ‘inelastic demand.’ What this means is that the demand for that particular product remains relatively constant regardless of price fluctuations. Inelastic demand is a result of, in the simplest possible terms, addiction.

Because we are addicted to the vile products of the tobacco lords, we will buy their goods at virtually any price. The cartel chiefs, of course, know this. That’s why they don’t really mind raising the price of cigarettes; they just need a justification for doing so, so as not to look like the thieves that they are. That is where their government lackeys come into play.
By posing as the public servants that they are supposed to be, crusading politicos attack the tobacco giants, imposing new taxes and securing enormous legal settlements. The result is a new source of revenue for the state, while the corporations maintain – and in most cases actually increase – their profits. Everyone wins, except of course for the consumers, who once again get fucked.

What is really at play here is a clever form of covert taxation that allows politicians to bask in the populist glow of having won a great victory against the forces of corporate irresponsibility, while at the very same time imposing a decidedly non-populist regressive tax. And it is, make no mistake about it, a regressive tax.

A regressive tax is, according to the economists, a tax that disproportionately targets the lower income brackets. This is in contrast to a progressive tax, which is supposed to disproportionately target those in the best position to pay. The federal income tax is allegedly such a tax, though phony liberals like Jerry Brown would like to flatten it.

The reason that doubling the price of cigarettes is a regressive tax is not because only poor people smoke, but because wealthy smokers, by and large, don’t really give a shit whether they’re paying $2 or $4 a pack. Either way, it’s pocket change. But to someone living paycheck to paycheck, or worse, it makes a hell of a difference.

The rapidly rising cost of cigarettes is not, by a long shot, the only covert regressive tax being foisted on the American people. Soaring gasoline prices fall into that category as well. Like the tobacco lords, the oil cartels have had a cozy relationship with the U.S. ship of state for decades, going back to the days of John D. Rockefeller.

And as with cigarettes, we are addicted to the products offered us by the oil industry, for we are addicted to our cars. This addiction has been actively nurtured by the oil and auto cartels for decades, who have worked diligently to sabotage and propagandize against any meaningful proposals for public transportation systems.

We are also addicted, by our lifestyles, to the electricity and natural gas that heat and power our homes. These are also, strangely enough, beginning to drastically increase in cost. This is yet another emerging regressive tax, and others will no doubt follow.

Let’s see now, what else do I have to bitch about? How about our schools? Everybody else seems to be bitching about them, so what the hell. Our educational system is a disgrace, an international embarrassment. But fear not, for Washington has some great ideas on how to fix our schools. The key words seem to be ‘testing’ and ‘vouchers.’

Both of our illustrious presidential candidates have proposed extensive testing of our schools. They have not, mind you, proposed actually providing any funds or resources to improve our schools. No, we can’t just keep throwing money at the problem, though in truth precious little money has been thrown that direction for many years now.

What we really need to do, according to our fearless leaders, is to test the schools in their currently grossly under-funded conditions, apparently to verify what is already known – that many of our schools are under-performing. Once they are identified, the solution is to shut them down.

The only difference between the candidates’ positions seemed to be the frequency of testing and the speed with which they would shut down ‘failing schools.’ The Bush boy is for more frequent testing, but the Gore kid has taken a no-nonsense approach to school closures. During the debates, he sounded as though he was ready to assemble a federal goon squad to criss-cross the country to begin padlocking schools.

Not to worry, though. The Washington gang has another plan as well – vouchers. After your kid’s school is closed, you might be lucky enough to get a voucher to send them to a private school, where they can allegedly get a good education. The only problem is that the voucher won’t even come close to actually paying for a private education, and if you can’t make up the difference, you’re shit-out-of-luck.

And your elected leaders couldn’t care less. In fact, they couldn’t care less about your local school’s test scores either. The dirty truth is that they never did care. Public education was never about learning the curriculum offered and gaining an informed view of the world.

Nothing, in fact, could pose a greater threat to the state than an informed populace. Luckily then, public schools have never been about imparting knowledge. They have always been about how that knowledge is delivered. The process is what was important. (5)

Public schooling did not arise from some benevolent desire by the ruling powers to offer education to the masses. It arose as a necessary outgrowth of the industrial revolution, which was, in essence, a process whereby archaic concepts such as ‘skilled labor’ and ‘craftsmanship’ were discarded in favor of mass production by largely unskilled assembly-line workers.

It required a fundamental change in the American labor pool. What was thenceforth needed were masses of interchangeable laborers willing to perform meaningless, unfulfilling, regimented and repetitive tasks day in and day out, year in and year out. Also required was a mindless obedience to authority, an ingrained awareness of the importance of punctuality, and a thorough socialization of the values of the corporate state.

The way to achieve those goals – to churn out endless numbers of mindless, robotic workers – was through public education. In truth, our public schools have never been ‘failing;’ they have performed wonderfully at the task for which they were designed. To be sure, they have failed to truly educate, to produce students capable of independent thought, but they were never designed to do that.

Now the concept of public education appears to be headed for the dustbin, and this really shouldn’t come as any surprise. I don’t know if anyone’s noticed, but the industrial age is pretty much over. We are now in what is being heralded as the ‘information age,’ and the American workforce is once again being transformed. Rapidly disappearing are all those industrial jobs that once needed to be filled with a steady source of bodies.

In other words, in the eyes of our leaders, public schooling has lost its purpose. What this means for future generations of Americans is, to put it bluntly, you are not needed. The state has no desire to impart knowledge to you, and no reason to condition you for jobs that no longer exist.

The good news is that you need not worry about becoming some random, insignificant cog in the wheel. The bad news is that the state has no other use for you either. You have become, in the immortal words of Adolf Hitler, a generation of “useless eaters.” Sorry to have to break the news to you.

Moving on then to other areas of interest, I see where Sammy “The Bull” Gravano was arrested recently in Arizona. (6) For those who are unfamiliar with Gravano, he was a prominent member of the John Gotti crime family who turned state’s evidence against his former boss. For this, he was given a new identity and placed in the Witness Protection Program. He was also essentially given a free ride on no less than nineteen brutal murders to which he confessed.

Maybe if he had killed twenty people, the authorities would have considered actually prosecuting Gravano. Instead, they set him up with a new name and apparently a little plastic surgery, and he promptly set up shop in Arizona. But I’m sure it was worth the price the state paid to put Gotti away, though he would have been out of commission much earlier if the FBI hadn’t protected him and colluded in sabotaging his previous trials. (7)

Gravano was born in 1945, served as a corporal in the U.S. Army for two years, and performed his fist contract killing shortly after that — the shooting of crime boss Joseph Collucci in February of 1970. At one point in his life of crime, Gravano enlisted the services of boxing trainer Teddy Atlas, who sent Sammy to a hypnotist — a key element of his training regimen. Atlas’ past clients included Mike Tyson. (8)

Gravano’s killing years came to an end in December of 1990, when he and Gotti were arrested. Sammy was held in an isolation unit for ten months, after which he became extremely cooperative, so he was transferred to Quantico to hang out with his old friends at the FBI. His subsequent testimony put no less than 37 people in prison, including Gotti. (8)

Gravano was set free on April 19, 1995 — just in time to celebrate Hitler’s birthday. After entering the Witness Protection Program, Sammy decided to co-author a book with Peter Maas, which he promoted by making a number of high-profile media and public appearances, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the code of Omerta called for his immediate termination. Rather preposterously, he wasn’t killed. (8)

Lucky guy that he is, an appellate court in New York ruled that Sammy could keep the nearly one million dollars in profits that he reaped from the book and from a movie development deal. The state’s Crime Victims Board had argued that the ‘Son of Sam’ law prohibited him from profiting from his crimes, but the court ruled otherwise. (9)

Following that, Gravano quickly busied himself with setting up a massive drug trafficking ring. According to the charges filed against him, Gravano controlled all the Ecstasy traffic in the state of Arizona, a multi-million dollar operation run through Gravano’s construction company. Some of the money was allegedly laundered through his ex-wife’s Italian restaurant, just like in the movies. (6)

Gravano was also allegedly the head of a white supremacist cult composed primarily of local high school athletes. Calling themselves the ‘Devil Dogs,’ the group reportedly had a fondness for brutally beating random victims who didn’t meet their high Aryan standards. The teenagers also functioned as Gravano’s muscle, and as his street level drug distribution network. (6)

Adding to Gravano’s legal woes, he and his son were hit with another federal complaint in Brooklyn accusing them of procuring their Ecstasy supply from a New York gang. Additional charges filed in Arizona allege that Sammy also put out a contract on the life of New York defense attorney Ron Kuby, who represents some of the survivors of Gravano’s nineteen murder victims. (10)

Of course, the federally protected mass murderer had allegedly built this empire without the knowledge of authorities. Sounds reasonable to me, though you have to wonder why the CIA would miss out on a party that included neo-Nazis, drug traffickers, ‘Devil Dogs’ and Mafioso.

One final topic needs to be discussed here for the skeptics in the crowd. In my book, Derailing Democracy, I wrote that: “Well known among State Department and intelligence personnel, though not among the American people, is the U.S. desire to unleash the power of tactical nuclear weaponry upon the world.” Absurd, scoffed the critics.

Eighteen months after those words were written, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that: “For more than 50 years, there has been a taboo against unleashing the terrible power of the atom in war, but some in the U.S. nuclear weapons establishment and their political allies now envision a world where nuclear combat could become almost a commonplace event. Sound crazy? Unfortunately, it’s true.” (11) I hate to say I told you so, but …

The Chronicle went on to note that: “Top Senate Republicans already have pushed through a measure that will allow U.S. weapons labs to begin studies on a so-called ‘mini-nuke,’ intended not to deter a potential enemy but for use in small, regional wars … The aim would be to kill national leaders such as Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic, or to destroy stocks of biological/chemical weapons held by so-called ‘rogue states’.” (11)

So at least they will be put to good use, though to use a nuclear bomb to assassinate an individual seems like it might border on overkill. You might want to cut back on the coffee there at the war planning room, guys. I suppose I should mention that assassinating a foreign head of state, with a nuke or otherwise, is a rather flagrant violation of international law.

I really like the idea of using the little nukes to blow up chemical/biological weapons caches though. That way, we can disperse the toxic agents and throw in a healthy dose of radiation as well. A profoundly depraved idea that could only come from the military leaders of a seriously fucking dangerous and out-of-control country.

References:
1. Stephanie Simon “Missouri Governor Feared Dead in Plane Crash,” Los Angeles Times, October 17, 2000
2. Stephanie Simon “Missouri Mourns for ‘Decent, Caring’ Governor,” Los Angeles Times, October 18, 2000
3. Associated Press “Carnahan Plane Malfunction Reported,” Los Angeles Times, October 19, 2000
4. Doug Moench The Big Book of Conspiracies, Paradox Press, 1995
5. Robert Sterling “Apt Pupil,” in You Are Being Lied To (publication pending)
6. Julie Cart “A Culture of Violence and Denial,” Los Angeles Times, October 26, 2000
7. Marilyn Bardsley “John Gotti: Clenched Fist,” The Crime Library http://www.crimelibrary.com/john/johnmain.htm
8. “Sammy ‘The Bull’ Gravano: Giving Up the Mob,” A&E Biography, March 5, 2001
9. Dareh Gregorian “One for the Books: ‘Bull’ Finds Crime Pays,” New York Post, March 8, 2000
10. Christopher Francescani “Sammy Bull and Son Face New Indictment Agony Over Ecstasy,” New York Post, December 15, 2000
11. Martin Butcher and Theresa Hitchens “Unleashing ‘Mini-Nukes’ Will Bring Dire Consequences,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 21, 2000

The Gulfstream III jet, descending in heavy fog, clipped a light pole and slammed into a field south of downtown … Authorities said the Gulfstream III was 1½ miles from the runway when it hit a light pole on Beltway 8, a toll road that encircles the outskirts of the city. Part of the jet’s wing was sheared off by the impact; the pole was bent in half. (Lianne Hart “Jet Bound for Bush’s Father Crashes,” Los Angeles Times, November 23, 2004)

As we argued in “The Five-Sided Fantasy Island”,  the very survival of star eyewitness Frank Probst is difficult enough to reconcile with the “Official Story”, since he was supposedly undisturbed by wake turbulence as he stood near the heliport while the plane passed over his head.  Further evidence of the validity of our argument was recently provided by David MacGowan [Editor’s note: it’s McGowan, Jerry; think Irish, not Scottish], who posted this video http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/simulation.mpeg, which is a “staged demonstration” showing an automobile being blown about like a tumbleweed by the blast of an aircraft engine exhaust.  As NASA explains at: http://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/directline_issues/dl6_blast.htm

Before a crew can say “powerback,” jet engine blast can up-root trees, flatten building structures, shatter windows, lift and propel heavy objects, weathercock braked airplanes, blow over lift trucks, shift unbraked baggage carts, and create other havoc on airport ramps, taxiways, and runways.

Although the diagrams don’t say so, jet blast can also injure or kill crew and passengers who happen to cross its path.

Yet we are expected to believe that the 757 flew over a highway overpass at about 10 feet altitude, clipping antennas with its engines, passing near billboard-style highway signs, and passing within 6 feet of Frank Probst, all without catching anything in the blast of its turbine exhausts. We found ourselves  wondering if perhaps the forward speed of the plane might paradoxically have mitigated the effects of the engine’s blast, by carrying the air mass forwards around itself (relatively speaking). We can investigate this further by using the engine modeling tool at:

http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/airplane/ngnsim.html

Possibly the most important subset of witnesses consists of those who provide explicit, realistic and detailed claims that a 757 crashed into the Pentagon after executing a high velocity, low altitude approach. We believe that, contrary to Hoffman’s opinion, these accounts can readily be interpreted in favor of our argument that no such collision took place. This is based on the fact that there is almost total disagreement among the eyewitnesses, about the detailed physical description of the actual collision, as well as severe disagreements with the “official story” of the 757 impact as determined by the ASCE report. Out of 27 witness accounts which we classified as “explicit”, we were able to identify substantial errors or contradictions in 24 accounts, or 88% … we [also] found a very high prevalence of elite insider connections among the witnesses who claimed to see the 757 hit the Pentagon, compared to other witnesses whose perceptions were more indeterminate. Out of the 27 explicit witnesses, 14 had what we would consider “deep” insider connections, while 24 of 27 worked for either the Federal Government or the mainstream media.

(more >>>)

“Responding to your Newsletter #68A… I found your analysis of the Light Poles knocked down in the alleged flight-path is acceptable except for one minor distinction … the plane (or whatever it was) probably didn’t physically hit the poles. Each engine produces roughly 50,000 pounds of thrust, with exhaust gases ejected at mach 0.95 = 720 mph. I know the numbers, but they’re not the real problem. Light aircraft pilots all know the real hazard of low-flying jumbo jets is wingtip vortex. These vortex have such extreme power that a light aircraft, such as a Cessna, would be violently flipped over and slammed to the ground if it met up with one of these vortexes. This can happen during landing, takeoff or simply taxiing on the ground. Many such accidents occur every year, and are often fatal. We’re talking about forces strong enough to throw a Ford Explorer across a tennis court. I did a Google search for a website that provides some factual data as well as some graphic indicators. Obviously there are many sites, but I stopped after finding one that seemed adequate. Although I think wingtip vortex is a much more likely explanation than wings clipping poles, I do not know what really happened that day. Like you, I am convinced that no 757 hit the Pentagon, so I don’t think it much matters ‘what’ knocked down the poles… we already know the ‘who’ wasn’t 19 hijackers based out of Afghanistan.”

When an aircraft wing generates lift, it also produces horizontal, tornado-like vortices that create a potential wake-vortex hazard problem for other aircraft trailing. The powerful, high-velocity airflows contained in the wake behind the generating aircraft are long-lived, invisible, and a serious threat to aircraft encountering the system, especially small general aviation aircraft. Immediately behind the wake-generating aircraft is a region of wake turbulence known as the roll-up region, where the character of the wake that is shed from individual components (wingtips, flaps, landing gear, etc.) is changing rapidly with distance because of self-induced distortions. Farther away from the generating aircraft is an area of the wake known as the plateau region, where the vortices have merged and/or attained a nearly constant structure. Even farther downstream from the generating aircraft is a wake area known as the decay region, where substantial diffusion and decay of the vortices occur due to viscous and turbulence effects. Depending on the relative flight path of a trailing aircraft in the wake-vortex system, extreme excursions in rolling motion, rate of climb, or even structural load factors may be experienced during an encounter with the wake. If the encounter occurs at low altitudes, especially during the landing approach, loss of control and ground impact may occur. (http://oea.larc.nasa.gov/PAIS/Concept2Reality/wake_vortex.html)

You wrote: “You would think that if a 100+ ton metal object traveling at hundreds of miles per hour impacted a steel light pole, it might, at the very least, maybe dent the pole, or perhaps bend it a little bit. In other words, you would think that there would be some kind of impact scar visible on the toppled pole…”

The pictures you illustrated this statement with appear to me to document dented and bent poles, especially the picture on the left. Since I don’t believe a plane hit those poles any more than you do, I wonder what, and who, did uproot, dent, and bend those poles, and when did they do it.

Most of the metal street light standards in this country are especially designed and built to break away cleanly at their bases after only modest impacts. This is so that they don’t kill people who hit them with their cars. I don’t know whether the poles would break away before altering the course of a plane/missile/whatever, but it seems possible that they might. They’re pretty much ready to lay down and die right from the factory as I understand it. (I’m no expert, but have been around this stuff a little on the construction side.)

Sooner or later you’ll see the aftermath of a car-versus-street-light collision on the road, and you’ll probably see a relatively straight-looking street lamp pole laying down with a clean break at its base, like the ones in the Pentagon pictures.

I don’t think this detracts from your point, I’m mostly writing in case you did not know that such poles are specifically made to snap off clean if you hit them very hard.  And of course, I have no idea whether the Pentagon poles were breakaway.

FYI – no biggie, but I thought you might want to know it’s Olsen (with an “e”) for Theodore or Barbara.

If you haven’t watched the video yet, by the way, you really need to do so: https://www.bitchute.com/video/vnkButpq2Wza. And have all your friends and family members watch it as well. It’s a little on the long side and could use some serious editing, but it does succeed in completely laying waste to the official story of what happened in Boston on April 15, 2013.

As for Mr./Ms Archangel, he/she wasn’t too far off, though I’ve been told that it’s actually incurable small-cell lung cancer that has already spread to my liver and bones. And no, that’s unfortunately not a joke. It’s my new reality as of just a few short weeks ago, when my entire world was turned upside-down and I suddenly found myself being admitted to the oncology ward at Glendale Adventist Medical Center. Four days later, I was beginning my first round of chemotherapy infusions. The second round begins tomorrow, on Monday, June 15.

I’m still having a very hard time processing all of this. Despite not having the healthiest diet and not making the most healthy lifestyle choices, I have been remarkably healthy throughout my adult life. Until a few weeks ago, I’d never been hospitalized as an adult. Never had any surgical procedures performed. Never had a major illness or significant injury. Never broke a bone in my body. Haven’t ever been reliant on any prescription drugs of any kind. Haven’t even had a primary care physician for many, many years.

But now, literally overnight, that reality has been replaced with a painful and, if I’m being perfectly honest, terrifying new reality. Based on what my doctors have told me and what I have read, the prognosis is not good. My oncologist seems to be of the opinion that I only have six months to a couple of years left on this planet, if that. The odds of surviving for even five more years are very, very low.

But I’ve never been one for taking advice or believing what I have been told. And I can be exceedingly stubborn. So if the medical community tells me that there is virtually no chance that I can survive this, I will do everything in my power to prove them wrong. But it is going to be a long, tough fight against a formidable foe. And any support that readers can offer, whether financial or moral, will be greatly appreciated.

In closing, thanks to all of you for your support and encouragement over the years. I hope to be able to continue to expose the crimes of the elite for many years to come. Stay tuned ….

Alissa’s Note: After a courageous and painful six-month battle, Dave passed away on November 22, 2015, at his home in Eagle Rock. He was indeed one of the most stubborn individuals I have ever known, and he fought with every last ounce of strength he had. Despite the predictions of Mr./Ms. Archangel, my father did not believe himself to be a target, and knew that his untimely death was a product of his own unhealthy lifestyle choices. A heavy smoker for over 40 years, he also had a job that exposed him to asbestos and other cancer-causing agents, as well as a typically male aversion to the doctor (he ignored warning signs for many months before seeking medical attention). This site (and his intellectual property) are now owned and maintained by me, his eldest daughter, Alissa.

Daddy eight days before his death, filling his last orders for signed copies of Weird Scenes.

His obituary and guest book can be viewed here: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/latimes/obituary.aspx?pid=176717987.

May 7, 2013

The Boston Marathon bombing incident produced an exceedingly bloody, gore-filled scene. We know that because virtually all avenues of the mainstream media, as was obvious from the very first reports, wanted us to know that. Never before can I recall seeing so many blood-soaked images being so prominently displayed. Newspapers and network and cable news broadcasts seemed to be on a mission to bring you the bloodiest, most graphic images they could come up with. The most disturbing of those images, by far, all involved a guy who had reportedly just had both of his legs blown off. The most heavily circulated and iconic of those images are of the legless guy being rolled away from the scene in a wheelchair, his unbelievably graphic wounds uncovered and on full display for the waiting cameras.

How crazy would it sound to suggest that that did not happen by accident — to suggest that not only were his injuries staged, but that they were specifically designed for that high-profile wheelchair ride? Pretty crazy … right? After all, I have in the past been rather critical of other researchers who have alleged that the victims of high-profile mass murders are actually actors. Nothing, it seems to me, could possibly serve to better alienate and offend the general public than attacking the victims as being part of the conspiracy. But what if the evidence is so overwhelming that it simply cannot be ignored?

I need to be very clear here in stating that I am not arguing that no one was injured in the attack and that there was no real suffering. That undoubtedly was not the case. But the fact remains that the most high-profile of the victims, who also happened to be by far the most gruesomely injured of the victims, and the guy who purportedly provided the tip that allowed authorities to identify the alleged perpetrators, appears to have been a fake. And though we were told that there were numerous people who lost limbs that day, he is the only one the media chose to put in the spotlight that day.

Given his central role in the affair then, we should probably take a much closer look at the wheelchair guy. That means, of course, that this post will necessarily be filled with very graphic images. But there’s no need to worry – you’ve seen plenty of this stuff before on your television and on theater screens. And it doesn’t appear to be any more real here than it is in a George Romero movie or an episode of The Walking Dead.

Before getting to the images though, a brief review of the official story is in order here so that we can gauge how closely the photographic evidence conforms to the story that we have been asked to believe. To begin with, the guy’s name is supposedly Jeff Bauman. The posted photos of Bauman, however, do not really resemble the wheelchair guy. In addition, the initial identification of Bauman came via an unverifiable Facebook post. In fact, virtually everything that has been reported about Bauman to this day seems to have come from unverified Facebook posts, though the info has been reported as fact. Those posts have largely been credited to Jeff Bauman, Sr., though no reporters, as best I can determine, have actually located and spoken to the senior Bauman. Reports claim that Jeff, Jr. was supposedly waiting at the finish line for his girlfriend to cross, but that girlfriend has never been identified and has not come forward to speak to the press. And Bauman himself, though healthy enough after just 19 days to attend a Boston Bruins hockey match, has not been sought out by or interviewed by anyone in the media.

Some on the Internet have claimed that the guy who allegedly lost his legs was actually Nick Vogt, a former serviceman who had previously lost his legs overseas. But numerous photos of Vogt can be found posted online and none of them really seem to resemble the wheelchair guy all that closely. I don’t pretend to know who the no-legs guy actually is, but I do know that the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that he did not lose his legs at the Boston Marathon. For the purposes of this post, we will refer to him as Jeff Bauman, though I am not at all convinced that that is his real name.

According to the official narrative, Bauman was all but straddling backpack bomb #1 when it went off. As reported by Bloomberg News, “Bauman was waiting among the crowd for his girlfriend to cross the finish line at the Boston Marathon. A man wearing a cap, sunglasses and a black jacket over a hooded sweatshirt looked at Jeff, 27, and dropped a bag at his feet, his brother, Chris Bauman, said in an interview. Two and a half minutes later, the bag exploded, tearing Jeff’s legs apart.” Curiously, that alleged brother has not been seen, photographed or spoken to by any other media outlet.

What we will be viewing here then in the accompanying images is ‘ground zero’ of the Boston bombing – the very area that the so-called Cowboy Hero, Carlos Arredondo, described as follows: “[there was] blood, blood everywhere, on the floor … and then all you see was people without limbs. I mean, ripped off limbs everywhere, everywhere …”

Arredondo has claimed in interviews that he was seated in the bleachers across the street when the first bomb went off, but that he immediately swung into action. The Daily Mail reported that, “as most people ran for their lives when the explosions went off in Boston, [Arredondo] vaulted a fence to get to spectators, many of whom had lost limbs, and used his clothes and towels to stanch victims’ bleeding.” Naturally enough, Arredondo immediately recognized that Bauman was the victim most in need of assistance and he acted accordingly, reaching his side within “moments”: “The first time Jeff Bauman Jr. met Carlos Arredondo it was moments after one of the blasts at the Boston Marathon blew him to the ground taking both his legs.”

The Daily Beast provided one of the most detailed accounts of Arredondo’s heroics: “Carlos Arredondo was in the bleachers by the finish line of the Boston Marathon when the first bomb went off directly across the street … In the next moment, the 53-year old was vaulting a barricade and racing straight into the acrid cloud …” He immediately located and rushed to assist Bauman. “A second bomb went off 100 yards away. Arredondo kept his focus on the young man …” In other words, he had worked his way down from the bleachers, raced across the street, vaulted the barricade, located Bauman amidst the smoke and confusion, and already begun to assist him – all within less than 15 seconds! I think we can all agree that heroes of that magnitude aren’t born every day.

The ever-heroic Arredondo then quickly lifted Bauman into a nearby wheelchair and without hesitation got him to a medical tent, pinching off Jeff’s exposed femoral artery along the way, thus saving the young man’s life. From his hospital bed Bauman has reportedly confirmed that account: “When Carlos picked me up and threw me into the wheelchair, then I was like, maybe I am going to make it … before that, no way. I thought I was done.”

Another guy we will be seeing a lot of in the images that follow is allegedly named Christian Williams, but we will refer to him as “the hoody guy” or just “hoody” because I seriously doubt that that is his real name. Hoody guy was right alongside Bauman at the time of the blast and, like Jeff, he sustained very serious, life-threatening wounds. According to a fundraising page put up by someone claiming to be a friend of hoody guy, he remains in the hospital and has endured numerous surgeries aimed at putting him back together. Here are a few (very poorly written) excerpts from the page:

“[Christian] remembers quite vividly that a Boston Marathon runner who is also a surgeon, came to his rescue. He remembers the man was able to get people to help him apply tourniquet to each of his legs, he hollered out ‘if we can get this guy out on the next transport he has a chance, otherwise he’s going to die.’ That’s when he realized how serious his injuries were … Christian is indeed lucky that his legs will not have to be amputated … Here’s the latest update from Christian … ‘today I met a few of my saviors … Standing before me were the three members of the Boston EMS who were directly responsible for keeping me alive and getting me swiftly to the hospital. Apparently, they had been speculating about my outcome for two weeks and decided to surprise me with a visit, because I was by far the most seriously injured patient they treated that day, and that they had not expected me to make it. They had applied not one, not two, but three tourniquets to my left leg, yet still my blood poured down off the stretcher and onto the floor. Both of my femurs were exposed and they were applying pressure to keep them in place. My right leg was so badly wounded from top to bottom they thought for sure it was gone. My blood pressure was nowhere to be found, and they were calling ahead and alerting the trauma team that I had turned ashen.'” Elsewhere on the page, it says that, “Christian’s right hand was also partially ‘degloved’, meaning he has no skin left on his last three fingers.”

Also right alongside Bauman at the time of the blast was a young woman allegedly named Nicole Gross, who was waiting at the finish line with her sister. We will be seeing quite a bit of Nicole as well. Also with her was her husband. According to an account in the Charlotte Observer, Nicole and her husband were taken to the hospital together. While her husband sustained only minor wounds, Nicole and her sister were far more gravely injured. Nicole’s injuries included two breaks in her left leg, a fracture in her right ankle, torn skin, and a severed Achilles tendon. Her sister fared even worse, losing her left leg below the knee and suffering a compound fracture in her right leg, a broken right ankle, and broken bones in her foot. While I seriously doubt that her name is really Nicole, I will play along and use that name for her in this post.

There is one more person we will be seeing a lot of, a black woman dressed in black pants, a white top and a red sweater. She was also in the grouping around Bauman when the first blast occurred, which means that according to the official version of events she was also nearly straddling the supposedly shrapnel-laden bomb. As best I can determine at this time, she has not been identified and so will here be referred to as “Redcoat.”

Having now met the cast of characters and having familiarized ourselves with the relevant portions of the official narrative, let’s now review the available photo and video evidence to determine if there might be a possibility that some parts of the story might be untrue. Let’s begin with some live footage from the Boston Globe that depicts the explosions and their immediate aftermath. As can be seen, the explosions took place on the side of the street opposite the bleachers – the side of the street, that is, where there were far fewer spectators gathered. The explosions also took place behind some temporary fencing/scaffolding, requiring would-be rescuers to spend a full two-and-a-half minutes working to dismantle the fencing to get to victims. Arredondo can be seen among the responders and volunteers working to tear down the fencing.

So already, we have a bit of a problem with the Cowboy Hero’s version of events: he clearly did not immediately vault over the fence to get to victims and he just as clearly was not at Bauman’s side within “moments.” Below is a photo taken from above of the first bombing site just seconds after detonation. Plainly evident is that there were relatively few people at the site of the blast and, with the exception of a small huddled group, all of them are on their feet and quickly moving away from the area. That would tend to indicate that they still had their legs firmly attached.

The fact that there were relatively few witnesses at the blast location, coupled with the fact that would-be rescuers were held at bay for the first few minutes by the temporary fencing, would have provided an ideal window of opportunity to stage the scene, if anyone had been inclined to do so.

Below is the first post-blast image of Bauman, taken from a surveillance video. He can be seen to the left, just in front of Redcoat. Just behind her is the hoody guy. Barely visible to the far left is Nicole Gross. Hoody, Nicole and Redcoat are all three huddled closely around Jeff’s freshly mangled legs. The smoke is still pretty thick in this image so we can’t discern much, but we can see that from the earliest moments after the explosion, both of Bauman’s stumps are at right angles to his body. And the lower leg on the longer stump, though it can’t be seen from this angle, is at a near perfect right-angle to the upper leg. Both of his stumps, in other words, are in a sitting position. And they will remain in that very same orientation, without even minor changes, throughout his ordeal. Also worth noting is that the shorter stump looks considerably different here than it does in later images.

Moving on to the second image, we can clearly see that the hoody guy, mere moments after the blast, is primarily concerned with donning his sunglasses. Some web posts and videos have claimed that this was to send a signal to Redcoat – which seems rather unlikely, I have to say, given that the two are obviously close enough to signal each other verbally. Far more likely is that hoody guy was mostly concerned with concealing his identity. He will remain in the hoody and shades for as long as he is on the set, even while receiving medical attention. We can also see more clearly here that Redcoat, Nicole (now visible) and hoody guy are all within inches of Jeff, with his freshly amputated limbs pointed directly at them. In fact, Jeff’s longer stump appears to be wedged in between Redcoat and Nicole. All three accomplices, nevertheless, will emerge from their ordeal without so much as a drop of Johnny’s blood on them. Also, none of the three appear to have received any significant injuries despite having been right alongside a guy who supposedly got both his legs blown off.

In this third image, we can now see the right-angle bend in Jeff’s remaining knee. We can also see that the bony stump is all but poking Redcoat in the head (which seems, even under the circumstances, kind of rude). And it is clearly pointing directly at both Redcoat and the hoody guy, both of whom remain remarkably blood-free. We can also see that no one else in this scene appears to be nearly as gravely injured as Jeff. Also, Redcoat and hoody guy seem rather calm relative to most of the others in the scene, many of whom are in full panic mode. Lastly, there is no sign of hoody’s wife, who was supposedly alongside him, or of Nicole’s husband and sister, both of whom were allegedly alongside her.

Moments later, we can see that Jeff and Redcoat seem to both be giving the very same hand signal in the direction of approaching responders while making eye contact with one another. Both stumps continue to be in a sitting position and both continue to point directly at Redcoat. It doesn’t seem to have yet occurred to Jeff or anyone else to put pressure on his wounds. Hoody guy looks on passively while making no effort to offer assistance to Jeff. Indeed, neither Redcoat nor hoody guy ever make any effort to staunch the flow of Jeff’s blood, which is okay since there doesn’t appear to actually be any blood flowing. Meanwhile, Nicole has moved out of the shot.

This next series of images captures the same scene from a slightly different vantage point and at a higher resolution, revealing that hoody guy, demonstrating a considerable amount of manual dexterity for a guy with a ‘degloved’ hand, began working diligently on Jeff’s stumps before the smoke even began to clear. And he did so without getting any blood on his hands.

We now change positions to look at the same scene just moments later from a different perspective, and this is where things really start to get interesting. All five of our keyplayers (Carlos, Jeff, Hoody, Nicole, and Redcoat) are present and accounted for. Just about everyone else, which is to say all the non-actors, have fled the scene. Jeff is just behind Redcoat, though he is all but impossible to see. Everyone is ignoring him. In fact, with the notable exception of Arredondo, no one on the scene is even looking in his direction. Not a single person.

And speaking of Arredondo, he is, mere moments after the blast and with the smoke still swirling, already inside the temporary fencing, which obviously would have been impossible had he initially been seated across the street in the bleachers. And it’s hard not to notice that he isn’t actually rushing to help anyone but is instead standing idly by, hat and flag in hand, though he is obviously aware of Jeff and appears to be looking right at him.

Next up is a more detailed view of Arredondo, cropped from a higher resolution version of the above image. He is indeed inside the fencing and leaning casually against it. He also is quite obviously pointing with his right hand while shielding the gesture with his hat, as though covertly sending a signal. And he is, as previously noted, looking at Bauman while doing so.

Below is a close-up of hoody guy, cropped from the same high-resolution image. Hoody is clearly knocking on death’s door here and we can bear witness to his exposed femurs, shredded and badly bleeding legs, and partially ‘degloved’ right hand. We can also see that he is very concerned about his missing wife. Ooops …. actually we can’t see any of that because none of it really happened. What we actually see is a guy comfortably reclining with a fully intact right hand and two perfectly fine legs. He hardly even has any blood on him, and what is visible was undoubtedly picked up from the pavement.

Next up is a close-up of Redcoat, lying in what is supposed to be Bauman’s pooled blood. She nevertheless has remarkably little blood on her, though she does have an alien growing out of her midsection. I have no idea if that is supposed to be blood on her otherwise white top, but it certainly doesn’t look like any kind of normal blood pattern. Overall, despite laying in a pool of blood and having been directly in the line of fire of Jeff’s femoral arteries, she has very little blood on her and doesn’t appear to have suffered any significant injuries.

The next image up for review is of Nicole, with her twice-broken left leg, fractured ankle and severed Achilles tendon. Luckily, those injuries haven’t hindered her mobility as she has clearly moved from her original position. Those are some excruciatingly painful injuries that she has, but she seems to be toughing it out okay. She has though been abandoned by her husband, who you would think would be tending to and comforting her, and her legless sister is nowhere to be seen. Her right arm got peppered with shrapnel, but luckily for her it was a special kind of shrapnel that shreds clothing fibers but doesn’t penetrate flesh. That was a relatively common phenomenon in Boston that day, with the guy in the following image, looking like he just walked off a film set, being a classic example.

Moving on now to the next image in the sequence of events, we find Arredondo moving quickly to aid Bauman. Just kidding … what we actually find him doing is beginning to pull the fence down from the inside, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he is bringing it down directly on top of one of the victims, which is probably okay because she was undoubtedly an actress anyway. What is important to note here is that the Cowboy Hero already had access to the victims but rather than assist them he chose to spend the next few minutes helping to tear the fence down, pretending as though he hadn’t already been on the other side of it. No medical personnel are yet on the scene and yet almost all of the victims have already left on their own, thoughfully carting their severed limbs off with them. Jeff, naturally enough, continues to be ignored. As can be seen, the bomb shrapnel all passed cleanly between the fence pickets without breaking a single one.

In the next image we see that Redcoat has moved away to reveal that the spot previously occupied by her and the other accomplices is covered with a pool of very unconvincing blood. The fence is now down and responders are on the scene but Arredondo is nowhere in sight and Jeff is being ignored by everyone. Both of his stumps continue to be at right angles to his body and the knee on the left stump remains bent at a right angle, though he has rolled onto his side to draw attention away from that. He is now also keeping a firm grip on that longer leg/prosthesis and he will continue to do so for as long as he remains in camera range.

Absurdly enough, hoody guy, while still wearing his shades, is receiving medical attention while Jeff, just a couple of feet away, is apparently invisible. No one has bothered to even fashion a makeshift tourniquet or two to arrest his alleged bleeding. And why, one wonders, has Jeff been abandoned by all his accomplices? Why, after first providing no assistance whatsoever, have all three of them now physically distanced themselves from him? It clearly wasn’t to get out of the way and let responders tend to his alleged wounds. And speaking of responders, wouldn’t it have been a nice gesture for hoody to say to rescuers something along the lines of, “don’t worry about me, guys – the poor motherfucker right there doesn’t have any legs!”

Next up is an image in which we again see that the ground is drenched in stage blood that even Roger Corman would have balked at using. We also see that both of Jeff’s limbs continue to be locked in a sitting position and that he continues to keep a very tight grip on the left prosthesis. And he continues to suffer alone, with no one at any time offering any assistance whatsoever in any of the recorded images, even though a responder is clearly standing right there in what is supposed to be his pooled blood, with his back turned to Jeff as though he is guarding him rather than assisting him. Just to the left of Jeff’s head can be seen the boot and camo fatigues of a soldier with the national guard, who also has his back to Jeff as though guarding rather than assisting him. Arredondo remains missing in action. Apparently aware of the presence of a photographer (who the girl next to him is looking directly at), Jeff is now grimacing.

In this next image, Jeff is ready for his moment in the spotlight. Ridiculously, he is in a wheelchair rather than strapped to a gurney. And just as ridiculously, his alleged wounds are on full display because, you know, no one thought to throw a coat or a sheet or something over them. It couldn’t really be any more obvious, given the laws of gravity, how absurd it is for a bottomless guy to be transported in an upright position. There is no question that under any other circumstances, this guy would have been on a gurney with his wounds covered with a sheet. But that would have ruined the show that his prosthetics were specifically designed for. Also, it would have looked pretty ridiculous to have him in a sitting position while lying on his back on a gurney.

The next two images are not part of the sequence of events revolving around Jeff and his associates, but are included here as examples of how people on the scene with far less significant leg wounds were handled by responders. This is how, in the real world, people with alleged leg injuries are transported.

Next up is another view of Jeff in the wheelchair. From this angle we can see that his left leg is still bent at the knee at a right angle, even though that is a very unnatural position for it to be in. Without exertion by our victim/hero, his lower leg would be hanging straight down. To maintain it in that position would require physical exertion for the entire time that Bauman remained on the scene, both while on his back and while in the wheelchair. So apparently Jeff not only remained conscious and quite alert throughout his ordeal, he also maintained enough strength to keep his knee locked at a right-angle.

I should also point out here that though we have a clear view of the street, there isn’t so much as a drop of blood visible in the wheelchair’s path. Note also that Jeff’s longer stump looks quite horrifying here, with bloody flaps of skin and all manner of nastiness hanging from it, though none of that was visible when he was waving his stump in his accomplices’ faces while avoiding getting blood on them.

This next image is a highly incriminating one of Redcoat, ready for her photo op. It is clearly the same woman – same face, same clothes, same purse. But the last time we saw her, she had miraculously survived the blast without visible injury and had even more miraculously managed to avoid getting drenched in Jeff’s blood. But now, as she is about to be rolled out for the waiting cameras, she has suddenly and inexplicably become a bloody mess. Note also that Nicole, who had previously been sitting up and looking around, has once again moved to a different location and is now being treated as though she has a spinal injury. She also has a makeshift tourniquet around her leg which appears to be unnecessary.

Here is yet another dramatic shot of accomplice #1 being rushed to a waiting ambulance. She is now bleeding so profusely that there is a river of blood rushing down towards the bottom of the gurney and her chest is completely drenched. It’s a miracle she’s still alive. Luckily they had a gurney available for her. And for Nicole as well, as can be seen below. And they also drove the ambulance right up to the site of the blast, rather than wheeling her down the street. But they could probably only do that for people with really serious injuries.

There is one other image that must be discussed here. Among the literally hundreds of posted photos that I have reviewed, it stands out as being the only image in the public domain that comes anywhere close to depicting the level of carnage described by Arredondo and others. It is the only image that depicts anyone other than Bauman with an apparently amputated limb. It also depicts some rather dead-looking women who appear to be being checked for vital signs. And of course Jeff himself makes an appearance with his perpetually bent knee.

There is though a bit of a problem with that particular image: it seems to be at odds with other available images. If we look at it side-by-side with an earlier image, for example, it is pretty clear that the guy with the missing lower leg and the two dead women weren’t there initially. And at the risk of sounding insensitive, I have to note here that dead people and/or people with mangled legs generally have pretty limited mobility, so the question naturally arises: how did they get there?

One final piece of evidence concerning Bauman can be found in a YouTube video. As can be seen, as Jeff is belatedly being rolled out, an EMT rushes up to stop the wheelchair processional to make a last-second adjustment before Bauman reaches the waiting cameras. Given that Jeff was at the time allegedly just moments away from death, what kind of adjustment could have possibly been so important?

So what have we learned today? Some conclusions can be drawn with a certainty, such as that the story told by Carlos Arredondo is a complete fabrication. Virtually every aspect of the tale he has told is demonstrably untrue and yet it has been readily accepted and repeated by the mainstream media. It is also irrefutably true that the guy calling himself ‘Christian Williams’ has also left a reeking pile of bullshit on the table. His phantom injuries, which he has used to raise some $100,000 (is that the going rate these days for selling your soul?), were entirely imaginary and his wife is nowhere to be seen in any of the photos. We also know that the image of Redcoat that was presented to waiting photographers was an entirely contrived one, complete with lots of added stage blood. And we know that ‘Nicole Gross’ didn’t really break her leg in two places and wasn’t really standing with her husband and sister when the blast occurred.

And what about ‘Jeff Bauman’? Did he really have both of his legs blown off? Is it really possible for someone to have both legs blown apart like that while those around him walk away with barely a scratch? And is it really possible that the people who were pressed up against him could somehow avoid being drenched in blood? And is it possible that real blood does sometimes look like red paint? And that with two freshly severed femoral arteries, there wouldn’t have been a much, much larger pool of blood? And is it within the realm of possibility that everyone around him, including numerous first responders, could have completely ignored his dire condition for an inordinate amount of time? And that when he was finally ‘rescued’ it was by being rolled off to who-knows-where in a wheelchair? And should we just ignore the fact that hoody was manipulating Jeff’s stumps immediately after the blast, while shielded by smoke? And should we also ignore the curious fact that Jeff’s stumps remain locked in the exact same position throughout his ordeal? And that Carlos can be seen signaling to him very soon after the blast occurred, after which he subsequently ignored him for a considerable amount of time? And that Jeff didn’t bother mentioning that while allegedly praising Arredondo from his hospital bed?

None of that, quite frankly, seems very plausible to me. It also seem very unlikely that a guy who really did have his legs blown off would find himself surrounded by people who were obviously there as actors playing roles. I will be the first to admit though that the notion that the government would use amputee actors to portray trauma victims, complete with Hollywood blood and gore, seems a rather bizarre notion. But it is not, strangely enough, wild-eyed conspiracy theorizing to suggest such a thing. To the contrary, as this video clip culled from the mainstream media clearly demonstrates, it is an acknowledged fact that the government does indeed employ amputee actors for training purposes.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that the government used actors in the Boston bombing operation. It does though mean that there are amputees out there who have experience convincingly portraying victims of severe trauma, and it means that the government is more than happy to employ them during training exercises, and that it does so primarily for shock value. And nothing in recent memory, I have to say, had quite the shock value of the guy at the finish line of the Boston Marathon with the shredded legs.

It’s okay though. You can go back to sleep now. I’m sure everything is going to work out just fine. Don’t be surprised though if you wake up one day soon to find the streets lined with armored personnel carriers and the skies filled with military helicopters. Because if you accept the implementation of martial law in Boston as a legitimate response to a patently fake ‘terrorist’ attack, then you have given your seal of approval for far more wide-reaching and far more permanent states of martial law in the not-so-distant future. And it will happen. The only question is when.

]]> 559 https://centerforaninformedamerica.com/boston-3/ Tue, 14 May 2013 23:47:18 +0000 http://centerforaninformedamerica.com/?page_id=579 May 14, 2013

There are a number of additional questions raised by the photo evidence that I feel compelled to address here. But first, let’s take another look at one image that was presented at the tail end of my last post. You know the one I’m talking about – the one that features two apparently dead people and two guys who have had one or both of their legs blown off.

After further review, I have a number of questions about this shot, beginning with why, given that the media establishment was clearly on a mission to traumatize us with the most graphic images available, do we have only one shot of this particular scene – and an out-of-focus, poorly exposed one at that? And why is this the only view we have of the hollowed-out leg guy, who we can’t even recognize from this angle and distance? Given the numerous graphic, very bloody images we have of Jeff, why didn’t this guy get equal time? Were his prosthetics and make-up not as convincing as Jeff’s? Where are the close-up shots of him lying in a pool of his own blood? And where is his iconic wheelchair shot?

What is up, by the way, with the strawberry blond gal in the red top? Why is she still there? She doesn’t have any visible injuries that would prevent her from leaving, or at least moving, yet she seems very reluctant to give up her position. Even when Carlos pinned her under the fence, she remained unfazed, just as she is unfazed by the two guys just behind her with mutilated legs who are presumably howling in pain, and by the dead woman and the nearly dead woman just behind her, and by the large pools of blood all around her. She also doesn’t seem concerned with the fact that she is clearly impeding the progress of the responder trying to work on the girl behind her. And speaking of responders, you gotta love that there is one walking right between Jeff and the hollow-leg guy while offering help to neither of them. I’m guessing that if we had audio with this pic we’d hear him saying, “Anyone here need any help? Anyone? Anyone at all?”

And what are we to make of the two women in the foreground? Are they both dead? If so, how exactly did they die? They don’t have a mark on their faces or upper bodies, and as Jeff’s saga has taught us, the human body can withstand an incredible amount of trauma to the lower extremities. You can have your legs blown clean off and then bleed out unattended for a considerable amount of time and yet still remain conscious and fully alert and even have enough strength left to sit upright in a wheelchair while holding your stump aloft. So what was it that killed these two women so quickly? Not far away, Jeff is still able to sit up entirely on his own and he doesn’t have any legs at all!

The frail old runner who was knocked over by the blast was, as best it can be determined from available videotape, just on the other side of the temporary barricade from these women. And yet, by his own account, he was uninjured and was able to complete the race. So how exactly is it possible that a healthy young woman was hit with lethal force but a guy who looked like he was already half dead was just 10-15 feet further away from the explosion and directly in the line of fire and yet he walked away without a scratch on him? In what alternative reality could that actually happen?

Another very obvious question raised here is: if these women are in fact dead, then why are they not included in the official victim tally? As the story goes, there were only three deaths that day and two of the fallen were an eight-year-old boy and a young Asian woman. That only leaves one spot to fill and yet we have two bodies. Why then are we being shown women who we are clearly supposed to assume are dead when the official story holds that at least one of them can’t possibly be?

According to email I have received from a couple of incensed readers, the two women pictured are Krystle Campbell and her friend, Karen Rand. According to the official story, Ms Campbell was killed by the blast but her friend was not, though she was severely injured. Fair enough, I suppose … except that there are serious problems with the Campbell/Rand story as reported by our illustrious ‘free’ press. On the left below is a pic of the two women that was supposedly taken just hours before they were struck down. Beside that is a widely circulated photo of Ms Campbell, and beside that is a cropped and rotated version of the previous image.

Given the quality of the image, it is impossible to determine with any certainty whether the two women lying near the finish line are the same women depicted in the ‘before’ image, though it certainly seems quite possible that they are. Unfortunately though, that ‘before’ photo is wildly at odds with photos that have been released that purport to depict Ms Rand recuperating in her hospital bed. And while the gal in the image to the left above could conceivably be the woman in black in the crime scene image, the woman below most certainly could not be.

It’s amazing how much difference just a few days can make, isn’t it? Ms Rand clearly let herself go while in the hospital. The rather fit, shapely, youthful young lady in the before pic has been replaced by a decidedly heavyset, middle-aged woman. The official narrative holds that Rand is fifty-two years old, which is clearly about twice the apparent age of the woman in the middle photo above. The official story also holds that Campbell was initially listed as injured but alive, with the mix-up being attributed to a case of mistaken identity. For reasons that have never been explained, Rand was supposedly carrying Campbell’s identification rather than her own. And doctors, despite having the woman to the left above fully exposed on the operating table, did not realize that she wasn’t a rather petite, 29-year-old blond woman. I’m sure that kind of thing happens all the time. And it is also probably fairly common to pose someone cheek-to-cheek with their deceased friend. But since the woman in black clearly isn’t the Karen Rand pictured in the hospital bed, then apparently it is actually a stranger posed cheek-to-cheek with the deceased Ms Campbell. And that, I have to say, is pretty bizarre.

In other news, the guy who is a living embodiment of “Boston Strong,” Mr. Jeff Bauman, is back in the news with an interesting account of his ordeal. And by “interesting account,” I mean a version of events that bears no resemblance at all to either previously published accounts or to the photographic record. In the earlier version of events, it will be recalled, Bauman “woke up under so much drugs, asked for a paper and pen and wrote, ‘bag, saw the guy, looked right at me.'” And that drug-addled tip, of course, is what led the FBI to crack the case.

In the new and improved version of events, Jeff was telling anyone who would listen that he knew who was responsible within moments of the blasts. Swiftly carted off to a waiting ambulance, “Bauman told the man attending to him that he knew who had set off the bomb. Although he was somewhat delirious and in shock, Bauman remembered what he’d seen. When he was unloaded from the ambulance, he told an officer the same thing. But he was rushed into the emergency room and into surgery so quickly that he didn’t have time to share the details. When Bauman woke up, FBI agents were outside his door, ready to hear what he had to say. He started talking, and a sketch artist started drawing.”

Close enough, I guess. But his account of his encounter with the alleged bomber is completely different as well. When the tale was first told, “Bauman was waiting among the crowd for his girlfriend to cross the finish line at the Boston Marathon. A man wearing a cap, sunglasses and a black jacket over a hooded sweatshirt looked at Jeff, 27, and dropped a bag at his feet … Two and a half minutes later, the bag exploded, tearing Jeff’s legs apart.”

The new story has a few minor variations: “When Jeff Bauman looked Tamerlan Tsarnaev in the face, he knew something wasn’t quite right. Tsarnaev, then an anonymous man in a cap, sunglasses and backpack, seemed out of place … Bauman was at the marathon to watch his girlfriend, along with her two roommates. One of them, Michele Mahoney, was also badly injured and is now recovering in the next room over from Bauman at Spaulding. Just before Bauman saw Tsarnaev, he was looking for Mahoney so they could move farther down, just in case they’d missed his girlfriend crossing the finish line. The weird feeling Tsarnaev gave him made his desire to move more urgent. As he was looking for Mahoney, he saw a black backpack alone on the ground – the same one he’d seen on the suspicious man. Then, that pop.”

So, uhmm, the bag wasn’t dropped at his feet after all? He just had some kind of superhuman ability to identify one particular black backpack to the exclusion of all other black backpacks? Meaning that, even if we choose to believe Bauman’s ever-evolving story, we are left to conclude that he couldn’t actually connect Tsarnaev, or anyone else for that matter, to the alleged backpack?

Bauman also provided a new account of the supposedly very brief time that he lay on the ground awaiting help: “Bauman lay on the ground, first thinking someone had lit a firework in the street. He propped himself up and saw people screaming and running amid rubble. At first, he couldn’t feel the pain. He remembers lying back, trying to move and touch his legs. He yelled out. He looked for Mahoney, who had been taken away. He felt around grasping for his cell phone. He felt like he’d been lying there forever. ‘I was just laying there and I was just like, ‘Oh I’m gonna die,’ so I was looking for my cell phone to call people, and I couldn’t find it,’ he said. That’s when Carlos Arredondo, the cowboy-hat hero made famous from the now-iconic photograph of the two men together, came to his side. ‘He’s gotta go!’ Arredondo was yelling, and before Bauman knew it Arredondo hoisted him up by his T-shirt, threw him in a wheelchair and took off – over the finish line, through the medical tent and right into the ambulance.”

That’s a very touching story and all, but it is completely at odds with all the photographic evidence. In the moments after the blast, he didn’t prop himself up to see people running and screaming; he was on his back with his attention focused on the people directly in front of him. And where exactly was the “rubble”? I’ve reviewed a lot of images and I have yet to see anything resembling rubble. As for lying back and attempting to move and touch his legs, they were sticking straight up in the air; he could not only touch them, he could see them! His girlfriend’s roommate was apparently whisked away immediately, but by whom? There were no responders on the scene that quickly. It’s funny how Jeff, hoody and Nicole all claim to have been waiting with companions when the bomb detonated, but none of those companions can actually be seen in any of the available images.

I could also comment on the claim that Arredondo quickly came to his rescue, but that story has already been so thoroughly discredited that it hardly seems worth the effort.

One question that really needs to be asked here is: what the hell is up with all the leg amputations? Exactly what kind of bomb was this supposed to be? Because the last time I checked, crude pressure-cooker bombs weren’t directional. They’ll pretty much damage or destroy everything within a given radius. But this appears to have been a very special kind of bomb that only targeted things within 2-3 feet of the ground. I’ve lost count of how many media stories I’ve read that have featured amputated legs, but I have yet to read a story about someone who lost an arm. Or even a hand. How could that be? A post on the Washington Post website contains the stories of a sampling of the Boston victims. By my count, this group lost a total of 12 legs that day, plus an additional foot, and a number of other legs were saved only by the heroic efforts of responders and doctors. Not a single person though lost an arm, or a hand, or even a finger. Unless a whole lot of people had formed huddles around the bombs just before they went off, I’m at a loss for any sort of rational explanation for that.

ABC News has boldly proclaimed that more than 25 people lost limbs that day. Some of the explosive amputation stories told by the media have been ridiculously over-the-top in their absurdity. Take, for example, the case of the guy calling himself Jarrod Clowery, who told the Washington Post that no fewer than three of his companions had their legs blown off: “Three of Clowery’s buddies who were with him each lost limbs in the bombings … Clowery believes he already was in the air, clearing the metal guardrail, when the explosion hit, which may have saved his legs. His friends still were grounded. ‘They’re all big guys. I think they spared some other people when they took that impact.'”

If everyone in the blast zone had been walking on stilts, it appears, there wouldn’t have been any injuries at all. The next best thing, I guess, would have been to stand behind some really big guys. Those are important things to remember if you ever find yourself in a crowded public space in the future.

Amazingly enough, Clowery isn’t the only one claiming to have had three companions fall victim to the leg-severing bombs. Our old friend Shrapnel Man has made the very same claim. The media would like us to believe that Shrapnel Man, whose name is allegedly James “Bim” Costello, was seriously injured by the bombings, to such an extent that he was initially unsure if he would make it out alive. And that, of course, makes me feel just terrible for having previously mocked the image below.

Costello’s body was “so burned that he was left needing pig skin grafts on most of his right arm and right leg. Costello had plucked two rusty roofing nails from his stomach and was trying to walk toward any help he could find following the explosions, his ears ringing, his body pebbled with shrapnel, and his mind reeling from the thought moments earlier that he might be dying … Three of the friends who were with Costello on race day each lost a leg.”

So he walked away from his three friends who were bleeding out on the pavement? I guess he had a photo shoot to get to. If his body is ‘pebbled’ with shrapnel, by the way, then why do you suppose it is that he doesn’t seem to have so much as a drop of blood on his shirt? Even if he had received no injuries himself, how is it possible to have been alongside three guys who literally had their legs blown off and not be covered with blood? Of course, the same question can be asked of just about everyone who was within the blast zones.

I shouldn’t really need to point out here that when a couple dozen legs are blown asunder, all that blood, bone and flesh goes somewhere. Actually, what I should say is that all of that blood and tissue goes everywhere. The reality is that, as bloody as some of the pictures we were assaulted with were, they were not actually nearly bloody enough to lend any credence at all to the official story. Below is a fairly high resolution shot taken almost immediately after the first detonation (note that most of the people in the foreground are still holding their ears). Countless legs have just been explosively amputated, covering the scene in hundreds of pounds of blood and gore, as if someone had fed a dozen human legs into an industrial wood chipper. Take a look for yourself.

Did you see all the blood and chunks of meat? On all the people? And all over the ground? And on the flags? And on everything else? You saw it all … right? Because it has to be there. There’s really no way around it. If the official story is true, and if all the media reports of explosively amputated legs are true, and if all the photos we have seen of people recovering in hospital beds are real, then it has to be there. I personally haven’t been able to find it, but maybe you’ll have better luck.

Did you also notice, by the way, that while the guy in the center of the scene apparently uses the same ultra-trendy tailor as Shrapnel Man, no one else in the frame has so much as lost a button? Their clothing is fully intact and soot-free – the sole exception being The Running Man, who we will take a closer look at in the next installment. For now, we’ll just take note of the fact that this was some very high-tech shrapnel, with the amazing ability to weave through the crowd and selectively target one guy’s clothes and several other people’s legs while leaving everyone else untouched. I really hope that the FBI is diligently investigating this case to determine how the ‘terrorists’ obtained such cutting-edge technology.

Let’s return now to Shrapnel Man, who we are told is still in the hospital nearly a full month after suffering his injuries. The photo below was purportedly taken on May 10, three-and-a-half weeks after the bombing. Beside it is Shrapnel Man’s left leg as of April 15. It only looks slightly worse now than it did then, so I guess his doctors have things under control.

Now let’s take a look at some of the overlooked victims of the Boston Marathon bombing. These images haven’t been widely distributed so you likely haven’t seen them before. Notice that, despite the gravity of their wounds, this seems to be a good-natured group of survivors. But that is because they aren’t really injured. And the images weren’t captured in Boston. These people are, in reality, actors hired by the Pennsylvania National Guard to portray victims of a fake ‘dirty bomb’ attack in the fall of 2011. Our government, you see, has been practicing this kind of thing for quite some time now.

Returning now to the topic of severed legs, we all know, of course, that all those legs were taken off by shrapnel. But was there really any shrapnel in that device? Shrapnel ejected with enough force to literally tear someone’s legs off would travel a very long way. So was there some kind of special, invisible shrapnel guard between the sidewalk and the street? Or was it all magically held back by that rickety picket fence? Because we know that none of the runners out in the street were injured. Even the old guy who was knocked over, as previously noted, got up, dusted himself off and crossed the finish line. And I don’t recall reading about the bleachers across the street getting peppered with shrapnel. But it is perfectly obvious that not all of the ejected shrapnel would have found a nearby target. Much of it would have continued on out into the street and beyond. So where did it go? And how did it avoid hitting any of the runners or spectators?

Shortly after the Boston bombings, the thoughtful folks over at CNN put on a little demonstration of the destructive power of a pressure-cooker bomb. In the linked video, the reporter on the scene explains how, “for safety reasons, we’ve had to retreat to this mountaintop here. We are now over a quarter of a mile away from where we left that pressure cooker. But that’s still not far enough to avoid flying shrapnel, so we’re watching from inside a bunker.”

To recap then, a quarter mile is not a safe distance to be from a real pressure-cooker bomb, but people standing just a few feet away from the Boston bombs walked away without a scratch on them. And no one beyond the flimsy temporary barrier, which was maybe ten yards from the detonation site, was affected at all. Why, by the way, haven’t we seen any of the alleged shrapnel (described at various times as consisting of nails, BBs, ball bearings, or rusty roofing nails)? Does anyone remember seeing the police display any shrapnel they recovered at the scene? Or any reporters walking their cameramen over to take a look at the shrapnel embedded in the building facades and in trees? Anyone seen any Facebook photos or Youtube videos of curiosity seekers visiting the site to look for shrapnel? Or the divots that would have definitely been left by real shrapnel?

We will return to the subject of shrapnel in the next installment, after I have had time to sort through and organize all the images I have collected. I’ll leave off for now with another painfully obvious question that is begged by the photo evidence: where exactly are all the alleged victims of this attack? Last I heard, the count stood at 267, with three dead and 264 wounded. But even if we take a worst-case scenario approach to analyzing the available images, maybe 10% of those victims can be accounted for. And that is being very generous. So where are all the rest? And why did the count magically grow from the relatively modest numbers that were initially reported, likely based on the number of victims reporters saw being carted away, to the ridiculous final count that we now have?

“But wait a minute,” you’re probably thinking, “what about the second blast site? Maybe the other 250 or so victims were over there.” Maybe … but that, as it turns out, is impossible to determine.

Wouldn’t it be really weird if a bomb went off at a major event in a major American city and afterwards there wasn’t a single photograph in the public domain documenting that fact? Not a single photo of the site of the explosion, or of any victims lying on the ground, or of any responders either on the scene or even headed to the scene, or of any of the victims being carried away from the scene? Almost as if the event never even took place at all, except that the explosion itself was captured on video, so it clearly did happen? Wouldn’t that seem really bizarre?

That is, nevertheless, exactly what happened, and yet no one seems to find it unusual at all. There were obviously reporters and camera crews on the scene and yet no one appears to have bothered to stroll down the street to take a look at the second bombing site. Why? Was there nothing to see there? The first site was, in fairly short order, swarming with police, military personnel, medical responders, Good Samaritans, news crews, ambulances, etc. Shouldn’t there have been a similar scene at the second site? Actually, since the vast majority of the victims necessarily had to come from the second site, shouldn’t there have been an even larger and more chaotic scene going on there? But if so, then why did we see none of that? Why did we not even catch a passing glimpse of it?

All I have been able to come up with is a few seconds of video footage which appears to have been clipped from a European newscast. It’s difficult to determine much of anything from the very brief clip, and the narration added to it is ridiculous, but there really doesn’t appear to have been a whole lot going on and we are shown only a couple of apparent casualties. So we are still well short of accounting for 267 victims. And how about that survival rate? 267 struck down, many with very grave injuries, and yet we lost just three? Nearly a 99% survival rate? That, my friends, is what ‘Boston Strong’ is all about.

One final note (for now at least): I have read in several accounts of the bombings that the explosive charges were placed so as to maximize the amount of damage they would do. That hardly seems to be the case. To the contrary, they seem to have been placed to minimize the damage. And that, I have to say, doesn’t really seem like something a ‘terrorist’ would do.

You didn’t think we were done here, did you? Not even close. As it turns out, much to my surprise, I haven’t even thrown some of my best punches yet.

We begin, as we did on the last outing, with that image of the two women we are clearly supposed to believe are dead. After complaining in the last post that there weren’t any other views of this scene available, I discovered that there is, in fact, another image in the public domain, presumably taken by the same photographer within moments of when the other image was captured.

The second shot, though technically a much better photograph, has not been widely circulated. But that is probably because it clearly reveals that the above shot was a wholly contrived, posed, stage-managed affair. In the second shot, the two ‘dead’ actresses don’t have their heads pressed together and both have their eyes and mouths open. And maybe it’s just me, but the girl who is supposed to be an EMT appears to be smiling at them! Also, we can see that the hollow-leg guy, hereafter referred to as The Other Jeff, still has his lower leg and foot.

Did you notice, by the way, that the responder who was previously in between Jeff and The Other Jeff is now assisting the guy who didn’t just get both his legs blown off? The Other Jeff, as it turns out, was also hauled away by wheelchair, which seems to have been the preferred method of transport for people with really serious fake injuries. His leg isn’t showing though so someone really dropped the ball on that photo-op.

I’m sure you noticed that in the ‘dead women’ photo, Ms Campbell’s legs appear to be thoroughly mangled, bent at impossible angles and quite possibly detached. But they’re not. She was just posed to make it look that way. We know that because when she was wheeled off, her legs were still fully attached and they had been magically straightened. Seems kind of weird that the medical personnel didn’t straighten them when she was on the ground though, so that her injuries could be evaluated.

Campbell is obviously still alive while being transported, but she allegedly expired upon arrival at the medical tent. Or while she was being treated at the medical tent. The stories vary. More than one version of the story has been told by the guy in the bloodless yellow shirt who is holding the oxygen mask. Identified as Dr. Allan Panter, he is, like Carlos, one of the heroes of this tall tale. According to legend, it was ‘fate’ that brought him all the way from Gainesville, Georgia (or Sylva, North Carolina, depending upon whether it is a North Carolina or a Georgia newspaper that is reporting the story) to within 20-30 feet (by his own account) of the site of the first detonation. Luckily though, he didn’t get injured and was able to swiftly go to work helping others.

In the next installment we’ll take a closer look at the good doctor, while noting here that he can also be seen in the next image, rushing to the scene … well, not exactly rushing, but kind of casually strolling onto the scene. He can also be seen in the smiling EMT shot; he’s the guy sticking his ass in Jeff’s face and showing a considerable amount of concern for the two not-really-dead women.

We are, I’m guessing, supposed to believe that Campbell just kind of landed in that bloody heap due to the force of the blast. But as we can see in the next image, she was initially on her side in something of a spooning arrangement with the younger and slimmer version of Karen Rand. But that was before Carlos crushed them under the fence while he was, you know, saving people. Before the dueling corpses pic was taken, Campbell rolled over onto her back and repositioned her right leg. And her sidekick was repositioned as well.

Next up is a fascinating video shot by a spectator who was in the blast zone filming the race when the first device detonated. The post-blast footage is understandably shaky and erratic, consisting basically of a jumbled mass of images, and the conclusions drawn by the guy who put the Youtube video together are overreaching, to say the least, but when the footage is slowed down, one thing becomes very clear: at the time of the explosion, our old friend hoody was not in the position he was later photographed in. To the contrary, he was sitting down in front of Lenscrafters with his back to the wall, calmly waiting to take his place amidst the manufactured carnage. And luckily for him, he was sitting outside the windows that didn’t get blown out.

What that means, of course, is that while everyone else was moving quickly away from the scene, hoody plunged right into the midst of the smoke cloud. And as we already know, he didn’t do that to offer assistance to victims; he did it to play the role of a victim himself. And amazingly enough, he was able to move himself into position despite having two exposed femurs, shredded legs and a ‘degloved’ right hand!

While it is impossible to say for sure since we have previously only seen him in a hood and sunglasses, I’m guessing that this is hoody being wheeled off to a waiting ambulance. Notice that they had plenty of sheets and blankets on hand to completely wrap him from neck to toe, but they didn’t have anything available to cover Ms Campbell’s leg wounds. You don’t suppose that could be because they wanted Campbell’s graphic wounds on full display while seeking to hide the fact that hoody didn’t have a mark on him, do you? Hoody, of course, needed oxygen, though Jeff and The Other Jeff were able to man-up and do without.

Let’s change course now and talk for a little bit about what thoroughly inept ‘terrorists’ those wild and crazy Tsarnaev brothers were. They had the right idea – engineer a mass-casualty incident at a high-profile event in a major American city. That is, after all, what ‘terrorists’ do, isn’t it? And that is what our illustrious Department of Homeland Security trains for. But these two particular ‘terrorists’ made two major, colossal mistakes, which we will now take a look at.

Error #1: timing is everything. A few hours before the devices detonated, there was a huge crowd gathered near the finish line, as can be seen in the next photo. They were there to see the winners from the various divisions cross the finish line. But no one really cares who crosses the finish line a couple hours after the winners have been crowned, so the crowds had dwindled to a considerable degree by the time of the explosions. So a ‘terrorist’ who had put a little thought into it would most likely have placed and detonated the bombs a couple hours earlier.

Also on hand a couple hours before the blasts was a whole shitload of professional sports photographers. You can see them in the image above, kneeling at the finish line while waiting to get their money shots. And there were many, many more on what is known as the photo-bridge just beyond the finish line. But they of course were long gone as well, depriving us of potentially thousands of high-resolution photos of what really happened that day.

If someone had placed a bomb on the pavement in the midst of the dense finish line crowd we see above, then it seems reasonable to conclude that we would in fact have had the kind of mass-casualty event described by the media, with scores of serious injuries and far more than three dead. But that would only have been true if the ‘terrorists’ had not committed Error #2: don’t forget to pack some shrapnel in the bomb.

This next image was initially a bit baffling to me. What I was having trouble with was figuring out why the shrapnel shield this victim was standing behind didn’t protect her. As can be seen, the paper shield appears to have successfully stopped all the low-flying shrapnel, with nary a tear or puncture to be seen. So I couldn’t figure out how she had been hit. But then I remembered that this was a special kind of magic shrapnel that had the ability to turn corners to seek out victims.

The next image confused me for the opposite reason; the shrapnel shield is clearly sagging where the blast has occurred, leaving a number of people vulnerable, but yet they all seem to be okay. I guess the shield was still high enough to protect their lower extremities.

Here we see another view of the thin, nylon mesh (I’m guessing here) shrapnel guard, which survived the blast without a single penetration. The wood railing just ten feet or so from the blast site also held up pretty well. And it’s not even attached to the ground, by the way. It is a temporary, movable assembly. And it not only wasn’t damaged, it’s still standing and didn’t even move. And the brick façade of the building appears to be shrapnel-proof as well. Even the lowest portions of it.

Given the absurdity of these images, is there really any room left for reasonable debate on the topic of shrapnel? Side-by-side below is essentially the same moment in time captured in two different images. On one side of the temporary barrier is a horrifying scene of bodies along the fence line cut to ribbons by shrapnel. And on the other side there was not a single injury of any magnitude – not to any runners, or to any race officials, or to any spectators, or to any of the workers on the course – despite the undeniable fact that the only additional protection the people on the outside of the barrier had was about ten feet of air.

Unless we choose to hide our heads in the sand, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that there was no shrapnel in what was essentially an oversized version of a Red Devil safe-and-sane smoke bomb. And that necessarily means that none of those graphic injuries were real. Some innocent bystanders were likely injured by flying glass or by being trampled by others, but no one, including Jeff Bauman, lost a leg.

Losing both your legs at such a young age, I have to say, would really suck. But you know what sucks even more than that? Ruining your favorite shirt on the same day you get your legs blown off.

Predictably enough, I have received email berating me for stooping so low as to attack the victims of this tragedy. It should be perfectly clear though by now, to anyone who is paying attention, that I have done no such thing. The people in those graphic, blood-soaked images were not the victims of this attack. You and I were.

That’s all for now, but there is more to come. Stay tuned.

]]> 589 https://centerforaninformedamerica.com/boston-5/ Wed, 22 May 2013 00:00:21 +0000 http://centerforaninformedamerica.com/?page_id=600 May 22, 2013

I don’t think that it is any big secret that I am not much of a fan of Fox News. But every once in a while, even Fox lets a little bit of truth slip out, though certainly not intentionally. Take for example a fascinating Youtube clip which features a befuddled Shepard Smith (at least I think it is Smith; he doesn’t appear on camera) trying to make sense of the live aerial footage he, along with the audience, is viewing.

The first couple minutes is a ground level view of people rushing back and forth. At about the 2:20 mark is where it starts to get interesting. That is when our old friend Jeff Bauman is wheeled out with his gruesome wounds on display. Smith appears to be genuinely horrified by what his network is splashing across the screen (which is, of course, the reaction we were all supposed to have), after which he begins speculating on what has just happened: “We do not see an enormous amount of structural damage at all. What we see is windows that are blown out and people who are injured who came from behind those glass walls.” (emphasis added)

The “glass walls” he is referring to, of course, would be the blown-out glass storefront of the Lenscrafters outlet, which raises a rather provocative question: did Smith actually see footage of the actors emerging from within Lenscrafters to take their places on the pavement? Is that where the prosthetics, make-up and costuming were handled?

Smith then offers up the theory that the explosion was in what he assumes to be a hotel, and that it could possibly have been the result of a gas leak in the kitchen. His confusion is entirely understandable given that there was a noticeable lack of any indication that there had been an explosion out on the pavement, including a serious shortage of visible victims. Smith then listens in as local Fox reporter Maria Stephanos talks with the anchor for the local Fox affiliate, who is identified only as Mike. Stephanos quickly dismisses the second blast as insignificant. She then goes on to say that the first blast did not occur at ground level, but rather midway up the building. Mike interjects, “So, Maria, again just to make this point, since you were right there, you’re saying from what you could see, it didn’t seem like the explosion happened on the ground but actually happened in the building?” To which Maria quickly responds, “Exactly, Mike, in the middle of a building. I was right there. I turned around and you saw the plume of smoke in the middle of the building.”

So the bomb went off midway up the building, but it blew off everyone’s legs?! That doesn’t sound quite right. What does sound entirely plausible though is that a smoke bomb was detonated over the heads of the crowd, providing cover for the actors, in full wardrobe and make-up, to swiftly emerge from Lenscrafters to take up their positions on the pavement. And if that sounds crazy to you, blame Fox News. They’re the ones who reported it.

Below is a shot of the scene of the crime not long after the smoke bomb was detonated. We’ve seen this shot or ones very similar to it before, but our focus has been on the actors in the scene, all of whom are basically within the center triangle. But let’s shift our focus instead to the stragglers on the scene at the bottom of the image who aren’t actors. I’ve enlarged that area for you to make it easier to ascertain what is going on.

Did you notice that pretty much all the people along the fence line who aren’t running away, beginning with the bald guy with sunglasses and continuing down to the guy in the red jacket and blue cap, are all looking in the same direction? And it’s not at the ground, where the bomb supposedly detonated and where all the alleged victims are laid out. No, they are all looking at a spot about midway up the building, above where all the fake victims are sprawled out. That’s a pretty strange coincidence, isn’t it?

It would appear then that there were no backpack bombs. And if there were no backpack bombs, then there obviously were no backpack bombers. So it really doesn’t matter if the Tsarvaev brothers were among the spectators that day, and it doesn’t matter whether they were or were not wearing backpacks, and it doesn’t even matter whether Jeff Bauman ever makes up his mind about whether he saw one of the brothers set his pack down, because none of that has anything at all to do with what happened in Boston on April 15.

The Tsarzaev brothers did not detonate smoke bombs above the heads of spectators. The Tsarnaev brothers did not hire a bunch of crisis actors and outfit them with make-up and prosthetics. The Tsarnaev brothers did not ensure that there would be fake responders like Carlos Arredondo on the scene to rush to the aid of the fake victims. And the Tsarnaev brothers did not see to it that all avenues of the American media would report the story the way Washington wanted it reported.

Let’s now return, as promised in the last post, to the tale of the heroic Dr. Allan Panter, who gave Carlos a serious run for his money for the title of ‘the most brazen liar to emerge from the Boston debacle.’ One breathless account of Panter’s heroics (the one that claims that he is an ER doc in North Carolina), reads as follows: “Now, Panter steps into hell … The bombs, which authorities say were stuffed with ball bearings and nails, have ripped through the bystanders, creating what Panter describes as a ‘mangled mess.’ One of the first victims Panther (sic) treats is a man dug out from the street-front rubble. His legs now end at the knee. Nearby, a young woman in her mid-20s goes into cardiac arrest. Panter works to keep her airways open. Someone else does CPR. They get a pulse. The victim is loaded on a stretcher and rushed to an impromptu medical tent. Panter later hears that she dies.”

Does anyone recall seeing Jeff Bauman being dug out from under any rubble? Or seeing anything in any of the images that might be characterized as a “mangled mess” of bodies?

The woman referenced is, of course, Krystle Campbell. In another version of events, Panter is described as an ER doc from Gainesville, Georgia, and the Krystle Campbell tale is told as follows: “Allan Panter spoke with ABC News and he said he and another volunteer worked on a seriously injured woman right after the blast. ‘I started trying to control the airway, another gentleman started doing CPR and we worked until we got a stretcher there,’ said Panter. ‘We had a pulse until we got her to the medical tent and then we lost her.’”

So I’m a little confused. Did Panter leave her at the tent and then later learn that she had expired, or did she die upon arrival at the tent? Perhaps some of Panter’s interviews can clear that up, such as this one where, referring to Jeff Bauman, he boldly claims that, “a lady that we pulled out from under him was in traumatic arrest, basically. And we started working on her in between trying to put tourniquets around the gentleman who was laying right beside of her.”

Oh, I see. So Bauman was actually lying on top of Campbell. And so both of them, I suppose, were buried under the rubble. She must have been pretty hard to get to. I guess that’s why Panter ignored her for so long. But once he had dug the two of them out, he worked on them side-by-side, which of course is directly contradicted by numerous photos. Panter though has a script to follow, the evidence be damned, so he also claims that, “the gentleman who had his legs blown off had singed facial hair, so he obviously got a lot of the heat from it.” Obviously.

In another interview, Panter described how he quickly swung into action “and just started helping with the other bystanders, pulling people actually apart, because they were laying in a pile basically, with mangled limbs.” Once again, Panter is describing exactly what we have seen in the available photos, so there is no reason to suspect that he is anything other than a great American hero. Of that other great American hero, Jeff Bauman, Panter has said that, “He was pretty much as you’d describe, in shock. He was mumbling words, but not coherently.”

Not coherently? Really? Then how did he manage to notify two different people that he knew who was responsible for the bombings, resulting in the FBI pacing the hospital floor like an expectant father while Jeff was in surgery? Not only is everyone involved in this incident lying, they can’t even manage to all tell the same lies. And amazingly enough, despite not taking the time to roll up his sleeves before rushing into action, and despite allegedly performing triage on the two bloodiest and most seriously injured victims (Bauman and Campbell), Dr. Cleansleeves nevertheless managed to keep his shirt almost completely blood-free.

Dr. Cleansleeves also didn’t bother with slipping on the official blue responder gloves. Many of the other emergency personnel didn’t either. And none of the medical personnel on the scene, without exception, bothered with surgical masks or eye protection either. And that, dear readers, is another clear giveaway that this entire incident was staged.

There was supposedly blood on the scene everywhere, flowing from scores of victims. A good number of those victims allegedly had explosively amputated limbs and were thus necessarily spurting blood everywhere. And yet none of the trained medical personnel on the job – not the doctors, not the nurses, not the EMTs – all of whom should have been well-versed on the dangers of blood-borne pathogens, bothered to don a surgical mask or eye protection. We live in an era when the family dentist will not take a peek in your mouth without a mask and eye protection and yet we are supposed to believe that all these unprotected medical professionals fearlessly waded through rivers of blood to perform triage on patients whose femoral arteries were spraying blood like garden hoses?

And it certainly cannot be argued that supply was a problem. As has been noted in numerous media reports, the medical tent set up just beyond the finish line was essentially a 100-bed field hospital. Masks and eye protection should have been just as easy to come by as those ubiquitous blue gloves. And yet after reviewing more images from that day than I care to remember, I have not seen a single medical responder wearing a mask or eye protection. Not one.

I had a lot more that I was going to discuss here but the rest will have to wait until the next outing because something else has come up that takes precedence: someone has boldly offered up a ‘debunking’ of my work on the Boston bombings. And there are few things that provide me as much enjoyment and entertainment as someone trying to ‘debunk’ my work, so I really need to focus the remainder of this post on that effort.

The ‘debunking’ was penned by someone named Anita Dalton-Clark, but since she makes very clear throughout her post that she is a big fan of my assignment of nicknames, I’m going to give her one of her very own: Fucktard.

First of all, it appears that Fucktard put the site up specifically to ‘debunk’ Boston bombing conspiracy theories. If you click on the links at the top, most of them lead nowhere. Other than her pathetic attempt to ‘debunk’ my work, there ain’t much else to be found on the site at all. So I guess I should be rather flattered that Fucktard put up an entire fake website just to feebly ‘debunk’ me.

I wholeheartedly encourage everyone to drop in and read what Fucktard has to say, most of which is just a lot of feigning of outrage over my supposedly insensitive treatment of the ‘victims.’ I am, of course, going to go over some of the highlights, but I would still recommend giving it a read. There is a lot of really funny stuff in there. Take, for example, Fucktard’s comments on shrapnel: “Shrapnel is not a bullet – it’s not aerodynamic, and it does not travel in a straight line. You cannot predict a shrapnel arc.”

You can imagine how stupid I feel! Foolishly, I had based my arguments on the universally accepted laws of physics – such as the one that says that a body in motion will continue in a straight line until acted upon by an outside force – without realizing that universal laws of physics don’t apply to shrapnel. You learn something new everyday I guess, and today we have learned that shrapnel is not bound by the physical laws that govern all other solid matter. It’s a good thing that Fucktard is looking over my shoulder or we might not have ever known that.

I would hope that anyone with at least two functioning brain cells realizes that when someone has to literally rewrite the laws of physics to make their point, that person is completely and totally full of shit. But Fucktard wasn’t satisfied with simply rewriting every physics textbook ever published, so she followed that up by rewriting the dictionary as well: “A moment is a minute, not a second.”

It is? Then why not just call it a minute? Dictionary.com says that a moment is “an indefinitely short period of time; instant,” which doesn’t really sound like the definition of a minute. Again, I have to say here that I am very flattered, to say the least, because when someone has to rewrite both the dictionary and the laws of physics in a desperate attempt to ‘debunk’ me, that tells me that my work is pretty solid.

Elsewhere in Fucktard’s rant, she claims that hoody “was initially facing amputation but the doctors managed to save his legs.” And how does she know that? Because it says so on hoody’s repulsive fundraising site, so it surely must be true and no independent corroboration is required. She also says that, “It is clear on his right hand that he is missing the skin on (sic) middle and ring finger.” That “can be seen,” she says, “with the naked eye.”

Given Fucktard’s high level of visual acuity, she should have no trouble seeing that in hoody’s staged hospital pic, he has the index and middle finger on his right hand wrapped, not the middle and ring fingers. Those inept doctors who are treating him apparently wrapped the wrong fingers! I think we can all agree that it is just terrible to see such a horribly injured man receive such shoddy medical care.

Fucktard also complains that I didn’t show readers the photo below, taken from hoody’s fundraising page, which she seems to think proves that hoody was in fact gravely injured. Of course, we can’t actually draw any conclusions at all from the image because we have no idea who that leg is attached to, which is why I didn’t bother to include it. I also didn’t include the second image, which also conveniently leaves out the owner’s face. Tellingly, those are the only two images of hoody’s allegedly injured legs that can be found on his page.

One of Fucktard’s most bizarre claims is that, contrary to one of my assertions, Nicole’s sister can be seen in some of the images. The photo below has been doctored by Fucktard to supposedly highlight that fact. It’s difficult to determine whether Fucktard is really as stupid as she is pretending to be here, but it is perfectly obvious that the woman she has indicated is the strawberry blond gal who remained on the scene completely immobile throughout the ordeal. And it is just as obvious that the two women, who completely ignored one another despite being in fairly close proximity, are not sisters.

Or maybe they are estranged sisters. Yeah, that’s probably it. They are estranged sisters who nonetheless attended the marathon together. Fucktard also claims that the same woman she identifies as Nicole’s sister “lost a leg.” In the photo below, it is difficult to determine which of her legs had to be amputated. Maybe they just took off both of them to be on the safe side. Apparently doctors took off a whole lot of perfectly good legs that day. Maybe they had a quota to fill or something.

Moving on, we find Fucktard dumping a huge load of horseshit with this passage: “I am unsure how McGowan would have had medical personnel and bystanders get Jeff Bauman, Jr. to help without it being graphically visible to the cameras. Had he been strapped down on a gurney, the horror of his legs would still have been visible and still would have been all over our TVs. Moreover, the wheelchair is important because it shows that Arredondo and others on the scene recognized how terrible Bauman’s wounds were. Had they waited for a gurney Bauman might have bled out. But understand that there would have been little way for Bauman’s injuries to have been hidden regardless of how he had been transported to help.”

Where to begin? With the irrefutable fact that Redcoat was hauled out of there on a gurney before Jeff’s famous wheelchair ride, revealing as a brazen lie the claim that there were no gurneys available? By noting that hoody was hauled out on a gurney with no part of his body visible? By noting that The Other Jeff was taken by wheelchair with his alleged injuries covered? By pointing out that the notion that Jeff was rushed away on the first available transport device due to the gravity of his alleged injuries is belied by the fact that he was allowed to bleed out on the ground for several minutes while numerous responders stood idly by?

There are numerous other things that Fucktard got wrong, but she did get one thing right – the images that I initially started this series with, and that I have long since moved on from, were crops of larger pics taken from an office window. When initially circulated on the web, they were billed as stills from a surveillance video and I had no reason to suspect otherwise. And what difference does it make? The source of the images has nothing whatsoever to do with what is depicted in them. And it’s not as if I, you know, tried to rewrite the laws of physics.

We can only hope that Fucktard keeps her word and posts ‘debunkings’ of the rest of the parts of my series. At times like these, we can all use a good laugh now and then.

If the official story of what occurred in Boston on April 15 is true, then there should be no compelling reason for the various victims and responders who have spoken to the media to not be telling the truth. Human memory is, of course, not infallible, so we should expect to find some discrepancies here and there, but overall the stories that have been told should be in compliance with (1) the official story, (2) the photographic record, and (3) the stories told by other victims and survivors.

But we already know that that is not the case because we have already heard Dr. Allan Panter, Carlos Arredondo, Jeff Bauman, and Hoody all weigh in with a variety of lies. And they are not the only members of the Boston Marathon Liars Club. There are plenty more. In fact, it appears to be all but impossible to find anyone who played a high-profile role that day who isn’t lying. Take, for example, Dr. Panter’s wife, Theresa, who posted the following fanciful note on Facebook.

I’m having a hard time figuring out who the unidentified deceased male might be. There are no dead men in any of the photographs and according to the official story, the only male to die was an eight-year-old boy who was at the second bomb site, which Panter wasn’t working at. So we’re going to need some clarification on that. Also, as we saw in the last post, the photos do not in any way support her ridiculous claim that the good doctor was “covered in blood.”

Let’s check in now with Dr. Martin Levine, who also just happened to be on hand to serve as a first responder: “When we got there we saw that one of the initial individuals had lost both of his legs. I saw multiple people with only the upper part of their leg left … These are devastating, horrendous injuries … I saw such horrendous things that I don’t know how they could have saved any of the limbs ..” Wow! That sounds just horrifying. But where did he see all of that? It certainly wasn’t in front of the Lenscrafters outlet. Below is a shot of Dr. Levine in action.

Like Dr. Panter, Dr. Spielberg went to work without rolling up his sleeves, and yet he somehow managed to keep that white jacket absolutely spotless. I wonder if Dr. Spielberg can answer a couple of questions for us? Like why, if there were numerous people bleeding out from explosively amputated limbs, as you claim in your interview, did you abandon them to help transport someone who still has both her legs attached? Were the other four people unable to carry that stretcher without you? Do you think that was the best possible use of your time given that you are, you know, a doctor and all?

Let’s now meet Dr. Albert Pendleton, identified as an orthopedic surgeon who was – wouldn’t you know it? – hanging around the finish line. Dr. Pendleton has told some real whoppers as well. Speaking about Bauman – because everyone likes to comment on Bauman, he being the only apparent amputee that anyone actually saw that day – Pendleton claimed that he saw “two people carrying a guy with blood just coming, spurting out of his legs.” Really? So those photos and videos of him being pushed in a wheelchair while leaving no blood trail are all fake? Pendleton has also claimed that, “there was (sic) tons of mangled extremities on the ground.”

Yes, doctor, we have seen them in the photos. Severed, mangled legs lying in piles everywhere. So many that, from what I hear, doctors accidentally reattached a number of them onto the wrong bodies. As with most things though, so long as you don’t end up with any leftover parts, it’s safe to assume that everything has been assembled more-or-less correctly, so it’s all good.

Dr. Chad Beattie was also loitering around the medical tent at the finish line when the fake bombs went off. His account of what he saw and what he did goes something like this: “Beattie ran toward the area where the first bomb exploded on Boylston Street. ‘I was running through a cloud of smoke,’ Beattie says. ‘When the smoke cleared, there was a pile of bodies. The first victim I saw was a traumatic amputee. I took my belt off and made a tourniquet.’ While the doctor didn’t learn the fate of the first victim he encountered, the memory of the woman’s deep blue eyes is etched upon his memory. After hearing news reports, Beattie now believes the victim was Krystle Campbell, who grew up in Medford. As Beattie rushed to aid victims, he saw medical personnel place a white sheet over the body of 8 year-old Martin Richard. He also watched as Lu Lingzi, a graduate student from China, was pronounced dead when efforts to revive the young woman were unsuccessful. ‘I am glad I was there to help,’ the doctor says, adding he also made several splints for broken bones out of wooden fence slats and cardboard congratulatory signs he found scattered in the debris.”

Dr. Beattie sure was a busy guy. Like everyone else on the scene, he of course worked on Campbell, though while doing so he failed to notice that she wasn’t actually a traumatic amputee. And amazingly enough, he saw all three of the alleged fatalities, which I guess means that he was at both bomb sites simultaneously. I’m curious though to know how well those cardboard splints worked out. I’m also curious as to why we didn’t see any of the alleged victims wearing any of those improvised splints he fashioned for them.

Dr. Sushrut Jangi was on the scene as well, and he also experienced the horror of that day: “Through the haze, the stretchers arrived; when I saw the first of the wounded, I was overwhelmed with nausea. An injured woman — I couldn’t tell whether she was conscious — lay on the stretcher, her legs entirely blown off. Blood poured out of the arteries of her torso; I saw shredded arteries, veins, ragged tissue and muscle … More victims followed: someone whose legs had been charred black, another man with a foot full of metal shrapnel, a third with white bone shining through the thigh. I watched in shock as the victims were rushed down the center aisle to ambulances at the far end of the tent.”

I wonder who the woman was who had had both legs blown completely off and was spraying blood everywhere? You would think that she wouldn’t be that hard to spot in some of the photos taken that day. I’m also wondering who the person was whose legs were charred black, because this is the first I have heard about someone suffering such injuries.

Dr. Richard Guynes came all the way from Jackson, Mississippi to hang out at the medical tent. And he, of course, also worked to save Krystle Campbell: “’I did have the opportunity to try to help a lady. Krystle Campbell, I believe is her name, who did ultimately pass away, unfortunately. She was already in shock and had bled a great deal before she made it into the tent. Her face, I’ve seen it on television. She looks completely different than when I saw her in the tent,’ said Guynes.” It’s really a shame that with all those doctors making heroic efforts to save her, Ms Campbell still didn’t pull through.

Dr. Gregory Antoine claims to have treated Jeff Bauman in the medical tent, which I guess he did very quickly while Bauman was being rolled through: “Of dozens Antoine helped treat, two stand out: One was a man who had both his legs blown off. As Antoine worked on him, drapes concealed everything but the man’s mangled limbs. A couple of days later, Antoine realized it was the person in the iconic photo — Jeff Bauman being wheeled to a makeshift medical tent.”

The drapes are a nice touch. Now let’s check in with Jim Asaiante, a former Army nurse, and his sidekick, Stephen Segatore: “Asaiante and Segatore rushed from the medical tent to the finish line to tend to the wounded. The stench of burning flesh hung in the air. Blood pooled on the sidewalk. People bleeding from lost limbs were already being carried toward the tent, so the two nurses stopped and headed back.”

The stench of burning flesh? That’s a new one. And somehow the photographers and camera operators missed all those people with lost limbs being carried to the tent immediately after the blast. Here’s some more from the same article: “Segatore had just worked to save a man who had lost both his legs when a woman [identified in the report as Campbell] arrived in critical condition, struggling to breathe … Along with a doctor and emergency medical technician, Segatore scanned her wounds, mostly on the left side of her body. One leg was twisted backwards, and she had a wound near her left hip. She had black markings on her head, possibly residue from being so close to the blast.”

So he too worked on Jeff in the medical tent? And Campbell as well? Weren’t we initially sold the story that Bauman was rushed straight through the tent and into a waiting ambulance? And what’s with Campbell’s leg being twisted backwards? It was straight on the gurney, so how did it get twisted backwards again? And I’m having trouble seeing those black markings on her head in the image below, which I’m guessing was taken while Dr. Panter was working on Jeff and Krystle side-by-side, after she had been pulled out from under him.

In another report, Segatore had more to say about his alleged experiences that day: “’I ran out and saw people who were missing legs and part of their face and part of their abdomen,’ he said Monday evening. ‘My training prepared me for what to do, but nothing can ever really prepare you for what you see.’” Elsewhere in the same report we find this: “One of his first patients was a young woman, he thinks maybe 20 or 22 years old, whose abdomen was torn open. Her left leg was broken and facing the wrong way and she wasn’t breathing.” And this: “Working alongside Segatore in Tent A was Jim Asaiante, a nurse in the emergency room at the UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, Massachusetts. Asaiante didn’t run out after the explosion.”

Now I’m getting really confused. So Campbell’s abdomen was torn open? Was that airbrushed out in the pics of her where it can clearly be seen that there is no damage to her abdomen? Just like the black spots on her head were apparently airbrushed out? And why did Segatore claim in one report that Campbell was struggling to breathe while in another he says that she wasn’t breathing at all? Also, why does one report claim that Asaiante rushed to the scene while another claims that he stayed at the tent? And where exactly in the available photos might we find those people who had part of their faces and abdomens blown off?

Is it common practice, by the way, for a woman who is allegedly in traumatic arrest and just minutes away from death to be passed around like a hot potato to every doctor and nurse in the greater Boston area?

Nurse Alix Coletta saw “Three people carr[y] in a woman. One of her legs was blown off. Someone was holding it. The woman was ‘dripping blood all over’ and ‘wailing in pain.’” So now we know why there were no severed limbs at the crime scene – people apparently picked them up and carried them to the medical tent, where they were probably running a ‘cash for legs’ program.

A New York Daily News report published the day of the marathon is filled with what appear to be completely fraudulent ‘witness’ accounts, such as the claim by a John Ross that “Somebody’s leg flew by my head.” And the claim by a Tim Davey that he was in the medical tent when “They just started bringing people in with no limbs.” No limbs at all? So they were just torsos? Then there is the tale told by a Lance Svendsen, who saw “one lady who looked like she didn’t make it. Another gentlemen, he was a runner, and he was missing both of his legs below the knee. He was oddly calm, but his family all around him were freaking out.”

No clue who that might be. Jeff Bauman wasn’t a runner and he didn’t have his family all around him. And no runners were actually injured at all that day. These appear to be completely manufactured statements from people who likely don’t actually exist.

Who else might have an interesting story to tell? Finish line coordinator Tom Meagher boldly claimed that he “actually saw bodies flying.” Then there is Rhode Island State Trooper Roupen Bastajian, who “started running toward the blast. And there were people all over the floor … We started grabbing tourniquets and started tying legs. A lot of people amputated. … At least 25 to 30 people have at least one leg missing, or an ankle missing, or two legs missing.”

No shit, Roupen? 25 to 30 people with amputated limbs all in one place? Someone should have gotten a photo of that! I’m wondering, by the way, if the people who were missing an ankle were also missing a foot, or if it was just the ankles that were blown off? And were there any people who were missing knees but still had their lower legs? Just curious.

As absurd accounts go, you’d have to search pretty thoroughly to find one that tops this: “Bruce Mendelsohn, 44, was in an office above the finish line, celebrating the successful marathon of his brother, an assistant U.S. Attorney in Newark, when the blast threw him off the couch, he said.” So a blast that didn’t knock people over who were standing 15-20 feet away knocked him right off his couch? I hope he wasn’t seriously injured.

We haven’t heard from Cowboy Carlos for a while now, so let’s check in with him. In reference to Bauman’s favorite shirt, Arredondo has said that, “this dark area was on fire” when he got to Jeff. Really? So not only was the poor guy bleeding out from both legs, but he was actually on fire as well, and still no one came to his assistance for several minutes? What does a guy have to do to get a helping hand in Boston these days?

Speaking of Carlos, he recently revised his story via a Facebook post. Actually, it’s probably more accurate to say that his handlers had him revise his story in an effort to explain away some major discrepancies. His new story goes a little something like this: “This is Carlos. I want you all to hear my version of what happened at the Boston Marathon because though many journalists did do a good job, there were several stories that I have read recently that had some errors  … I was at street level and Mel was in the stands … As soon as I heard the bombings, I jumped fences and began tearing the barricade fences out of the way so rescuers could get to the injured. Once on the other side, I took several pictures with my camera. Then I saw many injured, tried to comfort some and then went to Jeff who was alert but terribly wounded. I ripped clothing to give to an MD who applied tourniquets to Jeff Bauman. An Asian women was nearby with an empty wheelchair. I helped to lift Jeff onto the chair. Everyone went running but one of the tourniquets was caught in the wheelchair so we stopped. I ripped off the extra fabric and held the bandage (what many people throught was an artery) until we reached an ambulance. I stayed with Jeff until the ambulance where again I lifted him into the ambulance. The personnel asked for his name so I asked Jeff his name. He said Jeff Bauman and began spelling his last name and then he left for the hospital.”

So Carlos wasn’t pinching his femoral artery shut? Then why did he even need to be there? What purpose was he actually serving? Oh yeah … that’s right … I almost forgot that that ‘iconic’ wheelchair shot wouldn’t have been nearly so iconic without the cowboy hero.

It’s good to know that, before offering help to any of the victims, Carlos paused first to grab his camera and take some shots as keepsakes. You don’t see that kind of thing everyday, I suppose. And it’s also good to know that the processional was stopped to free one of the tourniquets that was caught in the wheelchair, except that in the money shots taken after the adjustment the tourniquet can still be seen tangled in the right front wheel. We’ve also learned that Carlos only helped lift Jeff into the wheelchair, even though Jeff has given Carlos sole credit for doing so. And we’ve learned that Bauman not only gave his name to Carlos but also spelled it for him, and yet Carlos couldn’t remember it when interviewed not long after.

Some of Carlos’ earlier accounts, like this one, were a bit more colorful: “I jumped the fence after the first explosions and all I saw was a puddle of blood and people with lost limbs. I saw adults, much younger than myself — ladies, men, pretty much everyone was knocked out … It broke everybody’s legs. Two ladies at my left side were knocked unconscious. They lost their legs. I was putting pieces of clothing on their legs to stop the bleeding and called for assistance. Someone came and we helped get them in wheelchairs.”

So everyone was out cold? All the photos make it appear as if none of the victims, not even Krystle Campbell, were unconscious, but I suppose it is best if we trust what Carlos has to say rather than relying on our own eyes. Carlos did though forget to mention that he had an accomplice that day, a certain John Mixon. As far as I know, Arredondo has never really mentioned Mixon’s heroic deeds, but Mixon hasn’t been shy about praising his cowboy buddy. The two were supposedly there to support the Run for the Fallen organization, which, given that it has these two poseurs as members, probably isn’t what it is supposed to be.

The first blast, according to Mixon, “knocked me right out of the bleachers.” The blast was so strong that it knocked Mixon out of the bleachers, threw Bruce Mendelsohn off his office couch, and knocked over a runner who was about 100 years old. According to one account, “Mixon and Carlos Arredondo … charged across the street to help the spectators who had lined up behind a snow fence four and five deep to watch the finish. What they encountered was worse than anything Mixon, a Vietnam veteran, had seen overseas. ‘When we got over there, it was just a pile of bodies – people with legs missing,’ Mixon said Monday evening. ‘It was absolutely like a war scene. This was worse, because it was all innocent people, just defenseless. They were just lying in a pile, gunpowder all over them, burnt.’”

Worse even than Vietnam? That’s kind of hard to believe. And what’s with the victims being covered with gunpowder? Doesn’t that usually burn up in the blast? Isn’t the instantaneous combustion of the gunpowder what propels all the shrapnel? Was one of the ‘terrorists’ walking around sprinkling gunpowder on people so that they could then light them on fire?

In another account, Mixon “caught up to Arredondo, who had vaulted the fence and was kneeling beside a man whose legs had been blown off. ‘Carlos was putting a tourniquet on him made from a flag,’ Mixon said. ‘He was a real hero.’ Mixon said he and Arredondo helped lift the man into a wheelchair and then the two men lost each other. ‘I lost Carlos in the crowd,’ Mixon said. ‘When he made it back to me later, he was covered in blood.’”

So Mixon helped out with Bauman as well? Jeff sure had a lot of guardian angels that day. But what, I’m naturally wondering, happened to that flag tourniquet? I’ve been thinking that there was something missing from that ‘iconic’ wheelchair shot and now I know exactly what it was. How ballsy is it, by the way, to claim that Carlos was “covered in blood” when we can see for ourselves in the widely circulated images that he clearly isn’t? But that didn’t stop Theresa Panter from telling the very same lie about her husband, so why should it stop Mixon?

The reality is that none of the responders on the scene that day came anywhere close to being “covered in blood.” In fact, the vast majority of them didn’t get so much as a single drop of blood on their clothes, or even on their hands. In the scene below, for example, you’d be hard-pressed to pick out a single responder with any blood on them at all. You might also notice that neither Dr. Spielberg nor Carlos are actually helping anyone.

Returning now to Mixon, he has also said that what he experienced was “was like a war zone … It was like 9/11 with a front-row seat.”

Yes, it was exactly like 9-11 … except that there were allegedly three people dead rather than 3,000, and instead of billions of dollars in property damage, there were a few broken windows. But other than that, it was exactly like 9-11 all over again.

Yet another report holds that “Mixon said Arredondo, a Costa Rica native, went to a man who lost both his legs in the explosion and fashioned a tourniquet out of a T-shirt. When a woman brought around a wheelchair, Mixon and Arredondo helped get the man on and Arredondo and a medic led him to an ambulance. In some images, Arredondo appears to be pinching the victim’s severed artery shut.”

So the tourniquet wasn’t fashioned out of a flag? Uncle Sam obviously hired some really bad liars to take part in this operation. Can’t you people just choose a lie and stick with it? I know it’s kind of hard when all the photographic evidence contradicts you, but the newer lies aren’t any better than the older ones so you may as well just stick to your original lies.

Mixon has told at least one other wholly original lie, which goes like this: “All the bodies were there and people were struggling, like, to climb over it — they were kind of trapped with nowhere to go.”

So the temporary fencing was hastily torn down to free the victims? Because they were trapped behind it with nowhere to go? All the non-actors on the scene, of course, had no trouble at all getting the hell out of Dodge, but all the people Mixon saw were clawing their way through the fencing.

Let’s move along now to Mery Daniel, who has a rather tragic story to tell: “’And I was on the floor and I still didn’t understand what was happening,’ she recalled. ‘When I looked next to me there was a woman, with the arms were gone. And that’s when I understood something very tragic had just happened.’ Mery lost her left leg and much of the back of her right leg was blown away. Unconscious, she was rushed to Massachusetts General Hospital. It was two days before she woke and discovered the extent of her injuries.”

You all already know Mery, but you know her as Redcoat and you undoubtedly had no idea she had suffered such terrible injuries. I’m really starting to wonder when all the medical malpractice lawsuits are going to be filed. Because if I were transported to the hospital in the same condition as Mery in the image below, and I didn’t wake up for two days and when I did, I was missing a leg, I don’t know that I’d be too happy about that. I think I might have asked the doctors if maybe we could just try a few stitches rather than going straight for the bone saw.

By the way, what do you suppose happened to that woman who was next to Mery who had both her arms blown off? We haven’t heard much about her. She doesn’t appear to be in any of the available images and the media has never mentioned her. She most likely died, because if shrapnel ripped off both her arms, it must have shredded her torso as well. Or did it just hit both her arms but not between them? This was pretty selective shrapnel, after all, so I suppose that is possible.

I’m guessing that she probably met Jeff Bauman in the hospital and the two quickly began a torrid, passionate affair. When asked later about their budding relationship, they will undoubtedly tell everyone that they complete one another.

No? A little too far with that one? Maybe so, but as far as I can see, these are people who have sold their souls and sold out their country. They are beneath contempt and nothing I have to say about them should really offend anyone.

Before wrapping up, we also have an update on Nicole, who when last seen had suffered two breaks in her left leg, a fracture in her right ankle, torn skin, and a severed Achilles tendon. Now, says Gross, she is recovering from “a compound fracture of one leg, a nearly severed Achilles tendon, and hearing damage.” Do these people just make this shit up as they go along?

Like everyone else in this sordid affair, Nicole has a fundraising page up and is raking in quite a load of cash. One of the most appalling aspects of this story is that not only are the fake victims of this attack getting large payoffs for their service, but they are getting those payoffs from the American people, the very people they so cravenly betrayed.

Everyone who has had a microphone stuck in their face has, virtually without exception, lied about what they saw, what they experienced and what they did. And these have not been random lies, but rather lies specifically crafted to describe a scene far more horrifying that what actually existed – bodies piled up in bloody heaps, disembodied legs littering the scene, the stench of burning flesh, bodies being pulled out from beneath the rubble of buildings, gushing wounds spurting blood everywhere, etc. Not one of these people though can point to a single photograph that actually depicts what they claim to have witnessed.

But they don’t have to because the entire media establishment is happily playing along and no one is going to call them on their bullshit. And people like me? Well, we’re just fucking crazy … right?

]]> 618 https://centerforaninformedamerica.com/boston-7/ Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:33 +0000 http://centerforaninformedamerica.com/?page_id=623 June 1, 2013

Having reviewed the tales told by many of the most prominent of the victims and responders, I was going to reboot this series and start over from the beginning with the assistance of a set of photos that I previously did not have access to, but I have accumulated a lot of clutter that I need to clear out first.

Let’s begin, for no particular reason, with a radio interview with Jeff Bauman that was aired on April 26, just eleven days after the marathon. At that time, Bauman had already been released from the hospital after a near miraculous recovery. To say that his demeanor was amazingly upbeat for a guy who had just lost both his legs a mere week-and-a-half earlier would be something of an understatement. At the tail end of the interview, one of the two hosts actually has to prompt him to show some kind of real emotion, which he still fails to do.

The exchange goes something like this: “Jeff, I’m going to try – this is not meant to be an insensitive question, but I’m, but I’m listening to your voice and you don’t sound angry, you don’t sound pissed off. Can I ask you what your feelings are toward the men who did this to you and so many other people?” To which Bauman responds, rather unconvincingly, “Yeah, well, I’m – I’m pissed, obviously, but, I mean …,” after which he mumbles something about looking to the future rather than at the past.

But that’s not my favorite part of the interview. No, my favorite part is when he tells the show’s hosts that his “hearing is shot … I can’t hear anything.” That would be an injury that would be expected for someone who had been in the midst of a bombing, of course, but what makes it a rather bizarre claim is that he says it while participating in a telephone interview during which he consistently responds to the hosts’ questions without hesitation or confusion.

Curiously, an interview that Dr. Panter did with the repugnant Bill O’Reilly ended the very same way – with the doctor prompted to talk about how “pissed off” he must be. Even more curiously, O’Reilly introduced him as “an emergency room physician who works in South Carolina.” Another report described Panter as “a Florida emergency room physician.” This guy must be the busiest ER doc in the entire country, apparently dividing his time between facilities in at least four different states.

Anyway, in the O’Reilly interview, Panter tells yet another version of his tall tale, which goes a little something like this: “We pulled a gentleman out from under [Campbell], and then we began working on her too. Uhh, she was basically in arrest at the time. We thought we had a faint pulse. We started CPR, uhh, because we weren’t sure of the pulse or not.” Panter later identifies that “gentleman” as Jeff Bauman, apparently forgetting that he had told another interviewer that he had pulled Campbell out from under Bauman.

Panter also repeats a claim that he made in other interviews: that he made it through the blast without injury only because the people between him and the bomb, who were all mowed down, served as a human shield: “The people next to me went down … The people to my left absorbed the impact and I basically – they went down and I stood there unscathed.” We’ve actually already reviewed a photo of the good doctor in the position he was in when the blast occurred, but let’s take another look to see if Dr. Panter is accurately describing the situation. Panter is the guy in the yellow shirt with the black jacket tied over his shoulders. The people behind him, who were to his left when he was facing the street, don’t really look like they “absorbed the impact.”

With that out of the way, let’s take another look at The Other Jeff as he is wheeled off the scene. You would have thought that someone would have done him a solid and flipped down the foot rest for him to rest his bad leg on so that his toes weren’t practically dragging on the ground, wouldn’t you? He doesn’t really look very happy, but the two responders with him seem to be taking a pretty lighthearted approach to the carnage. That’s a pretty clean bandage, by the way, on the guy behind them.

Let’s now turn our attention to what I like to call the ‘indestructible temporary sign.’ As can be seen in the first image, the sign was affixed to a pole that was in the immediate vicinity of all the victims we have come to know and love, like Krystle, Jeff, Hoody, Mery and Nicole – all of whom, as we know, received very serious, life-threatening injuries. As the second image makes clear, the paper/cardboard/foamboard sign was very firmly attached to the pole with twine. And as the third image reveals, that amazing sign survived the blast without so much as a scratch on it – no rips, tears, punctures, or singeing whatsoever. Nothing strange about that, I suppose. The sign was, after all, above crotch level. But there was that singeing of Campbell’s head that we learned about in the last post …

Did you notice, by the way, that in all three of those images, Carlos can be seen heroically assisting victims? Moving on, we find that the onlookers in the image above weren’t the only ones on the scene to direct their attention to the upper floors of the Lenscrafters building. In the images below, we can see that a group of cops seemed to take a keen interest in that area as well. So too did Dr. Spielberg and a guy in a blue shirt and sunglasses. And Carlos seemed to think that something might have happened up there as well (as do possibly the cops in the background, though it is difficult to tell given that they are obscured by the tree).

Next up is another iconic “victim in a wheelchair” shot that I’m sure you’ve all seen before. At the risk of sounding like a contrarian, I really have to ask: do those leg injuries look real? Take a closer look in the second image. What the hell is that supposed to be? A cut? A gash? A burn? Is that the kind of wound that shrapnel would cause? A long, clean cut extending vertically down the length of the lower leg? And why were the front of her legs injured when the official story holds that the victims were lined up at the fence watching the race when the bomb went off behind them?

Speaking of leg injuries, we saw in the last post that there were a number of reports of disembodied legs littering the scene – legs flying past people’s heads, legs strewn on the ground, legs being carted off to the medical tent. But this wasn’t an attack by a gang of machete-wielding terrorists who maniacally hacked off innocent spectators’ legs. And shrapnel, as far as I know, doesn’t generally cleanly sever limbs, a fact that was supposed to be illustrated by the alleged injuries suffered by Jeff. So even if there had been a number of people who had suffered explosively amputated limbs, the notion that the scene would have been littered with more-or-less intact legs is fundamentally absurd. What it would have been littered with, as I noted previously, is meat, bone shards, and lots and lots of blood.

By the way, has anyone heard about the fisherman in Belarus who was killed recently by a beaver? It was the weirdest thing – the dude got bit on the leg by a crazed beaver and bled to death despite efforts by friends to save him, including the application of an improvised tourniquet: “His friends desperately tried to staunch the blood welling up from the wound but the animal’s bite had severed a major artery and his life could not be saved.” You can see his wound in the morgue shot below. The guy obviously wasn’t ‘Boston Strong.’ He only severed one major artery while dozens of people in Boston had their entire leg blown off and didn’t even have friends standing by to immediately offer assistance, yet they all live on while this wimpy guy died.

Let’s just hope that in future attacks, the ‘terrorists’ stick with bombs rather than unleashing a horde of angry beavers. Unlike bombs, which hardly kill anyone, those things are dangerous! In other news, there are, as it turns out, some images of the second bombsite in the public domain, though not very many. One of the two below is partially blurred, though I have no idea why since the scene is considerably less bloody than the first site. There are a handful of additional images of the site at each of the links below. There really wasn’t much to see there though, with virtually no property damage and not many apparent victims on display. And yet that is where two of the three alleged deaths were supposed to have occurred.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kenshinokubo/sets/72157633255956194

http://www.flickr.com/photos/brianjdamico/sets/72157633259135348

Actually, that may or may not be true. It is all but impossible to determine where Lingzi Lu supposedly died because there are no detailed media reports to be found. We don’t know which site she was supposed to be at, where at that site she was supposed to have been standing, or whether she died where she fell or in the medical tent or at one of the area hospitals. We also don’t know what injuries she sustained that caused her alleged death. And there don’t appear to be any photos of her either sprawled out on the scene or being transported away from the scene. So we’re just supposed to take it on faith that she died somewhere and in some manner as a result of the explosions at the Boston Marathon.

It is though officially the site where eight-year-old Martin Richard supposedly died and where other members of the Richard family suffered grave injuries, and where numerous people lost limbs. But there is little in the available images that lends support to such claims. If we are being very generous, there were maybe two-dozen victims at the first site and there were obviously even fewer at the second site. So even if we give the government and media every benefit of the doubt and accept that all the victims in the photos suffered real injuries, we are still woefully short of accounting for the official victim tally, which continues to rise and now stands at 282.

We seem to be roughly 250 bodies short. Boston.com has kept a running tally of the known victims which they initially pledged to “continue to update,” but more than six weeks later they have only been able to come up with about 50 named victims, and the details on many of them are quite sketchy. Don’t Boston hospitals and the police and FBI keep records of such things? How hard should it be for a local reporter to call around and verify the official tally? Why are we only honoring 50 victims while ignoring the other 232?

Of course, in the aftermath of the explosions, Boston hospitals were off-limits to pretty much everyone, with heavily armed SWAT teams menacingly guarding the entrances. There were – wouldn’t you know it? – very convenient bomb threats supposedly called in, which necessitated the heavy police presence. As one report held, “Among the uncertainty, a SWAT team stood guard here at the entrance to Brigham and Women’s Hospital – family and visitors asked to leave, only the injured allowed.”

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I’m not entirely sure what to make of the information that is to follow, but it is a part of this story so I feel an obligation to report it. The facts are beyond dispute, but determining their meaning is another matter altogether.

Let’s begin on February 2, 2013. That was the day that Chris Kyle, former Navy SEAL and author of American Sniper, was shot and killed on a Texas shooting range by a US Marine veteran. Kyle was widely hailed as a hero by both the mainstream and alternative media, but this scribe didn’t shed too many tears. Kyle was credited with 160 confirmed kills and claimed nearly 100 more. He was, simply put, a hit man for Uncle Sam. By any reasonable definition of the term, he was a serial killer – and a very prolific one at that, putting rivals like Jeffrey Dahmer and Richard Ramirez to shame.

He followed that up by founding and running Craft International, an entity devoted to providing paramilitary training to government and corporate clients. It is companies like his that we have to thank in part for the wholesale militarization of the nation’s police forces. How any of that qualified him as a hero is anyone’s guess. But though I tend to think that he got exactly what he deserved (live by the sword and all …), it still must be stated that the circumstances of his death were a bit odd.

Two-and-a-half months after Kyle’s death, at least six guys appearing to be Craft International personnel showed up at the Boston Marathon. It is impossible to say whether they were in fact operatives from Craft, but their apparel makes it appear that they are. Of course, it doesn’t really seem to make sense that they would be flying their colors, so to speak, but it also doesn’t really make sense that six guys would show up attired as if they were Craft people when they actually weren’t.

It seems almost as if the powers-that-be wanted them to be seen, but also wanted there to be a certain amount of ambiguity about who they really were. No one in Washington or in the media wants to talk about them at all, yet the photos of them on the scene have been freely circulated since day one. One of those photos is reproduced below.

So we know that some mercenary thugs appearing to be Craft personnel were on the scene, and we also know that actor Bradley Cooper made a high-profile appearance at the bedside of Jeff “I can’t hear anything” Bauman, inserting himself into this storyline. And of course we know that another guy who was on the scene in a rather high-profile way looked, in many of the images, uncannily like director Steven Spielberg, though he was actually Dr. Levine.

What makes all of that rather bizarre is that, just a couple weeks after the Boston Marathon incident, it was announced that Mr. Spielberg’s next film project will be directing the celluloid version of American Sniper. Producing the film and starring as Kyle will be, of course, Bradley Cooper.

Is all of that just a very strange set of coincidences? It doesn’t really seem very likely that it is. What we appear to be seeing here is a campaign aimed at erasing the line between reality and fantasy – between what is objectively real and what is make-believe. For many years now we have seen a blurring of the line between news and entertainment, as well as, through ‘reality’ television, a blurring of the line between what is ‘real’ and what is scripted. We are now entering an age when there will be no dividing line at all between news, scripted entertainment and ‘reality’ TV. It will all be one and the same.

In the new ‘reality’ we will be living in, nothing will be real and everything will be true.