Monday, April 16, 2007

A Plea For Sanity

jonathon:
A Plea For Sanity

Dear Progressive Blurrrgosphere,

I realize it's enjoyable to make fun of Fred Hiatt, the editorial page editor of the Washington Post, for publishing this column by Kathleen "Less Crazy Than Jeffrey Dahmer!" Parker. (If you haven't seen it already, Parker is arguing that we should make "common cause" with Iran's Ahmadinejad in keeping ladies out of the military.) And indeed, I've engaged in similar activity many times myself.

Still, we're in danger of missing what's important here. And what's important is not Fred Hiatt. Hiatt has his job because Donald Graham, the Post's publisher, likes what Hiatt does. If Hiatt woke up one day and suddenly decided to stop publishing the insane, it wouldn't be long before he was out of work, replaced by someone who was eager to run columns by lunatics.

In other words, the problem with the US media isn't all the non-reality-based editors and producers who hire the Kathleen Parkers and Tim Russerts and Sean Hannitys. It's the right-wing billionaires who hire those editors and producers. (Or if you really want to depart from acceptable discussion, the problem is an economic system that allows only right-wing billionaires to own newspapers and TV networks.)

So I come before you today with this plea: let's focus less on the sock puppets, and more on the hands.

* meanwhile, Larisa:
"Why Are They Trying So Hard to Distract Us?

The national media continues to self destruct under the weight of its politically purchased editorial pages. Not content to simply slink away quietly after leading the nation into a disastrous war of choice through negligent and even highly corrupt reporting practices, the editorial boards of all of the major newspapers - still apparently strapped collectively into a mission accomplished payola flight suit - continue to play political attack dog for their paymasters.
[]
Why? Where in reality do these people - from the editorial boards, to the talking heads, all of them - think they are, in comparison to the rest of us, that would excuse their behavior as anything but unethical, dishonest, and brutishly cynical?

Perhaps they are in a place where conscience is so easily bought and sold that they can pretend at decency and fool themselves convincingly. But they are not in a place from which the truth will ever venture out, not on purpose anyway. Truth may escape on occasion, and usually in broken parts, seemingly unrelated to a larger narrative, but by and large, this place of so called mainstream journalism is a wasteland, decadent and collapsing under its own Faustian deal.
[]
Do I exaggerate? You tell me.

Thanks to the few remaining MSM journalists who are still able to sneak facts out from the opaque corporate curtain stretched from one end of our democracy to another, we know the following:

The administration ignored repeated warnings preceding attacks on this nation, over and over and over. Yet the editorial pages and TV pundits did not demand that such negligence and complete disregard for the safety of this nation be punished in some manner. No one was willing to speak up and ask even the basic question: is Bush fit to serve? Instead, the president was given unearned mythical standing as some hero because he grabbed a bullhorn at ground zero and said a few well penned words.

Despite the fact that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia were directly linked to the attacks of September 11, both countries continued to enjoy privileged status as our "friends."

We have continued providing aid to Pakistan and military support for the Saudi royals, in essence, giving aid and comfort to the enemy as a matter of policy. Six years into this administration we hear nothing about Pakistan's dueling loyalties. Editorial pages across the nation have not devoted their most vitriolic and screeching patriotism to something as serious as giving aid and comfort to enemies of the United States, instead such clean sheets have been stained with a steady full front assault on anyone who in anyway disagrees with the official one party rule agenda.

News outlets have taken to calling an American Senator - Barak Obama - after a terrorist, Osama. They have openly slandered such respected statesmen as Senator Kerry and Senator Hagel, and obsessively attacked the first female Speaker of the House.

No one ever bothered to question the last Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, on allegations of bribery by foreign interests in Turkey or why an FBI whistleblower remains gagged in order to cover up those real and serious allegations. No, that never occurred to anyone, it seems, as being anything requiring full page editorials raging with anger the likes of which has been seen over Nancy Pelosi's trip to Syria.

[]

Why are they trying so hard to distract us? Because they have already lied. Lies require more lies and more lies require myths and trumped up scandals. Would honest people ever spend this much time on distractions?

I think that with the exception of a few real journalists and honest columnists in the MSM, the American media-industrial-political complex is a discredited, decadent, ugly thing to behold and, sadly for us, a real danger to democracy. They are a collective Faust, selling their very souls for access, power, money and anything that relates to those three commodities so important to the morally vacuous. They sell their souls, we pay the price, and they make a profit.

If I seem to be exaggerating in my absolute disgust over the state of our media, then you - dear reader - have not been paying attention or you simply don't care.

18 comments:

Anonymous said...

'If I seem to be exaggerating in my absolute disgust over the state of our media, then you - dear reader - have not been paying attention or you simply don't care.'

i'm w/Larisa. but in my case burnout took me almost 7 years of stress and my health and lately, i haven't been paying attention that closely.

«—U®Anu§—» said...

Rimone, tell us about yourself. I saw that documentary on HBO, Paragraph 175, about homosexuals and the holocaust. One of the people stated that Germans became indifferent about the concentration camps fairly early and didn't realize they were becoming death camps. I think more people would speak up if they thought Washington was listening, which it isn't. So, they just wait for time to sweep away the infidels. Unfortunately, because republicans keep getting a free pass for some reason, we get bigger and bigger republican lawbreakers.

How's this for a notion? Janet just told me she thinks today's Virginia Tech shooting was orchestrated by Washington to take people's attention away from Gonzales' meeting with Congress. Too far out? I don't know if it is. It coincides nicely with the Bush administration's policy of killing as a first resort to any problem.

Anonymous said...

Well, considering the Cheney regime had no qualms about killing 3,000 Americans in one single morning on 9/11, I really don't think it would bother them a whit to kill a hundredth as many as a distraction. Who knows what this is all about? One thing I certainly DID notice in watching the coverage of it was that the story we are being told doesn't seem to add up. Now, I'm not going out of my way to FIND something wrong with their story mind you, but sometimes you can't help but find that certain details about something have an odd ring to it and it sticks in your head, you know what I mean? My first thought wasn't immediately that the Cheney regime was behind it, rather I just started seeing things about it that didn't add up, didn't make sense to me. What the meaning of this is, if anything, I have yet to determine.

For one thing, the first 9-1-1 call saying there was someone shooting was made at about 7:15 a.m. and said the shooting was taking place in the Johnston dorm. On CNN they said that the campus authorities told the students to remain in their rooms, not to go outside. They then said that soon a man was taken into custody on the drill ground nearby, and after not too long, the "lockdown" order was rescinded. Then more than 2 hours after the original shooting at Johnston dorm, way across campus at an engineering building the shooting started AGAIN, and this was where most of the casualties resulted.

The problems are that:
1.why the large time lag between the original shooting and when it started back up again? They said the second batch was after the "lockdown" had been rescinded, but why on earth would they be so nonchalant about lifting the "lockdown" status so soon after this? Especially since we are told there were multiple bomb threats made at the campus in the 2 weeks before this, and the shooting of a campus police officer in August of last year.

2.Why are the police insisting that they took nobody into custody when on CNN and their local Virginia affiliate they showed color photos of an Asian man down on the ground with his hands being handcuffed behind his back, and being placed in the back of a cop car? What reason would the police have in blatantly lying to us? And how does this jive with their repeated insistance that there was only ONE shooter? Also, why can they not answer, even several hours later, whether or not the suspect whom they are saying is definitely dead, if he shot himself or was shot by police? Shouldn't that be a fairly straightforward matter?

There could be perfectly harmless, reasonable answers to these questions but at this stage we have yet to hear them.

Anonymous said...

They are having a press conference now and they are contradicting themselves. They are now saying that the original approximately 7:15 shooting they thought was an isolated incident, and that they rescinded the "lockdown" status because they thought the incident was resolved. Yet how does that jive with the police chief standing there saying (again) that they have nobody in custody? If the original shooting was resolved then wouldn't someone have to be in custody for them to presume it was resolved? How is it possible for 1.the original shooting to be resolved with nobody in custody, yet 2.there occurs a second batch of shootings a couple hours later, and 3.all done by the same shooter, with the police claiming no other suspects are believed to be at large? The more they try to explain this, it seems the more they contradict themselves.

Anonymous said...

Now they are saying they think the original shooting was a man in the dorm shooting his girlfriend and a resident advisor, and they thought the situation was resolved when (now don't laugh) the shooter left campus. After killing 2 people?? They felt it was safe enough to rescind the "lockdown" situation?? Yet they also claim that police were then searching the campus for the shooter when 2 hours later the second batch of shooting started. They also still claim, in defiance of photographic evidence to the contrary, that they didn't take anyone into custody. Dateline NBC just had a special coverage program on the shootings and predictably made no mention of the photos of the man being handcuffed and placed in a police car. This is sounding more and more fishy as the hours go by. We will know by tomorrow morning if this was just some nut(s?) going crazy and shooting people or if there is something more to it than meets the eye, as certainly the Washington Post will have a big story on it. If they mention the discrepancies, most importantly the photos of the man being arrested, and ask hard questions then we can be reasonably sure this was what it appeared to be, one (or two?) people going crazy and shooting people. If on the other hand the Post glosses over the discrepancies and makes no mention of the photos of the man being arrested then we can be reasonably sure there is a cover-up going on related to this incident and thus that there is a whole lot more to it than what we are being told.

Anonymous said...

Well, I scoured the Washington Post this morning and though they had page after sickening page of coverage of this tragedy, there was no mention whatsoever of the photos of the man being arrested. Not even any mention of the police denying that they had taken anyone into custody. So it appears there is a cover-up in progress. The news stations appear to be no longer showing the photos either, nor making any mention of them, as they contradict the "official" story.

Another couple things have since come to light, namely the identity of the shooter who they are saying definitely killed himself, a Korean-American. He is definitely not the same man as the Asian-looking man I saw photos of being handcuffed, that one didn't look Korean, more like Samoan or something. And now in most disingenious fashion, the "authorities" are saying that the dead gunman had a business card on him from the gun store where he supposedly bought the two guns. That in itself sounds fishy, as why would he have a business card on him from there when he didn't even have any i.d. on him? Also, they claim he bought one gun a month ago and the other one a week ago, yet are still "speculating" that the cause of this was his girlfriend breaking up with him. Why then would he have bought the first gun a month ago if she allegedly broke up with him yesterday? Also now they are saying the serial numbers on both guns were filed off which sounds REALLY fishy, as why on earth would he have bothered to file off the serial numbers if he had planned to make this a mass murder-suicide anyway? What difference would it make if "authorities" had been able to track down where he allegedly bought the guns if he was acting alone and was planning on being DEAD by the time they were investigating??

But it is really the sweeping under the proverbial rug of the photos of the man being arrested that is most suspicious and just screams COVER-UP. What is being covered up, and by whom, and why, is at this time uncertain. But it is pretty apparant that SOMETHING about this matter is being covered up.

Track said...

The crack newsteam at 8asians wants to be first to report that the Asian man seen being cuffed in this photo is Shaozhou Cui, a photographer for the VT student newspaper. HE IS NOT “THE SHOOTER!” The only thing Shao can be accused of shooting is photographs. (1)

«—U®Anu§—» said...

Yep, Janet sticks by her opinion it's a black bag operation. Enlightenment, she's formerly chief counsel for our state bureau of investigation, and not given to odd conspiracy theories. You're about to see a vigorous debate about gun control, which is ridiculous. "If they'd used kitchen knives," Janet asked, "would we need to outlaw them?"

Do you feel safer in a world bristling with guns, or one in which Shrub collects all of them? I like lots of guns in the wild, personally. With King George at the wheel, I think everybody needs at least one.

Anonymous said...

Yes Noise and Uranus, I noticed the 8Asians blog information this morning, that is the same photo I saw earlier and they say he is a photographer on campus. I presume he was arrested since they were looking for an Asian gunman so though they are probably being politically correct in saying they assume he "got too close", I on the other hand would presume it was because he was a tall Asian man and so was the apparant shooter, so the police probably arrested him thinking he was the gunman. Then denied arresting someone since that might raise racial issues of racial profiling. So that may explain why the police denied taking anyone into custody when there was photographic evidence they did, out of embarrassment. Though that still doesn't explain why the Post would totally ignore the matter, since they have before reported on matters of racial profiling such as the famous case of the imams getting removed from an airliner for praying at the terminal.

Also, the police who had denied yesterday that they were looking for any additional suspects are now saying there is a "person of interest" on the loose but aren't giving any more details about this person. And their story changes further, now saying it wasn't a business card from a gun shop they found on him but instead saying it was a receipt for one of the guns. They are still saying he filed the serial numbers off, which doesn't make sense if he was intending to commit mass murder before shooting himself, but does make sense if he was simply "directed" to carry this out and his handlers didn't want the guns being traced.

Janet may well be correct Uranus, and believe me, I wasn't really discounting the black bag op theory, just saying that before I make any guesses I wanted to let the situation develop more. And I wasn't saying she is some tinfoil hat wearer either, and I am thrilled that she has a healthy skepticism of things we are told by the corporate media, as they rarely give us an accurate picture of what really happened regarding anything. Far too many people out of laziness, incuriosity, or psychological cowardice just willingly lap up the mainstream "official" version of EVERYTHING without giving a thought to looking into the details for themselves. 9/11 is a perfect example of that.

She could very well be correct in her hypothesizing, especially considering that it is a proven fact that the C.I.A. has for many years conducted a program called MK-ULTRA, and its spinoffs, MK-DELTA, MK-NAOMI, MK-SEARCH etc. and these were all about mind control, including creating programmed assassins through hypnosis, LSD brainwashing, ritual abuse etc. where they use post-hypnotic suggestion to "implant" directions in a person's head which will only be carried out when a code word etc. triggers their programming.

My first thought regarding a motive was in line with Janet's, about it being a way to ram gun control down people's throats, and use the Democrats as the heavies, as a means to make armed rebellion harder for the time when the majority of Americans realize the truth about 9/11 and the "war on terror". The only flaw I see in that hypothesis is that the overwhelming majority of gun owners are staunchly Republican, and in the event of declaring martial law could probably be counted on to be "deputized" to help in the repression, as opposed to violently opposing the repression, and those die-hard Republican gun owners are the dumbest of the dumb, the blindest of the blind, who wouldn't believe the truth about 9/11 if Cheney came out and said on t.v. "Yeah, we were behind it... What are you going to do about it?". Conversely, by using this massacre as a tool to ban gun ownership or severely curtail it could likely cost the Cheney regime their last bastion of die-hard supporters. Though it is still a possibility, especially considering Bush doesn't have to run for re"election" in '08, however I don't know if he would want to poison the atmosphere for the next Rethuglican candidate.

However, there are other possible motives for this being a black bag job. For example, there's the distraction from the Gonzales testimony as Janet mentioned, and yes, his testifying HAS been postponed to Thursday because of the massacre. Don't know if they would do something like this just to buy a couple more days but we will see if on Thursday he testifies as scheduled or throws up his hands and says "Gee, I'd really love to testify but I'm just way too busy leading the investigation into this massacre". We will have to see how that pans out, but I would suspect even if that is the case that it would be a secondary motive, a "bonus" externality if you will.

Another possible motive could be this: In the past few weeks to a month we have seen the Cheney regime tightening the economic screws against China, with a raft of anti-piracy legislation. Then came the manufactured dog food crisis which they kept changing the story until they got to something to bash China with, first saying it was contaminated by rat poison, then saying no not rat poison, it was a chemical used in making plastics, before making the leap to contaminated wheat gluten from China then promptly banning all imports of Chinese wheat gluten. Also a few days before the massacre was legislation for tightening immigration restrictions on bringing additional family members into the country, a move seen by Asian-American groups as being decidedly anti-Asian. Now I realize that the alleged gunman was a Korean-American, not a Chinese, however I can assure you that most Americans don't distinguish between different Asian countries, frequently using the terms Japanese and Chinese interchangeably, and are wholly unable to grasp the physical and ethnic differences between nationals of different Asian countries, just as they almost always cannot distinguish between Middle Easterners and Pakistanis, and even between either of them and Indians. Remember right after 9/11 when a Sikh gas station owner was shot in the face by a guy who assumed because he wears a turban he must be a Muslim? Sikhs worship at the Golden Temple in India and are not Muslim. They just wear turbans. But that is far too high-minded for most Americans to grasp, they tend to lump everyone that is in any way remotely similar together as being the same. So it is with their view of Asians; it would be so easy to manipulate Americans into a racist fervor against Chinese, to wholeheartedly back further anti-Chinese trade restrictions (if that is the Cheney regime plan) by having an Asian-American commit a horrible mass shooting, then not with administration officials but with their mouthpieces on the radio, t.v. and the blogosphere paint all Asians with the same brush through innuendo. Believe me, Americans are probably about the easiest people in the world to whip into an ignorant racist frenzy. So this could be like so many other things all about economics. I'm just thinking out loud but yes, Janet could very well be onto something and this incident sure has an odd smell about it. For the record though I am EXTREMELY leftist I am adamantly opposed to banning guns. They can't be uninvented, and with madmen like Cheney and Bush in power it's good to have one just in case they send their brownshirts to throw me in some gulag for daring to have an independent mind.

Anonymous said...

Still another possible motive just occurred to me a few minutes ago when I heard that the alleged gunman sent a package to NBC containing among other things a "manifesto" citing his grievances. That I will address in a moment, but first I would like to mention that I find it very strange that he would mail this package in the time between the first shootings and the second, which is the time that supposedly the timestamp on the package says (Though with the way they keep changing their story they could tomorrow say it was mailed a week before). Also of note is a photo in the package showing the alleged gunman holding BOTH guns; this is interesting since we have been told he bought the second of the two pistols last Friday they said, meaning the photo would have to be very very recent, all but ruling out conventional photo development and meaning it would have had to have been a digital camara hooked up to a printer, again not impossible, just interesting.

OK, back to the "manifesto" and another possible motive. In his rambling diatribe he rails against the rich and says he wants to take revenge against them. It immediately hit me, could this be something designed to be used as a verbal weapon in future arguments regarding the yawning and ever-increasing gap between rich and poor in America, where the average CEO makes 400 times the money of his average worker? So that when people start criticizing this disparity the Republifascists can say "Oh, so you hate the rich, huh? So are you going to go into some college and start shooting a bunch of innocent students like that OTHER guy who hated the rich??"

Track said...

It's definitely a strange story but we have watched the media refuse to be a watchdog since 9/11 so if this tragedy had not taken place they would have continued their same awful news coverage of something else.

«—U®Anu§—» said...

Those are interesting observations, Enlightment. I read some junk today about how the gun issue is always hard on democrats, and we're approaching the presidential election cycle. Raising this issue now is a great diversion and a way to punch at the left. I didn't have any guns until about a year ago. Washington has become too spooky. My name is on a number of offender databases for buying simple household items, but I can buy gasoline and ammunition without checking in with Uncle Sam. They make better weapons than lighter fluid, anyway.

Anonymous said...

Thanks Uranus. A couple more possible motives occurred to me today. For one, just yesterday the "Supreme" Court banned late-term abortions, a big step in whittling down Roe vs Wade. Without the massacre that would surely be the leading news story but instead it gets mentioned in passing before getting back to the wall-to-wall coverage of the massacre.

Another possible motive could be a push for putting CCTV camaras in college classrooms, in the name of "greater campus security" but really all about monitoring what the professors are teaching (especially political science and economics professors). Though so far all the talk of increasing campus security has been in general terms with no specifics, as the days and weeks go by I wouldn't be surprised to hear anyone mention putting camaras in college classrooms ostensibly as part of that effort. In addition to monitoring outright what professors are teaching, more critically they would KNOW they are being monitored and it would have a chilling effect on their freedom to teach as they see fit. Just a couple ideas. Anyway, it could be several motives at once; the C.I.A. usually tries to get the most "bang for their buck" out of any operation, usually trying to, as they put it, "scratch several itches at once".

Anonymous said...

The more this matter unfolds the more sure I am that this Cho fellow was an MK-ULTRA programmed assassin.

Why would he file off the serial numbers on the pistols if he intended to be dead by the time the investigation would start? This sounds more in line with him being manipulated by others who didn't want anything traced farther rather than if he was acting all on his own accord.

Why was Cho allowed to buy the guns in the first place, since Virginia law states that anyone who has been determined to be a danger to themself (which he was) is ineligible to buy them? Since gun shop owners rely on federal background checks, why did the state provide incomplete information to federal authorities?
Or conversely, if that isn't the case, why did the federal authorities delete that from his record?

Why is it, if Cho was an English major whose English professor had him removed from her class (and she or other authorities there had him sent to get psychiatric help), and his English classmates made fun of him, why on earth would he NOT go and shoot his former English professor and his classmates who teased him? Why would he go across campus to the engineering department for almost all of his victims instead?

Why was the local cell phone network shut down during the massacre? Virginia Tech campus and the surrounding town of Blacksburg is very VERY "wired" in terms of communication; it is even called "Blacksburg Electronic Village". And why was the Virginia Tech website shut down during the massacre? One would think had it not been, they could have at least posted a big notice on it in the over 2 hrs. they had between the first and second batches of shootings, saying "Attention! There's a gunman possibly still on campus who shot 2 people dead already!". Why was nothing even announced over the campus PA system to warn students? Hell, in the time they had between the 2 sets of shootings they could have at the very least had campus police driving around with megaphones warning students, but this was not done either. Why not?

Which can be answered by asking the next question: Why were the campus police ordered by the Feds to stand down? According to local police and EMT workers, the campus police were given an order by the feds to stand down and not pursue Cho. This is corroborated by local Blacksburg resident Matt Kazee who was an eyewitness to the event and talked to campus police and EMT personnel who all said the same thing, they were ordered to stand down until the FBI arrived to "provide backup". This could be the reason why the excuses given regarding failure to do much of anything after the initial shootings sounded so lame, because they couldn't say "Hey, we were ordered to stand down, what do you expect?" The same article quotes longtime campus police officer George French who says "Setting up a series of roadblocks, controlling access to very large pieces of property, is very much routine on any university campus in Canada and in the United States. After a double homicide, when you’re looking for a dangerous fellow with a firearm, I find it unfathomable that a series of roadblocks weren’t set up…to prevent the felon from escaping." See: http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/april2007/200407standdown.htm

Supposedly Cho hated the rich, but his parents are the owners of a dry cleaning business, petit-bourgeois and able to send their son to a very good technical college and their daughter to Princeton (!). In this context his railing against the rich sounds hollow. And since he talks of his classmates as being snobs, again, why didn't he shoot his classmates from his English classes whom he actually had contact with, instead of shooting people in the engineering department?

Why would Cho take the risk of being caught after the double homicide at Ambler Johnston dorm to go to the post office (a federal building mind you) and mail his package? How could he assume that the authorities wouldn't have an A.P.B. out on him and thus might be walking right into getting caught, complete with his two murder weapons on his person?

Virginia Tech's engineering department has a long, symbiotic relationship with DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a highly-secretive research and development agency for the military. There is a possibility that the main target of this massacre was the aeronautics engineer Liviu Librescu who was world-renowned in the aeronautics community and did a huge amount of work for DARPA and NASA. Perhaps (like the FBI stole the PROMIS software years ago from its small company that developed it), DARPA or NASA may
have coveted something he designed and didn't want to pay him the royalties for it, and in killing him wouldn't have to worry about him suing them for stealing his idea, as his family would never be familiar enough with his research to be able to prove in court that whatever it is was really Librescu's idea. In which case, the shooting of everyone else there would be just for cover's sake, to make it look less like an assassination of Librescu when there are 31 other dead victims and about an equal amount wounded. Another top-notch engineering professor who was killed, Kevin Granata, whose work was in the field of robotics especially for prosthetics, may not have been a designated target, since his classroom was on the third floor and he just happened to come down to the second floor when he heard shooting, and was shot in the corridor, appearing to have simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. And is the shooting on Friday at Johnson Space Center in Houston, also at a high-tech, engineering related building, Building 44 (Communication and Tracking Development Laboratory) related to the VT massacre? The killer shot the one victim very early in the standoff, not when police made contact with him, which infers he came there specifically to shoot that person as opposed to shooting him in desperation when police closed in; a female hostage who was tied up with duct tape was unharmed even when the police came into the building. It appears the killer deliberately targeted that one victim. Also consider, very early in the standoff, the police reported hearing shots fired (probably their basis for assuming the victim was killed very early in the ordeal), but didn't attempt to storm the building, instead giving the gunman who at that point would have to have been presumed to have shot someone, plenty of time to do whatever he wanted to do inside Building 44. Now of course this could be just a coincidence happening in the same week as the VT massacre, but it is something to keep an eye on.

lukery said...

thanks Enlightment, I've posted another link on the front page.

Anonymous said...

Most welcome Lukery.

Anonymous said...

The snippet of Cho's recording I heard sounded so monotonous and uninflected in tone, like he was reading a statement or was psychologically programmed, say by hypnosis. His statement did not sound spontaneous or like he was emotionally involved and conscious of what he was doing, supporting the claim that it might be an MK Ultra Manchurian Candidate type of black bag operation.

Adding support to this hypothesis is the information I have seen from two different sources -- the Wayne Madsen Report whose source apparently is a South Korean newspaper and this website I accessed through Lisa Pease's Real History Blog.

According to these sources, the alleged killer's older sister, Sun-Kyung, graduated from Princeton University in 2004. A source, who asked to be identified as a senior Administration official, said she works for McNeil Technologies, a firm contracted by the State Department to manage reconstruction efforts in Iraq. From the company website: "McNeil’’s Intelligence and Language Center (ILC) provides unmatched expertise in the areas of Intelligence and Language Services. The combination of Intelligence and Language guarantees our clients mission success.... Our services and capabilities include:
* Intelligence Architecture Operations in support of the US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC).
* Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) which supports the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and other government agencies, and
* HUMINT (Human Intel) operations in support of DIA, or with federal counter Intel outsourcing effort."

As Cryptogon says: "It’s obviously just a coincidence [obviously, tongue very firmly in cheek] that the sister of the shooter works for a large provider of these services. Right? A company with more publicly stated connections to U.S. Intelligence than you can shake a stick at… A company that is providing ongoing support to current U.S. Intelligence operations…"

According to Madsen: "Her employer is McNeil Technologies of Springfield, Virginia. McNeil, which was involved in prisoner interrogations for the Defense Department, is owned by Veritas Capital, a defense industry acquisitions firm that also owns two other Defense and US intelligence contractors, Dyncorp International and selected remnants of the former company of Mitchell Wade (of Duke Cunningham infamy), MZM Inc., renamed Athena Innovative Solutions, Inc. Cho Sun Kyung is three years older than her brother. While attending Princeton, Cho's sister served a stint as an intern at the US Embassy in Bangkok, where among other tasks, she studied the plight of Burmese migrant workers on the Thai-Burmese border."

However (off-topic), Enlightenment, the word you mean in your comments is "jibe" not "jive". A lot of people are getting these words mixed up (as I once did). Jive is African-American slang for BS. Jibe means to be in accord. I recommend you verify this with your dictionary.

Anonymous said...

Ewastud, thanks for the correction, you are right, it is jibe, not jive. ;)