By Craig McKee
The official story is set within hours – sometimes even minutes. We saw it with the Kennedy assassination(s), the Oklahoma City Bombing, 9/11, and many other proven conspiracies. Now we’re seeing it with the Colorado “Dark Knight” shooting that took place in an Aurora movie theatre on July 20.
Once the official narrative is set, it will rarely change substantially. New details will emerge but the initial story that we’ve been fed is locked in.
The official story of the shootings (in which 12 died and 58 were injured) is that 24-year-old neuroscience student James Holmes was mentally disturbed and acted alone. This is echoed in the media with few exceptions. Any information contradicting the official spin was, and continues to be, buried. Essential questions are not asked.
In the Colorado shooting, the media have focused on whether it was too easy for the suspect to get the weapons he allegedly used. They have questioned whether his psychiatrist told authorities of her concerns about Holmes’s mental state and whether she notified police. They have questioned whether the University of Colorado should have seen the potential for Holmes to commit a violent act and taken preventative action.
Despite early reports that the shooter may have had at least one accomplice, the media have stuck to the script, putting all their focus on questioning what would make an intelligent young university student become a killer. They take it as a given that he is the killer, just as the media has done with Lee Harvey Oswald for the past half century.
An ABC News report done minutes after the shooting set the stage by announcing that a “lone gunman” had been responsible. How did they know that? How could police tell them that so quickly? Interestingly, ABC anchor Rob Nelson, talking over live pictures from the Century 16 theatre, said: “This does fulfill a fear that we’ve all had as Americans, that we’ve reported on extensively at ABC News, and that is the proliferation of the lone wolf terrorist, and this could be an example of that.”
The report gets worse as Nelson then goes on to talk about the movie-goers as “soft targets”:
“If you think about airports, we know what the security is like there; we take off our shoes, we take off our belt and walk through those scanners, but we don’t do that on buses, we don’t do that on trains, in shopping malls, movie theatres and you have to wonder, once the dust settles, once we get past in initial shock of this, do we now begin a talk about security?” His co-anchor chirps in: “We’re so vulnerable.”
The push to impose an official version of this crime has come on two fronts. First, the authorities and the media dismiss any idea that the crime could have been a co-ordinated attack involving more than one shooter. Second, the media obediently report that Holmes is that one shooter. Major media reports not only don’t question whether others could have been involved, but they don’t allow Holmes a trial before deciding he is guilty. They don’t even acknowledge that there is no proof that he fired even one shot.
ABC News shamelessly and deliberately twisted the words of Holmes’s mother when she said, “You have the right person.” She meant that yes she is the mother of James Holmes. She didn’t even know the shooting had taken place at this point (ABC called her before 6 a.m.). They claimed she made this statement confirming that she wasn’t surprised to find that her son had shot up a movie theatre.
This was a blatant lie by ABC, which has mangled coverage of this story on so many levels. ABC also showed the 2006 video of James Holmes speaking at a science camp, labelling the footage: “first video of a killer.” The number of media reports – mainstream and otherwise – that simply call Holmes “the killer” are too numerous to list.
On the Colorado Public Television show Devil’s Advocate, University of Denver law professor David Kopel makes this incredible statement during a recent discussion of the shooting:
“The media’s actually hyper-scrupulous about calling the killer “the accused” or “the suspect.” That’s appropriate in about 99.9% of crime cases but here it’s absolutely certain he did this crime. There’s a question about whether he’s legally insane, but there’s no doubt… And yet because of media standards they still have this sort of Victorian sensibility about calling him the suspect.”
We don’t have to wait for a trial to pronounce someone “the killer” if we’re REALLY SURE he did it. And this guy teaches law. Well, if we can call Holmes a killer without needing a trial, why don’t we just lock him up for life without a trial, too? I mean, if we’re sure…
An ABC “virtual view” re-enactment was accompanied by this voice-over: “… a man in the front row got up, pretending to take a phone call. He went out the emergency exit, propping the door open behind him. Witnesses say he threw a green canister into the crowd, filling the theatre with smoke as if re-enacting a scene from a Dark Knight comic book. Witnesses say Holmes fired into the air and then started firing into the crowd.”
How do they know he was pretending to take a call? How would witnesses even know this? How does anyone know that the person who went out was the same person who came back in, dressed head to toe in full SWAT gear and gas mask? And how can witnesses say it was Holmes? No one ever saw Holmes in the theatre.
Then there’s witness Corbin Dates who has stated in great detail that a man with a goatee came in to theatre 9 and sat in the front, right row. He took a call on his phone and then walked to the emergency exit. He held the door open with his foot and gestured to someone outside.