There is a destructive, delusional meme spreading like a virus among
many misguided Americans. It pushes the idea that government can pick
and choose which rights codified in the Bill of Rights it wishes to
recognize or discard on any given day.
This delusion is
predicated on the concept that if a popular majority can be emotionally
whipped into a frenzy over one particular right, then that right can
simply be discarded and stricken from the Bill of Rights.
But no
such power exists to discard any portion of the Bill of Rights, at least
not without proper ratification by three-fourths of the fifty states.
There is no such power found solely in the federal government. There is
no such power placed solely in the executive branch, nor in Congress,
nor in the White House.
The Bill of Rights describes a set of
individual rights and liberties which are not granted by government, but
recognized as DIVINE rights given to use by our Creator. Because
government never granted the rights in the first place, it has no
authority to take them away.
"The Framers of the Bill of Rights
did not purport to "create" rights. Rather, they designed the Bill of
Rights to prohibit our Government from infringing rights and liberties
presumed to be preexisting." - William J Brennan Jr.
The
individual liberties described in the Bill of Rights cannot be
infringed, nor deleted, nor overridden by popular opinion... not even
loudly screamed opinion. America is not a nation ruled by the tyranny of
the mob. It isn't even a democracy -- it's a republic, where certain
inalienable rights describe the protection of each individual, even if
that individual is the lone voice of sanity in a majority gone mad. The
Bill of Rights protects individuals from the tyranny of mob rule -- a
phenomenon that routinely rears its head in any society where historical
illiteracy is rampant and the masses are lulled into a state of
complacency by charismatic but dishonest leaders.
It was the
extended amendments attached to the Bill of Rights that outlawed
slavery, guaranteeing individual freedom to those of African descent
even in a time and place when the majority of voting citizens believed
slavery was socially acceptable. And it was the Second Amendment that
put firearms into the hands of those recently-freed slaves, ensuring
that they could defend themselves against attackers of any color through
the powerful expression of armed defense (aided by the laws of physics
and certain materials from the table of elements, notably lead).
Another
amendment beyond the Bill of Rights granted women equal voting rights
in an age when the majority believed women should not be allowed to
vote. It was the Bill of Rights that decriminalized prohibition, ending a
dark era of mass criminalization of everyday citizens who suffered
under the oppression of government law enforcement gone bad.
Yet
today, incredibly, many African-Americans and women are actively
assaulting the very document that first secured their own freedoms. They
now wish to take their freedom and power and use it to enslave someone
else by revoking other people's rights under the Bill of Rights. This is
the ultimate social betrayal, and it is a powerful demonstration of the
principle that those who do not respect freedom for others do not
deserve it for themselves.
The Oath of Enlistment to the United States Marine Corps
I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the
Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and
domestic...
Memory Hole Blog is a forum for criticism and commentary on
sociopolitical issues and phenomena overlooked or misreported by
mainstream media. Such neglected concerns are often omitted from or
distorted in popular consciousness and memory. The site is authored and
maintained by James F. Tracy PhD, Associate Professor of Media Studies
at Florida Atlantic University.
The Sandy Hook Slight of Hand
Inconsistencies and anomalies abound when one turns an analytical eye
to news of the Newtown school massacre. The public’s general acceptance
of the event’s validity and faith in its resolution suggests a deepened
credulousness borne from a world where almost all news and information
is electronically mediated and controlled. The condition is reinforced
through the corporate media’s unwillingness to push hard questions
vis-à-vis Connecticut and federal authorities who together bottlenecked
information while invoking prior restraint through threats of
prosecutorial action against journalists and the broader citizenry
seeking to interpret the event on social media.
Along these lines on December 19 the Connecticut State Police
assigned individual personnel to each of the 26 families who lost a
loved one at Sandy Hook Elementary. “The families have requested no
press interviews,” State Police assert on their behalf, “and we are
asking that this request be honored.[1] The de facto gag order will be
in effect until the investigation concludes—now forecast to be “several
months away” even though lone gunman Adam Lanza has been confirmed as
the sole culprit.[2]
With the exception of an unusual and apparently contrived appearance
by Emilie Parker’s alleged father, victims’ family members have been
almost wholly absent from public scrutiny.[3] What can be gleaned from
this and similar coverage raises many more questions and glaring
inconsistencies than answers. While it sounds like an outrageous claim,
one is left to inquire whether the Sandy Hook shooting ever took
place—at least in the way law enforcement authorities and the nation’s
news media have described.
The Accidental Medical Examiner
An especially important yet greatly underreported feature of the
Sandy Hook affair is the wholly bizarre performance of Connecticut’s top
medical examiner H. Wayne Carver II at a December 15 press conference.
Carver’s unusual remarks and behavior warrant close consideration
because in light of his professional notoriety they appear remarkably
amateurish and out of character.
H. Wayne Carver II has an extremely self-assured, almost swaggering
presence in Connecticut state administration. In early 2012 Carver
threatened to vacate his position because of state budget cuts and
streamlining measures that threatened his professional autonomy over the
projects and personnel he oversaw.
Along these lines the pathologist has gone to excessive lengths to
demonstrate his findings and expert opinion in court proceedings. For
example, in a famous criminal case Carver “put a euthanized pig through a
wood chipper so jurors could match striations on the bone fragments
with the few ounces of evidence that prosecutors said were on the
remains of the victim.”[4] One would therefore expect Carver to be in
his element while identifying and verifying the exact ways in which
Sandy Hook’s children and teachers met their violent demise.
Yet the H. Wayne Carver who showed up to the December 15 press
conference is an almost entirely different man, appearing apprehensive
and uncertain, as if he is at a significant remove from the postmortem
operation he had overseen. The multiple gaffes, discrepancies, and
hedges in response to reporters’ astute questions suggest that he is
either under coercion or an imposter. While the latter sounds untenable
it would go a long way in explaining his sub-pedestrian grasp of medical
procedures and terminology.
With this in mind extended excerpts from this exchange are worthy of
recounting here in print. Carver is accompanied by Connecticut State
Police Lieutenant H. Paul Vance and additional Connecticut State Police
personnel. The reporters are off-screen and thus unidentified so I have
assigned them simple numerical identification based on what can be
discerned of their voices.
More Unanswered Questions and Inconsistencies
In addition to Carver’s remarks several additional chronological and
evidentiary contradictions in the official version of the Sandy Hook
shooting are cause for serious consideration and leave doubt in terms of
how the event transpired vis-à-vis the way authorities and major media
outlets have presented it. It is now well known that early on
journalists reported that Adam Lanza’s brother Ryan Lanza was reported
to be the gunman, and that pistols were used in the shooting rather than
a rifle. Yet these are merely the tip of the iceberg.
When Did the Gunman Arrive?
After Adam Lanza fatally shot and killed his mother at his residence,
he drove himself to the elementary school campus, arriving one half
hour after classes had commenced. Dressed in black, Lanza proceeds
completely unnoticed through an oddly vacant parking lot with a military
style rifle and shoots his way through double glass doors and a brand
new yet apparently poorly engineered security system.
Further, initial press accounts suggest how no school personnel or students heard gunshots and no 911 calls are made until after Lanza begins firing inside
the facility. “It was a lovely day,” Sandy Hook fourth grade teacher
Theodore Varga said. And then, suddenly and unfathomably, gunshots rang
out. “I can’t even remember how many,” Varga said.[5]
The recollection contrasts sharply with an updated version of Lanza’s arrival where at 9:30AM hewalked up to the front entrance and fired at least a half dozen rounds
into the glass doors. The thunderous sound of Lanza blowing an opening
big enough to walk through the locked school door caused Principal Dawn
Hochsprung and school psychologist Mary Scherlach to bolt from a nearby
meeting room to investigate. He shot and killed them both as they ran
toward him.
Breaching the school’s security system in such a way would have
likely triggered some automatic alert of school personnel. Further, why
would the school’s administrators run toward an armed man who has just noisily blasted his way into the building?
Two other staff members attending the meeting with Hochsprung and
Scherlach sustained injuries “in the hail of bullets” but returned to
the aforementioned meeting room and managed a call to 911.[6] This
contrasted with earlier reports where the first 911 call claimed
students “were trapped in a classroom with the adult shooter who had two
guns.”[7] Recordings of the first police dispatch following the 911
call at 9:35:50 indicate that someone “thinks there’s someone shooting
in the building.”[8] There is a clear distinction between potentially
hearing shots somewhere in the building and being almost mortally caught
in a “hail of bullets.”
How did the gunman fire so many shots in such little time?
According to Dr. Carver and State Police, Lanza shot each victim
between 3 and 11 times during a 5 to 7 minute span. If one is to average
this out to 7 bullets per individual—excluding misses—Lanza shot 182
times, or once every two seconds. Yet according to the official story
Lanza was the sole assassin and armed with only one weapon. Thus if
misses and changing the gun’s 30-shot magazine at least 6 times are
added to the equation Lanza must have been averaging about one shot per
second—extremely skilled use of a single firearm for a young man with
absolutely no military training and who was on the verge of being
institutionalized. Still, an accurate rendering of the event is even
more difficult to arrive at because the chief medical examiner
admittedly has no idea exactly how the children were shot or whether a struggle ensued.
Where is the Photo and Video Evidence?
Photographic and video evidence is at once profuse yet lacking in
terms of its capacity to demonstrate that a mass shooting took place on
the scale described by authorities. For example, in an era of ubiquitous
video surveillance of public buildings especially no visual evidence of
Lanza’s violent entry has emerged. And while studio snapshots of the
Sandy Hook victims abound there is little if any eyewitness testimony of
anyone who’s observed the corpses except for Carver and his staff, and
they appear almost as confused about the conditions of the deceased as
any layperson watching televised coverage of the event. Nor are there
any routine eyewitness, photo or video evidence of the crime scene’s
aftermath—broken glass, blasted security locks and doors, bullet casings
and holes, bloodied walls and floors—all of which are common in such
investigations and reportage.
Why Were Medical Personnel Turned Away From the Crime Scene?
Oddly enough medical personnel are forced to set up their operation
not at the school where the dead and injured lay, but rather at the fire
station several hundred feet away. This flies in the face of standard
medical operating procedure where personnel are situated as close to the
scene as possible. There is no doubt that the school had ample room to
accommodate such personnel. Yet medical responders who rushed to Sandy
Hook Elementary upon receiving word of the tragedy were denied entry to
the school and forced to set up primary and secondary triages off school
grounds and wait for the injured to be brought to them.
Shortly after the shooting “as other ambulances from neighboring
communities rolled up, sirens blaring, the first responders slowly
realized that their training would be tragically underutilized on this
horrible day. ‘You may not be able to save everybody, but you damn well
try,’” 44 year old emergency medical technician James Wolff told NBC
News. “’And when (we) didn’t have the opportunity to put our skills into
action, it’s difficult.’”[9]
In light of this, who were the qualified medical practitioners
pronounced the 20 children and 7 adults dead? Who decided that none
could be revived? Carver and his staff are apparently the only medical
personnel to have attended to the victims—yet this was in the postmortem
conducted several hours later. Such slipshod handling of the crime
scene leaves the State of Connecticut open to a potential array of hefty
civil claims by families of the slain.
Did a mass evacuation of the school take place?
Sandy Hook Elementary is attended by 600 students. Yet there is no
photographic or video evidence of an evacuation on this scale. Instead,
limited video and photographic imagery suggest that a limited evacuation
of perhaps at most several dozen students occurred.
A highly circulated photo depicts students walking in a single file
formation with their hands on each others’ shoulders and eyes shut. Yet
this was the image of a drill that took place prior to the event
itself.[10. See Correction] Most other photos are portraits of
individual children. Despite aerial video footage of the event
documenting law enforcement scouring the scene and apprehending one or
more suspects in the wooded area nearby the school,[11] there is no such
evidence that a mass exodus of children from the school transpired once
law enforcement pronounced Sandy Hook secure. Nor are there videos or
photos of several hundred students and their parents at the
oft-referenced fire station nearby where students were routed for parent
pick up.
Sound Bite Prism and the Will to Believe
Outside of a handful of citizen journalists and alternative media
commentators Sandy Hook’s dramatically shifting factual and
circumstantial terrain has escaped serious critique because it is
presented through major media’s carefully constructed prism of select
sound bites alongside a widespread and longstanding cultural impulse to
accept the pronouncements of experts, be they bemused physicians, high
ranking law enforcement officers, or political leaders demonstrating
emotionally-grounded concern.
Political scientist W. Lance Bennett calls this the news media’s
“authority-disorder bias.” “Whether the world is returned to a safe,
normal place,” Bennett writes, “or whether the very idea of a normal
world is called into question, the news is preoccupied with order, along
with related questions of whether authorities are capable of
establishing or restoring it.”[12]
Despite Carver’s bizarre performance and law enforcement authorities’
inability to settle on and relay simple facts, media management’s
impulse to assure audiences and readerships of the Newtown community’s
inevitable adjustment to its trauma and loss with the aid of the
government’s protective oversight—however incompetent that may be—far
surpasses a willingness to undermine this now almost universal news
media narrative with messy questions and suggestions of intrigue. This
well-worn script is one the public has been conditioned to accept. If
few people relied on such media to develop their world view this would
hardly be a concern. Yet this is regrettably not the case.
The Sandy Hook tragedy was on a far larger scale than the past year’s
numerous slaughters, including the Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting and
the Batman theater shooting in Colorado. It also included glaringly
illogical exercises and pronouncements by authorities alongside
remarkably unusual evidentiary fissures indistinguishable by an American
political imagination cultivated to believe that the corporate,
government and military’s sophisticated system of organized crime is
largely confined to Hollywood-style storylines while really existing
malfeasance and crises are without exception returned to normalcy.
If recent history is a prelude the likelihood of citizens
collectively assessing and questioning Sandy Hook is limited even given
the event’s overtly superficial trappings. While the incident is
ostensibly being handled by Connecticut law enforcement, early reports
indicate how federal authorities were on the scene as the 911 call was
received. Regardless of where one stands on the Second Amendment and gun
control, it is not unreasonable to suggest the Obama administration
complicity or direct oversight of an incident that has in very short
order sparked a national debate on the very topic—and not coincidentally
remains a key piece of Obama’s political platform.
The move to railroad this program through with the aid of major media
and an irrefutable barrage of children’s portraits, “heartfelt”
platitudes and ostensible tears neutralizes a quest for genuine
evidence, reasoned observation and in the case of Newtown honest and
responsible law enforcement. Moreover, to suggest that Obama is not
capable of deploying such techniques to achieve political ends is to
similarly place ones faith in image and interpretation above substance
and established fact, the exact inclination that in sum has brought
America to such an impasse. Addendum: It is readily apparent that the FULL TRUTH of Sandy Hook is being hidden and changed to fit TPTB agenda.
That Agenda is crystal clear.
To rob by deception the American people of their inherent rights set forth in the United States Constitution. Make No Mistakes
