conniption wrote:Special Report on the Boston Marathon: The Curious Case of the Man Who Could Only Sit Down, Part 3
May 14, 2013
Since McGowan's article and its attendant updates are slowly assuming iconic status with regard to the alleged fakery of the bombing, it might be fun to examine it for any scraps of truth or - more likely - the uncomely obverse.
I don't really see any good reason to forsake posting of the images in the article here on the forum. In fact it seems to be simply a way of hiding evidence, rather than preserving some element of propriety, or dignity, or absence of the gore-factor. If the more sensitive or traumatized need a warning to look away: here it is.
As an overview and a method of understanding the brevity of the time duration we're looking at, here again is the scene seconds after the detonation, taken from a window above the scene, animated into a gif:
Now to take the plunge...
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.
Here is the image:
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?
Does anyone else see the problems with this line of questioning? Firstly, do you see in any of the photos of the aftermath images of photographers walking around and snapping shots? Why not? It would seem pretty evident that very few photographers actually felt compelled to stroll into the devastation and record the events on the ground. In fact, from the perspective of this image, the photographer who took the picture was likely standing on the curb, or just outside of the lathing fence, and so our point of view is limited to that. The reason we have more shots of Jeff is that the photographer or photographers on the scene were attempting to stay out of the way of the responders rather than wandering past the police and into the bloody mess, and Jeff's position was closer and less obstructed. It might seem odd to McGowan that no one was hovering in for tight close ups of the gore, but then maybe he's a seasoned war-theater photographer fully acclimated to getting in the way of emergency personnel to capture the money shot, because he can't seem to imagine being asked to get out of the way by police at the scene of a horrific emergency.
I'd like you to notice something else about the format of McGowan's paragraph above, a stylistic thread that runs through these articles: the sheer number of question marks. His tactic here is to ask as many questions as possible without making any attempt to answer them directly himself. This serves several purposes:
- It removes his responsibility as a journalist to make sense of what he is seeing in a logical way,
- It allows him to posit smug and bizarre notions into the stream of his article without accountability (e.g., "hollowed out leg guy", "prosthetics and make-up", etc.),
- The sheer number prevents the reader from working through the various and ridiculous assumptions and characterizations as they present, tacitly accepting them as de facto in order to proceed through the text,
- These unexamined givens, provided entirely en passant, inculcates in the reader a sense of common purpose with McGowan, the sense that the reader is privy to a viewpoint unavailable to the sheeple, and special.
In other words, he is using rhetorical techniques of demagoguery and propaganda to create an air of conspiratorial inclusion and thought-stopping confusion.
Onward!
What is up, by the way, with the strawberry blond gal in the red top?
The strawberry blond "gal". Notice the workmanlike fashion in which each victim is not simply depersonalized, but actually deeply ridiculed by McGowan throughout the essay. What purpose does this serve, except to work upon the readers' judgement of the victims personalities and denigrate them hand-in-hand with the writer? Any sense of journalistic objectivity is long gone here. Guys and gals...
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.
Let's consider for a moment the nature of the alleged "bomb" the effects of which are under examination here. The pressure cookers were filled with BB's and carpenter nails. So if you were in the right place, your legs might be riddled with BB's or nails and all an observer might notice would be a very small series of rents in the fabric of your pants. And it's entirely possible that this is what happened to the woman in the picture. As well, this picture is taken perhaps one or two minutes after the explosion of a bomb which by many accounts left nearly everyone in the blast radius with hearing damage. This woman is not "unfazed", she is dazed, deafened, wounded, and in shock. But of course if you live in Dave McGowan's reality, this should be no impediment to hopping right up and going about your business.
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?"
Another unexamined assumption. A real investigator might try and find other pictures of this man, and set them into a coherent timeline. He might have been photographed while in that position for an instant as he went about trying to help people. Shutter speeds are notoriously fast.
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!
Four questions here, interspersed with ridicule and assumptions designed to make the reader actively despise the victims. Notice, though, the difference between Krystle Campbell's wounds and those of Jeff Bauman. Her leg is blown off at the upper thigh, severing the femoral artery high in the leg. The femoral at that position in an adult is nearly an inch-thick pipe of pumping blood, so it's no wonder that she quickly bled out. Look:
Her leg is blown off nearly at the hip. The difference in the wounds is obvious - and yet McGowan is somehow unable to see that.
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?
Examine the photos of the "frail old runner" for yourself. He is in the neighborhood of forty or fifty feet from the explosion, and shielded by the bodies of those persons standing at the curb:
Apparently the photos and videos of the "frail old runner" and his position vis-avis the bomb are unavailable to McGowan. BTW, his name is Bill Iffrig, but McGowan can't let you know this, as it would tend to personalize the man, making it marginally less likely that you might be inclined to mockingly dismiss anything about him or the larger issues at hand.
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?
This is simply wrong, of course.
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.
Please try and examine McGowan's ideas here objectively. In the blurry and rotated photo, Karen Rand is laying on her back and unconscious. Yes, she looks a bit different, as you might expect.
Skipping through the remarkable idea that Jeff Bauman has told several versions of his story, we come to this...
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.
I would direct you to the .gif I posted above, in which you can clearly see Bauman prop himself onto his elbow.
And where exactly was the "rubble"? I've reviewed a lot of images and I have yet to see anything resembling rubble.
Incredibly, McGowan doesn't see rubble in the very picture he posted himself at the top of the article:
Can you see it? Because I see rubble. Lots of it. But maybe McGowan's notions of rubble require large boulders of destroyed masonry work laying about in piles.
There's lots more of this nonsense. I could go on like this for hours, but I have some things to do, so I have to call "time".
EDITED TO FIX SOME TYPOS.
Forgot to mention that here, although I did cop to it in the Boston Thread already.
