Orlando / Pulse Mass Shooting Thread

[Elihu]

Didn't they used to put up yellow tape and draw chalk circles around bodies and shell casings? When something goes down in a public street they still do that don't they? I mean for the trial n all. That would pretty much settle it wouldn't it?

Btw, as the story broke I flipped the channel so I wouldn't vomit on Charlie rose. As the story goes did the perp off himself or did our heroes gun him down? Just curious.

[Karmamatterz]

As to who was injured or killed by friendly fire could easily be determined by ballistics testing. Doubtful that will happen.

The bit about recognizing, or not, the perp, well some said they had seen him there before. So it's not like people don't remember him. Just because it's dark and a club doesn't mean you can't remember what someone looks like.

[SonicG]

You can view lots of pictures of the inside of the killer's home in the media, for example here: http://metro.co.uk/2016/06/14/inside-th ... n-5943716/

I remember with the San Bardino shootings it was so strange how the media had acces to the home and so soon after the attacks. But some time has passed since and i'm wondering if that's considered normal now? What do you good people think?

Wow! Amazed also again here too...I guess that rumor of a robbery at his house while he was out was not true...
And I see that there were now various 911 calls...

During his rampage, Mateen placed a series of calls to 911 to pledge loyalty to the leader of Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
He also claimed solidarity in those calls with the Chechen brothers who carried out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and with a Palestinian-American who became a suicide bomber in Syria for the al Qaeda offshoot known as the Nusra Front, authorities said.

And the wife might be charged as an accomplice for dropping him off (!?), which would explain things in that he was dropped off right in front of the club and was able to slip because the cop was a bit off the door maybe...Also, the going to gay clubs and using Grindr etc. are being put down to "scouting locations"...which sounds right but how long back do those reports go?

[82_28]

Fuck you, Elihu for making a good point. Indeed, very good question. There is a lot to monitor right now as far as the media "coverage".

[seemslikeadream]

wow busy thread this morning

What the FBI Was Doing Instead of Catching the Orlando Shooter
by AntiMedia.org, June 15, 2016

After the most recent mass shooting in Orlando, Florida – the worst in U.S. history – one might ask how the FBI was able to investigate the perpetrator, twice, without deciding to take any further action. This question is further confounded by the fact the perpetrator was, according to his wife, an abusive, unstable man suffering from bipolar disorder.

A more appropriate question would be: what is the role of the FBI in counter-terror operations? How were they not able to prevent this incident, despite “preventing” hundreds of high profile incidents prior to this?

Out of the 508 terrorism-related cases since September 11, 2001, more often than not, the FBI has had a hand in creating the very terrorist threat they have claimed to be protecting us from. Two-hundred and forty-three of these cases involved an FBI informant. In many instances, the targets of these operations, who are later accused of plotting attacks, are not only almost always Muslim, but they are also often suffering from a mental illness, such as schizophrenia. Moreover, the targets are also vulnerable and easily susceptible to bribery as they are desperate for money – so desperate, it seems, they will help put their own friends behind bars.

This can be seen most clearly in the Newburgh Four case, which saw a combination of mental illness and an urgent need for money. One of the “Four,” James Cromitie, was a former drug addict who repeatedly tried to back out, saying “I don’t want anyone to get hurt.” In the words of a U.S. Court Judge, “only the government could have made a “terrorist” out of Mr. Cromitie.”

Another defendant in the Newburgh case, Laguerre Payan, suffered from schizophrenia to the extent he kept bottles of urine in his apartment. David Williams, another of the four, had a brother who needed a liver transplant, and he was prepared to do almost anything for the money to pay for it.

The FBI chooses the most vulnerable members of society and then coaxes a relationship between the target and an “informant,” who helps instigate the terrorist activity. There is, generally speaking, no evidence the targets would have engaged in such activity had it not been for the FBI.

The case of Rezwan Ferdaus involved a man who suffered from severe depression and seizures and had to wear adult diapers for lack of bladder control. An FBI agent told the target’s own father Ferdaus was “obviously” mentally ill. Yet Ferdaus became a target of these FBI operations: he had plans to carry out an attack on a massive scale on Capitol Hill, which the FBI could then “save” the public from – relishing in all their glory.

However, prior to this engagement with the FBI, there was, again, no evidence Ferdaus would have ever engaged in any criminal or terrorist activity. Ferdaus’ attorney argued he had repeatedly tried to back out of this activity.

In another case, this time linked to an individual reportedly inspired by the Boston bombing, it was the target’s own father who alerted the authorities of his son’s behavior; his son had created a Facebook page expressing his support for ISIS. He, too, had a long history of mental illness. The FBI evidently saw this as a great opportunity to advance their agenda and provided him with two rifles and a handgun – despite the fact he had previously expressed a desire to fight for ISIS.

Informants are also vulnerable targets of these FBI operations and usually, do the “dirty work” of the FBI in exchange for softer punishment in their own previous prosecutions. In addition, they often do it for money – or a combination of the two. An FBI informant can earn approximately $100,000 or more for a single case.

The culmination of the extent of the FBI’s interference can be seen most clearly in the infamous case of Sami Osmakac. The FBI provided the weapons he used in his propaganda videos, paid the informant who instigated his behavior, provided and assembled the car bomb he was supposedly going to detonate, and even paid his transport costs to get him exactly where the FBI wanted him to go.

This is a man who had no links to any terrorist groups, had no weapons, and could barely afford a new car battery for his 1994 Honda Accord. The FBI squad supervisor, Richard Worms, referred to Osmakac as a “retarded fool” who didn’t have a “pot to piss in.”

Osmakac’s own family stated he had become paranoid, delusional, and pale, and that he would sleep on the floor, complaining about nightmares in which he was burning in hell.

He was later diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder by a court-appointed psychologist.

If these people need help, why can’t the authorities provide it to them? Why prey on them, further radicalize them, and provide them with supplies and weaponry that put the wider public at risk – only to lock them away for decades for a crime they would not have otherwise committed?

The answer is simple. In the words of former FBI Assistant Director, Thomas Fuentes:

“If you’re submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency, for an intelligence agency, you’re not going to submit the proposal that ‘We won the war on terror and everything’s great,’ cuz the first thing that’s gonna happen is your budget’s gonna be cut in half. You know, it’s my opposite of Jesse Jackson’s ‘Keep Hope Alive’ – it’s ‘Keep Fear Alive.’ Keep it alive.”

[82_28]

One thing is is that this is highly existentally problematic. It covers all the bases. FUD. Fear Uncertainty and Doubt. With an additional extreme sadness.

I'm trying to think of some book I read in my teens. I'll post it once I remember it. I think it was by Alan Watts.

[82_28]

I read so many of Watts' books so I am not totally sure.

But I wanna say it was his The Meaning of Happiness upon my searches.

[stickdog99]

I'm now inclined to believe that the guy was just another patsy.

He had problems. He was at the club. He was Muslim. He may have even taken some hostages, But somebody made some 911 calls for him, then made sure he and all of the people around him ended up dead in a firefight.

What actual evidence to the contrary has been presented to date?

[Burnt Hill]

^^Maybe it's Omar Mateen's son. (His wife is being fed to the press as we speak.)

Reports are circulating that it was a Radical Islamic alligator.

[stickdog99]

Why are all these pictures with the Bernie Sanders doctor so damn creepy?

Back inside the club, the three friends reunited and then sought shelter with some other men in a handicapped bathroom stall.

Mateen was quick to follow the victims into the bathroom though, and started unleashing a barrage of bullets - striking the man that had closed the door to their stall.

'We were all scrambling around in the bathroom, screaming at the top of our lungs,' Carter recalled.

It was when Mateen stopped and left that she realized that she had been hit in the leg, and that her friends were shot too

"At that point we knew that this wasn't a game. This was very real and this was something that was really happening to us right now. It was a shock. We went from having the time of our lives to the worst night of our lives all within a matter of minutes,'"

Carter says Mateen did eventually return to their stall and that they feared he was going to shoot them again. But this time he called out and asked if there were any black people hiding behind the doors.

Carter was too afraid to respond, but another black person did, giving an affirmative. Surprisingly, that caused Mateen to put away his weapon.

'I don't have a problem with black people,' Mateen reportedly said. 'This is about my country. You guys suffered enough.'

The notion that he 'didn't have a problem with blacks' is, however, contradicted by the fact that he had already shot a number of them that night and statements from ex-colleagues who said he was openly racist and continually making derogatory remarks about blacks and hispanics.

Carter says she also heard some of Mateen's phone conversations with police during the three-hour stand-off, recalling that he spoke in Arabic at a certain point, pledged an allegiance to ISIS and said he was carrying out the shooting to stop America from bombing his country. Mateen was born in New York and is a U.S. citizen, but both of his parents immigrated to the country from Afghanistan.

The whole thing reads like really bad fan fiction. What happened to the guy in the stall who got shot? Was this a male, female or unisex bathroom? What motivated Mateen to hang out in the bathroom talking to the 911 operators on his cell phone knowing he had an audience of people, one of whom said he or she (which?) was black without knowing whether this would enrage or pacify the gunman? What happened to Mateen and the people hiding in the stall when the SWAT team stormed the nightclub?

And was this an under 21 club is is this just another case of bouncer failure?

[NaturalMystik]

Reports are circulating that it was a Radical Islamic alligator.

^^

[stickdog99]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/14/us/orlando-shooting.html

As officials offered new details about the worst mass shooting in American history, which left 49 people dead and 53 wounded, Chief John Mina of the Orlando Police Department said that the gunman, Omar Mateen, 29, told police negotiators — falsely, they later discovered — that he had explosives and accomplices at Pulse nightclub.

Mr. Mateen eventually made comments persuading them that “there would be an imminent loss of life,” Chief Mina said, prompting the chief to end a three-hour standoff and order the assault that killed Mr. Mateen and freed dozens of people trapped in the club.

An "imminent loss of life"? I thought this guy was supposed to have shot and reshot and reshot again scored of people before the police finally came to the rescue.

Chief Mina said that an off-duty officer who had been working at Pulse responded to shots fired at about 2 a.m. Sunday. Additional officers rushed to the scene, he said, and entered the nightclub, where they engaged in a gun battle with Mr. Mateen, forcing him to retreat to a bathroom where officers believed he had four to five hostages. About 15 to 20 people were in another bathroom.

“At that time we were able to save and rescue dozens and dozens of people and get them out of the club,” Chief Mina said. A SWAT team was called and took up positions in a bathroom across from where Mr. Mateen had taken cover.

From that point, “it kind of stabilized and the suspect had barricaded himself in the bathroom,” and there was no shooting during the subsequent standoff, the chief said. Mr. Mateen called 911, beginning a series of calls and conversations with the police, in which he declared allegiance to the Islamic State, the terrorist group that has taken over parts of Syria, Iraq and Libya. The attackers who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., in December also stated their allegiance to the group.

“He was cool and calm when he was making those phone calls to us,” Chief Mina said. “We had a team of crisis negotiators that did talk to the suspect, just trying to get as much information as possible, and they focused on what they could do to resolve the situation.”

But, he added, “he really wasn’t asking for a lot and we were doing most of the asking.” Asked about reports that Mr. Mateen was laughing or celebrating, the chief said there was no sign of that in the phone conversations.

“There was talk about bomb vests, about explosives, throughout,” and eventually “there were statements made about imminent loss of life.”

Law enforcement officials decided to mount an assault on the club, but an explosive placed on the wall did not penetrate completely, so officers used an armored vehicle to punch a hole about two feet off the ground, allowing hostages to flee, the chief said. Mr. Mateen also came through the breach in the wall, Chief Mina said, and was killed in a shootout with the police.

When asked during the news conference if there was a chance that people might have been struck by friendly fire or in the crossfire, Chief Mina said: “I will say that is all part of the investigation. But I will say when our SWAT officers, about eight or nine officers, opened fire, their backdrop was a concrete wall. And they were being fired upon, so that is all part of the investigation.”

At hospitals and gathering spots nearby, relatives and friends of the clubgoers who remained unaccounted for began to lose hope that their loved ones had somehow survived. And those who had already learned that their loved ones had died began to plan for funerals.

“I cannot imagine being one of the parents or knowing your loved one may be among the deceased and waiting to find out,” Mr. Dyer said. The authorities adjusted the death toll on Monday, saying that the 50 people killed included the gunman. Orlando Health, which has a network of medical facilities in the area, said 43 victims remained in the hospital, including six who would undergo operations on Monday.

Investigators continued on Monday to scour the crime scene for evidence and piece together the gunman’s motive. Thirty victim witness specialists and crime reconstruction experts were on the scene, F.B.I. officials said.

[American Dream]

http://www.madcowprod.com/2016/06/13/or ... cia-asset/

ORLANDO SHOOTING DAD A LONGTIME CIA ASSET

Posted on June 13, 2016 by Daniel Hopsicker

The father of the man who slaughtered 50 people in the Orlando nightclub shooting Saturday night is a longtime CIA asset, whose TV show receives funding from the Voice of America -Dari. Pictured below is Seddique Mateen with California Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher



Rohrabacher was initially elected to Congress in 1988, with the fundraising help of friend Oliver North. Rohrabacher’s decades-long involvement in “all things Afghan” eventually earned him the nickname “Gunga Dana.” Today he chairs the United States House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia and Emerging Threats.

This morning President Obama called him a “home-grown” terrorist. In a series of phone interviews Monday morning, Donald Trump responded that “there’s something going on” with the President’s reaction to the Orlando shooting.

I guess even a stopped clock is right twice a day.


“It’s like calling Blackwater XE”

Orlando shooter Omar Mateen’s father said his son was not motivated by Islamist radical ideology, but in a Facebook video posted early Monday he said, “God himself will punish those involved in homosexuality.”

My own suspicion was first awakened on Monday morning when U.S. news outlets uniformly reported that the father’s TV show aired on “a U.S.-based Afghan satellite channel.”



That sort of circumlocution is typical when something is being hidden which the corporate media prefers we not ask questions about.

The name of the nameless Afghan satellite channel, Payam Afghan, is said to be widely-known in Southwest Asia as a CIA-Pakistani ISI construct, as this picture from Flicker shows.

The identification of shooter Omar Mateen also involved deception. He was said to work for a security company called G4S, which few have ever heard of. However, “G4S” is merely a re-branded “Wackenhut Corporation,” a name with a storied reputation for scandal in the U.S. and around the world.

Rohrabacher has stated that he sees radical Islam as the source of a major terrorist threat to the U.S. Calls to his office today to request comment on whether he views CIA assets relocated in the U.S. as a terrorist threat have not been returned.

[Wombaticus Rex]

NYT timeline / summary with many infographics and maps
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016 ... .html?_r=0

[Nordic]

Why are all these pictures with the Bernie Sanders doctor so damn creepy?

In the closer shots he looks more like Richard Dreyfuss.

I think the cops were responsible for a great deal of the deaths. But we'll never know because they will never ever release the ballistics tests on the bodies that shows this.