The Faked Assault on the Holocaust Museum

In the United States government-sponsored psychological operation designed to simulate an antisemitic terrorist attack by a lone-wolf gunman on the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., a mistake in the narrative planning was made so fundamental and basic that no amount of amending or eliding to the record will correct it.

The only visual proof of the attack publically released to date are several images of a bullet-scared glass entrance door, the location where a gunman who was approaching the museum building, met a security guard stationed inside, who held the door open for him in welcome. At this close range, the gunman fatally shot the guard, and he fell just inside the door. The gunman was then himself shot by other armed security guards who were present, and the gunman fell wounded just outside the door.

This encounter is said to have bought enough time to mount a response, which prevented the intruder from accomplishing his apparent terroristic goal of causing maximum causalities. By taking a bullet in this fashion, the African-American guard has been lionized a hero, especially by the Jewish custodians of a holocaust memory housed there.

It is up to police and law enforcement professionals to determine the proofs of forensic evidence---establishing the trajectory of a bullet, for instance---and then release it to a supposedly skeptical media, where it filters into the court of public opinion. Ultimately, a court of law makes a decree---and afterward, everybody in a nation of laws accepts it.

It is not up to me to question this visual evidence---noting its contradictions and implausibilities. The ground beneath the record can shift---first reports indicated five shots were fired, later dispatches report eleven shots. Were I to make a legitimate point, I only do the work of those people tasked with manipulating the public record, which is actually quite a malleable thing---the "public" part being only a matter of perception. Operators can suppress and alter "published" sources to a degree honest people find hard to imagine---despite having read George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984. Who "wants" to believe in dystopia?

If a man holds a door open for another man, and is shot at the threshold in the process, he could fall wounded inside. Then while the door is still open, the attacker could get shot, and fall backwards outside. Then the door could close, and be pierced by five subsequent bullet shots, but that would take at least seven shots.

Some of the five bullet holes in the glass may have come from the same shot which wounded the assailant, but only if he was hit first while inside, with the bullet continuing on through a closed door, but he would have to open it and stagger outside first to fall---and no report states anything like that. A report could suddenly appear though, which is why the plausible deniability of a compliant bureaucracy in cahoots with amoral media leaves us shaking our heads.

If the multiple reports of five shots being fired were to hold up, then it wouldn't fit the evidence we have of five bullet holes in glass doors separating two men with bullet holes.

One thing I can state with complete assurance: A security guard who holds a door open to allow someone carrying a rifle to enter is never a hero, even if he takes a bullet that buys enough time to save lives. That would be called two things: a bored, distracted, menial worker of a type we all know, combined with an accident of fate.

It is also less than a substitute for what could have been an heroic scenario completely in sync with the established visual evidence:

Imagine a gunman on a mission, walking up to the entrance of a fraught facility. An alert security guard inside the door sees him coming, and has time to draw his handgun, but it doesn't stop the assailant, who is on a mission. As he pulls on the door to open it, the guard refuses to yield. He yanks on the door and a struggle ensues. Either of them could be the one to shoot first ---either in assault or defense---but the image of the guard physically holding the doors shut, as the frustrated gunman fires through the glass and kills him, is the more heroic.

When I was 15 and 16 years old, I was a dishwasher and busboy at Nero's Cactus Canyon and Silver Slipper, a restaurant and nightclub in suburban Nashville, Tennessee that had a one-man band and a postage-stamp dance floor. Despite the sound of that, it was the top place in the city of its kind, with cocktail waitresses dressed in long gowns, and an annual blow-out night after the Tennessee-Vanderbilt football game. One Halloween, everyone who worked there got dressed up in costume for the evening. Although a work shift, given all the festivities, the staff was allowed to join in and start drinking. Two old-school African-Americans---a grillman, and a waiter, got into a fight in the kitchen over a woman, and a disturbance ensued.

I was standing near the bar when the waiter tore past me, stalked by the man marching in deliberate rage and carrying a big knife. The waiter dashed through the front door of the dining room and out into the parking lot, with his assailant right behind. But then, just as quickly, the waiter popped back in an adjoining door to the Silver Slipper bar. A pretty little blond secretary who worked in the office was sitting in a booth up front. Sensing a call to action I was oblivious too, she popped up just in time to grab the door from the inside and hold it, even against the man's far superior strength.

Dressed up as Scarlet O'Hara in a real hoop skirt, the memory of the sight of her, with the skirt's hoops bouncing up in the back from the force of her exertions, is so crystal clear in my memory that I know I was given a gift of something real back then, with which to compare something unreal now. Nearly 40 years later, seeing images of white people, and black people, and Jewish people acting in ways that are so patently unreal, fills me with eternal anguish.

The Day of the Living Dead

This is not about making Jews the fall guys in some battle between good and evil. We are only proxies here anyway. But this sad rerun of a failed Shakespearean sit-com known as 9/11---staged assaults against police, abortion providers, and a Jew's internal sense of safety---isn't working and has to stop. As a life-long liberal, I am angered to see the right-wing set up this way. If an ideology is to fail it should do so on its own demerits, not because somebody turned a dial up somewhere. And if the right-wing could be made to take a fall, it could be the Jews who were getting set up here too---just at a higher level.

In the closest I've come to live blogging, yesterday I made an editorial aside. Having theorized the day before that the African-American victim of the Holocaust Museum shooting, Stephen Tyrone Johns, was a part of a conspiracy, and was in fact, alive, I'd suggested I could be proven wrong by an open-casket funeral the next day, and this is my description of what followed:

In the Washington Post coverage of Johns' funeral, Museum Shooting Victim Remembered at Funeral, Hundreds Gather to Honor Slain Guard in Fort Washington Ceremony, by Washington Post staff writers Keith L. Alexander and Hamil R. Harris, posted online at 2:24pm, today, June 19, 2009, the article explicitly states Johns' was an open-casket funeral:

"At 9 a.m. mourners were allowed in to view the body, walking up to two security guards posted on both sides of the open casket. Leading the mourners were Johns's fellow security officers from Wackenhut security firm. Several officers saluted the casket as they walked by.

Johns was dressed in a cream linen suit, a toy butterfly on the pillow next to him. A recording of local recording artist Jeff Majors's "Psalm 23" was played as mourners streamed in to view the body."

But an accompanying video by Anna Uhls of WaPo, Slain Holocaust Museum Guard Mourned in Md, reports matters slightly differently. The journalist giving the on-camera report was unnamed, but he was a young African-American with a disarming speech impediment that could sometimes get in the way of his report. He said that

"people gathered here as early as seven-thirty this morning to pay tribute to Officer Johns', who lost his life at the Holocaust Museum, when a White Supremacist [oops] walked in and shot him in the stomach---after Officer Johns' opened the door for him.

"Johns' casket was brought in by National Guard, and put at the alter of the church, um, and the first few persons who were able to see him---obviously besides his family---were his co-workers at the Holocaust Museum.

"A lot of the people I talked with, strangely enough, didn't even know officer Johns. They came out to show their support for him and his family."

He says this while the camera pans a shot of crowds of well-dressed professional white people who are seen disembarking off tour buses, which helped to fill the 3000-seat church auditorium.

A single comment posted to the article, by someone with the nic LiveontheHill says:

"Mr. Alexander - don't quit your writing job. TV is not for you."

So it seems Mr. LiveontheHill may actually be DeadBetweentheEars, as he completely misses the subtle distinctions between Mr. Alexander's written reporting and that which he lisps. I didn't miss it. The truth in what Mr. Alexander says is quite clear, and I commend him on his efforts. Revealed are some of the parameters of how things work in the real world. Now: we shall return to our regularly scheduled programing...

Within hours, the video online was radically different, recut so almost to complete eliminate the reporter, Mr. Alexander, and filled up instead with disconnected segments showing the talking heads of white and black living dead.

This is just how the errant bits of our perceptions could formerly be nipped in the bud before being fully transmitted to our group consciousness. Sometimes a swell could swamp a boat, but usually the bucket brigades keep things afloat. Now with the internet, and after the hubris of 9/11, we're all up a creek without a paddle.

I knew this would be the result as I live blogged it but still it came as a surprise. I thought briefly about finding a less transparent style of working but there isn't one. I've found one piece of evidence that Johns' was not an open-casket funeral. A report at WTOP Federal News Radio said

Shortly before the funeral, mourners filed past Johns' body in a large wooden casket topped with an enormous bouquet of cream and blue roses. The casket was flanked on either side by a security guard from Wackenhut Services Inc., the contractor Johns worked for during his six years as a security guard at the museum. Several family members sobbed loudly as they walked past to pay their final respects.

It's hard to top an open casket with an enormous display of flowers. I think I have a safe cache of the page, but you never know. Internet technology seems designed for just these sorts of purposes.


Thomas Jefferson's famous quote, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants---it is it's natural manure," is from a letter he wrote to William Smith, dated, Paris Nov. 13. 1787. A more extended version of Jefferson's quote reads

"...the British ministry have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, & what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves. Yet where does this anarchy exist? Where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusetts? And can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honorably conducted? I say nothing of it's motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, & always, well informed. The past which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive; if they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13 states independent 11 years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century & a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century & half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it's natural manure."

So, the buying off of the press by politicians was old news already in 1787, was it? Well, somebody should have told me. The record of a record has now been cracked open sufficiently enough that there is no way they can stuff the entrails back into that rotting corpse.