May 1, 2015: The day we said NO MORE COVER-UPS

Six Baltimore officers have been indicted in the murder of Freddie Gray.

We now know that the ostensible charge for the arrest was bogus. Gray was not carrying a switchblade, despite the false report we originally heard. He had a perfectly legal folding knife -- a "pen knife," under Maryland law -- similar to my own "every day carry."

The cops probably thought that if they just killed the guy, nobody would notice that the bust was bad. The fix was in.

It took nothing less than an insurrection to un-fix the fix. Right now, this minute, you can feel the relief in the air. Even the cops, I suspect, are glad to have the truth out.

Yes, what those six officers did to Freddie Gray was infuriating -- but at least there will be no transparently phony cover-up, as there was in New York and Ferguson.

God knows they tried to peddle lies. A couple of days ago, the WP published an absurd piece which attempted to convince us that Freddie Gray had somehow broken his own spine, much as the Joker did in The Dark Knight Returns. That report derived from the testimony of a young man who shared that fateful paddy wagon ride with Gray. This "earwitness" could not actually see Gray, due to a wall between the two, but he heard banging sounds.

We now have a more accurate account from the man in the van, Donta Allen:

“The second prisoner who was picked up said that he didn’t see any harm done to Freddie at all,” Commissioner Anthony Batts said. “What he has said is that he heard Freddie thrashing about.”

But Allen wants to set something straight.

“All I did was go straight to the station, but I heard a little banging like he was banging his head,” he said.

He tells WJZ he’s angry about an internal police report published in The Washington Post.

“And they trying to make it seem like I told them that, I made it like Freddie Gray did that to hisself (sic),” Allen said. “Why the [expletive] would he do that to hisself (sic)?”

Allen was in the van because he allegedly stole a cigarette from a store on North Avenue.

He was never charged. Instead he was brought straight to the station.

“I talked to homicide. I told homicide the same story.” Allen said.

A story he says is being distorted and now he fears being killed.

“I had two options today right, either come and talk to y’all and get my credibility straight with ya’ll and not get killed by these [expletive] or not tell a true story,” Allen added. “The only reason I’m doing this is because they put my name in a bad state.”

We know that the van did not go straight to the police station, which was located not far from the site of the arrest, but instead made a bizarre, circuitous journey through the city. The van made several inexplicable stops. I suspect that, during one of those stops, one of the cops got into the compartment with Freddie Gray. Either that, or the cops picked up someone who would "explain" things to Gray in a particularly brutal fashion. Or maybe the ride itself sufficed.

I'm trying to come up with a word to describe what these officers did. The first word that comes to mind is "thugs."

The only thing more horrible than what happened to Gray is what the authorities tried to do to the truth -- to the very concept of truth.

Although I personally despise violence, although I believe that violence must always be the last resort, do not count me among those who say violence never solved anything. In this case, mob violence -- and the threat of worse violence to come -- forced the authorities to stop lying. Had there been no insurrection, the Big Lie would have prevailed.

This entire country is being lied to every day -- by all levels of government, by politicians from both parties, by academics and historians, by our mainstream media, and even by much of the alternative media. We live in a culture built on falsehood. Perhaps the only way to dismantle that culture is for all Americans to emulate the brave young fighters of Baltimore.

Speaking of hidden truths: I hope you've all seen this important story in Mother Jones. I said from the first that there was no reason for a small army of cops in riot gear to be in that neighborhood. We now know that the police overreacted to a false story which some unknown party decided to spread around via Faceboook. So a cohort of centurions showed up where they could do absolutely no good -- and then they stupidly made it impossible for kids coming out of high school to disperse and go home. What a goatfuck!

If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd say that someone wanted to stir up trouble.