The San Bernardino Massacre Mystery

Ever since the despicable Alex Jonesians starting spewing hooey about "crisis actors" at Sandy Hook, I have hesitated to discuss oddball claims involving mass shootings. Whenever these events happen, the most repellent elements of the conspiratard subculture shriek for attention.

But the San Bernardino tragedy has given rise to some genuine enigmas, so I have decided to take the risk of venturing into WeirdoLand.

We've all heard that only two people committed this crime -- Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik. But now we learn of a third man, a next-door neighbor named Enrique Marquez, described as "a long-time friend and former neighbor of gunman Syed Rizwan Farook."

Investigators have said Marquez bought the two assault rifles three years ago that wound up being used in the shooting.

Officials say Marquez has told them he did it as a favor, so that Farook would not have to go through a background check or be on record as the purchaser. Authorities say Marquez has told the FBI that he and Farook talked about conducting some kind of attack in 2010 but called it off after unrelated terrorism arrests in southern California.

An LAT story says that Farook introduced Marquez to Islam. Marquez is 24, so he would have been just 19 in 2010. This neighbor was a small, geeky guy with big glasses who hoped to join the Navy despite his jihadist beliefs.

According to the affidavit, the two met a decade ago when Marquez moved to Riverside. Farook introduced Marquez, his next-door neighbor, to Islam, and, in 2007, Marquez converted. Farook later introduced Marquez to radical Islamic ideology, which included expressing disdain towards Muslims in the U.S. military who killed other Muslims, as well as discussing the extremist views of the now-deceased imam and Islamic lecturer Anwar Awlaki.

Over the next few years, Farook provided Marquez with radical Islamic materials, and by 2011, Marquez spent most of his time at Farook’s residence listening to lectures and watching videos involving radical Islamic content, the affidavit alleges.

Much of this new information contradicts the narrative we've heard previously. Before today, we were told that Syed was a quietly religious, non-violent Muslim until he was radicalized by his wife Tashfeen, whom he met overseas in early 2014. Apparently, they chatted on the internet for some time before actually meeting.

Now we are told that Syed had become attracted to terrorism as early as 2010. If so, he surely would have talked about jihad during his online chats with Tashfeen. Such conversations must have come to the attention of the NSA, which collects everything (as in everything) and possesses software that looks for keywords. 

Tashfeen lived overseas, in the adopted home country of Osama Bin Laden. Since she was a foreign national, her electronic communications were not protected by our Constitution or by the "minimization" requirements of FISA. The NSA would have considered her fair game. An American Muslim talking to a Pakistani Muslim about jihad should have been a legitimate target for eavesdropping.

The above-linked LAT story says that Syed was a devoted reader of Inspire, a slick pro-Al Qaeda online magazine which offers mostly recycled material. The Iranians are not the only ones who consider that publication to be a "honeytrap" created by American intelligence. It is well-known that at least one pdf issue of Inspire contained a computer virus, which was obviously designed to allow spooks to track the readership.

One of those readers, it seems, was Syed Farook.

My point is simple: Syed's online activities should have had sirens wailing and warning lights flashing. So why wasn't he placed on the "no fly" list? Why was Tashfeen allowed to enter this country?

The whole point of living in an Orwellian surveillance state is that we're supposed to be able to spot people like Syed and Tashfeen and Enrique before they do something insane.

More strangeness.  No less than three separate witnesses have said that the shooters were a trio of large white men. Syed and Tashfeen were both dark-complected and small, and only one was male.

Please do not give me the standard lecture about the untrustworthiness of eyewitness testimony: I've already heard that lecture plenty of times, thank you very much. A long time ago, I noticed that the folks who like to give me that lecture usually make exceptions for eyewitnesses whose testimony aids the Establishment scenario: Go to hell, Ed Hoffman; glad to meet you, Howard Brennan. (Don't know the names? Google is your friend.)

The "three shooters" witnesses all tell the same story, and thus are not easy to dismiss.

Several eyewitnesses and family of witnesses and victims initially said that three athletic Caucasian men had been responsible for carrying out the attacks. Police immediately banned them from speaking with the media.

Just days ago, another eye-witness in the office came forward and said that in spite of what the law enforcement and mainstream media narrative is saying, the people who carried out the attack where very athletic, large, Caucasian men, who were three – not two – in number. Farook’s wife, it should be remembered weighed approximately 90lbs.

Now, a third prominent eye-witness, Chirs Nwadike, has stepped up to challenge the mainstream narrative. He recently told reporters he received a phone call from an unknown person around 7 p.m., on the evening of the shooting, who told him that he must say that Sayd Farook was the shooter.

You read that right, he says that he was called and told to change his story and say that Farook carried out the attacks with his wife, even though that is very different than what he witnessed.

Nwadike told reporters:

“No it’s not him [Sayd]. I told them about it. He’s quiet. He doesn’t make any trouble.”

“He was just spraying bullets everywhere,” Nwadike said. But the gunman was not Sayd, or his wife.

And the strangeness never stops. See here:

The only eyewitness identifications that I can find speak of three white men.

I looked at several published timelines of the shootings. You can, too. Search for “timeline,” “Farook,” “San Bernardino.” No victim identified the two suspects immediately after the shootings, which had ended by the time the police and firefighters arrived at 11:05 a.m. The police had no clues regarding Farook and his wife. The two were shot in a firefight at 3 p.m. They were in a black SUV . . . four hours after the attack.

Four hours. What were they doing during this time? Where were they?

The New York Daily News reported this: “The suspects had escaped the blood-spattered murder scene without swapping a single gunshot with the horde of law enforcement descending on the center, a social services facility for people with developmental disabilities.”

The SUV was spotted four hours later, two miles from the crime scene. How did the police find this SUV? The Daily News says only this: “a tip.”

Think about this. Two people shoot 35 people, and escape unnoticed the police. They then disappear for four hours. Then “a tip” informs the police of their whereabouts: two miles away from the crime scene.

Just before the shootout with the cops, that SUV was flashing its headlights as it drove down the street (as captured on video here). I wonder why?

(The last link goes to the Unz Review. From the comments: "Here we go again. Tower 7 was imploded by Halliburton and a hand held rocket launcher brought down that TWA flight...." Once again, we see the dangers of "conspiracy culture": Garbage theories make legitimate questions seem ridiculous.)

Although I hesitate to bring the matter up, I can't help mentioning the North Carolina angle, as covered by the Washington Post and this Gawker story. In short and in sum: A bizarre Army exercise took place in North Carolina at the exact same time of the shooting in southern California.

As news of the San Bernardino shooting broke, three soldiers dressed in plain clothes decided it was the right time to start touring North Carolina elementary schools, asking “suspicious” questions and generally freaking everyone out.

It’s a weird story: The men were apparently in the area on official Army business—except no one could confirm it at the time, and officials were never warned in accordance with normal procedure. That oversight, it seems, may have been because the men were never authorized to visit the elementary schools—a vaguely unsettling choice they made “on their own initiative.”

The men said that they were from Fort Bragg. So far, no mainstream account of this story has seen fit to mention that Fort Bragg is home of the 4th Psychological Operations Group -- the Army's only active PSYOPS team.

Eventually officials were able to confirm the men were part of “an official exercise that deployed teams to gather information in preparation for major disasters including military incidents, hurricane and flooding disasters, and locating food banks and shelter locations.” Except—elementary schools were decidedly not part of the investigation.

A truly paranoid person might note that these three strange school visitors in NC resemble the descriptions we've heard of the "real" San Berdoo shooters.

A truly paranoid person might even go so far as to speculate that two separate teams were poised to go into action on the same day.

A truly paranoid person would note that there was another training exercise in San Bernardino that day: A SWAT team just happened to be conducting a drill not far from the massacre site.

Yes, a truly paranoid person could use this raw material to cobble together a few very wild scenarios. Fortunately, there are limits to my tolerance for that kind of paranoia: Our culture provides a built-in safety mechanism which prevents me from venturing too deeply into WeirdoLand.

Y'see, every time I begin to research these incidents in any depth, I encounter stories like this one...

How blatant do these staged shootings have to get before people wake up and realize it’s all a tragic manipulation of public emotions in order to confiscate guns from private citizens and unleash an Obama totalitarian regime that will soon be handed off to Hillary Clinton for the “full tyranny” crackdown?

Oy. My aching back.

And that's it and that's it and that's it. I probably won't post again about the mysteries of San Bernardino, unless there is a major new development. The stench of crazy is too damned strong.

Farewell, WeirdoLand. Back to writing about Syria!