The La Toscana Village mall, here in the unincorporated community of Casas Adobes, is home to a Safeway grocery store and connected to a Walgreens. There are other shops and restaurants nearby including a Beyond Bread restaurant and other merchants.
There is little if anything on site that would indicate that a mass shooting had taken place there a little over four months earlier.
This suburban shopping mall, where innocent lives were taken or destroyed on the morning of January 8, 2011, doesn’t strike one as the sort of place where such horrific events unfolded.
Across Ina Road from the shopping center are six white crosses with the names of the six shooting victims crudely inscribed on them. Other than that, there is nothing noting the shooting.
And that’s where we start. It was to be a regular day that winter morning at La Toscana Village mall. How quickly things turned into a nightmare.
Conducting an informal “Congress on Your Corner” meeting for her constituents in her southern Arizona district, U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, a “Blue Dog” Democrat based here in Tucson, was addressing them when Loughner allegedly opened fire.
The day this tragic event happened, I suspected right off the bat that something was amiss. First, the report was that Rep. Giffords had been shot dead. Then, later, reports clarified that she was simply seriously injured. It reminded me of so many of these national tragedies where information comes out and the story changes over time.
Think back to earlier this month when it was reported global villain Osama Bin Laden was shot dead and dumped in the ocean. The story changed a dozen times. Who knows what to believe? Of course Obama’s numbers rose and he looked like a tough, decisive commander-in-chief. Yet, with both the Loughner/Tucson massacre and the Bin Laden killing, so many things simply do not add up.
And with the Giffords shooting, we learn that not only was a member of the U.S. Congress shot and injured, a respected, conservative U.S. District Court judge, John Roll, was shot dead at the scene as well. Then, unbelievably, a girl, aged 9 and named Christina-Taylor Green, was shot and killed as well. And the kicker? She was born on Sept. 11, 2001.
Before I go any further, I should note that this all took place against a volatile backdrop of state and local politics. Being close to the Mexican border, immigration politics was being addressed in a hot and heavy fashion.
You had the rise of the Tea Party and the Shawna Forde case where a white, female member of the Minutemen border-security group who was being tried for the May 2009 murder of an immigrant and his daughter.
Interestingly, Forde’s trial began in Tucson, at the Pima County Superior Court, three days before the Giffords/Roll shooting. The trial would then be delayed a week due to the shooting.
And less than a month earlier, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed in a shootout with Mexican bandits, linked to a drug cartel, and possibly with weapons – an AK-47 in the case of Agent Terry – that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives allowed to transported across the border into Mexico as part of Project Gunrunner.
The shootout occurred just south of Tucson, near the border and the gun in question is said to have come from an Arizona gun shop. The BATFE has, so far, been reluctant to admit any wrongdoing, despite a congressional investigation and attempts by the Department of Justice and Attorney General Eric Holder to avoid answering the tough questions.
And then there is Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik. A real piece of work, this guy. Back in April 2010, when a tough immigration law was passed and signed into law by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, Dupnik wasquoted in the media saying he would not follow the law and went on to say that the law was “irresponsible” and that the legislators who pushed for it are “racists.”
This rhetoric certainly didn’t help things in Pima County, an area of Arizona populated by leftists and liberals who hate the immigration law and want open borders and want to create their own state of “Baja Arizona.”
Join The Intel Hub News Alerts Mailing List
Dupnik would later say, after the shootings in his county, that “a toxic political environment” is to be blamed for the deadly shooting.
So, we can see that the Tucson area was (and still is, to a large degree) in the midst of a volatile and toxic situation. The mass shooting here in Tucson – Casas Adobes, specifically – appeared to be part of something larger than troubled college kid Jared Lee Loughner. As I reported the following day, here at Red Dirt Report, in a piece headlined “MK ULTRA at work in Tucson attack?”
We noted how Loughner was “ a person not only obsessed with issues pertaining to mind control but also a person who has all the characteristics of someone under mind control” not unlike previous assassins like Lee Harvey Oswald, Mark David Chapman and Sirhan Sirhan. Loughner was undoubtedly troubled, with a string of run-ins with the police on his record and reports from people who encountered him noting that Loughner was “creepy.”
There are echoes of the Columbine shooters at play, it would seem. Even photos of Loughner from his high school yearbook – featured in the media – bear an eerie resemblance to Dylan Klebold, one of the Columbine shooters.
And then you have Judge John Roll. As Sheriff Richard Mack noted in a piece “Judge John Roll: A True American Hero,” he writes that Judge Roll was an “honest man and a principled judge” who heard a lawsuit Sheriff Mack brought against the Clinton administration in 1994, amazingly enough.
Writes Mack: “I met Judge Roll back in 1994, in fact, it was in his courtroom. He was the judge who first heard my lawsuit against the Clinton Administration. Judge Roll had the courage to take a strong stand against the very entity that controlled his salary and career.
He actually had the audacity to tell Congress and President Clinton that they exceeded their authority when they made the Brady bill a law.”
Roll, writes Mack, concluded in court that the anti-gun Brady bill violated both the 10th and 5th amendments, something Mack noted as being remarkable and a ruling that “changed my life and helped alter American history.”
And now Judge Roll, a real, solid American jurist who cared about the Constitution is out of the way. The judge who defied the powerful Clinton machine back in 1994 is no longer here. They don’t make judges like John Roll very often. He will certainly be missed.
We also noted that prior to the Tucson shooting, political analyst Mark Penn had been quoted saying that President Obama needed an “Oklahoma City-like event” to help his sagging poll numbers and reconnect with voters.
Interestingly, within days of the Tucson shooting we had Obama appearing in Tucson with a made-for-T-shirt slogan “Together We Thrive.” Now, we’re still not sure how all these T-shirts, handed out at a massacre memorial at the University of Arizona, were printed so quickly. Regardless, as conservative writer Michelle Malkin noted, “the Tucson massacre is bring branded.”
And just as President Clinton saw a boost in his numbers after the OKC bombing and was also able to put the kibosh on the burgeoning militia movement in the wake of the all-too-convenient Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, things were forced to simmer down in the powder keg known as Tucson. The city, noted the media, put their political differences and came together to support the injured and the dead. It was almost as if this horrific event had been scripted …
Of course we now know that Clinton exploited the bombing in Oklahoma City for political gain. He tried to paint conservatives as extremists in hopes of staging a political comeback after months of tanking poll numbers. It appears it’s deja vu all over again, except it’s a different Democrat in the White House this time.
And who can forget how Obama’s advisor and now-mayor-of-Chicago Rahm Emanuel famously said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Indeed! And so we had a young girl – Christina-Taylor Green – born on 9/11/01 of all days! – invoked by the President – saying that Christina, just getting involved in politics at her elementary school, would want folks to get along.
Said Obama: “I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it. All of us – we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations.”
Since I have been looking into the Tucson shooting case, into Jared Lee Loughner’s life and into the events surrounding the shooting you see lots of things that don’t add up.
First, where are the videotapes from the scene? Visiting the shopping center – the Safeway and the Walgreens – you see where video cameras are mounted. There’s a few that I could see. And back in January, a week or so after the shootings, you had reports coming out with “federal law enforcement officials” telling the media that Judge John Roll was shot in the chest, right after Rep. Giffords was shot in the head.
Reported the Los Angeles Times on Jan. 18, 2011: “You see him shot in the chest,” the official said. “He tried to get up. He started to get up but then fell back down again. He didn’t make it.”
It would sound as if the shock of being shot in the chest and damage to Roll’s body prevented the judge from doing anything, which is certainly understandable. But then, on the following day, The Washington Postreports that Roll, after being shot in the back, tried to protect Giffords’s staffer Ron Barber. An inconsistency? I guess we won’t know for sure until the tapes are released to the public, as they should be.
We assume that the videotapes will be eventually released. Perhaps around the time of the trial. Of course here in Oklahoma City activists and others are still trying to force the government to release videotapes from around the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building on the morning of April 19, 1995. That was over 16 years ago!
But then we see a report at the independent website The Government Rag which notes that an episode ofLaw & Order, which aired this past Monday, was not shown on KVOA in Tucson because the station’s general manager felt the community should not see it – it’s about events that closely mirror what happened in Tucson – because of the “timing and sensitive nature” of the episode.
Connie A. Tushion, the writer at The Government Rag who wrote the piece about the censored episode (the station instead showed a program about the Pentagon memorial, of all things) noted that there is a cover-up afoot and that she talks to folks in Tucson who are getting wise to the “mind control agenda and information suppression protocols.”
Writes Tushion: “I speak with many people living in Tucson about the event and the episode of Law & Order. Residents express they are getting fed-up with total control and domination creeping on them in Tucson by the powers-(that)-be. Deciding what residents can and cannot watch is a sign of a draconian entity creeping into the city.”
Missouri-based Stephanie Sledge, who operates The Government Rag website and is doing something quite similar to what we’re doing here at Red Dirt Report, by looking into the strange anomalies related to the Tucson shooting. Sledge is a frequent guest on Joyce Riley’s “The Power Hour” and she has been joined by Ed Chiarini of WellAware1.com.
Both Sledge and Chiarini believe that many of the people involved in the Tucson shooting – primarily eyewitnesses and so forth – are actors and that the whole thing was staged.
There are questions about where Christina-Taylor Green was laid to rest and NASA’s curious interest in Green’s elementary school prior to the shooting and to this very day – Giffords’s husband is Mark Kelly, commander of the space shuttle Endeavour which is currently in low-earth orbit conducting the last space mission Endeavour will ever conduct as America’s space program appears to enter its twilight years.
It’s a provocative position to take, to be sure. Clearly Rep. Giffords and others are still healing from their wounds and the families of Christina-Taylor Green, Judge John Roll, Giffords’s staffer Gabe Zimmerman, and constituents Dorothy “Dot” Morris, Phyllis Schneck and Dorwan Stoddard are still in mourning over the deaths of their loved ones.
Still, Sledge and Chiarini are asking the tough questions that are being largely ignored by the local, state and national media.
While in Tucson, Red Dirt Report writer Ted Smith and I went to Oro Valley, Ariz. and witnessed an angel sculpture in a park frequented by slain 9-year-old Christina-Taylor Green. There was next to nothing available about who made it or for whom. A woman in the park confirmed it was made for Christina but knew nothing more.
It took some time, scouring the Internet, to finally find a story about the sculptor Lei Hennessy-Owen and the name of the sculpture she had made in Christina’s memory. I say that to say that the local media – theArizona Daily Star, specifically – has not done a very good job asking the tough questions and getting all the answers. They have a Sheriff running amok in their county and little is being done.
While the irresponsible Sheriff Dupnik demonizes conservatives and the Tea Party movement and blames them for the Giffords shooting, he adds fuel to an already blazing fire. It may be smoldering right now, but it won’t take much for a small spark to stoke it back into an inferno.
Of course we wish a speedy recovery for Rep. Giffords and the others who survived the shooting. The Tucson community appears to still be reeling from the massacre, after talking to people here. And Loughner? We hear he may be “too deranged to stand trial.” Again, how convenient.
Back to La Toscana Village mall, ground zero for the shooting, Smith and I walk around and look for any sign of grass. This being an arid, desert climate, none is found. I mention that because we learn that Loughner’s Glock, the weapon he used to allegedly fire 32 rounds, was found in a “grassy” area.
We also note to the east of the Safeway entrance and above the area where Giffords held her “Congress on Your Corner” event, is a clearly visible “trap door” or some sort, leading to the roof. Was someone up there during the shooting? In the first hours following the shooting, authorities strongly believed a second gunman had been on the scene.
A “John Doe 2” type of situation that was eventually dismissed, even though Pima County deputies reported finding a rifle at the scene as well. Ah! Another bit of evidence crammed down the memory hole.
Out in the parking lot of the La Toscana Village Safeway, Smith and I run into a young man collecting grocery carts. Asking him if he worked there at the time of the shooting, he replied he had only started working there a month or so ago.
We explained that we were from out of town and that we were looking into discrepancies in the official story and that we suspected a cover-up of what really happened there was underway.
The young man gave me a strange half-smile and simply told us to “Keep asking,” as if to say we were on the right path.
And that’s what we intend to do. As independent journalists who truly desire the truth, we intend to “keep asking.”
No comments:
Post a Comment