Another in the endless mass shootings in USA - this time Denver

[Peter Lemkin]

False Flag Terror and Conspiracies of Silence

by Prof. James F. Tracy

Global Research, August 10, 2012

The news media's readiness to accept official pronouncements and failure to more vigorously analyze and question government authorities in the wake of "domestic terrorist" incidents contributes to the American public's already acute case of collective historical amnesia, while it further rationalizes the twenty-first century police state and continued demise of civil society.


Some may recall "Bugs Raplin" (Giancarlo Esposito), the resolute investigative journalist depicted in Tim Robbins' 1992 political mockumentary Bob Roberts. After being framed as the culprit in a false flag assassination attempt by corrupt political huckster Bob Roberts (Robbins), Raplin delivers a perceptive soliloquy that among other things effectively describes the American public's moribund civic condition and short-circuited democracy. "The reason Iran-Contra happened," Raplin begins,
is because no one did anything substantial about Watergate. And the reason Watergate happened is because there were no consequences from the Bay of Pigs. They're all the same operativesthe foot soldiers at the Bay of Pigs, the plumbers that got busted at Watergate, the gunrunners in Iran-Contraall the same people, same faces. Now it doesn't take a genius to figure out the connection here: A secret government beyond the control of the people and accountable to no one. And the closer we are to discovering the connection, the more Congress turns a blind eye to it. "We can't talk about that in open session," they say. "National security reasons." The truth lies dormant in their laps and they stay blind out of choice. A conspiracy of silence.
Twenty years later amidst the vast outsourcing of intelligence and military operations many more events may arguably be added to such a shadow government's achievementsthe 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1995 Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building bombing, the September 11 terror attacks, the non-existent weapons of mass destruction prompting the occupation of Iraq, the July 7, 2005 London tube bombings, the shoe and underwear "bombings"all of which have contributed to the official justification of imperial wars abroad and an ever-expanding police state at home.

Lacking meaningful contexts with which to understand such events in their totality the general public is incapable of recognizing the road it is being forced down. The most recent set of events that give pause are the horrific, military-style shootings in Aurora Colorado and Oak Creek Wisconsin that authorities maintain were carried out by "lone wolf" gunmen.

Operation Gladio in America?

A potential backdrop and precursor to the Colorado and Wisconsin events is the oft-forgotten Operation Gladio, a campaign involving US and British intelligence-backed paramilitaries anonymously carrying out mass shootings and bombings of civilian targets throughout Europe. Hundreds of such attacks took place between the late 1960s and early 1980s by "stay behind armies" of right wing and fascist saboteurs in an overall effort to terrorize populations, deploy a "strategy of tension," and thereby maintain a centrist political status quo.[1] In the uncertain environment the petrified citizenry pled for stepped-up security and stood poised to part with personal freedoms. At the same time the maneuver allowed for political adversaries---in Gladio's time socialist and communist groupsto be blamed for the attacks and thereby demonized in the public mind.

The string of still unresolved US political assassinations throughout the 1960s suggest how such practices were not restricted to foreign countries. Nor were they solely the terrain of intelligence agencies. Along lines similar to Gladio, in the early 1960s the US Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed Operation Northwoods, where terrorist attacks would be initiated against US civilians in American cities and the violence blamed on Cuban combatants to justify war against the island nation.[2] The Kennedy administration rejected the proposal. While Northwoods exhibited the capacity for government to conceive and propose such plans, Gladio was demonstrably carried out against Western civilian populations in multiple locations over many years.

Consideration of Gladio and Northwoods might be dismissed were it not for early eyewitness accounts following the Colorado and Wisconsin shootings contending how there were two or more killers present at each incidenttestimonies contradicting official government narratives that have accordingly been suppressed in the public mind.[3]

As communications historian Christopher Simpson observes, "the tactics that created the [Gladio] stay behinds in the first place are still in place and continue to be used today. They are standard operating procedure."[4] Such potential explanations will appear foreign to an American public that is systematically misinformed and easily distracted. And in times of crisis especially that very public is tacitly assured of its safe remove from such practices, looking instead to political authorities and experts to reestablish a stasis to the carefully constructed "reality" major media impose on the mass psyche.

In this alternate reality Gladio has effectively been "memory-holed." A LexisNexis Academic search for "Operation Gladio" retrieves a mere 31 articles in English language news outletsmost in British newspapers. In fact, only four articles discussing Gladio ever appeared in US publicationsthree in the New York Times and one brief mention in the Tampa Bay Times. Barring a 2009 BBC documentary [5] no network or cable news broadcasts have ever referenced the maneuver.

Almost all of the articles related to Gladio appeared in 1990 when Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti publicly admitted Italy's participation in the process. The New York Times downplayed any US involvement, misleadingly calling Gladio "an Italian creation" in a story buried on page A16.[6] In reality, former CIA director William Colby revealed in his memoirs that covert paramilitaries were a significant agency undertaking set up after World War II, including "the smallest possible coterie of the most reliable people, in Washington [and] NATO."[7]

A Plausible Narrative / Conclusion

Gladio's successful concealment for so many years demonstrates how mass atrocities can be carried out by a shadow network with complete impunity. Most incidents from the Gladio period remain unsolved by authorities. In the US, however, a plausible narrative appears to be required for public consumption. For example, just a few hours after the Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) officials swept in and wrested the case from Oak Creek authorities by classifying it as an act of "domestic terrorism."[8]. Less than twenty four hours later one of the federal government's foremost de facto propaganda and intelligence-gathering armsthe Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)developed a storyline that was unquestioningly lapped up by major news media.[9]

In an August 6 Democracy Now interview with SPLC spokesman Mark Potok and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Don Walker, Potok explained in unusual detail how the alleged killer was involved in "white supremacist groups," "Nazi skinhead rock bands," and that the SPLC had been "tracking" the groups he was in since 2000. Potok's remarks, which dominate the exchange and steer clear of the suspect's experience in psychological operations, contrasted sharply with Walker's, who more cautiously pointed out that the suspect's "work in [US Army] PsyOps is still a bit of a mystery to all of us ... We talked to a psychiatrist who said that [being promoted to PsyOps is] like going from the lobby to the 20th floor very quickly."[10]

Like the Aurora Colorado storyline of a crazed shooter who expertly booby-trapped his apartment with exotic explosives, such appealingly sensationalistic narratives serve to sideline the countervailing testimonies of eyewitnesses and are difficult to contest or dislodge once they are driven home by would-be experts through almost every major news outlet.

A similar scenario played out in the wake of the Oklahoma City federal building bombing when the ATF, FBI and SPLC together constructed the dominant frame of Timothy McVeigh as the lone bomber, an account that likewise diverged with the local authorities' initial findings, early news reports of unexploded ordinance and a mysterious accomplice of McVeigh, and the overall conclusions of the Oklahoma City Bombing Investigation Committee's Final Report.[11] The narrative nevertheless served to maintain the political status quo while securing the Clinton administration's second term in office. To this day most Americans believe McVeigh was solely responsible for the bombing despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

For its time Raplin's prognosis was an accurate description of America's cascading socio-political nightmare. Elected officials abdicate their responsibility of oversight for personal gain and thus perpetuate "a conspiracy of silence." Yet over the past two decades, the quickening pace of "terrorist" events suggests how shadow networks have grown in boldness and strength, while each attack has contributed to the steady erosion of civil society and constitutional rights.

With this in mind both the mainstream and "alternative" news media, through their overt censorial practices, their consistent failure to place events in meaningful historical contexts, and their overall deliberate obeisance to dubious and unaccountable authorities, compound this conspiracy by ensnaring the public in questionable realities from which it cannot readily escape.

Notes


[1] Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, New York: Routledge, 2005; Richard Cottrell, Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe, Progressive Press, 2012.


[2] James Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency, New York: Anchor Books, 2002, 83. For a recent applications see Michel Chossudovsky, "Syria: Killing Innocent Civilians as Part of a US Covert Op. Mobilizing Support for a R2P War," GlobalResearch.ca, May 30, 2012,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...&aid=31122. Entire Operation Northwoods document available at
http://archive.org/stream/OperationNorth...0/mode/2up


[3] Overall sufficient scrutiny of the Colorado and Wisconsin shootings is entirely lacking save a handful of alternative news media. See Alex Thomas, "Wisconsin Sikh Shooting False Flag: Multiple Shooters, Army Psy-Ops, The FBI, Operation Gladio, and the SPLC," Intellhub.com, August 6, 2012,
http://theintelhub.com/2012/08/06/wiscon...-the-splc/
Jon Rappoport, "Shooting in Sikh Temple: Who Benefits Big Time?" August 5, 2012,
http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2012/0...-big-time/


[4] NATO's Secret Armies, Andres Pichler, director, 2009. Simpson interview at 46:23,
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2010/07...653266.php.


[5] NATO's Secret Armies.


[6] Clyde Haberman, "Evolution in Europe: Italy Discloses Its Web of Cold War Guerrillas," New York Times, November 16, 1990, A16.


[7] Stephen Lendman, "NATO's Secret Armies" [A Review of Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, op cit.] September 15, 2010, http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/09/na...rmies.html


[8] Steven Yaccino, Michael Schwirtz, and Marc Santora, "Gunman Kills 6 at a Sikh Temple Near Milwaukee," New York Times, August 6, 2012, A1.


[9] For example, Erica Goode and Serge F. Kovaleski, "Wisconsin Killer Was Fueled by Hate-Driven Music," New York Times, August 7, 2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/07/us/arm...wanted=all,
Madison Gray, "Sikh Temple Shooter Identified, Had Ties to White Supremacist Movement," Time News Feed, August 6, 2012,
http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/08/06/sikh...-movement/,
Dinesh Ramde and Todd Richmond, SPLC: 'Frustrated neo-Nazi Opened Fire on Sikh Temple," Associated Press, August 6, 2012,
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display...kh-temple/


[10] Amy Goodman, "Neo-Nazi Rampage: Army Psy-Ops Vet, White Power Musician ID'd as Gunman in Sikh Temple Shooting," Democracy Now, August 7, 2012,
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/8/7/sik...chael_page


[11] Charles Key, The Final Report on the Bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, Oklahoma Bombing Investigation Committee, 2001. http://www.okcbombing.net/



James F. Tracy is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Florida Atlantic University. Additional information is available at his blog, memorygap.org.

[Adele Edisen]

The New York Times
August 26, 2012

Before Gunfire, Hints of Bad News'
By ERICA GOODE, SERGE F. KOVALESKI, JACK HEALY and DAN FROSCH

AURORA, Colo. The text message, sent to another graduate student in early July, was cryptic and worrisome. Had she heard of "dysphoric mania," James Eagan Holmes wanted to know?

The psychiatric condition, a form of bipolar disorder, combines the frenetic energy of mania with the agitation, dark thoughts and in some cases paranoid delusions of major depression.

She messaged back, asking him if dysphoric mania could be managed with treatment. Mr. Holmes replied: "It was," but added that she should stay away from him "because I am bad news."

It was the last she heard from him.

About two weeks later, minutes into a special midnight screening of "The Dark Knight Rises" on July 20, Mr. Holmes, encased in armor, his hair tinted orange, a gas mask obscuring his face, stepped through the emergency exit of a sold-out movie theater here and opened fire. By the time it was over, there were 12 dead and 58 wounded.

The ferocity of the attack, its setting, its sheer magnitude more people were killed and injured in the shooting than in any in the country's history shocked even a nation largely inured to random outbursts of violence.

But Mr. Holmes, who was arrested outside the theater and has been charged in the shootings, has remained an enigma, his life and his motives cloaked by two court orders that have imposed a virtual blackout on information in the case and by the silence of the University of Colorado, Denver, where Mr. Holmes was until June a graduate student in neuroscience.

Unlike Wade M. Page, who soon after the theater shooting opened fire at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, killing six people, Mr. Holmes left no trail of hate and destruction behind him, no telling imprints in the electronic world, not even a Facebook page.

Yet as time has passed, a clearer picture has begun to surface. Interviews with more than a dozen people who knew or had contact with Mr. Holmes in the months before the attack paint a disturbing portrait of a young man struggling with a severe mental illness who more than once hinted to others that he was losing his footing.

Those who worked side by side with him saw an amiable if intensely shy student with a quick smile and a laconic air, whose quirky sense of humor surfaced in goofy jokes "Take that to the bank," he said while giving a presentation about an enzyme known as A.T.M. and wry one-liners. There was no question that he was intelligent. "James is really smart," one graduate student whispered to another after a first-semester class. Yet he floated apart, locked inside a private world they could neither share nor penetrate.

He confided little about his outside life to classmates, but told a stranger at a nightclub in Los Angeles last year that he enjoyed taking LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs. He had trouble making eye contact, but could make surprising forays into extroversion, mugging for the camera in a high school video. A former classmate, Sumit Shah, remembers an instance when Mr. Holmes performed Irish folk tunes on the piano until others took notice of his playing, when he stopped. So uncommunicative that at times he seemed almost mute, he piped up enthusiastically in a hospital cafeteria line when a nearby conversation turned to professional football.

Like many of his generation, he was a devotee of role-playing video games like Diablo III and World of Warcraft in 2009, he bought Neverwinter Nights II, a game like Dungeons & Dragons, on eBay, using the handle "sherlockbond" ("shipped with alacrity, great seller," he wrote in his feedback on the sale). Rumored to have had a girlfriend, at least for a time, he appeared lonely enough in the weeks before the shooting to post a personal advertisement seeking companionship on an adult Web site.

Sometime in the spring, he stopped smiling and no longer made jokes during class presentations, his behavior shifting, though the meaning of the changes remained unclear. Packages began arriving at his apartment and at the school, containing thousands of rounds of ammunition bought online, the police say.

Prosecutors said in court filings released last week that Mr. Holmes told a fellow student in March that he wanted to kill people "when his life was over."

In May, he showed another student a Glock semiautomatic pistol, saying he had bought it "for protection." At one point, his psychiatrist, Dr. Lynne Fenton, grew concerned enough that she alerted at least one member of the university's threat assessment team that he might be dangerous, an official with knowledge of the investigation said, and asked the campus police to find out if he had a criminal record. He did not. But the official said that nothing Mr. Holmes disclosed to Dr. Fenton rose to the threshold set by Colorado law to hospitalize someone involuntarily.

Yet Mr. Holmes was descending into a realm of darkness. In early June, he did poorly on his oral exams. Professors told him that he should find another career, prosecutors said at a hearing last week. Soon after, he left campus.

That Mr. Holmes, who is being held in the Arapahoe County jail awaiting arraignment on 142 criminal counts, deteriorated to the point of deadly violence cannot help but raise questions about the adequacy of the treatment he received and about the steps the university took or failed to take in dealing with a deeply troubled student. In court hearings and documents, Mr. Holmes's lawyers have confirmed that he has a mental disorder and that he was in treatment with Dr. Fenton. They will undoubtedly use any evidence that he was mentally ill in mounting a defense. Colorado is one of only a few states where, in an insanity defense, the burden of proof lies on the prosecution.

J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist and expert on mass killers, has noted that almost without exception, their crimes represent the endpoint of a long and troubled highway that in hindsight was dotted with signs missed or misinterpreted. "These individuals do not snap," he said, "whatever that means."

But who could divine the capacity to shoot dozens of people in cold blood? Or the diabolical imagination necessary to devise the booby traps the police said Mr. Holmes carefully set out in his apartment the night of the rampage, devices that could have killed more?

Cool and Detached

A potential for violence was the last thing that came to mind when a graduate student at the university met Mr. Holmes at a recruitment weekend for the neuroscience program in February last year.

"What struck me was that he was kind of nonchalant," the woman recalled. "He just seemed too cool to be there. He kicked back in his chair and seemed very relaxed in a very stressful situation."

But his reticence was also apparent, she said.

"I noticed that he was not engaged with people around him. We went around the table to introduce ourselves, and he made a weird, awkward joke," said the student who, like many of those interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing reasons that included not wanting their privacy invaded by other news organizations and hearing from law enforcement or university officials that talking publicly could compromise the investigation. The university, invoking the investigation and the court orders, has refused to release even mundane details about Mr. Holmes, like which professors he worked with.

As the fall term began last year and students plunged into their required coursework, that pairing of laconic ease with an almost crippling social discomfort would become a theme that many students later remembered.

The neuroscience program, which admits six or seven students each year out of 60 or more applicants, sits under the umbrella of the Center for Neuroscience, an interdisciplinary and multicampus enterprise started a little over year ago to bring together basic science and clinical research. More than 150 scientists are affiliated with the center, 60 of them formally involved with the graduate program.

The mix of laboratory scientists and clinicians is "absolutely fundamental" to the center's goals, said Diego Restrepo, its director. Dr. Restrepo and two other administrators met with The New York Times under the ground rule that no specific questions about Mr. Holmes or the case be asked.

The research interests of the neuroscience faculty are wide-ranging and include the effects of aging on the sense of smell, the repair of spinal cord injuries, promising drugs for Down syndrome, treatments for stroke, and studies of diseases and disorders like Alzheimer's, schizophrenia and autism. The center is particularly known for its research on the neurobiology of sensory perception.

In the first year of the program, each neuroscience graduate student takes required courses and completes three 12-week laboratory rotations, said Angie Ribera, the program's director.

"Students might come in with a strong interest in one area, but we feel strongly that they should get broad training," she said. "It's an incredibly supportive group of students. There is a bonding there."

Other students said Mr. Holmes did his rotations in the laboratories of Achim Klug, who studies the auditory system; Mark Dell'Acqua, who does basic research on synaptic signaling; and Dr. Curt Freed, whose work focuses on messenger chemicals in the brain and stem cell transplants in patients with Parkinson's disease.

But even in a world where students can spend hours in solitary research, Mr. Holmes seemed especially alone.

He volunteered little information about himself, his interests or what he dreamed of doing with his degree, said one graduate student who, touched by Mr. Holmes's shyness, tried repeatedly to draw him out. Attempts to engage him in small talk were met with an easy smile and a polite reply if only a soft-spoken "yo" but little more.

"He would basically communicate with me in one-word sentences," one member of the neuroscience program said. "He always seemed to be off in his own world, which did not involve other people, as far as I could tell."

In classes, Mr. Holmes arrived early to grab a good seat, his lanky 5-foot-11 frame in jeans and sometimes a "Star Wars" T-shirt. He hardly ever took notes, often staring into the distance as if daydreaming. Uncomfortable when called on by professors, he almost always began his responses with a weary-sounding "Uhhhhhhh."

But there was little doubt about his intellect. In a grant-writing class, where students were required to grade each other's proposals, Mr. Holmes wrote thoughtful and detailed comments, one student recalled, giving each paper he was assigned to review a generous grade.

"This was the only time I saw an assignment of James's," the student said. "Frankly, I was very impressed. I thought his comments were much better than anyone else's."

In the spring, just months before the shooting, Mr. Holmes turned in a midterm essay that a professor said was "spectacular," written almost at the level of a professional in the field.

The essay was "beautifully written," the professor said, and "more than I would have expected from a first-year student."

In the talks Mr. Holmes gave after his first laboratory rotations, he often resorted to jokes, perhaps in an effort to cover his unease. During one presentation, he stood with one hand in his pocket, a laser pointer in his other hand. With a slight smile, he aimed the pointer at a slide and crowed "Oooooooh!"

"Oh my God, James is so awkward," a student recalled a classmate whispering.

Yet in a video of scenes from Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms," made when he was a student at Westview High School in San Diego, where he was on the cross-country team and was a standout soccer defender, Mr. Holmes proved a deft comedian with a talent for improvisation, his former classmate Jared Bird remembered.

"He kept making funny faces at the camera and making unexpected comments," Mr. Bird said. "He was being a goofy bartender. We expected him to play it straight, but he made it more interesting, much more comical. He ad-libbed everything."

By the end of high school, Mr. Holmes was already pursuing his interest in science, attending a summer internship in 2006 at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, before going to college at the University of California, Riverside. But if he was beginning the process of finding a career, he was also forging a reputation for extreme shyness.

"I frequently had to ask yes-or-no questions to get responses from him," said John Jacobson, his adviser that summer, adding that he completed virtually none of the work he was assigned, which involved putting visual illusions developed in the laboratory on the Internet. "Communicating with James was difficult."

Mr. Holmes was more voluble in e-mails. When he discovered that Mr. Jacobson spoke Mandarin, he began one e-mail to him with a greeting in that language: "Ni hao John."

But he stayed apart from the other interns, often eating alone at his desk and not showing up for the regular afternoon teas. He was the only intern not to keep in touch with the coordinator when the program ended.

"At the end of the day, he would slink upstairs and leave," Mr. Jacobson said.

A Notable Presence

A smile and the air of one who walked a solitary path they were enough to attract the attention of shopkeepers in the gritty neighborhood just west of the Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, where students could find cheap, if amenity-free, housing.

On many days, Mr. Holmes could be seen cruising home slowly down 17th Avenue on his BMX bicycle toward the red-brick apartment building where he lived on the third floor, his body arched casually, his gangling frame almost too big for the small bike, a Subway sandwich bag dangling from the handlebars.

Waiters and sales clerks recognized him. He washed his clothes at a nearby laundry, took his car for servicing at the Grease Monkey, bought sunglasses at the Mex Mall and stopped in at a pawnshop on East Colfax Avenue, perusing the electronics and other goods for sale.

He favored a Mexican food truck in the mornings, buying three chicken and beef tacos but refusing sauce, and at night he sometimes dropped by Shepes's Rincon, a Latin club near his apartment, where he sat at the bar and drank three or four beers, a security guard there said. But he spoke no Spanish, and other than placing his order talked to no one.

On several occasions, he was spotted in the company of two other students, one male, one female. Did he date? No one seemed sure. Mostly, he was alone.

"You kind of got that feeling that he was a loner," said Vivian Andreu, who works at a local liquor store.

"Sometimes," she said, "I would get a smile out of him."

Months of Planning

He had apparently planned the attack for months, stockpiling 6,000 rounds of ammunition he purchased online, buying firearms a shotgun and a semiautomatic rifle in addition to two Glock handguns and body armor, and lacing his apartment with deadly booby traps, the authorities have said.

But Mr. Holmes's neighbors did not seem to notice Narender Dudee, who lived in an apartment next to his, did not even hear the loud techno music that blared from his rooms on the night of the shooting.

"I must have been in a deep sleep," Mr. Dudee said.

Studies suggest that a majority of mass killers are in the grip of some type of psychosis at the time of their crimes, said Dr. Meloy, the forensic psychologist, and they often harbor delusions that they are fighting off an enemy who is out to get them.

Yet despite their severe illness, they are frequently capable of elaborate and meticulous planning, he said.

As the graduate students reached the end of their second semester, wrapping up coursework, finishing lab rotations and looking toward the oral exam that would cap their first year, some noticed a change in Mr. Holmes. If possible, he seemed more isolated, more alone.

His smile and silly jokes were gone. The companions he had sometimes been seen with earlier in the year had disappeared.

On May 17, he gave his final laboratory presentation on dopamine precursors. The talks typically ran 15 minutes or so, but this time, Mr. Holmes spoke for only half that time. And while in earlier presentations he had made an attempt to entertain, this time he spoke flatly, as if he wanted only to be done with it.

A student with whom Mr. Holmes had flirted clumsily he once sent her a text message after a class asking "Why are you distracting me with those shorts?" said that two messages she received from him, one in June and the other in July, were particularly puzzling.

Their electronic exchanges had begun abruptly in February or March, when she was out with stomach flu.

"You still sick, girl?" she remembers Mr. Holmes asking.

"Who is this?" she shot back.

"Jimmy James from neuroscience," he replied.

After that, she said, he sent her messages sporadically once he asked her if she would like to go hiking though he would sometimes walk right past her in the hallway, making no eye contact.

As the oral exams approached, she recalled, Mr. Holmes seemed relaxed about the prospect, telling her, "I will study everything or maybe I will study nothing at all."

The goal of the one-hour exam, said Dr. Ribera, the neuroscience program director, "is to evaluate how students integrate information from their coursework and lab rotations and to see how they communicate on their feet." It is not, she said, "to weed out or weed in."

As is customary in many doctoral programs, three faculty members ask the questions during the exam. If a student does poorly, the orals can be repeated.

Mr. Holmes took his oral exam on June 7. The graduate student sent him a message the next day, asking how it had gone. Not well, he replied, "and I am going to quit."

"Are you kidding me?" she asked.

"No, I am just being James," he said.

A few weeks later, another student recalled, Cammie Kennedy, the neuroscience program administrator, accompanied the students to Cedar Creek Pub on campus to celebrate the completion of the first year. All the students except Mr. Holmes attended.

As the group drank beers and waxed nostalgic, Ms. Kennedy suddenly grew serious.

"I want to let you guys know that James has quit the program," a student remembered her saying. "He wrote us an e-mail. He didn't say why. That's all I can really say."

Mr. Holmes informed the school that he was dropping out at the same time that members of the threat assessment team were discussing Dr. Fenton's concerns, the official familiar with the investigation said. Prosecutors in the case have said in court documents that Mr. Holmes was barred from the campus after making unspecified threats to a professor. But university administrators have insisted that he was not barred from campus and said his key card was deactivated on June 10 as part of the standard procedure for withdrawing.

In early July, the woman who conducted the text exchange with Mr. Holmes sent him a message to ask if he had left town yet. No, he wrote back, he still had two months remaining on his lease.

Soon he asked her about dysphoric mania.

Whether the diagnosis was his own or had been made by a mental health professional is unclear. Through a lawyer, Mr. Holmes's parents declined several requests to talk about their son's life before the shooting or the nature of any illness of his.

Dr. Victor Reus, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, said dysphoric mania is not uncommon in patients with bipolar disorder, a vast majority of whom never turn to violence.

But in severe cases, he said, patients can become highly agitated and caught up in paranoid delusions, reading meaning into trivial things, "something said on TV, something a passer-by might say, a bird flying by." Dr. Reus declined to speculate about Mr. Holmes, whom he has never met, and he emphasized that he knew nothing about the psychiatric treatment Mr. Holmes might have received.

But he said that in some cases psychiatrists, unaware of the risks, prescribe antidepressants for patients with dysphoric mania drugs that can make the condition worse.

Dave Aragon, the director of the low-budget movie "Suffocator of Sins," a Batman-style story of vigilante justice and dark redemption, remembers receiving two phone calls in late May or early June from a man identifying himself as James Holmes from Denver. The caller had become enraptured with the four-minute online trailer for the movie, Mr. Aragon said "He told me he'd watched it 100 times" and had pressed him for more details about the film.

"He came off as articulate, nervous, on the meek side," he said. "He was obviously interested in the body count."

Painful Retrospect

In the days after the shooting, faculty members and graduate students, in shock, compared notes on what they knew about Mr. Holmes, what they might have missed, what they could have done. Some said they wished they had tried harder to break through his loneliness, a student recalled. Others wondered if living somewhere besides the dingy apartment on Paris Street might have mitigated his isolation.

At a meeting held at Dr. Ribera's house, a student said, Barry Shur, the dean of the graduate school, said Mr. Holmes had been seeing a psychiatrist. When the authorities told him the identity of the shooting suspect, Dr. Shur said, his reaction was "I've heard his name before."

But all that came later.

No one saw Mr. Holmes much after he left school in June.

A classmate spotted him once walking past the Subway on campus, his backpack in tow. Mr. Dudee, his neighbor, saw him in mid-July, his hair still its normal brown. Perhaps in a sign of ambivalence, he never took the forms he had filled out to the graduate dean's office, the final step in withdrawing from the university.

He never replied to the fellow student's last text message, asking if he wanted to talk about dysphoric mania.

At some point on Thursday, July 19, according to the police, he gathered up the bullets and shotgun shells, the gas mask, an urban assault vest, a ballistic helmet and a groin protector and moved into action at the Century 16 Theater.

He mailed a notebook to Dr. Fenton that the university said arrived on July 23, its contents still under seal by the court. And he bought a ticket for the midnight premiere of "The Dark Knight Rises," as if he were just another moviegoer, looking forward to the biggest hit of the summer.


Sheelagh McNeill, Kitty Bennett and Jack Styczynski contributed research.

Adele

[Peter Lemkin]

Some interesting things in the article above. Some I am inclined to believe; others I'm inclined to believe are being misconstrued or used to cover up something more sinister - knowingly or not by the authors [likely unknowingly]. That he took LSD at some point is interesting, and the anti-psychotics more lately - in combination with many opportunities to have been in the 'orbit' of pros in drug+mind-control.

Had there not been so many irregularities with the evidence, so far and the 'investigation' I might even be inclined to lean toward the 'official version'...but I'm not - not at all. We have all too many such killings and they follow a pattern. They can't all be 'real' organic events - something is behind many to most of them....IMHO

[Peter Lemkin]

At least seven dead in Shopping Mall in New Jersey...yawn...so, what else is new in USA?!:mexican:

[Magda Hassan]

At least seven dead in Shopping Mall in New Jersey...yawn...so, what else is new in USA?!:mexican:

Yeah, just heard....and next week?

[Peter Lemkin]

At least seven dead in Shopping Mall in New Jersey...yawn...so, what else is new in USA?!:mexican:

Yeah, just heard....and next week?

They don't even spice it up with variations. This shooter also had full body armor and is dead.....maybe he didn't like shopping malls...or maybe he was a robot for the Borg. they usually skip a week....but you can bet in two or three weeks another....very similar....:gossip: Munition futures look good...buy!buy!buy! [before Muslim Obama lets the UN invade after taking away everyone's guns...that's the latest propaganda whisper out now!] Some Americas are so stupid, I wonder how they keep their breathing and hearts going...

[Magda Hassan]

[video]http://www.theonion.com/articles/nation-celebrates-full-week-without-deadly-mass-sh,29293/[/video]

[Peter Lemkin]

New Jersey Shooting Leaves Three Dead -- But It's Not At The Empire State Building, So Go About Your Day
By James King Fri., Aug. 31 2012 at 8:10 AM

For the second Friday in a row, there's been a mass-shooting in the New York area -- but it isn't at the Empire State Building, so it's apparently only kinda news.

Authorities in New Jersey say three people -- including the gunman -- are dead following an early-morning shooting spree at a grocery store in Old Bridge, just south of Staten Island.

The gunman, police say, entered a Pathmark grocery store just before 4 a.m., as employees were stocking shelves before the store was scheduled to open at 6 a.m.

Details of the shooting are unclear, but the gunman -- who reportedly was wearing body armor (a claim that we were unable to independently confirm) -- opened fire in the store before shooting it out with police. He was killed at the scene, although it's unclear whether he was killed by police.

Two others also were killed in the shooting. It's unclear how many were wounded.

Last week, as we're sure you recall, 58-year-old Jeffrey Johnson shot a former co-worker near the Empire State Building before police took him out in a hail of bullets, many of which hit pedestrians fleeing the scene.

Because of the famous location of last week's shooting -- and the potential of it being a terrorist attack -- the media ate it up; all the national news outlets stopped what they were doing for breaking coverage of a "mass-shooting" at a famous landmark.

That "mass-shooting" wouldn't have been "mass" at all if the cops didn't shoot nine of the 10 victims -- it turned out to be just one disgruntled ex-employee attacking a former co-worker, not the Aurora-esque killing spree the media had initially billed it as.

But this morning's shooting happened at a grocery store, not a famous landmark -- so Fox and Friends, MSNBC, and CNN are too busy discussing "Mitt's Big Moment," and "Dirty Harry's" debating a chair at the Republican National Convention to pay it much mind.

Regardless, three people are dead and several others could be wounded in what appears to be an actual mass-shooting,

Here at the Voice, we like to give all mass-shootings equal time, so check back later for updates.

[Keith Millea]

[video]http://www.theonion.com/articles/nation-celebrates-full-week-without-deadly-mass-sh,29293/[/video]

Oh look!It's the four shot hand signal......Yes we can!!!!!!!

[Peter Lemkin]

[video]http://www.theonion.com/articles/nation-celebrates-full-week-without-deadly-mass-sh,29293/[/video]

Oh look!It's the four shot hand signal......Yes we can!!!!!!!

:thumbsup: