13 Shot Dead in NY -- What does it mean?

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Richard Moore

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Apr 5, 2009, 11:20:27 AM4/5/09
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Of course you've seen this shocking story on TV, and below is the NY Times report, 13 Shot Dead During a Class on Citizenship. I've included at the bottom some of the comments that readers posted in response to the article. As you might expect the following kinds of sentiments were passionately expressed:

• guns must be banned!
• guns aren't the problem!
• too many immigrants are getting into the country.
• the attacker was probably a redneck.
• right-wing talk radio deserves the blame for the killings.
• the liberal media is playing up this incident for its own purposes.

The political consequence of the incident is increased polarization, left vs. right, much like we are seeing with the hoopla around Rush Limbaugh, and his tirades against Obama. Those tirades makes sense to many on the right, and are seen as dangerous nonsense by everyone on the left. Meanwhile we have Obama blaming the Republicans for creating all the problems, and for putting obstacles in the way of his programs.

Besides polarization, we are also getting increased fear on both sides. The right is afraid of a socialist takeover, while the left is afraid of some kind of right-wing reaction. As one reader of the article put it, "We don't need to fear Al-Quaida, we need to focus on the terror being fanned by Limbaugh and others."

This is developing into a positive-feedback scenario, where increased fear on each side leads to increased stridency, leading to a heightened reaction from the other side, and so it repeats. This kind of shooting incident dramatically accelerates the spiraling process of mutual fear and animosity. 

One of the consequences of this polarized environment is the submergence of all substantive issues. The only thing that matters is whether you're for Obama or against him. If you offer a critique of his agenda, you must be a right-winger, or a victim of right-wing propaganda, in the eyes of liberals. If you support Obama, you're either a socialist or you're brainwashed, in the eyes of the right. Neither side is interested in a reasoned discussion of the issues, and neither side is interested in listening to the other side's point of view. Ironically, it's similar to the kind of divisiveness Bush promulgated: Either you're with us, or you're with the terrorists.

If you think this is all a co-incidence, then I suggest you take the blue pill, and skip ahead to the NY Times article. 
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Every Presidential administration comes in with a covert substantive agenda, a phony public agenda, a psy-op mind-control regime, and of course a lead PR person, the President, who pretends to be in charge.

In the case of the Clinton administration, the substantive agenda was the destabilization of Yugoslavia, the seizure of Kosovo's resources, a genocide program against the Iraqis, and the undermining of US economic sovereignty via NAFTA. The phony agenda was about gay rights, universal health care, and human rights generally. 

The psy-op regime had an obvious part and a non-obvious part. The obvious part, as usual, was the media attention given to the phony agenda, making it seem to be the important news of the day, and the spin given to the covert agenda, making it seem unintended or forced by others. The non-obvious part was the Monica Lewinsky affair, and the way it was handled, creating a rabid anti-Clinton constituency prepared to embrace a Christian-sounding Bush. Of course the gay-rights thing added considerably to this constituency, while vote fraud and Supreme Court corruption made up the difference.

In the case of the Bush administration, the substantive agenda was the dismantlement of the Bill of Rights, the establishment of a police-state infrastructure, the destruction of the economy, the expansion of US power in important petroleum-related territories, and the surrounding of Russia and China with US bases. The phony agenda was about fighting terrorism and disarming weapons of mass destruction. 

The psy-op regime, apart from the usual obvious part, was of course based on the 9/11 false-flag op, the preparations for which began long before Bush took office. The constant 'terror alerts', the nonsense security measures at airports, and the phony Bin Laden videos, were all pure psy-op. And just as Clinton had an 'exit psy-op' in the Lewinsky Affair, Bush's exit psy-op was his well-acted stupidity, and the hopelessness he made us all feel, preparing us to embrace savior-figure Obama. 

One of the things I learned from Estulin, is the degree to which the think-tank industry is devoted to psy-ops. That is, for example, one of the primary missions of the Rand Corporation -- figuring out how to manipulate the masses psychologically. It's high-tech stuff, psychologically speaking, much more nuanced that what Madison Avenue puts out.

And of course there have been the experiments on the population itself, usually referred to as Operation Mind Control. There was the first phase, aimed at controlling Manchurian Candidate type operatives, using drugs, hypnosis, sensory depravation, and who knows what techniques. That's where you get your 'crazy-man massacres', like this current one in New York. Then there was the second phase, research into cult management, with such infamous CIA experiments as Jim Jones' People's Temple, and Koresh's Branch Davidian movement. 

In the case of the Obama administration, the substantive agenda is about completing the destruction of the economy, institutionalizing the transfer of power to financial elites, reducing American living standards and public services closer to third-world standards, moving the world toward a global centralized government, and expanding and re-focusing the military missions begun by Bush. The phony agenda has to do with hope, improving health care and education, energy independence, becoming more green, stimulating the economy, and creating the conditions for resumed economic growth. 

So we have a situation where Obama will be doing, and has been doing, the exact opposite of what he promises. This creates a special challenge for the psy-op regime. How do you get people to keep believing in hope while their world is being systematically dismantled around them? In order to rise to this challenge, all the stops have been pulled out, giving us a psy-op regime that in its own way is just as radical, dramatic, and unexpected, as was the demolition of the twin towers.

Every President has played their supporters and detractors against one another, that's part of the standard psy-op regime. But with Obama we have something quite different. For the first time, we have the deployment of an outright cult operation. It was launched via an innovative campaign strategy, is being carefully nurtured by the media, and it features Obama as the naturally charismatic leader, like Jones and Koresh in the experimental prototypes. 

Normally we have supporters and detractors who are motivated by issues, with the President promoting policies that his supporters have been asking for, and that his detractors disapprove of. With Obama, we have instead believers and disbelievers, who are motivated by their psychological response to Obama's emotional rhetoric. No concrete agenda was articulated or debated in the campaign, rather Obama sought to convince people that his perceived intelligence and integrity would guarantee change of a useful kind. And people had been carefully prepared to welcome such a fellow, by eight years under an administration seemingly headed by a perceived idiot and liar. 

Obama was selling himself rather than a platform, and the media played along, focusing on the personalities in the campaign, rather than on any key issues. When people began to question how we could expect change to come from his establishment Cabinet appointees, he underscored this personal focus: "The change will come from me", he said, and that was more than enough to satisfy the believers. In their minds, lions in his den reveals his confidence and strength, rather than signaling his capitulation, as it so obviously does.

And that's how cults work. Once the leader has been imprinted in the believers' minds as the one in whom we trust, then the logical mind will go to any lengths to rationalize that continuing trust. The relief from having hope is very powerful, and the thought of losing hope is very threatening. These are very strong psychological forces that bind the believer to the leader, in the same way people are bound to religions. The purpose of the CIA experiments was to see how far you could go with these binding forces, to develop mind-control techniques that could get people to take their kool-aid on command. They learned their lessons well.

What they learned is that you need other binding forces as well, in particular you need an outside threat. The disbelievers are just as important to cult management as are the believers. Having hope is a strong binding force, but when the contradiction between hope and reality becomes too great, there is always the possibility that rational thinking might raise its ugly head and undermine the cult dynamic. Thus we see media attention given to Limbaugh et al, to inspire fear and revulsion in the believers, and to draw them closer to their comforting leader. And in the liberal media, we see ridicule of the right wing, and the characterization of them as being dangerous, tightening the emotionally-oriented cult bonds, and further submerging any concern with issues.

But this is only the beginning. The shit has not really hit the fan yet. When unemployment doubles and doubles again, when there are food riots and unemployment riots, when the dollar becomes worthless, that is when the cult bonds will become critical to maintaining the mind-control regime. Thus it is necessary to accelerate divisiveness, to accentuate fear, and to create a charged us-vs-them environment. If 3,000 can be sacrificed in a 9/11 incident without any sense of guilt or remorse by the perps, then 13 or 14 in a shooting incident is surely small potatoes. As Kissinger says, you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.

rkm
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April 4, 2009

13 Shot Dead During a Class on Citizenship

A gunman invaded an immigration services center in downtown Binghamton, N.Y., during citizenship classes on Friday and shot 13 people to death and critically wounded 4 others before killing himself in a paroxysm of violence that turned a quiet civic setting into scenes of carnage and chaos.

The killing began around 10:30 a.m. and was over in minutes, witnesses said, but the ordeal lasted up to three hours for those trapped inside the American Civic Association as heavily armed police officers, sheriff’s deputies and state troopers threw up a cordon of firepower outside and waited in a silence of uncertainty.

Finally, officers who had not fired a shot closed in and found a sprawl of bodies in a classroom, 37 terrified survivors cowering in closets and a boiler room and, in an office, the dead gunman, identified as Jiverly Wong, 42, a Vietnamese immigrant who lived in nearby Johnson City.

Two pistols and a satchel of ammunition were found with the body. In what the police took to be evidence of preparation and premeditation, the assailant had driven a borrowed car up against the center’s back door to barricade it against escape, then had walked in the rain around to the front to begin the attack.

What motivated the assault remained a mystery. Binghamton officials said the assailant apparently had ties to the center, which helps immigrants and refugees with counseling, resettlement and other issues.

It was the nation’s worst mass shooting since April 16, 2007, when Seung-Hui Cho, 23, shot and killed 32 people in a dormitory and classroom at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Va., then killed himself in the largest shooting in modern American history. In the last month, 25 people, including 2 gunmen, were slain in three mass shootings, in North Carolina, California and Alabama.

As city, state and federal officials from numerous agencies began what was likely to be a lengthy investigation, expressions of condolence for the victims and their families were offered by Gov. David A. Paterson and other officials who went to Binghamton; by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., in New York to address a civil rights group; and by President Obama, in Europe for NATO talks.

The vice president said Americans must find a way to prevent the kind of bloodshed that erupted in Binghamton. “We’ve got to figure out a way to deal with this terrible, terrible violence,” Mr. Biden told a meeting in New York.

Binghamton, a city of about 43,000 at the confluence of the Susquehanna and Chenango Rivers in the Southern Tier, some 175 miles northwest of New York City, is the home of Binghamton University, part of the State University of New York. It is a working-class town whose population is more than 80 percent white and about 10 percent black, with small percentages of Asians and Latinos.

The American Civic Association, a small nonprofit resettlement agency financed largely by the United Way, has resettled 53 refugees through its Binghamton center since 2004, most of them Vietnamese who studied English as a second language there. It operated quietly for years, its officials said, and seemed an improbable venue for a murderous attack.

Little was known about the assailant Friday night. Cautious officials declined to name the gunman, but there appeared to be little doubt about his identity. The name Jiverly Wong was provided by a law enforcement official who declined to be named because he was not authorized to release information.

But the official said Mr. Wong had a New York State pistol license that listed two handguns, apparently the weapons he used at the immigration services center: a .45-caliber Beretta and a 9-millimeter Beretta. The authorities matched the serial numbers of the two weapons found with the gunman’s body to the serial numbers on the pistol license. Officials said they were trying to trace the histories of the guns. Other public records indicated that Mr. Wong had also lived in California in recent years.

At Mr. Wong’s home in Johnson City on Friday night, the police were seen removing a rifle case, a box with a picture of a rifle on the side, and two black boxes that may have been handgun cases.

Maurice Hinchey, who represents the area in Congress, said he was told by law enforcement officials that the gunman drove to the center in a car registered to his father and barricaded the center’s back door with it. “He made sure nobody could escape,” Police Chief Joseph Zikuski said at a late-afternoon news conference.

It was unclear what connection the gunman previously had with the immigration services center, but there appeared to be no doubt that he was acting alone, Chief Zikuski said.

Armed with the two handguns and wearing a green jacket, the executioner came out of the rain through the glass front doors of the center, entering a reception area where he encountered two secretaries. He said nothing, but shot both. One slumped dead, but the other, Shirley DeLucca, pretended to be dead, and as the gunman walked on, she crawled to a desk and called 911.

Beyond the entryway, about 50 people — Russians, Kurds, Chinese, Arabs, Laotians and others — were arrayed in several classrooms at their desks in language and citizenship classes. The gunman entered the first room, a citizenship class, and resumed firing. As victims wounded and dying crumpled to the floor, students in nearby classrooms heard the shots.

Thanh Huynh, who translated the account of a young Vietnamese woman, said the group fell silent. The teacher called 911, then hurried out with the others, running for the back stairs to the basement. “They heard the continued shooting, very fast,” the translator said, “like 10 bullets, 10 shots together. They tried to hide in the basement anywhere they can, under chair, closet, storage room. Then, after they heard, so quiet.”

Zhanar Tokhtabayeva, 30, from Kazakhstan, told The Associated Press that she was in an English class when she heard the shots. Her teacher screamed for everyone to go into a storage room. “I heard the shots, every shot,” she said. “I heard no screams, just silence, shooting. I heard shooting, very long time. And I was thinking, when will this stop? I was thinking that my life was finished.”

At least 26 people took refuge in a boiler room, the police chief said. The first officers were on the scene within two minutes of the first 911 call, he said. In all, he said, 37 survivors were found.

Meanwhile, swarms of Binghamton police officers and Broome County sheriff’s deputies with rifles and shotguns converged on the scene a block off Main Street, just west of the Chenango River, and took cover behind a tangle of vehicles and the corners of nearby buildings.

Streets were cleared for blocks around. Apartments and homes nearby were evacuated, along with shops and other business establishments in the area. Nearby, Binghamton High School went into lockdown. The ensuing hours were tense, with no further shots fired inside and no information on how many were dead, wounded and trapped.

About 1:30 p.m., police SWAT teams moved into the building methodically, encountering the gunman with his weapons and ammunition satchel. It was unclear in what part of the body he had shot himself. Most of the dead were found sprawled in a classroom — their names were not released — and survivors were found scattered about in closets, storage rooms and the boiler room. Many were too terrified to come out of hiding, the police said.

In addition, the police were unaware at the time that there was only one assailant. On the possibility that others were involved, some of the male survivors were handcuffed when they were brought out. Chief Zikuski later apologized for this.

Four wounded survivors were taken to area hospitals. Two women and a man suffering gunshot wounds were being treated at Wilson Medical Center in Johnson City, and a man was being treated at Our Lady of Lourdes Memorial Hospital in Binghamton. The police and other officials called their conditions critical, but hospital representatives gave various reports of conditions.

On Friday night, the scene of the shooting and much of the block around it remained cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape. Crowds that had milled around throughout the day had dwindled to a group of onlookers who mingled with television news crews, lingering in the ordinarily quiet neighborhood, a mix of homes and small businesses.

Just a few doors down is the First Congregational Church of Binghamton, a local landmark. The pastor, the Rev. Arthur Suggs, said the shooting that had transformed the city was only part of a larger pattern in the nation. “It’s like our number came up,” he said.

Omri Yigal, 53, said in a telephone interview late Friday night that his wife, Doris Yigal, also 53, was taking an English class at the center at the time of the shooting and remained “unaccounted for.” The police told him she was not among the survivors they had interviewed, Mr. Yigal said, adding that he could not find her at the local hospitals.

Ms. Yigal, a homemaker originally from the Philippines, came to the United States about a year ago. She was taking English classes to help her compete in the job market.

“She has always dreamed of coming to the United States,” Mr. Yigal said. “But certainly she had no idea of the kind of dangers that were present in our society.”

She has two sisters, he said, both of whom called wanting to know how she was. “They’re very distraught,” he said.

Mr. Yigal said he planned to stay up through the night, calling hospitals and hoping. “Right now, I’m looking at our wedding pictures,” he said.

Reporting was contributed by Ray Rivera in Binghamton, N.Y., Nate Schweber in Johnson City, N.Y., Al Baker, Jack Begg, Nina Bernstein and Anahad O’Connor in New York City, and Francesca Segrè in Inglewood, Calif.

____


Some of the comments left by readers:

Why can't we be a gunless society...why do we need guns at all. Regulate them now and out of existence if at all possible.
It's time to amend the constitution. — rlk, chappaqua, ny

Another in our almost daily tales of carnage that the gun lobby somehow keeps getting its way in spite of... one wonders why these crazies don't just shoot themselves and leave a note? they must know in their planning phase they are going to die, so why take innocents with them? (I know, I know, I'm imputing a level of rationality to this that just isn't there in the minds of these killers).
Take the guns away, for crying out loud! enough! force them to use primitive tools to carry out their public displays of anger - at least a whole lot less people will die from fists, rocks or baseball bats.
— Bill, Dallas

I really can't understand why those communist liberals keep pushing for gun control. You can see that guns had little or nothing to do with this carnage. Go NRA!!!! — Johanna Clearfield, Brooklyn

It is sad that so many people lost their lives. It was horrible that this guy killed these immigrants in cold blood. However, it is the federal government which is partially responsible for these senseless deaths. If it actually monitored our borders and didn't let anyone and their 10 kids in this country, these immigrants would likely still be alive. And this psycho wouldn't have had the opportunity or motivation to kill them. My prayers are with the victims and their families at this sad time.
— Bruce Goldensteinberg, NY

Something tells me that it's only a matter of time before we find out that the perpetrator of this horrible crime was some unemployed redneck spending far too much time of his free time listening to vitriolic conservative talk radio.
— RD, New York, NY

With Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck screaming FEAR at every turn in this depressed economy I think that all of this will simply become more prevalent. The news everyday is filled with horrific stories of the recession, lost jobs, lost lives. People are terror-stricken and are blasting away with assault weapons. We don't need to fear Al-Quaida, we need to focus on the terror being fanned by Limbaugh and others. Gun sales went up 100% after Obama was elected. We are our own worst enemy. — bacher4, Hawaii



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