The reason this result is no surprise is because the trial was in DC. Washington DC is what you might call a company town – the company being “the Swamp” and in particular the Democratic Party. What’s more, some jury members had ties to people involved in the case (see information at the link), but I think it’s highly likely that any DC jury would have acquitted even without such ties.
The trial had the advantage of spelling out some very bad stuff on the part of Clinton, Sussman, and the FBI, but only for those inclined to pay close attention, which is only a small percentage of the American people. For those on the left, the trial’s outcome will almost undoubtedly be used to claim innocence on the part of those who orchestrated and executed Russiagate.
The law ordinarily cannot save a system so corrupted.
It also occurs to me, and not for the first time, that the only reason the Watergate conspirators were convicted was that they were on the Republican side. In addition, although many had formerly been in the CIA (or in Liddy’s case the FBI), they weren’t working on behalf of those agencies when they perpetrated Watergate. Last but not least, they were guilty of more obvious crimes of the conventional type, and that’s what their convictions were about: burglary, wiretapping, and conspiracy around those things.
The Russiagate conspiracy was far wider, involved members of government agencies working supposedly on behalf of those agencies, was perpetrated by Democrats and others who didn’t like Trump, and didn’t involve the same sort of obvious crimes as Watergate even though Russiagate was far worse and far more dangerous, in my opinion.
ADDENDUM: On today’s open thread I noticed the following from John Tyler in the comments, referring to the Sussman acquittal:
Is it because it is not illegal to create a fictional narrative to slander and destroy a political opponent?
Or is it because, the conspirators are all so versed in the law, they know how and what to do and not be in violation of any laws?
That’s what I was getting at in this post when I compared the Russiagate perps to the Watergate perps. Russiagate was incredibly widespread, sophisticated, and coordinated exercise in which many of the perps were lawyers and knew exactly what they were doing. They never expected to be caught. But in the off chance that they were caught, they knew they almost certainly were safe from conviction for a host of reasons.]
If you’re readin’ this
My momma’s sittin’ there
Looks like I only got a one way ticket over here.
I sure wish I could give you one more kiss
War was just a game we played when we were kids
Well I’m layin’ down my gun
I’m hanging up my boots
I’m up here with God and we’re both watchin’ over you
So lay me down
In that open field out on the edge of town
And know my soul
Is where my momma always prayed that it would go.
If you’re readin’ this I’m already home…
The first time I ever heard the song I got the chills as the lyrics unfolded and I realized what it was about, and then again and again as the heartstrings were jerked harder and harder as the song went on.
Most of us do, or should, feel a very strong gratitude to the men and women who sacrificed their lives to defend liberty here and abroad, and a very strong sorrow that it was necessary. On Memorial Day, we thank them.
You’ve probably already heard of one fourth-grader in Uvalde who smeared herself with the blood of her dead friend, intending to pretend to be dead herself if the shooter returned to her classroom from the adjoining room where he was at the time.
I consider this an impressive display of resourcefulness and composure in one so young. From where did she get the idea? Movies? Pretend play? She was incredibly brave – and she also is the girl who took her dead teacher’s cellphone from the body and made many 911 calls describing the situation and asking for help.
This girl and her surviving classmates have witnessed and experienced an encounter with the deepest evil, and that is difficult for anyone much less a child of her age. She is understandably traumatized and will need to learn how to see herself as a heroine – which she is – rather than as a victim. It will take time, but I hope she makes it.
The interview with this girl is hard to even hear about. She is neither shown nor heard in the video, except for a still photo from the past; what she said in the interview is described by the interviewer, but that’s bad enough.
The killing of her teacher is one of the most chilling parts of the story the girl tells, and once again it illustrates what I consider to be the psychological sadism of the killer. It reminds me of some of the things the Columbine killers said to their victims, grim cinema-like “jokes” as though playing a role in a violent movie. It bolsters my previous belief that Ramos was a psychopath, although “psychopath” is merely a descriptive word that tells us little to nothing about how a person becomes one.
A couple of things this girl’s interview makes clear is that the school went on lockdown very early. You will see when you watch it that the murdered teacher was just about to lock the door when she encountered the killer. Another thing that is made clear is that the girl made the 911 calls while the murderer was in an adjacent room; that might explain why he didn’t hear her and come back to kill her, which I had wondered about earlier. The effectiveness of her act of smearing blood on herself in order to effectively play dead was never tested because apparently the perp never returned to her room.
[NOTE: By the way, why are there so many girls among the dead? Did the perp especially target girls? Or was it just by chance? Five boys and fourteen girls died. I don’t know the breakdown of boys and girls among the wounded.]
I’ve noticed, also, that many people who are following the story – be they newscasters or pundits or commenters on blogs – keep getting the details mixed up and either inferring things that weren’t said or hearing incorrectly what was said. Granted, a lot of it doesn’t seem to make sense and a lot is missing, which indicates either a coverup or simply the fact that the relevant information hasn’t been learned yet by the authorities themselves. Creating a coherent story of a violent attack – a coherent story that isn’t fiction, that is – requires a lot of research, interviews, and phone calls and surveillance videos to watch and analyze.
But yesterday we got a lot more information, and much of it was shocking. Here’s the speech by Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw, which is followed by questions from the press and answers from McCraw. Each answer of his raises question in me, and most of the questions haven’t been answered yet:
For example, when he says at the outset that surveillance video reveals that a teacher propped open an outer door to the school at 11:27 AM (a minute before the perp’s car crash near the school, and very shortly before his entry onto school property), my first thought when I heard that was of the exquisitely painful timing of an act that the teacher probably thought innocuous and one that she might even have performed hundreds of time before without anything bad happening.
…For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
The kingdom that was lost in Uvalde was nineteen innocent and precious children and two teachers who by all accounts were wonderful, and the peace of mind of the town and even so many of the rest of us. Where is the teacher who propped open the door (a woman, it’s been revealed, and not one of the teachers who was killed), and what is she thinking and feeling today? My guess is that she may be at risk for suicide herself.
But my second thought was, “why did she prop the door open”? And why did she not close it (I get the impression she re-entered the school afterwards, being aware of shots having been fired)? I think that perhaps can be explained by panic – McCraw said she called 911 in panic. Apparently she and hundreds of others have already been interviewed, and there will no doubt be a lengthy report in the fullness of time. But that doesn’t tell us much now.
The biggest question is why did the police chief [see UPDATE below] of Uvalde decide this was not an active shooter situation, and tell all the forces (including the initial Border force group) to stand down? This is outrageous and unconscionable, with children at risk and some dying as a police force of nineteen waited outside the room. You’ll have to listen to the video to get a sense of what McCraw was saying and why, but it’s clear to me that (a) he is outraged by the decision (b) he doesn’t understand it himself (3) he is constrained from fully speaking his mind; and (d) he knows it was actually an active shooter situation and they should have gone in.
Unexplained are the details, except that we are told it was the Uvalde police chief’s decision and he was in charge of the whole operation. Was he present at the site in the hallway, or was he directing this from afar? McCraw doesn’t say, although I am virtually certain he knows – but a criminal investigation is going on. Does that mean the police chief might be charged with something himself?
Here is a profile of the police chief [see UPDATE below]; I see nothing remarkable there. Apparently he only spoke very briefly to the public immediately after the shooting, and has been mum since.
Also unexplained is the reaction of the police officers waiting all that time in the corridor or wherever they were. Were they okay with being told to stand down? Were they enraged, but required to obey the orders? How much did they know at the time of what was actually happening inside the two classrooms? In particular, since one child in particular made many 911 calls during the standoff (more about that later in another post), was the content of these 911 calls conveyed to the police chief and to the forces at the school? If not, why on earth not?
Those 911 calls made it clear that in those two rooms there were many dead children and some dead teachers, many injured children as well, and some uninjured children, all continuing to be at the mercy of an armed killer. This information was so vital to the decision-making process of the police chief that it seems highly unlikely (although possible) that he didn’t know about it, and if he did know then it seems that the officers should have been told to try just about anything to get in there and subdue the killer (as McCraw himself indicates).
It didn’t happen. We don’t know why, but someday we may.
Another puzzlement for me is whether children were being shot while the officers were waiting outside the room. Many many commenters and newscasters and others have now assumed that was the case, but I don’t know. McCraw makes it clear the seven officers entered the school and had some sort of gunfire exchange with the killer early on, and then that Ramos fired many rounds after that while the seven held off. Were those rounds only at the officers, or was that when the perp was killing the teachers and the children?
[NOTE: Some of this is described in an interview with the girl who made most of the 911 calls, who turns out to be the same girl who smeared herself with a dead friend’s blood in order to effectively play dead if the killer returned to her room (he was in the adjacent room when she made the calls). I will be discussing that interview in another post.]
UPDATE:
The person identified in that linked CNN article – Arredondo – as having been in command of decisions during the shooting and its aftermath was referred to as both the Uvalde police chief (in a photo caption) as well as the school district police chief. It appears, however, that he was the school district police chief and not the Uvalde police chief, and that he was in fact present on the scene at the time. I didn’t catch that when I listened to McCraw. I may just have missed it and perhaps he said it, or perhaps the video doesn’t show the entire question-and-answer period. At any rate, School District Police Chief Arredondo was the one who was in charge at the scene and it was apparently he who made the fateful decision to hold off. It was not Uvalde Police Chief Rodriguez; at least, that’s what I get from the information available at the moment. What Rodriguez’s involvement was, and whether he had any involvement at all, is unclear.
UPDATE 6:55 PM:
I think this is important information (if correct). See this [emphasis mine]:
An off-duty BORTAC agent was the first to arrive outside of the “quiet” classroom at 12:15 p.m. and found several local police officers in the hallway there…
The agent began concocting a tactical operation to get inside, and reinforcements from CBP arrived around 15 minutes later…
The other BORTAC agents, along with members from ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit, were late to get to the classroom after they were initially told by local police to wait outside the school upon arriving…
The HSI agents had been instructed to instead help retrieve children from the windows. But after roughly 30 minutes, the agents from both agencies ignored local law enforcement and entered the school, the report said.
With no battering ram on site to bust the classroom door down, agents opted to use a ballistic shield provided by a U.S. Marshal.
It was difficult to determine who had authority over the operation, the source said…
The first BORTAC agent who arrived wanted to breach the door and get to the shooter immediately with the small team assembled outside [my question is: how?]. In the meantime, CBP and other law enforcement officers evacuated students and staff from other classrooms, the source said.
Officers sent for a key to unlock the classroom, which reportedly took 40 minutes to an hour to retrieve from a janitor.
The agent said he heard no shots fired during that period of time, according to The Washington Post.
The team made their entry “within minutes” of getting the key, the official told the paper. Officials said they entered around 12:50 p.m.
The article also says that the perp was hiding in a closet when they entered and then he burst out shooting.
It sounds as though this was actually an exceptionally difficult situation, even if the other officers hadn’t been told to stand down and if they had been trying to break in. How to do it without the proper equipment? Why was it so hard to get a battering ram? How to enter without being picked off one-by-one themselves, as they entered with no ballistic shield?
It also seems exceptionally confused as far as command and control goes. But this wasn’t the Marines – it was a smallish town police department and school district police department. And yet they had rehearsed the response to a school shooter situation before.
My present theory – which might change as new information emerges – is that the problem was a combination of poor and/or incomplete information, bad communication, confusing chain of command, lack of proper equipment, and perhaps also lack of a more creative approach to a difficult situation in terms of getting into the room.
Most of us have wondered at the snail’s pace of Durham’s Russiagate probe, which was way too slow to affect the all-important 2020 election and very frustrating. Here’s Bill Barr’s explanation, for what it’s worth – and I think it’s worth at least something:
Barr told The Blaze that when he brought Durham on board, DOJ inspector general Michael Horowitz (D) had yet to finish his investigation of the FBI’s use of FISA court warrants against Carter Page, an adviser to the Trump campaign. Durham wanted to see Horowitz’s report before starting his work, which was finally released in December 2019. Durham was able to access the report for just three months before the Covid-19 pandemic shut down grand juries and delayed his investigation throughout most of 2020.
“His hands were very much tied as to how far he could push things and how much pressure he could bring on people through most of 2020,” said Barr.
I’m not saying it would have changed anything in the 2020 election (and of course it depends on whether fraud was a significant factor in Biden’s win). But it might have done so.
COVID lockdowns hurt the US and the world in so many many ways.
I’m a product of New York City’s gifted and talented program in the public schools, although I think it was called something slightly different back then (if memory serves, it was “intellectually gifted children” or “IGC”; forget the “talented”). Not all that many years later I heard of the first attempts in NY and elsewhere to stop such programs, and I had no trouble imagining what a disaster that would be for the “smart” kids, who would transition from being somewhat bored (as I often was) to being unutterably bored, and who would learn less and less and less.
But some people apparently thought they should be the sacrificial lambs to the idea of “self-esteem” for the greatest number – or some such thing.
Such efforts certainly haven’t stopped in the decades since. Here’s what happened in the latest skirmish:
A New York state judge this week shot down an activist organization’s lawsuit against New York City’s Gifted and Talented (G&T) program in a single-paragraph ruling, noting that such decisions are better left to state legislatures–and ultimately, voters.
As reported by the Washington Examiner, IntegrateNYC in its lawsuit claimed the G&T program created a racial “caste system” through a school curriculum that “centers white experience.” In addition, the activists accused the City of “failing to recruit diverse staff and dismantle racism.”
The group’s lawyer said it was ““the first case in the nation to seek a constitutional right to an anti-racist education.” That’s “anti-racist” in its new meaning, not the old.
If I’m not mistaken, the NYC school system is already at the point where there aren’t many white kids left in public schools – this site says it was 15% as of 2017-2018. As far as I know, most people in NYC – white or black or Asian or of any other ethnicity – who can afford to send a child to private school there do so rather than allowing the child to enter the public school system.
Israel could not prevent attacks if its efforts were based solely on armed security guards at each school, he said. Israel “invests heavily in monitoring profiles of people,” Hazony continued.
It has a “complex, multi-layered approach” to security that uses intelligence networks to examine the acquisition of weapons and social media activity, he said.
Yigal Arbiv, who was in charge of security at Tchernichovsky Junior High School in the Israeli coastal city of Netanya for 16 years, told Fox News Digital it is important that the “head of security [for a school] be given authorization to do everything” to provide safety for the children and staff.
Arbiv, who has 27 years of military and security experience, said his system employed a “spotter 50 meters from school” who patrolled the area and kept an eye out. Visitors to the school “could only come from one direction,” he said.
A fence surrounds the school and cameras are in place all over the facility. “Hot spots” can be manually activated when a problem arises, sending a message to the head of security and staff, said Arbiv, who now runs the Israeli Krav Maga & Security Training company (I.K.M.A).
“Everyone who goes into the school needs to go through a metal detector, like at an airport, and sign his name,” the security expert said, adding that the “school has one exit and one entrance… nobody comes to the school without the head of security knowing about it. We do not allow people not connected to school to come inside.”
There are also “barricades around the school, so people can’t drive into it,” he said. Palestinian terrorists have used vehicles to carry out ramming attacks in Israel.
Arbiv, who said he has trained police in the U.S., added that a large school compound also requires a guard on a motorcycle…
They also have a network of volunteers to help.
There are a lot of differences between the Israeli situation and the American one. Israel is a tiny country; the US is huge. Israel is comparatively homogeneous in population (although certainly not entirely homogeneous) compared to the US, and the threats to Israeli schools are almost certainly of the Palestinian or Islamic terrorist variety. In the US, they could be political but are more likely to be the result of teens who are either psychopathic or troubled in various other ways. The possibilities in the US have so much more variety.
The article contains a photo of the security fence at one Israeli school (copyright issues make it impossible to post here, so you’ll have to go to the link to see it). It’s formidable in strength and very high, much higher and stronger than the 8-foot chain link fence the Uvalde shooter is said to have scaled. I don’t think there’s a school in the US with a fence like that Israeli one, which gives a fortress and prison-like atmosphere but is probably very difficult for a lone teenager to breach without special equipment.
Are we ready for schools to be surrounded by something like that? I don’t know.
This is something I previously had suspected as a possibility – that by the time police got to the scene at Uvalde and entered the school building, and then got to the barricaded classroom, they thought the shooting of children and teachers was finished and that the perp was simply barricaded in the room. Was this the truth, or was it a tragic and horrific – and probably even stupid – miscalculation? We don’t yet know, just as we don’t know a ton of other important things about the timeline, the actions, and the decisions made:
Texas official: The decision to not breach the classroom was made by the Chief of Police for the school district.
"He was convinced at that time that there was no more threat to the children…and that they had time to organize…" pic.twitter.com/TKRmatNfWO
So two police officers had been “hit” by the perp’s gunfire although not injured seriously, and one was “grazed.” What was the reason police decided there was no danger anymore to children – and was this correct? I have so many questions that are unanswered:
Was that just cowardice and abysmal judgment, or did it make sense at the time? Had all the shooting from the perp stopped by this time, and was he only firing at police? I have suspected for a while now that the children were killed very early on, perhaps even before police arrived on the scene, but is that true? And what did the police know? What evidence were they relying on when they made the decision? How many children might have died from bleeding out in the meantime, while the police waited? Was there any sort of camera in the room that told police what was going on? And an unanswerable one – how many police might have died storming the room without proper equipment? Does that possibility not go with the territory of being a police officer? At what point would such action have been suicidal, without the proper equipment?
This is very disturbing information. But here’s more that indicates the same scenario:
Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw said Friday that when officers were responding to Robb Elementary School , “there was a barrage – hundreds of rounds were pumped in, in four minutes,” into two classrooms inside the school.
“Any firing afterwards was sporadic and it was at the door,” McCraw continued. “So the belief is that there may not be anybody living anymore and that the subject is now trying to keep law enforcement at bay or enticing them to come in and suicide [by cop].”…
“Texas embraces and teaches the active shooter doctrine,” McCraw later said. “As long as there’s kids, as long as there’s somebody firing, you go to the gun, you find them, you neutralize them, period.
“There are some nuances with transitioning to a barricaded subject and also transitioning to a hostage situation,” McCraw also said. “And, of course, that the decision at the scene was that this is still a barricaded subject, it did not go back to an active shooter.”
I haven’t watched the whole press conference – only read the excerpts and summaries – but it seems to me that it’s possible that it never did “go back to being an active shooter” situation after that. It takes time to generate a timeline that fits all the facts, and I wonder if any of this was recorded. Neither teacher in the room survived, but perhaps some children were aware of the exact time the shooting of the victims occurred, either through watches or cell phones? It may be an exceptionally difficult thing to reconstruct. Was there surveillance video at least of the halls, and if so does it have sound? A sound recording would be very helpful in figuring this out.
McGraw says that the holding back was the “wrong decision, period.” I agree. But it’s possible the decision could be understood by knowing the answers to these questions. It’s also possible it would seem like an even worse decision than it already appears to be.
It’s hard to withhold final judgment until we get further information in a situation of such high emotion and horror, and with so much room for justified anger. But I think it’s necessary.
UPDATE 4:50 PM:
At that news conference by McCraw, it was explained that several 911 calls came in during the standoff. This site summarizes the talk today from McCraw. Some relevant quotes:
The first call was from an unidentified person inside the classroom [at 12:03]. The person made another call at 12:10 pm and advised that multiple people were dead. She called again at 12:13 pm and 12:16 pm and said there were eight to nine students alive inside the classroom she was in.
Another call was placed from inside a classroom at 12:19 pm from another unidentified person, “who hung up when another student told her to hang up,” McCraw said.
The initial caller, identified as a “student/child” made two more calls at 12:43 p.m. and 12:47 p.m. and asked the 911 operator to “please send the police now,” McCraw said.
It was initially reported that a 911 call was placed by a teacher, but that has since been retracted.
My question is: were the police at the scene informed of the content of the calls? I’m going to assume that they were – which makes their behavior even worse – but do we know they were informed? They certainly should have been, but I’d like to know for sure before I assume that they were privy to that information.
It really does look more and more as though terrible judgment was used by the police, especially if the police at the scene were informed of the content of those calls. And if they weren’t, they certainly should have been.
UPDATE 5:10 PM:
It seems to me that, as more and more information comes out – some of it information the police and other authorities are just now putting together from multiple sources – it looks more and more as though the Uvalde massacre was a chain of events that featured some things that could not have been prevented, but also a great many errors and also a lot of bad luck as well.
–A perp with some warning signs that he planned carnage, signs that apparently were not reported by the other young people who heard them.
–A police officer early on the scene who passed the perp by (he was crouching behind a car) and mistakenly stopped a teacher whom he thought might be the perp.
–A door that had been propped open by a teacher just minutes before the perp came on the scene and entered the school through it. That’s both an error and then remarkably bad luck.
–A police force that seems to have been in over its head and making bad decisions, perhaps based in part on incomplete information but seemingly based on fear and error.
UPDATE 7:55 PM:
Apparently the school did have an assigned officer who was armed, but he was not there at the time of the shooting. I don’t know whether he was supposed to be there every day all day, because that’s not always the case with these officers:
As for the armed school officer, he was driving nearby but was not on campus when Ramos crashed his truck, according to a law enforcement official who was not authorized to discuss the case and spoke of condition of anonymity.
Investigators have concluded that school officer was not positioned between the school and Ramos, leaving him unable to confront the shooter before he entered the building, the law enforcement official said.
It seems like another screw-up. Or perhaps it’s just another case of bad luck because the officer wasn’t supposed to be on duty that day.
…for lowness at this point in a president’s term, breaking a previous record set by Truman:
Former Presidents Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, and Gerald Ford had lower average approval ratings at some stage early in their presidencies, but Biden has caught up, and today’s average was the first for which he was below all presidents since Truman, a potentially troubling trend as Democrats ready for the midterm elections.
Right from the start, Trump was the victim of a fraudulent campaign to destroy him and brand him a traitor, an effort in which various government agencies cooperated. So his low approval rating was no mystery. What was causing Clinton’s and Ford’s, as well as Truman’s? The article doesn’t say, and it would take a lot of research to find out. Whatever the cause – and in Truman’s and Ford’s cases, it may have simply been that neither was elected to his first term – Biden has been far, far, far worse.
