When false reporting precludes clarity of what actually happened.

There have been a handful of terroristic incidents in the US in the past twenty years or so which puzzle me.  

Timothy McVeigh and the 1995 Oklahoma Bombing

Nidal Hasan and the 2009 Fort Hood shooting 

Omar Mateen and the 2016 Orlando Nightclub Shooting 

Stephen Paddock and the 2017 Las Vegas Shooting

Nikolas Cruz and the 2018 Stoneman Douglas High School Shooting 

Anthony Quinn Warner and the 2020 Nashville Bombing

What these have in common is that they are among the most exceptional domestic attacks in terms of number of victims and yet each has substantial unanswered questions.  Paddock and Warner are the principle ones.  We know who, and we know how but we don't have any idea of why.

McVeigh, Hasan and Mateen we know who and how and some idea of why but not with great confidence, particularly in the case of Mateen.

Cruz, we know who and to some degree why but not really how.  We know how he did it but we don't know how multiple authorities and agencies missed the warning signs.  Actually this is also pretty similar to the Fort Hood shooting.  

I am not suggesting any conspiracy theory, just puzzled why there are so many unanswered questions about such rare and consequential events.  

It all started with a Glenn Greenwald tweet this morning. 

How and why did the media spend an entire month definitively affirming what appears to be a completely false story about the only person said to have been killed by the Capitol mob: Officer Brian Sicknick?

Why do we not know how or even when he died? https://t.co/XLg2OR0EoA

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 11, 2021

Follow the thread.  There is much political and criminal mystery about the Capitol Hill Protest, the Capitol Hill Insurrection, the Capitol Hill Demonstration, the Capitol Hill MAGA Riot, the Capitol Hill Antifa Riot, the Capitol Hill BLM Riot, etc..

At one level this is reasonably understandable.  The mainstream media is deeply Democratic and are trying to exploit the incident for partisan purposes.  Additionally, the mainstream media needs the sales from Trump "crises" which don't just manufacture themselves, especially now that he is out of office.  

But we are more than a month out from the events and there are many fundamentals we still simply don't have reliable information on yet.  Clearly not an insurrection, but what?  And what is going on which could justify walls and barbed wire around the Capitol and the appearance of a National Guard occupation force of 25,000 in Washington, D.C. - what is it that we don't know that would bolster this deviance from our political and social norms?

Greenwald is focusing on a particular case.  We are given to understand that at least two Capitol Hill police have committed suicide.  Really?  In all the BLM and Antifa riots these past eight months, I have not heard once of any police committing suicide.  Those were much worse than the Capitol Hill protest.  Were there no suicides or were there suicides which occurred and were not reported?

One protestor, a retired Air Force veteran, was shot and killed by the Capitol Hill police under disputed circumstances.  

A couple of protestors died of heart attacks.

And, as Greenwald points out, one Capitol Hill Police officers was said to have been killed by the protestors, Brian Sicknick.  As is clear, in Greenwald's twitter stream, it seems as if the early accounts of Sicknick being murdered by a mob have been known to be false since the day after the riot and yet have been perpetuated despite being known to be false.

Greenwald is focusing on why this untruth is being perpetuated.  Fair enough question.

But in reporting, Greenwald mentions the earlier Orlando Nightclub Shooting.  In the months afterwards, most the press reported this as an attack by a homophobe.  In his thread, Greenwald makes the repeated point that the authorities have known since the beginning that this was not about LGBT hatred.  Then why?  I simply do not know.  But what I do know is the MSM media invested heavily in manufacturing and maintaining a known untruth.  

Greenwald then mentions a similar experience in 2018 after the attack on the Pulse Night Club.  The federal investigators and prosecuting attorneys insisted Mateen chose the Pulse Night Club because he was a closeted and enraged Gay man.  Yet, at that time, Greenwald was reporting At Trial of Omar Mateen's Wife, Judges Questioning Reveals a Huge Hole in Prosecution's Case and Deceit by Prosecutors.  

In all the above instances, there are major questions remaining on some of the most consequential attacks in the recent past.  That lends itself to conspiracy theories but I lend that little credence.  I am simply astonished that the condition of unknowing can be so significant for so long about such consequential events.

Given other circumstances where the FBI has perpetrated absurd misreporting for years at a time despite the ready availability of the facts in the public domain, perhaps all these are simply FBI incompetence.

But Las Vegas and Nashville are simply astonishing.  In a connected world where everyone is always online, for us to have little idea of the motives of two mass terrorists (Paddock and Warner) seems almost inconceivable.