Farook Family Attorneys Question Veracity of San Bernardino Shooting Event

2015 San Bernardino shooting map location of mass shooting, OpenStreetMap (CC BY-SA 2.5)

Federal authorities seeking to pass off active shooter training exercises as real events may have pushed the stick too far with the San Bernardino shooting.

The family of alleged gunman Syed Rizwan Farook has retained two attorneys who are raising important questions and pointing to evidentiary anomalies that neither the federal agencies conducting the “investigation” nor the corporate media “reporting” the shooting want the public to consider.

They also argue that the event has nothing to do with terrorism.

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Farouk family attorneys David S. Chesley and Muhammad Abuershaid speak to reporters on December 4, 2015

In fact, at one point the attorneys even invoked the Sandy Hook massacre as an example of how recent mass shootings simply don’t add up. Media outlets have been quick to dismiss such comparisons as illogical and baseless.

For example, Mediaite observes:

Syed Farook‘s family lawyer Friday said “there were a lot of questions” surrounding the San Bernardino shootings, at one point floating Sandy Hook conspiracy theories to suggest the crime did not occur as the FBI claims.

In an interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo, attorney David Chesley iterated reports that the attack had nothing to do with terrorism, saying, “there have been suggestions that it may be something that was related to their work, that somehow he was a disgruntled employee.”

“I mean obviously these things were found there, how they got there we don’t know.”

“There were a lot of questions drawn with Sandy Hook and whether or not that was a real incident or not,” Chelsey added, insisting “there has been a lot speculation about” the elementary school massacre that killed 20 children and six adults. [sic]

Malik-Farook-family-lawyer

This has resulted in tremendous ire from major media and general public outrage, even though the attorneys’ queries are entirely within the realm of sound questioning.

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Prefacing his interview with Chesley and Abuershaid, CNN’s Cuomo expresses his frustration that the attorneys have put their thinking caps on and have thus not readily accepted the utterly sensationalistic San Bernardino shooting narrative presented by authorities and major news outlets.

“They don’t represent the shooters–obviously they’re dead,” Cuomo begins, “but they don’t represent their interests as well.”

This is a fascinating example of misinformation at play. In his enthusiastic defense of the dominant story frame, CNN’s Cuomo contradicts himself by questioning the attorneys’ judgement and capacity to represent dead people, as strange as that sounds.

What he’s really saying is that the attorneys are venturing in a direction that could reveal this event for what it is. This is a major reason the interview has been downplayed and the interviewees vilified. “They say that the family’s in shock,” Cuomo continues,

They say that the family didn’t know. We have no reason to disbelieve that from the investigators at this point. But they go farther. They question whether or not this is terrorism. They question whether or not this even happened the way we think it happened.

Attorneys, law enforcement officers, physicians, and university professors  are all especially menacing for those seeking to drive home a dubious storyline because such individuals represent and constitute credentialed authority to which corporate news media often defer. Thus an expert cannot be as readily dismissed as an independent researcher with a blog or YouTube channel.


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About the author:

James F. Tracy was a tenured Associate Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Florida Atlantic University from 2002 to 2016. He was fired by FAU ostensibly for violating the university's policies imposed on the free speech rights of faculty. Tracy has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the university, with trial set to begin November 27, 2017. Tracy received his PhD from University of Iowa. His work on media history, politics and culture has appeared in a wide variety of academic journals, edited volumes, and alternative news and opinion outlets. Additional information is available at MemoryHoleBlog.com, TracyLegalDefense.org, and jamesftracy.wordpress.com.

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