Pentagon gunman: case of mind control?

This is from the wall street journal.


"Pentagon Gunman Dies; Mystery of Assault Deepens


WASHINGTON—The sole suspect in Thursday's Pentagon shooting died from the wounds he received in gunfire exchange with police, deepening the mystery surrounding the failed assault on the Defense Department's sprawling headquarters.

At a morning news conference, Pentagon Police Chief Richard Keevill said that the alleged gunman, John Patrick Bedell, had been carrying two 9-mm semiautomatic pistols and several magazines of ammunition. More ammunition was found in Mr. Bedell's car, Chief Keevill said.

Pentagon officials said that Mr. Bedell, 36 years old, appeared to have acted alone and that authorities were expanding their investigation into what may have prompted him to open fire on Pentagon police officers Thursday evening. Web postings linked to Mr. Bedell reflected antigovernment sentiment.

There is no indication at this point that there is any domestic or international terrorist connection, Chief Keevill said.

Concerns about the safety of U.S. military installations have been running high since a shooting at Fort Hood in Texas last November killed 13 troops and an earlier incident outside a Little Rock, Ark., recruiting station killed one soldier and badly wounded another. Both of the earlier assaults appear to have been religiously motivated.

Speaking to reporters this morning, Chief Keevill provided new details about the shootings. He said that the gunman had been wearing a suit when he exited the subway station that serves the Pentagon and walked towards the building's entrance.

There was no distress in his appearance, Chief Keevill said Friday.

When two Pentagon police officers at a nearby checkpoint asked for identification, Mr. Bedell allegedly reached into his pocket, pulled out a handgun and opened fire.

The officers shot back, critically wounding Mr. Bedell. The officers themselves were hospitalized briefly with minor injuries but have since been released, Chief Keevill said.

Chief Keevill said the guards ensured that the gunman couldn't enter the building, which was less than 20 yards away from where the shooting took place. The incident occurred near the subway station, which is used by thousands of military personnel and civilian Pentagon employees every day.

"The officers acted very quickly and decisively to neutralize the threat and no one else was injured," Mr. Keevill said Thursday night.

In the immediate aftermath of Thursday's shooting, Pentagon authorities sealed all of the entrances and exits to the mammoth building, preventing many military and civilian officials from returning home. The closures were lifted after a short period of time. The building was open for normal business on Friday, but Chief Keevill said the Pentagon's subway entrance would remain closed while investigators continue to comb what he described as an extensive crime scene.

In postings on Wikipedia and other Web sites, Mr. Bedell came across as an educated and technologically proficient man with strong libertarian leanings, an anger toward the U.S. government, and a belief that far-reaching conspiracies were behind events as big as the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and as small as the disputed 1991 death of a Marine colonel.

Mr. Bedell spent years studying engineering at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Pat Harris, a spokeswoman for San Jose State University in California, said Mr. Bedell took undergraduate courses in chemical engineering in 1995-1996 and then spent 2008-2009 doing graduate work in electrical engineering. She said he was no longer enrolled at the university and hadn't received any degrees from San Jose State.

Mr. Bedell's user page on Wikipedia, which he wrote under the name "JPatrickBedell," said that he was "determined to see that justice is served in the death of Colonel James Sabow, as a step towards establishing the truth of events such as the September 11 demolitions."

Col. Sabow had been found dead outside his California home in 1991 in what authorities said was a suicide, but his family and friends have long argued that he was killed to cover up government-sanctioned drug smuggling and secret military operations in Central America.

Mr. Bedell gave a detailed explanation of his world view in a Nov. 25, 2006, podcast called "Directions to Freedom, Part Two." He said the "seizure of the United States government by an international criminal conspiracy" was a "long-established reality." Those shadowy forces used the powers of the federal government to safeguard the shipments of their own drugs into the U.S. while crushing their would-be rivals, issued trillions of dollars of new debt to expand their wealth, and launched "political and military" disasters like Vietnam and Iraq to divert attention from their true activities, he said.

Mr. Bedell criticized the military and the nation's intelligence services, which he said had become tools of an oppressive, illegitimate regime. "This criminal organization would use its powers to convert military, intelligence, and law enforcement bureaucracies into instruments for political control and the domination and subjection of society, while discrediting, destroying, and murdering honest individuals within those services that work to root out corruption and faithfully serve their fellow citizens," Mr. Bedell said. "This organization, like so many murderous governments throughout history, would see the sacrifice of thousands of its citizens, in an event such as the September 11 attacks, as a small cost in order to perpetuate its barbaric control."

In his writings, Mr. Bedell also railed against U.S. drug laws, particularly the prohibition on marijuana cultivation.

"My desire for justice led me to violate what I think is one of the most unjust laws, cannabis prohibition, by growing 16 cannabis plants on my balcony," he wrote on the Wikipedia page.

Mr. Bedell's page on Cannabis Wiki, a user-generated Web site, includes digital copies of the court records from his June 2006 arrest in Orange County, Calif. According to the records, Mr. Bedell was charged with illegally cultivating and harvesting 16 four-foot-high marijuana plants, as well resisting a police officer. An official at the court confirmed that the records were authentic.

"Col. Sabow had been found dead outside his California home in 1991 in what authorities said was a suicide, but his family and friends have long argued that he was killed to cover up government-sanctioned drug smuggling and secret military operations in Central America".

This guy was a Colonel? Thats interesting in itself. Why dont you dig up what you can on the colonel.

Nothing more than a raving, out of control hop head.

Wait a minute....hop heads are non violent, spending their days lounging on their couches.

Something doesn't add up here, unless his verbal attack was hitting too close to the mark, stepping on the wrong toes?

Drug dealings done outside of the laws of the land, make strange bedfellows. I would say that a drug dealer trying to get to the source might just actually get to the source.

I think this shooter has really harmed all the 'causes' that he stood for.

The media is pinning this on several of the shooter's interests;
- 9/11 conspiracy theories
- Wheed prohibition, growing & use
- Mental instability.

Fact is, the vast majority of the groups of people that support any of the above, is non-violent. They realize like me that violence like the shooter has chosen to do is utterly useless, and no amendment justifies it in spirit.
Considering the alternatives (of longterm peaceful change), killing a few government employees is not effecting such an amendment, it's useless murder.

The parents are trying to pin it on "the disease" (of mental instabilty).
But i know from personal experience that most schizos and bipolars are peaceful people.
About 1 to 5% of them have a capacity for violence leading to injury or worse, up to 20% a capacity for scary intimidation.

So i'd like to pin it on their education of their son:
- they did not detect their son contemplating violence as a "solution".. so they didn't communicate like good parents do.
- they did not instill their son with a sense of how to get political goals achieved peacefully.

Bad parents, those who smear many innocent schizos and bipolars, to cover up their own grave faults.

[edit on 5-3-2010 by jk197x]