Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

Some readers have asked for my take on the Orlando Shooting.

I don’t have one. Let’s see if together we can form a reasonable view.

Let’s start with the basic first question. Before there can be a murder declared, there must be a body. Has anyone seen on TV or in newspapers pictures of dead bodies? Bodies should be readily available if the reports are correct that fifty people were killed and 50 or more were wounded and in hospital.

I cannot bear the presstitute TV and print media. These are full-time propaganda organizations. Hopefully, some of you hold your nose and watch the news and can fill in the spaces. Has anything we have been told been confirmed by any real evidence?

Initially, I saw a CNN newscast and a RT report. The reports were heavy with verbiage of blood being all over the place, but the only visual evidence offered were three people, supposedly injured, being helped, not by medics or first responders, but by ordinary folks. A couple of people were helping a guy with tattoos in place of a shirt, but there was no sign of blood. Several people were helping people in police uniforms to carry a person who they dumped in the back of a pickup truck, not in the cab. About 6 people were carrying a person stretched out prone (no stretcher) down a street.

There was no blood and it looked like a crisis acting performance. Why prone? Is an injured person really able to keep his body stiff so that he can be carried along prone parallel to the ground? Where are they taking him? Is this just a camera walk-by? http://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2016/06/12/orlando-nightclub-shooting-witness-sot.cnn/video/playlists/orlando-nightclub-shooting/ What has become of the protocol that untrained people are not to attempt to help injured people? When police arrive at a scene, they usually run off bystanders, not recruit them to assist their activities or allow them to carry away the wounded and dead.

Readers have noticed that the visual evidence does not match the verbal reports. Readers report that Fox “News” and MSNBC repeatedly show the same footage described above of bystanders carrying supposedly injured victims whose facial expressions are completely unstressed and show no pain, fear, or blood.

So has anyone seen any dead bodies? Any body bags? Any wounded taken to hospitals in ambulances? Any of the hospital wounded interviewed by TV reporters? Has any reporter checked with the morgue?

Allegedly, people inside the massacre location made cell phone calls and texted. But no one took photos or videos? Are there no security cameras? No doormen to notice a heavily armed person enter?

With 50 people killed and 50 or more wounded and reports of oceans of blood, there should be plenty of evidence Have any of you seen any of it?

As far as I know, dead bodies, other than those of the perpetrators themselves, seldom if ever emerge from the terrorist attacks. No dead bodies materialized from the Paris attacks except those of the alleged perpetrators. No dead bodies ever emerged from the Sandy Hook shootings. The only dead bodies I recall from the San Bernardino shooting were the husband-and-wife-alleged-perpetrators, and their hands were handcuffed behind their backs. Do police handcuff dead people who the police have shot to pieces? I don’t remember dead bodies from Brussels, just reports of dead bodies.

One could say that the media is averse to invading the privacy of dead people and their relatives by showing dead bodies, or that the media doesn’t want to show gruesome scenes—except for the videos of Muslim terrorists cutting off people’s heads. But by now the unanswered questions from the various shootings have created so much skepticism that a person would think the media would provide corroborative evidence for the official claims.

Maybe they have. As I admit, I don’t watch the presstitute news.

In order to shoot 100 people, the principal weapon allegedly used, an AR-15, would have had to have been reloaded several times, a procedure that takes enough time for people to rush the shooter and overpower him.

Is it possible for one person to shoot 100 people successfully but not be able to shoot even one cop when police appear? Remember the Charlie Hebdo event. The two killers were highly professional when they wiped out the magazine staff and a policeman in the street, but later when confronted by police they were so hapless and incompetent as to suggest that they were not the same people. Remember the San Bernardino shootings. Three eyewitnesses said that the shooters were three muscular males dressed in black, not a husband and diminutive wife with a new baby.

What is most troublesome about these shootings is that the story seems already prepared by the government and is immediately set. We are fed the story before there is time for investigation by government or media. The media never investigate. The media just repeat the government’s story over and over until it is set in everyone’s mind. Contrary evidence is just discarded.

The alleged perpetrators are always killed, so we never hear from them. The only survivor of the various terrorisms is the younger Tsarnaev brother who has been held incommunicado. We have never heard directly from him.

One might think that by now the US media would have at least a smidgen of skeptcism. After all, for the past 15 years we have wasted trillions of dollars in wars in the Middle East based on lies that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and Assad used chemical weapons against his own people. So why is the media willing to accept whatever the government says without any investigation or even raising a question?

The chairman, co-chairman, and legal counsel of the official 9/11 Commission have said publicly that the commission was lied to by the US government, that information was withheld from the commission, and that the commission was “set up to fail.” If the government will not tell the truth to the 9/11 Commission, why would the government tell us peons the truth?

It is not reporting merely to repeat the government’s claim. But that is all we get from the payroll jobs, unemployment and inflation reports to terrorism reports and claims of “Russian aggression.”

Send your emails with URLs of news broadcasts showing dead bodies and other real evidence. Don’t send in your speculations. They might be interesting and on the mark, but what we are trying to do is to see if there is any real evidence in behalf of this latest story of mass slaughter inside a night club.

It will be difficult, perhaps even impossible, to get any truth out of the Orlando shooting. Too many vocal and well organized interest groups have a strong stake in the government’s explanation. It comes to the aid of the anti-Muslim lobby and the Trump campaign which want Muslims kept out of the US and those here arrested and deported. It comes to the aid of the gun control lobby. It comes to the aid of the progressive-left that wants to normalize homosexual and transgendered people, thus the outpouring of sympathy for those shot in the homosexual night club. It comes to the aid of the spy industry and the police state that want no check on their activities. It comes to the aid of Washington’s murderous foreign policy—so what if we blow up Muslim children—look what they do to us when they grow up, which is what the Israelis say about the Palestinians. It comes to the aid of the neoconservatives and the military-security complex for whom wars against Muslims advance their agenda and fatten their pocketbook.