It wasn’t as if 26-year-old Iraq war vet Esteban Santiago was a total unknown when he opened fire in the Ft. Lauderdale International Airport baggage claim, killing five random strangers, on January 6th, 2017.
Santiago had already walked into an FBI field office in November 2016, with claims he was hearing voices and that the CIA was controlling his mind.
The FBI and police had Santiago evaluated for four days, let him keep his gun, and sent him on his merry way. His brother Bryan told the media:
“The FBI failed there. We’re not talking about someone who emerged from anonymity to do something like this. The federal government already knew about this for months, they had been evaluating him for a while, but they didn’t do anything.”
So a guy hearing voices and claiming government mind control tries to turn himself in, is totally on the FBI’s radar, but they let him go and soon after he commits a horrible crime. Sounds familiar?
When Santiago walked into that FBI field office in Anchorage with his two-month-old son and carrying a magazine filled with ammunition (after flying to Alaska with a single piece of checked luggage that included his legally owned gun), he straight up told the agents that he was hearing voices in his head, he was having quote “terroristic thoughts” and that the government was “controlling his mind” and forcing him to watch Islamic State videos. That’s pretty specific.
The FBI then called the cops and had the baby’s mom come pick the kid up. Santiago told agents he left his gun out in his vehicle which the police held onto until after he was released from his psychological evaluation four days later. Then they called him up to come pick up his weapon.
Just weeks later, he would purchase a ticket from Alaska to Ft. Lauderdale. Once he got to Florida, he quickly retrieved his gun from his checked luggage, loaded it in the men’s restroom, then shot up the baggage claim in Terminal 2, killing five people and wounding six more.
No one has confirmed yet whether or not the gun Santiago brought to the FBI field office was the same one he used at the airport shooting, but it’s a pretty safe bet that it was.
His family said he was never the same after he came back from Iraq and that only after his return he began hearing voices.
The case is frighteningly similar to other mass shooting incidents that have occurred in recent years.
In November 2014, a young lawyer named Myron May walked into Florida State University’s library and shot three people. The media reported that he was crazy and hearing voices, just like Santiago.
May also claimed the government was electronically harassing and gang-stalking him. Days before the shooting, he sent off 10 packets of information including flash drives (packets which were later intercepted by the FBI) to try and prove what he claimed was happening to him, the point of which he said was to drive him to commit an act of mass violence.
A week before the shooting, May posted this chilling message on Facebook:
Myron May was killed by Tallahassee and Florida State University police during the shooting. In this case, May’s family, friends, and coworkers all vouched for his mental soundness prior to the shooting. The video below is the first of three which were taken off his computer and released to the public months later in 2015. They were reportedly recorded just days before the shooting and describe what May believes was being done to him.
Question: Does this person sound insane or schizophrenic to you?
Go back in time a little farther and you have another similar case of someone claiming to be a targeted individual: Navy yard shooter Aaron Alexis.
The military contractor made similar claims to May, and he even filed a police report in Rhode Island about his “harassment” with what he felt were microwave directed energy weapons prior to walking into the DC Navy Yard and shooting and killing 13 people in September 2013.
If you’ll recall, Alexis had carved “My ELF [extremely low frequency – a reference to microwaves] weapon” into the stock of his shotgun before his rampage.
Go back a little further to 2012 and Aurora movie theater shooter James Holmes (who holds a Bachelor of Science degree in neuroscience and whose family is tied to Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and who, years before, was a young intern at the Salk Institute where researchers were working on ways to “neurologically enhance” soldiers at the time, just by the way).
It has been reported that Holmes told another inmate that he thought he was in a video game at the time of the shooting and that “he had been programmed and rehearsed to complete the shooting at the movie theater”. Even since the shooting, Holmes has told people including psychologist Dr. Rose Manguso who interviewed him a year later that he still hears voices in his head.
This list could go on much longer. These are just few stories. There are many more that go back for tens of years. And this is before we even discuss the technologies being developed for decades through the CIA’s now declassified MKULTRA program.
The claims are always similar. Are all of these people really just insane and making up similar stories or is something else more sinister going on here?
Fort Lauderdale Airport Gunman Says Government Controlled His Mind
An Iraq war veteran is accused of killing five people at an airport in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Esteban Santiago, 26, was taken into custody immediately following the shooting and questioned at length, said George Piro, a special agent in charge of the FBI’s office in Miami.
Santiago was formally charged with 22 federal charges in the shooting rampage and risks death penalty or life imprisonment.
Authorities said Santiago had suffered from psychological problems and has said his mind was being controlled.
A federal law enforcement official said Santiago had entered an FBI office in Anchorage back in November was behaving erratically and turned over to local police, who took him to a mental facility for evaluation.
He told FBI agents that his mind was being controlled by a US intelligence agency who were forcing him to watch videos by the ISIS terrorist group.
Press TV reports:
“Authorities said Santiago, an Iraq war veteran, suffered from psychological problems and had complained that the US government was controlling his mind. Santiago retrieved a semi-automatic handgun from his checked luggage and began firing indiscriminately after arriving in Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood International Airport from Alaska.”
“After he claimed his bag, he went into the bathroom and loaded the gun and started shooting”, Broward County Commissioner Chip LaMarca said.
One witness said the attacker kept shooting until he ran out of ammunition for his handgun.
At the time, Florida Governor Rick Scott told reporters: “This is a senseless act of evil”. A White House spokesman said President Barack Obama had spoken to Scott and other state officials. Obama said such tragedies had happened too often during his eight-year-term in office.
Florida Shooter Complained About ‘Mind Control’ Two Months Before Attack
Flordia Shooter Esteban Santiago, who launched the deadly assault at the Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, had complained about being “mind controlled” two months prior to the attack.
The 26-year old had shown up at the Anchorage, Alaska offices of the FBI, complaining to federal authorities that U.S intelligence had taken control of his mind. He then reported that Intelligence was urging him to fight for the Islamic State terror group.
USA Today reports: “While the report was initially alarming, it was soon clear that the young man’s reported complaint was more a cry for medical treatment than a matter meriting the attention of counter-terrorism officials.”
“During the interview, Santiago appeared agitated and incoherent, and made disjointed statements”, the FBI said in a statement. “Although Santiago stated that he did not wish to harm anyone, as a result of his erratic behavior, interviewing agents contacted local authorities who took custody of Santiago and transported him to a local medical facility for evaluation. The FBI closed its assessment of Santiago after conducting database reviews, inter-agency checks, and interviews of his family members.”
A background check, while revealing a brief military deployment to Iraq as a member of the Puerto Rico National Guard, found no nexus to terror.
Local Anchorage police authorities did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Yet the troubling episode is now part of an emerging profile of a deeply disturbed man described by his aunt as someone who had “lost his mind”.
Maria Luisa Ruiz of Union City, N.J., said her nephew, who had moved to Alaska for work as a security guard, only prior to the attack began to show signs of instability. “Like a month ago, it was like he lost his mind”, she stated after the shooting. “He said he saw things.”
Shortly after being informed that her nephew was a suspect in the stunning shooting that left five dead and eight others wounded, Ruiz showed reporters a photo taken in September 2016 of Santiago at a hospital holding his newborn son. Staff at Providence Hospital in Anchorage confirmed that the photo was taken in that hospital.
In the photo, the young father wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the logo for the band Disturbed. Ruiz said that Santiago, whose mother lives in Puerto Rico, appeared happy after the birth of his son, but that changed a short time later. She said he was hospitalized for two weeks, but she did not have details about his condition.
“I don’t know why this happened”, she said before FBI agents showed up at her door and local authorities closed off the street near her home.
How The Florida Shooting Will Be Used To Bolster War, Usurp Freedom, And Create More Terrorism
After September 11, 2001, discarding freedom and personal liberties in the name of security became standard operating procedure following a tragedy, and the mass shooting at the airport in Fort Lauderdale has not deviated from the new Orwellian norm.
Officials say Esteban Santiago arrived in Florida on a flight from Alaska and proceeded to the baggage claim area, where he pulled a firearm from his checked bag and opened fire – killing five people and wounding eight.
“He eventually retrieved a firearm and began indiscriminately shooting”, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel told the press. “This cowardly, heinous act resulted in the deaths of five people.”
While the incident unfolded, before total casualties and injuries had been counted, corporate media presstitutes championed in live time increased security measures and tighter strictures on gun laws – except for TSA agents, whom, some intoned, should now be required to carry firearms in the performance of their duties.
We have been conditioned for this. Fustian politicians assume an inept undervaluation of rights – and a careless lack of vigilance under color of fear – in the minds of the somnambulant masses will allow the implementation of new rights-crushing legislation.
On cue, the Wall Street Journal nearly immediately published an article citing Jeff Price, an aviation security expert and aviation-management professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver, who – without a hint of irony – asserted:
“I think we can expect to see more of what we’ve seen every time we have one of these incidents at an airport: better-armed, better-trained police and a surge in law-enforcement visibility.”
Because terrorism. Because mass shootings. Most simply, because guns.
Guns, many pols and gun-control enthusiasts will tell you, create calamity – nothing else – and the Second Amendment is an antiquated anomaly to be relegated to the already overflowing dustbin of constitutional rights.
These politicians will further exploit fear of The Next Tragedy to install new checkpoints, more scanners, appended means to verify identity, and additional TSA agents – already proven wholly ineffective, if not derelict – to molest, grope, and harass anyone daring to enter an airport.
Travel, they’ll say, is a dangerous affair – and must be policed accordingly.
No matter Santiago has been deemed mentally disturbed – one person, a lone shooter, who chose a divergent method for enmity – now that someone has undertaken a mass shooting in this manner, terrorists paid attention and gleaned fresh plans, they’ll say.
This snark is in no way reductive to the abhorrent nature of the indiscriminate shooting, nor to the mourning which indeed the country must now collectively experience; but right now is precisely the time for acute attentiveness – not fear-induced myopia as has become epidemic after such incidents.
A more rational response surprisingly came from one legislator, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Greg Steube, who is sponsoring a bill to eliminate gun-free zones in Florida – a necessary measure now that the state has experienced several horrific mass shootings.
“My first thoughts and prayers are with the families of the victims” Steube said, quoted by USA Today. “But this goes back to the fact why I’ve been working against gun-free zones for the past three years. Gun-free zones don’t prevent criminals from breaking the law and killing innocent victims. All that law did was prevent law-abiding citizens who have a concealed-carry permit from carrying their firearm in defense of themselves and others.”
While Steube’s thinking seems counterintuitive to those on a crusade to eliminate gun possession for everyone but law enforcement, Chicago – with the strictest gun control laws in the nation and more shooting deaths than New York City and Los Angeles, combined – proves the futility of the notion.
Stricture and prohibition spark black markets – if someone intends to do harm using a firearm, they will find it. That applies equally to all mass shooters, whether mentally unstable, paranoid xenophobe, or religious radical, if guns are the intended tool for an attack, oppressive gun laws only stop law-abiding civilians from killing whatever malicious wingnut next begins shooting random people in a crowd.
Tightening the reins on suffocating security procedures and positioning additional law enforcement officers in airports also won’t stop criminals of any motivation from discerning a creative method to thwart remaining deficiencies. These repeated clamp-downs only restrict our ability to travel freely – they aren’t preventing the next attack or quashing terrorism as politicians claim.
Fear is a potent manipulator, and the government counts on pulling the blindfold of dread over everyone’s eyes in the wake of catastrophe to erase yet another protected freedom from the Bill of Rights.
This time, don’t let it happen – don’t be fooled into obliging lawmakers whose only motive is to use death as a Police State weapon against all of us.
yogaesoteric
July 15, 2017