I recently wrote an analysis of the Boston Bombings and the idea that 'actors' were used in place of victims. In that article I made reference to other websites and researchers who had taken up this meme and run with it. Author and researcher Dave McGowan has been cited most often (to me at least) as having made the best case for 'actors'. McGowan has published a multi-part series of articles, all of which rely heavily on photographs to make his case. In this article I'll be looking at the 'evidence' that he presents for the 'actors' theory. Before I begin though, I should explain how and why my approach differs from what appears to be the way McGowan has approached this event.

The short explanation is that my approach employs a sane mind, logic and critical thinking. McGowans' approach employs mostly his imagination possibly fueled by crack cocaine or psychotropic drugs. I also assume he uses some metaphorical surgical gloves and tweezers or similar intangible instruments, because he pulls most of his 'evidence' out of his ass, metaphorically-speaking.

The longer explanation is that, when trying to decide whether a particular conspiracy theory or particular angle on a conspiracy theory is likely to be true or false, my approach is to first look at the plausibility of the theory in question. In terms of the Boston bombings, the idea that 'actors' took the place of real victims is the theory. When I first was forced to consider this theory, it took me about 3 minutes of rumination before it began to make no logical sense whatsoever. I more or less spelled out the lack of logic in my previous article, but it can be summed up as: why would a US intel agency chose to use actor victims at a bombing that is designed to terrify the US population into believing that evil terrorists are out to kill them when they could VERY easily just plant a bomb and let the bomb do what bombs do best, kill and maim people? Why would a US intel agency chose to do this when, if you think about it, it massively complicates the planning of such an operation and greatly increases the chances of the official story falling apart? To date, no one has offered a sensible answer to this question. For his part, at the end of his series of articles on the topic, Dave McGowan suggests that all of the alleged "fakery" is:

a campaign aimed at erasing the line between reality and fantasy - between what is objectively real and what is make-believe. For many years now we have seen a blurring of the line between news and entertainment, as well as, through 'reality' television, a blurring of the line between what is 'real' and what is scripted. We are now entering an age when there will be no dividing line at all between news, scripted entertainment and 'reality' TV. It will all be one and the same. In the new 'reality' we will be living in, nothing will be real and everything will be true.

That's fair enough, but hasn't that already been achieved, to a great extent, with the long list of US/Israeli/British false flag "Muslim terror attacks" over the past 15 years? Isn't the yawning chasm between what most people believe about "Muslim terror attacks", and the likely truth behind them, wide enough that it constitutes an already massive break with reality? What do the PTB have to gain, vis a vis the public, by adding the 'actor victims' element into the mix. If the average person in the street is none the wiser about the presence of 'actors', isn't that functionally the same, from a psy-ops point of view, as if victims were real people and not actors? If people believe the 'actors' to be real victims, what's the point in having actors rather than real victims? Maybe the answer is that US intel agencies have suddenly grown a conscience and an aversion to killing people, hence their use of 'actors'? But the last time I checked, those high-level intel and government types were still a bunch of conscienceless, blood-thirsty, murderous bastards who delight in the suffering of others.

So basically, that's where I was coming from when I began to look at the 'actors' theory. I could find no logical reason for the inclusion of 'actors' and many reasons why they should NOT be used. In addition, I found the alleged evidence for 'actors' at Boston sorely lacking in that it relied on conjecture, supposition and a good measure of imagination, all to make the evidence fit the pre-established theory. Basically, all of the 'actors' theorists seem to have used an "ink blot test" approach to their analysis of the photographic evidence from the Boston bombings.

Note, it wasn't that I was averse to the idea of the Boston bombings being staged by some element of US intel agencies - far from it. I was more or less fully convinced (based on the hard evidence and historical context) that the Boston bombings were a dyed-in-the-wool, false flag "homegrown terrorism attack", designed, like all others, to justify US imperial warmongering and to terrorize the American people into trusting their authorities and looking to them for protection.

So, let's look at some of McGowan's 'evidence':

The idea that many 'terrorist' attacks are in fact carried out by government intelligence agencies is not a new concept (we here at Sott.net have spent the last ten years attempting to highlight the evidence for government complicity in 'Islamic terrorism' for one example). What is new is the idea that these government-inspired or perpetrated terrorist attacks are somehow doubly "fake" in the sense that some or all of the details of the attack didn't actually happen in any real sense. The idea is that, not only was the attack fake in the sense that government, not 'Muslim terrorists' or 'homegrown terrorists', were responsible, but that the apparent victims were fake also, their roles, where necessary, being portrayed by 'actors', presumably working for the government. The claim that 'crisis actors' were used in place of real victims has been made about the December 2012 Sandy Hook shootings, the more recent Boston marathon bombings and even the May 22nd knife attack on a British soldier in London.

To clarify, the idea of 'actors' as it is being used in this context is not the same as 'media plants'. Media plants are people placed at the scene of a government false-flag terror attack who pose as 'eyewitnesses' to establish an official narrative for the media and public. 'Actors', on the other hand, are people who are supposedly part of the false-flag attack itself and who pose as victims of the attack but who are not really injured at all.

The Sandy Hook massacre last December seems to have been the first major event where the 'actors' idea gained traction. Within a month of the massacre, there were literally hundreds of Youtube videos and articles supposedly providing proof that the parents and neighbors of the victims were actually crisis actors and, therefore, the entire event was probably staged and no one was killed. The 'hoax' was, it is claimed, a crass and obvious attempt by the government to impose 'gun control' on America.

Many of the Sandy Hook hoax videos have received tens, and sometimes hundreds of thousands of views. I wrote about the implausibility of that particular 'actors' theory here and tried to compile the best evidence for Sandy Hook being a US intel 'black' operation here and here. Despite my efforts, (not that I ever expect them to make much difference) the 'terror attack actors' idea continued to gain pace and made a serious reappearance at the Boston Marathon bombings.

Let's Talk...

As Joan Rivers was wont to say.

But really, let's have a nice chat about the fact that our whole planet seems to have descended into lunacy!

The other day I noticed an interesting article the SOTT editors picked up:

Brain cells work differently than previously thought: Nicotine helps to spark creativity

which tells us:

Increasingly, studies are beginning to show that complex information processing, and perhaps consciousness itself, may result from coordinated activity among many parts of the brain connected by bundles of long axons. Cognitive problems may occur when these areas don't communicate properly with each other. [...]

Using nicotine, they stimulated the axon to determine how it would affect a signal the brain cell sent to the cortex. Without applying nicotine, about 35 percent of the messages sent by the brain cell reached the cortex. But when nicotine was applied to the axon, the success rate nearly doubled to about 70 percent.

Crisis actors faking injury at the Boston Bombings? No schoolchildren murdered at Sandy Hook? Holographic planes flew into the World Trade Center? "Where's all the blood?!" Conspiracy theorists come in for a lot of ridicule, often unfairly, but the alarmingly high number of hits and airtime some recent choice conspiracy theories have received has even us backing away slowly and wondering just what is going on.

On this week's show, we talked about the idea of "government actors" and "fakery" at "terror attacks", including the recent killing of a British soldier in Woolwich, London, which some claim was staged and no one really died "because there was not enough blood", echoing the claims made about Jeff Bauman at the Boston Marathon finish line.

Are such ideas deliberately promoted to sow disinformation and discredit, by association, anyone attempting to analyse the hard data?

Running Time: 01:47:00

Download: MP3

"There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, 'Fool me once, shame on... shame on you. But fool me... can't get fooled again!'."

~ Dubya interpretation of 'Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me', Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002

The anti-Assad propaganda is in full swing with contradictory and unsubstantiated claims that the Syrian government has "used chemical weapons against its own people." Against this backdrop of faulty, evocative rhetoric, Israel recently launched deadly air strikes on Syrian territory. Like textbook plagiarism or a record on repeat, we're seeing a re-run of the 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' (WMD) lies that led to the illegal invasion of Iraq ten years ago.

UN investigator Carla del Ponte reported that if any sarin gas was used in Syria, it was actually fired by the US-backed opposition rebel forces, not the state forces of President Bashar al-Assad.

The damning additional fact is that the Syrian 'rebels' the West are arming are, in reality, terrorist 'Al-Qaeda' factions, as has been admitted in the French daily Le Monde and supported by an admission in the New York Times. Just as many Azawadi rebels in northern Mali last year defected from the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad to Al-Qaeda-in-the-Islamic-Maghreb and other CIA fronts ahead of full-scale military intervention by Western powers in January 2013, Free Syrian Army 'rebels' are consolidating their allegiances to (and pooling their resources with) Jabhat al-Nusra, "an Al Qaida associate operating in Syria" that is responsible for cross-border attacks in Turkey and Lebanon.

This week we were joined by Dr. Colin Ross, a psychiatrist who received his M.D. from the University of Alberta in 1981 and completed his specialty training in psychiatry at the University of Manitoba in 1985. He is the author of over 170 papers in professional journals, most of them dealing with dissociation, psychological trauma and multiple personality disorder. He is a past president of the International Society for the Study of Dissociation and Trauma and a former Laughlin Fellow of the American College of Psychiatrists.

Dr. Ross is also the author of 27 books, including, The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations By American Psychiatrists, Military Mind Control: A Story of Trauma and Recovery and The Great Psychiatry Scam.

In his book, The C.I.A. Doctors, Dr. Ross provides proof, based on 15,000 pages of documents obtained from the C.I.A. through the Freedom of Information Act, that there have been pervasive, systematic violations of human rights by American psychiatrists over the last 65 years. He also proves that the Manchurian Candidate "super spy" is fact, not fiction. He describes the experiments conducted by psychiatrists to create amnesia, new identities, hypnotic access codes, and new memories in the minds of experimental subjects.

In The Great Psychiatry Scam, Dr. Ross provides evidence that modern psychiatry is actually a pseudo-science, with many of the main accepted theses about the causes of human mental illness actually disproven by psychiatric experiments and research.

Running Time: 02:36:00

Download: MP3

Did you hear the one about part of a Boeing 767 wing and thick rope found wedged between two buildings a block away from the site of the old World Trade Center in Manhattan? No, this isn't a joke - they really did claim last week to find a chunk of one of the hijacked aircraft flown into the Twin Towers over 11 years ago on 9/11. Not only that, it was discovered at 51 Park Place, Lower Manhattan, site of the planned Islamic community center. Talk about "catapulting the propaganda"... or maybe that should be 'lowering the propaganda into place'?...

Coming on the heels of the Boston Drill/Bombings on Patriots' Day last month, as well as a 'ricin poisoned letters' scare that transported us all back in time to that crazy week in September 2001 when letters laced with anthrax were sent to politicians, the spectre of the 9/11 attacks looms large as ever over the U.S. and much of Western civilization.

"9/11 was an inside job," is by now a familiar mantra in the small but active alternative online community. It has even found its way into the mainstream, despite years of ridicule and the heavy presence of COINTELPRO types derailing efforts to investigate and publish the truth of what happened on 9/11.

So, was it really an 'inside job'? Certainly, there is evidence that Israeli intelligence and elements in the U.S. government colluded to cover-up what really happened and used the event for their own gain. We know that prior to 9/11, certain high-level members of Bush Jr.'s administration dreamed of 'a new Pearl Harbor', the catalyst for expanding American hegemony.

But does that necessarily mean they orchestrated it? What about the evidence for 9/11 being an 'outside job'? Many anomalous aspects of the attacks that day have been overlooked. This week we invited Dr. Judy Wood on the show to discuss the compelling evidence she has gathered and analysed in her book Where Did the Towers Go?, pointing to some form of 'exotic technology' may have been responsible for destroying the World Trade Center on 9/11.

In the second part of the show, we tried to look at 9/11 from a broader perspective with Lisa Guliani, former internet-based political talk show host, political writer and SOTT.net editor. As you'll soon discover, however, even over 11 years later, it's no easier today to get a coherent discussion going about Israel and the NeoCons' role in 9/11... can we conclude that 9/11 as a psy-ops has successfully neutralized the so-called 'Truth Movement'?

Running Time: 03:00:00

Download: MP3

Joe Quinn asked recently: Was the West, Texas Explosion a Meteorite Impact?

More information has come to light that suggests exactly that, and, at the very least, strengthens the idea that a 'missile' strike of some kind caused the explosion.

We now have four different video angles of the fire at the fertilizer plant.

In the first three videos, we can see the explosion that happened afterwards. In the last video, we can't see the explosion, but it gives us another vantage point of the site in flames:

Video from viewpoint #1:


Video from viewpoint #2:

Although the gruesome sight of mangled body parts is an everyday reality in countries occupied or bombed by the U.S. military, the 'double-tap' bombing in downtown Boston on 'Tax Day', Monday 15th April, was the first terror attack on U.S. soil in 12 years.

Anyone with a couple of neurons firing will have noticed by now that the official story is riddled with inconsistencies. In fact, it makes absolutely no sense at all. In fact, there is no 'official story'; U.S. authorities have clearly just been making stuff up as they go along, hoping that the emotional trauma of a terrorist attack will suffice to 'win the hearts and minds of the American people'.

So far it appears to be working, but when we discussed this on a recent SOTT Talk Radio show, we had a few callers who were completely exasperated with the contradictory, incomplete, and simply unbelievable accounts of last week's events in Boston.

It was a strange week in more ways than one. It was the 20th anniversary of the Waco Massacre. It was the 18th anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing. It was the 14th anniversary of the Columbine School Massacre. And the bombings happened on the 238th anniversary of the opening shots in the American Revolutionary War.

Coincidences? Or by design?

And what on Earth careened into the town of West, Texas, just north of Waco and within miles of the Mount Carmel site of the Branch Davidian compound that was burned to the ground by the Feds in 1992? The explosion at a fertilizer depot on Wednesday 18th April killed three times as many people as the Boston Bombings just two days before... was someone sending the bombing perpetrators a message?

Listen to find out more...

Running Time: 02:35:00

Download: MP3

As a doctor, I can tell you that stress has reached pandemic levels, though many still hold back from admitting it to themselves or their peers. Our normalcy bias prevents us from taking notice that tens of millions of people in Western countries are dropping like flies from illness, depression and self-destruction. I came across this article by David Kupelian on Americans' health and agreed with some of the observations made about the dire state of affairs:

• Suicide has surpassed car crashes as the leading cause of injury death for Americans. Even more disturbing, in "the world's greatest military", more U.S. soldiers died last year by suicide than in combat.

• Fully one-third of U.S. employees suffer chronic debilitating stress, and more than half of all "millennials" (18 to 33 year olds) experience a level of stress that keeps them awake at night, including large numbers diagnosed with depression or anxiety disorder.

• Shocking new research from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that one in five high-school-aged children in the U.S. has been diagnosed with ADHD, and likewise a large new study of New York City residents shows, sadly, that one in five preteens - children aged six to 12 - have been medically diagnosed with either ADHD, anxiety, depression or bipolar disorder.

• New research concludes that stress renders people susceptible to serious illness, and a growing number of studies now confirm that chronic stress plays a major role in the progression of cancer, the nation's second-biggest killer. The biggest killer of all, heart disease, which causes one in four deaths in the U.S., is also known to have a huge stress component.

• Incredibly, 11 percent of all Americans aged 12 and older are currently taking SSRI antidepressants - those highly controversial, mood-altering psychiatric drugs with the FDA's "suicidality" warning label and alarming correlation with school shooters. Women are especially prone to depression, with a stunning 23 percent of all American women in their 40s and 50s - almost one in four - now taking antidepressants, according to a major study by the CDC.

• Add to that the tens of millions of users of all other types of psychiatric drugs, including (just to pick one) the 6.4 million American children between 4 and 17 diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed Ritalin or similar psycho-stimulants. Throw in the 28 percent of American adults with a drinking problem, that's more than 60 million, plus the 22 million using illegal drugs like marijuana, cocaine, heroin, hallucinogens and inhalants, and pretty soon a picture emerges of a nation of drug-takers, with hundreds of millions dependent on one toxic substance or another - legal or illegal - to "help" them deal with the stresses and problems of life.

Likewise, the CDC has reported that antidepressant use in the U.S. has increased nearly 400 percent in the last two decades, making antidepressants the most frequently used class of medications by Americans aged 18-44. The U.S. population makes up 5% of the world population, yet are prescribed two-thirds of all psychiatric drugs used worldwide. If this is not a sign of looming mental health collapse, I don't know what is!