Notes From a Security Breakdown

[Luis Gonzalez]

Notes From a Security Breakdown
By Dr. Hunter Stockton Thompson (Reported Posthumously and Without Permission)
A Last Wire Exclusive

They’re calling this a “closed case,” but nothing in Butler feels closed. Not the air, not the town, not the wound carved into the country. Even from the other side of the river Styx, you can smell the loose ends. That’s why I send this dispatch. Death doesn’t stop the machinery of paranoia; it only sharpens it.

You can sense it the moment you drift over that county fairground — something unfinished, something left out. The official reports sit there like half-burned scripts. A shooter on a roof, a rally, a perfect angle, a perfect shot, a dead man on the pavement, and a thousand contradictory explanations scattered like shell casings around a bad story. They’ve tied the bow, but the knot won’t hold.

The shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, remains a cipher so blank it’s practically fluorescent. They say he acted alone, but then they say nothing else. No motive explained. No manifesto. No unraveling of ideology. Just a hazy profile, a confused trail of hints, and a corpse folded neatly into the archive. Lone wolves always leave noise. This one left silence.

Silence is the loudest alarm.

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[Smokin Joe]

Excellent article.

Yes, though many would attribute to malice what is incompetence, the latter is even more frightening. It's as if security (in general) is a victim of the Dunning/Kruger effect writ large, and that leaves no room for peace of mind.

Personally, there is likely far more depth to the incident than its most glaring surficial failures, not only failure on the ground to secure the site and ensure communications, but the apparent inability to prevent the event, but somewhere in the past of the perpetrator there is that event or impetus that propelled him on the path to the radicalized felon that fired until silenced. Without the information, the question lingers of whether the deceased suspect was the only shooter: without the ballistic remains and analysis accounting for each shot, we cannot be assured that only one rifle was used by only one shooter. Early on, someone did an analysis of report/shot sounds and determined that some of those shots originated from much farther away than Crooks' position, which might mean there were two, and Crooks may have merely been the patsy who died to cover the shooter's escape, even if Crooks did kill and wound others besides Trump.

Like you said, nature abhors a vacuum, and theories will rush in to fill the void a lack of information leaves. It is a pattern that seems to repeat in some of the most curious cases, including the Las Vegas shooter and others.

Thanks for another well-delivered ration of food for thought.