Gun attack on French magazine Charlie Hebdo kills 11

[MacCruiskeen]

I wrote:

What I don't understand is that he says he gave the film to the police and then posted it to Facebook. Surely they warned him not to? (Evidence in an ongoing criminal investigation, etc.) And if he had his own copy of the film to post to Facebook, then he must have copied it to his computer before giving it to the police.

Also, again: the mere fact that they stopped the car and got out to shoot the guy at all. NB, they didn't just slow down and shoot him in passing; they stopped the car (quite unnecessarily), at least 20 yards away (quite unnecessarily), then both of them exited the vehicle (quite unnecessarily), strolled up to him, shot him at point-blank range, and then strolled back. They might have been picking up a six-pack from the 7-11.

I'm sorry, but that is not a getaway. They were in no hurry at all. And the already injured policeman posed absolutely no threat to their "getaway". And they had just spent "5-10 minutes" carrying out a very noisy massacre in the centre of Paris at 11:30 am on a workday.

Yet there they are, in a narrow side-street with a bend in it, with every reason to expect heavily-armed SWAT teams rushing in from both ends of the street at any moment -- or at least for the cops to erect barriers to prevent their escape.

And while they were so coolly and casually wasting time like this, there just happened to be someone filming them? Directly opposite? With no cars or trees happening to obscure his view?

It's possible, certainly.

[MacCruiskeen]

[...] Some argue that the video plays a useful role by exposing terrorists' heartlessness. Mir said that one official told him the video helped galvanize French public opinion.

"For me, the policeman killed, it's like a war photo," Mir said at one point, comparing it to famed photographer Robert Capa's controversial picture of a soldier being shot dead during the Spanish Civil War.

The video did help cause an outpouring of support for Merabet and his family, with many adopting the tag "Je Suis Ahmed" - I am Ahmed - as a spin on the solidarity slogan "Je Suis Charlie." As Mir spoke to AP on Saturday, members of the public were still gathering at the site of Merabet's death to lay flowers and pay respect.

Mir didn't even know what he was filming at first. Drawn to his window when the sound of gunshots interrupted his emailing, he initially thought there was a bank robbery in progress. When he spotted the rifle-wielding men in black walking down the street, he assumed they were SWAT police going to help a stricken comrade.

"And - horror - they're not," Mir said.

As police rushed to the scene, Mir downloaded the video to his computer and then to a removable disk, which he handed to officers.

Then, he uploaded the footage to Facebook - and to the world.

Mir, a slight man in his 50s whose parents were refugees from fascist Spain, is still at a loss to explain exactly what pushed him to share the chilling video with his 2,500 Facebook friends.

"There's no answer," he said. Perhaps a decade of social networking had trained him to share whatever he saw.

"I take a photo - a cat - and I put it on Facebook. It was the same stupid reflex," he said.

Mir wanted Merabet's family to know he was "very sorry," saying that he had turned down offers to buy the footage and that he wanted media organizations to blur Merabet's image before running it. But many, he said, just broadcast the unedited footage without permission.

The AP received Mir's authorization to run the video on condition that it cut the scene of the officer's death, which is standard AP practice.

Mir said that, if he could do it all again, he would have kept the video off Facebook.

"On Facebook, there's no confidentiality," he said. "It's a lesson for me."

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/ ... TE=DEFAULT

"On Facebook, there's no confidentiality," he said. "It's a lesson for me." - Is this plausible? He's not some naive 14-year-old. He's an engineer in his fifties. He's on FB, LinkedIn, and I don't know where else, he runs his own electronics company, and he has his own blog. He's been online for years.

[Nordic]

Okay check this shit out!

http://metro.co.uk/2015/01/13/apple-had ... e-5020632/

Apple had a ‘Je Suis Charlie’ app out within an hour of the Charlie Hebdo massacre

Oliver Wheaton - HeadshotOliver Wheaton for Metro.co.uk
Tuesday 13 Jan 2015 3:27 pm

Apple had a 'Je Suis Charlie' app out within an hour of the Charlie Hebdo massacre

The ‘Je Suis Charlie app’ was reportedly available on Apple’s app store within an hour of the massacre at Charlie Hebdo after being fast tracked by CEO Tim Cook.

French news agency Nice-Martin created the app, which shows a map of users who have declared ‘Je Suis Charlie’ in solidarity with the people killed at the magazine, managed to get around Apple’s usually lengthy process to get an app live by contacting Mr Cook directly.

They reportedly received a reply from his assistant within ten minutes, confirming that they app would go live as soon as possible.

The average time it takes an app to become available online is about ten days.

So far the free app claims to have more than 120,000 ‘Charlies’ (people who have declared Je Suis Charlie through the app).

MORE: Watch what happened when someone played John Lennon’s Imagine during the March of Unity

]

[IanEye]

Then again, I don't know how long it would take to reach Paris, but I seem to recall flights to EU are quicker than flights back, due to some crazy theory about Earth spinning in space.

Anderson Cooper ain't exactly flying coach with the rest of the plebs.

Phil Collins performed at both Wembley Stadium and JFK, utilising the Concorde to get him from London to Philadelphia. UK TV personality Noel Edmonds piloted the helicopter that took Collins to Heathrow Airport to catch his flight.
Aside from his own set at both venues, he also played the drums for Eric Clapton, and played with the reuniting surviving members of Led Zeppelin at JFK.
On the Concorde flight, Collins encountered actress and singer Cher, who claimed not to know anything about the Live Aid concerts.

[MacCruiskeen]

Concorde no longer exists, Ian.

[IanEye]

Phil Collins can't play drums anymore.

[MacCruiskeen]

And Paris is not what it used to be.

...où sont les neiges d'antan?

(Also: where have all the flowers gone?)

[IanEye]

i guess i was just agreeing with Wombat that 1985 state of the art airplane tech has probably made it's way to the current flying machines of the rich and famous.
but perhaps not.

[MacCruiskeen]

Nordic, Apple getting that "Je suis Charlie" app out within one hour is certainly remarkable. Maybe someone more computer-literate than I am can say whether it's unfeasibly fast. I would guess that it was just a very simple app, and that it only required a very minor tweak (three new words) to something that already existed.

If nothing else, it demonstrates 21st-century capital's amazing ability to home in on a profit-opportunity. Though, this being Saint Steve Jobs's corporation, I'd presume that they have waived any immediate monetary profits (because that would look greedy and uncool) and are content to bask in the free publicity. A free, instant "Je suis Charlie" app just gives the Apple brand even more credibility among their customer-base, i.e., vaguely-liberal affluent hipsters worldwide.

[MacCruiskeen]

A very good piece by Jonathan Cook, who is not normally any kind of a "conspiracy theorist" (how I hate that term):

What Hebdo execution video really shows

13 January 2015

http://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2015- ... 9IX5S.dpuf

He answers my objection from one page back -- that the Muslim policeman is undoubtedly dead -- by pointing out that this doesn't necessarily imply that what killed him was the shot fired in Jordi Mir's video.

I still don't understand how those two masked gunmen managed to escape central Paris at all. Why did the police take so long to get there? That strikes me as the most urgent and most obvious unanswered question of all right now. (Cf. the grotesquely delayed police response to the Norway massacre, and the collapse of air-defence SOP on 9/11.)

[elfismiles]

Dramatic new footage of Islamist gunmen's rampage emerges, showing the killers calmly stopping to reload their weapons before firing at police as they drive towards them
Said and Cherif Kouachi took on French police in shocking Paris gun fight
They were making their escape after massacring Charlie Hebdo journalists
Opened fire on police car which confronted them in a narrow city street
Used doors for cover and shot at policemen, who retreated from the killers
Video shows them chanting: 'we have avenged the Prophet Muhammad'
By Jay Akbar For Mailonline
Published: 14:17 EST, 13 January 2015 | Updated: 15:23 EST, 13 January 2015

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... tacks.html

[jingofever]

One thing I'm trying to figure out is this: exactly when did CNN and Anderson Cooper (the CIA's very own) get to Paris? How did they get there so fast? Were they already there, waiting for this to happen?

I'm not sure yet, but it seems they got there damn quick...

The shooting happened on the 7th, the hostage taking on the 9th, so he had plenty of time to get there.

[MacCruiskeen]

^^Miles, yes, that NEW video is now posted at the BBC too. As their pundit Gavin Esler says;

"What is so extraordinary is how calm these two men appear to be in what they're doing."

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30803575

"Extraordinary" is right. They have not a care in the world.

What is the exact timeline here? How many times, and in how many places after the 5-10-minute-long Charlie Hebdo massacre, did they stop their car and get out to shout "Islamist slogans", display themselves to anyone watching, fart around with their guns, park a Kalashnikov on the car roof while having a chat (!), exit the car to shoot people who were no threat to them, and generally waste time?

The arrival and retreat of that police car demonstrates that the police by then knew exactly where the gunmen were. So how did they manage to escape from central Paris at all? Why no road-blocks?

ON EDIT: Note that the gunmen's car makes it all the way to the end of that dogleg street -- all the way up to the police car, in fact. What happened then? The video ends just when it starts to get really interesting.

Is this on the same street as the Jordi Mir video (the one that shows the prone Muslim policeman being shot)? If so, then they must have reversed back up the street and stopped and got out again.

WTF?

[MacCruiskeen]

A good article, by a Canadian theatre critic who also happens to be a 9/11 sceptic (I had never heard of this guy before, but his website's well worth a look):

Unintelligence sources

01/11/2015

By Frank Moher

http://backofthebook.ca/2015/01/11/unin ... ces/11458/

[Morty]

Blah, blah, blah, set up job.

Turning good folk into fools. Same as it ever was.

The second video here shows what seems to be a big enough gap for that cop to be shooting through.
Edit: I should say, *warning*, video is of the last moments of one of the alleged gunmen/terrorists.