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Uvalde narrative upended by ProPublica, Tx Tribune [1]

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Date: 2022-09-08

You asked for it, you go it. Here is my axe to grind.

The Trib/ProPublica story wends it’s way to a conclusion by saying this, in passing:

About 45 minutes after the gunman began shooting, a U.S. Border Patrol SWAT team, known as BORTAC, arrived at the scene. The unit typically handles dangerous situations involving migrants. Its responsibilities do not include responding to school shootings, but Paul Guerrero, the team’s acting commander, told the House committee that issued the legislative report that he chose to act after arriving and encountering the disorganized scene. Guerrero requested surveillance through classroom windows, retrieved a door breaching tool from his car, ordered officers to set up a medical triage for victims and organized an assault team that consisted of several agencies. Eventually, he led about a half-dozen officers into the classroom and a Border Patrol agent killed the gunman at 12:50 p.m. No state troopers or school police were on that team. Guerrero could not be reached for comment, and a spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection did not answer questions about the agency’s response, saying it was conducting a review.

It's not very expansive, is it? Granted, the story solidly focused on DPS, and this just the part that completes a narrative on the way to a conclusion regarding DPS, but the fact remains that no one in Texas can seem to say a whole lot more than this, three months and several alleged investigations later.

Who called these hired guns? WHY? Where did they arrive from, how, and why? Who do they answer to in a command and control fashion and who oversees the agency itself? Did they have radios and a dispatcher and where are the transcripts? What weapons and equipment did they bring, what video did they record, what did they write in their report at the end of the day and who did they give that report to? Does BORTAC have an Active Shooter policy? Who wrote it? Did they follow that policy? Shouldn't we know WHO WHAT WHEN WHERE HOW AND WHY, and also what the guys had for breakfast that morning, just to be thorough? And so on.

For a brief time in my long-ago, galaxy far far away college career, I had ONE journalism class. If I learned one thing and one thing only, which is debatable, it was that any story a reporter files story STARTS with "who what when where how and why" and then you work the name of the newspaper into the first sentence too, if you can.

I'd say what we have here rises to level of something like this: "On Nov 22nd, the president visited Dallas accompanied by his lovely wife and he died on his way to lunch. Afterwards, the Secret Service took his body back to Washington DC for further review. Merry Christmas and shut the hell up, kids or else no soup for you."

Call me greedy, but it's just.... a little thin, is it not?

The idea that Border Patrol was "conducting a review" is something that would make my cat laugh, and my cat is not prone to fits of laughter. One wonders what sort of "review conducting" takes three months to conduct, and if "an investigation" (which seems called for to me) was one step above a review, how may years would that take to produce a result that the taxpayers had a chance to review?

But this sort of "we will allow this blather for an anonymous, media-coached spox because we have to put something into the paragraph," is very frustrating to me. I note that this CBP "spokesperson" isn't even named.

Again I will note that this story is about DPS, not BP or "ad-hoc BORTAC," and is a MUST READ article but I hope the next ProPublica deep dive focuses on the federal response to Uvalde, because in actual point of fact the national level authorities have all said just about nothing at all, ever to the public, up to and including Joe Biden.

Since May 24th we've learned that ICE, BP, the DEA and US Marshalls were involved, along with whatever in god's name is "Ad-hoc BORTAC," which to me sounds like a gang of secret prions flying squad goons who answer to no one and train to subdue unarmed teenage boys who are put into cages and resent it.

I won't be surpised to learn next that the US Postal Inspectors were in the hallway too, collecting and trading commemorative stamps. And they they are "conducting a review" of which flavor stamp backing is the most minty fresh. But, presently, "no comment."

It's possible the entire dithering debacle in the hallways regarded a foolish and prolonged wait for the rifle-ready ballistic shield delivered by the US Marshalls. The shield is seen arriving at 12:20, a full-half hour before this supposed "Assault Team" got lucky by catching the dastardly shooter cowering in a closet and shot him full of bullets. Or so we have heard.

I'm just a person with my own opinions here but how did we arrive at this juncture? Where is the transparency? And where is the demand for transparency to be properly directed? And by who, and when and where and how and why? And what.... the F?

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/9/8/2121664/-Uvalde-narrative-upended-by-ProPublica-Tx-Tribune

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