The Christopher Dorner story, and the media’s complicity with the police

Max Blumenthal was monitoring a police scanner during the standoff between alleged cop killer Christopher Dorner and the police who had surrounded the cabin where he was staying:

In an initial dispatch, a deputy reported seeing “blood spatter” inside the cabins. Dorner, who had just engaged in a firefight with deputies that killed one officer and wounded another, may have been wounded in the exchange. There was no sign of his presence, let alone his resistance, according to police dispatches.

It was then that the deputies decided to burn the cabin down.

“We’re gonna go ahead with the plan with the burner,” one sheriff’s deputy told another. “Like we talked about.” Minutes later, another deputy’s voice crackled across the radio: “The burner’s deployed and we have a fire…”

Over the course of the next hour, I listened as the sheriffs carefully managed the fire, ensuring that it burned the cabin thoroughly. Dorner, a former member of the LAPD who had accused his ex-colleagues of abuse and racism in a lengthy, detailed manifesto, was inside. The cops seemed to have little interest in taking him alive.

“Burn that fucking house down!” shouted a deputy through a scanner transmission inadvertently broadcast on the Los Angeles local news channel, KCAL 9. “Fucking burn this motherfucker!” another cop could be heard exclaiming.

This fact hardly registered in the media, however:

At the time that I am writing this, some online media outlets are beginning to entertain the possibility that San Bernardino County Sheriff’s deliberately set the fire that killed Dorner – a fact that I reported on Twitter as soon the sheriff’s department order came down. If there is any doubt about the authenticity of theYouTube clip containing audio of the sheriff deputies’ orders to burn the cabin down, I can verify that it is the real thing. I was listening to the same transmissions when they first blared across the police scanners.

In the hours after the standoff, however, the police cover-up remained unchallenged thanks largely to local media complicity. An initialLos Angeles Times report recounted the incident in a passive voice, claiming “flames began to spread through the structure, and gunshots, probably set off by the fire, were heard.” Similarly, LA’s ABC affiliate, KABC, quoted Bachman’s vague comment about “that cabin that caught fire,” failing to explore why it was aflame or who torched it.

Today, the Los Angeles Times reported claims by anonymous “law enforcement sources” that the sheriffs used “incendiary tear gas” to flush Dorner out of the cabin. The sources claimed the deputies who had besieged the cabin were under a “constant barrage of gunfire” and that, “There weren’t a lot of options.”

This is almost certainly a lie.