Great story. Well written. Another snippet:
[quote ]
this ...
<Back to my story. The first real jolt indicating a serious problem with the plan came when television reporter Cathy Carlsen was killed in Norfolk, shot dead while covering the commissioning of the Harvey Milk, the Navy's newest destroyer. That she was killed was bad enough. That it happened on a "secure" naval base—a federal installation—made it much worse. Her blood splattered across the Admirals' white uniforms made quite a picture. The videos...
We were two women born in the same year, with similar academic backgrounds. We had known each other for decades, and her untimely death hit me hard. Cathy Carlsen had been a reliable voice on the progressive side of a supposedly impartial television news network. That a respected member of the media would be assassinated was big surprise, at least to me. Up to that point, only a few federal officials and high-ranking agents had been targeted.
Then a new photo was released on the internet. I had always thought the NSA could trace those things back to their origins, but apparently not. The photo was taken through the Norfolk sniper's rifle scope just a few moments before the murder. It showed thin black crosshairs and other reference marks across Cathy's smiling face. And it showed some text added just above her head:
If the media lies, the media dies.
You take a side, you're along for the ride.
A traitor in front of a camera is still just a traitor.
This single act of domestic terrorism immediately dampened the enthusiasm of most of our formerly reliable reporters to continue to carry our water. More such photographs of other media figures appeared on the internet with crosshairs over their faces. Most of the pictures were bogus, just photoshop pranks, but they had a similar effect: our dependably cooperative reporters suddenly lost their nerve. The comments following the photos on the remaining right-wing web forums were perhaps the most frightening aspect. It was obvious that plenty of Americans were willing to voice their support for the assassinations of their enemies in both the media and the government. It became a game for them to walk up to the "fomenting domestic terrorism" line with carefully parsed words, and this glutted our SNA fusion centers with background noise.
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