Consider this the third in a series of stories about left wing news outlets doing their best to spin the bad news out of Georgia about an environmental activist who shot a state trooper and who was then shot and killed by police. My first story on this topic takes a look at the shoddy coverage by Vice, The Daily Show and Truthout. I wrote the follow-up story Monday which looked at another similar story published by Teen Vogue. Today, there’s a new entry at the Nation written by Michael Gould-Wartofsky.
What all of these stories have in common is that they make a concerted effort to not mention the inconvenient facts about what happened in the forest outside of Atlanta. In this case, the story just skips over the fact that someone else was shot. There are the opening two paragraphs:
On the morning of January 18, agents from nine agencies, including the FBI and its local counterpart, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, descended on a section of Atlanta’s South River Forest occupied by activists. For the past two years, hundreds had lived in the section of the Weelaunee forest, in tents and treehouses, in order to block its planned conversion into a police training facility—a “Cop City” complete with a mock village, firing ranges, and a Black Hawk landing pad. That morning, the agents were under orders to “eliminate the future Atlanta Public Safety Training Center of criminal activity.”
It is still unclear why the task force opened fire. But after 12 shots rang out, Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, known as Tortuguita (or “Little Turtle”), a young, nonbinary forest defender of Afro-Venezuelan and Indigenous ancestry, had been hit and killed.
No mention at all of the state trooper who was shot and taken to a hospital where he underwent two surgeries. No mention that the gun found at the scene was a ballistics match for the bullet removed from the trooper (contradicting claims by some that the trooper may have been hit with friendly fire). And no mention that Manuel Esteban Paez Terán had legally purchased the gun in question in September 2020.
The author then moves on to more whitewashing of leftist violence:
Terán’s death marks the fifth protest fatality at the hands of US law enforcement since the start of the George Floyd rebellion in May 2020: David “Ya Ya” McAtee was killed by a National Guardsman’s bullet in Louisville, Ky., on June 1, 2020; Sean Monterrosa was gunned down by undercover police in Vallejo, Calif., the very next day. Michael Reinoehl and Winston “Boogie” Smith Jr., both antifascists, were hunted down and “neutralized” by US Marshals within months of each other.
Michael Reinoehl was the “100% Antifa” suspect in the murder of Aaron “Jay” Danielson in Portland back in August of 2020. He fled the scene and was on the run when US Marshals caught up with him and killed him as he was preparing to drive somewhere. Questions were raised about that shooting. Reinoehl had two weapons with him but the NY Times reported his pistol was found in his pocket after the shooting and it apparently hadn’t been fired. In any case, the reason he was “hunted down” by authorities is because he’d shot and killed a man in the street. The omission of that fact seems like part of a patter with this author.
The story of Winston “Boogie” Smith Jr. appears similar in many ways. Smith had a felony warrant and was located by US Marshals:
The U.S. Marshals and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), which is investigating the shooting, said Smith had a warrant for a felony firearms violation when the U.S. Marshals Fugitive Task Force learned of his whereabouts Thursday.
Smith was parked in a car on top of a parking garage in the city’s Uptown neighborhood when the task force members tried to arrest him. Smith did not comply and “produced a handgun resulting in task force members firing upon the subject,” the U.S. Marshals said in a statement. Task force members provided medical aid, they said, but Smith died at the scene.
A statement from the BCA said evidence indicated that Smith fired a weapon from inside his car and that a handgun and cartridges were recovered from the driver’s side of the vehicle. A 27-year-old woman who was in the car with Smith was injured by broken glass and was treated and released, the bureau said.
Again, there are questions about this case. Smith’s girlfriend was in the car and claimed she never saw a gun. But it sounds like, in this case, there was a gun and it had been fired.
Eventually, in what is literally the last paragraph of the story, the author gets around to mentioning that a state trooper was “injured.”
We do not know exactly how or under what pretext the task force opened fire. One of the tactical officers involved was injured during the raid, but in the absence of body camera footage—or of any independent inquiry whatsoever—we may never learn the full story of what went down that day. But we are obliged to name the shooting of Terán for what it was: an extrajudicial execution, carried out by hired men armed with military assault weapons, paramilitary training, and qualified immunity from prosecution—in other words, a death squad in all but the name.
The trooper was injured but it would be a lot more accurate to say he was shot. But I guess that would lead to awkward questions this piece doesn’t want to try to answer (such as Who shot him?). That would also spoil the narrative that this was an “extrajudicial execution” since firing at someone who shot at you (whether you’re a cop or not) is self defense, not an execution.
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