Dark Knight gunman: 'Evil therapist programmed me to commit mass slaughter at Aurora cinema' The man accused of shooting dead 12 people during a screening of the latest Batman movie said he was programmed to commit the gun rampage by an 'evil therapist,' a former prison inmate has claimed. James Holmes, 24, has been charged with carrying out the killings – and injuring at least 58 others – on July 20, when he allegedly opened fire at a cinema in Aurora, Colorado, that was showing The Dark Knight Rises. Steven Unruh who claims to have been a fellow inmate at the detention centre where Holmes is being held said he told him that he was 'programmed' to carry out the massacre during psychotherapy he had been receiving. Thirty eight-year-old Mr Unruh said he was in the booking area of the Arapahoe County Sheriff's Office Detention Facility in Colorado when Holmes was first brought in – Daily Mail

Dominant Social Theme: These things happen without rhyme or reason … No need to point fingers elsewhere. Conspiracy theory is a dead end.

Free-Market Analysis: James Holmes has made an impact in the mainstream news today with a story that he was "programmed" by a therapist to commit mass murder at the Aurora, Colorado cinema.

As believers in directed history, we are not much surprised by these accusations, only that the mainstream media is letting them see the light of day. The accusations are second hand, as we can see from the excerpt above. Former inmate Steven Unruh, who had the chance to speak to Holmes after Holmes had been incarcerated, presented them to the media.

Unruh claims that Holmes showed a good deal of remorse and that in blaming the shooting on an unnamed psychotherapist, Holmes was distancing himself from direct responsibility. This is unlike some other mass murderers and serial killers who have continued to claim responsibility and wish to be subject to the consequences such a position entails.

Most of the mainstream articles treated Holmes's claims scornfully, the product of the deranged imaginings of a madman. But over at the alternative news site Infowars there was a decidedly different reaction. Here is some of the Infowars posting:

The most explosive element of what Unruh claims Holmes told him could – if true – shed an entirely different light on the circumstances behind the Aurora theater shooting. "He says that Holmes told him "he felt like he was in a video game" during the shooting, that "he wasn't on his meds" and "nobody would help him." He says Holmes also mentioned NLP — presumably, neuro-linguistic programming, a much-scorned and outmoded approach to psychotherapy — and claimed to have been "programmed" to kill by an evil therapist."

"When he got out to his car, he wasn't programmed no more," Unruh says. "It sounded kind of crazy. He was trying to run it by me, basically." Unruh was also given a phone number that Holmes asked him to call which connected to a bereavement counselor who says she has no acquaintance with Holmes or Unruh.

"They're going to try to discredit my story," Unruh told writer Alan Prendergast. "But I was able to have a four-hour talk with him. I talked him out of suicide." Prendergast notes that although jail authorities doubt Unruh would have had an opportunity to speak to Holmes, "certain elements of the story" ring true, including, "a description that resembles the headbanging routine that sent Holmes to the hospital last week."

Stories about infamous killers being brainwashed into carrying out murders are almost commonplace. The most well known is probably Sirhan Sirhan, Robert F. Kennedy's alleged assassin. As the London Independent reported in 2005, evidence strongly indicates that Sirhan was a Manchurian candidate, a victim of mind control who was set up to be the fall guy for the murder. Sirhan was described by eyewitnesses as being in a trance-like state as he pulled the trigger.

"There was no way Sirhan Sirhan killed Kennedy," said (Sirhan's lawyer Larry) Teeter…. He was the fall guy. His job was to get busted while the trigger man walked out. He wasn't consciously involved in any plot. He was a patsy. He was unconscious and unaware of what was happening – he was the true Manchurian Candidate."

The CIA's use of mind control to create killers is a matter of historical record. MK-ULTRA was the code name for a covert, illegal CIA human research program, run by the Office of Scientific Intelligence that came to light in 1975 through investigations by the Church Committee, and by a presidential commission known as the Rockefeller Commission. 14-year CIA veteran Victor Marchetti insists that the program is ongoing and has not been abandoned.

According to his lawyers, Sirhan Sirhan "was an involuntary participant in the crimes being committed because he was subjected to sophisticated hypno programming and memory implantation techniques which rendered him unable to consciously control his thoughts and actions at the time the crimes were being committed," and served only as a diversion for the real assassin.

The parallels between Sirhan Sirhan and James Holmes are alarming. Both were described as behaving as if in a trance or under the influence of drugs, both cannot remember any of the details of the shootings, and in both cases eyewitnesses reported more than one gunman at the scene.

In both the RFK and 'Batman' shootings, eyewitnesses described other shooters, dismantling the "lone wolf" narrative. According to Nina Rhodes-Hughes, another man was shooting at RFK and the authorities tried to alter her account of what happened. "What has to come out is that there was another shooter to my right," Rhodes-Hughes said in an interview with CNN. "The truth has got to be told. No more cover-ups." Sirhan's lawyers also presented evidence that "two guns were fired in the assassination and that Sirhan's revolver was not the gun that shot Kennedy."

The coverups, in our view, may be extensive. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is another episode that has caused a great deal of controversy, and continues to do so for good reason. The cover story, with its "magic" bullet causing numerous wounds, is difficult to believe.

Likewise, and in some ways more alarmingly, the Columbine High School shooting of 1999 is subject to similar questions and provides substantiated facts that contradict the "official" story. There are numerous websites that ask questions about the Columbine shooting and provide facts that hang in air … unanswered. To date, there has been no official revisiting of what is obviously a dubious tale.

Such questioning can extend to 9/11 itself and the many flaws in the official story such as it is. Whatever happened on 9/11 has not been fully explained or even investigated. Here's a statement, supposedly from a Columbine witness, delineating some of the issues with the official Columbine story (paragraphing ours):

I'm not convinced the two boys where the shooters, or the only shooters. Many of the statements taken from other students state that they DID NOT recognize the (shooters)! Why are the STUDENTS who witnessed the shootings talking about grenades, not Pipe Bombs? Because pipe bombs where not used! And it was NOT the two students using them, but black clothed terrorists from the ATF.

They DID NOT commit suicide. I believe, based on evidence I've seen, that they where executed at the end of the shooting spree by another operative. The ATF where OBSERVED planting two of the 30 lb. bombs found, by Jefferson County Sheriff's deputies (a SGT. and a Captain) who are scared witless by what they saw. And they WILL NOT come out and talk about it.

Why where FBI, ATF, CIA, NSA and NATO spooks on the scene at Columbine literally within minutes of the (beginning of) shootings? BECAUSE they knew about it before hand and where prepared and ready to go, parked only a mile or two away.

Not one so-called law enforcement official entered the school during the shooting. Instead, they cowered outside behind fire engines like the compromised cowards and traitors that they really are. Not ONE round was fired by a Law Enforcement official. In conjunction with item 6, WHY where Law Enforcement officials ORDERED, by FBI and ATF officers-in-charge, to NOT enter the building until AFTER the shooting stopped?

Even if the quote is a "fabrication" and the witness is a composite, the points made in the above quotation are amply borne out on other websites dedicated to the massacre. As difficult as it is to believe, US law enforcement officials apparently continue to engage in a coverup of the facts behind one of the worst murderous rampages in US history.

Given what we call the Internet Reformation, we've anticipated that these issues would start to be revisited. Modern US history – Western history in general – is littered with increasingly strange episodes of violence. They range from individual shootings to world wars to the current string of inexplicable hostilities in the Middle East and Africa.

The dominant social theme is always the same, of course. Unexpected violence lurks all around us and can explode any minute: Thus, we need the state to protect us. The subdominant social theme often has more to do with the shooters themselves (in the case of serial killing and random massacres, especially). The often-stated perspective among those who knew the killer is that they "never would have expected," that he (they are mostly he) seemed like a nice guy, a respectful person, an unassuming and quiet fellow.

The idea, perhaps, is that anyone may be a killer … That random violence is nearly a certainty. That one can be a productive member of society one day and a perpetrator of bloodthirsty evil the next.

It is a power elite that one can hypothesize is organizing these killings or at least encouraging them. The idea always is to create chaos, a perception of chaos anyway, that can be exploited for purposes of further regulation and further state authoritarianism.

Perhaps Holmes was merely a single deranged individual. But his story has elements that correspond to other similar stories voiced by Sirhan Sirhan and many others. The questions continue to mount and the evidence of mind control manipulation – a staple of bad science fiction – continues to gather credibility if not legitimacy.

At some point perhaps one of these stories will be legitimatized and then people will have to face the dark underbelly of Western regulated democracy and the reality of those who manipulate it behind the scenes.