Following the publication of my column on Sunday, two more leaks have come out which further undercut the media meme on the shooting in Ferguson, Mo.

The police department indicates it has 12 eyewitnesses to the shooting who confirm officer Wilson's account, and Wilson has an eye orbital fracture which is also consistent with his claim that Brown reached into the police car and attacked him. We also have been informed from the Brown family's pathologist that marijuana was found in Brown's body. There may be more drugs, as the toxicology report is not due in for weeks.(Apparently the drug of choice there is swisher cigarillos (which we see Brown stealing) hollowed out, filled with marijuana and dipped in PCP before smoking. We do not know if Brown did have PCP in his body, but if he did the 300 pounder would have been likely very dangerous.

We are seeing two sides to this story, not because of any great work by the media, which once again shamefully played into the "It's Always Selma" fairytale of the race hustlers. No- -- it is the honest , gutsy work of the Ferguson chief of police and officers that it letting the truth of the matter come to light.

Thomas Lipscomb sees it as I do and has said this (which he has given me permission to quote in full). 

I am in full agreement with his observations following Legal Insurrection's warning on the unreliability of eyewitness testimony:

First of all the key problem here is strictly limited to the very few witnesses who will speak out and this is a VERY small list precisely because of the nonjudicial sentence carried out as scribbled by locals on the wall of the burnt out convenience store “snitches get stitches.” There were a LOT of witnesses to this confrontation as we can see from phone cams of the scene. NONE have come out publicly.

Secondly, as reporting today is FINALLY beginning to show… the media-derided “Keystone Cops” of the Ferguson police force have apparently been quietly doing their job, just as the media noisily have NOT.

There has been NO careful media assessment of the many outsiders and their groups that have been responsible for most of the continuing violence, partly because it gets in the way of the Holder/Obama/media-endorsed narrative that this is “the righteous wrath of the much-abused local community” and partly because of LAZY and gutless reporters of today’s dying press who are as afraid to ask questions of the real bad guys they can clearly see right there in front of them as they were to grill Hamas.

The police have though. As the Washington Post showed today they have around 50 arrest records of largely out of state rioters (and it only took a week and millions of dollars of destroyed property for ONE single newspaper to begin to do its job).

And finally, not ONE media source has talked to a single witness to the shooting who didn’t have an axe to grind, for Wilson, or for Brown. There were lots of them in those camera pictures.

The police have though. And Christine Byers at the St Louis Post Dispatch tweeted last night that she had information leaked to her (I would interpret came from local snitches contacted behind the scenes by the police who know the individuals in that local community) that a dozen witnesses were backing up what we think of as Wilson the cop’s story (as filtered by the Chief, “Josie” and others)

So while the classic reasons that “eyewitnesses are unreliable” are true… there is ONLY one eyewitness the media has quoted and named and we only know about through them, who definitely had a ringside seat. That is Brown’s companion, the indicted felon Dorian Johnson who was at the robbery of the convenience store and came up with the “hands raised” meme which has caused so much trouble and apparently has unnamed media-credentialed “witnesses” (USA TODAY) saying they saw too.

Any tight knit ethnic community shuts up to inquiry by any outsiders. Any black and white cop movie of the 30s and 40s depends on it as a plot device and in those films the community is usually Irish or Italian.

THAT and not the “unreliability of eyewitnesses” is the principle operating in the flood of activist misinformation and speculation which is delaying the resolution of the Ferguson affair.

And the disgraceful media irresponsibility in not constantly reminding the public of that fact and of the difficulty of the ongoing investigation, preferring to play 24/7 “newsbreak” games with the statements of activists and advocates, has led to an unnecessary week of violence and abraded interracial trust.