Scary Terror Focus Group Video: Real Or Hoax?

Conference room video asks participants what government should call post-bio attack quarantine program, if media should be banned from criticizing President, how election cancellations should be framed
By Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Nov. 02, 2006

A bizarre six minute video posted to the You Tube website claims to show a focus group responding to questions put to them by a moderator about how the U.S. government should react to a bio-attack, including what they should name quarantine procedures, if they should outlaw criticism of the President, and the terms they should use for the process of canceling an election in the wake of a suicide bombing.

The video was allegedly part of a court action because one of the four participants in the focus group, a man named as "Raymond Estaver" on the You Tube website, suffers an apparent stroke at the end of the tape and falls off his chair.

The blurb that accompanies the video reads, "My uncle Raymond Estaver suffered a stroke while he was participating in a focus group last May. This tape was acquired as part of the trial discovery. We lost the suit but this is what happened."

Though the You Tube video at time of press is still available, its creator has warned of its imminent removal and for that reason we are providing a full audio of the conversation here, as well as screenshots and a substantive transcript below. In the meantime you can watch the You Tube video below. It has only been online since Tuesday and has received few views before the publication of this article.

If this is a real focus group undertaken by a real government agency or a real PR firm on behalf of a government agency then the implications are truly frightening.

The moderator opens up the forum by stating, "We're gonna be dealing with some pretty serious stuff here....we're gonna be dealing with what happens if something bad happens in this country again - something worse than 9/11, bio-warfare....Marburg's disease, ebola. This is what happens when somebody releases a pathogen or a virus out into the population."

He continues, "What happens if they're large scale? We have to contain them, we have to do something about that, what happens if the water supply you're drinking is tainted? What happens if a nuclear bomb goes off in Disneyland?"

He then leads into the first question, "Imagine that this event has happened, we need to contain it, so we need to quarantine certain cities, we need to shut them off from the rest of America so that this does not spread, we need that quarantine."

The moderator calls for a gut reaction from the participants stating, "don't think just react," and reads off the possible names that the quarantine would be called.

"United in safety," this receives a "strongly favorable" response according to the text that flashes up on the screen.

"United response to terror," this receives a "moderately favorable response" according to the cumulative evaluation from the participants.

"United against the threat of terrorism," receives a "strongly favorable" response.

"America defended from within," receives a "most favorable response."

The moderator then begins to introduce the next question.

"You have to imagine that something terrible happens in this country, what's the most important thing we have to to, we have to build this country back up again and we have to get back on our feet, we have to get America back to where it was. So there's gonna be some people out there that are gonna try and interfere with that effort - they're gonna try to hit us while we're reeling. So it's gonna be important that the media doesn't interfere with that process."

He continues, "That's gonna be important - the media does not criticize or harm the relief effort and it's also gonna be important that they don't give out potential targets to terrorism, OK?"

The moderator again asks for gut reactions to the following questions.

"So would it be OK to make it illegal to publish or distribute stories that identify targets or at least information that might be used by the terrorists?"

The response from the participants to the question is "strongly favorable."

"Would it be OK to make it illegal to publish or distribute stories against U.S. policy?"

The reaction is "moderately favorable."

"Would it be OK to make it illegal to publish or distribute stories against the statements or actions of the U.S. government or the President?"

The reaction again is "moderately favorable."

"Last question here," states the moderator, "Again this is in the aftermath of an attack, OK so you have to think this is a you know, we're in a very very dire situation here, and this is just the kind of thing that you have to prepare for here - that's why we're here."

"You can imagine certain circumstances where an election is almost an impossible thing to have, there might be suicide bombers that wanna disrupt a conventional election, we might have certain circumstances in this country where it is not possible to have a conventional election - so we might be in a situation where the President needs to fill the positions of government by executive decision."

At this point the middle-aged woman sat to the moderator's left exclaims, "Is this really gonna happen?" to which the moderator responds, "Well I certainly hope not, but that's what we're here to plan for just in case it does."

He continues, "So we're now in a situation where the President needs to fill branches of government by executive choice, right, executive choice."

"What do you think, I want you to indicate your preference here, on the best sort of name for that kind of an effort."

"The good faith appointment of interim leadership."

The participants "moderately disagree" with this choice.

"A new system for a new America."

At this point the male participant falls off his chair and the rest of the participants react in shock and the moderator calls for help and tells everyone to leave the room. The tape ends.

While this tape is obviously disturbing in its ramifications if true, there are several indicators that strongly suggest to us that it's a hoax.

The first is the wooden acting on show from both the moderator and the participants which comes across as fairly obvious right from the start.

The second is the improbability that on-screen text would be later added to the video and that it would still be used even after one of the participants seemingly suffers a stroke.

The third is that the man seems to push himself over and not fall off the chair as a result of the stroke - the chair is on wheels and so would not topple over without considerable force.

What's your take on this video? Is it a harrowing warning that the government is preparing to quarantine millions of Americans and then completely ban freedom of speech and cancel elections after a terror attack?

Is it a cheap hoax on behalf of pranksters trying to scare the "conspiracy theorists" into bedlam?

Or is it an intentionally released fake on behalf of the government to muddy the waters and pollute the truth movement? If so it wouldn't be the first such tape that has been released and then debunked in order to discredit critics of the Iraq war or the war on terror.

Back in May a tape was released in which an alleged former Marine, Jesse McBeth, testified that brutal indiscriminate murder of civilians had taken place in Iraq. The tape was an obvious fraud, McBeth had never been a Marine, but it served to debunk other very real evidence of war crimes against the Iraqi people because the Neo-Cons seized upon it as an example of anti-American "peace propaganda."

Similarly, the apparently hoax focus group tape serves to debunk confirmed programs taking place all over the nation run by FEMA, in which Pastors and other religious representatives are trained to become secret police enforcers who teach their congregations to "obey the government" in preparation for a declaration of martial law, property and firearm seizures, and forced relocation.

The mysterious origin, context and purpose of the "focus group" tape is yet to be confirmed but as soon as anything new turns up you'll read it here first.