Dave Emory’s entire life­time of work is avail­able on a flash dri­ve that can be obtained here. (The flash dri­ve includes the anti-fas­cist books avail­able on this site.)

Lis­ten: MP3

Side 1   Side 2

NOTE: This descrip­tion con­tains mate­r­i­al not includ­ed in the orig­i­nal broad­cast.

Intro­duc­tion: Polit­i­cal come­dian Mort Sahl (who worked for New Orleans Dis­trict Attor­ney Jim Gar­ri­son) asked in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy; “How many lies can you allow your­self to believe before you belong to the lie?”

Ana­lyz­ing the Boston Marathon bomb­ing in light of the failed inves­ti­ga­tion into the 9/11 attacks, we ask if the Unit­ed States belongs to the lie. Had the Oper­a­tion Green Quest raids of 3/20/2002 been ful­ly inves­ti­gat­ed, we would not be in the posi­tion in which we find our­selves vis a vis the Boston marathon bomb­ing.

The indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions that were the focal points of the Oper­a­tion Green Quest loom in the back­ground of the envi­ron­ment of the Boston Marathon bomb­ing, as do Islamist/Muslim Broth­er­hood-linked to the milieu of Al-Qae­da.

In a pre­vi­ous post, we high­lighted some of the con­sid­er­a­tions to be weighed in eval­u­at­ing the Boston Marathon bomb­ing. After an ini­tial report of the arrest of a Sau­di nation­al, we are told–rightly or wrongly–that he is con­sid­ered a wit­ness not a sus­pect.

Sure enough, the ele­ments we cit­ed in the above-linked post are com­ing into view, high­lighted in the sto­ries linked and excerpt­ed below.

We advise strong­ly against sim­plis­tic analy­sis of the Boston bomb­ing, as we warned in our first post on the sub­ject. The prob­a­bil­ity is very strong that we are deal­ing with a sit­u­a­tion involv­ing dou­ble and triple agents–a sit­u­a­tion that will be impos­si­ble for an out­side observ­er (and some of the inside observers) to fig­ure out, past a point.

What is becom­ing obvi­ous is that we are  deal­ing with an intel­li­gence milieu involved with the Chechen gueril­las and the com­plex, dead­ly real­i­ties con­nected with The Earth Island Boo­gie. The pol­i­tics in the back­ground of the bomb­ing over­lap the inter­sect­ing milieux of neo-Ottoman pow­er pol­i­tics and what we have termed “Turk­ish Taffy”–the cos­metic pre­sen­ta­tion of Turkey’s Islamist gov­ern­ment of Erdo­gan as “demo­c­ra­tic” and “mod­er­ate.”

The Tsar­naev broth­ers exist[ed] in an envi­ron­ment deeply enmeshed with intel­li­gence-con­nect­ed ele­ments, evi­dent­ly CIA, “ex”-CIA, or (per­haps) an off-the shelf intel­li­gence oper­a­tion along the lines of the Safari Club. Evi­dent­ly run by West­ern, petro­le­um-linked and Sau­di ele­ments, this milieu con­tin­ues to pur­sue Islam­ic jihadist forces as proxy war­riors.

This intel­li­gence milieu appears to be an exten­sion of the forces oper­at­ing in the Afghan and Balkan the­aters against the for­mer U.S.S.R. and the for­mer Yugoslavia. At present, their focus appears to be pry­ing the oil-rich Cau­ca­sus away from Rus­sia.

Some­where along the line, they became imbued with third posi­tion ide­ol­o­gy and struck on April 15th–tax day–which is a focal point of domes­tic fas­cist ter­ror­ists.

Key Points of Dis­cus­sion Include: 

• The Boston bomb­ing sus­pects’ uncle appears to have worked both for AID (a fre­quent intel­li­gence cov­er) and for a sub­sidiary of Halliburton–Dick Cheney’s old com­pa­ny.
• Uncle Rus­lan also was mar­ried to the daugh­ter of a very impor­tant for­mer CIA offi­cer, Gra­ham E. Fuller, with whom Rus­lan co-found­ed a Chechen orga­ni­za­tion that may well have been an intel­li­gence front.
• Dhokar Tsar­naev’s tutor Glyn Williams had a back­ground in the CIA, serv­ing in Afghanistan.
• The alleged bombers wor­shipped at a Mus­lim Broth­er­hood-con­nect­ed mosque in Boston that was once admin­is­tered by Abdu­rah­man Alamoudi–a pro­tege of Grover Norquist and among the focal points of the Oper­a­tion Green Quest raids of 3/20/2002. Norquist’s pro­tege Alam­oudi proved to be a senior financier of Al Qae­da. The mosque had numer­ous links to ter­ror­ist inci­dents over the years.
• Both the FBI and CIA, as well as the Russ­ian author­i­ties had inves­ti­gated Tamer­lan before. As not­ed by Dave Gaubatz, U.S. law enforce­ment has relied on the Broth­er­hood and its front orga­ni­za­tions such as the Mus­lim Amer­i­can Soci­ety.
• The al-Taqwa/­Op­er­a­tion Green Quest milieu heav­ily over­laps indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions involved in train­ing chap­lains for both prison pop­u­la­tions and the mil­i­tary. With that kind of ide­ol­o­gized preach­ing find­ing its way into those milieux, we should not be sur­prised at a recur­rence of “lone wolf” jihadis, sim­i­lar to and–perhaps–overlapping the “lead­er­less resis­tance” tac­tic long pur­sued by neo-Nazi and fas­cist ele­ments.
• A major focal point of Chech­nyan jihadism is in Boston, evolved from the Al Kifah orga­ni­za­tion, renamed CARE (not to be con­fused with the UN char­ity.) That milieu is inex­tri­ca­bly linked with the 1993 attack on the World Trade Cen­ter.
• In turn, some of the Al Kifah/CARE oper­a­tives pur­sued by the gov­ern­ment were employ­ees of the PTech cor­po­ra­tion, that devel­oped crit­i­cal soft­ware for numer­ous fed­eral agen­cies with juris­dic­tion in the 9/11/21001 attacks.
• As dis­cussed in FTR #467, PTech is inex­tri­ca­bly linked with the over­lap­ping milieux of Oper­a­tion Green Quest and the Bank al-Taqwa.
• Review­ing infor­ma­tion from FTR #710, we note the con­tin­ued oper­a­tion of jihadist proxy war­riors by ele­ments of the petroleum/GOP/Underground Reich fac­tion of U.S. intel­li­gence.
• We note that Tamer­lan Tsar­naev was in pos­ses­sion of white-suprema­cist, far right-wing lit­er­a­ture and was appar­ently influ­enced by it. We have seen col­lab­o­ra­tion between white suprema­cist­s/­neo-Nazis and Islamists before. (See text excerpts below.)
• Fur­ther reportage on Tsarnaev’s Nazi/white suprema­cy links reveals that among the influ­ences on him was “The Amer­i­can Free Press,” pub­lished by Willis Car­to. (See text excerpts below.) Car­to is best known as the edi­tor of The Spot­light, a neo-Nazi news­pa­per that achieved con­sid­er­able cir­cu­la­tion. Car­to has been alleged to have been the ghost­writer for Eddie the Friend­ly Spook’s Pres­i­den­tial can­di­date of choice Ron Paul.
• Note, also, the appar­ent influ­ence of the “Zeit­geist” film on Tsar­naev. A fas­cist “Truther” film, it is filled with Jew­ish banker con­spir­acy the­o­ries and exem­pli­fies the sort of fas­cist ide­ol­ogy that has influ­enced the so-called Truther move­ment. Jared Lee Laugh­ner also appears to have been influ­enced by the film.
• The beliefs exhib­it­ed by the Tsar­naevs man­i­fest the Third Posi­tion, a fas­cist con­struct that incor­po­rates tra­di­tion­al fas­cists in alliance with left­ist and Third World ele­ments. Two Mis­cel­la­neous Archive Shows detail this ide­ol­o­gy: M19: “The Fas­cist “Third Posi­tion”, The Far Right and Their Attempt to Co-opt Pro­gres­sive Forces” (7/3/’88)   Side a, Side b, Side c. M21: “The Fas­cist ‘Third Posi­tion’ Part 2″  (7/24/’88)  Side a, Side b
• With­in hours of the Boston bomb­ing, an attack on a PG & E pow­er sub­sta­tion took place, with indi­ca­tions that it, too, was a ter­ror­ist attack. Were both attacks man­i­fes­ta­tions of the “lead­er­less resis­tance strat­e­gy”?

1. Daniel Hop­sick­er has not­ed that Uncle Rus­lan (the Tsar­naev broth­er­s’un­cle) worked for AID in Kaza­khstan. AID is a fre­quent cov­er for U.S. intel­li­gence activ­i­ty.

Uncle Rus­lan’s milieu also runs in the direc­tion of a for­mer sub­sidiary of Hal­libur­ton, Dick Cheney’s old com­pa­ny.

“Was Boston Bombers ‘Uncle Rus­lan’ with the CIA?” by Daniel Hop­sicker; Mad Cow Morn­ing News; 4/22/2013.

The uncle of the two men who set off bombs at the Boston Marathon, who struck the only grace note in an oth­er­wise hor­rific week, worked as a “con­sul­tant” for the Agency for Inter­na­tional Devel­op­ment (USAID) a U.S. Gov­ern­ment Agency often used for cov­er by agents of the CIA, in the for­mer Sovi­et Repub­lic of Kaza­khstan dur­ing the “Wild West” days of the ear­ly 1990’s, when any­thing that wasn’t nailed down in that coun­try was up for grabs. . . .

. . . . The pur­chase of the Prince’s [Andrew of Great Britain] estate was put togeth­er, accord­ing to pros­e­cu­tors in Italy and Switzer­land, by a group of oil exec­u­tives who com­prise “a net­work of per­sonal and busi­ness rela­tion­ships” alleged­ly used for “inter­na­tional cor­rup­tion,” report­ed The Lon­don Tele­graph.

Tsarni, called “a US lawyer who has had deal­ings in Kaza­kh busi­ness affairs,” by the Sun­day Times, clear­ly appears to be a mem­ber of that net­work.

The Sun­day Times report­ed, “A state­ment by Rus­lan Zain­di Tsarni was giv­en in the High Court in Decem­ber, claim­ing that Kulibayev bought Sun­ninghill and prop­er­ties in May­fair with $96 mil­lion derived from a com­plex series of deals intend­ed to dis­guise mon­ey laun­der­ing.”

“Tsarni alleged that the mon­ey came from the takeover of a west­ern com­pany, which had been used as a front to obtain oil con­tracts from the Kaza­kh state.”

The “west­ern com­pany” used to laun­der the mon­ey which the Sun­day Times referred to is Big Sky Ener­gy Cor­po­ra­tion, where Rus­lan Tsarni was a top exec­u­tive.

Big Sky, which used to be known as Chi­na Ener­gy Ven­tures Corp, is a now-bank­rupt US oil com­pany run by S.A. (Al) Sehsu­varoglu, a long-time exec­u­tive of Hal­libur­ton, which had oil leas­es in Kakakhstan’s Caspi­an Basin.

Tsarni was Big Sky’s Cor­po­rate Sec­re­tary and Vice Pres­i­dent for Busi­ness Devel­op­ment. He joined Big Sky in 2005. . . .

2a. In addi­tion to his past employ­ment by the Agency for Inter­na­tional Devel­op­ment and a sub­sidiary of Hal­libur­ton, the alleged bombers’ uncle was mar­ried to the daugh­ter of a for­mer CIA officer–Graham E. Fuller, a for­mer sta­tion chief in Kab­ul.

It was Fuller who was quot­ed in FTR #513 (among oth­er pro­grams) advo­cat­ing a U.S. alliance with the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, a posi­tion that was appar­ently real­ized dur­ing the Arab Spring gam­bit.

3a. Dzhokar Tsar­naev’s tutor was Bri­an Glyn Williams, who had a back­ground in the CIA, deal­ing with jihadists, Chech­nya and sui­cide bombers. He spent time in Afghanistan. One won­ders if he was mere­ly a tutor or did he play a part in recruit­ing Tsar­naev?

“I Hope I Didn’t Con­tribute To It” by Mark Ames; nsfwcorp.com; 5/8/2013.

. . . . For now, I want to start with one of the biggest “What The Fuck?!” in the bomb­ing sto­ry, a detail so far com­pletely over­looked: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s high school project “men­tor,” Bri­an Glyn Williams. Bri­an Glyn Williams hap­pens to work for the CIA, on Islam­ic sui­cide bombers, Chech­nya, and jiha­di ter­ror­ism. Williams is also an asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of his­tory at the Uni­ver­sity of Mass­a­chu­setts-Dart­mouth, the uni­ver­sity where 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsar­naev was enrolled, and where he spent many of his last free hours between the Boston Marathon bomb­ing on April 15, and his arrest on April 19. . . .

3b. More about the Williams-Tsar­naev rela­tion­ship:

“As Man­hunt Ends, New Ques­tions Emerge in Boston Bomb­ings” by Kevin John­son, Don­na Lein­wand Leg­er and Gary Strauss; USA Today; 4/19/2013.

. . . . The New Bed­ford Stan­dard-Times report­ed that Dr. Bri­an Glyn Williams, who teach­es Chechen his­tory at the Uni­ver­sity of Mass­a­chu­setts at Dart­mouth, said he had tutored Dzhokhar in the sub­ject when he was in high school.

“He was learn­ing his Chechen iden­tity, iden­ti­fy­ing with the dias­pora and iden­ti­fy­ing with his home­land,” Williams said, adding that Dzhokhar “want­ed to learn more about Chech­nya, who the fight­ers were, who the com­man­ders were.” . . . .

3c. Williams dis­miss­es the notion of a Wah­habi-Chechen con­nec­tion, which–as we shall see–is a “less than com­plete” analy­sis.

“Thoughts on the ‘Jihad­i­fi­ca­tion’ of Boston Bomber Tamer­lan Tsar­naev” by Bri­an Glyn Williams; Huff­in­g­ton Post; 4/25/2013.

. . . These arti­cles sys­tem­at­i­cally demol­ished the mis­guided notion that the out­gunned, Sovi­etized, Sufi-mys­tic Chechen rebels defend­ing their moun­tain home­land from the mighty Russ­ian Fed­er­a­tion had some­how devel­oped a for­eign pol­icy which bizarrely led them to become the evil hench­men of the Sau­di Ara­bian Wah­habi fun­da­men­tal­ist ter­ror­ist Osama Bin Laden and his Pash­tun trib­al Tal­iban allies in Afghanistan. I myself per­son­ally trav­eled to Afghanistan in 2003 and inter­viewed numer­ous Tal­iban pris­on­ers of war held by North­ern Alliance Uzbek Gen­eral Dos­tum to see if they had ever seen a real Chechen fight­er of the sort report­ed to be the van­guard of their armies (see my pho­tos here). None of them had ever seen or heard of Chechens; it was like look­ing for the Chechen Big Foot. . . .

4a. The mosque attend­ed by the Tsar­naev broth­ers was found­ed by Grover Norquist’s pro­tege Abdul­rah­man Alam­ou­di.

“Mosque that Boston Sus­pects Attend­ed has Rad­i­cal Ties” by Oren Dorell; USA Today; 4/23/2013.

The mosque attend­ed by the two broth­ers accused in the Boston Marathon bomb­ing has been asso­ci­ated with oth­er ter­ror­ist sus­pects, has invit­ed rad­i­cal speak­ers to a sis­ter mosque in Boston and is affil­i­ated with a Mus­lim group that crit­ics say nurs­es griev­ances that can lead to extrem­ism.

Sev­eral peo­ple who attend­ed the Islam­ic Soci­ety of Boston mosque in Cam­bridge, Mass., have been inves­ti­gated for Islam­ic ter­ror­ism, includ­ing a con­vic­tion of the mosque’s first pres­i­dent, Abdul­rah­man Alam­oudi, in con­nec­tion with an assas­si­na­tion plot against a Sau­di prince.

And its sis­ter mosque in Boston, known as the Islam­ic Soci­ety of Boston Cul­tural Cen­ter, has invit­ed guests who have defend­ed ter­ror sus­pects. A for­mer trustee appears in a series of videos in which he advo­cates treat­ing gays as crim­i­nals, says hus­bands should some­times beat their wives and calls on Allah (God) to kill Zion­ists and Jews, accord­ing to Amer­i­cans for Peace and Tol­er­ance, an inter­faith group that has inves­ti­gated the mosques.

The head of the group is among crit­ics who say the mosques teach a brand of Islam­ic thought that encour­ages griev­ances against the West, dis­trust of law enforce­ment and oppo­si­tion to West­ern forms of gov­ern­ment, dress and social val­ues.

“We don’t know where these boys were rad­i­cal­ized,” says the head of the group, Charles Jacobs. “But this mosque has a cur­ricu­lum that rad­i­cal­izes peo­ple. Oth­er peo­ple have been rad­i­cal­ized there.”

Yusu­fi Vali, exec­u­tive direc­tor at the Islam­ic Soci­ety of Boston Cul­tural Cen­ter, insists his mosque does not spread rad­i­cal ide­ol­ogy and can­not be blamed for the acts of a few wor­shipers.

“If there were real­ly any wor­ry about us being extreme,” Vali said, U.S. law enforce­ment agen­cies such as the FBI and Depart­ments of Jus­tice and Home­land Secu­rity would not part­ner with the Mus­lim Amer­i­can Soci­ety and the Boston mosque in con­duct­ing month­ly meet­ings that have been ongo­ing for four years, he said, in an appar­ent ref­er­ence to U.S. gov­ern­ment out­reach pro­grams in the Mus­lim com­mu­ni­ty.

The Cam­bridge and Boston mosques, sep­a­rated by the Charles Riv­er, are owned by the same enti­ty but man­aged indi­vid­u­ally. The imam of the Cam­bridge mosque, Sheik Basy­ouny Nehela, is on the board of direc­tors of the Boston mosque.

Dzhokhar Tsar­naev and his broth­er, Tamer­lan Tsar­naev, attend­ed the Cam­bridge mosque for ser­vices and are accused of set­ting two bombs that killed three peo­ple and injured at least 264 oth­ers at the April 15 Boston Marathon.

The FBI has not indi­cated that either mosque was involved in any crim­i­nal activ­ity. But mosque atten­dees and offi­cials have been impli­cated in ter­ror­ist activ­i­ty.

• Abdul­rah­man Alam­oudi, who signed the arti­cles of incor­po­ra­tion as the Cam­bridge mosque’s pres­i­dent, was sen­tenced to 23 years in fed­eral court in Alexan­dria, Va., in 2004 for his role as a facil­i­ta­tor in what fed­eral pros­e­cu­tors called a Libyan assas­si­na­tion plot against then-Sau­di crown prince Abdul­lah. Abdul­lah is now the Sau­di king.

• Aafia Sid­diqui, who occa­sion­ally prayed at the Cam­bridge mosque, was arrest­ed in Afghanistan in 2008 while in pos­ses­sion of cyanide can­is­ters and plans for a chem­i­cal attack in New York City. She tried to grab a rifle while in deten­tion and shot at mil­i­tary offi­cers and FBI agents, for which she was con­victed in New York in 2010 and is serv­ing an 86-year sen­tence.

• Tarek Mehan­na, who wor­shiped at the Cam­bridge mosque, was sen­tenced in 2012 to 17 years in prison for con­spir­ing to aid al-Qae­da. Mehan­na had trav­eled to Yemen to seek ter­ror­ist train­ing and plot­ted to use auto­matic weapons to shoot up a mall in the Boston sub­urbs, fed­eral inves­ti­ga­tors in Boston alleged.

• Ahmad Abousam­ra, the son of a for­mer vice pres­i­dent of the Mus­lim Amer­i­can Soci­ety Boston Abdul-Badi Abousam­ra, was iden­ti­fied by the FBI as Mehanna’s co-con­spir­a­tor. He fled to Syr­ia and is want­ed by the FBI on charges of pro­vid­ing sup­port to ter­ror­ists and con­spir­acy to kill Amer­i­cans in a for­eign coun­try.

• Jamal Badawi of Cana­da, a for­mer trustee of the Islam­ic Soci­ety of Boston Trust, which owns both mosques, was named as a non-indict­ed co-con­spir­a­tor in the 2007 Holy Land Foun­da­tion ter­ror­ism tri­al in Texas over the fun­nel­ing of mon­ey to Hamas, which is the Pales­tin­ian wing of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood.

What both mosques have in com­mon is an affil­i­a­tion with the Mus­lim Amer­i­can Soci­ety, an orga­ni­za­tion found­ed in 1993 that describes itself as an Amer­i­can Islam­ic revival move­ment. It has also been described by fed­eral pros­e­cu­tors in court as the “overt arm” of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, which calls for Islam­ic law and is the par­ent orga­ni­za­tion of Hamas, a U.S.-designated ter­ror group. . . .

. . . . The lead­er­ship of the two mosques is inter­twined and the ide­ol­ogy they teach is the same, Jacobs says. Ilya Feok­tis­tov, direc­tor of research at Amer­i­cans for Peace and Tol­er­ance, says much of the mon­ey to cre­ate the Boston mosque came not from local Mus­lims but from for­eign sources.

More than half of the $15.5 mil­lion used to found the Boston mosque came from Sau­di sources, Feok­tis­tov said, who cites finan­cial doc­u­ments that Jacobs’ group obtained when the mosque sued it for defama­tion. The law­suit was lat­er dropped. . . .

4b. We review the Alamoudi/Norquist/Rove/Bush nexus.

“Count­down with Kei­th Olber­man” for Oct. 23; MSNBC News; 10/23/2003.

JOHN LOFTUS: Well, you know, it’s a fun­ny sto­ry. About a year-and‑a half ago, peo­ple in the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity came and said-guys like Alam­oudi and Sami al-Ari­an and oth­er ter­ror­ists weren’t being touched because they’d been ordered not to inves­ti­gate the cas­es, not to pros­e­cute them, because they were being fund­ed by the Saud­is and a polit­i­cal deci­sion was being made at the high­est lev­els, don’t do any­thing that would embar­rass the Sau­di gov­ern­ment. So, of course I imme­di­ately vol­un­teered to do it and I filed a law­suit, against al-Ari­an charg­ing him with being a major ter­ror­ist for Islam­ic Jihad; most of his mon­ey came from Sau­di char­i­ties in Vir­ginia.

Now, Alamoudi’s head­quar­ters were in the same place, he was raid­ed the same day, on March 20. An hour after I filed my law­suit, the U.S. gov­ern­ment final­ly got off its butt and they raid­ed these offices. And, the stuff that they’re tak­ing out of there now is absolute­ly hor­ren­dous. Al-Ari­an has now, final­ly been indict­ed, along with Alam­oudi, today. But, who ws it that fixed the cas­es? How could these guys oper­ate for more than a decade immune from pros­e­cu­tion? And, the answer is com­ing out in a very strange place. What Alam­oudi and al-Ari­an have in com­mon is a guy named Grover Norquist. He’s the super lob­by­ist. Newt Gingrich’s guy, the one the NRA calls on, head of Amer­i­can tax­pay­ers. He is the guy that was hired by Alam­oudi to head up the Islam­ic insti­tute and he’s the reg­is­tered agent for Alam­oudi, per­son­ally, and for the Islam­ic Insti­tute.

Grover Norquist’s best friend is Karl Rove, the White House chief of staff, and appar­ently Norquist was able to fix things. He got extreme right wing Mus­lim peo­ple to be the gate­keep­ers in the White House. That’s why mod­er­ate [Mus­lim] Amer­i­cans couldn’t speak out after 9/11. Mod­er­ate Mus­lims couldn’t get into the White House because Norquist’s friends were block­ing their access. . . . .

5a. A major focal point of Chech­nyan jihadism is in Boston, evolved from the Al Kifah orga­ni­za­tion, renamed CARE (not to be con­fused with the UN char­ity.) That milieu is inex­tri­ca­bly linked with the 1993 attack on the World Trade Cen­ter.

“Boston’s Jihadist Past” by J.M. Berg­er; For­eign Pol­icy; 4/22/2013.

When Boston Marathon run­ners round­ed the bend from Bea­con Street last week, they were in the home stretch of the race. As they poured through the closed inter­sec­tion, they ran past a non­de­script address: 510 Com­mon­wealth Avenue.

The loca­tion was once home to an inter­na­tional sup­port net­work that raised funds and recruit­ed fight­ers for a jihadist insur­gency against Russ­ian rule over Chech­nya, a region and a con­flict that few of the run­ners had like­ly ever giv­en any seri­ous thought. . . .

. . . . (The most impor­tant Chechen jihadist group has dis­avowed the attack, but has not unequiv­o­cally ruled out the pos­si­bil­ity of some kind of con­tact with Tamer­lan.) . . .

. . . But if the lead pans out, it won’t be Boston’s first brush with that far­away war. Dur­ing the 1980s and into the 1990s, Islamist for­eign fight­ers oper­ated robust recruit­ing and financ­ing net­works that sup­ported Chechen jihadists from the Unit­ed States, and Boston was home to one of the most sig­nif­i­cant cen­ters: a branch of the Al Kifah Cen­ter based in Brook­lyn, which would lat­er be rechris­tened CARE Inter­na­tion­al.

Al Kifah sprang from the mil­i­tary jihad against the Sovi­ets in Afghanistan. Through the end of the occu­pa­tion, a net­work of cen­ters in the Unit­ed States helped sup­port the efforts of Afghan and Arab muja­hedeen, solic­it­ing dona­tions and recruit­ing fight­ers, includ­ing at least four from Boston who died in action (one of them a for­mer Dunkin Donuts employ­ee). When the war end­ed, those net­works did not dis­ap­pear; they refo­cused on oth­er activ­i­ties.

In Brook­lyn, that net­work turned against the Unit­ed States. The center’s lead­ers and many of its mem­bers helped facil­i­tate the 1993 World Trade Cen­ter bomb­ing, and they active­ly planned and attempt­ed to exe­cute a sub­se­quent plot that sum­mer to blow up the Lin­coln and Hol­land Tun­nels in New York, which would have killed thou­sands. . . .

. . . . When the FBI thwart­ed the tun­nels plot, the Brook­lyn Al Kifah office and most of the oth­er satel­lite loca­tions were shut­tered. But in Boston, the work con­tin­ued under a new name and with a new focus: sup­port­ing for­eign-fight­er efforts in Bosnia and Chech­nya.

The fol­low­ing nar­ra­tive is derived from inter­views and thou­sands of pages of court exhibits, includ­ing cor­re­spon­dence, Al Kifah and CARE Inter­na­tional pub­li­ca­tions, and tele­phone inter­cepts devel­oped over a years-long series of FBI inves­ti­ga­tions into the char­ity that were made pub­lic as part of mul­ti­ple ter­ror­ism-relat­ed pros­e­cu­tions.

Estab­lished in the ear­ly 1990s, the Boston branch had emerged from the World Trade Cen­ter inves­ti­ga­tion rel­a­tively unscathed. Lit­tle more than two weeks after the bomb­ing, the head of the Boston office, Emad Muntass­er, changed his operation’s name from Al Kifah to CARE Inter­na­tional (not to be con­fused with the legit­i­mate char­ity of the same name). . . .

. . . . It took longer to build a case against CARE. In 2005, pros­e­cu­tors in Boston went after the charity’s direc­tors using the Al Capone strat­egy. Muntass­er and fel­low Boston-area CARE offi­cials Samir Al Mon­la and Muhamed Mubayyid were charged with fil­ing false tax returns and relat­ed crimes, hav­ing mis­rep­re­sented their polit­i­cal and mil­i­tant activ­ity as relief for orphans and wid­ows in order to obtain a non­profit tax exemp­tion.

The strat­egy was not as suc­cess­ful as it was with Capone. The defen­dants were con­victed but received min­i­mal sen­tences after years of appeals and legal dis­putes. Muntass­er and Al Mon­la have since been released from prison and are liv­ing in the Unit­ed States, accord­ing to pub­lic records data­bases. Mubayyid was deport­ed after a short sen­tence and was last report­ed to be liv­ing in Aus­tralia. . . .

5b. In turn, some of the Al Kifah/CARE oper­a­tives pur­sued by the gov­ern­ment were employ­ees of the PTech cor­po­ra­tion, that devel­oped crit­i­cal soft­ware for numer­ous fed­eral agen­cies with juris­dic­tion in the 9/11/21001 attacks.

As dis­cussed in FTR #467, PTech is inex­tri­ca­bly linked with the over­lap­ping milieux of Oper­a­tion Green Quest and the Bank al-Taqwa.

“US Says Firm Hid Ter­ror­ist Sau­di Backer: Shrews­bury Man Worked at P‑Tech” by Lee Ham­mel; Worces­ter Telegram and Gazette; 7/19/2009.

. . . . He was con­victed Jan. 11, 2008, in U.S. Dis­trict Court in Boston after the Jus­tice Depart­ment alleged that he and two oth­er offi­cers of Care Inter­na­tional — both for­mer Worces­ter res­i­dents — had ille­gally con­cealed from the gov­ern­ment that the char­ity sup­ported the world­wide Holy War and the muja­hedin who fight it.

Mr. Mubayyid, 44, was sen­tenced to 11 months in prison and fined $1,000 on charges of con­ceal­ing mate­r­ial facts from the gov­ern­ment, obstruct­ing the Inter­nal Rev­enue Ser­vice, and three counts of fil­ing a false tax return.

Mr. Mubayyid has since been deport­ed to Aus­tralia, where he had pre­vi­ously lived, accord­ing to his lawyer, Michael C. Andrews of Boston, who said that Mr. Mubayyid’s appeal to the 1st Cir­cuit Court of Appeals is pend­ing.

The U.S. Attor­ney is appeal­ing the deci­sion of Judge F. Den­nis Say­lor IV to reverse jury con­vic­tions of Mr. Mubayyid’s codefendants—all of the charges against Samir Al-Mon­la of Brook­line and some of the charges against Emaded­din Z. Muntass­er of Brain­tree, the two for­mer Worces­ter res­i­dents who were for­mer pres­i­dents of Care Inter­na­tional. Mr. Muntass­er, a founder of Care Inter­na­tional, was sen­tenced to a year in prison and fined $10,000 for lying to an FBI agent. . . .

7. The FBI was request­ed to put the Tamer­lan Tsar­naev on the ter­ror watch list. We won­der if “Ban­dar Bush” or his cur­rent attor­ney (for­mer FBI chief Louis Freeh) may have helped frus­trate that effort.

“CIA Sought to Have Boston Bomb­ing Sus­pect put on Ter­ror­ist Watch List” by Greg Miller and Sari Hor­witz; Wash­ing­ton Post; 4/24/2013.

The CIA asked the main U.S. coun­tert­er­ror­ism agency to add the name of one of the sus­pected Boston Marathon bombers to a watch list more than a year before the attack, accord­ing to U.S. offi­cials.

The agency took the step after Russ­ian author­i­ties con­tacted offi­cials there in the fall of 2011 and raised con­cerns that Tamer­lan Tsar­naev — who was killed last week in a con­fronta­tion with police — was seen as an increas­ingly rad­i­cal Islamist and could be plan­ning to trav­el over­seas. The CIA request­ed that his name be put on a data­base main­tained by the Nation­al Coun­tert­er­ror­ism Cen­ter.

That data­base, the Ter­ror­ist Iden­ti­ties Data­mart Envi­ron­ment, or TIDE, is a data store­house that feeds a series of gov­ern­ment watch lists, includ­ing the FBI’s main Ter­ror­ist Screen­ing Data­base and the Trans­porta­tion Secu­rity Administration’s “no-fly” list.

Offi­cials said Tsarnaev’s name was added to the data­base but it’s unclear which agency added it.

The CIA’s request came months after the FBI had closed a pre­lim­i­nary inquiry into Tsar­naev after get­ting a sim­i­lar inquiry about him from Russ­ian state secu­rity, accord­ing to offi­cials, who spoke on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty because they were not autho­rized to dis­cuss the mat­ter.

Law enforce­ment offi­cials said that the request to the FBI in 2011 orig­i­nated from fears by the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment that Tamer­lan was a threat to Rus­sia and would com­mit a ter­ror­ist act in Rus­sia — not the Unit­ed States. The request came from Russ­ian fed­eral police to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.

“There was a con­cern he might have some kind of ties to ter­ror­ism,” said FBI spokesman Paul Bres­son. “We did every­thing legal­ly that we could do with the lit­tle bit of infor­ma­tion we had. After we did, we found no deroga­tory infor­ma­tion.” . . . .

8. The pro­gram high­lights a fright­en­ing arti­cle about appar­ent U.S. sup­port for a Geor­gia-based jiha­di con­fer­ence. (This arti­cle was a major ele­ment of dis­cus­sion in FTR #710.) Rich with fos­sil fuels, the Cau­ca­sus region has long been the focal point of hos­tile activ­ity by for­eign inter­ests look­ing to secure those resources for them­selves, wrest­ing the area away from Rus­sia and/or the for­mer Sovi­et Union. In FTR #646, we looked at the Bush administration’s close nation­al secu­rity con­nec­tions to the Geor­gian repub­lic, result­ing in a secu­rity agree­ment with that state, con­cluded on the eve of Obama’s inau­gu­ra­tion.

One can but won­der if petro­leum con­stituen­cies in the West are look­ing to use Mus­lim Broth­er­hood-con­nect­ed ele­ments to foment the inde­pen­dence of those regions. The areas are also piv­otal in the tran­sit of hero­in, in addi­tion to logis­ti­cal sup­port for the war in Afghanistan.

In turn, it can be safe­ly sur­mised that Rus­sia will not give these areas up. In past dis­cus­sions with Daniel Hop­sicker, we have not­ed the pres­ence of Russ­ian orga­nized crime fig­ures in the Huff­man Avi­a­tion milieu through which Mohammed Atta and oth­er 9/11 hijack­ers infil­trated. The pos­si­bil­ity that Rus­sia might retal­i­ate by uti­liz­ing some of these crim­i­nal ele­ments is also one to be seri­ously con­sid­ered.

“Gorin: More Details on the Geor­gia-Host­ed Jiha­di Con­fer­ence Emerge” by Julia Gorin; Jihad Watch; 4/12/2010.

An analy­sis pub­lished Mon­day by Defense & For­eign Affairs offers some cor­rob­o­ra­tion for the Geor­gia-host­ed, U.S.-approved jiha­di con­fab in Decem­ber, the men­tion of which seemed to upset some read­ers.

Here are the rel­e­vant excerpts from the 16-page analy­sis, which is sub­scrip­tion-only and there­fore not link­able:

Mean­while, Geor­gia is active­ly seek­ing to exploit the spread of jamaats [jihadist mini-soci­eties] in the North Cau­ca­sus in order to go after the Russ­ian pipelines in hope of ensnar­ing the US into active­ly sup­port­ing a new con­fronta­tion with Rus­sia. In ear­ly Decem­ber 2009, Tbil­isi orga­nized a high-lev­el meet­ing of jihadists groups from the Mid­dle East and West­ern Europe in order “to coor­di­nate activ­i­ties on Russia’s south­ern flank.” The Geor­gian Embassy in Kuwait, for exam­ple, arranged for trav­el doc­u­ments for jihadists from Jor­dan, Sau­di Ara­bia and the Gulf States. (There is a large and very active Chechen/Circassian com­mu­nity in Jor­dan since the 19th Cen­tury that is heav­ily rep­re­sented in the intel­li­gence ser­vices and the mil­i­tary.) In Tbil­isi, Deputy Min­is­ter of Inter­nal Affairs Lord­kipanadze was the host and coor­di­na­tor. The meet­ing was attend­ed by sev­eral Geor­gian senior offi­cials who stressed that Saakashvili him­self knew and approved of the under­tak­ing. The meet­ing addressed the launch of both “mil­i­tary oper­a­tions” in south­ern Rus­sia and ide­o­log­i­cal war­fare. One of the first results of the meet­ing was the launch, soon after­wards of the Russ­ian-lan­guage TV sta­tion First Cau­casian.

The jihadists of the North Cau­ca­sus — includ­ing the Arab com­man­ders in their midst — came out of the ear­ly Decem­ber 2009 meet­ing con­vinced that Tbil­isi is most inter­ested in the spread of ter­ror­ism. The meet­ing was attend­ed by, among oth­ers, Mohmad Muham­mad Shabaan, an Egypt­ian senior com­man­der who is also known as Seif al-Islam and who has been involved in Cau­ca­sus affairs since 1992. He took copi­ous notes. Accord­ing to Shabaan’s notes, the Geor­gian gov­ern­ment wants the jihadists to con­duct “acts of sab­o­tage to blow up rail­way tracks, elec­tric­ity lines and ener­gy pipelines” in south­ern Rus­sia in order to divert con­struc­tion back to Geor­gian ter­ri­to­ry.

Geor­gian intel­li­gence promised to facil­i­tate the arrival in the Cau­ca­sus of numer­ous senior jihadists by pro­vid­ing Geor­gian pass­ports, and to pro­vide logis­ti­cal sup­port includ­ing the reopen­ing of bases in north­ern Geor­gia. Russ­ian intel­li­gence was not obliv­i­ous of the meet­ing. Seif al-Islam and two senior aides were assas­si­nated on Feb­ru­ary 4, 2010. The Rus­sians retrieved a lot of doc­u­ments in the process. Moscow sig­naled its dis­plea­sure short­ly after­wards when the pres­i­dents of Rus­sia and Abk­hazia signed a 50-year agree­ment on a Russ­ian mil­i­tary base in order to “pro­tect Abkhazia’s sov­er­eignty and secu­rity, includ­ing against inter­na­tional ter­ror­ist groups”.

A major issue still to be resolved is the extent of the US cul­pa­bil­i­ty.

The same analy­sis recalls when this mis­guided approach was used in the Balka­ns, and out­lines how, in order to not alien­ate Mus­lims while we tried to con­tain ter­ror from the Mid­dle East, we for­ti­fied ter­ror in the Balka­ns and jump-start­ed the glob­al jihad:

Ini­tially, the US-led West­ern inter­ven­tion in the for­mer Yugoslavia was aimed first and fore­most to sal­vage NATO (and with it US dom­i­nance over post-Cold War West­ern Europe) from irrel­e­vance and col­lapse. As well, the sup­port for the Mus­lims of Bosnia became the counter-bal­ance of the US con­fronta­tion with jihadism in the Mid­dle East. Antho­ny Lake, US Pres­i­dent Bill Clinton’s Nation­al Secu­rity Advis­er, for­mu­lated the log­ic for the US-led inter­ven­tion on behalf of the Mus­lims. The US nation­al inter­est “requires our work­ing to con­tain Mus­lim extrem­ism, and we have to find a way of being firm in our oppo­si­tion to Mus­lim extrem­ism while mak­ing it clear we’re not opposed to Islam. If we are seen as anti-Mus­lim, it’s hard­er for us to con­tain Mus­lim extrem­ism. And if we stand by while Mus­lims are killed and raped in Bosnia, it makes it hard­er to con­tinue our pol­icy,” Lake argued. That in the process the US would end up part­ner­ing with, sup­port­ing and arm­ing, the very same jihadist forces Clin­ton was seek­ing to con­tain meant noth­ing to Wash­ing­ton. The only thing Wash­ing­ton cared about was the image of a US ral­ly­ing to the res­cue of a Mus­lim cause.

Note that in the 90s the U.S., like Britain, per­mit­ted and facil­i­tated ter­ror­ist net­works to oper­ate in Bosnia and Koso­vo for the pur­pose of Serb-killing, and along with Ger­many we trained Alban­ian and Mid­dle East­ern ter­ror­ists in Alba­nia. Sure enough, the same decade saw U.S. offi­cials par­tic­i­pat­ing in a Decem­ber 1999 meet­ing in Azer­bai­jan very sim­i­lar to the Decem­ber 2009 meet­ing in Tbil­isi, where “pro­grams for the train­ing and equip­ping of muja­hedin from the Cau­ca­sus, Cen­tral and South Asia, and the Arab world were dis­cussed and agreed upon.” The men­tion of this meet­ing comes in as the analy­sis gives back­ground on how we decid­ed to sup­port ter­ror­ism against Rus­sia:

By 1999, the US had giv­en up on rec­on­cil­ing Azer­bai­jan and Arme­nia in order to con­struct pipelines to Turkey, and instead Wash­ing­ton start­ed focus­ing on build­ing pipelines via Geor­gia.

For such a project to be eco­nom­i­cally viable, the Russ­ian pipelines would have to be shut down. Hence, in ear­ly Octo­ber 1999, senior offi­cials of US oil com­pa­nies and US offi­cials offered rep­re­sen­ta­tives of Russ­ian “oli­garchs” in Europe huge div­i­dends from the pro­posed Baku-Cey­han pipeline if the “oli­garchs” con­vinced Moscow to with­draw from the Cau­ca­sus, per­mit the estab­lish­ment of an Islam­ic state, and close down the Baku-Novorossiysk oil pipeline. Con­se­quently, there would be no com­pe­ti­tion to the Baku-Cey­han pipeline. The “oli­garchs” were con­vinced that the high­est lev­els of the Clin­ton White House endorsed this ini­tia­tive. The meet­ing failed because the Rus­sians would hear noth­ing of the US pro­pos­al.

Con­se­quently, the US deter­mined to deprive Rus­sia of an alter­nate pipeline route by sup­port­ing a spi­ral­ing vio­lence and ter­ror­ism in Chechnya....The Clin­ton White House sought to active­ly involve the US in yet anoth­er anti-Russ­ian jihad as if reliv­ing the “good ol’ days” of Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herze­gov­ina and Koso­vo, seek­ing to sup­port and empow­er the most vir­u­lent anti-West­ern Islamist forces in yet anoth­er strate­gic region.

In mid-Decem­ber 1999, US offi­cials par­tic­i­pated in a for­mal meet­ing in Azer­bai­jan in which spe­cific pro­grams for the train­ing and equip­ping of muja­hedin from the Cau­ca­sus, Cen­tral and South Asia, and the Arab world were dis­cussed and agreed upon. This meet­ing led to Washington’s tac­it encour­age­ment of both Mus­lim allies (main­ly the intel­li­gence ser­vices of Turkey, Jor­dan, and Sau­di Ara­bia) and US “pri­vate secu­rity com­pa­nies” (of the type that did Washington’s dirty job in the Balka­ns while skirt­ing and vio­lat­ing the inter­na­tional embar­go the US for­mally sup­ported) to assist the Chechens and their Islamist allies to surge in spring 2000. Cit­ing secu­rity con­cerns vis-à-vis Arme­nia and Rus­sia, Azer­bai­jan adamant­ly refused to per­mit train­ing camps on its soil.

Now, just to keep our — includ­ing my — heads straight, let’s remind our­selves that this exer­cise that Robert Spencer was good enough to let me engage in on these pages was not a defense of Rus­sia; it was not meant to start an argu­ment about how bad or how not-that-bad Rus­sia is. The point is that for­eign rela­tions in a mad world require find­ing enough com­mon ground with not-so-great states so that we can work togeth­er where we can work togeth­er. It’s to min­i­mize the messi­ness of things. Why, when we had Rus­sia in its his­tor­i­cally most maleable form, did we insist on pro­vok­ing and pro­vok­ing and pro­vok­ing? Why did we make a bad sit­u­a­tion like Rus­sia worse when we had an oppor­tu­nity to make it bet­ter? As with all prob­lem­atic coun­tries that we nonethe­less find areas of coop­er­a­tion with, we nar­rowed even those areas by deal­ing with the Rus­sians in the bad faith that had been their trade­mark. Simul­ta­ne­ously, we moved away from pick­ing the less­er evil in a giv­en con­flict, and start­ed sid­ing with the greater.

It’s a sur­real sit­u­a­tion indeed when the actions of my sav­ior coun­try put me in the posi­tion of hav­ing to “defend” Rus­sia, whose peo­ple my par­ents thank their lucky stars to not have to live among any­more. I myself am a self-pro­claimed Rus­so­phobe; I just had no idea how much more patho­log­i­cal America’s Rus­so­pho­bia is. So for some­one who is loath to vis­it even Brighton Beach, I find myself in a sur­pris­ing posi­tion here, point­ing out where we went wrong and shoved Rus­sia back into old behav­iors.

Infu­ri­at­ingly pre­dictably, one of the com­ment posters sug­gested that the line I’m tak­ing here is one that’s paid for by Rus­sia. The same “tip” was offered to Robert by a fel­low blog­ger — in that tone of pro­vid­ing “some friend­ly, pro­fes­sional, and cau­tion­ary advice.” The likes of which I’m all too famil­iar with by now. (One Wall St. Jour­nal fix­ture advised me, “Your views on this [the Balka­ns] are deeply misjudged...You’re not doing your career any favors.” Thanks. Good thing I don’t have a career, then.) It cer­tainly would be nice if any­one paid me for any­thing I do, but it wasn’t to be in this life­time.

Regard­less, it shouldn’t seem strange for some­one to be point­ing out that our for­eign pol­icy is being guid­ed by peo­ple with a stronger anti-Russ­ian agen­da than anti-jihad agen­da. And notice where this kind of think­ing has got­ten us. Take the past two decades of West­ern pol­icy and media cov­er­age in the Balka­ns, which were based on infor­ma­tion that made its way into reporters’ note­books direct­ly from the Min­istry of Infor­ma­tion of the Bosn­ian Gov­ern­ment run by the fun­da­men­tal­ist Mus­lim wartime pres­i­dent Ali­ja Izetbe­govic. The tem­plate was used again when politi­cians, reporters, NGOs and human rights orga­ni­za­tions duti­fully repeat­ed what was com­ing out of the KLA-run news­pa­pers and oth­er pro­pa­ganda organs of the Koso­vo sep­a­ratists. And so in ser­vice to con­sis­tency, hav­ing got­ten into this hole, we’ve kept dig­ging. With our Yugoslavia inter­ven­tion, as the Defense & For­eign Affairs analy­sis points out, we’ve end­ed up “demo­niz­ing the Serbs and the world of East­ern Chris­tian­ity as a whole.” Such that we’ve arrived at a place where the word “Byzan­tine” is now used to mean prim­i­tive or unciv­i­lized. While the Mus­lim world and Islam­ic her­itage rep­re­sent the height of cul­ture, tra­di­tion, her­itage and civ­i­liza­tion.

One inter­est­ing thing about the reac­tions to call­ing the U.S. on its aggres­sive alien­ation of Rus­sia via, for exam­ple, the use of jihadists is the sense of out­rage and shock at the sug­ges­tion that Amer­ica would sup­port these vio­lent groups, fol­lowed imme­di­ately by a defense or jus­ti­fi­ca­tion of such tac­tics (e.g. “we *should* help the Chechens against the Rus­sians”). Mean­while, these oh-so-incen­di­ary alle­ga­tions hap­pen to coin­cide with overt­ly stat­ed inten­tions and poli­cies. (See the late Sen­a­tor Tom Lan­tos and his ilk applaud­ing the cre­ation of a U.S.-made Mus­lim state in Europe, which the jihadists should “take note of,” Lan­tos hoped.) . . .

9. Prince Bandar–nicknamed Ban­dar Bush because of his close rela­tion­ship to the Bush clan–is now the head of Sau­di intel­li­gence. In dis­cus­sions to per­suade Pres­i­dent Putin to drop his sup­port for the Assad regime in Syr­ia, Ban­dar not­ed that the Chechen gueril­las who had threat­ened the Olympics in Sochi were “con­trolled by us.” The remark might be con­strued as a veiled threat.

This would appear to negate Bri­an Glyn Williams’ state­ment excerpt­ed above.

In light of Ban­dar’s alleged state­ment about the Chechen jihadists, we won­der if a Sau­di nation­al injured in the Boston attack was real­ly the “wit­ness” he was alleged to be.

“REPORT: The Saud­is Offered Mafia-Style ‘Pro­tec­tion’ Against Ter­ror­ist Attacks At Sochi Olympics” by Geof­frey Inger­soll; Busi­ness Insid­er; 8/27/2013.

. . . . Buried inside a Tele­graph post about secret Russ­ian and Sau­di talks was a strange pas­sive-aggres­sive alleged quote from the Sau­di head of intel­li­gence about ter­ror­ist attacks at the Sochi Olympics in 2014.

The talks — divulged in leaked doc­u­ments — were alleged­ly about an oil deal that would sta­bi­lize Russia’s mar­kets, if Sau­di Ara­bia cur­tailed the amount of oil it put on the glob­al mar­ket. In exchange for their glob­al price fix­ing — the Tele­graph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes that Rus­sia “relies on an oil price near $100 to fund the bud­get” — Rus­sia would back off its sup­port for Assad.

But there was a threat alleged­ly hid­den in there right along with the fruit.

From The Tele­graph [empha­sis theirs]:

[Sau­di intel chief] Prince Ban­dar [bin Sul­tan] pledged to safe­guard Russia’s naval base in Syr­ia if the Assad regime is top­pled, but he also hint­ed at Chechen ter­ror­ist attacks on Russia’s Win­ter Olympics in Sochi if there is no accord. “I can give you a guar­an­tee to pro­tect the Win­ter Olympics next year. The Chechen groups that threat­en the secu­rity of the games are con­trolled by us,” he alleged­ly said.

Along with Sau­di offi­cials, the US alleged­ly gave the Sau­di intel­li­gence chief the thumbs up to con­duct these talks with Rus­sia, which comes as no sur­prise. Ban­dar is Amer­i­can-edu­cat­ed, both mil­i­tary and col­le­giate, served as a high­ly influ­en­tial Sau­di Ambas­sador to the U.S., and the CIA total­ly loves the guy. . . .

10. We note that Tamer­lan Tsar­naev was in pos­ses­sion of white-suprema­cist, far right-wing lit­er­a­ture and was appar­ently influ­enced by it. We have seen col­lab­o­ra­tion between white suprema­cist­s/­neo-Nazis and Islamists before.

This appears to indi­cate that the elder Tsarnaev–perhaps both–had grav­i­tat­ed to the Third Posi­tion.

“Tamer­lan Tsar­naev Had Right-wing Extrem­ist Lit­er­a­ture” by Hilary Ander­s­son;  BBC News; 8/5/2013.

One of the broth­ers sus­pected of car­ry­ing out the Boston bomb­ings was in pos­ses­sion of right-wing Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture in the run-up to the attack, BBC Panora­ma has learnt.

Tamer­lan Tsar­naev sub­scribed to pub­li­ca­tions espous­ing white suprema­cy and gov­ern­ment con­spir­acy the­o­ries.

He also had read­ing mate­r­ial on mass killings.

Until now the Tsar­naev broth­ers were wide­ly per­ceived as just self-styled rad­i­cal jihadists.

Panora­ma has spent months speak­ing exclu­sively with friends of the bombers to try to under­stand the roots of their rad­i­cal­i­sa­tion.

‘Gov­ern­ment con­spir­a­cies’

The pro­gramme dis­cov­ered that Tamer­lan Tsar­naev pos­sessed arti­cles which argued that both 9/11 and the 1995 Okla­homa City bomb­ing were gov­ern­ment con­spir­a­cies.

Anoth­er in his pos­ses­sion was about “the rape of our gun rights”.

Read­ing mate­r­ial he had about white suprema­cy com­mented that “Hitler had a point”.

Tamer­lan Tsar­naev also had lit­er­a­ture which explored what moti­vated mass killings and not­ed how the per­pe­tra­tors mur­dered and maimed calm­ly.

There was also mate­r­ial about US drones killing civil­ians, and about the plight of those still impris­oned in Guan­tanamo Bay. . . .

11. Fur­ther reportage on Tsarnaev’s Nazi/white suprema­cy links reveals that among the influ­ences on him was “The Amer­i­can Free Press,” pub­lished by Willis Car­to. (See text excerpts below.) Car­to is best known as the edi­tor of The Spot­light, a neo-Nazi news­pa­per that achieved con­sid­er­able cir­cu­la­tion. Car­to has been alleged to have been the ghost­writer for Eddie the Friend­ly Spook’s Pres­i­den­tial can­di­date of choice Ron Paul.

Note, also, the appar­ent influ­ence of the “Zeit­geist” film on Tsar­naev. A fas­cist “Truther” film, it is filled with Jew­ish banker con­spir­acy the­o­ries and exem­pli­fies the sort of fas­cist ide­ol­ogy that has influ­enced the so-called Truther move­ment. Jared Lee Laugh­ner also appears to have been influ­enced by the film.

“Boston Bomb­ing Sus­pect Was Steeped in Con­spir­a­cies” by Allan Culli­son; The Wall Street Jour­nal; 8/6/2013.

Extrem­ist U.S. news­pa­pers and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions found in the apart­ment of Boston Marathon bomb­ing sus­pect Tamer­lan Tsar­naev reveal a broad inter­est in far-flung con­spir­acy the­o­ries, well beyond the Islamist rad­i­cal­ism author­i­ties allege moti­vated the attack.

Mr. Tsar­naev dis­cov­ered some of the rad­i­cal pub­li­ca­tions by chance. He had worked car­ing for a 67-year-old man who passed on the news­pa­pers and his fringe beliefs long before Mr. Tsar­naev and his broth­er alleged­ly set off explo­sives that killed three peo­ple and injured hun­dreds more. . . .

. . . .

Mr. Tsarnaev’s moth­er, Zubei­dat Tsar­naev, had tried to make ends meet for her fam­ily by work­ing as a home health aide after the fam­ily arrived in the U.S. in 2003. One of her clients in 2010 was Don­ald Lark­ing of New­ton, Mass., who was dis­abled after he was shot in the face near­ly 40 years ago in the rob­bery of a con­ve­nience store where he worked.

Mr. Lark­ing mirac­u­lously sur­vived, but peo­ple close to the fam­ily said his fac­ul­ties didn’t. He was intrigued with far-flung con­spir­a­cies, they said. He sub­scribed to news­pa­pers and jour­nals that doubt­ed the Holo­caust and described the attacks of Sept. 11, Okla­homa City and the New­town school as plots by unseen elites, and the U.S. and Israeli gov­ern­ments. . . .

. . . .  The papers includ­ed The First Free­dom, an Alaba­ma-based news­pa­per that espous­es “equal rights for whites” and whose web­sites fea­tures a Con­fed­er­ate flag. Anoth­er was The Sov­er­eign, a New York-based pub­li­ca­tion that alleges the U.S. is under the sway of Israeli lob­by­ists, and that Israel and the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity were “deeply involved” in the Boston bomb­ings. Nei­ther paper returned requests for com­ment.

Mr. Tsar­naev got his own sub­scrip­tion to Amer­i­can Free Press, a paper that the South­ern Law Pover­ty Cen­ter said pro­motes anti-Semit­ic con­spir­acy the­o­ries. A spokes­woman for the paper denied it had such an agen­da, say­ing the paper pub­lishes “news that the estab­lished media won’t.” She con­firmed that some­one bought Mr. Tsar­naev a “get acquaint­ed” 16-week sub­scrip­tion in Decem­ber. It expired in April, at about the time of the Boston Marathon attack. . . .

. . . . His for­mer broth­er-in-law, Elmzi­ra Khozhugov, said Mr. Tsar­naev in 2008 was seek­ing out a copy of the Pro­to­cols. That year he took a sharp turn toward Islam, drop­ping his box­ing career and telling friends and fam­ily that it was un-Islam­ic to punch any­one in the face, fam­ily and friends said.

Mr. Khozhugov recalled how that year Mr. Tsar­naev vis­ited him at col­lege in Wash­ing­ton state and they spent a week togeth­er. They watched the movie “Zeit­geist,” which called the Sept. 11 attacks a plot of pow­er-hun­gry elites against the U.S.

Mr. Tsar­naev was inter­ested in the so-called tech­no-utopi­an Zeit­geist move­ment, whose adher­ents believe in the com­ing col­lapse of mon­ey-based soci­ety and the advan­tages of an econ­omy man­aged by com­put­ers inca­pable of cor­rup­tion. . . .

12. With­in hours of the Boston bomb­ing, an attack on a PG & E pow­er sub­sta­tion took place, with indi­ca­tions that it, too, was a ter­ror­ist attack.

We won­der if this indi­cates a man­i­fes­ta­tion of the “Lead­er­less Resis­tance” strat­e­gy embraced by Nazi and white-suprema­cist groups.

“Assault on Cal­i­for­nia Pow­er Sta­tion Rais­es Alarm on Poten­tial for Ter­ror­ism” by Rebec­ca Smith; The Wall Street Jour­nal; 2/4/2013.

The attack began just before 1 a.m. on April 16 last year, when some­one slipped into an under­ground vault not far from a busy free­way and cut tele­phone cables.

With­in half an hour, snipers opened fire on a near­by elec­tri­cal sub­sta­tion. Shoot­ing for 19 min­utes, they sur­gi­cally knocked out 17 giant trans­form­ers that fun­nel pow­er to Sil­i­con Val­ley. A minute before a police car arrived, the shoot­ers dis­ap­peared into the night.

To avoid a black­out, elec­tric-grid offi­cials rerout­ed pow­er around the site and asked pow­er plants in Sil­i­con Val­ley to pro­duce more elec­tric­ity. But it took util­ity work­ers 27 days to make repairs and bring the sub­sta­tion back to life.

Nobody has been arrest­ed or charged in the attack at PG&E Corp.‘s Met­calf trans­mis­sion sub­sta­tion. It is an inci­dent of which few Amer­i­cans are aware. But one for­mer fed­eral reg­u­la­tor is call­ing it a ter­ror­ist act that, if it were wide­ly repli­cated across the coun­try, could take down the U.S. elec­tric grid and black out much of the coun­try.

The attack was “the most sig­nif­i­cant inci­dent of domes­tic ter­ror­ism involv­ing the grid that has ever occurred” in the U.S., said Jon Welling­hoff, who was chair­man of the Fed­eral Ener­gy Reg­u­la­tory Com­mis­sion at the time.

The Wall Street Jour­nal assem­bled a chronol­ogy of the Met­calf attack from fil­ings PG&E made to state and fed­eral reg­u­la­tors; from oth­er doc­u­ments includ­ing a video released by the San­ta Clara Coun­ty Sheriff’s Depart­ment; and from inter­views, includ­ing with Mr. Welling­hoff.
Relat­ed

Q&A: What You Need to Know About Attacks on the U.S. Pow­er Grid

The 64-year-old Nevadan, who was appoint­ed to FERC in 2006 by Pres­i­dent George W. Bush and stepped down in Novem­ber, said he gave closed-door, high-lev­el brief­ings to fed­eral agen­cies, Con­gress and the White House last year. As months have passed with­out arrests, he said, he has grown increas­ingly con­cerned that an even larg­er attack could be in the works. He said he was going pub­lic about the inci­dent out of con­cern that nation­al secu­rity is at risk and crit­i­cal elec­tric-grid sites aren’t ade­quately pro­tect­ed.

The Fed­eral Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion doesn’t think a ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion caused the Met­calf attack, said a spokesman for the FBI in San Fran­cisco. Inves­ti­ga­tors are “con­tin­u­ing to sift through the evi­dence,” he said.

Some peo­ple in the util­ity indus­try share Mr. Wellinghoff’s con­cerns, includ­ing a for­mer offi­cial at PG&E, Metcalf’s own­er, who told an indus­try gath­er­ing in Novem­ber he feared the inci­dent could have been a dress rehearsal for a larg­er event.

“This wasn’t an inci­dent where Bil­ly-Bob and Joe decid­ed, after a few brewskis, to come in and shoot up a sub­sta­tion,” Mark John­son, retired vice pres­i­dent of trans­mis­sion for PG&E, told the util­ity secu­rity con­fer­ence, accord­ing to a video of his pre­sen­ta­tion. “This was an event that was well thought out, well planned and they tar­geted cer­tain com­po­nents.” When reached, Mr. John­son declined to com­ment fur­ther.

A spokesman for PG&E said the com­pany takes all inci­dents seri­ously but declined to dis­cuss the Met­calf event in detail for fear of giv­ing infor­ma­tion to poten­tial copy­cats. “We won’t spec­u­late about the motives” of the attack­ers, added the spokesman, Bri­an Swan­son. He said PG&E has increased secu­rity mea­sures.

Util­ity exec­u­tives and fed­eral ener­gy offi­cials have long wor­ried that the elec­tric grid is vul­ner­a­ble to sab­o­tage. That is in part because the grid, which is real­ly three sys­tems serv­ing dif­fer­ent areas of the U.S., has failed when small prob­lems such as trees hit­ting trans­mis­sion lines cre­ated cas­cad­ing black­outs. One in 2003 knocked out pow­er to 50 mil­lion peo­ple in the East­ern U.S. and Cana­da for days.

Many of the system’s most impor­tant com­po­nents sit out in the open, often in remote loca­tions, pro­tected by lit­tle more than cam­eras and chain-link fences.

Trans­mis­sion sub­sta­tions are crit­i­cal links in the grid. They make it pos­si­ble for elec­tric­ity to move long dis­tances, and serve as hubs for inter­sect­ing pow­er lines.

With­in a sub­sta­tion, trans­form­ers raise the volt­age of elec­tric­ity so it can trav­el hun­dreds of miles on high-volt­age lines, or reduce volt­ages when elec­tric­ity approach­es its des­ti­na­tion. The Met­calf sub­sta­tion func­tions as an off-ramp from pow­er lines for elec­tric­ity head­ing to homes and busi­nesses in Sil­i­con Val­ley.

The country’s rough­ly 2,000 very large trans­form­ers are expen­sive to build, often cost­ing mil­lions of dol­lars each, and hard to replace. Each is cus­tom made and weighs up to 500,000 pounds, and “I can only build 10 units a month,” said Den­nis Blake, gen­eral man­ager of Penn­syl­va­nia Trans­former in Pitts­burgh, one of sev­en U.S. man­u­fac­tur­ers. The util­ity indus­try keeps some spares on hand.

A 2009 Ener­gy Depart­ment report said that “phys­i­cal dam­age of cer­tain sys­tem com­po­nents (e.g. extra-high-volt­age trans­form­ers) on a large scale…could result in pro­longed out­ages, as pro­cure­ment cycles for these com­po­nents range from months to years.”

Mr. Welling­hoff said a FERC analy­sis found that if a sur­pris­ingly small num­ber of U.S. sub­sta­tions were knocked out at once, that could desta­bi­lize the sys­tem enough to cause a black­out that could encom­pass most of the U.S.

Not every­one is so pes­simistic. Ger­ry Cauley, chief exec­u­tive of the North Amer­ica Elec­tric Reli­a­bil­ity Corp., a stan­dards-set­ting group that reports to FERC, said he thinks the grid is more resilient than Mr. Welling­hoff fears.

“I don’t want to down­play the sce­nario he describes,” Mr. Cauley said. “I’ll agree it’s pos­si­ble from a tech­ni­cal assess­ment.” But he said that even if sev­eral sub­sta­tions went down, the vast major­ity of peo­ple would have their pow­er back in a few hours.

The util­ity indus­try has been focused on Inter­net attacks, wor­ry­ing that hack­ers could take down the grid by dis­abling com­mu­ni­ca­tions and impor­tant pieces of equip­ment. Com­pa­nies have report­ed 13 cyber inci­dents in the past three years, accord­ing to a Wall Street Jour­nal analy­sis of emer­gency reports util­i­ties file with the fed­eral gov­ern­ment. There have been no reports of major out­ages linked to these events, although com­pa­nies have gen­er­ally declined to pro­vide details.

“A lot of peo­ple in the elec­tric indus­try have been dis­tracted by cyber­se­cu­rity threats,” said Stephen Berberich, chief exec­u­tive of the Cal­i­for­nia Inde­pen­dent Sys­tem Oper­a­tor, which runs much of the high-volt­age trans­mis­sion sys­tem for the util­i­ties. He said that phys­i­cal attacks pose a “big, if not big­ger” men­ace.

There were 274 sig­nif­i­cant instances of van­dal­ism or delib­er­ate dam­age in the three years, and more than 700 weath­er-relat­ed prob­lems, accord­ing to the Journal’s analy­sis.

Until the Met­calf inci­dent, attacks on U.S. util­ity equip­ment were most­ly linked to met­al thieves, dis­grun­tled employ­ees or bored hunters, who some­times took pot­shots at small trans­form­ers on util­ity poles to see what hap­pens. (Answer: a small explo­sion fol­lowed by an out­age.)

Last year, an Arkansas man was charged with mul­ti­ple attacks on the pow­er grid, includ­ing set­ting fire to a switch­ing sta­tion. He has plead­ed not guilty and is under­go­ing a psy­chi­atric eval­u­a­tion, accord­ing to fed­eral court records.

Over­seas, ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tions were linked to 2,500 attacks on trans­mis­sion lines or tow­ers and at least 500 on sub­sta­tions from 1996 to 2006, accord­ing to a Jan­u­ary report from the Elec­tric Pow­er Research Insti­tute, an indus­try-fund­ed research group, which cit­ed State Depart­ment data.

To some, the Met­calf inci­dent has lift­ed the dis­cus­sion of seri­ous U.S. grid attacks beyond the the­o­ret­i­cal. “The breadth and depth of the attack was unprece­dented” in the U.S., said Rich Lor­dan, senior tech­ni­cal exec­u­tive for the Elec­tric Pow­er Research Insti­tute. The moti­va­tion, he said, “appears to be prepa­ra­tion for an act of war.”

The attack last­ed slight­ly less than an hour, accord­ing to the chronol­ogy assem­bled by the Jour­nal.

...

In a news release, PG&E said the sub­sta­tion had been hit by van­dals. It has since con­firmed 17 trans­form­ers were knocked out.

Mr. Welling­hoff, then chair­man of FERC, said that after he heard about the scope of the attack, he flew to Cal­i­for­nia, bring­ing with him experts from the U.S. Navy’s Dahlgren Sur­face War­fare Cen­ter in Vir­ginia, which trains Navy SEALs. After walk­ing the site with PG&E offi­cials and FBI agents, Mr. Welling­hoff said, the mil­i­tary experts told him it looked like a pro­fes­sional job.

In addi­tion to fin­ger­print-free shell cas­ings, they point­ed out small piles of rocks, which they said could have been left by an advance scout to tell the attack­ers where to get the best shots.

“They said it was a tar­get­ing pack­age just like they would put togeth­er for an attack,” Mr. Welling­hoff said.

Mr. Welling­hoff, now a law part­ner at Stoel Rives LLP in San Fran­cisco, said he arranged a series of meet­ings in the fol­low­ing weeks to let oth­er fed­eral agen­cies, includ­ing the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity, know what hap­pened and to enlist their help. He held a closed-door meet­ing with util­ity exec­u­tives in San Fran­cisco in June and has dis­trib­uted lists of things util­i­ties should do to strength­en their defens­es.

A spokesman for Home­land Secu­rity said it is up to util­i­ties to pro­tect the grid. The department’s role in an emer­gency is to con­nect fed­eral agen­cies and local police and facil­i­tate infor­ma­tion shar­ing, the spokesman said.

...