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.)
NB: Updated on 5/11/2013.
COMMENT: In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, we’ve highlighted the unraveling of the “two lone nuts” theory of that tragic event.
Although much has yet to come to light about the attacks, a number of things have become clear, including:
- The fact that Boston was an epicenter of the Chechen jihadist movement, which grew out of the Afghan mujahadin effort.
- The mosque frequented by the brothers was inextricably linked with the Operation Green Quest milieu of Grover Norquist, Karl Rove and the Bush administration.
- The bombers’ “Uncle Ruslan” had links to AID (a frequent intelligence cover) as well as a subsidiary of Halliburton (Dick Cheney’s outfit).
- Uncle Ruslan was married to the daughter of a key CIA officer, Graham E. Fuller, who appears to have played a role in precipitating the Iran-Contra affair, the “turn to the Muslim Brotherhood” and the defense of the Fetullah Gulen cult against charges that it works with the CIA.
- Uncle Ruslan founded Chechen Congress International, a probable intelligence front.
- Uncle Ruslan also lived at the Graham Fuller residence for a time.
We caution, as we did from the beginning of the investigation, against simplistic analysis of the event. It is only too clear, however, that the bombers were part of an intelligence milieu that is pursuing jihad in the Caucasus.
In this context, we note that younger brother Dzokhar Tsarnaev’s high school mentor has a background in the CIA and also teaches Islamic studies at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, which Dzokhar attended.
Williams has been quoted in the media about Dzokhar’s strong interest in the Chechen jihad and its leaders.
Professor Williams has also penned a piece for The Huffington Post diminishing the notion of the Chechen fighters as participants in the global jihadist network.
As we saw in FTR #710, the Chechen jihad and other, similar movements in the Caucasus are receiving the active assistance of elements of the U.S. national security establishment.
We note in this regard that the scenario unfolding here is consistent with our working hypothesis presented in the long For The Record series on the Arab Spring.
In our visits with John Loftus, we have noted his work demonstrating that, in effect, there are two CIA’s and two State Departments. The smaller and less powerful faction of both agencies is affiliated with the Democratic Party and the larger, more powerful faction of each agency is associated with the GOP and the transnational corporations. We also note that the GOP faction of each is fascist and effectively controlled by the Underground Reich.
At this point in time, we feel that the GOP/Underground Reich faction is in control, with the Obama administration left to answer uncomfortable questions concerning the event.
For some time, we have noted Obama’s attempts at “rebooting” our relations with Russia. Support for jihad in the Caucasus cannot help that at all.
We note in that regard the GOP drumfire about Hillary Clinton’s behavior vis a vis the Benghazi attack. We believe that this destabilization was part of the intent of the so-called Arab Spring. The GOP/Underground Reich is working to neutralize Hillary before 2016.
It will be interesting to see if “Lee Harvey Obama” also catches heat for the Boston attack.
It is against the background of the Boston attacks and the general mayhem overtaking this society that we reflect on the ascension of Michael Morell to acting director of CIA, this accomplished through the “Petraeus Coup.” We wonder if Morell is Underground Reich and to what extent he may be assisting/orchestrating some of this.”
“I Hope I Didn’t Contribute To It” by Mark Ames; nsfwcorp.com; 5/8/2013.
EXCERPT: . . . . 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. . . .
EXCERPT: . . . . 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.” . . . .
EXCERPT: . . . 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. . . .
ENTIRE TEXT: 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.)
Looking Back from 1984
The aggressive alienation of Russia makes perfect sense if the goal is to recreate the cold war nuclear standoff. The war on terror just doesn’t do it for a high tech arms race the same way as a Soviet/US scale superpower conflict. Drones are cheap, the profit isn’t the same as building ICMB’s.
@Chris–
There is a dynamic I call “Information vs. Confirmation.”
I am in the process of disseminating INformation. Most people, apparently including yourself, are interested primarily in CONfirmation, having their beliefs, hopes, fears etc. reinforced.
You obviously haven’t done much work with the links and admittedly detailed analysis contained in the For The Record series about the Arab Spring/WikiLeaks.
Your analysis reflects this.
Cheers,
Dave Emory
They probably don’t intend to create a new cold war, but if they keep up support for insurrection and terror attacks in S. Russia, and the establishment of peripheral states that undercut Russia’s oil/gas sector, it’s difficult to believe the Russians won’t react in some tangible way.
@Chris–
Yes, indeed!
In my opinion, we are witnessing a proxy war with elements in the West (petroleum related) backing Sunni combatants and Russia trying to protect its southern flank by bolstering Shiite combatants (Iran, Syria.)
Russia’s recent decision to sell advanced surface-to-air missiles to Syria may well be part of that.
The Boston bombing may well have been blowback from that–perfectly acceptable to the GOP/petroleum interests.
It will also help traditional German “Ostpolitik.”
In this context, do read T.H. Tetens’ text “Germany Plots with the Kremlin,” available on this website.
The current program–FTR #710 is also relevant, as are the Food For Thought posts about the Boston Marathon bombing.
Best,
Dave Emory
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/08/07/unlikely-friendship/xQao9NHjkUvtvhTcK1uwCL/story.html
Tsarnaev friend tells of beliefs in conspiracies
By Sally Jacobs
| Globe Staff
August 08, 2013
It was a most unlikely friendship.
The elderly man was an invalid and a lifelong Catholic recently converted to Islam. The younger man was a robust Russian immigrant, as proud of his muscled physique as he was devout in his Islamic faith. But somehow in the back row of a Cambridge mosque over a series of Friday afternoons, the boisterous boxer and the suburban senior developed a rare connection.
“Tamerlan Tsarnaev was my friend and we talked about everything from politics to religion,” said Donald Larking, 67, who began attending the Islamic Society of Boston mosque in Cambridge a couple of years ago at Tsarnaev’s suggestion. “He was very, very religious. He believed that the Koran was the one true word and he loved it.”
Larking has been identified in news media reports as a confidant of Tsarnaev, but he has never, until now, spoken publicly about their bond, and his apparent influence on the younger man. It was Larking who introduced Tsarnaev, who has been implicated in the Boston Marathon bombings and died in a shootout with police in April, to several right-wing publications colored by conspiracy theories.
Last year he gave Tsarnaev a subscription to The American Free Press, which has been criticized for promoting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, for a Christmas gift. He also loaned his young friend his own copies of “The Sovereign, newspaper of the Resistance!” which suggests on its website that US military explosives were involved in the World Trade Center collapse. But Larking said that Tsarnaev, who was 24 when the two men met, had strong political views long before then.
“He believed that 9/11 was an inside job and that the government had pulled it off,” recalled Larking. “His mother believed that, too. He didn’t like George Bush for torturing prisoners, but he didn’t really like Obama either.”
Investigators have speculated that Tsarnaev and his younger brother, Dzhokhar, who has been charged in connection with the bombings, were probably inspired by extremist Islamic propaganda. But Tsarnaev’s conversations with Larking suggest the elder Tsarnaev may have had a more complex political world view, colored in part by his belief in domestic conspiracy theories. The FBI declined to comment yesterday.
Larking was introduced to the Tsarnaev family in 2011 when friends recommended Zubeidat Tsarnaev, Tamerlan’s mother, to help care for Larking’s wife, who is a quadrapalegic. Zubeidat, who supplemented her income with work as a home health care aide, worked for the Larkings in their West Newton home on weekends. At times, one of her sons covered her shift. When she returned to Russia last year, Tamerlan’s wife, Katherine Russell, took over the job.
Larking is also disabled. In 1974, according to the family’s lawyer Jason Rosenberg, Larking was shot in the head during a holdup of a convenience store where he worked as a manager. Larking suffered some loss of mental acuity and now speaks and walks with some difficulty, Rosenberg said.
In Larking’s several conversations with the Globe, his account seemed consistent and clear.
In recent years, according to Rosenberg, Larking has deteriorated emotionally and has become interested in anti-Semitic and conspiracy-minded websites. But Rosenberg confirmed the accuracy of what Larking said about his relationship to the Tsarnaevs.
Although raised a Catholic, Larking says he became disillusioned with his church years ago when it became the subject of sex abuse scandals, and he converted to Islam. Tsarnaev urged Larking to attend the Cambridge mosque, which he himself had begun to attend — albeit fitfully — a couple of years earlier.
Because of his physical disabilities, Larking sits on a chair in the rear of the mosque while others pray upon the floor. On the occasional Fridays that Tsarnaev was present for the afternoon service at the mosque, he frequently joined Larking at the end and helped him walk to a handicap van waiting outside to take him home. Tsarnaev fondly dubbed Larking “Dawud,” David in Arabic.
Tsarnaev also urged Larking to grow a beard saying, as Larking recalled it, “that all Muslim men needed beards. So, I said, ‘OK.’ ” When Larking began growing a beard, Tsarnaev came to his home every several weeks to trim and take care of it.
“He was very kind,” Larking said.
Katherine Russell, who married Tsarnaev in 2010, converted from Catholicism to Islam for reasons similar to his own, said Larking. Like him, she was deeply disappointed over the scandal that engulfed the church and she was worried that the daughter she had with Tsarnaev would not be safe in the church in which she had grown up.
“She wanted a church with more morals,” recalled Larking. “She felt the mosque would be a safer place for her daughter to go to nursery school.”
One of Tsarnaev’s stronger political beliefs was that America was too involved in the affairs of nations around the world and should mind its own business. He often criticized Obama for US intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, Larking said. During the 2012 presidential campaign, Tsarnaev spoke in support of conservative Ron Paul, a fierce proponent of non-intervention overseas.
About a year ago, Tsarnaev handed his Cambridge landlord, Joanna Herlihy, a copy of the book, The Protocol of the Elders of Zion, a tract that purports to describe a plan by Jewish leaders to take over the world. Long ago discredited, it was first published in Russia over a century ago.
“This is a good book,” he told her, as she recalled.
Herlihy said she warned Tsarnaev that the book was seen as “propaganda.” Still, she took the book and tried to “plow through it” this past winter, committed to understanding it enough to have a “serious conversation” with Tsarnaev. However, she never did finish the book and feels badly she missed the chance to engage him, and perhaps dissuade him, from such extreme ideas.
“I’ve regretted it,” she said.
A voracious reader, Tsarnaev kept many of the publications Larking shared with him in his Cambridge apartment. But when federal investigators ransacked the place after the April bombing, some residents in the building noted with interest that they left behind some of Tsarnaev’s non-Muslim extremist readings.
“I think it’s interesting the FBI didn’t take them,” said Harvey Smith, a longtime tenant of the same building. “Maybe it’s because it didn’t fit into their thinking about him.”
Globe reporter Patty Wen contributed to this story.
Re: Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s friend Todashev, shot by the FBI in Orlando:
Ibragim Todashev was ‘a very good boy who wanted to live’ dad says of son killed by FBI in Orlando
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/breakingnews/os-todashev-father-speaks-tampa-20130813,0,4617373.story
(excerpt)
“He said Todashev’s friends have said they were questioned by the FBI in the days before the fatal shooting, and threats were made suggesting that if the friends did not spy on local mosques, they would risk having their immigration statuses changed.”
———–
This suggests that Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s FBI “visits” were also about recruiting — his immigration status could have been leveraged due to a domestic abuse case against him.
Remember the shape-shifting weapon wielded by Ibrahim Todashev? If not, jump to ~2:50 here. So was it a knife? A pipe? A broomstick? No weapon at all?
It looks like “pipe” is going to be the final answer:
151 here we come!
The Boston Globe has a story that “part” of the FBI interview of Todashev was recorded on video. His confession (about the Waltham Ma. killings) may or may not be on that video.
They consider the case closed.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/03/25/todashev/rt3K7PSMY1ykZiU0DaaiuI/story.html
However, this article in Counterpunch details the murder scene with photographs and has a very different conclusion:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/24/dark-questions-about-a-deadly-fbi-interrogation-in-orlando/
Note that the blood stains are all at floor level, none on the walls. This suggests that Todashev was shot while on the floor, execution style.
Also, a witness friend of Todashev’s was driven miles away from the apartment to prevent them from seeing the incedent.
It’s a long article, but here is the conclusion:
Was the Head Shot then a Coup de Grace?
Teyer has their own theory. Her career in the Army recently torpedoed by the FBI, which maliciously had her listed as a “security risk,” causing her to decide to retire from the service, the unintimidated Teyer says, “My theory is that Ibragim had too much information about Tamerlan, and they didn’t want that information to come out.”
What information would that be? Teyer, who is involved with a group fighting for the freedom of the surviving Tsarnaev brother, Dzhokhar, who faces death if convicted of the bombing, says she does not believe he and his brother Tamerlan were actually the Boston bombers, and says even if they were, they couldn’t have done it alone. “Look,” she says, “those two brothers couldn’t have come up with the idea of bombing the Marathon on their own! Someone would have had to plant the idea in their heads, and someone would have helped them plan it. Why do you think the police tried to kill Dzhokhar when he was hiding in the boat? They fired into that boat over 100 times. Why? He was already surrounded, and with Tamerlan dead, if he had been involved he would have been needed as a witness to find out if there were any accomplices or further attacks planned. Instead they tried to kill him.”
Saying it’s clear from all that has happened — the killings and the deportations and the blocking of people from returning to the US — that the FBI is simply eliminating witnesses to something. She adds, “I don’t know what Ibragim knew about Tamerlan, but he must have known something.”
It’s not such a wild speculation. Several news organizations have reported that all but one of the terrorist attacks between 2001 and the Boston bombing that were “disrupted” or foiled by the FBI have featured Bureau informants or undercover agents who played key roles in setting the plots in motion. Could the Boston Marathon bombing be a case of such an FBI-involved plot going somehow awry?
A call to FBI spokesman Paul Bresson to seek an explanation for the Bureau’s extraordinary ongoing 10-month hold on the coroner’s report on this killing and on its own lengthy investigation into the agent’s shooting of Todashev, as well as for an explanation for the decision to have only one agent with Todashev during an intense interrogation has so far gone unanswered.
A report is due out tomorrow by the Florida State’s Attorney in Orlando, Jeffrey L. Ashton, on this shooting. It is not clear what that conclusion will be. Ashton’s office send out terse note to the media over the weekend protesting an apparently FBI-leaked story claiming his investigation would also, like the Bureau, exonerage the agent in Todashev’s death. He said that his conclusion had not been reached yet, and called the leak “unfair to both the family and the agent.” A good question for Ashton, whatever his conclusion is, would be whether he had access to the witnesses who knew about the FBI’s harassment of Todashev between April 16 and his death on May 22, 2013, and especially to Todashev’s friend Taramov, the witness who was removed by the FBI from the vicinity of the shooting just before it happened. All those witnesses, were driven or deported out of the country by the FBI in the ensuing weeks after the killing, and Taramov, who left voluntarily to attend his friend’s funeral, was barred from returning to the US, despite his having a valid Green Card. Another question for Ashton would be whether his own investigators had access to the bullets removed from the Coroner’s office, and the many items removed from the apartment by the FBI.
Meanwhile, both the ACLU’s national office and its Massachusetts office, citing the “unbroken FBI track record of clearing its agents who use deadly force,” (that’s 150 agents cleared out of 150 agent shootings of witnesses or suspects over 18 years, not counting this latest shooting, according to a report in the New York Times), has objected to having the FBI investigating its own agent in this shooting and has called for an independent inquiry into Todashev’s death.
As Howard Simon, executive director of the national ACLU, said, in response to the Boston Globe’s report that the FBI study will exonerate its agent:
“As we said when we first called for an investigation into Todashev’s death, secrecy fosters suspicion. The DOJ should have called for a truly independent investigation of the shooting, and they still can! There remain too many unanswered questions about what happened in that Orlando apartment last May. Until they are answered—until the public knows exactly how and why FBI agents and police officers walked into an apartment to ask questions and walked out with a 27 year-old in a body bag—we will not stop our calls for transparency and answers.”
Let’s see what’s under this rock:
Here’s more on the mystery of the missing black powder:
Well this is going to make the prosecution of the three friends a lot more complicated since they removed fireworks from his apartment:
Also note that the fireworks taken by the three friends had the black powder scooped out:
Boy did this story just weirdererer.