I've yet to been able to make list of All The Things That are Strange About the Tsarnaevs' Case.
There are so many -- starting with that insignia from the Anzhi Makhachkala soccer club in Dzhokhar's Twitter (no, American teenagers who haven't been in the country they emigrated from 10 years previously and who don't currently play soccer don't do stuff like that, makes no sense), then moving through things like the murder of the three people on September 11, two of whom were Jewish, and the strange scattering of pot on their bodies, through the arrest and killing by the FBI of Togdashev, the Chechen who was said to be involved in these murders, but not the Boston bombings; then the fact I turned up that Togdashev's father works right in the Grozny mayor's office parceling out land to people and had his children perform in a swimming contest for Kadyrov's birthday; that trip to New York with the Kazakh friends in which they ate plov somewhere and it's not clear who they met; Uncle Tsarni's stepping up to defend Ablyazov, with whom he was associated (the Kazakh tycoon who was just arrested in France) -- there's just so many things in the list, and they all seem to have been swept into oblivion by the Snowden case and many other distractions. I continue to ponder them and will make the list up one day.
I continue to test a hypothesis that the Boston bombing occurred because of Putin's desire for revenge against the Magnitsky List -- about which he is hysterial -- and his means of doing this, which was to get Kadyrov involved -- who is even more hysterical -- and his means of outsourcing this -- which was to get crimnal mafias with ties to sports and Islamists to stage it.
However, I'm happy to kick the tires on this hypothesis and look at other things -- I just don't buy the false-flag/CIA plot sort of thing, however, that's too crazy and I just don't believe we hurt our own people like that, too far-fetched.
Now along comes another Strange Thing that seems to bolster the narrative of the home-grown jihadi -- a theory that I really don't buy but I'm happy to study. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Tsarnaevs were steeped in not just radical Islam, but other white supremacist/extremist American literature -- the notorious tsarist fabrication used by antisemites the world over, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and other such trash, all provided by a neighbour named Larking. The story has naturally been picked up by RT.
Now, while I'm quite prepared to believe that these papers actually exist in this house because hate gravitates to hate, and doesn't all have to be of one brand, I don't buy it as any the explanation for the bombing. An FBI profiler is quoted in this story who says she thinks this literature would have affirmed pre-existing beliefs rather than formed new ones.
I think what is much more operative is that Tamerlan came from the violent background of the North Caucasus and spent the summer in Dagestan, making side trips to Chechnya. He is reported as having been in touch with at least one, if not two or three jihadists who were assassinated by Russian special forces in the ongoing fierce battle in Dagestan in which hundreds have lost their lives and thousands have been arrested. I think not only were his views formed long before he read these hate tracts; I think there's more to the story of his bombing than we have gotten so far. I think like a lot of violence in this part of the world that has now migrated to us that it is more about a mixture of a kind of contract-killing of a sort of mafioso/Islamist/intelligence stuff from Dagestan than it is about America taking oil from the Middle East, and not about these emigres failing to adapt to their chosen new homeland or suffering failures there. But of course, there's some of that, too.
The home-grown theory is beloved by "progressives" because then they can use the case to do various bludgeoning of others whose views they don't like. For the crowd that wants to prove that Al Qaeda is no longer a threat or no longer active (hard to do, but there is such a crowd), the "home-grown" stuff seems imperative as an explanation. Or for the crowd that wants counter-terrorism to end because they feel it is counter-productive, the home-grown theory seems important to plug. For example, their favourite thing to say about all this on Twitter is, "Gosh, all this snooping, and the government couldn't even find these two Chechen brothers in time" -- so, the theory then concludes, we must cancel all that snooping completely because it doesn't work. Right....
Except, it does work in other cases, some of which we know about and some of which the government has mentioned since all this started.
And in this case, it was the civil rights concerns that the progs claim to profess that checked the FBI from further action. And it wasn't their bumbling, and it wasn't their dropping the ball; it was the Russians holding the ball close. When were they going to tell us that Tamerlan met with a guy they assassinated last summer?! Or maybe one or two others they killed in ambushes?! Seriously!
The home-grown theory is beloved for some -- libertarians, conservatives, progressives, don't matter -- because it fits into a way they wish the world really was -- with American controlling everything, and America responsible then for all the ills of the world AND THEN -- the icing on the cake of this notion of reverse exceptionalism: if you only fix America (with the help of all these nice, smart people who believe this), why, all will be right with the world.
I guess the idea that there are enemies, and they exist regardless of how much you coddle them, is very hard for the mind to take.
It's beloved, because then they can use this complicated case with lots of factors -- even up to and including "the sun got in our eyes" as a reason for dropping the backpacks near children and adults instead of just buildings -- as a reason to settle their scores about Americas' Wars and all the rest they want to agitate about.
Then there's this. Regretably, there is a fight about how to deal with the Russians, as there has been since time immemorial, which of course hobbles us and prevents effective deterrence of the Kremlin. And the Russians play on this.
So, the people who either a) want to make friends with Russia or want the Russian account to diminish in favour of other accounts (China, Iran) or b) have axes to grind about the War on Terror and think it should be converted to a Police Task Force on Workplace Violence or c) are embarrassed that the Russians didn't tell us about this and want to convert it all to a venue they can control, mainly the US were motivated to Do Something right before this big "2 by 2" meeting that just took place between the US and Russian foreign and defense ministers in Washington. The news of Obama cancelling the summit, but in fact then legitimizing Putin by agreeing to go to the G20 has overshadowed that meeting, but there it is. What happened there? Although it was supposed to be about arms control, surely other painful issues were touched upon. Besides the topic of Snowden, most likely the topic of the Tsarnaevs came up, under the rubric of the "challenges of the modern age, combating extremism, terrorism, and the narcotics trade" in the phrase always used in the Central Asian state press.
So I think somebody on our side with pro-Putin or soft-on-the-Kremlin views decided they needed a story to appear right before this media that would change mindsets and alchemies and such and plant in the consciousness the idea that the Tsarnaevs are home-grown, not Russian-assisted. That we need to look at old papers at their house, not demand more information from the Russians about Dagestan. That is my honest-to-God hunch about this very odd story. The 2x2 meeting was on the 6th; the article came out on the 6th.
Again, this is a hypothesis, not a conspiracy theory. To counter my own argument, one could say, but why would the Boston police and the FBI, who control the crime scene there, have a journalist come to put out this story, when they aren't related to the mechanics of the Pentagon or the State Department directly? Well, sure! Except, on this story they sure are, and maybe they had to put forth a briefing on their latest thinking on the case as it was going to be coming up, and this story got enabled as part of helping one line of thinking to prevail -- especially in a situation where different groups may be at odds about how to interpret this and how to act on it with the Russians.
I have no idea what Mueller and company talked about during his trip to Moscow but the fact that the CIA agent who accompanied the FBI agents to Dagestan was the one who later got exposed and expelled would be a signal to me that the Russians really were not cooperating on this Dagestan angle for the Tsarnaevs and really should get boycotted with more than just a summit postponement.
I continue to think something is up here, because the timing of the revelation feels odd.
It's odd because it wasn't discovered in the wild by a journalist; what happened is that the police contacted a WSJ reporter and had them come to the Tsarnayev's home (!) and rifle through stuff that remained after the police got what they needed (!). The police/FBI would have seen this stuff long, long ago, and would have left it as uninteresting -- obviously, they didn't swoop it up and put it in evidence bags as they probably did loads of other stuff.
A Wall Street Journal reporter recently visited Mr. Tsarnaev's apartment in Cambridge, Mass. and read a stack of newspapers, mostly borrowed from Mr. Larking, that allege nefarious conspiracies.
But that WSJ reporter doesn't tell us the mechanics of this remarkable visit. I'm sorry, that's just not standard operating procedure. Since when do reporters get to come into (presumably rather cold but still controlled) crime scenes like that? And why would stuff like that be left behind? And why doesn't he himself ask this?
These newspapers of various far-right and extremist organizations of the John Birch or Larouche type were then perused, and another story as wild and as compelling in a detailed way as the mysterious "Misha" who was like a Rasputin to the Tsarnaevs now comes on the scene.
It turns out that there's this brain-damaged fellow, shot in the face in a convenience store robbery 40 years ago, who is impaired but was able to subscribe to far-right newsletters and ramble on about them, but doesn't have "enough executive function" to talk directly to a reporter (!). It turns out he gave the papers to Tamerlan, and he also goes to the same mosque as the Tsarnaevs (Tamerland brought him into the fold), and people there treat him kindly as a vulnerable member of the community.
This all has a contrived feel to it for me, but maybe it's true. The Tsarnaevs' associations and connections in every direction were combed over extensively at the time of the bombing and every neighbour, mosque member, athletic club member, teacher, girlfriend, etc. etc. was interviewed to death. How did we all miss Mr. Larking and his hate papers?!
Naturally, for some people, this story feels immediately plausible because it fits right into their existing framework of the antisemitism and conspiracy-mongering of the Islamists. And that part is all definitely true -- these extremist movements all feed each other and you find them cross-pollinating. Of course, for young people, you don't know how much a newsletter affects them when they have Youtube and the Internet to turn their heads to hate and revenge, but there it is, the pile of stuff left in their house.
Sorry, but my hunch is that whatever the truth of the existence of these papers -- and they could well be part of the back story of this hate-filled bomber -- and whatever the truth of the back-story of the man who gave them to the Tsarnaevs -- and whatever the sincerity of the WSJ in following up on all this, I think it's no accident, comrades, that this story emerged in this way, now, at the time of this 2x2 summit. In order to make a point.
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