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 2×2 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 2×2
summit. In order to make a point.
Leave a Reply