Breaking: Explosion Reported at Boston Marathon's Finish Line

[David Guyatt]

Boston bombings: Suspect's classmates appear in court

Three college friends of the Boston bombings suspect have appeared in court, accused of obstructing the police investigation into the attacks.


Azamat Tazhayakov and Dias Kadyrbayev - both from Kazakhstan - threw away Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's laptop and backpack, police say.


Robel Phillipos is accused of lying to investigators. None of the three are implicated in plotting the attacks.


Three people died and 264 were wounded in the 15 April marathon blasts.


Mr Tsarnaev, a 19-year-old student, has been charged over the bombings. His 26-year-old brother, Tamerlan, was killed during a shootout with police.


'Lol'
The three 19-year-olds accused of hindering police investigators appeared in Boston federal court on Wednesday.


Mr Tazhayakov and Mr Kadyrbayev are charged with destroying evidence.




The FBI says they found these fireworks inside a backpack belonging to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
Mr Phillipos, a US citizen, is accused of making false statements to investigators.


They were remanded in custody as a prosecutor argued they all presented a "serious risk of flight".


If convicted, Mr Kadyrbayev and Mr Tazhayakov face a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $250,000 (£160,000) fine, while Mr Phillipos faces up to eight years in prison and a similar fine.


According to the affidavit, Mr Tazhayakov and Mr Kadyrbayev removed items from the suspect's dormitory room at the University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth, three days after the blasts.


When TV news reports aired photos of the bombing suspects, released by the FBI, Mr Kadyrbayev allegedly texted Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to say that he resembled the suspect.


Mr Tsarnaev's response included the phrases "lol" and "you better not text me".


According to the charge sheet, he also texted Mr Kadyrbayev: "I'm about to leave if you need something in my room take it."


Mr Kadyrbayev's lawyer said his client did not immediately think that Mr Tsarnaev was the suspect in the FBI images, and that he did not realise the backpack was evidence.


However, the FBI said that Mr Kadyrbayev knew when he saw a backpack containing fireworks which had been opened and emptied of powder that Mr Tsarnaev was involved in the bombings.


Student visas 'violation'
The affidavit says Mr Kadyrbayev told authorities that he and his two co-accused "collectively decided to throw the backpack and fireworks into the trash because they did not want Tsarnaev to get into trouble".




Tamerlan Tsarnaev's widow, Katherine Russell, has reportedly given consent for his body to be released
Mr Kadyrbayev also decided to remove Mr Tsarnaev's laptop "because he did not want Tsarnaev's roommate to think he was stealing or behaving suspiciously by just taking the backpack", the FBI said in court papers.


Mr Kadyrbayev said he placed the backpack and fireworks along with rubbish from the apartment in a large refuse sack and threw it into a bin near the men's apartment.


Investigators say they later found the backpack, along with a homework assignment sheet from a class that Mr Tsarnaev attended, in a landfill.


The court papers do not say what happened to the laptop.


Mr Tazhayakov said that Mr Tsarnaev had explained to the two Kazakhs a month before the attacks that he knew how to make a bomb, according to the affidavit.


Mr Tazhayakov and Mr Kadyrbayev have been held in jail for more than a week for allegedly violating their student visas.


University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth said in a statement on Wednesday that Mr Tazhayakov had been suspended pending the outcome of the case.


The two other men were not currently enrolled, the university said.


Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who received gunshot wounds during the police manhunt, faces a possible death sentence if convicted for his alleged role in the bombings.


He remains in a hospital prison.


Tamerlan Tsarnaev's relatives said on Tuesday they would claim his body now that his widow, Katherine Russell, has given consent for the Massachusetts medical examiner to release it, an uncle said.


The Tsarnaev family has origins in the predominantly Muslim republic of Chechnya in southern Russia.

.

[Magda Hassan]

I really think we need to revisit the topic of an exercise/drill involving private military contractors. From the way officials immediately shouted "it's a drill" when the first bomb exploded, it seems evident that this exercise involved a bomb, possibly a dirty bomb judged by the radiation detector shown in previous posts.

As we know, both 911 and London 7/7 had similar security exercises ongoing that the events actually replicated.

In the London 7/7 the exercise even had the same target tube stations etc. Photos of Met police officers from SO19 (at least one anyway) toting a Heckler & Kock non-fasctory standard assault rifle were discussed at one H & K forum I visited. The conclusion was that the police officer was almost certainly SAS dressed as SO19. Much later all those pictures had disappeared.

None of this can simply be put down to coincidence. It is something more than that. Were the exercises a cover for the real thing or did the perpetrators have inside knowledge and piggyback the exercises?

What is quite clear from the below report is that exercises of this type are very unusual at large marathon events.

I entirely understand Pete's concerns about this.

Yes, too coincidental for be believed isn't it?

And should be easy enough to resolve but I doubt we will be told who ordered (World of War) Craft to front up for the day. And I doubt the MSM will be asking either.

Why Such Secrecy about Private Military Contractor's Men Working the Event?

Thu, 04/25/2013 - 14:09

by:
Dave Lindorff



Speaking as an investigative reporter with almost 40 years's experience, I can say that when government officials won't talk, they're generally hiding something embarrassing or worse.
I tried, and nobody will talk about those Craft International Services private security personnel who were widely observed and photographed near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, wearing security ear-pieces, hats and T-shirts bearing the company's skull logo, and all wearing the same dark coats, khaki pants and combat boots, some carrying what appear to have been radiation detectors. (I got no hard answers, though there were some inadvertent hints given.)
I first contacted a man identifying himself as Jack Fleming, a public affairs person with the Boston Athletic Assn., sponsor of the marathon. Fleming advised me that "If you want to ask about that you should contact the Commonwealth (of Massachusetts) Executive Office of Public Safety."
I called that agency and spoke with the public information office there, a man named Terrell. He first said, "Did you call the Marathon organizers?" When I replied that I had, and that they had said to call his office, he replied, "They did?" Then he said, "You should call the City of Boston Police Department. They released a security plan to some media organizations."
Indeed they had released that plan to the Boston Globe. Based upon the information it got from the police the article the Globe ran, did report that the Police had deployed "air patrols, K9 units, and more than 1,000 uniformed officers and soldiers along the 26-mile course and the finish line," but it made no mention of the private contracting of soldiers-for-hire, which is what Craft International does (see the Craft website). News agency Reuters reported, meanwhile, that a top official for the Massachusetts state Homeland Security Department, Undersecretary Kurt Schwartz, told a group at Harvard U. that his agency had "planned" for a possible bombing attack on the marathon, even running a "table-top" exercise about such an event a week before the race.
I called the Boston Police to ask if they had hired the Craft International personnel who were observed at the scene just before and after the bombing, and was told by the public affairs office there that "Anything having to do with the investigation of the bombing would have to be referred to the FBI Boston Division office." When I pointed out that I wasn't asking anything about the investigation, but was simply asking who had hired the security personnel from Craft International, the answer was simply repeated: "You'll have to ask the FBI."
So I called the FBI, and got a public affairs person there named Amanda Cox. Her initial response to my question was, "I do not have any information on that."
Seven apparent Craft International rent-a-soldiers behind and departing (top rt. with backpack) a communications van

I then said I had been referred to her by the Boston Police Department, and said that photos of the scene after the bombing had shown Craft International personnel conversing with FBI agents. She then put down the phone, and I could hear her turn to a supervisor and ask, her voice muffled, "This guy's asking about the Craft Security Consultants -- who hired them and what they were doing."
I next overheard the muffled voice of another woman to whom she had been speaking reply, "I think you could safely say, I do know we worked with a lot of people who worked on security at the marathon...'" After that I couldn't make out what was being said.
Cox later returned to the phone, and instead told me, "I'd refer you to the company on any information about who hired them." (Taken together the overheard conversation and the official answer from Cox would at least seem to confirm that Craft's people were hired for the event, and that the FBI knows a lot more than it is willing to say about them.)
My next step was to call Craft International. The company has no phone number listed on its website -- just a general email address of info@thecraft.com (to which I wrote to asking for information, but which elicited no response)--but I found one listed for their headquarters office at 2101 Cedar Springs Rd., Suite 1400, Dallas, TX, in a listing on the company published in a directory in Bloomberg Businessweek, This entry noted that the company, in addition to "providing security, defense, and combat weapons training services for military, police, corporate and civilian clients in the US and internationally," also "offers corporate and private and civilian training services..." The number, published in a business magazine, was clearly meant as a contact for potential customers to call.
A woman answered the phone brightly with the company's name. However, when I identified myself as a reporter, and said I was wondering if someone could tell me who had hired personnel from the firm to work at the Boston Marathon, she responded with a flummoxed: "Um, I um, don't really have any information on that. I'm just an answering service."
I replied, "Look, the number I called is listed as the number of the company's corporate headquarters at 2101 Cedar Springs Road. You're not an answering service."
At that point she said, "Let me see who I can transfer you to."
However, after a long pause, she was back, and said, "The answer I've been given is that you should go to the website, where there's an email address you can write to with your question."
I had already done that, I told her. She then said she couldn't help me and hung up.
I also called the US Department of Homeland Security, but a women named Angela who answered the press office number for this public government agency (she refused to provide her last name despite being the public information office) said the DHS media office was "only taking inquiries sent in by email." I sent in an inquiry asking if any unit of the DHS had hired Craft International to provide security at the Boston Marathon, but so far (note: two days later!) have received no response.
As things stand, since it's highly unlikely that Craft International, a private for-profit enterprise founded by the late ace Navy Seal sniper Chris Kyle, would have "hired" itself to police the Marathon gratis, it seems pretty clear that we had rent-a-special forces-soldier people, hired by some agency, at the scene of the bombing ahead of the bombing.
And we have no reporting on this in the mainstream corporate media.
Why? I have no answer to that.
I did write to Andrea Estes, the lead writer of the Globe's piece on police security planning mentioned above, who is described in her bio on the Globe's website staff page as an "investigative reporter specializing in government accountability."
I called and left a message on her phone, and sent her an email, asking if she had looked into the Craft Security personnel, to see who hired them, what they were doing at the race finish line, and why they appeared be carrying radiation detectors. She has so far not responded to my request for information and assistance concerning anything she had done or learned about this, or whether she had looked into it at all.
Certainly there is a big accountability question. A bunch of them actually. Here are a few:
* If Craft International people were hired, who hired them and why?
* If it was the Boston Police or the FBI that hired them, why won't they just say so? Simply hiring outside security help should not be a secret, and could in no way affect the investigation into the bombing and the captured suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, so why the secrecy about that? Given all the police presence, and the size of the FBI's Boston division, why did they need those extra guys from a private rent-a-soldier firm?
* If it was not the Boston Police or the FBI, what agency did hire the company, and why?
* If it was the state's Homeland Security Dept. or or the state Executive Office of Public Safety, or perhaps more likely, the US Department of Homeland Security, did they notify the FBI that they had done so, and tell the agency what had prompted them to do this? 

* The big overarching question when it comes to who hired Craft International is, what possible gain in security could have been achieved by adding what appears to be seven guys (or perhaps a few more who didn't appear in photos) from a private security firm when the Boston Police had in place over 1000 armed security people from their office and the National Guard, and when, as became evident immediately after the bombs went off, a large number of FBI personnel were also on hand?
Unless, of course, the Craft Security people were aware of something that we, the public, including the race participants and spectators, and perhaps even the police and FBI, were not aware of.
Transparency is critical to accountability. At this point, it is clear that we have had a massive failure of the national security state. Despite the fact that the FBI was aware of concerns about Tarmelan Tsarnaev, and the fact that the CIA had him on a watch list, he appears to have been able to work on line to learn how to build a powerful homemade bomb, to obtain the materials, including a substantial quantity of black powder, to build a number of them, and, allegedly with the help of his younger brother Dzhokhar, to place them near the finish line and detonate two of them, killing three people and injuring as many as 200. That's a huge intelligence fail.
It would be an even bigger fail if it turns out that some agency had awareness of a credible threat and that it hired Craft International personnel to prevent it. We clearly need to know, and have a right to demand to know, who hired those men and why. After all, at a minimum, on the face of things, they did an abysmal job of preventing a bombing right in front of their supposedly well-trained noses.
And of course, as I wrote earlier, there is also another question, which is really disturbing: The image of the exploded backpack released by the FBI and identified as the remains of the pack that was carrying one of the two pressure-cooker bombs, prominently displays a white square on a black background. This is not a doctored photograph; it's the photograph that was released by the FBI. There are also at least two photos depicting one of the Craft International men who is wearing a black backpack identical to several of the other Craft International personnel. The same white square is also visible on the top of his pack.
There does not appear to be any such white marking -- square or otherwise -- on the top of the black backpack worn by Tarmelan Tsarnaev, as observed in several security photos taken of him (Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was shown carrying a smaller white or light-colored pack, slung over one shoulder). Check out the images below of Tarmelan, the exploded bag and the Craft International character:
FBI image of exploded pack with white square, white square on Craft guy's pack, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev (left.) with pack but clearly no white square marking

I am not drawing any conclusions from any of this, but I will say that when government agencies at all levels and a private contracting firm are all this obtuse and secretive (and in some cases even deceptive) about what should be a simple question -- who hired these men? -- my suspicions are aroused.
Somebody's clearly hiding something.
And by the way, why aren't the mainstream media asking about this? Are corporate media journalists so intimidated about being labeled "conspiracy nuts" that they can't do their jobs? At a minimum, this goes to the question of accountability. It also goes to the question of inter-agency communication or lack of it. And given what we know about how many times the FBI has been an active encourager and enabler of terror plots which it later thwarts and claims credit for preventing, there's the question, too of potential official culpability. Furthermore, when an horrific incident like this is used to justify such new threats to our Constitutional freedom as an unprecedented martial law-style lockdown of an entire 1-million-person metropolitan area and a precedent-setting deliberately Miranda-free, attorney-free interrogation of a hospitalized, gravely wounded and sedated suspect, it is critical that the whole story be told, not just the official one.
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1718

[Peter Lemkin]

[Magda Hassan]

Interesting. I hadn't looked beofre to see that the Craft worker had no pack pack after the event.....
Not a 100% convinced that Dzhokar doesn't have his yet though. It is hard to see for sure.

[Jeffrey Orling]

Does the FBI Stop Terrorism, or
Create It? A Brief History

by Edward Spannaus
[PDF version of this article]
April 28While the American people are being bombarded every day with news reports about the investigation of the Boston Marathon bombingsmost of which reports are based on deliberate FBI and law-enforcement leaks spoon-fed to the news mediaimportant lessons can be drawn from FBI terrorism cases going back 20 years, at least as far as 1993.
Furthermore, the FBI's long history of infiltration, incitement to violence, and entrapment, is little known to Americans today. But what the Bureau has done against labor, radicals, and other perceived adversaries for over nine decades, it is doing still today, particularly against Muslim communities and organizations.

1993: A Cautionary Tale

After the first World Trade Center bombing, on Feb. 26, 1993, the news media breathlessly reported detail after detail of the FBI's painstaking investigation. Sifting through bomb debris, investigators found an axle with a VIN (vehicle identification number). That led them to a truck rental outlet in New Jersey. When one of the alleged bombers, Mohammed Salameh, returned to the rental store to report that the van he had rented had been stolen, and to get his deposit back(!), he was arrested. Good police work led to other conspirators, and eventually the case was cracked through methodical detective work.
The reality was quite different. Three months after the bombing, in May 1993, it was revealed that an FBI informant had taught Salameh how to drive the van, two days before the bombing. In June, it was disclosed that a former Egyptian military officer, Emad Salem, had penetrated the alleged bomb conspiracy for the FBI, and had helped test explosives, and had rented the apartment where explosives were mixed. Even as more reports came out over the Summer, the FBI maintained that its informant Salem did not know in advance about the plans to bomb the World Trade Center.
Eight months after the bombing, on Oct. 28, 1993, the New York Times published a blockbuster story revealing the existence of tapes that Salem had made while talking with FBI agents, which showed that some agents and supervisors had known all along about the bomb-making plans. The Times reported:

"Law-enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center, and they planned to thwart the plotters by secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, an informer said after the blast.
"The informer was to have helped the plotters build the bomb and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by an FBI supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer, Emad A. Salem, should be used, the informer said.
"The account, which is given in the transcript of hundreds of hours of tape recordings Mr. Salem secretly made of his talks with law-enforcement agents, portrays the authorities as in a far better position than previously known to foil the Feb. 26 bombing of New York City's tallest towers...."

The Bureau's role in the 1993 bombing was raised on April 16, 2013, the day after the Boston Marathon bombings, by Fox TV's Ben Swann, on a "Reality Check" segment. Swann asked directly, whether the Boston bombings were the product of an FBI entrapment operation gone awry. He described the 1993 New York bombing, and then said: "So the question tonight must be asked, did the FBI have any knowledge of this plot before it happened?" and, "Is the practice of the FBI creating terror plots only to break them up before they can actually happen, really making us safer? What happened here?"
As we shall see, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was not the last time that FBI informants played a crucial role in planning terrorist attacks. Indeed, the Bureau has a long history, going back almost 100 years, of using informants and agent provocateurs to incite violence.
But first, let us look at its more recent history.

After 9/11: an American MI5

The day after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, then-President George W. Bush famously told his Attorney General, John Ashcroft: "Don't let this happen again." The "shackles" that had allegedly hindered the FBI from discovering the 9/11 plot came off. The Patriot Act gave the FBI new powers of surveillance and information-gathering, the alleged "wall" between law enforcement and intelligence gathering (always a fiction anyway) was dismantled, and there was a huge escalation in the use of informants and sting operations.
(Never mind that the 9/11 hijackers were "hiding in plain sight," with an extensive Saudi support network in place which was covered up during the official 9/11 investigations. To this day, the 28 pages of the Joint Congressional Inquiry which discuss the Saudi role in the 9/11 attacks, are still being suppressed at the insistence of the Bush and now, the Obama administrations.)
The "unleashing" of the FBI in the post-9/11 period meant that the Bureau's mission was now defined as prevention of terrorist attacks, not investigating them after the fact. The Bureau's top priorities were now gathering intelligence and preempting terror.
The FBI's new model was Britain's domestic intelligence service, MI5. New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau says that within the 9/11 Commission, there was "close to consensus" among the Commission members and senior staffers, that they should consider the creation of a new domestic intelligence agency modeled after MI5, which would take over anti-terror operations within the United States. The head of MI5 was brought to the U.S. to brief the 9/11 Commission on how to create the new agency. When FBI Director Robert Mueller met with the Commission in 2004, he pleaded the case for keeping counterterrorism within the FBI, and promised that he would reform the Bureau along the lines indicated.[1]
The Commission's final report in 2004 thus pulled back from recommending the creation of a new MI5-type agency, but it warned that the FBI's shift to counterterrorism intelligence collection required "an all-out effort to institutionalize change," and that it had to be done in a manner so that it would survive beyond Mueller's tenure (which was supposed to end on Sept. 4, 2011, at which point Obama extended it for two additional years).

An Army of Informants

The result is that over the past decade, the FBI's force of registered informants is now estimated at over 15,000, according to Trevor Aaronson, author of the new book The Terror Factory. That number itself is ten times the number of informants that the FBI ran in the 1960s during the infamous COINTELPRO (Counter-Intelligence Program) days. If unofficial informants and other confidential sources are added in, the number is three to four times that, Aaronson says, citing a former top FBI official. These informants are heavily targetted on the Muslim community, and they run the gamut from convicted criminals, to imams and professionals within the Islamic community itself.
(Intelligence community sources tell EIR that the Bureau has informants in virtually every mosque in the country. The idea that somehow Tamerlan Tsarnaev could repeatedly disrupt events in the Boston mosque he attended before being thrown out, and yet not come to the FBI's attention, defies belief.)
Under the FBI's new mission of "prevention, pre-emption, and disruption," the Bureau has carried out numerous entrapment operations, to the extent that most of the major terrorist prosecutions in the U.S. over past ten years actually involved plots created by the FBI. According to a report issued last Summer by the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School, "there have been 138 terrorism or national security prosecutions involving informants since 2001," and these informants have usually crossed the line "from merely observing potential criminal behavior to encouraging and assisting people to participate in plots that are largely scripted by the FBI itself."
Aaronson reported in 2011, that under the Obama Administration, sting-related prosecutions are being conducted "at an even faster clip than under the Bush Administration."[2]

'Investigate Crime, Don't Invent It'

Former FBI Special Agent Michael German recently reviewed Aaronson's book for Reason magazine.[3] German writes that many of the terrorist conspiracies reported as being broken up by the Bureau,

"were almost entirely concocted and engineered by the FBI itself, using corrupt agents provocateurs who often posed a far more serious criminal threat than the dimwitted saps the investigations ultimately netted."

The FBI recruits informants with extensive criminal records, pays them tens of thousands of dollars "to ensare dupes in terrorist plots," German points out. Most of these targets posed little if any threat; they rarely had weapons of their own, or the financial resources to carry out violent acts. "Yet the government provided them with military hardware worth thousands of dollars that would be extremely difficult for even sophisticated criminal organizations to obtain, only to bust them in a staged finale."
German says that when he worked undercover investigations for the FBI, prior to 9/11, "if an agent had suggested opening a terrorism case against someone who was not a member of a terrorist group, who had not attempted to acquire weapons, and who didn't have the means to obtain them, he would have been gently encouraged to look for a more serious threat." Moreover, German observes: An agent who suggested giving such a person a stinger missile or a car full of military-grade plastic explosives would have been sent to counseling. Yet in Aaronson's telling, such techniques are now becoming commonplace.
German's conclusion:

"The FBI should be investigating crime, not inventing it."

Incitement and Entrapment

Here are some examples of recent FBI sting operations compiled by EIR; many more can be found in Aaronson's book and in other sources. It should be noted, that every element of the recent Boston caseincluding incitement to "jihad," and the testing and planting of live explosives which killed peoplecan be found in these earlier cases, including the 1993 World Trade Center case.

• One of the most egregious of these cases is the so-called "Newburgh Four" in New York State, in which an informant in 2008-09 offered the defendants $250,000, as well as weapons, to carry out a terrorist plot. The New York University Center for Human Rights and Justice reviewed this case and two others, and concluded: "The government's informants introduced and aggressively pushed ideas about violent jihad and, moreover, actually encouraged the defendants to believe it was their duty to take action against the United States."
  
  The Federal judge presiding over the Newburgh case, Colleen McMahon, declared that it was "beyond question that the government created the crime here," and criticized the Bureau for sending informants "trolling among the citizens of a troubled community, offering very poor people money if they will play some roleany rolein criminal activity."
  
• In Portland, Ore., it was disclosed during the trial of the "Christmas Tree bomber" earlier this year, that the FBI had actually produced its own terrorist training video, which was shown to the defendant, depicting men with covered faces shooting guns and setting off bombs using a cell phone as a detonator. The FBI operative also traveled with the target to a remote location where they detonated an actual bomb concealed in a backpack as a trial run for the planned attack.
  
• In Brooklyn, N.Y., in 2012, an FBI agent posing as an al-Qaeda operative supplied a target with fake explosives for a 1,000-pound bomb, which the FBI's victim then attempted to detonate outside the Federal Reserve building in Manhattan.
  
• In Irvine, Calif., in 2007, an FBI informant was so blatant in attempting to entrap members of the local Islamic Center into violent jihadi actions, that the mosque went to court and got a restraining order against the informant.
  
• In Pittsburgh, Khalifa Ali al-Akili became so suspicious of two "jihadi" FBI informants who were trying to recruit him to buy a gun and to go to Pakistan for training, that he contacted both the London Guardian and the Washington-based National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms, and told them that he feared the FBI was trying to entrap him. The National Coalition scheduled a press conference for March 16, 2012, at which al-Akili was to speak and identify the informants, but the day before the scheduled press conference, the FBI arrested al-Aliki, charging him not with terrorism, but with illegal possession of a firearm.
  
  The chief informant trying to entrap al-Aliki turned out to be Shaden Hussain, a longtime FBI informant who had set up two earlier terrorism cases: the above-cited Newburgh, N.Y., case for which he was paid $100,000, and another in Albany, N.Y., for which his payments are not known.
  
  This practice continues to the present day.
  
• On April 19, 2013, the FBI arrested a 19-year old from Aurora, Ill., Abdella Ahmad Tounisi, as he attempted to board a flight from Chicago's O'Hare Airport to Turkey, where he hoped to join the Syrian al-Qaeda-linked opposition group Jabhat al-Nusrah.
  
  How was young Tounisi recruited? By a site that exhorted its viewers: "A Call for Jihad in Syria: Come and join your lion brothers ... fighting under the true banner of Islam." In fact, the website was constructed and entirely controlled by the FBI! When Tounisi sent an e-mail to the website, he was answered by an undercover FBI agent posing as "Brother Abdullah," a recruiter for al-Nusra, who even provided Tounisi with a bus ticket that would take him from Istanbul to the Syrian border.
  
  "They could entrap anybody, they could send anybody anything, and when you're young and impressionable, you're gonna believe it," Tounisi's father said on April 21, according to AP and the Chicago Sun-Times.
  

Boston FBI, Too

The Boston FBI office has its own history in this kind of activity. In the 2011 case of Rezwan Ferdaus, an American citizen and Northeastern University graduate, accused of planning to send miniature planes carrying explosives crashing into the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon, the Bureau went even further. According to various accounts, the FBI, using a drug-addicted informant posing as an al-Qaeda operative, provided money to Ferdaus to travel to Washington and to buy an F-86 Sabre minature plane for the attack. "The prosecution case also reveals how Ferdaus ordered the plane and rented a storage facility in which to keep it, and then took delivery from the FBI of 25 pounds of C-4 explosives, three grenades, and six AK-47 rifles," the London Guardian reported on Sept. 29, 2011 (emphasis added). The FBI press release, issued on Sept. 29, 2011, acknowledged that the FBI provided Ferdaus with "approximately 1.25 pounds of actual C-4 explosives."[4]
At the time, this operationwhich included providing live explosiveswas publicly defended by both Richard DesLauriers, the head of the Boston FBI office, and Carmen Ortiz, the United States Attorney, both of whom are still in place, currently overseeing the Marathon bombing case.
Not to be overlooked, is that the Boston FBI office was running this entrapment operation against Ferdaus, at the same time that it supposedly investigated Tamerlan Tsarnaev and determined that it could not make any further inquiry, because he did not pose a threat. That bespeaks either absolute incompetence, or that the FBI is lying and covering up what they actually did with Tsarnaev.

A Long History of Provocations

The irony was, that the numbskulls who demanded after 9/11 that the FBI must make intelligence-gathering and prevention its priority, were in fact reviving a corrupt tradition in the FBI, which Congress had tried to shut down after the scandals that emerged during Congressional investigations in the 1970s. The generic name for the FBI's unconstitutional use of its intelligence and investigative powers was COINTELPRO.
The FBI certainly had done intelligence and counter-intelligence before, and these programs were shut down not just once, but twice, for their wholesale violations of the constitutional rights of Americans.

Hoover and the Palmer Raids

The first incarnation of the strategy of "prevention, preemption, and disruption" was the Justice Department's General Intelligence Division (GID)created at the height of the post-World War I "Red scare," and involving extensive use of undercover agents, informants, and provocateurs.
The GID was created by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmerwhose name has gone down in history for the "Palmer Raids"in 1919, in preparation for series of brutal raids targetting aliens (immigrants), anarchists, and "Bolsheviks," first launched in a dozen cities on Nov. 7, 1919. The then-young and enthusiastic J. Edgar Hoover was put in charge of the GID.
A second series of raids was carried out against what were then the two Communist parties in the U.S., in 33 cities on Jan. 2, 1920. Already at this time, the GID had enough high-level undercover agents in the Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party, that they were able to schedule party meetings at the same time across the country, so that raids could be executed simultaneously. There were no constitutional rights for the more than 10,000 persons arrested and detained in these raids.
Hoover and the GID were moved into the (Federal) Bureau of Investigation in 1921which had been created by that Anglophile President, Teddy Roosevelt, in 1907. In 1924, the GID was shut down by Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone, but Hoover and his massive card files remained in place in the FBI.

Division Five

The FBI's counter-intelligence functions were revived in the 1930s, to keep track of the growing fascist and communist movements. With the outbreak of World War II, the FBI was reorganized with the creation of Division Five, responsible for internal security and counter-intelligence.
Collaborating with British Intelligence agents operating in the United States during World War II, the Bureau mastered the arts of warrantless wiretaps, opening of personal mail, and "black bag jobs" (surreptitious entries or burglaries)which methods were carried seamlessly into peacetime surveillance and disruption of domestic radicals and "subversives" in the 1950s and '60s.
During the investigations known as the Church Committee (Senate) and Pike Commission (House) in the 1970s, the public learned how the FBI had used infilatrators and provocateurs to foment violence within and between targetted organizations, to the point of encouraging suicide (e.g., Martin Luther King), and murders and assassinations (e.g., Black Panther Party, Martin Luther King, and Lyndon LaRouche; see below).
One favored FBI technique was to falsely label someone as a police or FBI informant, putting that person at risk of injury or death, while protecting its informants. Another method was blackmailwidely used by Hoover against his actual or potential opponents (but also, according to some accounts, used by British Intelligence against Hoover himself).[5]
Related to this were the "Abscam" and "Brilab" operations of the late 1970s and early 1980s, targetting elected officials and labor leaders, respectively. FBI provocateurs, many of whom were hardened criminals, such as Mel Weinberg (used to frame up Sen. Harrison Williams of New Jersey), would put words in a politician's mouth to give the appearance of bribe-taking, even when there was no such intention or conduct. The conduct of the Bureau's undercover agents in these cases, is eerily similar to its use of provocateurs in the "terrorism" entrapments described in the first section of this article. Similar tactics were used against African-American elected officials in the operations known as "Fruhmenschen" and "Lost Trust."

Provocations Against LaRouche

The political movement organized by Lyndon LaRouche has been repeatedly targetted by the FBI and Justice Department, going back to the late 1960s, when LaRouche first gathered around him a circle of students who had come out of the "New Left." In May 1969, the FBI anonymously mailed a leaflet to student activists at Columbia University, trying to mobilize Mark Rudd's anarchists and proto-terrorists (later the "Weatherman" terrorists) against advocates of LaRouche's pro-labor policies.
In 1973, the Bureau used its well-entrenched assets in the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) to launch violent attacks on the LaRouche-organized association, the National Caucus of Labor Committees. FBI documents show that it used the CP and other left-wing groups to label the NCLC as "right-wing terrorists," and "a front either for the local police or the CIA."
Most egregious, was the documented attempt by the FBI to incite the CPUSA to carry out the "elimination" of LaRouche. A Nov. 23, 1973 FBI memo stated:

TO: DIRECTOR, FBI
FROM: SAC, NEW YORK
SUBJECT: LYNDON HERMYLE LAROUCHE, JR.
In reviewing New York case file it is noted that information has been received that the CPUSA is conducting an extensive background investigation on the subject for the purpose of ultimately eliminating him and the threat of the NCLC, on CP operations....
[S]ources have advised that the subject is the controlling force behind the NCLC and all of its activities. A discussion with the New York NCLC case agent indicates that it is felt if the subject was no longer in control of NCLC operations that the NCLC would fall apart with internal strife and conflict.
New York proposes submitting a blind memorandum to the 'Daily World' CP newspaper, in New York City, which has been mailed from outside this area to help facilitate CP investigations of the subject. It is felt that this would be appropriate under the Bureau's counter intelligence program.

Otherwise, unable to find any pretext under which LaRouche and his associates could be prosecuted in Federal courts, the FBI orchestrated hundreds of harassing arrests of LaRouche movement organizers by state and local police. An FBI agent in New Haven, Conn. wrote a memorandum on a June 13, 1975 call from a supervisor "from Division 5 at the Bureau," who asked about cooking up some bogus Federal charges. "He further stated that some [FBI] offices have had considerable success in having local authorities proceed under local statutes against NCLC members...."

Around 1983, at the instigation of British agent Henry Kissinger, and corrupt circles in the Soviet Union, the Justice Departent and FBI launched a new COINTELPRO-type operation against LaRouche. Kissinger had written to FBI Director William Webster in August 1982, complaining about LaRouche; in January 1983, Kissinger's lawyer Edward Bennett Williams got the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) to ask the FBI to investigate the sources of LaRouche's funding. This led to an all-out public/private operation against LaRouche, designed to culminate with armed raids on the LaRouche movement offices; an intended, but averted, Waco-style raid on LaRouche's residence planned to kill him. (FBI documents show that the planning of the 1986 raid involved the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Commandlittle known then, but better known today, for its activities including killer drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan.)
Six months later after the raid, the Justice Department carried out an unprecedented involuntary bankruptcy proceeding against publishing companies operated by LaRouche's associates, which was later determined by a Federal court to have constituted "a constructive fraud on the court." Under conditions of the bankruptcy, the Justice Department then railroaded LaRouche and a number of associates into prison. Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark characterized the LaRouche case as having "represented a broader range of deliberate cunning and systematic misconduct over a longer period of time utilizing the power of the federal government than any other prosecution by the U.S. government in my time, or to my knowledge."

Clean-Up Is Long Overdue

Now, in light of this sordid history, look again at the FBI's handling of the Boston Marathon bombings. Is it just incompetence, that the Bureau somehow overlooked the Tsarnaev brothers? Or were there other operations going onprovocations, entrapment, etc., by the FBI or other agencieswhich the government is now scrambling to cover up? As EIR pointed out in its editorial in the last issue, it has been decades since the FBI has been subject to any serious scrutinybut look what came pouring out during the Church Committee and other investigations of the early and mid-1970s.
And now, with the world on the verge of World War III, and the British-Saudi wielding of terror as a detonator for war and dictatorship, it is essential that we find out exactly who is responsible for such terrorism todayin a manner which was never done around the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Such a thorough investigation and housecleaning are long overdue.
[1] Eric Lichtblau, Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008), pp. 100-102.
[2] Trevor Aaronson, "The Informants," Mother Jones, July 29, 2011.
[3] Michael German, "Manufacturing Terrorists: How FBI sting operations make jihadists out of hapless malcontents," Reason Magazine, April 2013, reviewing Trevor Aarsonson, The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Ig Publishing, 2013).
[4] FBI Boston press release, "Ferdaus Indicted for Allegedly Plotting Attack on Pentagon and U.S. Capitol and Attempting to Provide Material Support to Foreign Terrorist Organization," Sept. 29, 2011.
[5] Curt Gentry, "J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets" (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 296-297.

[Magda Hassan]

Yes, the first Trade Tower bombing in the 1990's is a huge give away to the involvement of the FBI in criminality/stupidity. It is largely forgotten now because of the big one in 2001.

[Jeffrey Orling]

I realize that there is a sort of black and white divide with respect to the nature of the involvement of intel (alphabets). One camp sees all the events a detailed planned conspiracies executed (choreographed) by intel who are operating presumably for their *masters* and are essentially the managers and supply the mechanics and of course the cover stories. This would be the MIHOP position.

At the other extreme there is the sort of case that intel is simply a bumbling bureaucracy which can't catch a criminal or stop a crime if they were present when it was committed. This is the incompetence argument and some complain that even at this level there has been no accountability which would confirm that the peformance was incompetence not intentional.

Then there is something in the middle which has now been called LIHOP. There is some confusion about what the IT actually is. And of course what the LET actually means. We've learned that the alphabets culture relationships with shady characters all over the place. The naive view of this is to listen in on them and catch their nasty plans before they go operational. But we also have ample evidence that FBI, at least, actually participates in these plots... helping with bomb making and so forth (1993 wtc)... and the series of caught terrorists post 9/11 in the USA. These incidents are clearly more than a LIHOP... and very close to MIHOP. Were the patsy perps of the mind to commit the acts without being directed by the alphabets? Or perhaps the alphabet has infiltrated the so called terrorists groups and have handlers within selecting and then directing the patsy. FBI is knowledgeable and or tipped off so that they can sting the operation... and score PR points... and get congress and the people and of course the lamestream media on board... not to mention more funding and more leeway in their operations... post proven successful stings. Entrapment/stings are considered to be legitimate tools in fighting crime and *terrorism*.

There is the notion that terrorism (and some crimes) can be prevented from taking place by engaging in infiltration, using double agents and so forth. But aside from the sort of drone strikes which target supposedly suspected bad guys who are not engaged in any criminal activity... stings require that the crime be in progress to achieve the desired purpose... PR for the agency, and supposedly to send a message to those who think that they can get away with similar.. Hahaha.. lookie here... we can catch you in the act!

Boston appears to be some sort of sting. It has all the tell tale signs. But was there a larger purpose? It was admitted that drills were conducted. Drills are OK because they make the JTTF and so forth prepared for the real deal... supposedly. Yet stings are largely conducted in the dark with little to no transparency even after the fact. The claim is that they can't compromise assets and tactics. How clever! So we can never know WHO is hired to work on these sorts of black ops / stings and what WAS the exercise. We're not allowed to know any details... just the broadest strokes.

What did they drill? We can only guess. They sure drilled the use of troops for martial law and lock down. How absurd the show of force to capture a 19yr old. They drill use of the media to float all manner of stories and evidence delivered by police and FBI... all unsourced and unquestioned yet reported to the world. They clearly seemed to have drilled the use of private security which they are refusing to fess up to despite the mounds of actual evidence of Kraft's involvement. The drill appears to have included a bomb going off and actors who were supposed to be injured. That is becoming abundantly clear. But could they get away with no real injuries? Probably not. So perhaps a real small bomb or two were used to make the drill more realistic. The two suspects appear to be patsies in on the drill who probably were not thinking their bombs would be detonated but were perhaps supposed to be caught by sniffer dogs??? But we'll likely not find out because we may never get a trial if the defendant is forced to take a plea deal to save his life and insure his silence in a super max.

Larger political motive? Identifying the perps from the Caucuses sure opens this region to the US to legitimately engage in operations for *national security* as this region has now produced enemies of the state. The region was formerly and presently in the Russian (USSR) sphere of influence. This domestic false flag may be the entry of the empire's open involvement in the Caucuses and pitting it against the Russia. Oh goodie! A further basis for arming up the MIC.

It should be interesting to follow some of the *victims* and see if they turn out to be part of the part of the drill. And will Kraft's role get some sunlight? They've been caught on camera and this evidence will not go away. Was this a drill some group decided take live and push the goals of the drill further... martial law.. etc. And of course was this a distraction allowing something else to take place with no one paying attention? Will the press continued to be fractured into stenographers reporting for officials (usually unnamed)... and outlier indie media which will be further marginalized as giving a platform for conspiracy nuts? What will the alt media which has not gone all the way to the Alex Jones territory going to do? How hard will they push for an investigation and answers to some very good questions that have been raised by the crowd sourced sleuths? Will the likes of Hedges, Greenwald, Goodman and Palast remain quiet and fall in behind the FBI released narrative?

Who comes up with these attacks? What is the presumed motive? And more importantly... what was the real motive?

[Albert Doyle]

Just some points:


From the bombing scene photos of the 2 Craft gendarme shown in the pre-bombing shots still had their backpacks after the bombing.


CIA (An organization involved in murdering the Kennedy's) said the bomb was so sophisticated that the Tsarnaev's could not have built it on their own.


Alex Jones (for whatever he's worth) said the Tsarnaev kid had a fake alias for his return from Russia which suggests handlers telling him how to get around watch-lists.

[Jeffrey Orling]

Suppose:

There was a drill. They probably had several guys with explosives in packs which they sniffers were supposed to find before some smoke bombs went off. The Kraft guys were part of the drill... as were the kids who would become patsies. Someone decided to detonate a real bomb or two. All the Kraft guys did not know what to do... when it went live one of them only detonated the bomb(s). The lot of them were met by their SUV and taken away. It's possible that not all of the 7 or 8 Kraft guys knew what was going on.. all it took was one to detonate the devices with a remote...just one liar the others could legitimately claim they were part of a drill. The kids had no idea that their bombs could be detonated. It's possible that they didn't even place the pack on the ground... or if they did it may not have had a detonator. It's not clear who place the pack on the ground. It appears that the younger brother was seen running away with his pack. Obvioiuly when it went off they figured out that something was wrong and they could be in deep do. They had done nothing illegal and tried to get back to their normal life and blend in assuming that someone else might be fingered. But they were named as the perps and had to escape and get rid of anything incrimminating that the FBI had given them as part of the drill. This may have included actual explosives to be placed into the packs and carried to the event as part of the drill...

They certainly couldn't test their martial law routine without a bomb going off. Sniffing could be done without making too much of a problem... but it would not be the full drill. The detonation has provided all manner of good stuff... a new terrosist example, policies will get more repressive and invasive... a new region for the empire to get involved with and a notice to Russia to not engage in Syria, for example, as the empire has now the perfect excuse to run around in the Caucuses.

Another part of the drill is now to see if they can thrwart the justice system and keep this kid quiet and locked away and have their fable stand. They will probably succeed... with threats and then a plea bargain and life in a super max.

Maybe

[Albert Doyle]

Seems like we need laws quickly enacted that allow democratic minders to attend all police investigations and interviews since the US media has now shamelessly defaulted on that position.