The Boston bombing was major blowback. That much is certain. The question is, what level of blowback?
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\nIt could have been a covert op gone real bad. It could have been blowback from former ”freedom fighters” – in this case ethnic Chechens – reconverted into terra-rists. It could have been straight blowback for United States foreign policy targeting Muslims, whether dispatching them to Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib or Bagram, extraordinarily renditioning them, or target assassinating them.<\/p>\n
The FBI, predictably, is not admitting any of these three options. It sticks to a convoluted screenplay worthy of those cocaine-fueled Hollywood nights in the 1980s; a couple of bad guys who ”hate our freedoms” because… they do.<\/p>\n
As I’ve written elsewhere<\/a> in a sort of preamble for this article, there are inter-galactic holes in the story of the Tsarnaev brothers. Now we also know – via their mother<\/a> – that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was monitoring elder brother Tamerlan for at least five years. In a subsequent interview to CNN’s Piers Morgan, the mother actually talked, significantly, about ”counseling”.<\/p>\n At the same time, the FBI was forced to admit it had in early 2011 accepted a ”foreign government” (code for Russia) request to take a closer look on Tamerlan. This, apparently, they did – and found nothing terrorist activity-worthy.<\/p>\n So what happened afterwards? Some IQ above 50 in the FBI must have noticed they now had access to a precious Chechen-American asset. So Tamerlan became an FBI informant. They could play him like a fiddle – like so many patsies before.<\/p>\n Yet if they didn’t, the FBI can rightfully be accused of devastating incompetence (that would not be a first). Because what the FBI is saying is that they had no clue their asset was working on a bomb, was trying to test-drive it, or was carrying a suspicious backpack to the Boston marathon.<\/p>\n What the FBI will never say is when was the last time they monitored\/controlled\/harassed Tamerlan. Remember, this is the same FBI that gave us The Fast and The Furious<\/i>-style Iranian cum Mexican cartel plot to kill a Saudi ambassador<\/a> debunked in a matter of days.<\/p>\n Tamerlan, of course, may have out-FBI-ed them all (not that hard) – and after years of being monitored\/harassed started working as a double agent. Apparently he left the US for Russia for a long period – January to July 2012. Nobody knows exactly what he did; the FBI would love to prove he was engaged in terrorist tactical training. Still, if he was indeed a valuable asset, he could have been sent on a mission to infiltrate Chechen jihadis led by Doku Umarov in neighboring Dagestan.<\/p>\n As for the ultimate, nuance-filled word on the extremely cozy relationship, since the 1990s, between Washington and Chechen terra-rists – a taboo issue in US corporate media – one should look no further than the awesome Sibel Edmonds, posting here<\/a>.<\/p>\n About that drill<\/b><\/p>\n The FBI has the power to impose on the US and the whole world a far-fetched ”young evil Chechens” screenplay. So let’s develop an alternative, credible scenario and see where that takes us.<\/p>\n Instead of two bad (foreign) guys, totally Americanized, who suddenly were inoculated with rage ”against our freedoms” by some jihadi indoctrination, mostly online, let’s see who really profits from what happened in Boston.<\/p>\n The Boston Globe was forced to ”disappear” the information of a counter-terrorist drill – including bomb-sniffing dogs – taking place during the marathon. Picture the FBI telling its asset Tamerlan he would be part of the drill. Although a tough guy himself, his family could easily have been threatened if he did not cooperate.<\/p>\n So Tamerlan was handed a black backpack with a fake pressure-cooker bomb inside and told to drop it in a determined place – as one of the procedures included in the drill. And it’s here that we have to be extra careful; there’s no conclusive evidence to establish whether this was supposed to be only a drill, or was the bomb designed to explode.<\/p>\n Let’s assume tough guy Tamerlan and his impressionable brother Dzhokhar were actually responsible (no FBI in the picture). After so much planning there had to be an immediate escape route – as in transportation, passports, money, plane tickets. There was nothing. Dzhokhar went to school, worked out in the gym, socialized, sent Twitter messages.<\/p>\n There are absolutely no witnesses saying the brothers dropped the bombs. They did it because the FBI says so. And from there onwards, it’s holes galore. They robbed a Mercedes at a gas station and let the driver go away – not without telling him that they were the marathon bombers. Dzhokhar and the Mercedes manage to escape from a major gunfight, by-passing a massive police barrage – but not without the Mercedes running over Tamerlan whose body was enveloped in explosives. Dzhokhar leaves a blood trail but he is not tracked by any dogs.<\/p>\n And then there’s the juicy martial law test drive; a whole city totally shut down, at immense cost, because of a fleeing teenager. Watch out, America, this is just the beginning.<\/p>\n What is certain is that the Tsarnaev brothers were not jihadis; only Murdoch gutter media addicts will swallow it. Just take a look at this jihadi website<\/a>, quite well established, and fully representative of what is known as the Caucasus Emirate Islamic insurgency. They ask very good questions, for instance here<\/a>. And they thoroughly debunk depicting the brothers as hardened jihadis.<\/p>\n The omniscient Craft<\/b><\/p>\n Few paramilitary outfits in the industrialized West are as sinister as the Craft<\/a>. Craft was responsible for the drill. Its symbol is a skull not dissimilar to the Marvel character The Punisher. Its motto is a subtlety-shy: ”No matter what your mother told you, violence does solve problems”. US corporate media simply vanished with any trace of Craft operatives swarming the marathon site; talk about a media blackout.<\/p>\n Alternative media though was not intimidated. Here<\/a> one may find a conclusive treasure trove of photos showing Craft operatives at the marathon site, complete with combat wear, black backpacks, tactical gear, and even carrying a radiation detector. So how did the FBI react to it? By imposing an absolute blackout. Total photo censorship, as in ”other photos will not be deemed credible” – only photos and footage showing the Tsarnaev brothers. Craft is untouchable.<\/p>\n The problem is that everything touching Craft in this scenario is troubling. 1) Their invisibility – corporate media sheepishly bowing to the FBI and never even mentioning them. 2) Their ”security” expertise – your army of mercenaries gets paid a fortune and all your hyper-trained tough guys loaded with high-tech gear cannot find a couple of amateur bombers. 3) The sinister possibility that this was a black ops produced by Craft.<\/p>\n If we stick to reality, not Marvel comics, all the Boston bombing evidence points to something very close to the modus operandi of that dodgy galaxy of al-Qaeda franchises. Based on the collected evidence of the brothers’ history and behavior – no military or sabotage background – it also suggests they were not experienced enough to pull that off by themselves. But it’s perfectly sensible to envisage a copycat al-Qaeda op then attributed to a couple of fall guys – something that Craft at least in theory could easily design.<\/p>\n So this is where a realistic scenario leads us: an FBI\/Craft false flag op which, 1) may have gone terribly wrong, thus the necessity to find two sacrificial lambs in a matter of hours; or 2) the sinister possibility this was designed as a little entrapment game to produce the exact same results – leading to further by now almost complete militarization of US civilian life.<\/p>\n The writing is on the (bloody) wall. The final vestiges of the rule of law are disappearing – even as a bipartisan panel had found that George W Bush elite functionaries were all, indisputably, implicated in torture; and that torture was systematic, even though it never led to thwarting any terror plot.<\/p>\n Washington is about to join the glittering ranks of Mubarak-era Egypt, Bahrain and Uganda. As that nasty little piece of work, Senator Lindsay Graham, put it, now ”the homeland is the battlefield”. And you’re an enemy combatant if we say so. Pepe Escobar is the author of<\/i> <\/i>Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War<\/a> (Nimble Books, 2007) and <\/i>Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge<\/a>. His new book, just out, is <\/i>Obama does Globalistan<\/a> (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com. <\/i><\/p>\n Copyright 2013 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. <\/i><\/p>\n
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