“There are truths which can kill a nation, Agent Mulder, and the military needed something to deflect from its arms strategy: global domination through the capability of total enemy annihilation. The nuclear card was fine as long as we alone could play it, but pointed back at us the generals and politicos knew what they couldn’t win was a public relations war.
Those photos of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were not faces Americans wanted to see in the mirror. Oppenheimer knew it, of course, but we silenced him. When the Russians developed the bomb, the fear in the military was not for safety at home, but for armistice and treaties. The business of America isn’t business, Agent Mulder, it’s war. Since Antietam, nothing has driven the economy faster.” – Michael Kritschgau. Season Five, Redux
“War Is a Racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.” - WWI decorated Major General Smedley Butler, “War Is A Racket” 1935
Many years ago I pretty much came to the conclusion you don’t need contemporary conspiracy theories, when much that transpires in the arena of politics is an open secret, especially with news media venues that under report, ignore key facts, or just gloss over stories altogether. Such is the state of our situation when legitimate reporting is considered ‘liberal bias.’ Many saw this complicity with the media after 9/11, when the drumbeat to go to war in the Middle East ratcheted up a hysteria that misdirected Americans from Afghanistan and Pakistan towards Iraq. With a media that ignored that George Bush was close friends of the Bin Laden family, allowing members of the Bin Laden family to leave the states on 9/11. Or that Bush acquiesced in Saudi Arabia and shut down the Bin Sultan airbase, meeting one of Osama Bin Laden’s demands. Or that the Bush administration lied about chemical weapons in Iraq, or had congress pass the “Patriot Act” under false pretenses, that we could not be safe with conventional safety measures. We always risk the same sets of patterns repeating.
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive,” Sir Walter Scott once observed. The Boston Marathon bombing has become a textbook example of the same mechanizations for deceit, possibly less from our own government than segments of Europe. Some of these developments have forced me to write about these issues, in spite of several pieces I have in the queue. Some of the persistent insanity I see is a byproduct of what Naomi Klein wrote about in “The Shock Doctrine;” also bear in mind that austerity measures have nothing to do with the economy, but with politics. The aim is to disorient the citizen to where, when a tragic event unfolds, no one can get their bearings on a greater agenda, they won’t be able to see the forest from the trees, they will look down at their neighbor, rather than look up and blame oligarchs for their plight. Terrorism has become a great tool to misdirect, and Muslims have become the enemy du jour, guilty until proven innocent. This does not mean that radical Islamists have not given grounds to harbor such mistrust and resentment by Americans; indeed they rightly have done so. But statistically that ratio of domestic terrorism in the States, as well as militias, virus foreign terrorists that have reached our shores, is still higher.
On April, 15th , 2013 the day began typically. There had been countless Boston Marathons that had occurred for years, and then at 2:49 p.m. two explosions rocked the area around the finish line. Three people killed, one a child, countless injured, disfigured, or lost limbs. The police secured the area, initiated a form of Marshall law, and by April 19th, during a lethal chase with the two suspects that had hijacked a car with the aim of heading to New York, they are cornered by police where the older brother and mastermind of the crime, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed in the firefight (Yet according to police reports as well as eyewitness accounts, the brother was actually killed when Dzhokhar ran over him.) The younger brother, Dzhokhar, managed to flee. By 6. p.m. that same evening, Dzhokhar is found hiding in a parked boat in a backyard, tipped off by the resident to the police. Severely injured, Dzhokhar was alive and was interviewed by investigators on the 19th and 20th where it was learned about the makeshift bombs created. I remember all too well, the hope that this action was not connected to Islamic terrorism, but what became all the more complicated was the connection to Russia.
Both were brothers of Chechen origin , and had come to the US a decade ago. Chechnya is a separatist region that has warred with Russia for independence, launching their own terror strikes, and is predominantly Muslim. The more one learned of their father, Anzor Tsarnaev, the more the initial smell test didn’t pass muster from an idyllic family that had adjusted to America life. Both brothers had become radicalized by a mysterious figure known as Misha. Records indicated that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had left the States for six months from Jan 12, to July 17, 2012 for Russia, and was labeled a ‘person of interest’ as a threat to American security on the Friday prior to the bombing. The conflicts in Chechnya had been long standing, as well as Putin’s general hatred towards this region’s Muslims, a past incident with North Ossetia in 2004 having taken on a certain infamy. This is detailed in accounts listed here and above. The Tsarnaev family had been another byproduct of the conflicts, fleeing to Kazakhstan, then the US; thus far, it appeared pretty clear-cut. But further understanding demonstrated that the parents had been eyed by the American government for years, which made it puzzling that the FBI wouldn’t make much of Russia’s request to investigate the brothers, on the face of it, only to then learn of the strained level of co-operation between the America and Russian intelligence agencies. This only gets more interesting with reflection. Of course the media reported breathlessly every detail of the friends and relations of the Tsarnaevs’, but without focusing on and following up on some key questions.
Just prior to the bombing, there was a story about President Obama’s defiance against Putin by publishing a list of 18 blacklisted Russians on April 12th. One has to start making certain connections here and raising certain questions – remember, the traditional tool of terrorism is to change the policy of a rival super-power. Furthermore, reports had indicated by March that relations had deteriorated between the Obama and the Putin administrations over human rights abuses. As well as the increasing death toll of journalists in Russia, harkening back to the days of old mother Russia. The traditional tool of terrorism was to simply highjack a plane and hold the passengers hostage, then that evolved into makeshift bombs on a domestic front, or to use a plane as a bomb, yet one would have to be naïve to believe that the middle east has a monopoly on such tactics. The IRA in Britain is an example.
Let’s go back to the Tsarnaev brothers, and the fact that Tamerlan was never put on a ‘no-fly’ list and allowed to roam freely between America and Russia. Now at this point Dagestan comes into play here, a country that Americans are warned not to visit, yet by many accounts Tsarnaev entered freely, a point that struck me as odd, and a detail that had been under-reported. One pattern emerges, Putin was allowed to appoint Dagestan’s next governor. Now taking into account what is known about Syria in March of 2013 38, one also has to take into account Putin’s doctrine and his move to consolidate power, and his rationalizations. There were also Putin’s ties to Assad to consider. By April 23rd, investigators interviewed the Tsarnaev parents in Dagestan. To complicate matters, there were the three murders that occurred in Waltham in 2011 on the anniversary of 9/11 that Tsarnaev had become connected with, then, the further revelations that the brothers had planned an attack on New York.
There was also the growing issue with Syria and the use of chemical weapons at that time, and the real push by right wingers to start another war in Syria, a game that would have been dangerous in relation to Putin. There’s an argument to be made that Vladimir Putin was trying to win hearts and minds in America due to sentiment against fundamentalist Muslims to validate America’s involvement in the Syria crisis at that moment of the Boston Bombing, and that on a geo-political sense President Obama didn’t bite. Again, there was also the cause and effect fallout on Innocent Muslims with attacks on them in America. Putin’s gambit seemed like it had enough of an impact on a certain percentage of American’s. Yet some were wise to Putin’s effort to exploit the Tsarnaev brother’s links to Checknya.
The following point is conjecture based on pieced-together evidence, that the Putin administration allowed the Tsarnaevs to move so freely, with the hope that a home-made terrorist act would occur, to foster sentiment by Americas, and to send warnings to the Obama administration that Putin’s government could allow more domestic terrorist actions to occur stateside. At the time the drumbeat to stage a war with Syria was growing, vehement, and miscalculated. The drumbeat came from many that called for us to get into an illegal war with Iraq when Bin Laden had no ties to that region. So, exactly then, what mechanizations were on play that I could cite?
There has been a back and forth over the issue of if Russian Intelligence withheld some information about the Tsarnaevs. The Russians had held back a secret telephone conversation that Tsarnaev had recorded with his mother about jihad in 2011. Members of the House Homeland Security committee have argued after focusing on Tsarnaev’s travels to Russia in 2012, if U.S.agencies shared all appropriate information about his comings and goings, if this information over his travels had been more shared with U.S. intelligence, it might have prompted further investigation into Tsarnaev. While it is true that Russian intelligence did ask the FBI in March 2011, they did so. But when the Bureau asked for further details by Russian intelligence, it wasn’t forthcoming.
Was this due to incompetence by both fronts –America and Russia-- or could there had been an act of contrition, orders on high at some level with the Putin administration to only disclose so much information? Were the Tsarnaevs allowed to move so freely between Dagestan and the U.S. as a means to an end? Could the Putin administration have indirectly engineered, or set up the conditions , to allow for a domestic terrorist act in Boston?
It’s a big and vital question, and one where I can’t rule out what Vladimir Putin is capable of.
There was the gamesmanship that occurred over President Obama drawing lines in the sand over Syria, and then not. If Putin was attempting to win over hearts and minds in the U.S., and have America ally with Russia over Syria and President Assad, exactly how is this any different than the role Saudi Arabia played in getting us involved into solving their problems with Iraq and Iran? I don’t see a big difference.
Putin had demonstrated with North Ossetia a ruthlessness that would leave one to assume anything was possible, if Putin was willing to engage in a genocide with Syrian rebels, if we had participated in such actions, it would have been as morally reprehensible as any Muslin terrorist. There’s been a lot of back and forth debate about the issue of Genocide in Syria. But the wrong course of action would have likely lead to World War III.
I don’t also agree with some colleagues that argue that President Obama is sleepwalking through European history, when dealing with powers that have access to nuclear weapons, certain choices remain catastrophic, unlike a region of desert countries that have access to oil. The context of what to do is important, and some of the west options have to be limited, even if I wish that wasn’t the case. Collectively, we all face the same dilemma: to do what is right as opposed to what is easy.
But any theory cited has little basis unless a pattern is established that validates a greater ulterior motive or agenda, which is why the downing of flight MH-17 over Ukrainian territory becomes so important to consider if Putin is willing to utilize a degree of collateral damage that is unprecedented. Bear in mind that by present accounts Russia’s economy is close to collapsing; it has been historically known that a nationalistic fervor has always been a great distraction to obfuscate from realities that could bring down a leader. We will explore those questions, and if those connections hold valid weight in part 2.
To be continued…
Thanks to Xscribe for editorial assistance
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