Things go boom

[Faust]

Hey at least you didn't nearly get the wrong guy killed like reddit and 4chan did.

[Cainad (dec.)]

Somebody killed the kid who was wrongly identified on Reddit, etc. 
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2013/04/25/boston-bombing-social-media-student-brown-university-reddit/2112309/

The student found dead had been missing since the middle of March: http://www.abc6.com/story/21665412/providence-police-seek-missing-person

I think forensic evidence still needs to come to light before we know if he died/was killed before or after the bombings. It's certainly still a possibility that he was killed by the witch hunt.

[Faust]

I suppose accusing someone who had died in an accident/ commited suicide / was murdered as the killer using CSI racial profiling isn't quite as bad as what I imagined.

[Suu]

Somebody killed the kid who was wrongly identified on Reddit, etc. 
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2013/04/25/boston-bombing-social-media-student-brown-university-reddit/2112309/

The student found dead had been missing since the middle of March: http://www.abc6.com/story/21665412/providence-police-seek-missing-person

I think forensic evidence still needs to come to light before we know if he died/was killed before or after the bombings. It's certainly still a possibility that he was killed by the witch hunt.

His body was said to have been in the river for "a long time." It looks like a suicide.

[Cain]

Hopsicker casts doubt on the "chubby red-haired Armenian exorcist" Misha, who is allegedly the radical who influenced the Boston bombers:

Tsarni's vivid description seemed to be taken from personal observation, from, in other words...real life. But that isn't possible. Tsarni had stated he hadn't been physically in the presence of his Boston relatives since December 2005. And Misha, if he existed, didn't show up on the scene until 2008 at the earliest.

In any other context, this might be seen as the rankest kind of "conspiracy theory." But, apparently, when the Associated Press does it, its news.

Then Uncle Ruslan made a clear mis-step.

"An uncle of the alleged bombers claims that Misha, an Armenian convert to Islam, had a huge influence on the elder brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Describing him as an "Armenia exorcist, Tsarni said, "Somehow he just took his brain."

Armenians are a deeply-rooted Christian community, which is proud of the fact that their country was the first in the world to adopt Christianity as state religion in 301 AD.

Moreover this is the week every year when they remember the Armenian Holocaust, when as many as 1,000,000 Armenians were slaughtered by Turkish Muslims.

In the large and close-knit Boston Armenian community, a red-bearded Armenian named Misha becoming a radicalized Muslim would stand out.

"I've never heard of him, nor has anyone that I know," Hilda Avedissian, executive director at the Armenian Cultural & Educational Centre

Also included in the article is additional information showing that Uncle Ruslan married the daughter of Graham Fuller, who is National Security State aristocracy.  CIA station Chief in Kabul, expert on Islamic extremism, the inspiration behind Iran-Contra...just a few snippets from his biography.  Tsarnaev incorporated the Congress of Chechen International Organizations in Maryland using Fuller's address, too.

The CCIO seems to not just be your average NGO either, going by this letter.  The Shaikh Fathi mentioned is "an ethnic Chechen from Jordan who had come to Chechnya in 1995. At that time, Fathi formed a unit of those who had recently arrived from the Middle East. His unit soon began to expand at the expense of other Chechen groups, as many fighters were attracted to his methods and equipment. Fathi's brigade was well outfitted and had no financial problems, in contrast to the Chechen units, which often looked bedraggled compared to his unit. Before coming to Chechnya, Sheikh Fathi had extensive military experience in Afghanistan and Tadjikistan. Despite his advanced years (he was well over 60, at the time), Fathi decided to devote himself to the struggle against the Russian occupation of Chechnya."

http://www.jamestown.org/single/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=2859 (source)

Just saying.

[Cain]

Looks like there is a new suspect in the ricin case: Everett Dutschke.

[Cain]

Russians contacted US counterterrorism officials no less than four times:

The picture emerging Wednesday was of a counterterrorism bureaucracy that had at least four contacts with Russian spy services about Mr. Tsarnaev in the year before he took a six-month trip to Russia in 2012, but never found reason to investigate him further after he returned, or at any time before last week's attacks in Boston that killed 3 people and injured more than 260.

The Russians had a phone tap on him, as well:

Russian authorities secretly recorded a telephone conversation in 2011 in which one of the Boston bombing suspects had a conversation with his mother of a radical nature, officials confirmed to CBS News correspondent Bob Orr Saturday, days after the U.S. government finally received details about the call.

In another conversation, the mother of now-dead bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev was recorded talking to someone in southern Russia who is under FBI investigation in an unrelated case, officials told The Associated Press.

The conversations are significant because, had they been revealed earlier, they might have been enough evidence for the FBI to initiate a more thorough investigation of the Tsarnaev family.

As it was, Russian authorities told the FBI only that they had concerns that Tamerlan and his mother were religious extremists. With no additional information, the FBI conducted a limited inquiry and closed the case in June 2011.

[Cain]

Saudi Arabia also sent warnings about the Boston bombers:

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia sent a written warning about accused Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2012, long before pressure-cooker blasts killed three and injured hundreds, according to a senior Saudi government official with direct knowledge of the document.

[...]

Citing security concerns, the Saudi government also denied an entry visa to the elder Tsarnaev brother in December 2011, when he hoped to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, the source said. Tsarnaev's plans to visit Saudi Arabia have not been previously disclosed.

Now this does smell a bit funky in places, but it seems to be confirmed by sources with knowledge of the warning in the USA.  On the whole I think it is valid, but possibly not telling us the whole story.  The article has something of a feel of a government information operation about it, which raises the question: why?

Incidentally, Daniel Hopsicker has confirmed my above research, to the point I'm wondering if we are reading each other:

What does this have to do with the Boston Marathon bombing?

One clue: The President of "Uncle Ruslan's" Congress of Chechen Organizations International, an expatriate Penn State engineering professor Mohammed Sishani, conducted almost all of his business through another organization he led, called the Chechen-Ingush Society of America.

All of his aboveboard business, that is. Ruslan's outfit surfaced for the dirty bits, the covert side of the Chechen's cause.

Was Ruslan Tsarni's organization acting as a free agent? Or was it a "cut-out" for the CIA, a convenient way to establish plausible deniability while executing decisions made by U.S. intelligence agencies, who were apparently interceding on the side of people we were calling "rebels" instead of "terrorists" for no reason other than it suited American objectives for Russian forces to get bogged down in a series of bitter civil wars?

Were such actions US policy at the time? Some say the answer is "yes." Wikileaks cables seem to agree.

America's fostering of a jihadist mercenary force in Afghanistan led directly to the blowback that became the 9/11 attack.

The creation of a "second Afghanistan" in the Caucasus may also have led to blowback: the unintended consequences of a covert operation. The result was in bombs going off in Boston.

Were two young jihadis from the North Caucasus region of Russia recruited to become Islamist terrorists and attack the United States at the Boston Marathon?

Questions remain. No, questions don't "remain." They "abound."

The elder Fuller had retired from the agency almost a decade before the brief marriage," wrote the reporter he selected to give him a sympathetic hearing.

If he'd retired, and taken up horticulture, or origami, or golfing in Florida wearing lime-green sweater-slack combinations, rumors that his ex-son-in-law had connections with the CIA might indeed be absurd.

Was that how Mr. Fuller was spending his well-deserved retirement? Nope... He was working for RAND Corporation.

It was a busman's holiday. But there was also something else... Uncle Ruslan Tsarni's company, back in 1996, was actively aiding Islamic terrorists in Chechnya.

And there's no telling what he's up to now, because a story last week revealed that he was working for the US Government, again. And again, it was USAID. This time, since 2008.

Using the home address of a top CIA official under President Ronald Reagan, who had also, and perhaps not coincidentally, been the author of a famous memo that eventually led Oliver North to step off a plane in Iran with TOW missiles in one hand and a cake for the Ayatollah in the other, Ruslan Tsarni's Congress of Chechens put into practice the CIA's unacknowledged policy in the former Soviet Republics.

He's been stirring up shit on Russia's southern border.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I guess my question is... if they receive warnings about an American citizen, and investigate and find nothing, what should the follow-up be? Are they looking for public approval to arrest and indefinitely detain citizens on the basis of suspicion aroused by warnings from other governments? I thought they already had that.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

If that's the case, well, "fair dos".

[Cain]

I guess my question is... if they receive warnings about an American citizen, and investigate and find nothing, what should the follow-up be? Are they looking for public approval to arrest and indefinitely detain citizens on the basis of suspicion aroused by warnings from other governments? I thought they already had that.

That's a hard one, I'll agree.

I don't think any answer will be found exclusively by looking at the domestic US political situation.  The international linkages abound in this case, and that suggests the answer lies at least partly in files in Riyadh and Moscow, and possibly Grozny and Sana'a too.  Though there does need to be some accounting for why US counter-terrorism took such a hands off approach with the brothers, when they have been anything but in other cases, with much less evidence.

[Suu]

They arrested 3 more people, apparently.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

Wha...?

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Wha...?

Three of his friends that removed things from his home after the bombings.

[Cain]

A lawyer representing Azamat Tazhayakov and Dias Kadyrbayev - both from Kazakhstan - said the pair had been held in jail for more than a week for allegedly violating their student visas, the Associated Press reported.

They are due to appear in court on Wednesday afternoon over separate federal charges related to the bombings investigation, the AP reported.