Things go boom

[Cain]

Kushen Taramov, friend of Todashev who was himself interviewed at Todashev's flat shortly before his killing, says five people were present at the interview.  One FBI man, two Mass. state police troopers, and two other, unidentified personnel.

The initial FBI statement strongly implied five or more people were present, when it said "The agent, two Massachusetts State Police troopers, and other law enforcement personnel were interviewing an individual in connection with the Boston Marathon bombing investigation when a violent confrontation was initiated by the individual."

Now, however, AP, the NYT, and CBS are all saying that only three people were conducting the interviews.

This stinks to high heaven.

[Junkenstein]

Those witness transcripts are going to be a fucking hoot.

When you're arguing about shit like how many people in the room,there's no fucking chance that anyone saw anything ever. At all.

[Cain]

If you're not subscribed to NSFWCorp already, you should be:

https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/prisoners-of-the-caspian-part-one/

We've had two deadly jihadi attacks in this country since the start of the new century: 9/11 and the Boston Marathon. In both cases, Washington's highly-politicized position on Chechen separatists played a key role in making it harder for FBI agents to prevent those attacks from happening.

The entrenched idea that Chechen separatists have not and do not engage in jihadi terrorism; that they pose no threat to the West; and that anyone who thinks or says otherwise should be distrusted — these false premises have framed a dangerously misguided policy in which Chechen radicals have been protected and nurtured — at the expense of American lives. The neocons, the same crowd that suckered Americans into invading Iraq, played a front-and-center role in whitewashing Chechen jihadi terrorism, and defining our disastrous policies in the Caucasus. The Boston Marathon bombings are, in no small part, blowback from the neocon love affair with Chechen terrorism.

https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/prisoners-of-the-caspian-part-two/

n 1995, Basayev's guerrillas took control over Budyonnovsk, a city of 60,000 about 50 miles north of Chechnya's border. The Chechen guerrillas stormed into the town's city center in KamAZ trucks, fired their weapons and ran through the city center, herding up to 1,800 Russian hostages into a city hospital, which they rigged up with mines. Some hostages were executed in cold blood to keep the others in line; others were forced to stand in front of the windows as human shields. At times, the TV news cameras would film a limp, lifeless Russian body dumped out of a hospital window, onto the ground below, as terrified hostages waved torn white sheets from inside.

One Russian hostage, a pregnant 18-year-old woman named Natalya Ageykina, told reporters how her captors forced her at gunpoint to stand in front of a window while the Chechen rebels fired from behind her. As Russian special forces outside fired back, her Chechens captors taunted her: "We are going to watch your own soldiers killing you." She was shot twice, and survived.

In all, over 130 hostages were killed. The commander of that raid, Shamil Basayev, awed the Western journalists who watched him fight off Russian commandoes and somehow make it back safely into Chechnya, to a hero's welcome. In the aftermath, most of the Western anger and outrage was aimed at Russians, whom they accused of brutality and of placing little value on human life.

"Body parts were regularly sawed off of people, including little girls and boys, on videotape. Then the videotapes were sent to their families along with the severed body parts. Such things were common and frequent occurrences throughout those three years. There were places in Chechnya where dozens of victims were kept in small cages, like animals. Many people were chained, sometimes by their necks in tiny dark holes. I know someone who was kept in Chechen cellar with a couple inches of water entirely covering the floor. These things happened to some of my friends.... Also, it happened to a lot of people that I don't know. When I was in Dagestan in 1998 it seemed that nearly every apartment building, sometimes nearly every stairwell, had someone who had been kidnapped, beaten and tortured in Chechnya. That was certainly true of my apartment building."

At the "slave market" it was possible, not only to negotiate the sale, purchase, and exchange operations, but also to secure a so-called "trademark." Well- known group leaders and field commanders accepted responsibility for abductions that might be committed a thousand kilometers from Chechnya. All the subsequent talks were conducted in that commander's name, and should the operation be successful, he would take a percentage of the ransom "for lending his trademark." By using the name of a field commander notorious for his cruelty, a kidnapper of lesser renown could cover his tracks and also demand a larger ransom.

The best-known "trademarks" were often used by groups within Chechnya. The most notorious case culminated in the murder of four engineers, three Britons and one New Zealander, in 1998 as a result of clashes between Chechen groups over a "trademark." The kidnappers had used Arbi Barayev's name in a prior operation, obtained the ransom, and returned the hostage to his family. Barayev, who had consented to the use of his name in the talks, demanded his share of the ransom for the use of his "trademark" but never got it. Barayev's group then abducted the four foreigners and claimed a ransom of $10 million for them. Chechen Telecom, the organization that had invited the foreign engineers to Chechnya, agreed to pay, but Barayev unexpectedly refused to release them and beheaded them instead. There's a popular version that some third party [i.e., Bin Laden — M.A.] had interfered and paid Barayev more for the heads of the engineers.

https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/prisoners-of-the-caspian-part-three/

sing a fake passport under a fake name — "Mr. Amin" — Zawahiri and his two Egyptian jihadi cohorts met up with a group of Chechens near the border with the Russian republic of Dagestan. The Chechens promised to guide Zawahiri through Dagestan, and into Chechnya. But as soon as they crossed over the Azeri-Russian border, Zawahiri was arrested by local Dagestani police, and handed over to the FSB.

The FSB locked Zawahiri and his two Egyptian jihadis in a jail in Dagestan while they investigated who "Mr. Amin" really was, and why they had come there. At the same time in Dagestan, radical Salafi Islam was spreading throughout the republic, particularly on the border with Chechnya. Its popularity was a result of rampant domestic corruption and unemployment, the violence in Chechnya, and funding from outside the region (primarily the Gulf states) and from foreign jihadi radicals like the Saudi-born Ibn al-Khattab.

The FSB suspected that Zawahiri was hiding his real reason for coming, and that the reason was jihad. But thanks to the intervention of rich, powerful forces, the FSB was blocked from conducting a full investigation into Zawahiri's true identity and intentions (sound familiar?). As the Wall Street Journal reported, Zawahiri had some powerful guardian angels looking after him:

The Russian investigators and a lawyer who defended the trio were puzzled by a groundswell of support for them from local Islamic organizations. These included groups that had embraced the fundamentalist form of Islam known as Wahhabism and received funding from Saudi Arabia, where the sect emerged two centuries ago. Twenty-six clerics signed an appeal for release of the three "merchants." One local Muslim accused a Russian investigator of doing "the devil's work" by detaining the three.

    A member of Russia's parliament, Nadyr Khachiliev, who had founded a group called the Muslim Union of Russia, wrote to Dagestan's highest court that the three "businessmen" had come to "study the market for food trade" and should be freed. Mr. Khachiliev, a wiry former boxer linked by the police to a string of violent attacks, denies any tie to extremism. Interviewed in his gothic brick mansion in Makhachkala, its outer wall and metal door pock-marked from gunfire, Mr. Khachiliev today says he can't recall any imprisoned Arabs.

The name "Nadyr Khachiliev" —also spelled "Khachilaev" as other media have spelled it — is back in the news, this time involving Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The radical Salafist mosque in Makhachkala on Kotrova Street that Tamerlan regularly attended last year is also known as the "Khachilaev Mosque" — named after the same Khachilaev who sprang Al Qaeda's current leader from his Dagestan jail.

In 1998, a year after he freed Zawahiri from jail, Khachilaev — founder of the Union of Muslims in Russia — became a wanted man after he and his brother raised an army of 200 gunmen and stormed Dagestan's main government building in the capital Makhachkala. The Russian Duma stripped Khachilaev of his parliamentary immunity, and he fled into Chechnya. Khachilaev had long pushed for unifying Chechnya and Dagestan into a single Islamic Emirate on the Caspian Sea coast — the same goal pursued by other jihadi radicals including Khattab, Shamil Basayev and Doku Umarov.

In 2000, just as his mosque was being built on Kotrova Street, Khachilaev was arrested and put on trial in Makhachkala, in what locals called "The Trial of the Century." He was convicted, and then swiftly pardoned on the promise that he would give up radical Islamic activism. That same year, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev moved to Makhachkala, Dagestan with their family from Kyrgyzstan.

Two years later, in 2002, Khachilaev was arrested over the IED bombing of a Russian convoy in Makhachkala that left seven Russian soldiers dead. In 2003, Khachilaev was gunned down in a hail of bullets. That same year, Tamerlan joined his brother and family in Boston, where they were granted political asylum.

When the media learned that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had spent the first six months of 2012 in Makhachkala, the big question everyone wanted answered was: Did Tamerlan frequent the infamous "Khachilaev Mosque" on Kotrova Street? The mosque that Khachilaev founded and built before his murder had become a magnet for Dagestani and Chechen terrorists over the past decade. For example, the jihadis who had set off the deadly bombing at a 2002 May Day parade in southern Dagestan, killing over 40 and scattering limbs around the parade grounds, were discovered hiding in the "Khachilaev Mosque."

Finally it was confirmed: Yes, Tamerlan had frequented the "Khachilaev Mosque" — the radical Salafi mosque founded by the Al Qaeda leader's local savior.

[Cain]

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/06/01/representative-william-keating-says-russian-officials-were-forthcomng-bombings-fbi-has-been-quiet/USMYNeWPuCIgVkzBF5iEIL/story.html

Keating said that Ibragim Todashev, the 27-year-old friend of Tsarnaev who was shot and killed by an FBI agent in Orlando on May 22, was mentioned by name in intelligence exchanges between US and Russian officials on April 21. The nature of that citation, he said, remains unclear.

[Cain]

Well, the American press and commentariat seem to have decided who is morally responsible for the Boston Bombings: Putin.

According to no less than five different sources I've read just today, Putin is a scheming, Machiavellian bastard who is playing the American public like a chessboard.

Yes, the FSB are overstating just how helpful they were to American agencies.  Yes the FSB kept the full extent of their surveillance against the Tsarnaev's, and the sources of their information, quiet.

But at the same time, does anyone remember what happened the last time radical Islamists carried out a successful attack in the USA?  Oh yes, America attacked the secular dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.  Maybe, just maybe, Putin is overstating how helpful the FSB were because he has an appreciation for how the American political machine "thinks"....which is to say, it does not when the opportunity to use force presents itself.

Incidentally, all those neocons and shifty private intelligence and oil and gas firms who had a role in stoking the Chechen conflict and, it would seem, the radicalization of the Tsarnaev's?  Not a word.

Just more evidence that when anything bad happens, and Russia is somehow involved, Putin is obviously to blame.  The American Left had Bush Derangement Syndrome, and the American Right suffer from Obama Derangement Syndrome, but it seems America as a whole suffers from Putin Derangement Syndrome.

[Count Chocula]

Oh the lengths America will go to inflate the price of gasoline.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

Cain, what do you make of this? Really dead or no?

http://english.pravda.ru/news/world/24-05-2013/124656-boston_terrorist_fbi_agents_killed-0/

The FBI agents, who eliminated Boston terrorist Tamerlan Tsarnaev, died as they fell out of a helicopter, the press service of the FBI said.
...
An official statement from the FBI says that special agents Christopher Lorek and Stephen Shaw fell out of a helicopter while training a complex exercise. The agents were supposed to be lowered on a rope on a ship from a helicopter. For yet unknown reasons, the two agents fell out of the helicopter and were killed in the fall.

[Junkenstein]

Timing certainly looks bad, and I would lean towards actually dead.

I'm basing that on the FBI looking a bit gung-ho of late, so not following procedures resulting in fatalities during training does not seem in the realms of the impossible.

So taking the stance of "Dead", how likely is it that this is an accident? Given the overall situation, I would suspect if it was not a fall from a helicopter, it would have been a diving/driving/ accident or the like. Something where a simple fuck-up can kill you and it's also pretty easy to sabotage.

Or these highly trained and qualified agents were both stupid enough to fall out of a fucking helicopter.


Fuck, I'm struggling to balance potential/probable idiocy against potential/probable conspiracy. Fucking humanity, too much of both everywhere. 

[Cain]

FYI, Pravda is not in any way a reliable news source.  It's funnier than it was under Communism, but that is about all that has changed.

They are dead, but the FBI is being typically tight-lipped about the nature of the training accident that occured.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

Thanks. Strange that it was both of them. And now.
I probably need to let it go before I end up at Infowars or something. 

[LMNO]

Wait, what?

Ok, I'm not one for CT-jumping, but what the fuck? How is this not in the least bit suspicious?

[Cain]

Oh, it is.  It may still be a genuine accident, I don't have enough information to pass judgement.

Who what how where why still applies though.

What would be the motive in killing them, who would gain from it and how did they do it, if it was indeed more than just an accident.  Were they involved in the wider investigation, or did they just participate in the lockdown shootout with Tamerlan?  We know officers involved in that lied about how heavily armed he was...but that's hardly enough reason to kill someone.

[LMNO]

Ok.... Point. Taking into account the prior of murder as reality rather than fiction does require a lot to shift.

[Doktor Howl]

Wait, what?

Ok, I'm not one for CT-jumping, but what the fuck? How is this not in the least bit suspicious?

SAY IT WITH ME:

ONE MAN, ACTING ALONE, KILLED JOHN F KENNEDY.
ONE MAN, ACTING ALONE, KILLED JOHN F KENNEDY.
ONE MAN, ACTING ALONE, KILLED JOHN F KENNEDY.

[LMNO]

Does anyone have a second source, or a confirmation that these two guys were the ones who capped the kid?