They were ethnic Chechen refugees. Their faith was Islam, but they weren’t radical Muslims, at least not at first. Although their mother said the boys were under FBI surveillance for years; the agency feared they were drifting towards radical Islam. But Zubeidat Tsaraev herself had gotten in trouble at Lord and Taylor’s for shoplifting woman’s clothes valued at $1,624, and two counts of wanton damage. In this refugee family, there is a miasma of shifting details like the people themselves.
Of the two Tsarnaev brothers, Tamerlan, 26, had permanent US residency, and Dzhokhar, 19, was a US citizen. Those who knew him said he was not religious. But there were family connections to the Chechen Republic that dated back many years. The father was an ethnic Chechen born in Kyrgyzstan who worked in Dagestan for years. He described his young son as a “true angel. He had plans to go to medical school.” Investigators were advised to look at the latter years of the brothers’ lives, and where their support came from, rather than dwell on their younger years in Dagestan in the Russian Federation.
A bigger question, as Wayne Madsen points out in Boston Marathon’s alleged bombers tied to Chechnya, was who had picked up the tab for the brothers, sponsoring them to live in the U.S., and paying for college tuition, military training abroad, for Tamerlan’s mixed martial arts training in Boston? Were they sponsored by the late Russian-Israeli tycoon Boris Berezovsky? Or George Soros’ Open Society Institute, which helped Chechen exiles, some who associated with Doka Umarov, who claimed responsibility for a number of terrorist bombings in Russia, a high-speed Moscow-St. Petersburg train, Domodedovo International Airport, the Moscow Metro stations.
Dzhokhar won a scholarship competition from the city of Cambridge in 2011. Tamerlan was found to have posted videos associated with radicals, Al Qaeda-linked “Black Banners of Khurusan, Feiz Muhammad, an Australian Muslim cleric who condemned Harry Potter books and films.
In the middle of endless, mindless coverage and the rush for unverified scoops, the corporate media’s New York Post blatantly identified the wrong suspects before the police could positively point out the suspects’ true identities. It wreaked havoc in the life of at least the college student who the New York Post fingered and who has talked about the nightmare it caused him.
In fact, just after the surveillance tape was released late Thursday, it showed Dzhokhar during a 7–11 robbery in Cambridge near MIT. It is here where a university police officer Sean Collier was killed while responding to a report of a disturbance. He died of multiple gunshot wounds. From there, the brothers carjacked a man in a Mercedes-Benz, keeping him with them in the car for half an hour before he escaped at a gas station in Cambridge.
The chase ended in Watertown, where police claimed the suspects threw explosive devices from the car and exchanged gunfire with them. It was here that Tamerlan was killed, as doctors said, from multiple wounds from gunshots and possibly the blast of an explosive. The chase led to Watertown, and a massive manhunt.
The next night, Dzhokhar was discovered hiding in a motorboat stored in a driveway under a blood-stained tarpaulin. He did not surrender to a SWAT team. They went in and grabbed him at some point, after hours of mindless television waited for his corpse. But he was not killed. An ambulance came to the scene and took him away to the hospital where he was said to have a serious throat wound and loss of blood. He’s still recovering and writing not verbally answering authorities’ questions.
Yet, it is truly a disgrace that the “public safety exception” was initially used in order not to read Dzhokhar his rights, skirting the Miranda rule.
Bottom line: on top of the New York Post’s egregious reporting, the law itself got away with locking down a whole American city to the acquiescence of the corporate media, working overtime to ramp up public fear and wallow in the tragedy of this heinous act. Unfortunately, the ease that the law got away with locking down Boston amounts to martial law. Will “shelter in place,” as authorities euphemistically called martial law (a.k.a. “lockdown”), be declared any time an incident happens or a false flag is pulled off? And that is not even to mention the inane speculation that spewed from the corporate media.
Dzhokhar, ironically, was a 9/11 Truther [not a denier]. He certainly believed it happened, but was not carried out by Muslims but rather the US government and the usual suspects. At some point he wrote, “A decade in America and already I want out.” Dzhokhar graduated from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School in 2011. He seemed to have many friends on campus and was well-liked.
His brother bitterly complained, “Ten years and I only have one friend in America.” That is the statement of a seriously disillusioned man. But both these boys were aware of the chaos of war in Chechnya. It would seem the pain, death and general insanity of it stuck to them like two more casualties of the War on Terror. Why them? Why not?
Thus, let me not forget the victims (3 dead and 180 wounded) by whomever or whatever created this horrific event. Invariably it is the faces in the crowd who perish or survive and are forgotten, except in the memory of their families and friends. But a seemingly unending death has hovered over the War on Terror for these dozen years. It is more like a War of Error, wrongly started, painfully continued, forever confusing the confused and renewing itself, making everyone but those who created it pay for it. One wonders why two presidents and all our brilliant leaders have not found a way to end it; to bring us a spring of peace that displays the life to enliven us all and bring us back from the dark side.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer and life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.
I would suggest that there is little chance of the “war on terror” ending any time soon. Our runaway military establishment has no limits on its ambitions and consumption and civilian control of that complex is nominal. A constant terrorist threat is the public justification for its existence. What does it matter that almost all of the terror plots discovered since 9/11 would not have happened without the connivance of security agencies, especially the FBI? The black magic of the major media have been able to hypnotize the American people into believing that “terrorism”, domestic and foreign, is such a great threat that we must bankrupt our treasury and trash our constitution in its name. One can only sit back in wonder at the surreal spectacle of one hundred square miles of one of our major cities put under a state of siege, all transport shut down, thousands of cops stuffed into full combat gear and supported by armored cars and helicopters, squads going from door to door, bellowing threats at the innocents within to come out on the double with their hands over their heads, all of this in a failed attempt to capture one badly wounded teenager. I would have supposed that more of my fellow citizens would have noted the bizarre disproportionality of the response. But no, most folks seem to get perverse pleasure out of being involved in these performances, so much like reality TV, note the relish with which media figures and citizens alike pronounce “sheltering in” and “lock down”. Cowering and house arrest is more like it. Note the adulation given the “brave” hordes of armored cops who seemed to be willing to take a chance on absolutely nothing. I would like to warn my fellow citizens that they should be careful what they encourage. This outrageous exercise was certainly not done to capture a single criminal, this was a staged event to test the waters, to see what they can get away with and it came off with disgraceful success. The imposition of a state of siege, martial law, at the drop of a hat and for any reason whatsoever, is now on the books in this country. And, my fellow citizens, if you are threatened by “terrorists”, let me give you and idea of what a protracted state of siege might look like. New Orleans and coastal areas of Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina were under martial law. My wife and I were volunteers at an evacuee shelter in Jennings, Louisiana in the immediate aftermath of the storm. We heard many, many sorry tales from those folks of the savagery and neglect of those that were supposed to “protect and serve” them. They were given no help whatsoever and were treated as threats to the public order rather than victims needing help. These tales of abuse were confirmed by almost everyone we encountered, white or black. The uncaring arbitrariness of some decisions of those in charge defied imagination. A trailer truck full of bottled water donated by Walmart was refused permission to deliver it to the stadium where thousands sheltered because the police declared the area “unsecured”. That very stadium where thousands languished without basic services for six days was never cut off by flood waters, it was cut off by the town of Gretna, across the river, when they posted an armed roadblock on the bridge, firing into the air when people tried to escape. They claimed they couldn’t handle the influx, not even for folks simply passing through. So, my fellow citizens, be careful of what you approve of and encourage and recall that manhunt for a cop killer in California a couple of months ago. In their undisciplined zeal during the hunt, they shot three innocent people who didn’t look like the suspect at all.
RE Tony Vodvarka: Well, Ton, you said it all. Frightened people made that way by a staged terror attack. They then relent their rights, their dignity, and their sanity. Is that it? Or did I miss it? In New Orleans as in Boston this happens, so we can rule out any ideas of white superiority. By the way, did you notice how few black people were present in Boston throughout the entire shebang? Very few. Yup, them Jihadis got to be punished, so let’s tear down the town all you pahk yah cah in the pahking lot types behave. A million people loose their sanity for four days. And a Muslim teenager wakes up from four gunshot wounds and is questioned for 13 hours, nor read his Miranda rights till it’s over. Google 21st Century Wire: “Actors, Directors and Bloody Squibs: Was the Boston Bombing Pure Hollywood?” It’s a great analysis of the surveillance photos and text.
Regards,
Jerry.
Dear JM, Indeed, this affair is entirely through the looking glass in several different ways. The photos of the double amputee seem to be particularly damning. There are two or three frames of him with his stumps held high over the hoodie man and the black lady and neither has any blood on them. The smoking gun seems to be a photo match of the double amputee with an Afghan War veteran who lost both legs in action. When my wife, a nurse practitioner with many years of experience in emergency rooms and a former Air Force flight nurse, saw a press photo of the bombing site taken from above after all the victims had been cleared, say three hours after the explosion, the blood stains on the pavement were still bright red and she immediately noted that shed blood should have turned brownish black by that time. On top of all of this are the video clips of what seem to be the older brother being arrested quite alive and being put naked into a patrol car and the younger brother emerging from the boat without any blood on his shirt and unarmed. As happens so often these days, something is really stinko here. Another disastrous day in our country’s history.
Great stuff Jezza man! I love almost everything you write. Good analysis and straight to the point without BS. I’m sorry but I hope your society soon dies since its existence causes so much pain. It can’t be much longer that the US dollar is the currency-of-trade in the world and I hope that yourselves can resign quietly.
Re:David Nielson: It’s true our society’s existence causes much pain. But that pain is firstly on us, its citizens. And it’s getting worse, because the government and the Americans still asleep are acclimating themselves to the pain, a la boiling frogs. And one day, zzzzzt, they/we will all be gone. It won’t be a pretty sight. Just a burst of fast pain, a flash of one’s life, and then we’re wind. BTW, another play variation on my name is Jazza, because I love to play jazz on ze piano. It takes me away from it all, like being in the woods. So that’s my escapist answer.
Regards,
Jazza Jezza.