By Russ Baker on Apr 10, 2014
That’s what the New York Times says. Had the Russians told the Americans
everything they knew about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the bombing might have been
averted by the FBI. The Times knows
this because it was told so by an anonymous “senior American official” who got
an advance look at a report from the “intelligence community.”
***
Anyone who still entertains the fantasy
that America is a vigorous, healthy democracy with an honest and reliable
security apparatus and an honest, competent, vigilant media need only consider
this major news leak just published as a New York Times exclusive. It pretty
much sums up the fundamental corruption of our institutions, the lack of
accountability, and the deep-dyed complicity of the “finest” brand in American
journalism.
Killing
Two Birds with One Stone
Just days before the first anniversary
of the Boston bombing on April 15, some unnamed “senior American official” puts
the blame for the bombing squarely on…Vladimir Putin.
It takes a keen understanding of
certain members of the American media to know they will promote, without
question, the latest “intelligence community” version of events. Which is that
responsibility for the second largest “terror attack” after 9/11 should be
pinned on the Russians, currently America’s bête
noir over Ukraine.
Consider the cynical manipulation of
public opinion involved here. The
government permits, presumably authorizes, a high official—the Attorney General
or someone of that status, perhaps even the Vice President—to leak confidential
information for no apparent purpose beyond seeking to put a damper on
legitimate inquiries into the behavior of the American government at the most
fundamental level.
And the world’s vaunted “newspaper of
record”—its brand largely based on insider access and the willingness of
powerful figures to give it “hot stuff” in return for controlling public
perceptions— shamelessly runs this leak with no attempt to question its timing
or provenance.
Let’s look at what this article
actually says. Here’s the opening paragraph:
The Russian government declined to
provide the FBI with information about one of the Boston marathon bombing
suspects two years before the attack that likely would have prompted more
extensive scrutiny of the suspect, according to an inspector general’s review
of how U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies could have thwarted the
bombing.
And here’s the “takeaway”:
While the review largely exonerates the
FBI, it does say that agents in the Boston area who investigated the Russian
intelligence in 2011 could have conducted a few more interviews when they first
examined the information.
The FBI agents also could have ordered
turkey sandwiches instead of pastrami, which surely would have been a little
healthier.
***
So, New
York Times, should we trust the anonymous individual, or more importantly,
the report that none of us have seen?
The report was produced by the
inspector general of the Intelligence Community, which has responsibility for
17 separate agencies, and the inspectors general from the Department of
Homeland Security and the Central Intelligence Agency.
Now, the Times doesn’t offer any useful context on why these reviews took
place, beyond a pro forma effort to
respond to complaints from a handful of congressional members (see this
and this).
The article does not address the quality or credibility of this
“self-investigation” and the overall track record of these investigators. Nor
does it express undue interest in why the report appears to have been finished
just in time for the anniversary of the bombing.
In our view, the article is one hundred
percent “stovepiping.” That’s when claimed raw intelligence is transmitted
directly to an end user without any attempt at scrutiny or skepticism. This is
irresponsible journalism, and it is the kind of behavior (from The New
York Times again) that smoothed the way for the U.S. to launch the Iraq war
in 2003.
The Times
doesn’t even point out how self-serving the report is, coming from an
“intelligence community” that has been publicly criticized for its actions
leading up to the Boston Marathon bombing and its behavior since. (For more on
the dozens of major reasons not to trust anything the authorities say about the
Boston Bombing, see this, this,
and this.
For perspective on the media’s cooperation with the FBI in essentially
falsifying the Bureau’s record throughout its history, see this).
Now let’s consider the core substance
of the new revelations:
[A]fter an initial investigation by the
F.B.I., the Russians declined several requests for additional information about
Mr. Tsarnaev….
Did the Times ask the Russians about this? Did they find out if the
Russians actually “declined” several requests, or whether they ever got back to
the FBI?
The anonymous official notes one
specific piece of evidence that the Russians did not share until after the
bombing: that intercepted telephone conversations between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and
his mother included discussions of Islamic jihad. The official speculates that
this information might have given the FBI greater authority to conduct
surveillance of the suspects.
However,
the reality is that the Russians had already warned that Tamerlan was an
Islamic radical, and it is not clear how this additional information would
necessarily have provided anything truly substantive to add to a request for
spying authority.
It’s also highly questionable, based in
part on Edward Snowden’s revelations, whether the FBI or the NSA were
actually adhering to such restrictions on spying anyway. Finally,
it’s worth noting how truly remarkable it is that the Russians shared such
intelligence at all. That they didn’t want to volunteer that they were
capturing telephone calls is not that surprising, on the other hand.
Hiding
the Real Story?
The Times
does mention, almost in passing, what should have been the key point of an
article: the timing of the “news” regarding the report:
It has not been made public, but
members of Congress are scheduled to be briefed on it Thursday, and some of its
findings are expected to be released before Tuesday, the first anniversary of
the bombings.
This leak, which clears the FBI of all
charges of incompetence or worse, comes just when the “American conversation”
will again intensely focus on the nature of the “war on terror” and the
trustworthiness of our vast secret state.
It also comes, most conveniently for
the Bureau, at the precise moment when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s defense counsel has
been seeking to learn the exact chronology and nature of the FBI’s interaction
with the Tsarnaev family.
Months ago, we ran Peter Dale Scott’s rumination
on whether the FBI could have recruited Tamerlan Tsarnaev as an informant, as
it has done thousands of times before with other immigrants of a similar
profile. Recently, the defense for Tamerlan’s younger brother, Dzhokhar,
essentially claimed this was correct—that the Bureau at least attempted to
recruit the older Tsarnaev. That has been cursorily reported
by the major media, but no one seems to have connected the dots linking this
claim to the new report that conveniently exonerates the FBI for failing to
take action against the Tsarnaevs in time to stop the bombing.
A
Curious Little Slip
As we have previously reported, it was the same duo of New York Times national security reporters,
Schmidt and Schmitt, who had first, inadvertently it seems, raised a
tremendously important question: when did the Tsarnaev family first come to the
attention of the FBI?
But according to an earlier
article by Schmitt and Schmidt (along with a third reporter), the Bureau’s
first contact with the Tsarnaevs came in January 2011. Though the Times did not make anything of this fact,
it would be enormously consequential—because it would mean that the FBI was
interacting with the Tsarnaevs two months before
the Russians suggested the US take a close look at Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
If that was in error, the Times should have issued a correction.
But it hasn’t. (Neither Schmidt nor Schmitt responded to WhoWhatWhy’s emails requesting comment.)
Interestingly, Schmidt and Schmitt, in
subsequent articles, including the recent one, make no more mention of this
early FBI contact. As it stands, the New
York Times is on record of having asserted, again based on what sources
told it, that the FBI was interacting with the Tsarnaevs before the Russians
ever contacted it. If that early report was true, then by definition, the
Inspector General’s report (and the leaked article about it) would be
calculated parts of a cover-up about an FBI foul-up.
Conversely, if the early report was in
error, then we need to know who provided it, or how they got that information
wrong. Serious investigators know not to reject anomalies and “wrong” early
reports as simply the result of haste or rumor without at least checking out
the possibility that the early reports were right—but were later suppressed
because they might cause problems to someone in power.
***
It is worth noting that the revelations
in the new report—sure to be picked up by other media outlets that tend to
repeat unquestioningly whatever the Times
publishes—will be all the average American remembers about the FBI’s
failure to prevent the Marathon bombing, and what may lie behind that failure.
Most members of the public will never
know of the substantial indications that something is seriously wrong with what
the government has put out about this affair. They will only recall that the
FBI was somehow “cleared.” And they will probably remember that Putin’s Russia
was somehow at fault.
In the final analysis, what we have
just witnessed is the kind of arrant manipulation that shows the contempt of
the “system” for the “people.” The “best” news organization gets another
exclusive story. The US government gets to point its finger again at the
Russian bogeyman. The FBI and the security apparatus get another free pass.
And the American people, once again,
are fed pig slop and told to imagine sirloin.
- See more
at:
http://whowhatwhy.com/2014/04/10/new-cover-boston-bombing-saga-blaming-moscow/#sthash.js10BLdg.dpuf
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