This combo of undated images released by the FBI (L) and the Boston Police Department (R) shows Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was the subject of an April 19, 2013 manhunt in the Boston area. Tamerlan was killed the day before., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.
'They were set up, FBI followed them for years'- Tsarnaevs' mother to RT
April 20, 2013 05:34
rt.com
With the 24-hour manhunt for the second suspect of the Boston bombing closed, RT remembers its conversation with the parents of the Tsarnaev brothers, who claimed all along their children were set up.
Zubeidat Tsarnaeva maintains her younger son is innocent and like so many of the brothers’ acquaintances, claims they were good, courteous kids and model students – especially the younger 19-year-old Dzhokhar. A US citizen who is presently in the Russian Republic of Dagestan, she revealed to RT some suspicions of her own.
Grief-stricken at the latest developments in the case, Zubeidat expressed her dismay at the allegations, recounting Dzhokhar’s life in the US and talking of his status among his peers and friends: he was an honors student, loved by many of his friends and teachers. And his older brother Tamerlan was a star athlete and student, whose ambition was to one day appear on the US Olympic wrestling team.
But her biggest suspicion surrounding the case was the constant FBI surveillance she said her family was subjected to over the years. She is surprised that having been so stringent with the entire family, the FBI had no idea the sons were supposedly planning a terrorist act.
“They used to come [to our] home, they used to talk to me…they were telling me that he [the older, 26-y/o Tamerlan] was really an extremist leader and that they were afraid of him. They told me whatever information he is getting, he gets from these extremist sites… they were controlling him, they were controlling his every step…and now they say that this is a terrorist act! Never ever is this true, my sons are innocent!”
When asked if maybe she didn’t know about some of her sons’ more secret aspirations and dark secrets, she said “That’s impossible. My sons would never keep a secret.”
Finally, she said that if she could speak to her youngest – Dzhokhar, she would tell him, “Save your life and tell the truth, that you haven’t done anything, that this is a set up!”
The suspects' father, Anzor Tsarnaev
In an interview with Russian television the brothers’ father Anzor Tsarnaev also claimed that they are innocent and somebody might have set them up.
“I’m sure about my children, in their purity. I don’t know what happened and who did this. God knows and he will punish them,” he told Zvezda channel. “Somebody might have set them up. I don’t know who and because of their cowardice killed the boy.”
The father said he was unable to contact his sons or other relatives. “Everything is switched off. I can’t reach my brother there either. I can’t reach anyone! I just want information. Now I fear for my boy, that they will now shoot him dead and then will say 'He had a gun'.”
“I fear for my son, for his life. They should arrest him, bring him, but alive. Justice should investigate who is right and who is wrong,” he said.
Mr Tsarnaev recently spoke to his elder son, Tamerlan [Suspect #1], telling him that he should take care of his younger brother. Speaking of the Boston marathon bombing he told his son “Ok, Thanks to Allah you were not close to there and did not suffer.”
“I remember I even asked “Who could do something like that?”
“We just talked. I asked him about our Dzhokhar [Suspect #2], how was he. I told him, he should help him out and keep an eye on him, so that he studies well. I told him ‘You left school, got married too early, but the kid should finish [his education]’. Because this is life – those who don’t study work a lot and work hard. That’s why I was telling them study”.
Russian 'Alpha' Special Forces team-veteran and vice-president of its International Association, Aleksey Filatov, believes there is more to the case than meets the eye. He emphasizes, firstly, that the origin and religious beliefs of the suspect, along with the specifics of the bombing, have all been carefully pre-meditated and planned by someone within the United States in order to distract the public from the true identity and long-term aims of the actual planners.
“Putting a young Chechen in those shoes was top-notch professionalism in distracting everyone from the true identity and motives of the planner,” he told RT.
“The executors were chosen to confuse the American public and simultaneously untie the White House’s hands in a way that would justify a departure from the rhetoric of non-involvement in military action on foreign territories.”
'Confusion and inconsistencies': How US plans to distract public from real truth about Boston
April 21, 2013 04:50
rt.com
The initial questions about the Boston bombing are behind us, but former FBI employee Sibel Edmonds believes the pursuit of truth will eventually lead to a far more secret agenda by the US, which she reveals to RT.
The United States is having to quickly wake up to the possibility that Chechens are not the ‘freedom fighters’ Western media has been categorizing them as, especially when it came to the Republic’s relationship to Russia. But even the newly formed perceptions may not be enough when it comes to investigating the motives and planning behind the Boston bombing, according to Edmonds, who is also a founder of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition.
With the dust somewhat settled after the capture of the younger suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Edmonds believes there will only be more unanswered questions in an investigation already plagued by obvious inconsistencies and falsities, which she recounts at length.
RT: We've learned in the last hour that Russia warned the FBI about the older Tsarnaev brother and his potential links with radical Islamists, but the FBI found nothing suspicious. How is that possible?
Sibel Edmonds: Actually, we predicted that the unnamed foreign country [Western media didn’t name the source immediately] was in fact Russia, two days ago. We have too little facts, too much false information and speculations. But just look at the period they are talking about. When you listen to the suspect’s mother, she’s talking about a period of three to five years. According to FBI officials, they received this information, this warning, in 2011. So we have that inconsistency right there. The other important inconsistency that we should pay attention to is the mother’s description of FBI mannerisms and conversation with the suspects and the family when they were visiting them for the last three to five years. That fits exactly the recruitment style of the intelligence community. When you go to the suspects, and one moment you’re saying “We know you’re decent, we know you’re doing nothing wrong, we know you’re good”, and the next minute they’re saying “You can be dangerous”, right after receiving that information from the Russian government, to threaten them with that information for what purpose – to recruit them as informants or for other agendas.
RT: We spoke to the mother last night. She said there is no way on earth they could have been involved in a heinous crime like this, that she knew everything about them and they could not have been potential terrorists. However, could there be another side to these people that they didn’t even let their mother know, is that not feasible?
SE: Well, again, we don’t have real information from our source in the last 48hours. I found out that they had been associating the brothers – especially the older one –with very wealthy individual Turkish persons, some of them students in Boston, some businessmen…really modern people. And we haven’t received any information that they [the brothers] had been associating with Chechens, even the radicals. So that itself is another major inconsistency in this story.
RT: Similarities are being drawn between the 'pressure cooker' bombs used in Boston and those which Al Qaeda gets English-speaking terrorists to use. Just how much does this prove in terms of the bombers' links with the terrorist group?
SE: Again, it’s way too early to comment on this and I think that whole notion right now sounds really, really weak. Because the US government, when it is convenient, one minute talk about how sophisticated Al Qaeda has become – in fact they’re as sophisticated as the NSA [US National Security Agency] – they are talking about their ability to obtain laptop, or suitcase bombs, nuclear bombs…and the next moment they are talking about this amateurish home-made ability. So, as far as the government is concerned, I think it’s too early to buy this either from the US media or the government.
This situation is really similar to the Bin Laden shooting. Every day the story changed. And this is what we are going to see in the next few days. They are going to change the story, they are going to throw so much confusion and inconsistencies and conflicting data that no one is going to figure out what actually happened, especially if the second suspect dies.
RT: There's been a tendency in the Western media to portray armed groups in the Chechnya as freedom fighters. Is that going to change at all after this?
SE: We all have to really look at the timing of this, because again the US media is portraying this incident by itself. It’s not putting it in the context of things that have been happening in the past – let’s say one year so – or recent stuff – we had this case of NGOs being shut down by the Russian government, which was a very smart move, because we know that the majority of these NGOs have CIA agendas, as they’re operated and managed by CIA people. And this is one way of infiltrating Russia by the US government, the CIA. And on the other hand, from this side, we had the 12 individuals from Russia, and what the US has done.
So, if you start putting these in context and also add the fact that Russia has been the biggest obstacle for the United States to get in and directly attack Syria – that’s when you start to see the bigger picture and that’s what the people should be paying attention to. And as far as the perception, up until recently you had individuals like Bolton, Armitage… in a group called The Friends of Chechnya, and they have been around for a while. Again, the false information that is being put forth by US media is that since the fall of the Soviet Union the United States has refrained from intervening in the Russia-Chechnya situation. And that is purely false. Since mid-1990’s, the US directly, or through Turkey has been arming, training, managing, orchestrating not only Chechens but also other factions in the region – and we are looking at Central Asia and the Caucasus. And of course the Russian government is fully aware of this.
RT: What about those resources?
SE: Alternative media has been waiting and reporting on this for years – the US operations in the region against Russia. And we are kind of puzzled in terms of the silence from the Russian government, because the FSB at any given moment can put a lot of information that would expose the fact that we actually are in the business of crating terrorists and bringing about terrorism in the region, as we have done for the last several decades in the Middle East, but especially since the fall of the Soviet Union – in Central Asia and the Caucasus. And again, there are tons of facts backing this up and there is much more in the hands of the Russian government, and I think this is a pretty good opportunity for some of this information to come out and enlighten the American public here in the United States.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Homegrown terror: 'FBI thought Chechens would only attack Russians'
April 20, 2013 13:46
rt.com
The Tsarnaev brothers managed to slip through the US security net and commit the Boston attack because of oversights in American intelligence, experts told RT. This act of “homegrown” terror has raised serious questions about the role of the FBI.
The US press has traditionally portrayed Chechen terrorism as a specifically Russian issue, and as such assumed that they would not be hostile toward the US, journalist Neil Clark told RT in an interview.
“It could be because of their Chechen background, because I think the way that this conflict [the Chechen Wars of 1994-96 and 1999-2009] has been portrayed in the Western media, the American media, has been that the Russians have been the bad guys,” noted Clark. He suggested that this stigma attached to Chechnya could be the reason why security checks were not carried out on the Tsarnaev brothers arrived in the US.
“Their thought was ‘These people have a Chechen background if they’re going to be attacking anybody it’s going to be Russian targets, not American targets,’” said Clark. Dzhokhar had received US citizenship and lived in America for a number of years, while his older brother Tamerlan was a legal permanent resident.
Political commentator, Aleksandr Nekrasov noted there is a “certain state of shock that these two people are connected to Chechnya.” “But I think that they are shocked because I think that basically the intelligence services were expecting some loner, maybe some Nazi, some white supremacist, who got his grievances with the federal Government,” Nekrasov told RT. He went on to say that in spite of the existence of a YouTube account where the brothers broadcast the fact that they were from Chechnya and “didn’t hide the fact that they were terrorists,” the FBI did not flag the brothers as a potential terrorist threat.
Terror in US backyard
The fact that the two brothers were able to live in the US and were granted green cards while fostering extremist views has raised serious questions over the effectiveness of US law enforcement, geopolitical analyst from Stopimperialism.com, Eric Draitser believes.
“We, of course, know that many other incidents of terrorism in, so-called, homegrown terrorism raise very serious questions about the role of so called law enforcement in all of this,” commented Draitser. He then hinted that FBI was moving in to sweep details of the attack under the rug, “essentially relegating anyone, who asks those questions to the dust bin.” “We’ve seen the FBI taking over the investigation, we’ve seen the FBI systematically removing from the narrative the pictures of private military contractors in Boston,” Draitser concluded.
Nekrasov reiterated this point, emphasizing that the US War on Terror is being conducted in an often counterproductive way.
“I think the main problem here is that the war on terror across the world and the Middle East and elsewhere – I think it’s not actually conducted in a way that can prevent more terrorist attacks in the West and the US itself.”
Following the massive manhunt that led to the killing of Tamerlan Tsarnaev and the eventual capture of his younger brother Dzhokhar, former mayor of New York Rudolph Giuliani remarked that the US had considered Chechen terror groups an intrinsically Russian problem.
“We don’t have that kind of problem here in the US. If anything the US has expressed a little bit of sympathy for them [Chechens],” Giulani told Bloomberg.
The bombs that went off at the Boston Marathon on Monday killed three people and injured scores. The ensuing manhunt paralyzed the city and led to widespread panic. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is currently receiving medical treatment for injuries he sustained during his capture by police on Friday night.
Following the 9/11 attacks, Washington has taken wide-reaching measures and defense spending has hit unprecedented levels, with officials saying that was necessary to keep America safe.
As part of steps to boost security, US Department of Homeland Security was founded along with many other law-enforcement agencies, and the Patriot Act was passed. In addition, the US set up a very complex surveillance system, which included CCTV cameras in major cities, facial recognition technology and cyber surveillance. In addition to measures taken domestically within past 12 years, the US has waged to wars overseas that have cost the country more than $2 trillion.
However, after the Boston Marathon attack many critics believe that the money and resources were wasted and did not make Americans any safer.
Watch more in RT's Marina Portnaya's report.
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