From Russ Baker at Whowhatwhy.com on the Boston bombing and the media coverage:
Was there anything else we could have been focused on? There was, but it was just too “distasteful” to broach, at least in the early hours. Perhaps counter-intuitively, it was the Fox brand (admittedly a local station, not the propagandistic Fox News Channel) that dared to raise questions about events that terrorize the public. In this report, the correspondent dares to remind us that the FBI has in the past had close relationships with people who want to blow things up, and has even facilitated these plots up to the point where law enforcement can intervene to thwart the bad guys. Was a similar sting in place at the Marathon – a sting that went horribly wrong?
One veteran marathoner, Alistair Stevenson, the cross-country coach at the University of Mobile, says that he noticed an unusually heavy police presence, including bomb-sniffing dogs and spotters on rooftops, before the race, and that runners were told not to worry—that law enforcement was carrying out “drills.”
Stevenson’s account was reported in an Alabama blog run by a consortium of respectable local news organizations, but it was virtually ignored by the traditional media. Nothing here worth a second-look? Really?
Is it heresy or madness to take a harder look at the metastatic growth of the national security state? History is replete with examples of cynical efforts to create “strategies of tension” in which the public, fearful of growing chaos, turns to the reassurances of those who promise order.
In fact, it so happens that advocates of increasing surveillance are pressing their game on every front. One involves the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which, if enacted, would authorize your web service provider to pass along your real-time personal data to the Federal spooks. There’s been a lot of opposition to this, but something like the Marathon bombing can be a game-changer. Those who monitor public sentiment understand the power of emotion to alter public stances.
That’s not to say there is necessarily anything “more” going on here. But from history, we know that the official story will point to one of two things: either an organized radical (Left or Right or Foreign) group that threatens “the American way of life,” or it will be a “lone kook.”It could be that by the time you read this, we will “know” the “full story.” At press time, the story was breaking in a new direction, with two young immigrant brothers, Chechens, the identified culprits. Why Chechens, who, though Muslim, would principally have a beef with the Russians, with whom they have been at war, not with the US? And why if they were, as apparently they were, treated well here and given opportunities, including a scholarship?
The upshot will be to bring the US and Russia into closer alignment.
Remember, though, that even the most radical of terrorists can be wound up by infiltrators, or can have links to our good friends, as we reported about those identified as the 9/11 hijackers, and their ties, via a house in Florida, to the Saudi royal family.
Oh, and what about the fire that broke out around the same time as the Marathon bombing, at the nearby John F. Kennedy Library and Museum? Interest in that fire largely vanished as soon as we were tentatively assured that it was (perhaps/probably) unrelated. Talk about symbolism: the Boston Marathon on “Patriot’s Day”—and the repository of records related to one of America’s greatest mysteries, the death fifty years ago of a President who warned us repeatedly of the dangers of tyranny—and who sought peace with the non-hardliners in the Kremlin.
So let’s not settle so fast for the wrong kind of reassurance. Other societies have learned the hard way to be wary of too-easy answers. We simply must be open to the most inconvenient truths—not out of paranoid fantasies, but from a cold-eyed look at history and recent experience.
H/t Thomas Soldan.
Boston Mayor Menino said, “People, please, work with us. So we locked them down.” Anyone who claims, as Menino does, that the lockdown of Boston was NOT an overreaction either dosen’t understand or doesn’t care how our Constitutional form of government is supposed to work. The forces at work here are varied and pernicious. Can you tell the good guys from the bad guys yet? We are told that the brothers Tsarnaev are the bad guys. We are also told that Oswald was the lone assassin.
I wonder to what degree this whole thing is some ginned-up domestic version of a Gulf of Tonkin. Who set whom up? Who benefits from this? Who gets to say ‘isn’t it wonderful we had cameras and dogs and stuff everyplace – don’t we all agree we need lots more of that’?
I’m from the camp that says there was plenty of intelligence to suggest there was going to be a second attack on the World Trade Center. And rather than head off such an attack, if it helps make your case to go to war in Iraq and you get lots of extra power to control the domestic population, well then – a small price to pay.
Did somebody give these guys some money? Or to a cause of theirs back in the old country? Did somebody want to have a test case? And if things go a little wrong, but you wind up getting lots of extra power to control the domestic population, well then – a small price to pay.
(Oh – and why did the bombs go off 4 hours after the start of the race – when the premier runners cross the line around 2:10-20 after the race starts? Wouldn’t the crowd have been biggest then?)
OMG Susie, “We’ll never know”? I was sure that the fever dreams on the Boston bombing would all come from the fear mongering right. So now a thesis akin to the Bush Administration staging the World Trade Center demolition from the left. Let’s follow the reasoning for pure cringe worthiness, shall we. Take as a given that the FBI has manipulated some truly pathetic vulnerables to stage grandiose attacks with employer provided faux weapons. From that it follows that Tamerlane may have been another dupe, but this one went off the rails and built real bombs. They actually knew who the bomber was going to be and apparently the target. The FBI either wanted the attack to succeed or missed their own operative in the sweeps. They played stupid over the identification for 72 hours while these known rogues were at large with bombs and guns. Then they let an MIT officer get gunned down and a bomb throwing shoot out occurred at the expense of the Watertown Police with near fatal wounds to another officer. When the bullets left Tamerlane still breathing they ran him over with a squad to finish him off, but their marksmanship failed them in that backyard boat and they were forced to take the kid brother alive. So they shot him through the vocal chords in the hope that he wouldn’t be able to implicate the FBI if he survived. Add to this scorecard three dead, dozens grotesquely maimed and 170 wounded to cover the FBI’s ass.
The rest of the article about the perils of the national security state would stand were it not for the Glenn Beck quality of the first paragraph.
Just like with Sandy Hook, the Colorado theater shooting, and all the way back to 9-11 – it just seems to be just one psy-op after another, as our former “rights” (i think Carlin was correct in calling them privileges) get further eroded away. Now we have the government going house to house under the guise of looking for this kid! In fact, after he was found – it was by some guy finally being allowed out of his house and NOT by the 9000+ cops, FBI, ATF, swat teams from all over, surveillance helicopters with thermal-imaging gear flying overhead, and the entire lock-down of the city! So the by-product or “precident” that was just foisted on us by a sleight of hand drill is now on record as another tool in their stack to control the populace, invade our space, void all issues of privacy or even NEED for that matter – they effectively put over a million peoples’ lives on hold for as long as they wanted! If you needed surgery that day – tough luck, the hospital is CLOSED.
Iless, I would suggest that the Bush/Cheney all too obvious lies to get us into an illegal war against Iraq may have been a tipping point for the public to begin to doubt –or at least view with high skepticism– more and more of our government’s pronouncements.
We were then lied to by Obama during his election campaigns, just enough to persuade Democratic voters that he was actually a Democrat, not the Oligarch’s Corporatist running dog lackey that he actually is and acts as. Hello, SocSec Lower Standard of Living Chained CPI! Hello, Medicare cuts. Hello, loss of civil liberties. Yada, yada.
Under these circumstances, and after learning that we were lied to about the actual witness statements about RFK’s assassination, maybe we are well warned to be less trusting?
Which is a terrible situation to find ourselves in: We know we often are lied to, but have little access to knowing the real facts. We can’t trust of Mainstream Corporate Media, and we can’t know if other sources are actually that much less influenced by some controllers or world views or…whatev’.
It’s frustrating and infuriating, so many just draw back and stop trying to understand, much less effect change.
Bad times, hard times.
Mic check!
Trust (a little) but verify (a lot).