12/04/14 – Kade Crockford – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, Shell, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
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All right, so our first guest today is Cade Crockford, and she is the director of the Technology for Liberty program at the ACLU of Massachusetts.
And you can follow her on Twitter, too.
OneCade on Twitter.
She raises hell on there all damn day.
As bad as me or worse, maybe.
PrivacySOS.org is the website.
PrivacySOS.org.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Really appreciate you coming on the show.
And I really appreciate you being all wrapped up in the case of the Boston bombing.
I haven't followed it.
It's nice to know that there's somebody as sharp as you paying very close attention to all the developments and keeping up for us.
And the latest is some pretty surprising, eh, maybe surprising?
Well, I don't know.
Pretty shocking.
Some level of something eyebrow raising.
Ah, where the government has changed their story to a great extent about a very important part of their narrative of the Tsarnaev brothers and and the lead up to the Boston bombing.
And so I guess I'm not sure exactly where to start.
I guess, you know, with the headline, can you tell us, remind us who the Tsarnaev brothers are and and tell us who is Ibrahim Todeshev?
Sure.
So the Tsarnaevs are the two guys, the FBI and the U.S. attorney here in Massachusetts, Carmen Ortiz, infamous for prosecuting Aaron Schwartz until he killed himself, the Internet freedom activist.
Carmen Ortiz and the FBI say that two Chechen immigrants to the United States, ah, Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his little brother, Jahar Tsarnaev, blew up the Boston Marathon in April of 2013.
And Ibrahim Todeshev is, was rather a Chechen immigrant as well, who was apparently, we are told, friends with Tamerlan, the elder of the accused in the Marathon bombing case.
Ah, we will look up to some very strange news.
The country in May 2013, just a few weeks after the Marathon bombing, to learn that Ibrahim Todeshev, who we didn't even know existed at that point, had been killed overnight by the FBI in his apartment in Orlando, Florida.
And right away, the FBI spun sort of magical tales about, you know, issuing conflicting reports to the press saying that Ibrahim Todeshev had attacked a Massachusetts state trooper and FBI agent from Boston who were in his apartment interviewing him in the middle of the night with a broomstick.
He had been, he attacked them with a sword.
The FBI went through a number of explanations of what happened that night until finally settling on a story that they put out in the FBI's final report of that shooting, obviously finding that the agent acted appropriately in shooting Ibrahim Todeshev, riddling his body with bullets.
He was shot, I think, eight times.
A couple of those shots in the back, one in the top of the head.
So, you know, like every other FBI shooting, and I'm not, that's not hyperbole.
Every time the FBI shoots someone, the FBI clears itself of wrongdoing.
Like every other FBI shooting, the FBI found that the agent, in this case a guy called Aaron McFarlane, who had actually been an Oakland police officer who was the target of a number of lawsuits for sort of vindictive, brutal behavior out in Oakland.
He moved to Boston and became an FBI agent in the Boston office, went down to Florida and killed Ibrahim Todeshev, who we are told, we were told at the time, was potentially responsible with Kamerlin Tsarnaev, again, the elder brother who was killed a couple days after the Marathon bombing by authorities in a bizarre shootout in Watertown, Massachusetts, accused of the Boston Marathon bombing, just about found guilty, at least in the public's mind.
We learned right after the FBI killed his friend Ibrahim Todeshev in Florida that the government suspected that Todeshev and the elder Tsarnaev had participated in a very gruesome triple murder on the 10th anniversary of 9-11, September 11, 2011, in Waltham, Massachusetts, in which Kamerlin Tsarnaev's best friend and two other people, the three of them drug dealers, basically, were found with their throats slit to the point where their heads were almost decapitated with lots of marijuana dumped on their bodies and thousands of dollars cash found in the house.
It was a totally bizarre murder.
Very rarely do things like that happen ever in this country, let alone in a very quiet suburb like Waltham.
This was on a residential street in the dude's apartment, and as I said, Kamerlin's best friend was one of the deceased.
So after we woke up to the news that Ibrahim Todeshev had been killed by the FBI in the middle of the night a few weeks after the Boston Marathon bombing, two years and some change after, or I guess just under two years after the September 11th triple murder in Waltham, we were told that the authorities thought that Ibrahim Todeshev had killed those people with his friend Kamerlin Tsarnaev.
Now, immediately after those allegations were anonymously leaked to the press by officials, CARE, the Center for American-Islamic Relations in Florida, announced that they had evidence that Todeshev was not in Massachusetts at the time of the 2011 murders and that they would be producing that evidence in a report that has never come out, unfortunately.
But there was a lot of shady stuff that happened immediately after Todeshev's killing, which was shady as well, and you can read all about all of that shady stuff and listen to it, even in a report that a journalist in Boston named Susan Zalkind did for Boston Magazine and then was picked up by This American Life, the NPR production.
They did an hour-long series, an hour-long program on what happened in the wake of Todeshev's killing by the FBI.
His girlfriend was seized by the Department of Homeland Security and summarily deported after speaking to Susan Zalkind, a journalist here in Boston, who went down to Florida to talk to her.
A number of his friends, basically everybody who knew the guy except for his former mother-in-law, who was a former U.S. Army employee, were deported from the United States.
Some of them arrested, held in solitary confinement for lengthy periods, but it's really quite bizarre that the FBI goes down to Florida, kills the person we are told is the sole living witness to a gruesome, yet-to-be-solved, triple murder in Waltham, Massachusetts that predated the Marathon bombings by about two years, for which we are told Tamerlan Tarnaev is partially responsible, and then proceeds to deport basically everyone he knew.
So it really looks like a cleanup operation.
What they're trying to hide, we still don't know.
Right.
Well, what a mess.
So first of all, when it comes to the actual night of the death of Tordeshev here, this interrogation and all that, from all that you've seen or known, I'm sorry, I'm asking you to speculate.
It'd be an educated guess, I guess.
Does it look to you like this was just a hit on a guy who knew the guy who did the bombing and just tied up that loose end?
Or that some kind of fight broke out during the interrogation and the cops just went too far and killed him like they like to do every day?
Or what happened there?
Do you know?
Oh, crap.
And now the music's playing.
We've got to take a break.
Well, anyway, we'll be right back, everybody, with Cade Crockford.
She's 1Cade on Twitter.
You ought to follow her there.
The blog is PrivacySOS.org.
And this article is called, Shocking New Information in Tsarnaev Case Casts Doubt on Official Story about the Killing of Igor Tordashev.
We'll be back in just a second.
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All right, you guys, I'm Scott Horton.
Welcome back.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Coming up, Jason Ditz and Chris Woods.
Right now, talking with Cade Crockford from the ACLU of Massachusetts.
And I don't know what that might sound like to you, but I beseech you.
Check out her great blog, PrivacySOS.org.
Follow her on Twitter.
It's one Cade with a K, Cade on Twitter there.
And so, I'm sorry, we were interrupted by the break and I was asking you to speculate, which ain't really fair, but I'm just trying to understand as best I can.
You got the FBI, the government says that the Boston bomber and his buddy did this murder.
They're in the middle of, they say, getting him to confess to that murder.
This is one that took place a year and a half, a robbery murder, that took place a year and a half before the bombing.
And then somehow they kill this guy in the middle of him writing this confession.
And now they're saying, oh, yeah, you know what?
We never said that Tsarnaev, the Boston bomber, had anything to do with this murder.
Are they still even claiming that Totoshev did?
And then I'm sorry, because the original question was, do you think they just went there to kill his friend or some kind of fight broke out?
I don't know.
And maybe, you know, but I think I'm just asking you to guess at this point.
Yeah, well, that's a lot of questions.
But to start with the question about what happened that night in Totoshev's apartment, I have no idea.
I mean, I wasn't there.
But what I can say is that there's a lot of fishy stuff surrounding his killing.
First off, the FBI is not usually in the business of going to people's homes in the middle of the night and interviewing them until midnight, one o'clock in the morning.
That's exactly what happened here.
Two Massachusetts state troopers, one of whom works on a violent gang and fugitive task force.
So basically, this guy's job is to go around the country finding people who don't want to be found and haul them back to Massachusetts to face prosecution.
And the other who was, we think, in charge of the state police side of the murder investigation, having to do with that triple homicide in Waltham in 2011.
Those two state troopers and this guy, Aaron McFarlane, the former Oakland cop who became a Boston FBI agent, went down to Orlando.
And they said, you know, we had to rush down there.
We had to rush down there because we heard that Ibrahim Totoshev was going to get on a plane and go back to Russia.
And we had to get down there before he left.
Well, that already stinks.
Because if the FBI wants to stop someone from leaving the country, it is not hard for them to do that.
This guy is not, he was not a US citizen.
He's Muslim, right?
So he already, the story sort of stinks.
There's no reason why the FBI would have to rush down there to interview this guy under hasty circumstances like they did, unless I think there was something fishy going on.
So they do.
They rush down to Florida.
They go to this guy's house to meet with him in the middle of the night, basically, or, you know, in the evening and last until the middle of the night.
And they do so even though they know that Ibrahim Totoshev was an MMA fighter, a very powerful guy who could probably kill those FBI and state troopers with his bare hands.
So even though they know this, they don't put handcuffs on him.
They don't bring him into a secure place where they can interview him with plenty of backup around in case he flips out.
So that's pretty fishy, too.
And as far as Mike German, a guy who used to work with us at the ACLU, who before that was an FBI agent, has said it's not standard practice.
You know, if the FBI had any good sense and was following its own policies, if they know that somebody is physically very powerful, they're going to do all that's necessary to make sure that he's in a secure environment before they start asking him questions that might agitate him significantly, which is what happened, we hear.
So the official story is that, like you said, Totoshev was sitting down in his apartment writing out a confession to the 2011 triple murder in Wampanoag.
There were a lot of problems with the confession.
Immediately after it was leaked, a journalist, Susan Dalkin, again, pointed out that some of the stuff that was written in that confession did not conform with the crime scene.
So already that was a little bit fishy.
But like you said, now, over a year later, we hear from the federal government in a court filing in the trial against the younger Tsarnaev brother who's facing the death penalty here in Massachusetts, we hear that the government, in fact, has no evidence to suggest that Totoshev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev were involved in that triple murder in Wampanoag.
So the FBI says, immediately after Totoshev is killed, that he was in the middle of writing this confession implicating himself and Tsarnaev in these murders, at which point he flipped out and attacked an FBI agent, and basically he got shot a bunch of times, and that was it.
He was killed.
It was found to be justifiable force, like I said, and the FBI made a lot of this notion that he was penning a confession to these murders implicating Tsarnaev.
In response to your question about whether or not they went down there to kill him, I don't know.
But we do have one bizarre hint to answer that question, which is a text message, a series of text messages that the law enforcement agents who were in that room sent each other the day after his killing.
So the day after, one of the cops sends a text message to another one, and this is on my website.
We have these materials because there was a state's attorney's report in Florida looking into this to see if they were going to bring any manslaughter or homicide charges against the FBI agent who killed Totoshev.
Of course, they didn't, but in the report, they highlight some of these text messages, and one of them says, well done this week, men.
Well done.
Enjoy some time at home.
We'll talk soon.
And then the next message says, that was supposed to say, well done, men.
We all got through it, and we're now heading home.
Great work.
So if I was a state trooper assigned to investigate a gruesome, unsolved triple murder in a quiet suburb of Boston that occurred two years prior, and I went down to Florida to interview someone who I thought might be a main suspect in that murder investigation, and then he ended up dead, I don't think I would think of that as great work.
And so that text message has always puzzled me, that these law enforcement officials thought that what they did there was great work, given that they killed what I think we are meant to believe was the sole remissioning living witness to those murders, someone who we were also told was one of the government's main suspects.
And then so when they say that now, they don't think that Tsarnaev, the Boston bomber, did that murder at all, is that more credible to you than their implication that he had done it, which they had insisted all this time?
Because I don't know which government story to believe.
Yeah, right.
So there's a lot of that in this case, actually.
The government saying one thing one day, and then the next another day.
But I think what's really interesting about the distinction between what they said initially and what they're saying in court now is where they said it and how.
So there's another example of this exact same problem in the Marathon case, and that has to do with the building of the bombs that blew up the Marathon.
Now, right after the Marathon attacks, the officials who are investigating made anonymous leaks to journalists all over the place, CNN, et cetera, et cetera, local press, telling them, not just vaguely alluding to this, but explicitly telling the press that officials had concrete evidence that the bombs were built in Tamerlan Tsarnaev's Cambridge apartment.
They said they had concrete evidence, explosives powder from multiple places in the house.
These were anonymous leaks, so we don't know the names of the officials who actually said these things to reporters.
The reporters, being credulous of the government, printed this stuff as if it was fact.
We can see how dangerous that credulity is, because a year later, so this was in May 2013, a year later in May 2014, Carmen Ortiz, her office, writes in a brief in the Tsarnaev case that, in fact, not only was there no evidence found in Tamerlan Tsarnaev's home that the bombs were built there, but that the FBI thinks that they were not built at Tamerlan's home, and furthermore, that they do not know who built the bombs.
So, this is an admission made in court, right?
I mean, court documents are things that are not read by very many people.
Hardly anyone is pouring through the numerous motions filed in this court case and picking out inconsistencies in them.
People do read blazing headlines on CNN, and in a way, what the anonymous officials are leaking to the press in 2013 becomes the truth.
It becomes the story.
And even if, a year later, officials say the exact opposite in court, it's never corrected in the mainstream.
So, the same thing happened, really, with this Khrushchev issue.
We were immediately told that Khrushchev was responsible for these murders with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and then, in court, because the Tsarnaev defense is trying to make an argument that, basically, in order to get the little brother off of the death penalty, to get him life in prison, they're trying to make an argument that Tamerlan was an overbearing, violent, and scary influence on his younger brother, and that he basically convinced his younger brother and pressured him to do the bombings, and that Jahar didn't do it of his own volition.
In order to demonstrate this, they want to be able to show in court that not only did Tamerlan kill those three people on Walfam in 2011, but Jahar knew it, and that, therefore, he was really intimidated.
Because, obviously, if your brother killed his best friend, split his throat, almost cut his head off, he's a pretty seriously guy not to be effed with, and you do not want to disobey him, right?
So, in this context, this is the context in which the government's startling admission comes that they have no evidence that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was involved in those murders.
Now, just last week, a federal judge ruled on these motions.
What happened was, the defense said, we want to see the evidence that the government has in its Walfam murder investigation, so we can use that in court to show that Tamerlan was an overbearing influence on his brother.
The government was saying, no, no, no, we're not showing you any of that stuff, and part of the reason we're not going to show you is that we don't have any evidence that Tamerlan was involved in those murders, despite the fact that they said a year prior in public that Tordeshev was penning a confession implicating Tsarnaev when he was killed.
So, that's why what's recently gone on in court passed so much doubt and suspicion, I think, on what the FBI has been saying publicly.
Now, which of those things is true, we still don't know.
It seems like a giant pile of BS just for, you know, part of the motive argument in a case that'll probably be plead out anyway, right?
I mean, I mean, the younger brother's going to do what his older brother said, because his older brother is bigger and older and is a professional fighter and must have beaten his younger brother's ass a thousand times in their lives, and so they could make the same argument without any of this stuff at all, without the, you know, cutting a guy's head off and all this stuff.
Yeah, and I mean, I don't know this, because I'm not privy to any secret information that the defense is using or any of their strategy, but just judging on what they've been doing, you know, from the public stuff, from the court filings, it seems to me that it might be a way to try to get the government to plea, because it sure seems like the government is hiding something, right?
And so if the defense says, we want to see access to this information, and this information is something that the government very much does not want to disclose, it could be an attempt to try to move forward towards a plea, to push the government to plea, because I think Carmen Ortiz really does want to go to trial, which confuses me in part because you know, a trial will have the effect of airing, I think, a lot of dirty laundry that maybe the FBI does not want aired, and I think that some of these motions, especially the motion to get input into the record some of the information about the Waltham investigation might be related to that.
Well, and again, it's unfair, and I'm asking you to speculate, but you alluded to it, so I'll ask you, what sort of dirty laundry do you suspect might be involved here?
Well, I mean, just among, one thing, for sure, is that the Jihar Tsarnaev defense team submitted a brief in court last year that said that they had evidence to show that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was approached multiple times by the FBI to become an asset.
So if he did become an asset, that would not look very good for the FBI.
If one of their own informants or assets ended up committing a gruesome terrorist attack in the United States, I think that would be something that the FBI would not like to be made public.
And again, I don't know if that's true.
I don't know if it's true that he became an informant, but you know, federal public defenders, the people who are defending Jihar Tsarnaev, are no conspiracy theorists.
They are not, you know, Alex Jones types.
They are, these federal public defender positions are highly sought after among the best attorneys in the country.
They're, these are very serious people who have very serious reputations to maintain and would not make such a claim in court if they didn't have evidence to back it up.
So I think there's something to that.
Sure.
Well, and we've seen that Trevor Aronson's great journalism in his book, The Terror Factory, and of course the ACLU itself has done massive studies that we've talked with, you know, other of your colleagues on the show about in the past, about all the FBI entrapment jobs, certainly well north of 50 now, where people were outright stung into these bogus terrorism plots.
And that's not including just bogus charges for donating to charity or whatever, but actual entrapments.
And so it seems within the realm of possibility that even if they didn't recruit the guy that they sure tried a few times, even within the realm of possibility, I'm not saying I've seen anything to indicate this.
I don't know that they wanted to trick him into doing something and he did this.
So I don't know.
It's a fair question to ask if you read Trevor Aronson's book, for sure.
That's right.
And, and not only just that, it's not just the brief that Sarnay lawyers filed saying that they have evidence that he was approached to become an FBI informant, but Chuck Grassley, the Senator, Republican Senator, actually wrote a public letter to the FBI just before Robert Mueller left his position in 2013, in October 2013, asking very publicly a number of questions, which I think the FBI did not want to answer.
Among them was that question, did you ever approach Tamerlan to become an informant?
And if not, why not?
And I think that second question is a really good one.
I mean, people need to remember that the FBI admits that it investigated Tamerlan Sarnay for three months in the summer of 2011, just before those Waltham murders.
And it is, as anybody who has read Trevor's book or paid any attention to what the FBI has been doing for the past 10 years, it is FBI policy to ask Muslims to become informants.
And so I think Chuck Grassley's questions are good ones.
Did you ask him to become an informant?
And if not, why not?
Since that's your standard operating procedure.
Right.
Yeah, that's definitely a great follow-up there.
And with that, I'm sorry, I can't follow up any further.
I've got to let you go.
We're way over time here and we've got to move on.
But thank you so much for coming back on the show, Kate.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
Take care.
All right, y'all.
That's Kate Crockford.
She is, let me get the title right, at the ACLU in Massachusetts, Director of the Technology for Liberty Program.
And she keeps a great blog, including many very interesting in-depth entries on the Boston bombing at PrivacySOS.org.
That's PrivacySOS.org.
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