04/13/15 – Marcy Wheeler – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show.
It's about time I got Marcy Wheeler back on the show to talk about something or another.
The brilliant Marcy Wheeler, aka Empty Wheel, online at emptywheel.net, and you can also follow her on Twitter at Empty Wheel, too.
And so, yeah, welcome back to the show.
How are you, Marcy?
I'm good.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
I need to turn you up here a little bit.
Hey, you know, I was thinking, I have kind of a moral hazard with you, like bankers who know that they can make bad business bets, and it doesn't matter because they'll always get bailed out.
I kind of did not pay any attention to the Boston trial thing at all because I thought, well, I'll just talk with Marcy about it, and she'll fill me in once it's over.
Oh, no.
So that's this.
So, yeah, you got this great article here at Empty Wheel.net, The Other Possible Whys Behind the Boston Marathon Attack.
So what all are still open questions after the conviction of Ballmer Jr. here?
Well let me take a step back and say that the trial was, there are two phases of the trial.
The first, which we're done with, is finding him guilty.
The second, which is going to start later in the week after the anniversary and after the marathon and so on, is going to figure out whether or not he should be killed.
And we'll get a completely different set of evidence in the second half, which the defense will have a lot more say over.
And that's important because in the first half, what the government tried to do was imply that everything that led up to the attack could have involved Jahar, and also implied that Jahar was this big, bad jihadist when he definitely was listening to jihadist propaganda, but he was also listening to a lot of rap.
There was this wonderful moment in the trial where the FBI got up and interpreted all of his tweets, only to have shown by the defense that not only were they misinterpreting them, but they were making big mistakes.
They hadn't even clicked through on his links.
They were interpreting, what's the name of that Comedy Central guy, Tosh, as a jihadist, rap music jihadist.
They confused Grozny with Mecca, so just really bad testimony, like really ignorant testimony about his tweets, which is what they used to argue that he was a jihadist, which is not to say he wasn't.
It's just to say that through the entire first phase of the trial, the government went to some lengths to retell the story that they always tell about terrorist trials, which is that the bad jihadist radicalized, big R radicalized, by Anwar al-Awlaki.
They were largely successful at telling that story, but that also meant that they also tried to downplay certain outstanding questions and certain evidentiary questions, the biggest of which is where the bombs came from.
They showed that there was a bunch of tools in the apartment in Cambridge, which is where Tamerlan lived.
The most interesting explosive was not the explosives used in the bomb, but nitroglycerin, which was stronger than what they used in the bomb, but they didn't explain where that went.
But what they didn't find in either the apartment or in Jahar's dorm room is the dust, the black powder that would have come from the firecrackers, which is almost impossible to mask, especially given how cluttered the Cambridge apartment was.
So we should believe that at the very least they didn't make the bombs in the Cambridge apartment where once the FBI claimed they had made the bombs.
They also, there were a couple of different pressure cooker bombs, one thrown in Watertown and that was a kind of straight bomb like you could make if you were following Inspire magazine, which is what the government wanted you to believe all of the bombs were based on.
The two set off at the race had remote control detonators and that's not a strictly followed Inspire recipe and the government never answered that question.
There were also two pressure cooker, the government did a pressure cooker dragnet.
So they got the, if you bought Scott, I doubt you have, but if you bought a pressure cooker between November, no, between July, 2012 and April, 2013, I may have the dates wrong, but if you bought a Frager elite pressure cooker from Macy's, then you're going to be an FBI dragnet for the rest of your life.
Because they collected the records of everyone in the United States who had bought one of these pressure cookers, they showed that two of the one, three of the ones bought in Massachusetts were bought with cash and they were able to show two of those had some tie to Tamerlan, which was a crazy tie, which I can get back to, but they were never able to show that the third pressure cooker turned into a bomb had been purchased by anybody with a tie to Tamerlan or that a pressure cooker that was found in the house and you know, the, the, in the Cambridge apartment.
And the implication is that that's what Tamerlan was testing off of.
They never explained where those two pressure cookers came from.
So, or whether maybe those were the two that we know to have been purchased in Boston, then we don't know where the two purchase, the pressure cookers blown up during the marathon war.
So in other words, incomplete story about the smoking gun or the smoking bomb as it, as it were.
And that's a big one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So is there much doubt that the older brother made the bomb?
Or I guess if they don't know where it was made, they really don't know who all made it at all.
Right.
There were some gloves found in a car used by him, but also be used by other members of the family that had that was one of the few places they found that powder, the powder that, that, that you would expect to find wherever the bombs were made.
So that suggests that Tamerlan may have been involved in it, but, but not at the house, not at the Cambridge apartment.
And they, I mean, I think, I, I think it's very safe to argue that the bombs thrown at Watertown were made by one or both of the brothers.
One of those, by the way, is the elbow pipe bomb that Inspire also has a recipe for, and the reporters were very impressed.
They're like, wow, that's just like the Inspire recipe.
And it's like, well, yeah, but that's a pipe bomb.
That's not, that's not the pressure cooker that went off at the race and killed four, killed three and maimed that hundreds.
Right.
There's no other narrative of how Tamerlan could have been taught how to make those in any other time.
No.
And there's weird part.
Let me give it.
This is one of my weirdest.
This is one of my favorite weird parts of the trial.
So to prove that or to suggest that Tamerlan had bought two pressure cookers, they showed that a mobile, a portable GPS that they found in the hijacked Mercedes.
OK, so that the brothers brought with them had also.
Then basically been in Boston where the pressure cookers were purchased.
So the idea is that that Tamerlan brought his portable GPS device with him to buy pressure cookers in Boston and then bought brought this portable GPS device in their getaway car.
Right.
Their getaway car, Scott, they want you to believe that this not not entirely stupid terrorist brought a GPS device to their getaway car.
He's just really bad with directions, which they would have hijacked, which they would have hijacked specifically to get rid of the car that the FBI knew they had.
And then the other weird thing about this story is that purchase, the purchase in Boston that they have sort of tied to Tamerlan was made with cash.
Why would he you know, why would he pay cash in May for two pressure cookers if he planned on being dead in April?
And if he was going to bring a GPS with him to to to buy the pressure cookers anyway?
Why?
Why?
This guy was not that stupid.
That doesn't make any sense.
Well, so what do you think it means?
I don't know.
But I think that it's I find it.
I don't know.
I actually don't know.
I mean, I think there are lots of theories out there that need to be entertained.
But I don't know what the story is.
You know, Masha Gaston just came out with a book that says that that she's got people who confirmed to her that that Tamerlan was an informant for the FBI, which is irrelevant to how he he planned it.
I mean, it's clear that the brothers did the attack.
I want to make that clear.
I'm not suggesting that, you know, Blackwater did the attack and they blamed it on not not going.
But the question is, where did he make the bomb?
Who was he working for when he made the bomb?
Yeah.
And how well the FBI knew him after questioning him?
All right.
Well, so Sanford Sun plan means we got to take this break, but we'll be right back, you know, with the great empty wheel, Marcy Wheeler, empty wheel dot net for this great article.
The other possible lies behind the Boston Marathon attack.
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All right, guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show.
Scott Horton Show.
I got Marcy Wheeler on the line.
Empty wheel dot net is her Web site and we're talking about the Boston attack.
And, you know, there's something fishy about, you know, what all's going on behind the scenes here and what led to the attack.
And I think people have had some questions all along.
And in your article here, you start with a piece by a cop in the Boston Globe asking questions about the FBI and and one that jumped out at a lot of people right away about how they ended up having to admit that they had questioned this guy in the past.
And yet it took them days to admit that they recognized him from the pictures or maybe they still claim they never did.
Never to recognize.
And that's the problem, is that you'll recall.
So the attack happens on the 15th.
They've got pictures within a day showing showing the brothers, at least as suspects.
And yet it wasn't until the 18th when the when the government released these pictures saying we need your help, which set off this manhunt, which set off the shooting, which set off, you know, lockdown of the city, the lockdown of the city on the 19th.
And so the most basic question, which is what that that unnamed cop asked, is why did the FBI guys I mean, the FBI interviewed Tamerlan and and members of his family a couple of times in 2011.
Why did the people who conducted those interviews not recognize these pictures?
I mean, that's that's the most basic level.
Why is it that days after the FBI had solid pictures for the suspects, did the FBI instead release these pictures and set up this drag, this this manhunt rather than say, oh, gosh, that's the guy interviewed as a terrorist suspect back in 2011?
Didn't happen two years earlier.
So that's the most basic question.
And then subsequent questions thereafter, I mean, I mentioned earlier the defense alleged in a filing that the FBI had approached Tamerlan to be an informant.
They said that they were going to target the Russian community.
Possible, definitely.
So that's that's one story.
And as I said, it seems likely at least that they had tried.
Right.
Whether or not he necessarily went along with them.
Right.
But, you know, it's funny because then there's the other then there's the other possibility, the other informant possibility, which is that he was involved in the drug in the in the in the drug war, I almost said in that he was involved in the drug trade.
There was that murder, that triple murder in 2011 in Waltham, Massachusetts, involving his best friend.
Everyone involved was involved in drugs, so it looked like a drug hit.
There were allegations that there were some corrupt Watertown cops, again, involved in these these drug rings.
So there's another possibility for him to become an informant.
Was he a drug informant?
And in that case, it might have been the DEA, not FBI.
And I think and I've shown there's good reason to believe we know, for example, that the NSA collected on Tamerlan before the attack, but didn't read that stuff until after the attack.
There's good reason to believe that when somebody is an informant, their collections are what's called defeated so that so that others won't then start chasing down your FBI handler because you call your FBI handler all the time.
So, in other words, if somebody is an informant, they may be hidden in NSA's dragnets precisely because they are an informant.
And so that that might explain that.
The other thing that I found really interesting is, is the testimony at the trial narrowly dodged a lot of issues or narrowly didn't talk.
Can you stop there for a second?
I want to go back to the picture real quick about, I mean, the most obvious question is why didn't they recognize him?
But then the sort of secondary question that might be, why did they lie and pretend that they didn't recognize him when, hey, we had questioned this guy before, but we didn't have enough on him to, you know, put a chip in his butt or anything.
So what are we going to do?
We had to let him go.
And then, yeah, so this happened.
That's not that bad of an explanation.
Would that be the only thing that they were would have to be worse than that for them to spin it, you think?
I, it's the FBI, Scott, can you or I really get in the head of the FBI and think the way they think?
I don't think so.
I don't think that's in our nature.
I mean, I guess just clamp down on the story altogether and figure out what to tell him later would be the right.
You're saying that the FBI should have come forward and said, gosh, we got a tip from Russia.
And as a result, interviewed this guy that had to come out as a leak rather than and it came out as a leak after this manhunt had come off.
So maybe they tried to get away with that.
Maybe they tried to suppress that information as well.
And that's a great that's a great, you know, I can't answer that.
I mean, because it seems like for the public interest in everything, they would say this is the guy we're looking for.
His name is Tamerlane, you know, or whatever.
Right.
They would.
They could have.
And instead they decided to clamp down on that.
It's highly significant.
And I'm sorry, because there's so many important things to go over here.
But it seems like a really big deal that they would apparently, allegedly by me, pretend that they didn't know this guy rather than just fail to figure out that they did know him.
Right.
They should have come as soon as they ID'd him on the 19th.
They should have said, golly, you know, this guy.
I mean, and here.
OK, now I'm going to pretend I'm an FBI person.
The FBI would say, well, we couldn't tell you that the Russians gave us a tip because that would piss off Vladimir Putin.
Yeah, but they wouldn't have to say their source, they would just have to say, we know who this guy is.
This is who he is.
And and we'll come up with our excuse for how this happened after we knew his name later.
But, you know, first things first.
Right.
Innocent people have been killed and maimed here.
What the hell?
Right.
Well, didn't happen.
So.
So, yeah, at the very least, that suspect, then the allegations that he was approached to be an informant, then the fact that at least according to some people involved or some people tied to that 2011 triple murder, he was inadequately investigated for it and he acted weird after that.
And then, you know, add that in with his trip to Russia that they couldn't find.
I've got new questions about that since, you know, since because he was actually moved into an inactive position, which, again, would make sense if he were an informant.
But but as a result, Customs and Border Patrol did not question him.
And there's at least reason to believe there there's reason to believe that Inspire magazine was either on his laptop that he brought with him to Russia or had been on his laptop and then deleted off.
But in such a way that it would still have been available if people had wanted to scan his laptop.
So they could have legally at the border taken his laptop in 2012 when he went to Russia and found that he had Inspire magazine on it and then they would have had another reason to investigate him.
That didn't happen either.
Well, so does it seem from at least kind of one take that he was somehow radicalized by an Al-Qaeda outfit in Dagestan or something?
They're the ones who recruited, recruited him and had him do this.
He just decided to start reading Al-Aulaqi and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsulas magazine online and and came up with this himself or.
Well, he was definitely reading Inspire before he went to Dagestan.
But because that came out in the trial, he he in fact, at 6 a.m.on the morning he left for Dagestan, he he or somebody else uploaded a copy of the complete Inspire onto Jahar's computer.
And so January 21st, 2012, you know, that transfer takes place by a thumb drive and he appears to have at some point either brought a translation or tried to write his own translation of Inspire magazine into Russian, which is sort of an interesting point.
But so, you know, I don't I don't know about that fact.
But one other thing, one other question I have coming out of the trial is just just as a tiny detail.
The brothers, Jahar had two phones.
He had a prepaid T-Mobile cell phone that he got the day before the attack and he had had an AT&T iPhone on a friends and family plan with a bunch of his his Central Asian buddies that from college and that one had that his particular phone on that friends and family plan had lapsed for nonpayment.
And by the morning of April 19th, 2013, the government was using his friends and family plan to enter his buddy's apartment without a warrant.
So they already had a lot of detail about his his AT&T phone.
What was what's interesting is that in the trial, the government hid what time on the 19th they learned from they they officially learned from T-Mobile that the brothers, each of their prepaid T-Mobile phones were in their name.
They weren't even burners, really.
They weren't hiding that they were their phones.
Right.
And what's interesting is the government didn't advance any plausible explanation for how they found the phones and when they found the phones.
We know that Jahar had destroyed both of the phones by the time, you know, by the time he was picked up by the government on on April 18th.
And all I'm trying to say with this is that probably they found the phones via other means.
And one way they might have done that is with location tracking that they don't want to tell us about.
And so, you know, the fact that there's this weirdness about the phones, the fact remember, they claimed that they used the NSA dragnet to check into the brothers relations, except at the same time, a bunch of anonymous people are saying they can't use the NSA dragnet doesn't collect any cell phone data.
Well, that's all they had.
That's all the brothers had.
And and according to their claims, they wouldn't have collected any of this T-Mobile data because T-Mobile is one of the providers that's not directly providing to the government.
So there's a lot of fishiness with the phone records, which leads me to believe they're hiding some phone tracking on the brothers that they don't want to know.
And that would be another way that they could have ID'd them before.
Before the big manhunt.
All right now, so I'm sorry to ask you to speculate, but I guess I don't know what the hell I will anyway.
And you say whatever you want.
Does this seem to you like one of those Trevor Aronson terror factory type plots?
Because, you know, usually it's a disturbed, young, naive kind of idiot that they trick into saying he loves Osama or hitting the red button or something stupid like that.
But the Tamerlan guy doesn't seem like the kind of guy that the FBI agents would try to play in that way necessarily to me.
I don't know.
But I wonder whether you think that it's one of the likely possibilities that the origin of this plot was one of these FBI entrapments that they just, you know, screwed up and it went off that kind of thing.
I don't think so.
And the reasons I don't think so is.
Because, A, he's smarter than the guys they try and entrap, and B, for a variety of reasons, it sounds like the addition of the Russian factor and, you know, whatever that is.
Remember, their uncle had ties to the CIA to, you know, and therefore presumably to intelligence collection in Chechnya.
That involves the drug trade, right?
So I think I'm actually in the middle of writing a post about David Headley, and I think when you get into this overlap between drugs and terrorists, that's when the government loses it.
And when their desires for informants may supersede their desire to entrap young terrorist defendants.
And I just think there's enough other factors in this case.
I mean, look, Tamerlan was real.
I think he may not have made the bombs, but he was a fairly competent young man, which is more than most of the guys that the FBI entraps.
I mean, most of them are mentally ill and most of them aren't aren't mixed martial art.
People don't have, you know, they don't they're not drug dealers.
They're not they don't have a network of criminal accomplices already.
And that's what these brothers had, both of them, frankly.
And so I think that already makes them somewhat more sophisticated than the than the average guy entrapped by the FBI.
Right.
Well, yeah, no, I definitely agree with that.
But, you know, it's interesting, though, I mean, to have a hole as huge as a likely or, you know, very possible, you know, unindicted co-conspirator out there who actually made those bombs that did the damage.
I mean, who could it have been?
I don't know.
I'm not I'm not trying to say, oh, I have to assume it was the FBI themselves or or someone else working for them or what.
I don't know.
But that's a pretty big hole for the FBI and the Justice Department to decide, well, let's go ahead with this prosecution.
And I guess leave the rest of the case unsolved, if well, you know, we don't know.
There was a really interesting detail that that the prosecutor succeeded in not letting the defense introduce, which is that, you know, the government tried to pretend that one of these computers, which was clearly Tamerlan's, wasn't just Tamerlan's.
That was the only computer that was encrypted.
That was the computer where he first downloaded Inspire.
But there was also on that Russian language materials about bomb making.
And we don't know whether the Russian language materials explained the details of the bombs that the Inspire recipe could not have, which is the remote control stuff.
We know that Tamerlan bought the remote control stuff, the car, you know, the car toy parts that they used to set off the bombs.
But we don't know whether he's the one who set that up.
But we don't we the prosecution succeeded in preventing us from learning what those Russian language bombing materials were.
And and that might point to more of an answer.
Yeah, very interesting stuff.
Well, thank you very much for your great work on this and your time on the show.
Explain it.
I sure learned a lot.
Absolutely.
Good to be on.
All right.
See you later.
Take care.
Bye bye.
All right.
So that's the great Marcy Wheeler.
Empty Wheel at Empty Wheel dot net and on Twitter at Empty Wheel.
We'll be right back.
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