Lindorff: Why such secrecy about Craft Int. in Boston?

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Lindorff: Why such secrecy about Craft Int. in Boston?

Postby MacCruiskeen » Fri Apr 26, 2013 5:55 pm

This is what actual investigative journalism looks like. Dave Lindorff is a brave man.

Link to original, inc. photos & hyperlinks

Dave Lindorff wrote:Published on This Can't Be Happening! (http://www.thiscantbehappening.net)

Why Such Secrecy about Private Military Contractor’s Men Working the Event?

Thu, 04/25/2013 - 14:09
Craft International Services hired guns at the Boston Marathon:
by: Dave Lindorff

http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1718

Speaking as an investigative reporter with almost 40 years’s experience, I can say that when government officials won’t talk, they’re generally hiding something embarrassing or worse.

I tried, and nobody will talk about those Craft International Services private security personnel who were widely observed and photographed near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, wearing security ear-pieces, hats and T-shirts bearing the company’s skull logo, and all wearing the same dark coats, khaki pants and combat boots, some carrying what appear to have been radiation detectors. (I got no hard answers, though there were some inadvertent hints given.)

I first contacted a man identifying himself as Jack Fleming, a public affairs person with the Boston Athletic Assn., sponsor of the marathon. Fleming advised me that “If you want to ask about that you should contact the Commonwealth (of Massachusetts) Executive Office of Public Safety.”

I called that agency and spoke with the public information office there, a man named Terrell. He first said, "Did you call the Marathon organizers?" When I replied that I had, and that they had said to call his office, he replied, "They did?" Then he said, “You should call the City of Boston Police Department. They released a security plan to some media organizations.”

Indeed they had released that plan to the Boston Globe. Based upon the information it got from the police the article the Globe ran [1], did report that the Police had deployed “air patrols, K9 units, and more than 1,000 uniformed officers and soldiers along the 26-mile course and the finish line,” but it made no mention of the private contracting of soldiers-for-hire, which is what Craft International does (see the Craft website [2]). News agency Reuters [3] reported, meanwhile, that a top official for the Massachusetts state Homeland Security Department, Undersecretary Kurt Schwartz, told a group at Harvard U. that his agency had “planned” for a possible bombing attack on the marathon, even running a “table-top” exercise about such an event a week before the race.

I called the Boston Police to ask if they had hired the Craft International personnel who were observed at the scene just before and after the bombing, and was told by the public affairs office there that “Anything having to do with the investigation of the bombing would have to be referred to the FBI Boston Division office.” When I pointed out that I wasn’t asking anything about the investigation, but was simply asking who had hired the security personnel from Craft International, the answer was simply repeated: “You’ll have to ask the FBI.”

So I called the FBI, and got a public affairs person there named Amanda Cox. Her initial response to my question was, “I do not have any information on that.”


Seven apparent Craft International rent-a-soldiers behind and departing (top rt. with backpack) a communications van



I then said I had been referred to her by the Boston Police Department, and said that photos of the scene after the bombing had shown Craft International personnel conversing with FBI agents. She then put down the phone, and I could hear her turn to a supervisor and ask, her voice muffled, “This guy’s asking about the Craft Security Consultants -- who hired them and what they were doing.”

I next overheard the muffled voice of another woman to whom she had been speaking reply, “I think you could safely say, ‘I do know we worked with a lot of people who worked on security at the marathon...’” After that I couldn’t make out what was being said.

Cox later returned to the phone, and instead told me, “I’d refer you to the company on any information about who hired them.” (Taken together the overheard conversation and the official answer from Cox would at least seem to confirm that Craft's people were hired for the event, and that the FBI knows a lot more than it is willing to say about them.)

My next step was to call Craft International. The company has no phone number listed on its website -- just a general email address of info@thecraft.com [4] (to which I wrote to asking for information, but which elicited no response)--but I found one listed for their headquarters office at 2101 Cedar Springs Rd., Suite 1400, Dallas, TX, in a listing on the company published in a directory in Bloomberg Businessweek, This entry noted that the company, in addition to “providing security, defense, and combat weapons training services for military, police, corporate and civilian clients in the US and internationally,” also “offers corporate and private and civilian training services...” The number, published in a business magazine, was clearly meant as a contact for potential customers to call.

A woman answered the phone brightly with the company's name. However, when I identified myself as a reporter, and said I was wondering if someone could tell me who had hired personnel from the firm to work at the Boston Marathon, she responded with a flummoxed: “Um, I um, don’t really have any information on that. I’m just an answering service.”

I replied, “Look, the number I called is listed as the number of the company’s corporate headquarters at 2101 Cedar Springs Road. You’re not an answering service.”

At that point she said, “Let me see who I can transfer you to.”

However, after a long pause, she was back, and said, “The answer I’ve been given is that you should go to the website, where there’s an email address you can write to with your question.”

I had already done that, I told her. She then said she couldn’t help me and hung up.

I also called the US Department of Homeland Security, but a women named Angela who answered the press office number for this public government agency (she refused to provide her last name despite being the public information office) said the DHS media office was “only taking inquiries sent in by email.” I sent in an inquiry asking if any unit of the DHS had hired Craft International to provide security at the Boston Marathon, but so far (note: two days later!) have received no response.

As things stand, since it's highly unlikely that Craft International, a private for-profit enterprise founded by the late ace Navy Seal sniper Chris Kyle, would have "hired" itself to police the Marathon gratis, it seems pretty clear that we had rent-a-special forces-soldier people, hired by some agency, at the scene of the bombing ahead of the bombing.

And we have no reporting on this in the mainstream corporate media.

Why? I have no answer to that.

I did write to Andrea Estes, the lead writer of the Globe’s piece on police security planning mentioned above, who is described in her bio on the Globe’s website staff page as an “investigative reporter specializing in government accountability.”

I called and left a message on her phone, and sent her an email, asking if she had looked into the Craft Security personnel, to see who hired them, what they were doing at the race finish line, and why they appeared be carrying radiation detectors. She has so far not responded to my request for information and assistance concerning anything she had done or learned about this, or whether she had looked into it at all.

Certainly there is a big accountability question. A bunch of them actually. Here are a few:

* If Craft International people were hired, who hired them and why?

* If it was the Boston Police or the FBI that hired them, why won’t they just say so? Simply hiring outside security help should not be a secret, and could in no way affect the investigation into the bombing and the captured suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, so why the secrecy about that? Given all the police presence, and the size of the FBI's Boston division, why did they need those extra guys from a private rent-a-soldier firm?

* If it was not the Boston Police or the FBI, what agency did hire the company, and why?

* If it was the state’s Homeland Security Dept. or or the state Executive Office of Public Safety, or perhaps more likely, the US Department of Homeland Security, did they notify the FBI that they had done so, and tell the agency what had prompted them to do this? 


* The big overarching question when it comes to who hired Craft International is, what possible gain in security could have been achieved by adding what appears to be seven guys (or perhaps a few more who didn’t appear in photos) from a private security firm when the Boston Police had in place over 1000 armed security people from their office and the National Guard, and when, as became evident immediately after the bombs went off, a large number of FBI personnel were also on hand?

Unless, of course, the Craft Security people were aware of something that we, the public, including the race participants and spectators, and perhaps even the police and FBI, were not aware of.

Transparency is critical to accountability. At this point, it is clear that we have had a massive failure of the national security state. Despite the fact that the FBI was aware of concerns about Tarmelan Tsarnaev, and the fact that the CIA had him on a watch list, he appears to have been able to work on line to learn how to build a powerful homemade bomb, to obtain the materials, including a substantial quantity of black powder, to build a number of them, and, allegedly with the help of his younger brother Dzhokhar, to place them near the finish line and detonate two of them, killing three people and injuring as many as 200. That’s a huge intelligence fail.

It would be an even bigger fail if it turns out that some agency had awareness of a credible threat and that it hired Craft International personnel to prevent it. We clearly need to know, and have a right to demand to know, who hired those men and why. After all, at a minimum, on the face of things, they did an abysmal job of preventing a bombing right in front of their supposedly well-trained noses.

And of course, as I wrote earlier [5], there is also another question, which is really disturbing: The image of the exploded backpack released by the FBI and identified as the remains of the pack that was carrying one of the two pressure-cooker bombs, prominently displays a white square on a black background. This is not a doctored photograph; it’s the photograph that was released by the FBI. There are also at least two photos depicting one of the Craft International men who is wearing a black backpack identical to several of the other Craft International personnel. The same white square is also visible on the top of his pack.

There does not appear to be any such white marking -- square or otherwise -- on the top of the black backpack worn by Tarmelan Tsarnaev, as observed in several security photos taken of him (Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was shown carrying a smaller white or light-colored pack, slung over one shoulder). Check out the images below of Tarmelan, the exploded bag and the Craft International character:


FBI image of exploded pack with white square, white square on Craft guy's pack, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev (left.) with pack but clearly no white square marking



I am not drawing any conclusions from any of this, but I will say that when government agencies at all levels and a private contracting firm are all this obtuse and secretive (and in some cases even deceptive) about what should be a simple question -- who hired these men? -- my suspicions are aroused.

Somebody’s clearly hiding something.

And by the way, why aren't the mainstream media asking about this? Are corporate media journalists so intimidated about being labeled “conspiracy nuts” that they can't do their jobs? At a minimum, this goes to the question of accountability. It also goes to the question of inter-agency communication or lack of it. And given what we know about how many times the FBI has been an active encourager and enabler of terror plots [6] which it later thwarts and claims credit for preventing, there’s the question, too of potential official culpability. Furthermore, when an horrific incident like this is used to justify such new threats to our Constitutional freedom as an unprecedented martial law-style lockdown of an entire 1-million-person metropolitan area and a precedent-setting deliberately Miranda-free, attorney-free interrogation of a hospitalized, gravely wounded and sedated suspect, it is critical that the whole story be told, not just the official one.

Source URL: http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1718

Links:
[1] http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/0 ... story.html
[2] http://www.thecraft.com
[3] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/ ... F620130424
[4] mailto:info@thecraft.com
[5] http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1708
[6] http://rt.com/usa/fbi-terror-report-plot-365-899/


Please post anything in this thread that can cast light on the role played by Craft International on the day of the Boston Marathon.
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

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Re: Lindorff: Why such secrecy about Craft Int. in Boston?

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Apr 26, 2013 6:07 pm

Is it TruthOut or TruthDig that's censoring - refusing to publish Dave? I can't remember


oh yea it's TruthOut
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/04/01/ ... -truthout/
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Re: Lindorff: Why such secrecy about Craft Int. in Boston?

Postby justdrew » Fri Apr 26, 2013 7:55 pm

it's kinda weird that other than that article, the phrase "craft security consultants" is not found anywhere else. Doesn't seem like it would be that rare of a phrase.

https://www.google.com/search?q="craft+security+consultants"
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Re: Lindorff: Why such secrecy about Craft Int. in Boston?

Postby coffin_dodger » Fri Apr 26, 2013 8:00 pm

Their web site is really scary
Last edited by coffin_dodger on Fri Apr 26, 2013 8:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Lindorff: Why such secrecy about Craft Int. in Boston?

Postby justdrew » Fri Apr 26, 2013 8:01 pm

would be best if you not directly link to them. please edit that
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Re: Lindorff: Why such secrecy about Craft Int. in Boston?

Postby DrVolin » Fri Apr 26, 2013 8:04 pm

.
all these dreams are swept aside
By bloody hands of the hypnotized
Who carry the cross of homicide
And history bears the scars of our civil wars

--Guns and Roses
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Re: Lindorff: Why such secrecy about Craft Int. in Boston?

Postby FourthBase » Fri Apr 26, 2013 8:28 pm

crikkett wrote:Good morning! I'm cross-posting some good stuff from FourthBase's facebook page, scrutinizing military, homeland security, and law enforcement response to the Boston Marathon bombings.

Here's maybe the juiciest subject so far, of both good and bad questions:
http://ftp.dailypaul.com/282579/identit ... n-bombings
http://killerapps.foreignpolicy.com/pos ... _yesterday
http://communities.washingtontimes.com/ ... rcement-b/

If you're the curious type, you might have eventually wound up stumbling on that same team of dudes via this hyper-presumptuous and hypo-reasoned meme:
http://images.4chan.org/b/src/1366445428542.jpg

I am not myself proclaiming "False flag!" I hate that ****. What's the point of ever asking a question, or ever formulating a good question to begin with, if you think you already have all the answers? There's none, no point. (Except maybe making the very act of asking a good question look bad?) For that reason, if you are one of those who recently announced that you would forever ignore any conspiracy theorist: Trust me, I understand. I get that. But you also want good questions asked, and answered well, right? Good news, then. This is the latter, not the former.

And the question is simply:
[seinfeld] What is the deal with these guys in khakis? [/seinfeld]
The way I see it, merely based on their position, they are at least guilty of some serious incompetence. Two dudes standing mere feet away from the first blast site, dudes who -- it's pretty safe to assume -- are supposed to be kind of keeping an eye out for shady bastards trying to do shady stuff, and they don't notice two shady bastards walk over, drop a big backpack, and walk away? Methinks they don't deserve a bonus in their next paycheck. Perhaps they should even be penalized.


Am I brave, too? :shrug: Crikkett, too?

A bit more from Facebook, all from a post that got me banned from the "Boston Public Radio" page:

So, we have two members of the MA National Guard unit assigned to be at the marathon just in case to respond to some kind of WMD attack, standing more or less right in front of the LensCrafters where the first blast occurred, standing there sometime after at least one runner had finished the race (the happy sweaty guy smiling into the camera, when did he finish the race, it might act as a kind of timestamp), and...did they have the opportunity to notice and report two shifty men drop a full backpack and walk away?


And more in response to an objection that CST WMD units are a good thing:

the point isn't just that there were such units. Of course, there should be! Just in case! You're right. The point is that two members of the MA unit were standing RIGHT THERE at seemingly RIGHT THEN or thereabouts, and should have noticed the two shady Tsarnaevs dropping a shady backpack and shadily walking away. If the Guard duo were still standing right in front of the LensCrafters at around 2:45-2:50, then they should be investigated for incompetence, negligence. Or worse. One of them has on a Craft International hat. (At first, I thought it might have been a promo hat for The Punisher movie, but the little flag on the right confirms it is Craft.) He might have bought it online on a whim, maybe it was a souvenir from a training session, maybe a gift from a friend or from family or from a boss, but maybe he is a Craft International employee and his day job is "solving problems with violence" as the company motto goes. Craft is a wannabe Blackwater. They do dirty, dirty things. Perhaps out of misplaced patriotism, perhaps out of greed. But, dirty. I do not assume with any certainty whatsoever that anything dirty happened at the marathon. But it's definitely worth knowing what the deal is with the two khaki pants guys. Maybe they were just at that spot briefly and moved away by the time 2:50 rolled around. Maybe at that time they were preoccupied with a person who came down with heatstroke at the corner of Boylston and Dartmouth. Maybe they were there, in front of LensCrafters, as the backpack was dropped, and should have noticed something wrong, and now owe the victims an apology for sucking at being observant. Maybe, more improbably, something worse -- but let's find out who they are first, let's see every photo of THEM to ascertain if or how badly they failed.


It is important to right now contemplate multiple possibilities. The least amount of evidence says they're all Craft dudes. But they might be. The most says they're a MA Guard unit, on CST duty, ready to respond to a WMD attack. But that there's definitely (now it's definite, definitely not a Punisher hat) a guy with a Craft hat. And they were definitely RIGHT THERE. And by identifying that runner, we get a general timestamp. And what the fuck were they drilling for before...tabletop what? What does that entail? Sounds interesting. What did they predict? Something that warranted a massive Guard presence? Craft presence? Yes, way way way back in the Boston thread, I think, I had asked the same kind of questions. If Craft: Who hired them? State? Feds? City? BAA? Corporation X? Other? No one? If they're Craft, why the Guard stories? If they're Guard, why the Craft garb?
Last edited by FourthBase on Fri Apr 26, 2013 10:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Lindorff: Why such secrecy about Craft Int. in Boston?

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Fri Apr 26, 2013 8:36 pm

This one goes on a bit, not quite as good as the Lindorff article, but I'll quote the pertinent info and some interesting links:

The alternative media, such as Citizens for Legitimate Government (CLG) and Whatreallyhappened.com, were far ahead of the “official” investigation and had already turned up photos of men in military garb and distinctive baseball caps that featured a skull logo, talking on cell phones and carrying backpacks that looked just like those that had been used in the bombings.

There were other photos of others in similar attire, who appeared to be members of the DHS or of a private security team–which appears to have been Craft International, a private mercenary firm that was founded by Chris Kyle–which was running this op on its behalf.

Exposing the fabricated attack was so threatening to DHS and the FBI that its Boston stooge, Richard DesLauriers, Agent in Charge, held a press conference during which he insisted that “the only photographs that the public should consider” were those of two other persons, one of whom appeared to have had his image photoshopped to look a lot like the men the alternative media had uncovered–except that the image on his baseball cap was obfuscated so it could not be made out.

The only justification for restricting attention to these photographs, however, would have been if the photographic record had been exhaustively explored where every person in every photograph had been identified and cleared of any culpability, which is absurd.

This was a transparent effort to divert attention from what the alternative media had already discovered. The real perps appear to be part of a military-style deployment, which was conducting a “drill” officials are attempting to deny:

In “Caught but not about to be arrested: Craft International Trained Men at Boston Bombing Location Before Attack” (19 April 2013), therebel presents a host of photographs, which provide convincing proof that Craft International was conducting this op on behalf of DHS, and writes,

“What does this mean? The images were uncovered first by 4Chan but I don’t know if they knew that the location where they were photographed was so close to ground zero.

“It’s been revealed that at least two men, possibly a third man with them, were photographed at the bombing scene in Boston wearing matching military grade boots and khaki pants and carrying large black backpacks that match the description of the ones the bombs were in.

“They were photographed just feet away from where one of the bombs was detonated before the attack.

“I have noticed that one of them is wearing a hat from Craft International, a mercenary training company set up by former Navy SEAL Chris Kyle and at least one of them is wearing an earpiece, the type the Secret Service use to communicate on site during operations.

“It might be worth noting also that Chris Kyle was killed a few months ago in a rather suspicious shooting at a gun range.I wrote about his shooting in relation to the ongoing American Gladio operation. And now here we have a guy wearing a hat from his company so close to ground zero with a backpack that matches the description of the one that had a bomb in it?”

http://nsnbc.me/2013/04/22/some-hard-le ... ged-event/
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Re: Lindorff: Why such secrecy about Craft Int. in Boston?

Postby wordspeak2 » Fri Apr 26, 2013 8:39 pm

And in that one image one of the two guys doesn't have a backpack on. This would seem to be relevant, am I right? In another image post-bombing he does have it on- which would seem to be after the one in which he doesn't have it on... unless I'm missing something.
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Re: Lindorff: Why such secrecy about Craft Int. in Boston?

Postby wordspeak2 » Fri Apr 26, 2013 8:42 pm

This youtube purports to implicate the Craft guys. The white square on the security guy's backpack matches the white square on the bomb bag. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjocGidSLJw
Thoughts?
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Re: Lindorff: Why such secrecy about Craft Int. in Boston?

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Apr 26, 2013 9:03 pm

wordspeak2 wrote:This youtube purports to implicate the Craft guys. The white square on the security guy's backpack matches the white square on the bomb bag. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjocGidSLJw
Thoughts?


:shock:
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Lindorff: Why such secrecy about Craft Int. in Boston?

Postby FourthBase » Fri Apr 26, 2013 9:05 pm

wordspeak2 wrote:This youtube purports to implicate the Craft guys. The white square on the security guy's backpack matches the white square on the bomb bag. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjocGidSLJw
Thoughts?


Yeah, the white square!

If it's not that guy's backpack, then one exactly like it, from his team.
But yes, let's see all the footage of the khaki Craft/Guard crews, all of it.
Oh, the state won't release such a thing? Shit. What do we do, then?
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Re: Lindorff: Why such secrecy about Craft Int. in Boston?

Postby justdrew » Fri Apr 26, 2013 9:27 pm

DrVolin wrote:@thecraft?


they don't need to see our site in their referrer logs

if anyone wants to link to sites like that, use:
http://anonym.to/en.html
to generate a link
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Re: Lindorff: Why such secrecy about Craft Int. in Boston?

Postby DrVolin » Fri Apr 26, 2013 9:34 pm

Sorry. I wasn't trying to link. I was marveling at the boldness of the domain name.
all these dreams are swept aside
By bloody hands of the hypnotized
Who carry the cross of homicide
And history bears the scars of our civil wars

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Re: Lindorff: Why such secrecy about Craft Int. in Boston?

Postby barracuda » Fri Apr 26, 2013 9:45 pm

Reposting this from the other thread, it seems to ID a few of the individuals in question.

Warning: Daily Paul.
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