Boston: The Case Is Not Closed, Parts 9 and 10
by RAZFX Pro @ 2013-07-30 – 23:53:49
Dear Readers:
Yesterday I ran parts 7 and 8, which focused on Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older brother of defendant Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who faces a possible death penalty in the Boston bombings. Today, a consideration of the Dzhokhar’s capture and interrogation. Earlier sections are available by back scrolling.
9. The Capture In The Boat.
After the confrontation at Dexter and Laurel, Dzhokhar escaped in the stolen SUV, ditched the vehicle and his cell phone, and while the FBI, the Boston cops, and various army forces imposed a military lockdown and occupation on Boston and nearby towns, hid under the tarp on a boat in someone’s driveway in Watertown, where he was found on the evening of the 19th. Law enforcement actually learned of his presence hours earlier but waited until darkness fell. Present were officers from several agencies, including the Massachusetts State Police, local cops and transit cops.
The accounts of the search and of Dzhokhar’s capture are hard to credit. Watertown Police Chief Deveau, who seemed to vastly enjoy his sudden prominence, gave the most detailed descriptions to the mass media, who characteristically swallowed them, but he was wrong.
To CNN and the gullible Blitzer, Deveau said that Dzhokhar fired on police when they found him in the boat. “It was back and forth,” he said. “He was firing.” The Washington Post agreed, reporting that the suspect “was shooting back.”
It turned out, however, that the volley of shots fired at the scene, which reporters heard, all came from the police and special force personnel. Up to a hundred rounds were fired, all of them into the boat. Dzhokhar was unarmed. It was nearly a week later before the press corrected the error. As Sari Horwitz and Peter Finn wrote in the April 24th Post, “police feared he was heavily armed (but) the suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing had no firearms when he came under a barrage of police gunfire that struck the boat where he was hiding... Authorities said they were desperate to capture Dzhokhar Tsarnaev so he could be questioned. The FBI, however, declined to discuss what prompted the gunfire.”
Dzhokhar was shot in the throat, according to all first news accounts of his capture. There was also plenty of wild speculation. The British paper, The Mirror, apparently prone to exaggeration on a massive scale, claimed that the suspect tried to take his own life “in a desperate bid to avoid... a possible death penalty,” by putting a gun into his mouth and pulling the trigger, though how this could help him to avoid the death penalty was not specified. “Reports say the bullet passed through his throat, just missing his spinal cord, and came out the back of his neck.”
There is now a photograph of Dzhokhar in circulation which shows him emerging from the boat, taken by Massachusetts State Police photographer Sgt. Sean Murphy. Murphy is said to have leaked this and other pictures to Boston Magazine because he was disturbed by the ‘glamorized’ cover shot of the suspect in Rolling Stone. He’s in trouble for doing it, and is under investigation.
The Murphy photo seems to show Dzhokhar without a throat wound at all. This may be due to angles and shadows obscuring it. To further muddle the situation, there is speculation that, despite the government’s story, Dzhokhar was not shot in the throat but cut. .
Says Officer Jeff Campbell of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority Transit Police SWAT unit, part of the team which apprehended Dzhokhar, “it wasn’t a puncture hole. It was a slice where it was spread open, possibly a piece of shrapnel from one of the explosives that they were using the night before. It didn’t look like a bullet wound to me. It looked like a cut of some kind.”
According to authorities, the brother was taken to the hospital with several wounds, among them a wound to the throat which prevented him from speaking. This disability did not prevent government agents from questioning him for sixteen hours, though, until a federal judge personally intervened.
10. A Very Strange Interrogation.
Until federal judge Marianne B. Bowler came to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s hospital room to put a stop to it, he was subject to questioning for sixteen hours, not by Boston police or even local FBI agents, but by a special team of interrogators, the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group flown to Boston from Guantanamo Bay Prison by order of the President.
Obama said at the time that agents could question the suspect without the presence of an attorney under an exception to the Miranda Rule. This little used exception, however, as the President certainly knew, permits at most a handful of questions and is narrowly applied only to circumstances in which lives may be in immediate danger.
Why, then, did Obama do it? What did he expect to gain? The violation of Miranda would jeopardize any statement Tsarnaev might make under interrogation and be inadmissible in court. In fact, this quite literally endangered any trial and prospective conviction, even if the Supreme Court is inclined to fry the defendant.
But that is not the only disturbing aspect of this chain of events. For the President to order in this particular interrogation unit from Guantanamo should set off alarm bells for anyone familiar with their special talents.
The federal government, as I have documented several times, knows full well that most of the prisoners at Guantanamo are factually innocent of any crimes; the Pentagon’s own study says this, as does the Red Cross. Yet, these people have been held for more than a decade and there are scant prospects for their release. Their conditions are so terrible that the vast majority recently spent months in a hunger strike to try to gain the attention of the outside world. Sadly, most Americans don’t give a shit.
Still, what is the principal task of the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group? It’s not as though the FBI has a dearth of qualified agents, and it’s not as though Boston Police can’t field skilled questioners. The Guantanamo team specializes in one thing and you know what that is: extracting false confessions from innocent people.
As journalist Andy Worthington has exposed (see his book, The Guantanamo Files), and has been confirmed by federal judges in habeas corpus petitions, the U.S. government has obtained false confessions from Guantanamo prisoners under torture. This is the specialty of the HVDIG. As I’m sure you know, there are forms of torture which are psychological, so it may have been unnecessary, as well as impractical, for these spooks to waterboard Dzhokhar in his hospital room.
It has since emerged that Tsarnaev repeatedly asked for an attorney and his request was ignored. These agents must have known, just as Obama knew, that refusing to provide a lawyer to a suspect who requests one, as was the case here, can not only contaminate any statement they might get but actually get any later conviction thrown out.
The questioners were senior people, fully aware that what they were doing was risky. But they proceeded. Then they leaked to a helpful mass media that the accused had confessed to them that he and his brother had planned and carried out the bombings due to their anger at U.S. policies in Afghanistan and Iraq. The leak was insupportable. Under these circumstances, and with the putative defendant without counsel, there could be only one purpose: to poison the public mind about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and short-circuit any further or parallel investigation.
Why would they do this? If the government had the airtight case it claims to have, it would not want to take chances with it. It would not need to further prejudice a public already willing to chow down on any official story it was told. Moreover, this supposed ‘confession’ could never be used in evidence, so what good was it?
That’s when former FBI agent and network shill John Miller came to the rescue, telling his CBS audience that, amazingly, there was a Tsarnaev confession that was admissible after all because one had been discovered, written on the inside of the boat where he’d hidden. He’d left a rambling explanation, Miller said, which informed the world that an attack on one Muslim was an attack on all.
The hospital ‘confession’ had done it’s work, further magnifying the public’s certainty that the brothers were guilty although direct evidence was rather paltry. What was needed was another ‘confession,’ one which could be used in evidence.
Hence, the fortuitous, rambling tell-all written by a bullet-riddled suspect, inside a boat, in the dark, on fiberglass, with a Sharpie that he had either been saving for just such a purpose or had found conveniently lying around.
Tomorrow: Part 11: Terrorism In The U.S.A.
http://lookingglass.blog.co.uk/2013/07/ ... -16278037/
