{"id":44924,"date":"2013-06-25T05:00:36","date_gmt":"2013-06-25T04:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/an-fbi-double-agent\/44924\/"},"modified":"2013-06-25T05:00:36","modified_gmt":"2013-06-25T04:00:36","slug":"an-fbi-double-agent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/an-fbi-double-agent\/","title":{"rendered":"An FBI Double Agent?"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n by Russ Baker
WhoWhatWhy.com<\/i><\/a><\/span><\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Recently
\n by Russ Baker: FBI:
\n Knew About Saudi 9\/11 Hijacker Ties \u2014 But Lied To Protect ‘National\u00a0Security’<\/a><\/i><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/i><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n \"\"<\/a>
\n <\/p>\n

Amid the swirl
\n of mysteries surrounding the alleged Boston bombers, one fact, barely
\n touched upon in the mainstream U.S. media, stands out: There is
\n a strong possibility that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older of the two
\n brothers, was a double agent, perhaps recruited by the FBI.<\/span><\/p>\n

If Tsarnaev
\n was<\/i> a double agent, he would be just one of thousands of
\n young people coerced by the FBI, as the price for settling a minor
\n legal problem, into a dangerous career as an informant.<\/span><\/p>\n

That he was
\n so coerced is the easiest explanation for two seemingly incompatible
\n incidents in his life:<\/span><\/p>\n

The first is
\n that he returned to Russia in 2012, ostensibly to renew his Russian
\n passport so he could file an application for US citizenship<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

The second
\n is that Tsarnaev then jeopardized his citizenship application with
\n conspicuous, provocative \u2013 almost theatrical \u2013 behavior
\n that seemed more caricature<\/i> than characteristic of a Muslim
\n extremist.<\/span><\/p>\n

False Notes<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

While walking
\n around in flashy western clothes in the Russian Republic of Dagestan,
\n he visited his cousin, Magomed Kartashov, a prominent Islamist leader,
\n already on the Russians\u2019 radar. The two reportedly spent hours discussing
\n Tsarnaev\u2019s wish to join a terrorist cell there in the Caucasus.<\/a>
\n Later, Russian authorities asked Kartashov if he had tried to incite
\n Tsarnaev with \u201cextremist\u201d views. Kartashov said it was the other
\n way around: he had tried to convince Tsarnaev that \u201cviolent methods
\n are not right.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Experts agree
\n that Tsarnaev could not have expected such provocative activity
\n to escape the notice of the vigilant Russian authorities.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Back in America,
\n Tsarnaev again called attention to himself as a radical Muslim.
\n Just one month after he returned from his trip, a YouTube page that
\n appeared to belong to him featured multiple jihadist videos that
\n he had purportedly endorsed.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

And in January
\n 2013, he got himself thrown out of a mosque in Cambridge for shouting
\n at a speaker who compared the Prophet Mohammed to Martin Luther
\n King Jr. Tsarnaev rarely attended this mosque, but he must have
\n known it was moderate. (He had done something similar the previous
\n November at the same mosque.) Typically, jihadists are trained to
\n blend in, to be as inconspicuous as possible. Did Tsarnaev go to
\n this mosque with the express intent of smoking out possible radicals?<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

The key to
\n Tsarnaev\u2019s puzzling behavior may lie in the answer to another question:
\n when exactly did Tsarnaev first come to the attention of the FBI?
\n The timeline offered by the agency, and duly reported in the mainstream
\n media, has been inconsistent. One story line focused on the FBI\u2019s
\n response to an alert from Russian authorities.<\/span><\/p>\n

Eric Schmitt
\n and Michael S. Schmidt of the New York Times, wrote, on April 24,
\n 2013,<\/span><\/p>\n

The
\n first Russian request came in March 2011 through the F.B.I.\u2019s office
\n in the United States Embassy in Moscow. The one-page request said
\n Mr. Tsarnaev \u201dhad changed drastically since 2010\u201d and was preparing
\n to travel to a part of Russia \u201cto join unspecified underground groups.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The Russian
\n request was reportedly based on intercepted phone calls between
\n Tsarnaev\u2019s mother and an unidentified person (The Guardian<\/i>
\n [London], April 21, 2013). According to another source, several
\n calls were intercepted, including one between Tsarnaev and his mother.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

So was it the
\n Russian alert in March
\n 2011<\/a> that first prompted the FBI to investigate Tsarnaev? This
\n conclusion seems undermined by another report in the Times \u2013 written
\n four days earlier by the same two reporters plus a third\u2014
\n that dated the agency\u2019s first contact with Tamerlan and family members
\n at least two months earlier, in January<\/a>
\n 2011.<\/span><\/p>\n

If the FBI
\n interviewed Tsarnaev before<\/i> the Russians asked them to, then
\n what prompted the agency\u2019s interest in him? Were his contacts here
\n as well as in Russia considered useful to American counterintelligence?<\/span><\/p>\n

The Canadian
\n Connection<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Although it\u2019s
\n not known why the Russians were intercepting phone calls involving
\n the Tsarnaevs, one reason might have been Tamerlan\u2019s connection,
\n direct or indirect, with a Canadian terrorist named William Plotnikov.
\n According to USA Today<\/i>, a Russian security official told
\n the AP that<\/span><\/p>\n

Plotnikov
\n had been detained in Dagestan in December 2010 on suspicion of having
\n ties to the militants and during his interrogation was forced to
\n hand over a list of social networking friends from the United States
\n and Canada who like him had once lived in Russia, Novaya Gazeta
\n reported. The newspaper said Tsarnaev\u2019s name was on that list,
\n bringing him for the first time to the attention of Russia\u2019s
\n secret services.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

According to
\n a slightly different version, Plotnikov, \u201cwhile under interrogation
\n in the militant hotbed of Dagestan, named Tsarnaev as a fellow extremist.<\/a>\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The similar
\n backgrounds of Plotnikov and Tsarnaev make it likely that they had
\n indeed been in contact. Both were recent immigrants from the former
\n Soviet Union. Both had successful boxing careers in North America,
\n and both surprised their friends by converting to Islamist extremism.<\/span><\/p>\n

Plotnikov was
\n a member of the Caucasus Emirate, an al-Qaeda ally, and the Royal
\n Canadian Mounted Police had been searching for him since 2010. By
\n 2011 the United States had joined the Russians in targeting this
\n terrorist group as an al-Qaeda ally, and had offered $5 million
\n for information leading to the capture of the group\u2019s leader
\n Dokka Umarov. (Moscow Times<\/i>, May 27, 2011)<\/span><\/p>\n

Plotnikov was
\n killed in July 2012 in a shootout between militants and police in
\n Dagestan. Tsarnaev left Dagestan for America two days after Plotnikov
\n was killed.<\/span><\/p>\n

US and Russia
\n Share Concerns<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Tsarnaev\u2019s
\n hopes for a Russian passport would have been put at risk by his
\n openly provocative behavior in Dagestan \u2014unless he was acting
\n as an informant. But for which government, the U.S. or Russia?<\/span><\/p>\n

The United
\n States and Russia have two shared concerns in the \u201carc of crisis\u201d
\n stretching from Afghanistan to the Caucasus \u2014 terrorism and drugs.
\n The two problems are interrelated, because drugs, especially in
\n the Caucasus, help finance terror operations. This vitally affects
\n Russia, both because it has one of the highest heroin death rates
\n in the world, and even more because some of its member republics,
\n like Dagestan, are up to 80 percent Muslim. This shared concern
\n has led to a successful joint US-Russia anti-drug operation in Afghanistan.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Was Tamerlan
\n Tsarnaev caught up in a similar counter-intelligence operation?<\/span><\/p>\n

The FBI\u2019s
\n Dysfunctional Informant Program<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

One of the
\n more controversial features of the FBI\u2019s informant program is the
\n frequency with which FBI agents coerce young people into the dangerous
\n role of informant, as a price for settling a minor legal problem.
\n Tsarnaev fits the mold. His successful career as a boxer<\/a>
\n was interrupted and his application for U.S. citizenship was held
\n up (and perhaps denied) because \u201ca 2009 domestic violence complaint
\n was standing in his way.\u201d This alone would mark him as a candidate
\n for recruitment.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Thousands of
\n vulnerable young people avoid our overcrowded prisons by agreeing
\n to become snitches, sometimes wearing a wire. In this way a person
\n whose only crime may have been selling marijuana to a friend can
\n end up risking his career and even his life. And for what?<\/span><\/p>\n

According to
\n Sarah Stillman in The New Yorker<\/i>,<\/span><\/p>\n

The
\n snitch-based system has proved notoriously unreliable, fuelling
\n wrongful convictions. In 2000, more than twenty innocent African-American
\n men in Hearne, Texas, were arrested on cocaine charges, based on
\n the false accusations of an informant seeking to escape a burglary
\n charge. This incident, and a number of others like it, prompted
\n calls for national legislation to regulate informant
\n use.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

After 9\/11,
\n the coercive techniques of the FBI drug war, along with half of
\n the agents using them, were redirected to surveillance of Muslims.
\n The emphasis was no longer on investigation of specific crimes,
\n but the recruitment of spies to report on all Muslim communities.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2005 the
\n FBI\u2019s Office of the Inspector General found that a high percentage
\n of cases involving informants contained violations of the FBI\u2019s
\n own guidelines. Its report noted that since 2001 the rules had been
\n loosened to reflect the new emphasis on intelligence gathering and.
\n by extension, the bureau\u2019s urgent need for informants.<\/span><\/p>\n

According
\n to the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School, \u2026 nearly
\n every major post-9\/11 terrorism-related prosecution has involved
\n a sting operation, at the center of which is a government informant.
\n In these cases, the informants \u2013 who work for money or are seeking
\n leniency on criminal charges of their own \u2013 have crossed the line
\n from merely observing potential criminal behavior to encouraging
\n and assisting people to participate in plots that are largely scripted
\n by the FBI itself. Under the FBI\u2019s guiding hand, the informants
\n provide the weapons, suggest the targets and even initiate the inflammatory
\n political rhetoric that later elevates the charges to the level
\n of terrorism.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

A writer for
\n Mother Jones,<\/i> Trevor Aaronson, also investigated the FBI\u2019s
\n informant-led terrorism cases for over a year; he too found that
\n in a number of cases, \u201cthe government provides the plot, the
\n means, and the opportunity.\u201d<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Read
\n the rest of the article<\/b><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

June
\n 25, 2013<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Russ
\n Baker is an award-winning investigative reporter. He has written
\n for <\/i>The New Yorker, <\/i>Vanity Fair, <\/i>The Nation,
\n <\/i>The New York Times, <\/i>The Washington Post, <\/i>The Village
\n Voice and <\/i>Esquire and dozens of other major domestic and
\n foreign publications. He has also served as a contributing editor
\n to the <\/i>Columbia Journalism Review. Baker received a 2005
\n Deadline Club award for his exclusive reporting on George W. Bush\u2019s
\n military record. He is the author of <\/i>Family
\n of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in
\n the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America<\/a>
\n (Bloomsbury Press, 2009); it was released in paperback as <\/i>Family
\n of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America\u2019s Invisible Government and
\n the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years<\/a>. For more information
\n on Russ\u2019s work, see his sites, www.familyofsecrets.com<\/a>
\n and www.russbaker.com<\/a>.<\/i><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Copyright
\n \u00a9 2013 <\/span>WhoWhatWhy.com<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

The
\n Best of Russ Baker<\/b><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on: Lew Rockwell<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Russ BakerWhoWhatWhy.com Recently by Russ Baker: FBI: Knew About Saudi 9\/11 Hijacker Ties \u2014 But Lied To Protect ‘National\u00a0Security’ Amid the swirl of mysteries surrounding the alleged Boston bombers, one fact, barely touched upon in the mainstream U.S. media, stands out: There is a strong possibility that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older of the two […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-44924","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44924"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44924\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}