Boston Marathon Bombing

[Gaspar]

This isn't about lowering the bar as much as it's about scoring political points.  As I've noted before, sometimes the difference isn't between right and left rather than right and wrong.  Instead of frantically searching for someone to blame, perhaps we should be asking if our government should be compiling these huge databases on all of us.  It's not a problem that originated with the Obama administration, and in fact, it probably goes back long before the Bush presidency.  All administrations want to (1) control the flow of information and (2) consolidate more power.  That's simply human nature.

For us liberals, the Obama presidency has been a mixed bag.  One writer said that when it comes to data collection via the internet and monitoring our phone calls, this is actually the fourth term for President Bush.  That our president didn't put an end to those practices is a huge disappointment.  Of course, if he had done so, our conservative friends would be whining about how he gutted national defense.  And so it goes.

Gotta go mow the lawn, but here's an interesting photo.  Dunno if it's 'shopped:

Wrong thread.

[Ed W]

Oops. I plead caffeine deprivation. It was a rough day.

[patric]

[patric]

You can start you Christmas shopping early by pre-ordering your souvenir Boston Bombing Capture T-shirts and calendar directly from the Watertown Police Foundation,   http://watertownpolicefoundation.org

The perfect gift this season not only includes the bleeding bodies, but "photos of the dramatic confrontation with the Marathon bombing suspects, pursuit and arrest, the cheering afterwards"

[Vashta Nerada]

As of late, everything with our government is getting weird. From the IRS becoming the president's personal gestapo, to the administration demanding that the hospital in Benghazi label Ambassador Stevens as a John Doe to fool the media, to classifying reporters as criminals for attempting to report the news.

Now we have federal officers shooting an unarmed suspect SEVEN times durring an interrogation.  It seems that the incompetence is not just at the top of the chain of command, but throughout.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2333101/Friend-Boston-Marathon-bomber-UNARMED-killed-FBI-agent-confess-triple-murder.html

FBI: "We dont know exactly what happened, but we're absolving ourselves of any wrongdoing"

http://boston.cbslocal.com/2014/03/21/cbs-news-fbi-agent-cleared-in-shooting-death-of-tsarnaev-associate

BOSTON (CBS/AP) – An FBI review has cleared the agent who shot Ibragim Todashev last year, CBS News reported Friday.
Todashev, 27, was killed in Orlando, Florida in May while FBI agents and others questioned him about his friendship with suspected Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
Officials originally said Todashev lunged at an agent with a knife. They later said it was no longer clear what happened.

Todashev's father, saying his son was killed execution style, produced autopsy photos that allegedly showed six gunshot wounds to the torso and one to the back of his head.

Todashev's widow spoke to WBZ-TV exclusively by phone from Russia.
"No. I don't believe it," Reni Manukyan said of the report. "Besides that, there were so many different versions of what happened. They had released so many different things that he was with a gun, with a knife, with a grate, with a broomstick, with a chair."
An official with knowledge of the situation told CBS News that an FBI internal review cleared the FBI agent who shot Todashev. The agent has not been identified.

"For them to admit themselves that yes we killed somebody and we were wrong I don't think that will ever happen and that goes for Ibragim's case as well," Manukyan says.

The New York Times reports in about 150 FBI shootings since 1993, about 70 of them fatal, not one agent has been found at fault in internal reviews.


Abdul-Baki Todashev, father of Ibragim Todashev, shows pictures of his son's bullet-riddled body at a news conference in Moscow.

A Chechen man who was fatally shot by an FBI agent last week during an interview about one of the Boston bombing suspects was unarmed, law enforcement officials said Wednesday.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/officials-man-who-knew-boston-bomber-was-unarmed-when-shot/2013/05/29/21f05b74-c8a8-11e2-9f1a-1a7cdee20287_story.html?hpid=z2

[Vashta Nerada]

You can spread it out over 500 pages.

You can stock it with photos of overturned chairs, the stitches on top of an FBI agent's head, sketches of the trajectory lines made by the seven bullets that entered Ibragim Todashev's body, and the recollections of two unnamed Massachusetts state police and one unidentified FBI agent.

But a whitewash is still a whitewash. Once again the FBI waltzes away from a mess. No harm, no foul.

A Florida state attorney released the long-awaited, but not highly-anticipated, report on the bizarre death of Ibragim Todashev in his Orlando apartment last May.

It contained plenty of words that did nothing to lift the fog that has surrounded this incident. What we do get from Jeffrey L. Ashton, the Florida state attorney, is some weird editorializing at the end of his five-page letter.

He seemed to blend a suicide-by-cop scenario in with a generous helping of the Incredible Hulk.

"For reasons which we will never know," Jeffrey Ashton writes, "Mr. Todashev's response to his impending arrest and probable incarceration was not to flee from the residence out the easily accessible door that was right behind him."

So, the state attorney concludes that it was Todashev's mix of wild Cossack and enraged mixed martial arts Hulk that all but invited his own demise in a hail of FBI gunfire.

"I find the statements of those who knew him from his fighting career most illuminating," Ashton opines. "The one common thread among all was the observation that (Todashev) was, at his core, a fearless fighter."

A tip of the hat to the dead wild man. It's an interesting way to both tiptoe around a mess, while buttressing the image of Todashev — armed with nothing more than "a pole of some sort" — scaring the living bejeezus out of two state cops and one FBI agent.

Missing from this report is any serious discussion about how or why it was that two law enforcement officers (plus another waiting just outside) did not even try to subdue Todashev with anything other than bullets.

The FBI agent with no name who appeared to be leading the 41/2 hour conversation (or was it an interrogation?) of Todashev apparently turned his attention away long enough to allow this "fearless fighter" to hurl a coffee table off the back of his head.

That's when all hell broke loose and before anyone could say Tamerlan Tsarnaev, his fearless fighting buddy, Ibragim Todashev, was just as dead.

Before those seven bullets ended the discussion, the cops were in-house for almost five hours. There is nothing in those 500 pages about any information they may have gleaned over all those hours about a triple murder in Waltham, or the bombing on Boylston Street.

Maybe there's another 500 pages on the way. Does anyone think they would contain a shred of enlightenment?
http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/columnists/peter_gelzinis/2014/03/gelzinis_fairy_tale_just_fbi_whitewash

[Vashta Nerada]

This may explain a lot of the secrecy......




OAKLAND, Calif. –  A former police officer in Northern California is being investigated for collecting a disability pension while he is currently working for the FBI.

Oakland city officials are looking into how Officer Aaron McFarlane receives more than $52,000 in disability benefits from the city while he has been working as an FBI special agent in Boston.
McFarlane's name surfaced after he was recently identified as the federal officer who last year shot and killed Ibragim Todashev, a friend of suspected Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlin Tsarnaev.

The 41-year-old McFarlane retired from the Oakland Police Department on medical disability in 2004, four years after he joined the department as a patrol officer. Those on disability retirement are banned from doing similar work for any other agency in California.
McFarlane joined the FBI in 2008.

Civil rights organizations are calling on State Attorney Jeff Ashton to re-examine Ibragim Todashev's death. The Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations says Ashton failed to consider the controversial past of the FBI agent who shot and killed the Chechen man during an interrogation in Orlando.

The Justice Department routinely cleared the FBI agent of any wrongdoing, but the Boston Globe reports the agent previously was the subject of two police brutality lawsuits and four internal affairs investigations when he was at the Oakland Police Department.



OAKLAND (KPIX 5) — While officials are Oakland are investigating a former police officer who became a FBI agent while receiving disability, a lawyer who sued the officer said he had a record of abuse.

Aaron McFarlane shot and killed Ibragim Todashev, a friend of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsanaev in Florida last year. The FBI refused to identify the agent, but the Boston Globe reported that it is McFarlane, a former Oakland officer who is collecting $52,000 a year on disability, tax free.

Attorney Ben Rosenfeld, who brought one case against McFarlane, wonders how the FBI let him slip through its rigorous physical and background checks.
"Why the FBI as the premier law enforcement agency in the country has to reach that low into the barrel for recruits..."


http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2014/05/23/ex-oakland-officer-on-disability-turned-fbi-agent-had-violent-track-record-lawyer-says-aaron-mcfarlane-ibragim-todashev-tamarlan-tsarnaev-disability-opd-police-calpers-riders-brutality/

[Vashta Nerada]

The family of an unarmed Chechen national who was shot dead in controversial circumstances by an FBI agent at his Florida apartment two years ago announced on Monday they were filing a $30m wrongful death lawsuit against the bureau.

The FBI is accused of a number of missteps that led to the "illegal" killing, including negligence in hiring an agent with a history of lawsuits against him for misconduct and false arrest.
Records show that Aaron McFarlane was named with another officer in two lawsuits alleging brutality, faced four internal affairs investigations, was accused of falsifying reports and stopped cooperating as a witness in a trial against colleagues accused of beatings and false arrests.


http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/02/family-chechen-shot-dead-sues-fbi-30m-ibragim-todashev

[Breadburner]

King of Spam strikes again......

[patric]

You would actually have to go up one whole post to find out who that was.   

[TeeDub]

And here is "the other side"

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/03/25/todashev/rt3K7PSMY1ykZiU0DaaiuI/story.html

[Vashta Nerada]

And here is "the other side"

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/03/25/todashev/rt3K7PSMY1ykZiU0DaaiuI/story.html

So the suspect, recovering from knee surgery and was barely able to walk, who, in the 5th hour of an interrogation, unexplicably produced either a Samuri sword or a broomstick or a metal pole or tried to grab a agents gun,  and had to be stopped, according to an agent with a long history of brutality, facing four internal affairs investigations for falsifying reports abiyt timecard fraud, disability fraud, beatings and false arrests.

Got it.

[guido911]

King of Spam strikes again......

It's not spam, it's "activism".

[TeeDub]

So the suspect, recovering from knee surgery and was barely able to walk, who, in the 5th hour of an interrogation, unexplicably produced either a Samuri sword or a broomstick or a metal pole or tried to grab a agents gun,  and had to be stopped, according to an agent with a long history of brutality, facing four internal affairs investigations for falsifying reports abiyt timecard fraud, disability fraud, beatings and false arrests.

Got it.

So a 27 year old MMA fighter with a proclivity for violence (Todashev had been arrested for violent incidents in 2010 and 2012 and again in early May, when he beat a man in a parking lot.) confessed to helping plot and carry out a murder.   He did this with a state trooper AND the FBI agent in the room (Finally, Todashev said, "I was involved in it."   A trooper read him his Miranda rights and Todashev appeared to sign the waiver indicating he understood. "Will you guys help me?" Todashev asked.)

[guido911]

So a 27 year old MMA fighter with a proclivity for violence (Todashev had been arrested for violent incidents in 2010 and 2012 and again in early May, when he beat a man in a parking lot.) confessed to helping plot and carry out a murder.   He did this with a state trooper AND the FBI agent in the room (Finally, Todashev said, "I was involved in it."   A trooper read him his Miranda rights and Todashev appeared to sign the waiver indicating he understood. "Will you guys help me?" Todashev asked.)

You forgot. The guy was minding his own business, picked up for no good reason, tortured, and only then made implicating statements which were false and coerced. That sh!t happened to me just yesterday.