Today’s Wall Street Journal had an article on the cover page titled Boston Bombing Suspect Was Steeped In Conspiracies. At first I didn’t know what they were going for. I thought perhaps the media/government thought it would be handy to be able to blame the Boston Marathon Bombing both on radical Islamists AND right-wing extremists at the same time. (I had even read an early report that the Boston Marathon Bombing was a false flag originally meant to have a “right-wing nut job” as patsy but that something went wrong with the plan.) Or maybe the article was meant to warn of the dangers of alternate thinking.
Given the possibilities, I read the article avidly, noting all the “conspiracy theory” and right-wing reading material reportedly found in Tsarnaev’s apartment that has only now come to light. I was particularly interested because immediately after the bombings, I found online a copy of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s Amazon wish list, which made him sound more like an aspiring spy than a truther.
The article explains that Tsarnaev was turned on to this newly-revealed reading material by an old man, Donald Larking, whom he had befriended. The article explains at length that an injury had left Mr. Larking’s faculties impaired, and includes numerous apologetic quotes from the family and lawyer of Mr. Larking, though Mr. Larking himself was not interviewed.
Still puzzling over why an article about Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s acquaintance’s eccentric predilections appeared on the front page of The Wall Street Journal four months after the fact, I came to the article’s end, and this sentence: “Mr Larking…believes Mr. Tsarnaev was the victim of a conspiracy.”
Given that fact, I have to say, Mr. Larking is getting off easy merely being outed as a mental case on the front page of The Wall Street Journal. After all, the last acquaintance of Tamerlan Tsarnaev who thought he was set-up was Ibragim Todashev, and we know what happened to him.
(If you don’t know what happened to him, read my previous post, Ibragim Todashev and Other Fishy Tales and watch this video of Todashev’s friend’s interview.)
