Click on the article below to get the full story from Techdirt. For my interview with Todashev’s widow, click here.
How The FBI Has Been Working Hard To Deport Friends Of Guy They Killed During Interview About Boston Bombing (via Techdirt)
This week’s This American Life is an entire hour devoted to investigating the FBI’s killing of Ibragim Todashev along with a companion piece in Boston Magazine. You probably heard about the basics of the Todashev story. Todashev was a friend of Tamerlan…
Answer: One. Or none, if you don’t think Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a jihadist and think instead that he was a patsy as his dead friend Ibragim Todashev did.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the dead Boston Marathon Bombing “Suspect #1,” was married to Katherine Russell Tsarnaev, daughter of Yale graduate, Dr. Warren King Russell II. Knowing of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s CIA connections and that Yale has deep links to the CIA, I wondered if Katherine’s family had any CIA connections itself. I thought perhaps Katherine and Tamerlan’s meeting was not as random as the nightclub story that is part of the official narrative. (How many radical Islamists pick up their future wives at nightclubs?)
Ends up, Katherine’s grandfather, Richard Warren Russell, was not only a Yale graduate as her father was, but was a member of Skull & Bones, the paradoxically well-known secret society. I happen to be reading a book I found through my research into tax exempt foundations following the recent IRS scandal, called America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones, by Antony Sutton, a Stanford Hoover Institution fellow. In that book, Richard Warren Russell is listed as one of the 15 annual Skull & Bones initiates for the year 1951. In addition, Richard Warren Russell’s obituary lists him as being a member of counter-intelligence for the US Army after graduating from Yale, which is not unlikely given that the connections between Yale and the intelligence community are particularly strong within Skull & Bones. (The Robert DeNiro movie The Good Shepherd highlights these connections.)
Ibragim Todashev
On May 22, 2013, the FBI interrogated Ibragim Todashev then shot him six times in the body and one time in the head. The Chechen was being interviewed because of his acquaintanceship with dead Boston bombing suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
As with the other stories surrounding the Boston Marathon Bombing investigation, the story keeps changing. Ibragim Todashev was first reported to have lunged at an FBI agent, then reported to have gone at him with a knife, now is reported as having attacked unarmed. Original reports also had Todashev interviewed in relation to any knowledge he might have of the Boston Marathon Bombings given his acquaintance with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, then in relation to a drug slaying of three in Boston on September 11, 2011, and has finally morphed into the claim by FBI that Todashev had confessed to having committed the triple homicide with Tamerlan Tsarnaev when he lunged at the agent while poised to sign the confession.
Friends and family of Todashev view all elements of this tale as totally untrue, claiming that Todashev was cooperating fully with the FBI, that the FBI was speaking with him solely in connection with the Boston Bombing and that Todashev postponed a long-planned trip to Russia in an effort to fully comply with the FBI’s wishes that he remain for one final interview. His friend and former roommate, Kushen Tamarov, interviewed here, claims that Todashev had a feeling the FBI was going to kill him and he was afraid.
The only indication that Todashev was violent was
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