Author: Dave LIndorff

Let us pause to honor Charles Fury.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans have protested America’s bloated, out-of-control military, and millions more are outraged that the US spends upwards of $1 trillion a year on war and preparing for war. The protests and the opposition to military spending have had little effect, as the military continues to grow in size and cost, backed by a Congress whose members are bought by the arms industry, and a ruling elite that wants its global investments protected–at taxpayer expense.

Fury, 25, while perhaps not an opponent of the US military, with one little action, managed to do more to damage the US war machine than all those protesters and war opponents put together.

Reportedly suffering an anxiety attack in the cramped torpedo room of the USS Miami, a 361-foot-long nuclear attack submarine that he and a group of fellow maintenance workers were renovating at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine, and wanting to get sent home early, Fury, a civilian painter and sandblaster, lit a small pile of rags on fire. His plan was to create a small conflagration that would force an early end to work that day. Instead, the fire he set spread and raged out of control for 12 hours, destroying the whole forward section of the massive vessel. Only one man, who fell through an opening on the deck breaking a couple of ribs, was injured by the 2012 fire.

The sub was destroyed as effectively as if it had taken an enemy torpedo. There was talk of repairing all the damage, but in the end, Congress has decided it is not worth the estimated $750 million needed to fix everything, and so the Miami is being scrapped.

Arsonist Charles Fury and the destroyed nuclear sub Miami, ablaze in the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard

Just after midnight on May 22, 2013, after 4 and a half hours of interrogation, and shortly after a potential witness was ordered from the scene by a second FBI agent, the FBI agent investigating a critical witness in the Boston Marathon bombing case shot and killed Ibragim Todashev in his own apartment in Orlando, Florida. The agent fired three bullets into Todashev’s back, apparently as he was trying to flee a brutal interview, and then, when he turned, possibly to surrender, he was shot in the arm and the heart, and hit with a coup de gras into the top of the head. Host Dave Lindorff reports on this story of an apparent FBI rub-out, and guest Elena Teyer, Todashev’s mother-in-law, offers her theory on why the Bureau may have arranged this killing.

To listen to this program on Progressive Radio Network (PRN.fm), just click on tbej photo above, showing Ibragim Todashev with his wife Reni Manukyan, and his body in the morgue, with the agent’s shot to the head exposed.

In the voluminous report issued by Florida State’s Attorney Jeff Ashton’s Office on the killing in Orlando last May 22 of a witness/suspect under interrogation by the FBI — an investigation that concluded that the shooting was “justified” — there is not a single mention of the bruise and contusion found on the left side of Boston Marathon witness Ibragim Todashev’s head.

That together with the lack of explanation for three shots in the center of the back raise a suspicion that Todashev may have been shot while trying to flee a brutal interrogation, and then killed, possibly while trying to surrender.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
UPDATE!
In an earlier article in Counterpunch magazine I suggested that if the killing of Todashev by the FBI was a deliberate action, now being covered up as a justifiable homicide, one possible explanation might be that, as Ibragim Todashev’s mother-in-law Elena Teyer suggests, Todashev “knew too much” about Tamerlan Tsarnaev. I mentioned the fact that the FBI has been deeply involved in orchestrating all but one of the 41 terrorist plots since 2011 that it claims to have “prevented” or “disrupted,” and wondered whether the Boston Bombing might be one such plot that got away from them somehow or went awry. Now a report in the Boston Globe saying that lawyers for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Tamerlan’s younger brother who is facing capital charges for the bombing, are saying that back a year before the bombing, the FBI at least sought to get Tamerlan to become an FBI informant. Perhaps the lawyers are wrong an the FBI succeeded, and doesn’t want the world to know that he was on their payroll and perhaps Todashev had learned that from his friend Tamerlan.

One more reason not to take this shooting of Todashev at face value.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
First about the bruise wound, which Orange County/Orlando Deputy Chief Medical Examiner Gary Utz told me, in an exclusive interview conducted in the week before the release of Ashton’s report on the case appeared to be the result of Todashev’s having been “forcibly struck,” blows out of the water the entire story of this case, as “reconstructed” by both Ashton’s office and the FBI and US Justice Department.

Note the bruise and contusion on the left side of Todashev's head, indicating, according to the coroner who examined the body, that he was “forcibly struck”
 

These agencies all have Todashev sitting at 11:30 pm in his apartment at the end of a four-and-a-half hour grilling, calmly “confessing” to participation, along with Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, in a vicious 2011 triple murder of three small-time drug dealers in Waltham, Mass., and starting to write down his confession on a couple of sheets of lined white paper. Out of the blue, they claim he “suddenly” upends the coffee table in front of the bed where he is sitting, tossing it at the head of the FBI agent sitting across from him, runs for the front of the apartment, and then turns and charges towards the FBI agent and Massachusetts State Trooper who have been interrogating him. As he attacks, the agent fires three rounds, causing him to stumble forward, but he “incredibly” rises and continues his attack, at which point he’s shot four more times and falls to the floor dead.

As I wrote yesterday, there’s a major problem with this account: It’s not the one provided by either of the two lawmen on the scene, but rather is an FBI composite that merges two wildly divergent accounts — one by the trooper that Todashev him running straight to the front door, grabbing a metal broomstick or rod leaning there, turning and brandishing it, and the other that has him running first into the kitchenette area, that is separated by a waist-high counter from the rest of the room, rifling through a drawer of kitchen implements, then running out of the kitchenette and rounding towards the agents in the living room before being shot. Clearly one or both of those conflicting accounts is untrue. He can’t have done both, as the merged “account” has him doing (State’s Attorney Ashton lamely insists the two accounts are “basically consistent”)

The Florida State’s Attorney for the Orlando region, Jeffrey Ashton, today released his conclusion at the end of a 10-month investigation into the FBI slaying of Ibragim Todashev, a suspected witness in the Boston bombing case, saying that he will not be prosecuting the agent. Ashton ruled that the killing, in which the agent, at the end of a nearly 5-hour May 21 interrogation in Todashev’s Orlando apartment, fired seven bullets into Todashev, killing him justifiably, after being attacked.

However the evidence submitted to Ashton’s office by the FBI, the local coroner’s office and his own investigators, on examination, actually leads to a different conclusion from the one of justifiable homicide which he, and the FBI in its own internal probe, have reached.

For one thing, the two accounts of what happened offered by the FBI agent who shot Todashev, and by a Massachusetts State Trooper who was also in the room at the time of the shooting, are significantly at odds.

Why should we care about the FBI slaying of a Russian Chechen immigrant during an investigation into a Boston murder case? Because, as I wrote recently in Counterpunch magazine, Todashev was actually also a close friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder of the two brothers suspected of being the Boston Marathon bombers. The FBI had started investigating Todashev a day after the bombing when it learned he was a friend of the elder brother, but perhaps were more interested in preventing him from talking about what he knew than in learning what he had to say.

First a scene setter: According to all witnesses who came onto the scene after the shooting, Todashev’s body ended up in a foyer leading to the front door from the apartment’s living room, where the interrogation happened, his feet pointing to the front door, and his head and shoulders on the floor in the living room. He was found positioned face down by an investigator from the local Medical Examiner’s office lying there on top of a red broomstick, a point made by every witness to the scene.
Diagram showing where an FBI agent's bullets hit slain interrogation subject Ibragim Todashev

(This article was written as an exclusive for Counterpunch magazine, where the full story can be read, along with photos of the crime scene). It is the first of a three-part series.
 

Ibragim Todashev, 27, a Russian immigrant friend of suspected Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was shot and killed last May 22 in the middle of the night by the FBI at the violent end of a five-hour interrogation in his home in Orlando. Now the FBI, ten months later, is claiming that its agent was attacked by Todashev, and was justified in killing him. But a Counterpunch investigation raises grave questions about what really happened in that apartment.

While it’s of course conceivable that this was just a hugely botched investigation by two inept and bungling FBI agents, our investigation suggests that Todashev may have been killed trying to flee a brutal interrogation, and that he may have even been deliberately executed by the FBI.

Questions raised in this case range from why FBI agents failed to follow Bureau’s long-established interrogation protocol, leaving just one agent to question the witness, to why a suspect known to be a competitive mixed martial arts expert was left unrestrained during a hostile and high-pressure interrogation, how Todashev was shot, including a bullet to the top of the head, and finally to how he could have been shot seven times, clearly with intent to kill given where he was hit, if he was considered by the Bureau to be a key witness in the Boston Marathon case.

The exit from the room of the interrogation into the foyer to the front door, showing where Todashev was shot and died, and a photo of his body, as it appeared when provided by the coronor to his widow, showing the FBI shot to the head
 

The FBI and other law enforcement sources, as I reported earlier in the online publication WhoWhatWhy.com, have leaked a series of widely at odds explanations to selected mainstream news media organizations as to how and why Todashev was shot and killed. Initially Bureau sources leaked to reporters that he had variously grabbed a sword off the wall, or left the room and returned from the kitchen with a pipe or a broomstick, or alternatively with a knife.

All of those leaked stories foundered on common sense. The “sword” in question turns out to have been a decorative scmitar with no sharp edge, hung on the wall and with a broken handle. There was no explanation for how the agent, who may have been accompanied in the room by a Massachusetts State Trooper, could have allowed Todashev to leave his seat and go to that sword, or alternatively to the kitchen area of the room to pick up any of the other alleged implements of destruction. Ultimately, the Bureau conceded that Todashev had actually been unarmed the whole time.

You might not know it from watching TV news, but FBI statistics show that crime in the U.S.—including violent crime—has been trending steadily downward for years, falling 19% between 1987 and 2011. The job of being a police officer has become safer too, as the number of police killed by gunfire plunged to 33 last year, down 50% from 2012, to its lowest level since, wait for it,1887, a time when the population was 75% lower than it is today.

So why are we seeing an ever increasing militarization of policing across the country?

Given the good news on crime, what are we to make of a report by the Justice Polivcy Institute, a not-for-profit justice reform group, showing that state and local spending on police has soared from $40 billion in 1982 to more than $100 billion in 2012. Adding in federal spending on law enforcement, including the FBI, Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Drug Enforcement Agency and much of the Homeland Security Department budget, as well as federal grants to state and local law enforcement more than doubles that total. A lot of that money is simply pay and benefits. The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that the ranks of state and local law enforcement personnel alone swelled from 603,000 to 794,000 between 1992 and 2010. That’s about two-thirds as many men and women as the entire active-duty US military.
What these statistics make clear is that policing in America is ramping up even as the crime rate is falling.

For example, SWAT team actions have soared from hundreds annually in the 1970s to thousands a year in the ‘80s to 40,000 a year by 2005, according to a report by the libertarian CATO institute. The author of that report, and academic experts studying the issue, now estimate there may have been as many as 70,000-80,000 such raids in 2013 alone. Hard figures are not available: the Justice Department does not keep records on SWAT-team usage…

Cops attack unemployed workers in New York's Tompkins Square in 1874

 
For the rest of this article, please go to WhoWhatWhy News, where it originally appeared.

Of all the people to come to the rescue of the Constitution, who would have thought it would be Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA).

Feinstein, after all, as head of the Senate Intelligence Committee since 2009, has yet to see an NSA violation of the Constitution, an invasive spying program or a creative “re-interpretation” of the law that she hasn’t applauded as being lawful and “needed” to “keep people safe.”

Feinstein, too, was one of the first to fly into paroxysms of outrage at National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, absurdly condemning him for being a “traitor,” though she surely knows that the Constitution very narrowly defines treason as “levying war” against the US, or providing “aid and comfort to the enemy.” As Snowden surely did not “levy war” against anyone but perhaps the NSA, and even according to the government did not provide any information to America’s “enemies” (whoever that may be in today’s unipolar world, while he may have “stolen” NSA information, he didn’t by any stretch, commit “treason.”

Feinstein, lastly, in her position as chair of the Senate Military Construction and Appropriations Subcommittee, grew rich thanks to military contracts directed to her husband, private equity and real-estate tycoon Richard Blum. (It wasn’t just military contracts either. He also managed to get to get the contract to manage the private sale of all the Postal Service properties being unloaded in tCongress’s ongoing dismantling of the national mail system.)

That is to say, this is a woman who clearly puts herself and her need for money (she’s reportedly worth over $80 million, though for most of her life she has done nothing but work as a salaried politician) first and the needs of her country somewhere way down near the floor. (Maybe that’s why she can’t understand Snowden, who put his life on the line for a principle, and not for personal gain — something that’s probably beyond Feinstein’s comprehension.)

And yet after years of CIA criminality, including torture of terror suspects, even those against whom there was no evidence, lying to Congress, and manufacturing of evidence that led to the disastrous and criminal invasion of Iraq — for all which there were no consequences in the Congress or in her Senate committee — it was Sen. Feinstein who finally called out the CIA for spying and lying.

Sen. Feinstein, busy using her political position to enrich herself, has been a spy agency apologist, but now she's attacking the CIA (Roots Action photo)

Hear the latest ‘ThisCantBeHappening’ program on the Progressive Radio Network.

Host Dave Lindorff, founder of this newssite, interviews Progressive Literary Agent Francis Goldin, a life-long fighter for freedom, democracy and socialism in America, talks about her life of struggle, and about her three goals at the age of 89. She also talks about one of those projects that has already come to fruition: publication of the book Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA, which features chapters on what’s wrong with capitalism, on how socialism would change everything from criminal justice to the environment to education to health care to work and to love, and on how we get from here to there.

Authors of the book include people like Angela Davis, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Bill Ayers, Frances Fox-Piven, and Lindorff himself (writing on health care under socialism).

To hear the one-hour interview, which was broadcast live on PRN.fm last Wednesday, just click on the image of Goldin’s new book below.

Listen to the 'ThisCantBeHappening' radio show, with host Dave Lindorff, Wednesdays at 5 ET or on the web at “PRN.fm Also, remember to tune in this Wednesday when Dave interviews fellow TCBH! journalist John Grant about Ukraine and America’s global war-mongering.

Maureen Faulkner, widowed as a young wife by the shooting death of her husband, Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner, has spent the over 32 years since his death on a crusade, first to have the man convicted of his death, Mumia Abu-Jamal, executed, and then, since the overturning of his death sentence on Constitutional grounds, trying to ensure that he remains a pariah in prison.

She has been assisted in her quest by a labor organization and political lobby, the Fraternal Order of Police, which has helped her to widely publicize her claims, often factually challenged, that Abu-Jamal was fairly tried and found guilty of murder, and that he is, moreover, a monster deserving the worst that the US penal system can dish out.

One of the FOP’s favorite claims in that campaign of vilification is a story that the widow Faulkner also tells at every opportunity, namely that during the early days of the 1982 murder trial, when the prosecutor held up the slain officer’s bloody shirt to display the bullet holes in it, Abu-Jamal, seated at the defense table, turned around and “smiled at me.”

It is, to be sure, a disturbing image.

It is also not possible to have occurred.

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), rejected Civil Right Division nominee Debo Adegbile,Maureen Faulkner and Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA)

If you want to make moral or legal pronouncements, or to condemn bad behavior, you have to be a moral, law-abiding person yourself. It is laughable when we see someone like Rush Limbaugh criticizing drug addicts or a corrupt politician like former Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) voting for more prisons, more cops, and tougher rules against appeals of sentences.

The same thing applies to nations.

And when it comes to hypocritical nations that make pious criticisms of other countries about the “rule of law” and the sanctity of “international law,” it’s hard to find a better laughing stock than the United States of America.

After invading Iraq illegally in 2003, with no sanction from the UN, and no imminent threat being posed by that country to either the US or to any of Iraq’s neighbors, after years of launching bombing raids, special forces assaults and drone-firing missiles into countries like Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia, and killing hundreds of innocent men, women and children, after illegally capturing and holding, without charge or trial, hundreds of people it accuses of being terrorists and illegal combatants, after torturing thousands of captives, the US now accuses Russia of violating international law by sending troops into Crimea to protect a Russian population threatened by a violently anti-Russian Ukrainian government just installed in a coup.

How many times has the US sent troops into neighboring countries based upon the claim that it had to protect American citizens during a time of turmoil? We have Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, the Dominican Republic in 1965, and Haiti in 2003, for starters. Would the US hesitate for even a moment to send troops into Mexico if the Mexican government were overthrown in an anti-American coup, and if demonstrators who had led to that overthrow were attacking Americans? Of course not.

The Panama invasion, and the overthrow and arrest and removal to the US of Panama’s elected President Manuel Noriega, is particularly instructive, as it involved protecting a strategic US overseas base — the US Canal Zone — much as Russia is protecting its naval bases in Crimea, operated under a long-term lease from Ukraine but threatened by the recent Ukrainian coup. The US, headed at the time by President George H.W. Bush, invaded Panama under the pretext of protecting Americans in that country, but the attack (which had been planned well in advance of any threats to Americans) quickly morphed into an overthrow of the Panamanian government, the arrest of its leader, and the installation of a US puppet leader.

But the US trashing of international law goes far beyond all these examples.

Invading US troops of 'Operation Just Cause' in Panama (1989), and Russian troops in Crimea (2014)