Noted

First and foremost: If you haven't seen it yet, the video embedded into the preceding post is extremely important. So scroll down, watch some teevee, then come back up here.

Zimmerman: Protests have erupted across the country. I even loaned my utility knife to my ladyfriend because she had to travel downtown today -- "just in case." Not until much later did I realize that this gesture occupies a ludicrous space somewhere between irony and hypocrisy. Beyond that, I'm not sure what I can add to this story. This is not the first difficult-to-explain jury decision we've seen, nor will it be the last.

One wrinkle deserves wider discussion: Ben Kruidbos, who worked for the prosecutors, claimed that the state attorneys did not give the defense all of the evidence from Martin's cell phone. Kruidbos was fired. No good deed goes unpunished...

Was the Boston bomber an FBI informant? For the longest time, I have tried to resist the suggestion that the bomber worked with the feds. One does not wish to be mistaken for Alex Jones. But this piece on the World Socialist Web Site is written to a high standard and raises some fair questions.

As you know, FBI investigators killed (under disputed circumstances) one Ibragim Todashev, a friend to Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Allegedly, both Todashev and Tsarnaev were previously involved in a triple homicide in Massachusetts, committed on September 11, 2011. Both men were young, wanna-be boxers -- the kind of guys traditionally hired as "muscle" when dirty work needs doing.

Here's the part you probably didn't know:

The FBI has detained and is currently preparing to deport Todashev’s roommate Tatiana Gruzdeva, a fact that has been buried by the US media, including the Times. Civil liberties groups believe Gruzdeva has valuable knowledge regarding Todashev’s interactions with the FBI. Hassan Shibly of the Counicl on American-Islamic Relations told the World Socialist Web Site that the moves against Gruzdeva have been made to prevent her from speaking publicly about the case. “There is a lot of mystery around the detention,” Shibly said. “There appears to be some sort of cover-up going on."

The failure to investigate Tsarnaev in connection with the murders is all the more inexplicable given what the FBI already knew about him. It had been warned by Russian intelligence in March 2011 that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a dangerous radical Islamist with possible terrorist inclinations or connections. The FBI claims, according to congressional testimony by FBI Director Robert Mueller, to have conducted a “thorough” investigation of Tsarnaev, including questioning him and other members of his family.

The FBI says it found nothing suspicious about Tsarnaev and closed the case. Even if one accepts this dubious claim, how is it to be explained that the grisly murder that September, on the anniversary of 9/11, of one of Tsarnaev’s best friends and two others, both Jewish, did not arouse the agency’s suspicions? Why was the FBI investigation not reopened and why did the agency make no effort to ensure that Tsarnaev was questioned in relation to the killings?

Four months later, in January of 2012, Tsarnaev was allowed to travel unhindered to Dagestan in Russia’s North Caucasus and remain there for six months, establishing contacts with Islamist separatist and terrorist groups. This was so despite the fact that his name had been placed on at least two terrorist watch lists.

Obviously, one explanation is that the FBI left Tsarnaev alone because he had been recruited as an informant, or had in some way aided agents working for the Bureau.

TWA 800: Allegations of FBI corruption also figure in this long, fascinating account in the Mail Online of the downing of TWA Flight 800 in 1996, an incident officially ascribed to faulty wiring. Before the crash, a plot to bring down an airliner was the subject of an ongoing discussion between Al Qaeda's Ramzi Yousef and mobster Gregory Scarpa, Jr., two unlikely acquaintances who met up in a Manhattan prison. Yousef was there because he had participated in the first World Trade Center plot; Scarpa, of course, was passing info along to the feds.

According to Lance [Peter Lance is a writer working on this story], the necessity to conceal ‘the unholy alliance’ of FBI and mob and protect a raft of Mafia indictments that might otherwise have been thrown out of court played a part in the Bureau’s decision to cover-up the TWA 800 plot.

In the aftermath of the crash the Feds attempted to dismiss Scarpa Jr’s intelligence as a hoax.

But the documents now reveal the fact that Scarpa Jr provided a diagram and detailed instructions for a detonation technique now known as ‘Yousef’s unique signature’ months before investigators found physical evidence to support it.

But why were investigators at such odds to disprove or reason away the presence of a bomb if the evidence – and the intelligence – all pointed to Yousef?

According to Lance: ‘Their motivation? To avoid embarrassment, to disassociate from an act of terror and to preserve the cases going through the Eastern District courts at the time.’

The cases to which Lance is referring were the high profile Mafia trials following on from a string of indictments.

Lance uncovered the Yousef documents while investigating the Mafia - his book, Deal with the Devil, chronicles a 30 year relationship between the FBI and the Mob so shocking that it remained secret until now.

Pay attention to this next bit. It may be possible to see here a pattern which one could apply to the (much later) Tsarnaev mystery.

The truth concealed behind the high profile Mobster arrests was that, for about 12 years, FBI Special Agent Robert Lin DeVecchio – known as Mr Organised Crime – had been working in corrupt tandem with capo Gregory Scarpa Sr, ‘the Killing Machine.’

Scarpa Sr was a top echelon criminal informant for more than three decades. De Vecchio was his handler between 1980 and 1992.

Scarpa Jr’s role as an informant was a direct consequence of that. He saw how well it had worked for his own father (who died of AIDS in 1994).

In his own defence Scarpa Jr planned to argue that his father had acted with the sanction and protection of the FBI, killing with impunity while a paid informant and that he had acted on his father’s instruction.

The alliance between Scarpa Sr and the FBI could not be made public for fear of the indictments that depended on it unraveling in the scandal that would follow.

And so, Lance argues, the credibility of Scarpa Jr and his intelligence had to be sacrificed.

(Emphasis added.) We don't yet have a sufficiently clear storyline here. For example, just what role could Yousef have played in the bombing (if bombing it was)? He had been in prison for the preceding 18 months. Surely there must have been some way to use Scarpa Jr.'s information without compromising other cases...

In its present shape, this narrative doesn't have enough details. It just doesn't make sense. Still, I am intrigued, and I hope those details are forthcoming.