You Have the Right to Remain Silent...as the Grave: Is the FBI in the Execution Business?

By Dave Lindorff

Anyone who was a fan of the old ABC TV series “The Untouchables” or of the later series, also on ABC, called “The FBI,” would know something is terribly fishy about the FBI slaying of Ibragim Todashev.

According to the FBI, Todashev, who was an acquaintance, or friend, of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing, was shot and killed by an FBI agent who was interviewing the young man, at his home, at midnight, allegedly because Todashev had suddenly attacked him, causing the agent to feel threatened.

There are many contradictions in this official story, including multiple explanations for how it happened, that variously had Todashev threatening the agent with a sword, a knife, a chair, a pipe, a metal pole and a broomstick. But one thing that stands out is that the agent was alone with Todashev, who was suspected of having been an participant, with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, in an as yet unsolved September 11, 2011 slaying of three suspected young drug dealers in Waltham, Mass. who were also friends of the Tsarnaev brothers.

The critical word here is “alone.”

Watchers of those FBI programs know that FBI agents always work in pairs. This is not just Hollywood. It’s FBI policy.

Indeed, when my father was informed back in 1969, by a colleague at the University of Connecticut School of Engineering where he was a professor, that the FBI was investigating me for my anti-war activities, the colleague, an arch-conservative backer of the US war in Vietnam, said that “two FBI agents” had come to his office to inquire about my activities (he had been outraged that the agents had come to him and not to my father for information about his son!). 

It was also a pair of FBI agents who came, unannounced, to my dorm room at Wesleyan University a year earlier, when a group of us students had been hiding my roommate’s older brother, a Marine who had deserted from the service on a visit home from Vietnam whom we later helped escape to Canada and ultimately Sweden. In fact, so common were the visits by agents to anti-war activists that we on the left back in those days used to laugh that the FBI guys always looked like Jehovah’s witnesses when they’d knock on your door on a visit, traveling in pairs and wearing their neatly pressed suits.

Jokes aside, though, there is a reason that FBI agents work in pairs...

For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent three-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1778