Two degrees of Separation: Tsarnaev Brothers had a CIA Connection

By Dave Lindorff

Let’s do a little exercise. Forget nationalities and identities for a moment.

Imagine you are a police detective investigating a horrific bombing in your city -- one in which several people were killed and hundreds were injured. You have a captured suspect whom you are sure was one of the bombers, and another was killed in a shootout, but both are young and not very sophisticated. 

They might have acted alone, of course, but knowing how these things work, you are also looking for leads to try to determine who else might have been involved, and especially who might have been behind the incident.

As it happens, your two suspects are immigrants. They were brought to your country at a young age by parents who were refugees seeking asylum from from a region of the world riven by civil war, brutal repression by a larger power, and that was a breeding ground for terrorists who had been known to have launched terrible attacks against civilians, including schools and full movie theaters in that larger power.

Now supposing you discovered that the national intelligence agency of a rival nation to that larger power had actually provided support to the terrorists that were attacking it, and that, moreover, the two young men who were your suspects were related to an uncle who had for three years been married to the daughter of a top member of that intelligence agency -- the latter a man who had had a long history of active involvement in that agency’s major covert operations.

Wouldn’t you be deeply suspicious about the nature of the connections between the two young men and this intelligence agency? Of course you would!

Well, let’s put some names to this scenario.

The troubled region in question is Chechnya, a region of the former Soviet Union which sought independence from Russia after the collapse of the USSR. The Russian state crushed that secession effort with incredible violence, but found itself still fighting a long and vicious guerrilla conflict against Chechen fighters who didn’t hesitate to take their battle to the Russian heartland in the form of terror strikes.  The Chechen guerrillas were supported by the CIA as the US adopted a covert policy of backing efforts by former regions of the old USSR to break free of Russia.

Just as the US long covertly supported terrorist actions by right-wing Cuban groups inside Cuba, and as it currently supports terrorist activities inside another rival state, Iran, by a terrorist organization called MEK (for People's Mujahedin of Iran or the Mojahedin-e-Khalq), it has also supported the guerrillas in Chechnya.  This explains why former federal prosecutor and arch neocon Republican Rudi Guilliani found himself sputtering in disbelief in a CBS interview a few days after the Boston Marathon bombing as it became evident that the suspected Boston bombers were two young Chechens...

For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF inThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent three-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1727