oh shit.

oh shit.

oh poop.

oh snap

I've never gotten so much crap in response to a post before.

I can't see anywhere in the article proof that the bombers' uncle ran a CIA front. There is a great deal of evidence pointing that way and the article follows it up with some assumptions. It seems possible, even likely, but certain?

The article has an interesting case but makes quite a few speculative leaps and pretends those leaps are iron-clad proof.

There are no certainties in this world, but this:

"Ruslan Tsarni was listed as the company's resident agent. The company's address was 11114 Whisperwood Ln in Rockville MD., the home of Graham Fuller, the one-time Vice-Chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA under President Reagan."

comes close enough for me. What more is needed? What proof could satisfy your doubts?

An admission of the fact by the CIA either explicitly or through the release/declassification of authenticated documents would remove all doubt. I'm not saying that it isn't true or even unlikely. The point I was making was that the article (and reading some of the comments below, its readership) have made their minds up with absolute certainty. There's no acknowledgement of the difficulty of piecing together a wide variety of sources (none of which come close to conclusively proving anything) or of the possibility of it being untrue.

Basically, veracity aside, I'm bothered by the utter lack of balance or any measure of caution in the analysis.

Basically, after looking through google hits, I found that the site is a conspiracy theorist site. If this is repeated in a more respected forum, then we should give credence to it. Until then, I don't count Mad Cow as a reliable source.

It's very interesting that Mad Cow (the article linked in the OP) published a scanned image of a letter sent by the "Congress of Chechen International Organizations" to an organisation called "Benevolence International", but in their scanned image, they appear to deliberately omit the bottom part of the letter.

If you look at a scan of the *whole* page:

http://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/case_docs/2154.pdf

... you'll notice it gives the address of the "Congress of Chechen International Organizations" as 1030 15th Street, Washington D.C. Now that is clearly NOT the address in Rockville, Maryland, claimed in the Mad Cow article. Mad Cow have clearly cut off the section of the scanned document which contains the organisation's address, as it does not support their view of events. Their lack of honest over this important detail calls into question, for me, all of the other claims they make.

Just a thought.

* lack of HONESTY (typo, sorry)

Good spot!

Jamie, corporations and the like frequently have one address (a home of one of the principals is not at all uncommon) when they file their paperwork before they actually get an office location and commence operations. The letter with the address of 1030 15th Street was sent in the year following the initial incorporation, where Fuller's address was used because they probably hadn't yet even started looking for an office at the time.

Ugh. That post is an incoherent mess. Let me try again:

Corporations and non-profits have to file the government paperwork before they can even think about starting operations and/or raising money. Oftentimes, since the entity doesn't have a location of its own at this point, the address of one of the principals involved is used instead in the filing. Once the entity leases an office and starts operating from it, they use the address of the office instead of the address listed in the incorporation paperwork. In short, there is nothing unusual about having two different physical addresses (I would imagine the journalist who has been breaking the story cut off the address to avoid just this sort of confusion/need for explanation).

@Tolstoy - Find corroboration for this article from someone that is reliable and I will consider it to be true. But as long as the site is questionable, so is the article.

That's not my point, Tolstoy. My point is that your source had clearly doctored the scanned image, rather than publishing the whole scan and then offering an explanation, such as the explanation you offer. Their doctoring of the image is bad journalism, from where I sit, and casts doubt over the robustness of their research, in general.

Also, what jimgov said.

Basically, this commercial says it all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmx4twCK3_I

"Find corroboration for this article from someone that is reliable and I will consider it to be true."

So if the someones that you find reliable all refuse to report on something (for whatever reason), that means it didn't happen?

"Their doctoring of the image is bad journalism, from where I sit, and casts doubt over the robustness of their research, in general."

The image wasn't "doctored", it was "cropped". People crop images all the time. In this case, it eliminated a ton of empty and useless white space. If this is the worst sin Daniel Hopsicker is committing, he's an angel compared to what we all see from "reputable" "mainstream" news sources (who, for instance, refused en masse to report on any of the evidence - like the UN inspectors' report - that Saddam Hussein didn't have WMDs in the run-up to the Iraq invasion) with nary a hint of protest from those who like to wag their fingers at "conspiracy theorists".

@Tolstoy - "So if the someones that you find reliable all refuse to report on something (for whatever reason), that means it didn't happen?" No. If a crap site that deals with conspiracy theories makes a "claim" that they have no backing on, and no one else in any media that the majority of people would define as credible has not jumped on the story, THEN it didn't happen.

@ Tolstoy: What point are you even trying to make with this thread? Do you believe that the CIA arranged the Boston bombings, or what?

oh shit.

"What point are you even trying to make with this thread? Do you believe that the CIA arranged the Boston bombings, or what?"

Truth be told, I have no idea what my point is/was. I am fascinated, though, that the probable perpetrators of such an unusual event (a successful terrorist attack on American soil) *just happen* to be the nephews of someone linked to the CIA. What are the odds of that, I wonder? One in thousands or tens thousands would be my guess.

Uncle Ruslan's CIA/government connections is by itself proof that the CIA was behind the bombing. But I *do* think that such a bizarre coincidence merits investigation by those who investigate such things, every bit as seriously as they are apparently investigating the mysterious and elusive "Misha" character who seems to be the linchpin of the "evil Muslims" theory of the bombing. Especially considering the long sad history of the American government committing acts of terror (or thinking about it) against its own citizens. But alas, we all know this CIA connection angle will never be investigated by "credible" authorities in or out of the government, so it will forever be stranded in the land of "conspiracy theorism", where upright citizens like jimgov can safely ignore them.

"is by itself proof" should be "is NOT by itself proof".

Six degrees of separation, Tolstoy. In today's globalised society, the chance of someone being linked to another person in a different part of the world through either a family relation, a close friend, is actually *much* more likely than you would intuitively think.

@ Tolstoy: I mean, think about this:

Estimates suggest the CIA directly employs over 20,000 people.

Each of those people will have an extended family.

If you take me to be an average example, I have two living parents, one living grandparent, a brother, two uncles, two aunts, an a girlfriend. That's 9 people, and I make 10.

So the CIA's 20,000 employees immediately give you 200,000 people who are directly "linked to the CIA" in your terms. If it is your view that the chance of one of those people "just happening" to be a terrorist is about 1-in-10,000 then you could logically assume that at any point in time there are about 20 CIA employees who *just happen*, by chance, and not even necessarily with their awareness, to be linked to a potential terrorist.

So, yes, it could easily be a total coincidence, actually. Ok?

Include my uncle's wife, both of my aunts' husbands, my five first cousins, my mother's new partner, and my father's new partner in your definition of "linked" and there are now 20 people linked to me, and more like 40 CIA operatives "directly linked" to a terrorist through no more than random coincidence.

This guy is pathetic.

And by this guy I mean the op

Come up with your story, in this case the government is behind the Boston bomb, and then find or make up the facts you need to fit that story. I still have not seen any proof that their uncle is in the CIA. I think the real question is why you need to believe this so bad.

"Estimates suggest the CIA directly employs over 20,000 people."

Fair enough. If Uncle Ruslan had been connected with someone who happened to be a CIA analyst on the Burkina Faso desk, this would not be news. but Graham Fuller wasn't just *anyone* at CIA. He was the guy who ran the CIA's covert operations in the Middle East during the '80s and served as Vice-Chair of the National Intelligence Council. The number of people in the American foreign intelligence bureaucracies at Fuller's level isn't in the tens of thousands, it's in the dozens or scores. Maybe a couple hundred, tops.

Then there's the other side of the equation. How many actual terrorists are there in America who have successfully pulled off an attack on American soil? With 9/11 there were the 19 perpetrators, a handful of people accused of being the "20th hijacker", an unknown number of support personnel almost certainly less than 10. Two were involved in the DC Sniper attacks. There have been a few other small-sale shootings of armed forces recruiting centers and the like. Then the Marathon Bombing. This is off the top of my head (and not counting all the gullible dupes who were recruited by government "terrorism facilitators" to be involved in fake terrorism plots), but we're definitely under a hundred here.

There are 320 million people in the United States. Just for the sake of putting numbers on the board, let's say that everyone on average knows 50 people well enough for the connection to be interesting in the perspective of a terrorism investigation. What are the odds that one of the less than 100 or so real terrorists in America in the last 12 years is connected to one of the (let's say) 1,000 past or present senior-most intelligence officials in the US government? Statistics was never my thing, but I'll take a crack at this:

1,000 senior intelligence officials will know 50,000 people.
The odds of someone in America being in the "intelligence official connection" set is 50,000 in 320,000,000, or about .015625%.
100 terrorists will know about 5,000 people.
The odds of someone in America being in the "terrorist connection" set is 5,000 in 320,000,000, or about .0015625%.
The odds of someone being in *both* sets - like Uncle Ruslan is - would be .015625% X .0015625%, or 0.000000244140625%.

Granted, these numbers are completely arbitrary. And I was never that good at statistics (if I'm doing something wrong in the math department, a correction would be appreciated). But even if we add a zero or two to the number of people a senior intelligence official might know (which would be entirely reasonable - people like that know lots of people), or include *everyone* who works at the CIA including the interns in the mail room, the odds of someone being in both sets is *still* astronomical.

What does this mean? I do not know. Maybe nothing. Maybe something. But if it is something, wouldn't you like to know about it?

"Come up with your story, in this case the government is behind the Boston bomb, and then find or make up the facts you need to fit that story."

Neither I nor the author of the story linked to in the OP have claimed that the government was behind the bombing. And what facts have been made up? The evidences cited in the article are all relatively public source and should be easy to debunk if they're not true.

"I still have not seen any proof that their uncle is in the CIA."

Nor has anyone else apparently. The claim is that Uncle Ruslan was linked by marriage and business to someone who is/was in the CIA. Even if he did/is work(ing) for the CIA, it's obviously an indirect employment relationship and he's not in the sort of position where he gets handed a paycheck signed by the Controller of the CIA every second Friday.

"I think the real question is why you need to believe this so bad."

I think a *better* question is why you believe that Uncle Ruslan never married Graham Fuller's daughter, even though it is proved through marriage records and the latter's public admission. *AND* why you believe Uncle Ruslan wasn't listed in the incorporation papers of the "Congress of Chechen International Organizations.", and furthermore why you believe that Graham Fuller's home address wasn't listed as the address for the said organization in the aforementioned incorporation papers. That's three public records, all of which could probably be verified on government websites from the comfort of your home internet connection in a couple of hours, that you are claiming can't possibly be real based on... what, exactly?

Have you ever lived in Washington, D.C. Area? Obviously not because if you did you would understand that if you are of the upper middle class you most likely have connections to the FBI, CIA, dept of homeland security, dea, dod or anyone else that you could pin this bombing on and get the seal of approval if disenfranchised white folk everywhere. So apologies if I misunderstood your original claims and now realist they are even more spurious. So uncle rusian lives in Rockville Maryland, a wealthy suburb of DC and he is married to someone with connections to a big wig in the military industrial complex. My Word! So shocking.

Lets also remember that uncle rusian has acted just like a shady CIA asset would. Mugging for the camera drawing as much attention to himself as possible then picking up the body in Boston.

@ Tolstoy: "The claim is that Uncle Ruslan was linked by marriage and business to someone who is/was in the CIA. Even if he did/is work(ing) for the CIA, it's obviously an indirect employment relationship and he's not in the sort of position where he gets handed a paycheck signed by the Controller of the CIA every second Friday."

Then, so what?

This whole thread has been much ado about nothing from the start. Some people just require a conspiracy to exist.

The fact that Ruslan wasn't collecting a paycheck from the CIA doesn't mean he wasn't working for the agency and serving their interests. It's nof hard to start an organization and pay its employees with laundered (or donated) money from other sources. But whatever. I think I know as much about this situation as I'm ever going to. What interests me most at this point is how the mind of a Coincidence Theorist works... I wonder if those who believe there is nothing out of the ordinary going on here would oblige me by answering the following true/false questions:
1) Uncle Ruslan was married to the daughter of a high-ranking CIA official
2) Uncle Ruslan was involved in running the "Congress of Chechen International Organuzations" in the mid-90s.
3) The aforementioned "Congress of Chechen International Organizations" listed the address of the said high-ranking CIA official as its address in its incorporation papers.
4) Points 1 through 3 are all true, but are entirely coincidental.
5) Uncle Ruslan is the uncle of the Boston bombers.
6) All of the above is true, but is statistically likely (greater than 5% likelihood).

I think a linkage world in more ways than uncle rusian used these boys to conduct a shady attack on Boston. Things we already know are that the family is Chechen (hardly a pronounced ethic community in the us) and that the individual was passed on by the FBI when interviewed. It is likely then that uncle ruslan's position in government (which you found in fragmentary unsubstantiated and questionably edited sources) might have helped a risky individual fall through the cracks and become radicalized and violent without prior action. That means uncle ruslan's position made his nephew's success more likely where others might have failed. Then again I think this whole story is pointless and the result of a community within this country that is alienated and looking for answer in creative ways.

Meant to say at first that his position could have made the attack more likely even without a CIA plot