How a Conspiracy Theory Is Rightly Born

Trey Smith

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. It’s not that they can’t handle themselves in a confrontation, though that no doubt is part of it. It’s that lying to a federal law enforcement agent is a felony -- one that is very easy to prosecute and win conviction on and that has long proved useful for locking people up when conviction for a bigger crime might be difficult -- but it is necessary to have a witness to make such a case. Two FBI agents means that there is always a witness to such lying -- one that a jury will be inclined to believe.

So how did it come to pass that when Todashev made his alleged lunge -- armed with knife, sword, chair, pipe, broomstick or whatever -- at the FBI agent in question, that agent was alone in the apartment with him?

We’re asked to believe that the other agent (two actually, as there were reportedly three of them involved in a five-hour interrogation at the house earlier that night), and several Massachusetts state cops who were also along in Orlando, Florida for the questioning of Todashev, had inexplicably just “left the room” for some reason.

This “explanation” for the two-man fight strains credulity to the breaking point. The FBI also claims that Todashev had already “confessed,” or was “about to confess” to having been involved in the triple murder of the drug dealers, though that alleged confession was, also incredibly, not recorded. Todashev was being questioned too, reportedly, about his links to the Tsarnaev brothers, and was thought to know about their alleged plans for marathon mayhem, so presumably keeping him alive to testify would have been very important to the pending federal case against the surviving younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

I would submit that it is simply not believable that such a suspect would not have been carefully guarded, carefully searched for weapons, and carefully secured in some fashion -- most likely with handcuffs, before being questioned. I would also submit that there is no way that one lone agent would have been left alone with him under any circumstances, and not just for security reasons, but because Todashev was supposedly being interrogated, and there had to be a witness to his answers besides just the agent doing the questioning.
~ from Is the FBI now in the Execution Business? by Dave Lindorff ~

I have shared this lengthy snippet simply because Lindorff makes a slew of pertinent points. The most important of these is that the varying explanations for what happened that night strain credulity. As I wrote in an earlier post, it boggles the mind that authorities would have allowed the now deceased man ANY opportunity to brandish a weapon. Who in their right mind interrogates someone supposedly thought to be involved in a triple murder and a bombing WITHOUT first patting down the suspect and removing anything that could be utilized as a weapon from the immediate vicinity?

Incidents like these explain how a conspiracy theory is rightly born. When official explanations don't make a lick of sense, inquiring minds go searching for explanations that DO make sense. From my standpoint, this looks like some sort of hit job. If you told the average person about the incident, but you failed to mention that the interrogators were G men, I bet a lot of people would guess that you were describing a mafia hit!

Chances are that we will never know what actually took place in Todashev's home that night...unless someone leaks it. The federal government has done itself no favors by seemingly changing their story at will. It is because the government's version of the events keeps changing that it is quite natural to be suspicious of their true motives. If you ask your 5 year old how mom's favorite vase was broken and said 5 year old provides changing and often conflicting accounts of how it happened, you get to the point in which you don't believe anything the 5 year old has to say in relation to the event.