The jury in Whitey’s case will begin to be impaneled starting tomorrow. If I’m going to be attending the court hearings I’ll be unable to venture far off base. So the emphasis on this blog will return to the matters surrounding Whitey while all the other matters that intrigue about the way our society operates in the legal arena will have to be put up on the shelf.
So I’ll try to clean up a couple of things today. I see Congressman William Keating has spent a few days in Russia and has had a chance to get the Russian’s point of view relative to the dealings with the FBI over Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Let me be the first to ask the question why is it that a sitting U.S. Congressman has to go to Russia, you know the old Soviet Union, to find out what happened when the Russians notified the FBI about Tamerlan?
The answer points to the problem with having a police force that is not de facto accountable to anyone. I’ll give you the answer. Keating had to go to Russian because the American FBI will not tell him what he wants to know. Think of it folks, our duly elected representatives have to rely upon the Russians to find out what information we had about a person who committed a terrorist attack in America. Keating said: “We had a hearing on homeland security and [the Boston FBI office] were invited,” When asked whether agents from the office had shown up, he responded: “No.”
It is now understandable why the FBI is stonewalling the investigation into the Marathon Terrorist Attack (MTA). Keating said: “If we had the level of information sharing that we do now, then the bombings might have been avoided.” No one asked why we didn’t. Why did it take a terrorist attack for this to be realized?
The Globe went on to say: “a US intelligence official, who asked not to be identified, told the Globe previously that “we have no dispute” with Keating’s previous characterizations of the Russian-provided information.”
Keating’s previous characterization, not mentioned in the above article, was that “that Russian officials showed him a letter they sent to the FBI in March 2011, warning that Tsarnaev had plans to join insurgents in Chechnya. Keating said the letter contained a lot of details about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, including his birthday, telephone number, cell phone number, where he lived in Cambridge and information about his wife and child. He said it also referenced the possibility that Tsarnaev might be considering changing names .The Russians also had information about his mother, including her Skype address.”
Keating then, fearful that he was going to far out on the limb and hoping that no one put two and two together and figured the Russians were more open with a US Congressman than the FBI added: “I’m particularly sensitive that if there’s an ongoing investigation they [the FBI] should not be releasing details to the public.” I guess Keating thinks it’s all right for the Russians to tell us what happened but not the FBI.
Maybe Keating should talk to his fellow Congressman Stephen Lynch who was told in August 2011 that the FBI was investigating why its office was still using people suspected of murdering other people as top-level informants. Maybe he’ll learn that the FBI will investigate things that might cause it embarrassment until Hell freezes over. Maybe Keating should realize how foolish it looks for American congressmen to be asking Russians about a terrorist attack on American soil. Maybe Keating and Lynch should look into a mirror and ask themselves what government the FBI works for; and if it is the US government, then perhaps they should remind themselves that they are as our representatives in charge of that government and the FBI. If they do that perhaps they’ll get a little courage up to have the FBI tell them, and they’ll tell us, why the FBI dropped the ball both before and after the MTA, or if it didn’t explain why we are wrong to believe that.
But I dream. In the cozy atmosphere of DC where our congressmen work and play, the FBI calls all the shots and the members of Congress live in fear of it. So we the people are subject to the humiliation of our representative going to an untrustworthy foreign government to find out what our own secret police won’t tell them. And that’s not to mention the FBI’s ongoing construction of a story about the Todashev homicide which no one will believe outside of the members of Congress.
try to be in the catbird’s seat