Thoughts
and Comments
by Ed Lake
Updates
& Changes: Sunday, May 19, 2013, thru Saturday, May 25,
2013
May 20, 2013 - This probably won't
interest anyone, but it's significant to me: Today I started volume #26
of my journal.
I started keeping a
journal on January 30, 1982, when I noticed blank journals on sale in a
book store for 80 cents and bought three of them. They mostly
just contain a summary of what I did in a given day and what my weight
was. Boring stuff. But, if anyone asks me where I was on a
given date in the past 21 years, I can tell them. Knowledge isn't
just what you know, it's mostly knowing where and how to look things up.
May 19, 2013 - I actually seem to be making some
headway with one of the two
Anthrax Truthers who
have been tag-team arguing with me on my
interactive blog.
I'd been arguing all week
with both Anthrax Truthers
that lay witness
testimony about handwriting as described on page 89 of the DOJ's
Amerithrax Summary Report below would
be acceptable in court:
The witness thought
that the handwriting on the envelope addressed to Senator Daschle reminded
the witness of Dr. Ivins’s writing. If the witness were to receive a
package with that writing on it, the witness would think of Dr. Ivins.
The witness noted that, in particular, the style of the block letters
with alternating heights stood out, as did the slant of the writing.
The witness said that this was the type of writing Dr. Ivins used when
he disguised his handwriting as part of a joke.
The argument from both
Truthers was that such evidence can only be presented in court by a
qualified "expert witness" who
is certified to be knowledgeable on the subject of disguised
handwriting. And, even then, it wouldn't be
allowed if the actual handwritten notes from Ivins weren't also presented as
evidence in court for the jury to see.
The
first Truther mostly just argues that evidence isn't evidence unless he
believes it's
evidence, but the second Anthrax Truther (who happens to be a lawyer)
had dumped one
legal citation after another
on me to argue about what "expert witnesses" did in court, and he
totally rejected everything I
said about
what "lay witnesses" can testify about in court. (He's the
same Truther who erroneously argued that the
handwriting on the anthrax letters and envelopes was the handwriting of
9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta.)
Their arguments didn't make any sense to me at all. I'm no
lawyer, but the subject of the law and courtroom procedures is another
life-time interest of mine, mostly the result of reading hundreds of
books by authors like Scott Turow and Elmore Leonard, watching dozens
of movies like "Inherit the Wind" and "Anatomy of a Murder," and a
long-ago interest in watching TV lawyer shows like "The Practice" and
"Ally McBeal." That was all fiction, of course, but it was
fiction based upon real legal
situations. (I did sit in a courtroom and watch part of a real
murder trial in Kansas City, MO, circa 1962. And, like most
Americans, I did watch some of the O.J. Simpson murder trial on TV.)
So, starting with an understanding of courtroom procedures that was
based almost entirely on fiction,
I
did some research looking for real
trial transcripts, and I stumbled upon a web
site where there is a wealth of information about many famous trials.
I picked the Timothy McVeigh trial from the list, then I picked the
first witness whose name I didn't recognize (Lori Fortier), and I found
a
transcript of her testimony.
After presenting the Anthrax Truthers with a few examples that neither
one of them accepted as being similar to the handwriting situation, I
located
an example where Lori Fortier had testified to seeing a "fake
driver's license" in the possession of Timothy McVeigh. Here are
some of the prosecutor's questions and Lori Fortier's answers:
Q. Again, during this
two-and-a-half-month period that
McVeigh was staying in the Kingman area, did you ever loan him anything?
A. Yes, I did.
Q. Just tell us
in your
own words what you loaned him, what the circumstances were, what he
said to you, where you were.
A. I was at the
house,
and he came and asked if he could use the typewriter; and I let him
take it for a couple days.
Q. Go ahead.
A. He brought it
back a
few days after that; and when he brought it back, he asked if he could
use the iron, because he had something to laminate.
And I told him
no
because I didn't want him to ruin our iron.
So I took what
it was
that he had and I laminated it for him.
Q. What was it?
A. It was a
false
driver's license.
Q. Describe
it,
please.
A. It was
white. It
had like a blue strip across the top, and Tim had put his picture on
there. And it was like the false name of Robert Kling. I believe it was
a North Dakota license.
Q. When you say
it was
a false name of Robert Kling, how is it you remember that name?
A. Because I
looked at
it.
The actual driver's license was NOT presented in court. It had
evidently been destroyed by McVeigh after he used it to rent a Ryder
truck to haul the explosives he used to blow up the Murrah Federal
Building in Oklahoma City in April 1995. So, this key piece
of evidence existed only in the memory of a lay witness who could testify about
it. No "expert witnesses" were needed to testify that it truly
was a fake license, that it showed McVeigh's photograph, or that
Timothy McVeigh had the capability to create it. There were
no objections from the Defense when the lay witness testimony was
given. Both Truthers had argued that such things would never be
allowed in court.
That
testimony seemed to have an effect on the first Anthrax Truther.
In one
comment on my blog, I had written:
In the theoretical trial of Bruce
Ivins that never took place
because Ivins committed suicide, the testimony of the lay witness in
court would have been that Ivins would DISGUISE HIS HANDWRITING
when writing cryptic notes to her.
The testimony of the
lay
witness in court would have been that the lay witness believed the
handwriting on the anthrax envelopes could have been Ivins'
disguised handwriting.
To which the first Anthrax Truther responded:
Okay, I'm confident that
your
first paragraph could have been admitted in court as testimony, but I'm
not sure to what effect
So,
the first Truther seems to have changed his mind and now agrees that
lay testimony about the disguised handwriting would be allowed in court. It
was a small but perhaps significant concession. The second
truther just went silent. I've heard nothing further from
him. He seems to be busy on Lew Weinstein's web site posting
comments about a
different Muslim terrorist who he now seems to believe wrote (or
merely mailed) the anthrax letters.
It appears that the key trick to arguing with Anthrax Truthers
(and probably Truthers of all kinds) is to get them to make
declarations of things they believe that can be disputed with
facts. They try to avoid making such declarations and much prefer
to ask loaded questions that imply government conspiracies or
incompetence, and to
voice bizarre opinions about why
the FBI or DOJ did or didn't do something, which they want you to try
to somehow disprove.
There were no new comments on my interactive blog this morning, so
maybe both Truthers have gone silent until they can figure out a way to
argue baseless beliefs again without risking that facts can be found
which will thoroughly and embarrassingly disprove their beliefs.
Meanwhile, I discovered there is a relatively easy way to
illustrate the problem I'm having with junk emails. Here's a
chart of the emails I've received for every day of 2013 through May
17:
Each horizontal line on the chart represents 100 emails.
So, my junk emails first broke through the 100 per day line on January
8, they
first broke through the 200 emails per day line on February 13, and
they
first broke through the 300 emails per day line on May 1. On May
2, it appears that the junk
emails peaked
out at 358 in one day. Of all the 21,948 emails this year, only
about a hundred or so were emails I wanted to read.
Encrypting the email address at the top of this web site may have
helped reduce the number of junk emails I get, but it looks like it
could be
a long time before I can be certain
that the long-term effect is going to be a gradual decrease in junk
emails.
I could start using a new email address. ed-lake (at)
ed-lake (dot) com, would be perfect, but because I'm using
very old software on almost everything, there's an incompatibility
problem somewhere. Unless I solve the incompatibility
problem, I wouldn't be able to merge new emails into my existing
archive of 50,000+ emails that I've accumulated since 2001. So,
I'm going to continue to simply procrastinate for awhile longer ( -
probably until some disaster forces
me to stop procrastinating).
|
Updates
& Changes: Sunday, May 12, 2013, thru Saturday, May 18,
2013
May 17, 2013 - The debate on my
interactive blog rages on. While I was thinking about ways I
might resolve some of the issues under debate, I found a very
interesting web site on "Famous
Trials" which contains a wealth
of information about many different trials - from the trial of Socrates
in 399 BC to the trial of 9/11 conspirator Zacarias
Moussaoui in 2006. Unfortunately, anything I find in those
trial documents that might
resolve an argument about what would
have happened in a trial of Dr. Bruce Ivins would more likely
just dissolve into a pointless argument of opinion versus
opinion. Or the Truther would just change the subject.
While it appears that a lot of disagreements could be resolved if Truthers could
just be required to stick to
a subject and not change the subject as soon as they see they are
losing an argument, in reality they would also have the option of just
walking away and ignoring what was resolved. Of course, they
would then return in a few weeks or months to argue it all over again
as if nothing had been previously resolved.
May 16, 2013 (B) - If you're
interested, you might check out an interesting debate about reality
versus what "Truthers" believe that "lay witnesses" can and cannot
testify about in court. It's on my interactive blog. Just
click HERE.
May 16, 2013 (A) - CBS
News is reporting that Dzohkhar Tsarnaev wrote what amounts to a confession on the inside wall
(bulkhead) of the boat in which he was hiding when he was found.
Dzohkhar explained why he and
his brother did what they did. So, even if a clever lawyer gets
his verbal confession tossed out of court because it was made before he
was read his Miranda rights, the feds still have a confession that can
be used.
May 15, 2013 - I find it highly
amusing that the True
Believer who
was declaring that the handwriting on the anthrax letters and envelopes
was the handwriting
of 9/11 terrorist Mohamed Atta has suddenly and
dramatically changed his tune.
First, while not admitting he may have been wrong in declaring that it
was Mohamed Atta's handwriting, he's now hinting that it may have been the handwriting of a
different Muslim
terrorist. But, he hasn't provided any evidence to support
that belief. It doesn't seem to matter to him which Muslim terrorist wrote the
letters, just as long as he can argue that it was Muslim terrorists who sent the
letters, and not Dr. Bruce Ivins.
Second, the True Believer seems to have suddenly gone
bananas in declaring that the handwriting is NOT the
normal handwriting of Dr. Bruce Ivins. He also declares:
No handwriting expert has
put their reputation behind an Ivins Theory.
It appears that this is a new
discovery for him.
Anyone comparing Dr. Ivins' handwriting to the handwriting on the
anthrax letters can see that there are great differences. The FBI
has (non-expert) witnesses who
claim the handwriting is similar to the disguised handwriting that Ivins
used when he sent out packages and cards to people and didn't want them
to know who the sender was. Page 89 and 90 of the DOJ's
Summary Report of the Amerithrax case says:
In addition, a witness
who had received a number of packages and cards over the course of
several years in the late 1990s and early 2000s was shown copies of the
letters and envelopes used in the anthrax attacks. The witness thought
that the handwriting on the envelope addressed to Senator Daschle reminded
the witness of Dr. Ivins’s writing. If the witness were to receive a
package with that writing on it, the witness would think of Dr. Ivins.
The witness noted that, in particular, the style of the block letters
with alternating heights stood out, as did the slant of the writing.
The witness said that this was the type of writing Dr. Ivins used when
he disguised his handwriting as part of a joke. As the witness
studied the letters, the witness noted that the “E” and the “R” in the
letter to the New York Post also looked familiar. The witness stated
that these letters also reminded the witness of when Dr. Ivins disguised
his handwriting as a joke. The witness described this “disguised”
handwriting as being similar to Dr. Ivins’s standard handwriting, and
that one could tell that he was trying to disguise his
handwriting to a limited extent. Another witness familiar with the
handwriting of Dr. Ivins in many contexts said the same thing.
That is the only
handwriting evidence related to the anthrax letters and envelopes used
by the DOJ and FBI in the Amerithrax case. It appears that no two
"handwriting experts" used by the FBI agree on much of anything about
the
handwriting.
In the legal case against Bruce Ivins as described in the Summary
Report, the DOJ uses experts to show that Ivins was lying when he
claimed he didn't write labels on
the slants he sent to the FBI Repository. But there is no
expert testimony about the handwriting on the letters and envelopes -
because the evidence is inconclusive.
In court, they'd leave it to the defense to argue that the handwriting
didn't match Ivins' handwriting. If the defense tried that, the
prosecution could then bring in a bus-load of experts who could argue
that Ivins could have used various methods to disguise his handwriting when
writing the letters and addressing the envelopes. Proving that
Dr. Ivins did NOT disguise his handwriting to write the anthrax
documents requires proving the
negative.
Meanwhile, it appears that many readers of this web site were also
somewhat surprised to learn that the handwriting on the anthrax
documents doesn't match Dr. Bruce Ivins' handwriting. A lot of
attention
has been paid to the illustration I used
on Monday to show how Ivins, Atta and the anthrax writer wrote the
number 4. I could go through dozens of comparisons, but I'll just
do one more here. Below is a comparison of how Mohamed Atta,
Bruce Ivins and the anthrax writer wrote the alphabetical character R:
Both Ivins and Atta appear to have drawn their R's similar to cursive
style, i.e, with single
stroke, first drawing the
vertical line, then tracing back over the vertical line to the top
where the arc is drawn and then reversing directions in order to add
the extender (the diagonal line.) The anthrax writer always used 3 strokes
when drawing R's: (1) the vertical line, (2) changing his method
from kindergarten style of drawing small circles for the tops of his
R's on the Brokaw letter to first grade style of properly drawing arcs
as the tops of his R's on the Brokaw envelope, and (3) then drawing the diagonal line. Click HERE to view a
video explaining 12 facts which clearly show that Ivins used a child to
do the
writing on the anthrax documents. There is no logical explanation
for why any adult - Ivins or
Atta or anyone - would change
his style of drawing R's and other letters of the alphabet, change the
size of his handwriting, and
change the use of punctuation between the
first anthrax mailing and the second.
May 13, 2013 - This morning, my
personal email inbox is being flooded with emails from a True
Believer who continues to
bizarrely argue that 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta's handwriting matches
the handwriting on the anthrax letters and envelopes. In over a dozen emails, he has been
specifically arguing that Atta's 6's and G's are
the same as the anthrax letter writer's 6's and G's - probably
because I previously didn't bother to explain the obvious differences
in the new "Mohamed
Atta did NOT write the anthrax letters" page I created on May
8th. So, I've now updated that page to show that there are also
great differences between the two writing styles for 6's and G's.
I wish the True Believer would post his arguments to my interactive blog
where the entire world can watch a discussion of his claims, but it
appears he doesn't like making
a fool of himself in public. This afternoon, I created a new thread
for my interactive blog on the specific subject of "Mohamed
Atta's handwriting." However, he's still making his bizarre
declarations about the handwriting via private emails (to which I never respond, except by commenting
in public here or on my blog. There's no point in arguing in
private, since there's no way of changing his mind. But, a public
argument is a good demonstration of the fact that there's no way to
change the mind of a True Believer). Some of his email arguments
make no
sense. Example, he wrote this at 4:13 p.m.:
Dr.
Ivins did not write the date similar to the writer of the anthrax
letters ; the FBI should disclose the handwriting comparison
A couple of the messages I received this morning include rantings about
how Bruce Ivins drew his 4's with an open top (just the way Atta did),
while the anthrax letter writer drew his 4's with a closed top.
The True Believer is once again declaring that this proves
that the handwriting on the anthrax letters and envelopes does NOT match that of Bruce
Ivins. But, who
ever said that
it did? The writing styles are obviously different. The
"official" explanation appears to be that that may be because Bruce Ivins disguised his handwriting. I
have been saying for 11 years
that the handwriting on the anthrax
letters and envelopes is that of a child used by the anthrax mailer
to avoid writing the letters in his own style -- or attempting to
disguise his own style of handwriting. I even created a video HERE to explain the facts which show that a
child wrote the letters.
May 12, 2013 (B) - I've been
exchanging emails with people regarding two new potential
controversies. First, there's the
question of whether or not the Tsarnaev brothers were mass murderers
long before they also became terrorists. I.e., did they cut
the throats and nearly decapitate three men in a Waltham, Mass.
apartment on September 11, 2011? Second, is there some connection
between a
paramedic who seems to have a hobby of making explosive devices and the
explosion at the fertilizer plant in West, Texas that killed 15
people?
I don't have any theories about either case. I'm totally content
with letting the police investigate those matters. Generally, I
only become interested in such matters when people start arguing
beliefs against facts, causing controversy. Then I usually side
with the facts. Right now, there don't seem to be enough facts to
argue one way or the other. There are interesting details in both
cases that could just be
coincidences. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was the best friend of one of the
slain men in Waltham; Dzohkhar Tsarnaev was allegedly a marijuana
dealer; and the three slain men may also have been marijuana
dealers. The paramedic who made pipe bomb components may have profited from the
fertilizer plant disaster, and he had a brother who was killed in the
explosion. And, he was fired a couple days after the explosion,
but no news report explains why.
I don't see much potential in either case for the creation of a
conspiracy theory. But, if someone develops such a theory, I'd
probably feel a need to examine the facts.
May 12, 2013 (A) - This is somewhat off-topic, and I
don't know if it is going to be of
interest to anyone else, but it was fairly interesting to me.
I've mentioned in previous comments that my newsguy.com email address
is being bombarded with
junk mail - over a hundred
junk
mail messages per day. What I didn't mention is that I have the
capability of using "filters" to try to filter out junk
mail. I've had 98 filters
in place since 2004. And those
filters have been deleting hundreds
more junk emails. For example, here are the subjects for the
emails one filter automatically deleted on Friday because the email subject
line contained a dollar sign ($):
And
here are the subjects of the emails automatically deleted on
Friday because they came from a sender with a .biz email address (the
.biz test is done first, that's why some of these subjects contain a
dollar sign):
And here are the subjects and
the senders' email addresses for the mails that were automatically
deleted on Friday because the subject lines contain a percent sign (%):
A
filter I created a week ago that looks for "Dr." in the "from" part of
the email is
currently causing the most deletions. Here are the subject lines
and email addresses for the spam emails that were automatically
deleted on Friday:
And
I'm using 94 additional
filters. Filters for the word "credit"
or "homeowner" or an equal sign (=) in the subject line cause almost as
many
deletions as the ones shown above. Filters for "blood
pressure,"
"garden," "timeshare," "Valium," "bargain" and "insurance" in the
subject line cause fewer deletions.
The emails shown above are examples of the spam emails I do not see
because the filters deleted them before I looked at my inbox. But
I still see about 200 junk
mail messages a day that get through because
I haven't found any common word or character to use in a
filter that wouldn't also be easily used by people who send me genuine emails.
Last week, I also noticed I had a new "mystery" on my web site
logs. I
noticed there were at least a fifty log entries every day
for visits to the new web page I just created to show solid
evidence that "Mohamed
Atta did NOT write the anthrax letters." But, there was a
strange pattern to those visits. The visitors accessed the main
page of my site and then immediately did an access to the new page, but
neither
access looked at any of the images
that are on those two pages. They only looked at the text.
I've seen that often happen
with the main page, and I never bothered to try to figure out what was
going on. This time I wanted to know more.
So, I started going through the log entries, one by one, to see where
the visits came from. They seemed to be from a wide variety of
different IP addresses,
but after I looked up the IP addresses for each one I started to see a second pattern:
173.232.86.244 = 5280 Enterprises LLC,
Kittery, ME
5.135.167.93 = Ovh
Systems, Roubaix, France
176.31.50.87 = OVH,
Wroclaw,
Poland
216.172.145.155 = 5280
Enterprises LLC, Kittery, ME
173.232.124.147 = 5280
Enterprises LLC, Kittery, ME
50.117.64.164 = 5280
Enterprises LLC, San Jose, CA
173.208.158.148 = The Kansas City
Internet Exchange, Kansas City, MO
173.232.45.198 = Infinitie.net, Henderson,
NV
173.208.158.159 = The Kansas City
Internet Exchange, Kansas City, MO
23.29.57.49 = 5280
Enterprises LLC, Kittery, ME
205.164.15.231 = 5280
Enterprises LLC, Kittery, ME
142.54.170.243 = 5280
Enterprises LLC, Kittery, ME
50.117.65.97 = 5280
Enterprises LLC, San Jose, CA
173.232.23.227 = Infinitie.net, Henderson,
NV
216.172.139.6 = 5280
Enterprises LLC, Kittery, ME
205.164.15.201 = 5280
Enterprises LLC, Kittery, ME
199.180.130.151 = Kansas City Internet
Exchange, Kansas City, MO
37.59.171.217 = OVH
Systems, Roubaix,
France
176.31.50.82 = OVH,
Wroclaw,
Poland
50.117.64.231 = 5280 Enterprises LLC,
San Jose, CA
5.39.83.7 = Ovh
Systems,
Roubaix, France
94.23.162.192 = Ovh
Systems, Roubaix, France
About half the visits were from "5280
Enterprises" using a wide variety of IP addresses. So, I
did some research into
"5280 Enterprises," and I found an interesting entry HERE
which led me to a web site for Proxy51.com,
which sells 100 "shared proxies" for $35. They advertise:
Our shared proxies are just as fast
and high quality as private proxies. The only difference is that a few
other users can also access them. We will never allow more than 10
people access to one proxy, and even that is very rare.
That required research into "shared proxies" and "private
proxies." As I understand it, proxies are a way of hiding your
own IP address when you visit web sites and/or send out emails. I
don't know exactly how proxies work, but it's
clear that they are used for sending
spam emails.
By using many
different proxy
IP addresses, it makes it very difficult for me to block accesses by
"5280 Enterprises" to my web site. And, I suspect that "5280
Enterprises" isn't the one sending me the junk mail, anyway.
They're just
providing proxy IP addresses to the peddlers who send me the junk
mail. And those IP proxy IP addresses are probably being used to
access my web site to look for my email address so that a spammer can
use it to send me junk mail.
Groan!
Anyway, as a result of this research, I removed the email addresses
from
the top of my current and previous main web pages and replaced them
with "detect (at) newsguy
(dot) com", which human beings can read and figure out, but a computer
program probably won't be able to decipher to be an email address.
I still didn't know why all those visits also accessed my new web
page about Mohamed Atta's handwriting. That new page has no email
address on it. Then, when I
checked my logs from before I created that new web page on May 8, and I
found an identical pattern
using what was previously the
newest page, the page about "PBS
Frontline vs. The Facts." It, too, has no email addresses on
it. So, I suspect that the Atta
handwriting page
was being accessed just because
it is the newest
page.
And the spammers were checking it to see if I also had an email
address on
it. The question now is: Since they focus on new pages, does that mean they
don't save email addresses for very long and will
stop
using an email address after
a while? Or do they continue to use an email address they've
saved as long as
it doesn't always get an error
message
back?
I also wonder: Will the spammers find and use all the email addresses
in the Dr. Oz
and Offers lists I created above? I
hope so.
Although it wasn't my plan, it appears that those lists could cause
a lot of spammers to spam
each other.
On a hunch, I checked who has been doing all the visits to the "Russian
Mystery" page I
created
early in 2012. That supplemental page contains a lot
of Russian web site addresses
in log entries that do not seem to the result of legitimate visits. My
checking found
that the visits
to the "Russian Mystery" page turned out to be
all from those same shared proxy IP
addresses dispensed by "5280 Enterprises," Proxy51.com and
"OVH." So, it appears the spammers not only look for email
addresses, they look for additional web site addresses they can search
for even more email
addresses.
If I had more time, I could undoubtedly figure things out more
definitively. But there are far more interesting mysteries that I
prefer to dig into.
When I turned on my computer this morning, I had 22 junk emails
waiting in my inbox. That's less than a third of what I've been
typically receiving lately. But, I'll watch it for a week
or so to see what immediate effect (if any) may have resulted
from removing my email address from the main page .
|
Updates
& Changes: Sunday, May 5, 2013, thru Saturday, May 11,
2013
May 11, 2013 - For what it's worth,
USA Today has a new article titled "Poll:
Belief in JFK conspiracy slipping slightly." It says,
A clear majority of Americans
still suspect there was a conspiracy behind President John F. Kennedy's
assassination, but the percentage who believe accused shooter Lee
Harvey Oswald acted alone is at its highest level since the mid-1960s,
according to a new Associated Press-GfK poll.
According to the AP-GfK
survey, conducted in mid-April, 59%
of Americans think multiple people were involved in a conspiracy to
kill the president, while 24% think Oswald acted alone, and 16%
are unsure. A 2003 Gallup poll found that 75% of Americans felt there
was a conspiracy.
It's discouraging that so
many people still believe there was a conspiracy, while it's a bit
encouraging that fewer people believe it now than ten years
ago. Maybe it's because we seem to get new conspiracy theories almost
every day, and most are incredibly dumb.
On the other hand, it's easy to understand a person starting with a
belief and then changing his mind as he learns the facts, but it's
difficult to imagine that anyone who understands the facts can change
his mind as a result of some new belief.
The Boston Globe also has a
lengthy new article about the JFK assassination. It begins
with this:
On the very day John F. Kennedy
died, a cottage industry was born. Fifty years and hundreds of millions
of dollars later, it’s still thriving.
Its product? The ‘‘truth’’ about the
president’s assassination.
‘‘By the evening of November 22,
1963, I found myself being drawn into the case,’’ Los Angeles
businessman Ray Marcus wrote in ‘‘Addendum B,’’ one of several
self-published monographs he produced on the assassination. For him,
authorities were just too quick and too pat with their conclusion.
...
Most skeptics, including
Marcus, didn’t get rich by publishing their doubts and theories — and
some have even bankrupted themselves chasing theirs. But for a select
few, there’s been good money in keeping the controversy alive.
Best-selling
books and blockbuster movies have raked in massive profits since 1963.
And now, with the 50th anniversary of that horrible day in Dallas
looming, a new generation is set to cash in.
With
the advent of the Internet, it's even easier for "Truthers" to publish
their ideas. They can create a web site or a blog to promote and
argue their personal version of "the truth." And, they don't even
have to believe what they write and say. They can do it just for
profit, or they can do it for no other reason than to be malicious --
to attack "the government," to create doubt, to generate fear, and to
replace trust with distrust.
May 9, 2013 - In standard True
Believer fashion, the Anthrax Truther/True Believer who argued that
9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta wrote the anthrax letters hasn't changed his
mind. This morning he
wrote:
The anthrax letters are in Atta’s
handwriting. I have uploaded the exemplar and handwriting
comparison.
He doesn't explain, so presumably his "exemplar and handwriting
comparison" are just the silly, error-filled graphic he created that is
located HERE.
He's sticking with his beliefs, even though his graphic appears to
indicate that an M in "MALE" is similar to an A in "ATTA," he compares
a 6 written by Atta to another
6 written by Atta and finds them similar, and he makes other ridiculous
comparisons as well. My new supplemental web page "Mohamed Atta did NOT write the anthrax letters"
explains my analysis in
detail. Anyone can look at the Anthrax Truther's reasoning
(which you mostly have to figure out for yourself) and my very clear
analysis and judge for themselves whether the writing on the anthrax
letters and envelopes was done by Mohamed Atta or not.
Meanwhile, someone sent me a link to some very large and very gruesome
pictures from the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing. Click
HERE
if you have the stomach for it. And Professor James Tracy seems
to have added some additional pictures to his
blog while still arguing that things didn't happen in Boston the
way he believes such things
happen. Therefore, the government must
have contrived it all.
The screwball reasoning of "Truthers" never ceases to amaze me.
Of course, they both believe the government is wrong about their particular issue, but they
probably totally disagree with each other's beliefs about what really happened, a.k.a, "The
Truth." Each seems to think that he's the only person on Earth
capable of figuring out "The Truth."
May 8, 2013 - Ah! I can get
back to discussing the anthrax attacks of 2001! An Anthrax
Truther just made some bizarre declarative statements about the
handwriting on
the anthrax letters and envelopes. On Lew
Weinstein's blog, he wrote:
The
anthrax letters are in the handwriting of Atta.
....
Code was used in the letters — but it
was not the made-up code offered by the FBI in its “Ivins Theory.” It
was the code known to have been used by Atta, Ramzi Bin Al Shibh, and
Ayman Zawahiri.
....
Amerithrax represents the greatest counterintelligence failure in the
history of the United States because the threat is still ongoing — and
the FBI closed the Amerithrax investigation.
The handwriting, of
course, is NOT
the handwriting of Mohamed Atta, the leader of the 9/11
hijackers. Any
handwriting expert can tell you that.
However, it certainly doesn't require an "expert" to see all the
significant
differences.
To show how silly it is to believe that Mohamed Atta wrote the anthrax
letters, I've assembled parts of comments I wrote in 2012 into a new
supplemental page for this web site. The new page is titled "Mohamed Atta did NOT write the anthrax letters."
I also noticed that in
another thread on Lew Weinstein's blog, the same Truther says,
I have argued that Adnan El-Shurkijumah
was the mailer of anthrax letters in the Fall 2001. He stayed
with Al-Hawsawi in safe houses in Karachi from February – April 2002.
Al-Hawsawi had the anthrax spraydrying documents his laptop.
So far, I haven't been
able to find where he argued that and what his reasoning was.
But, until he clarifies himself, I think it's fairly safe to assume
that his reasoning is just as ridiculous as his reasoning that Mohamed
Atta
was the anthrax letter writer.
On the other hand, I recently advised him that the number of visitors
to this site in April was 4½
times the number visitors to Lew Weinstein's blog that same
month. The Truther has begun to demonstrate that he doesn't
really
believe some of what he posts, he just wants to provoke people and/or to maliciously manipulate people into
doing what he wants. If he wanted to provoke me into providing
some links to
Weinstein's blog to give them more traffic, he has accomplished that.
May
7-8, 2013 (B) - This has nothing
to do with the anthrax attacks of 2001, but it has to do with
deciphering and trying to understand the news. TheAtlanticWire.com
has two
totally fascinating (and almost hilarious)
video interviews with Charles Ramsey (a
convicted wife beater), the man who helped Amanda Berry
escape from
what appears to be a barricaded
home owned by kidnapper, Ariel Castro. Amanda Berry,
Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight had been held
captive in the house for ten years,
since April 23, 2003. Michelle Knight had been held captive for eleven years. There's been
nothing on the news so far about what prevented the women from escaping
when their captive was away (as he was at the time of the escape), but
the description of events from Mr. Ramsey seems to indicate that he
responded when Amanda
Berry was screaming through a hole of some kind in a front
door that seems to have been covered on the inside with tape and
plastic. Here's the front door (click on it for a larger version):
Ramsey went onto the porch, saw Amanda was trying to get out, and he
evidently helped kick out a screen that allowed Amanda and her daughter
to crawl out of the bottom part of the door. Later,
the police entered and found the two other women. The New
York Daily News, however, doesn't even mention Ramsey and describes
the escape this way:
Berry, 27, managed to break
through the bottom of the home's front door and call 911 from a
neighbor's house.
ABC
News says,
Ramsey, who initially
believed Berry was involved in a domestic dispute, said he helped kick
in the aluminum screen door through which Berry and her daughter
escaped.
"Luckily … it was aluminum,
it was cheap," he said. "And she climbed out with her daughter. ... She
went to my house, we called 911."
The
Daily Beast says,
Police said one of the
women, Amanda Berry, 27, broke out the bottom lock of a door, and ran
into the arms of a passerby, telling him that she had been kidnapped.
In
the first TV interview with Charles Ramsey, he says he called
911. Ramsey's
911 call is on-line and is also hilarious,
even though the situation is deadly serious. In the second
TV interview, Ramsey seems to say that Amanda Berry made the first 911
call to the police. The
transcript of Amanda's call says it began at 5:51:59 pm.
Ramsey's call began at 5:52 pm and 34 seconds. Evidently, they
were on different phones, at or in front of a neighbor's home, both
making 911 calls
at roughly the same time.
Interestingly, there's also an April 2009 CNN report about "Three
teens disappear from same neighborhood." Two of the "teens"
are Berry and DeJesus. The third was Ashley
Nicole Summers, who wasn't
one of the 3 women rescued yesterday. Also, Berry's mother died
in 2006, while Berry was missing. And Michelle
Knight's brother didn't even know she was missing (for eleven years) until this story
broke. There will undoubtedly be a lot
more fascinating details released as the days pass, but, since a lot of
it will undoubtedly be very
grim and about all the horrible things that happened in that house
during the
past ten years, I don't expect
to write any further comments on this subject. I just needed to
do it today to organize what I was reading.
May 7, 2013 (A)
- I received an email this morning with a link that advised me that
The Boston Globe is reporting that the officer who was shot during
the shootout on Laurel Street was apparently struck by friendly fire. The
article also suggests that there may have been two other "friendly fire"
incidents. It says the police fired up to 300 shots at the two
suspects during the shootout. Real life shootouts are never as organized and tidy as
shootouts in the movies.
Digging further, I found a
Boston Globe article from April 26 which says a witness saw the police officer
fall, apparently as a result of friendly fire:
A neighborhood resident, who
said she saw Donohue fall as she watched from the window of her home,
said in an interview Thursday she was immediately concerned that
Donohue and other police officers were in the line of fire of fellow
officers.
“There were bullets flying
all around,” said the witness, who asked not to be named. “There was
concern about officers being in harm’s way. It was a war out there.”
The second law enforcement
official said that whether Donohue was hit by friendly fire or not,
officers were involved in a chaotic scene where they were trying to
subdue a dangerous suspect. The suspect was shooting at police, and
police were trying to protect themselves and each other by firing back,
officials said.
“It doesn’t change anything
at the scene, friendly fire or not,” the official said. “These suspects
set in motion a chain of events that required this kind of response.”
I agree. Another
Boston Globe article gives more details.
May 6, 2013 (B) - Groan! Someone just advised
me that the two cars parked in front of the Tsarnaev home in 2007 are a
Chrysler minivan and Toyota sedan, NOT the gray 1999 Honda SRV and the
green 1999 Honda Civic owned by the Tsarnaev brothers. I stated in my April 26 (B) comment
about the cars that "Identifying cars are NOT one
of my areas of expertise." And, now I seem to have fully
demonstrated that.
I'd checked pictures of 1999 Honda SRVs and Odysseys before writing the
comment, but now I can see a decorative grove on the side of the
Odyssey going through the door handles that isn't seen in the car
on Norfolk Street, and the 1999 Honda Civic tail lights are not the
same as those on the sedan on Norfold Street. The wheels are not
Honda wheels on either vehicle.
As I keep telling everyone: To err is human. And, I've
proved I'm definitely human.
May 6, 2013 (A) - I don't know if
this
is going to be of interest to anyone else, but I just finished using
Google to create an illustration of the Tsarnaev shootout on Laurel
Street in Watertown, MA. You can click on the image below to view
a larger version:
I used photos
taken by the witness to figure out where the witness was located,
where the stolen Mercedes SUV and the green Honda Civic were parked
during the shootout, where the pressure cooker bomb went off, where
Tamerlan Tsarnaev was shot and taken down, and the route that Dzohkhar
Tsarnaev took to escape the scene. He got into the SUV, did a
U-turn, traveled West on Laurel St., ran over his brother, sideswiped
at least one police car, then disappeared into the night.
Listening to the police tapes again, it appears that Dzohkhar abandoned
the SUV near the intersection of Spruce and Lincoln, which means that
after sideswiping the police car on Laurel Street, he crossed Dexter
Avenue and drove west on Spruce to Lincoln, where he left the car and
continued southwest on foot. But, my main purpose was to
figure out how far the explosion was from the SUV. It appears to
have been no more than 20 feet, yet the SUV showed no visible shrapnel
damage. That suggests to me that the bomb was less dangerous
(less powder and maybe no shrapnel) than the ones exploded during the
Boston Marathon.
I'm getting to the point where I think I understand the time and
location of everything that happened. If called upon, I can
debunk all the nonsense "evidence" the conspiracy theorists use.
I also found it amazing that Google
Street View allows me to explore
the scene and see everything as it looked in July 2007. The stone
wall around the front lawn of the house across the street from the
witness is a key landmark, as are the white fence two doors to the
west, lamp posts and the black circle patches in the asphalt that help
pinpoint exactly where the bomb exploded. The image below shows
blast marks on the street in relation to the round patches in the
asphalt that were also there in 2007.
Years ago, I did the same kind of street view tour of the area where
the anthrax letters were mailed in Princeton in 2001. And I did
the same thing in the area where Tamerlan Tsarnaev lived, noticing two
cars that I mistakenly thought
were the cars both brothers used parked
in front of the Tsarnaev home in July 2007. But check my (B)
comment for today. It appears I know nothing about cars and can't tell a
Honda from a Chrysler or a Honda from a Toyota. But, I still
think that finding those cars was like the opening scene for a movie
script
-- a guy does a Google street view tour and spots a vehicle parked in
front of his house that belongs to an old boyfriend of his wife.
Lots of possibilities.
May 5, 2013 (C) - Someone else just
sent me an interesting email containing a link to an article
illustrating someone's stupidity. It's a report from a CBS
station in Seattle titled, "Teachers
Shocked, Frightened After School Holds Unplanned Shooting Drill."
In Oregon, fifteen teachers were having a meeting in a school in the
town of Halfway on a day when the students were not in school, and suddenly two
masked men burst into the room and started shooting directly at the
teachers with handguns.
Teachers only realized it
wasn’t a real shooting when none of them were bleeding.
“There was some commotion,”
school principal Cammie DeCastro told The Oregonian.
Teachers were frightened
about what happened.
“I’ll tell you, the whole
situation was horrible,” Morgan Gover told the paper. “I got a couple
in the front and a couple in the back.”
The school held the unplanned
drill in hopes to better educate teachers on how to deal with a school
shooting. Of the 15 teachers in the room, only two would have survived.
And what if one or more of
the teachers had been carrying a weapon? Who would have been
responsible if the two "shooters" using blanks had been killed by real weapons? Or suppose one
of the surprised teachers had a heart attack? And what about eye
damage from the wadding in the blank rounds? TV actor Jon-Erik Hexum killed himself with a blank
round. And what about powder or blast burns if someone tried to
grab one of the guns wielded by the intruders? And, what is
learned about protecting school
children when the "drill" takes place during a teachers meeting?
It would appear that the primary lesson taught by the "drill" is that
their school principal seems to be an idiot.
May 5, 2013 (B) - In response to my
(A) comment this morning about errors in the media, someone sent me a
link to an article from the British tabloid "The Guardian." As is
common with conspiracy theorists and devious mind-game players, the
article's title asks a question instead of making a statement: "Are
all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?"
The article is laden with double-talk and words with double meanings,
but it seems to say that every
phone call in America is being recorded by the phone companies and is
accessible by the U.S. government. Since a great deal of computer
communications also goes over telephone lines, that would mean that
those transmissions are being recorded as well. That would
require an enormous (and
probably unrealistic) amount
of storage space by the various phone companies, for no logical purpose
other than to be able to give the government a recording of any phone
call if and when they request it.
It's known that text messages and emails get recorded and stored for a
period of time. But I'll need a lot more evidence before I'll
believe the phone companies (and my cable company) are recording my
phone calls to my sister. And I'll also need a much better source
than The Guardian and Glenn
Greenwald.
It was The Guardian which had
the June 24, 2002 headline "Anthax
killer 'could grow more bacteria'," which reported:
Barbara
Hatch
Rosenberg, a biological warfare expert at the Federation of American
Scientists (FAS) and a vocal critic of the official investigation, has
claimed that biodefence experts
had told the FBI the identity of a likely suspect but that the bureau
was keeping it secret, possibly because the suspect knows too
much about US experimentation with germ warfare.
Mrs
Rosenberg
said the suspect, whom she does
not name but describes in detail, was an American contractor
working for the CIA, who suffered a career setback last summer that
"left him angry and depressed".
"He must
be
angry at some biodefence agency or component, and he is driven to
demonstrate, in a spectacular way, his capabilities and the
government's inability to respond. He is cocksure that he can get away
with it," she wrote in an assessment on the FAS website.
"Does he know something that he believes to
be sufficiently damaging to the United States to make him untouchable
by the FBI?"
May 5, 2013 (A) - My 2012 book about the anthrax
attacks of 2001 examined the role the media played (and still plays) in
misinforming the public about what happened in the FBI investigation of
the attacks. The media coverage of the Amerithrax investigation
was probably the worst media
reporting in the past 100 years. One key example was the "media
feeding frenzy" over the anthrax collection at Iowa State University in
Ames, Iowa. It dominated the news
for weeks, but it had
absolutely nothing to do with
the attacks or the FBI investigation. It was entirely
a media feeding frenzy concoction. Another key example was
how the media misreported (and continues to misreport) how Steven Hatfill became a "person of
interest" to the FBI.
The Boston
Marathon bombings have now provided another
look at how "the
media" often gets things wrong. I used
quotation marks around "the media" because talking about "the
media" is like talking about
"the government." It's not a "thing," it's a collection of many
people with many talents, many failings, often with personal agendas
and
usually with a desire to do a good job. However, to err is human,
and
even reporters who just want to report the facts sometimes misinterpret
what they personally see, and they often quote
"experts" who are dead wrong. Reporters rely on the "experts" who
are
willing to talk to the media, which are very often NOT the key people
in an investigation. Sometimes "experts" are just more people
with personal agendas.
Yet, I rely very heavily on
the media for my understanding of what is going on. And, so do
most people. That's because we want to know what's going on before it's all over and the
official findings come out. And, unless the event is in our own
home town, the media is usually the only source of information we
have.
What I do to sort fact from beliefs is to read more than one media
source. I
compare reports, and if there's a discrepancy, I dig deeper to figure
out what really happened. The Boston Marathon bombings
provided a cram course in sorting fact from fiction.
Here's a list of the most interesting errors I noticed in the media
reports since the reporting on the Boston Marathon bombings began on
March 15:
The media erroneously
reported that 25 to 30 people had lost limbs in the blasts.
The real number seems to be around 10.
The reports about 25 to 30 people losing limbs all came from one
"expert" who seems to have simply made an inaccurate estimate.
The media erroneously
reported that unexploded bombs were found at the bomb scene. No unexploded bombs were
found.
The reports of unexploded bombs were probably just misinterpretations
of what happened when bomb squads blasted
suspicious objects apart with water cannons.
The
Washington Times erroneously reported that "the two
Boston bombing suspects were likely taking direction from
overseas." They've since deleted that opinion.
The media erroneously
reported that a Saudi national who was a "person of interest" in
the bombings was going to be deported. Totally false. There
was no Saudi "person of interest," just another bombing victim, and the
Saudi who was being deported (for a visa violation) wasn't the same
Saudi as the individual
the
media thought was a "person of interest." The injured Saudi student had been
tackled at
bomb scene because he looked
"suspicious" to bystanders.
The media erroneously
reported that Michelle Obama visited a "person of interest" in a
hospital. The man was that same Saudi victim of the attacks, and Michelle Obama was just being attacked by
ignorant, biased media people with a political agenda.
The
media erroneously
reported that the Tsarnaev "lobbed bombs" at the police as they
were being pursued through the streets of Watertown. Never
happened. It
appears that reporters listened to the
police chatter on the police band and assumed that what a cop said
on the radio was a fact, even though it was apparently just what one
cop thought was happening
miles away
based upon what he was
hearing on the police radio.
The media
erroneously reported that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was wearing an
"explosive vest" when he was captured. He wasn't. The reports appear to
be just assumptions that a
terrorist would typically
have such a vest and/or the result of comments by
"experts" who were concerned that the bombers might have such vests.
The
Boston Herald erroneously reported that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was
injured by "shrapnel and blast wounds" and "did not appear to have been
run over." Wrong on both counts. That was evidently
another report based upon statements from an "expert" who had
misinterpreted what he had seen or been told.
And that list doesn't even include the New York Post's deliberate
printing of a picture of two innocent men with the headline "BAG
MEN: Feds seek these two pictured
at Boston Marathon." That was evidently deliberate, not an error. For
a time, the Feds were looking to check out everyone who was carrying a
backpack near the scene of the crime - including the two men in the
picture in the Post. But, gradually the Feds were able to
eliminate most of them, and they narrowed in on two specific men who
the videos showed had actually dropped their backpacks at the scenes of
the explosions. The Post just used one of the pictures of innocent men for
sensationalism purposes - and probably as part of some political agenda.
And, of course, The
New York Post erroneously reported that there were 12 deaths.
There were "only" 3.
And The
New York Post erroneously reported that a Saudi national had been
taken "into custody." Such reports evidently fitted the Post's
political
agenda.
And, then there's the
Boston Globe story about a cab driver who thinks he may have driven the Tsarnaev
brothers home from a train station the day before
the bombing, and that they may
have been carrying the bombs with them at that time, suggesting that
they got the bombs somewhere and didn't actually make them in
Tamerlan's apartment. It's a reporting of an unsubstantiated story from a
not-very-credible witness who isn't even certain of what he saw.
It's brainless rumor mongering, not journalism.
And there were many other reporting errors by many others in the
media.
Figuring out what actually happened at a horrific event can be a
fascinating look into how
people think. I was totally fascinated by one reporter on CNN who
just couldn't shut
up about how suspicious a man seemed in the pictures taken of him
stumbling through one of the bomb scenes. The reporter
just went on and on for what seemed to be hours about the man in shredded
black clothing in the upper left of the picture below:
Others in the media were also highly suspicious of that man's
actions. To me, the man was doing nothing
suspicious. He seemed not so badly injured that he would have to
sit down and wait for help, nor did he seem so slightly injured that he
could stop and help others. He looked like someone looking for
the nearest aid station or an ambulance - possibly someone in
shock.
The mere fact that he was moving around all by himself, separate from
the others in the picture, isn't automatically suspicious to me.
The reactions from conspiracy theorists is, of course, another
fascinating part of all this, the same way it was with the anthrax
attacks of 2001. Doing a Google search for pictures from the bomb
scenes, I found a gruesome shot of a man whose leg was missing its
foot, and there was just a long bloody bone where the lower part of his
leg used to be. The picture traced back to an anti-Semitic web
site where the bombing was being blamed on the Great Jewish
Conspiracy. The picture no longer seems to be on Google, which
makes me believe Google operators try to remove particularly gruesome
shots from the bombing scenes. So, conspiracy theorist Professor
James Tracy needs to
understand that the lack of pictures of people with gruesome wounds
doesn't mean they don't exist. It just means you have to go to
where the gruesome photos are kept from the general viewer who doesn't
want to see them. I do the same on this web site. I'm only
trying to sort fact from fiction in a major event. I'm trying to
understand what happened. I'm not here
to provoke people, nor am I trying to promote some political agenda by
preying on people's emotions.
I simply find sorting fact from fiction to be totally fascinating. It
is what caused me to become interested in the anthrax attacks of 2001
in the first
place. Scientists were arguing with scientists, and I wanted to
know which scientist was discussing facts and which was discussing
personal beliefs. The anthrax attacks taught me that respected
scientists can be as mindlessly biased and ignorant as newspaper
reporters, lawyers, doctors, college professors, and just about
everyone else. Luckily for humanity, the truly
ignorant ones seem to be fairly small minorities.
|
Updates
& Changes: Wednesday, May 1, 2013, thru Saturday, May 4,
2013
May 4, 2013 - Yesterday's Boston Globe had this headline: "Bomb
suspect died of bullet wounds, trauma to head." And they
report:
The death certificate of
marathon bombing mastermind Tamerlan Tsarnaev lists the cause of his
death as “gunshot wounds of torso and extremities” as well as “blunt
trauma to head and torso.”
Peter Stefan, owner of
Graham, Putnam, and Mahoney Funeral Parlor in Worcester, where
Tsarnaev’s body is being prepared for burial, tonight showed reporters
the death certificate. It has not yet been filed with the city of
Boston.
The injuries occurred after Tsarnaev
was shot by police and then run over and dragged by a vehicle,
according to the death certificate.
So, it's almost official. It will be
"official" as soon as the death certificate is filed with the city of
Boston. Tamerlan did not
suffer blast and shrapnel injuries. That was just another erroneous
media report. I'm going to have to compile a list of the more
significant media errors I noticed in the news reports about the Boston
Marathon bombings.
May 3, 2013 (C) - As I was preparing
to close the office for today, I noticed a very interesting article in The
Telegram & Gazette. The headline: "Worcester funeral
director defends role in bomber case." A few sample paragraphs
are below:
[Peter Stefan, owner of
Graham Putnam & Mahoney Funeral Parlors] said plans for the funeral
of the alleged bomber are being held up by the refusal of several
cemeteries to accept Mr. Tsarnaev's body for burial.
....
As word spread this morning that the body had arrived at Graham Putnam
& Mahoney Funeral Parlors, at 838 Main St., television news trucks
from Boston and a few curious locals congregated outside the white
Victorian building, drawn by the spectacle of a story that has made
headlines around the world.
.....
But Dorrie Maynard of Worcester didn't approve of Mr. Stefan's actions.
“Worcester is bad enough,” she said. “I think he should be sent back.”
....
"Don't do it? OK, what do you suggest I do? What would you do?" Mr.
Stefan said, as Boston media converged on his funeral home.
....
The medical examiner's office has not released the cause of death for
Tamerlan Tsarnaev. A death certificate could be released as early as
today.
May 3, 2013 (B) - Uh oh. I
keep making assumptions and getting zapped for them. This morning
in my (A) comment, I assumed
that the Tsarnaev brothers had enough sense to avoid setting off smoke
detectors and therefore they most likely tested the trigger devices for
their bombs in the back yard. But, while I was working out at the
health club this afternoon, CNN
was reporting that explosive residue
was found inside the Tsarnaev
home.
The residue turned up in at
least three places, the source said: the kitchen table, the kitchen
sink and the bathtub.
So, they did the testing
in the bathtub? And on
the kitchen table? And
in the kitchen sink? Maybe that explains why the bomb they set
off on Lambert Street did so little damage. It was just some
leftover gunpowder with very little added shrapnel. However, now
that I've mentioned that hypothesis, there'll probably be a news report
very soon shooting it down and saying there's a much better explanation
for the lack of damage.
Meanwhile, CNN
is also reporting that an uncle of the Tsarnaev brothers has
claimed the body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev and the funeral will be in
Worcester, MA. That should mean the death certificate will soon
be released, and we'll get a better idea about whether or not he was
run over by his brother, and whether or not Tamerlan was injured by
shrapnel and the blast from one of his own bombs - as was previously
reported.
May 3, 2013 (A) - The news
media is making a big deal of the confession from Dzohkhar Tsarnaev
that the two brothers were planning to use the bombs during the 4th of
July
celebration in Boston, but they finished the bombs much quicker than
expected. So, they were eager to use the bombs, and while looking
for other potential targets, including police departments, they finally
settled
on the Boston Marathon.
But, I find something else in
the reports much more interesting: The bombs were built in Tamerlan
Tsarnaev's apartment.
The bombs used in the
Boston Marathon attack were built in the apartment that suspect
Tamerlan Tsarnaev shared with his wife and child, a U.S. law
enforcement official with first-hand knowledge of the investigation
told CNN on Thursday.
That not only seems to shoots down the theory that the bombs were made
by someone else and carried to the Tsarnaev home
via a cab from the Malden train station, it also draws an image of
Tamarlan Tsarnaev building the bombs while also taking care of his
3-year-old daughter. That's something that most people just
cannot imagine anyone would do.
But, if you put all the pieces together and look at how the bombs were
probably made, you can even picture Tamarlan and Dzohkhar taking the
child with them out into the back yard to test the detonators. Setting
off a teaspoonful of gunpowder with a broken lightbulb trigger would
produce only a soft puff of white smoke. It would be a way to
surprise and entertain a 3-year-old. But, for the Tsarnaev
brothers, it would be more than that. It would be solid assurance
that the makeshift trigger would also work on a full-size bomb.
May 2, 2013 (B) -
While I was
working out at the health club this afternoon, one of the TVs on the
wall was tuned to CNN and was flashing the banner "FBI has found
missing laptop." Checking the news when I got home, I found that
there wasn't much more than that being said. CNN
merely reports,
The FBI has a laptop computer belonging
to Boston Marathon attack suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, two federal
law enforcement officials told CNN. It's not clear how or when the FBI
got the laptop. One official said that investigators didn't find it during last week's
search of a landfill near the University of
Massachusetts-Dartmouth, which Tsarnaev attended.
As I wrote yesterday, I can't see any student throwing away someone's
laptop, no matter whose it is. Meanwhile, Slate.com
says this about the CNN report,
If true, the discovery
could provide investigators with a trove of information about the
Boston bombing suspects, perhaps including how the brothers learned to
make the homemade explosives they are said to have used near the finish
line of the Boston marathon.
Let's hope it has all
the FBI needs and more.
Meanwhile, another
stupid kid - a high school
student - has been arrested for making on-line threats to "out do the
Boston Marathon Bombings." A copycat wannabe.
May 2, 2013 (A) - When I shut off my
computer at 5 p.m. yesterday, I hadn't yet read the complaints filed
against the three college buddies of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. As
expected, this morning the media has summarized them for me in a Boston Herald article titled "Timeline
of alleged cover-up." Someone sent me the link, so I didn't
even have to hunt for it. Someone also sent me a link to a site
where I can read and/or download all the court documents. Click HERE.
But, what interested me most was that that second link had a link to another article titled "In
Which I Make Up Tsarnaev Legal Conspiracies So You Don't Have To."
It begins with this:
"Any man's death diminishes
me, because I am involved in Mankind," says John Donne.
But why stop there? Any man's
(or woman's) fatigue or writer's block diminishes me as well.
Is anyone sparing any thought
for the people furiously writing conspiracy theories about the federal prosecution of accused Boston Marathon
terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev? Does anyone even care about the quality of
home life of the people laboring to misinform their readers about
federal criminal procedure and the contours of constitutional rights?
So far, I've only read
some of what that very interesting and amusing article contains, and
I've only followed some of the links, which go to other very
interesting articles.
There's so much to read that I don't have time to read it all, much
less digest it all. And, other issues left unresolved keep
nagging at me. I need to
understand exactly what happened when the Tsarnaev brothers set off
that pressure cooker bomb on Laurel Street. I haven't yet made
sense of it. Were the two brothers injured by the explosion or
not? Or did they protect themselves by taking cover behind their
vehicles? If so, how could the vehicles
still be in working condition? Here's a picture of the
Mercedes SUV after the shootout:
I can see bullet holes in the windshield and the side. The rear
tire looks flat. The fender damage is almost certainly from
crashing through the police line after the bomb went off on Laurel
Street and created a diversion. CBS
News says there were 32 bullet holes in the car. But where's the bomb damage?
You'd think that
the tires
would be shredded. But, I don't know how far the bomb was from
the two vehicles when it went off. I think I have all the
information to figure it
out, I just need to set everything else aside to work on it.
Of course, I could get more
done by expanding my "office hours." I just "work" from 9 to
5. I could work on it
until I resolve it, even if it takes until 3 in the morning or
longer. But, this is all just an interest, a hobby, a pastime, not an obsession.
Plus, I need the time away from the issues to let my subconscious work
on things and sort them out while I go to the health club, do chores,
eat meals, watch TV, watch movies and sleep.
On my
interactive blog yesterday, I got into a discussion which led me to
wonder about the differences between "coming to an understanding" (which I think I do)
and "coming to a conclusion"
(which I think True Believers do). Maybe there's something in
that difference that can help me better explain things.
Meanwhile, I'm now getting about 20 junk emails per hour. When I
find some free time, I'll need to get a new email address and think
about all the implications of doing that.
And, I need to think about upgrading my computer operating
system. I'm teetering on the brink of a total shutdown if someone
changes something that my obsolete version of Windows XP cannot handle
and I can't back out of.
But, then again, I really really
enjoy having a day filled with much more "work" than I can possibly
handle. I remember "bad days" when I ran out of things to
do before 9:30 a.m., after saving my daily statistics and answering an
email or two. Terrible times.
Ah, jeeze! Today's May
2. I forgot to do my bi-monthly file backups yesterday.
I'll have to stop everything and do that now.
May 1, 2013 (B) - All morning I've
been getting emails with links to news articles about three "suspects"
who have been arrested "in
connection with" the Boston Marathon bombings. It all appears
to be media distortions.
Reading the articles, it seems that two of the students were arrested
because their visas had expired.
According to ABC
News:
The two have been held in
jail for more than a week on
allegations that they violated their student visas while
attending the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth with Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev.
A Boston
Globe article later in the day (and the
actual complaint filed in court) provide a lot of interesting
details. The Globe reports:
Azamat Tazhayakov and Dias
Kadyrbayev, both 19 and of New Bedford, were charged with conspiracy to
obstruct justice by plotting to
dispose of a laptop computer and a backpack containing fireworks
belonging to bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the US attorney’s
office said in a statement.
Robel Phillipos, 19, of
Cambridge was charged with making
false statements to law enforcement officials in a terrorism
investigation, prosecutors said. All three began attending the
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in 2011, the same university
Tsarnaev attended.
and
Three days after the
blasts, on April 18, the three men
allegedly removed Tsarnaev’s backpack, which contained fireworks that
had been opened and emptied of gunpowder, from his dormitory room.
Suspecting that Tsarnaev was
involved in the bombing after authorities released surveillance video
of the bombers that afternoon, the
trio decided to throw the backpack and fireworks in the trash “because
they did not want to get Tsarnaev into trouble,” according to an
affidavit filed by an FBI agent in support of the charges.
On Friday, authorities recovered the
backpack from a landfill in New Bedford. Inside, agents found
fireworks, a jar of Vaseline, and a UMass Dartmouth homework assignment
sheet, among other things. The homework sheet was for a class in
which Tsarnaev was enrolled, the agent said in the sworn statement. It wasn’t clear from the affidavit what
happened to the laptop.
I
don't understand why Dzohkhar would haul a backpack full of emptied
fireworks 60 miles from Cambridge, where his brother lived, to
UMass-Dartmouth which is near New Bedford. And why would he leave
it there after it became clear that the FBI and the police were zeroing
in on him and his brother? I can't come up with any scenario
where Dzohkhar made the bombs at school. And, I can't see a
student throwing away a laptop, no matter whose it was. They'd
probably pawn it or sell it to someone. On the other hand,
stupidity seems to
explain everything - both why Dzohkhar left evidence behind and why his
school buddies didn't tell the police.
May 1, 2013 (A) - The affadivit
asking
the judge to authorize the arrest of James Everett Dutschke for sending
the ricin letters is now
on-line HERE.
|
Updates
& Changes: Sunday, April 28, 2013, thru Tuesday, April 30,
2013
April 30, 2013 (C) - Yay!! We
now have information about the evidence against ricin mailer suspect
James Everett Dutschke. USA
Today is reporting,
Lab tests found traces of
ricin, a deadly poison made from castor beans, on several items federal
agents seized April 22 from trash at or near the Tupelo home of Everett
Dutschke, FBI Special Agent Stephen Thomason said in a sworn statement
unsealed in Mississippi.
Agents found a dust mask, yellow paper
and address labels in trash collected from a bin outside Dutschke's
home, along with a coffee grinder, a box of latex gloves,
another dust mask and an empty bucket of floor adhesive from a trash
can near his former business, Thomason said in the affidavit.
A
download of publication about ricin was found on Dustchke's computer,
and agents also discovered records showing Dutschke ordered 50 red
castor bean seeds on eBay on Nov. 17 and made a second purchase of 50
seeds on Dec. 1.
Dutschke
allegedly paid for the seeds via PayPal. U.S. Postal Service records
show the seeds were delivered to Dutschke's house on Dec. 5, the FBI
agent said.
Seems like some pretty good
evidence to me.
April 30, 2013 (B) - Groan!
While researching
something else, I stumbled across some intriguing information I'd
previously missed. I read an article on HollywoodLife.com
which includes a video of a "former CIA operative," Robert Baer,
explaining his belief that the Boston suspects "didn't act
alone." And Baer mentions a cab driver who supposedly picked up the Tsarnaev
brothers at a rail station in Malden, Mass, on Sunday, the day before
the Marathon, and drove them home to Norfolk St. The brothers
were supposedly carrying the
backpacks full of bombs at that time.
Checking further, I found a
Boston Globe article about the cab driver. However, from the
cabbie's description it appears
that the two men didn't speak very much English:
“Great day tomorrow for a
marathon — you guys going?” he asked them.
The younger male, wearing a
white cap responded, “Ah, marathon,”
Duggan said.
And then, suddenly, the older
male cut the younger one off, yelling at him in a foreign language,
clearly angry, his outburst startling Duggan.
Then:
After his attempt at small
talk, Duggan said, the two men
told him to make an abrupt stop.
“They certainly wanted to get
my attention, because they slammed their hands repeatedly on the back.
Bang bang, bang!” he said. .....
“They were angry at me, so I
tell them, ‘Excuse me, I’m a human being, I made a mistake and I’m
sorry.’”
Duggan lifted the hood and
reached for the dark backpack that the older man had carried. He was
shocked by its weight.
“It was as full as it could
be and it was very heavy, so heavy that I had to brace myself and try
to lift it again,” Duggan said.
The older man started screaming
and snatched the backpack. “I told him to relax, that I was just trying
to help,” Duggan said.
I could certainly be
wrong, but that doesn't seem like the two brothers to me. The
brothers had lived in the U.S. for over 10 years and could evidently
speak fluent English. The
cabbie nearly drove away with the backpacks still in the trunk, which
says he wasn't paying that much attention at the time. He
indicates they stopped him somewhere other
than on Norfolk Street, which makes me want to see the cabbie's
trip log.
The implication of all this is what the former CIA guy picked up on:
Why would the two brothers be bringing home backpacks full of bombs on
the day before
the Boston Marathon bombing? If it really happened, the incident
suggests that the brothers went somewhere to pick the bombs up from the
bombmaker. But, witnesses are notoriously unreliable. It
could have been two Finnish men with backpacks full of reindeer meat.
Unfortunately, if the FBI checks it out and finds that it was two
Chinese guys with two gunny sacks of books, we may never learn about
their
findings. They do not usually tell the public about all the false
leads they checked out. It's nobody's business.
April 30, 2013 (A) - Among the
screwball
complaints and attacks from a True Believer in my email inbox this
morning, I found a few informative emails from someone else. One
contained a link to a
Boston Herald article which included this tidbit of information:
A doctor who treated
[Tamerlan] Tsarnaev said he had gunshot, shrapnel and blast
wounds.
Police have said Tsarnaev’s younger brother Dzhokhar, while fleeing the
scene of the shootout, drove over his body.
Sharpnel
and blast wounds? From
where? From how? It seems that they could only come from
the bomb the brothers set off on Laurel Street. I still haven't
figured
out exactly what happened when they set off that bomb. I don't
see how Tamerlan could have been injured by the Boston Marathon blasts
without the guy from the hijacked Mercedes noticing something. However,
I suppose it's possible that
the doctor may have incorrectly interpeted the effects of being run
over and dragged under a car. Maybe that's why the Boston Herald
mentioned the body being run over in the next sentence.
Doing research, I found another
Boston Herald article from the 19th which said,
Emergency room doctors
desperately tried the save the life of Tamerlan Tsarnaev this morning,
and said the man was suffering
from gun, shrapnel and blast wounds
but the 26-year-old bombing suspect
did not appear to have been run over.
It looks like the only media outlet reporting that Tamerlan had
"shrapnel and blast wounds" is the Boston Herald. It now
appears that the Boston Herald
may have misinterpeted something.
We'll
know more when the death certificate is released. Meanwhile, when
I find some free time, I'm going try to figure out where everything
happened on Laurel Street.
April 29, 2013 - I'm still waiting
to see exactly what the feds are using as evidence to charge James
Everett Dutschke in the recent ricin mailing. Fox
News says,
Shackled and in leg irons,
Dutschke, 41, appeared in Federal Court in Oxford, Miss., Monday, where
he was charged with "knowingly developing, producing, stockpiling, transferring,
acquiring, retaining and possessing a biological agent, toxin and
delivery system, for use as a weapon, to wit: ricin." He faces life in
prison if convicted. Like the first suspect, he claims he is innocent.
That seems like a lot more than just "suspicion," although I'm not sure
of the difference between "retaining" and "possessing." According
to a CNN
report,
While the snappy
eight-minute hearing produced no new details, the public could learn
more about the accusations when the criminal affidavit in support of
the complaint is unsealed. That could happen as early as Monday,
according to the court clerk and a U.S. attorney.
But, it's looking less
and less likely that we'll learn anything new today.
According to News
Yahoo.com,
The judge ordered a
preliminary hearing be held on Thursday when prosecutors will present
more detailed evidence in the case.
April 28, 2013 (B) - I just noticed
that Professor
James Tracy is at it again. He is truly a conspiracy theorist
(and True Believer) of the first order. He can look at pictures
of an explosion and
of horribly injured people after the explosion and rationalize
whatever he wants to promote his sick and ridiculous
theories.
All his theories require is that everyone
involved be part of the conspiracy and lie to the American
public. Plus, of course, the media also has to be a willing
participant. And all the doctors who talk to the media have to be
part of the conspriacy, too. And, most absurd of all, Professor
Tracy seems to
believe he is the only human being on Planet Earth who is capable of
figuring out what really
happened.
April 28, 2013 (A) - The past week was another very busy
and interesting one for
me. The facts and guesses about the Boston bombers were coming in
fast and furious, and it
was often very difficult to
separate facts from guesswork. A couple examples:
First there were the news
stories about bombs being tossed out of the suspect's car(s)
during the
police chase. According to The
Huffington Post:
During the long night of
violence
leading up to the capture, the Tsarnaev brothers killed an MIT police
officer, severely wounded another lawman and took part in a furious
shootout and car chase in which
they hurled explosives at police from a large homemade arsenal,
authorities said.
And CNN:
As they attempt to elude
law
enforcement, the Tsarnaev brothers throw
two small bombs out of the car.
And The
New York Daily News has a double header, the bombs being tossed and
the explosive vest which Tamerlan may or may not have worn:
Tamerlan Tsarnaev had a bomb strapped
to his chest when he charged at police following a 6-mile chase,
during which the suspects lobbed
pipe bombs at pursuing authorities.
The
only bomb used during the chase that I can confirm was the pressure
cooker type bomb that was exploded during the gunfight on Laurel
Street. It was too heavy to hurl or throw or lob.
If bombs were tossed out of the car during the chase, why don't we have
pictures of where they exploded? Why don't we have photographs of
the damage or
explanations of why there was no damage? I suspect (but I could
be wrong) that the only bomb that was set off was the bomb the witness
saw and heard explode on Laurel Street, and all the others are just
media interpretations of the
chatter on the
police radio.
Second,
there ares the highly questionable news stories about Tamerlan Tsarnaev
wearing an explosive vest.
According
to McClatchy
newspapers,
Deveaux said police were
worried
that Tsarnaev was wearing an
explosive vest – as his brother had
been the night before.
Read more here:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/04/20/189209/crowds-mob-scene-of-watertown.html#storylink=cpy
and The
Wall Street Journal:
The older brother,
26-year-old
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, wearing what
appeared to be an explosive vest, was shot by police and died
shortly after,
and another
source:
After he was killed in a
shootout
earlier today, police found an
explosive vest strapped to the body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
and another
source:
The Chairman [of the House
Homeland Security Committee] says the pressure
cooker devices the Tsarnaev brothers used in the attacks are important
because they are signature IED’s “that really tie back to the Taliban
in Pakistan” and he says the
explosive vest Tamerlan was wearing in a firefight with police
officers is typically found in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The problem is: I don't really trust
any of
those sources, including the "Chairman" who evidently
just knew what he read in the newspapers or saw on TV, and he was
twisting the reports to make them fit his beliefs. If Tamerlan
was wearing an
explosive vest, why haven't we seen pictures of it? And, why
wasn't it listed among the
exposives found by the FBI, which said that the brothers were
carrying only one pressure cooker type bomb and five pipe bombs during
their getaway attempt.
There was no mention of any explosive vest. Furthermore,
explosive vests typically involve high
explosives such as dynamite or C-4, not gunpowder, which is the only
type of exposive the
Tsarnaev brothers were known to possess.
And, if Tamerlan was wearing an explosive vest, why didn't he set it
off? Why did he allow himself to be captured alive after rushing
the police?
While I certainly could be totally wrong, the facts seem to indicate
that there was no
explosive vest and no bombs
were thrown out of any car during the police chase.
I
spent a lot of time last week trying
to assemble all the time and location information about the anthrax
bombing suspects in one place - a crude off-line web page where I tried to
lay out all the events on a step by stop timeline while also trying to
figure out where everything
happened. I'm not that familiar with Massachusetts, and I was
surprised when I learned that the younger brother's dorm room at
UMass-Darmouth was located 63.6 miles south of the older brother's home
in Cambridge.
But, then it immediately made sense that Dzohkhar Tsarnaev would think
it was relatively safe to return to school after the bombings if his
school was so far from the bomb scene. And Dzohkhar probably
frequently drove up to Cambridge to spent weekends with his older
brother. The 2007 Google image of
their two cars together was probably taken on a Saturday or Sunday
when
the Google
street view car driver wouldn't have so much traffic to worry about.
I'm not speculating. I'm trying to fit the pieces together.
And one BIG issue in putting the pieces together is the cars that were
involved. If both brothers were in the same car, it would be a
lot easier to throw bombs out the window at the pursuing police
cars. But it appears
they were in two different cars during the chase, since they were in
two cars when the chase came to an end. While it may not be totally impossible to drive in a
high-speed chase while at the same time lighting fuses on one or more
pipe bombs and tossing them out a window, it becomes a lot more
problematic if your brother
is in the car immediately behind you.
Here are some key times and places in the Tsarnaev brothers' escape
timeline:
1. The
decision to run:
At some point during the day on Thursday,
April 18, the Tsarnaev brothers decided to make a run for
it. The police
were showing pictures of the bombers on TV, and people at the younger
brother's school were starting to mention that the pictures looked like
the two Tsarnaev brothers. Dzohkhar evidently climbed into
his green 1999 Honda Civic and headed to Cambridge to join up with his
brother. Whether or not his brother also had a car is an
unanswered question,
but, if he did, it appears to have been a gray 1999 Honda
Odyssey. (On Tuesday, the younger brother had tried to get
access to a white Mercedes station wagon that was in a repair shop, but
it wasn't ready. Source.)
2. The
shooting of the MIT police officer, Sean Collier:
The only weapons the two brothers had were some
bombs, one semi-automatic pistol and (reportedly) a pellet gun.
They allegedly tried to steal a gun from an MIT police officer:
According to a statement
from the Middlesex
district attorney’s office,
at 10:20 p.m,
gunshots were reported to police, and 10 minutes later
Collier was found shot in his vehicle, outside MIT’s distinctive Stata
Center. Source.
But the officer's weapon
was reportedly
in a "triple-lock holster" and the brothers weren't able to get it out.
3.
The hijacking of the Mercedes SUV:
The Tsarnaev
brothers evidently felt that they needed a second car or a different
car, perhaps assuming that the police would be looking for their
car(s).
The 26-year-old Chinese
entrepreneur ["Danny"] had just pulled his new
Mercedes [ML 350] to the curb on Brighton
Avenue to answer a text when an old
sedan swerved behind him, slamming on the brakes. A man in dark clothes
got out and approached the passenger window. It was nearly 11 p.m.
last
Thursday.
....
He ordered Danny to drive -- right on Fordham Road, right
again on Commonwealth Avenue -- the beginning of an achingly
slow
odyssey last Thursday night and Friday morning in which Danny felt the
possibility of death pressing on him like a vise.
.....
Danny described 90 harrowing
minutes, first with the younger
brother following in a second car, then with both brothers in the Mercedes,
where they openly discussed driving
to New York, though Danny could not make out if they were planning
another attack. Source.
4.
Getting money for the escape:
At 11:18
p.m., Thursday night,
Dzohkhar Tsarnaev used a debit card taken from their hostage to
withdraw $800 from a Bank of America ATM kiosk somewhere in
Watertown. I haven't yet determined which ATM(s) were used.
The ATM
photos make it seem
like it could be the one at 39 Main Street, but that would have required the brothers
to
backtrack and almost pass the crime scene where they previously shot
and killed the MIT
police officer. Doing that seems highly unlikely. Source.
5.
Getting gas for the trip to New York:
It's somewhat unclear
if both
brothers were in the Mercedes when they stopped for gas, or if the
younger brother was following the Mercedes in his Civic. I
suspect the latter. Either way, the Mercedes needed gas and they
pulled into a Shell gas station
and convenience store at
820 Memorial Drive in Cambridge. It was evidently a "cash
only"
station, which meant someone had to go inside to pay, leaving only one
person to watch over their prisoner.
When the younger brother,
Dzhokhar, was forced to go inside the Shell Food Mart to pay, older
brother Tamerlan put his gun in the door pocket to fiddle with a
navigation device -- letting his guard down briefly after a night on
the run. Danny then did what he had been rehearsing in his head. In a
flash, he unbuckled his seat belt, opened the door, stepped through,
slammed it behind, and sprinted off at an angle that would be a hard
shot for any marksman. Source.
or you can believe the
less reliable alternative version:
While one of the brothers
was
outside the car pumping gas and the other was inside paying, the victim
jumped out of the car and ran to a Mobil station across the street.
....
Mobil cashier Tarek Ahmed
said the
terrified victim rushed into his station, screaming, “Some men are
trying to shoot me. They have a bomb and guns.”
“He was so scared that he
could
not stand up,” Ahmed told the Daily Mail. “He fell over and at first I
thought he was drunk.
Ahmed called 911 and cops
converged on the gas station from all directions. Source
The Mobil station is at 816 Memorial
Drive in Cambridge. The police
radio calls describe the two brothers as "Middle-eastern males," one
lighter-skinned than the other.
My experience with "cash
only" gas stations is that they want the cash before they turn on the
pump. You give them X-dollars and they set the pump to dispense
X-dollars worth of gas. If the same holds true in Boston, it
suggests that the two brothers may
not
have had time to pump the gas if "Danny" escaped while Dzohkhar was in
the store.
6. The police chase:
This is where the police radio broadcasts seem to be the main source
for all the news reports - including the reports about bombs being
tossed from cars. Click HERE
to go to a web page that has the broadcasts.
The chase began, apparently with the Civic following close behind the
Mercedes. They pulled off the main streets with the police in hot
pursuit and then (it appears) that Tamerlan in the Mercedes decided to
stop and make a stand (perhaps because he had nearly out of gas).
He pulled over on side street in
Watertown. His brother drove around him and came to a stop at
an angle in front of the Mercedes. They were next to 62 Laurel Street in
Watertown.
7. The
shootout and the capture of Tamerlan Tsarnaev:
At 12:46 a.m.
on the morning of
April 19, 2013, an eyewitness
used his iPhone to take pictures
of the
Tsarnaev brothers in their shootout with police. Source.
The brothers had backpacks which they'd taken from the green Honda
Civic. They only had one gun, and Tamerlan used it to fire at
the police. A pressure cooker bomb from the backpacks was then
put to use:
The use of this
explosive created an enormous cloud of smoke that covered the entire
street. While the street was still cloudy with smoke one of the
brothers started running down the street towards the officers, while
still engaging them in gunshots. As he got closer to the officers,
within 10 -15 yards of them he was taken down. From my
vantage point I did not see whether he was tackled to the ground or
brought down by gunshots.
Dzohkhar then gots into
the Mercedes SUV, made a U-Turn in the middle of the street and headed
toward the police. He ran over his brother as the police
scattered; he crashed through the police cars, knocking off their car
doors; and he disappeared into the night. Dzohkhar abandoned the
Mercedes not far away (or maybe it ran out of gas) and continued to
flee on foot.
8. The
capture of Dzohkhar Tsarnaev:
The police cordon off the area, but Dzohkhar has already made it
outside of the area of the police lockdown. He was bleeding from
multiple gunshot wounds received during the gunfight on Laurel Street
and found a place to hide inside a boat parked on a trailer behind 67 Franklin Street. (Google says it is 0.8 miles from the scene
of the shootout
at 62 Laurel Street to where Dzohkhar was hiding on the boat, and it can
be walked in 14 minutes.)
Dzohkhar hid in the boat all day, until its
owner went outside to inspect the pads which protected his boat
from chafing against its trailer in high winds and noticed blood
on the deck inside the boat. Then he spotted Dzohkhar and
immediately called the police.
At approximately 7 p.m.
Eastern, shots were fired in
Watertown, leading to reports that officials had Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
cornered.
...
Shortly before 9 p.m.
Eastern, it was confirmed Tsarnaev was
in police custody, and transported to a local hospital via
ambulance. Source.
That was the situation on
Friday evening,
April 19th, 2013, less than 48 hours after the murder of MIT officer
Sean Collier and just 4 days after the Boston Marathon bombings.
I've been trying to make maps of all this for my own understanding, but
because I don't know which Bank of America ATM they used, the only map
I can currently show here is the better-than-nothing Google map below
(click on it to see a larger version):
"A" is the Shell gas station where the Mercedes driver escaped.
"B" is the Laurel Street shootout.
"C" is where the younger brother was captured hiding in a boat.
I find this whole subject to be very
fascinating - because of the constant need to sort fact from opinion
and belief. I'm not complaining. I think the mistakes by
the media are very understandable, as are mistakes by the
authorities. To err is human. Sorting such things out is a
good lesson on how history works. Pick the pieces you want, and
you can write a history book that is anywhere between 2% and 98%
accurate. You can write it to support your beliefs and opinions,
or you can write it to explain the facts. There's plenty of
material for both versions. Time will tell which book will reach
the market first.
Somewhat less fascinating (because there are so few details) is the
ricin letter case. I (along with presumably everyone else) am
waiting to see what evidence the FBI found to implicate Everett
Dutschke. It should be interesting to see how some in the media
will use their beliefs and opinions to distort and misread the facts
about that case.
|
|
