What Was Craft Security Doing at the Boston
Marathon?
Paramilitary Group Backpacks Are Exact
Match for Bomb Backpack
NewsFocus.org, by Tim Watts - 080414
Please examine the following photos of Craft Security at the Boston Marathon...
and then read the excellent article from Dave Lindorff below...
In short, it would appear that the Tsarnaev
brothers were nothing more than scapegoats for a government intel black-op.
The backpack for the Craft guys are exact matches
for the bomb backpack, while Tsarnev's does not match.
Next, see this excellent piece from veteran
reporter Dave Lindofff of This Can't Be Happening.net...
Why Such Secrecy about Private Military
Contractor’s Men Working the Event?
Craft International Services hired guns at the Boston
Marathon
ThisCan'tBeHappening.net, by Dave
Lindorff - April 25, 2013
Speaking as an investigative reporter with almost 40 years’s
experience, I can say that when government officials won’t talk,
they’re generally hiding something embarrassing or worse.
I tried, and nobody will talk about those Craft International
Services private security personnel who were widely observed and
photographed near the finish line of the Boston Marathon,
wearing security ear-pieces, hats and T-shirts bearing the
company’s skull logo, and all wearing the same dark coats, khaki
pants and combat boots, some carrying what appear to have been
radiation detectors. (I got no hard answers, though there were
some inadvertent hints given.)
I first contacted a man identifying himself as Jack
Fleming, a public affairs person with the Boston Athletic Assn.,
sponsor of the marathon. Fleming advised me that “If you want to
ask about that you should contact the Commonwealth (of
Massachusetts) Executive Office of Public Safety.”
I called that agency (Executive Office of Public
Safety) and spoke with the public information office there, a
man named Terrell. He first said, "Did you call the Marathon
organizers?" When I replied that I had, and that they had said
to call his office, he replied, "They did?" Then he said, “You
should call the City of Boston Police Department. They released
a security plan to some media organizations.”
Indeed they had released that plan to the Boston Globe.
Based upon the information it got from the police
the article the Globe ran, did report that the
Police had deployed “air patrols, K9 units, and more than 1,000
uniformed officers and soldiers along the 26-mile course and the
finish line,” but it made no mention of the private contracting
of soldiers-for-hire, which is what Craft International does
(see the Craft website).
News agency Reuters reported, meanwhile, that a top official
for the Massachusetts state Homeland Security Department,
Undersecretary Kurt Schwartz, told a group at Harvard U. that
his agency had “planned” for a possible bombing attack on the
marathon, even running a “table-top” exercise about such an
event a week before the race.
I called the Boston Police to ask if they had hired
the Craft International personnel who were observed at the scene
just before and after the bombing, and was told by the public
affairs office there that “Anything having to do with the
investigation of the bombing would have to be referred to the
FBI Boston Division office.” When I pointed out that I wasn’t
asking anything about the investigation, but was simply asking
who had hired the security personnel from Craft International,
the answer was simply repeated: “You’ll have to ask the FBI.”
So I called the FBI, and got a public affairs person
there named Amanda Cox. Her initial response to my question was,
“I do not have any information on that.”
Seven apparent
Craft International rent-a-soldiers behind and departing (top
rt. with backpack) a communications van
I then said I had been referred to her by the Boston Police
Department, and said that photos of the scene after the bombing
had shown Craft International personnel conversing with FBI
agents. She then put down the phone, and I could hear her turn
to a supervisor and ask, her voice muffled, “This guy’s asking
about the Craft Security Consultants -- who hired them and what
they were doing.”
I next overheard the muffled voice of another woman to whom
she had been speaking reply, “I think you could safely say, ‘I
do know we worked with a lot of people who worked on security at
the marathon...’” After that I couldn’t make out what was being
said.
Cox later returned to the phone, and instead told me, “I’d
refer you to the company on any information about who hired
them.” (Taken together the overheard conversation and the
official answer from Cox would at least seem to confirm that
Craft's people were hired for the event, and that the
FBI knows a lot more than it is willing to say about them.)
My next step was to call Craft International. The
company has no phone number listed on its website -- just a
general email address of
info@thecraft.com (to which I wrote to asking for
information, but which elicited no response)--but I found one
listed for their headquarters office at 2101 Cedar Springs Rd.,
Suite 1400, Dallas, TX, in a listing on the company published in
a directory in Bloomberg Businessweek, This entry noted
that the company, in addition to “providing security, defense,
and combat weapons training services for military, police,
corporate and civilian clients in the US and internationally,”
also “offers corporate and private and civilian training
services...” The number, published in a business magazine, was
clearly meant as a contact for potential customers to call.
A woman answered the phone brightly with the company's name.
However, when I identified myself as a reporter, and said I was
wondering if someone could tell me who had hired personnel from
the firm to work at the Boston Marathon, she responded with a
flummoxed: “Um, I um, don’t really have any information on that.
I’m just an answering service.”
I replied, “Look, the number I called is listed as the number
of the company’s corporate headquarters at 2101 Cedar Springs
Road. You’re not an answering service.”
At that point she said, “Let me see who I can transfer you
to.”
However, after a long pause, she was back, and said, “The
answer I’ve been given is that you should go to the website,
where there’s an email address you can write to with your
question.”
I had already done that, I told her. She then said she
couldn’t help me and hung up.
I also called the US Department of Homeland Security,
but a women named Angela who answered the press office number
for this public government agency (she refused to provide her
last name despite being the public information office) said the
DHS media office was “only taking inquiries sent in by email.” I
sent in an inquiry asking if any unit of the DHS had hired Craft
International to provide security at the Boston Marathon, but so
far (note: two days later!) have received no response.
As things stand, since it's highly unlikely that Craft
International, a private for-profit enterprise founded by the
late ace Navy Seal sniper Chris Kyle, would have "hired" itself
to police the Marathon gratis, it seems pretty clear that we had
rent-a-special forces-soldier people, hired by some agency, at
the scene of the bombing ahead of the bombing.
And we have no reporting on this in the mainstream
corporate media.
Why? I have no answer to that.
I did write to Andrea Estes, the lead writer of the
Globe’s piece on police security planning mentioned above,
who is described in her bio on the Globe’s website
staff page as an “investigative reporter specializing in
government accountability.”
I called and left a message on her phone, and sent her an
email, asking if she had looked into the Craft Security
personnel, to see who hired them, what they were doing at the
race finish line, and why they appeared be carrying radiation
detectors. She has so far not responded to my request for
information and assistance concerning anything she had done or
learned about this, or whether she had looked into it at all.
Certainly there is a big accountability question. A bunch of
them actually. Here are a few:
* If Craft
International people were hired, who hired them and why?
* If it was
the Boston Police or the FBI that hired them, why won’t they
just say so? Simply hiring outside security help should not be a
secret, and could in no way affect the investigation into the
bombing and the captured suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, so why the
secrecy about that? Given all the police presence, and the size
of the FBI's Boston division, why did they need those extra guys
from a private rent-a-soldier firm?
* If it was
not the Boston Police or the FBI, what agency did hire the
company, and why?
* If it was
the state’s Homeland Security Dept. or or the state Executive
Office of Public Safety, or perhaps more likely, the US
Department of Homeland Security, did they notify the FBI that
they had done so, and tell the agency what had prompted them to
do this?
* The big
overarching question when it comes to who hired Craft
International is, what possible gain in security could have been
achieved by adding what appears to be seven guys (or perhaps a
few more who didn’t appear in photos) from a private security
firm when the Boston Police had in place over 1000 armed
security people from their office and the National Guard, and
when, as became evident immediately after the bombs went off, a
large number of FBI personnel were also on hand?
Unless, of course, the Craft Security people were aware of
something that we, the public, including the race participants
and spectators, and perhaps even the police and FBI, were not
aware of.
Transparency is critical to accountability. At this point, it
is clear that we have had a massive failure of the national
security state. Despite the fact that the FBI was aware of
concerns about Tarmelan Tsarnaev, and the fact that the CIA had
him on a watch list, he appears to have been able to work on
line to learn how to build a powerful homemade bomb, to obtain
the materials, including a substantial quantity of black powder,
to build a number of them, and, allegedly with the help of his
younger brother Dzhokhar, to place them near the finish line and
detonate two of them, killing three people and injuring as many
as 200. That’s a huge intelligence fail.
It would be an even bigger fail if it turns out that some
agency had awareness of a credible threat and that it hired
Craft International personnel to prevent it. We clearly need to
know, and have a right to demand to know, who hired those men
and why. After all, at a minimum, on the face of things, they
did an abysmal job of preventing a bombing right in front of
their supposedly well-trained noses.
And of course there is also another question, which is really
disturbing: The image of the exploded backpack released by the
FBI and identified as the remains of the pack that was carrying
one of the two pressure-cooker bombs, prominently displays a
white square on a black background. This is not a doctored
photograph; it’s the photograph that was released by the FBI.
There are also at least two photos depicting one of the Craft
International men who is wearing a black backpack identical to
several of the other Craft International personnel. The same
white square is also visible on the top of his pack.
There does not appear to be any such white marking -- square
or otherwise -- on the top of the black backpack worn by
Tarmelan Tsarnaev, as observed in several security photos taken
of him (Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was shown carrying a smaller white or
light-colored pack, slung over one shoulder). Check out the
images below of Tarmelan, the exploded bag and the Craft
International character:
FBI image of exploded pack
with white square, white square on Craft guy's pack, and
Tamerlan Tsarnaev (left.) with pack but clearly no white square
marking.
I am not drawing any conclusions from any of this, but I will
say that when government agencies at all levels and a private
contracting firm are all this obtuse and secretive (and in some
cases even deceptive) about what should be a simple question --
who hired these men? -- my suspicions are aroused.
Somebody’s clearly hiding something.
And by the way, why aren't the mainstream media asking about this? Are corporate
media journalists so intimidated about being labeled “conspiracy nuts” that they
can't do their jobs?
At a minimum, this goes to the question of accountability. It also goes to the
question of inter-agency communication or lack of it. And given
what we know about
how many times the FBI has been an active encourager and enabler of terror plots
which it later thwarts and claims credit for preventing, there’s the question,
too of potential official culpability.
Furthermore, when an horrific incident like this is used to justify such new
threats to our Constitutional freedom as an unprecedented martial law-style
lockdown of an entire 1-million-person metropolitan area and a precedent-setting
deliberately Miranda-free, attorney-free interrogation of a hospitalized,
gravely wounded and sedated suspect, it is critical that the whole story be
told, not just the official one.
Source:
http://thiscantbehappening.net/node/1718
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