EEV: Interesting that this was placed as a News article and not an editorial. Its worth a good read, especially those familiar with history. There are more professional ways of expressing concern over differing views, regardless of how extreme they may be.

• Conspiracy junkies believe double-amputee  veteran pretended to be marathon spectator whose legs were blown off
• Growing movement accuses the U.S. government  and a private security company of staging the April 15 massacre
• Grainy news footage and off-angle photos are  evidence for claiming the Tsarnaev brothers surrendered but were killed by  police
• One theory holds that ‘two men in drag  planted the bombs’

By  David Martosko

PUBLISHED: 23:49 EST, 22  April 2013 |  UPDATED: 00:08 EST, 23 April 2013

They number in the thousands, and they  believe Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who has been charged with bombing the Boston  Marathon, is innocent.

Facebook is the natural place for like-minded  contrarians to gather from all corners of the globe, and Action for Justice, an  organized contingent of tech-savvy suspicion-slingers, is egging on those who  are inclined to doubt the U.S. government’s official account of what happened on  April 15.

The group is open by invitation only, and yet  it’s on pace to collect 25,000 adherents by the end of April.

‘What a bunch of unbelievable idiots,’ a  federal agent in Washington, D.C. told MailOnline late Monday. He spoke on the  condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to talk about the  case.

‘These morons will make it much harder for  the country to recover from this,’ he added. ‘I seriously hope ordinary people  have their BS-detectors on full throttle.’

 

The ‘Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is innocent’ Facebook page has  quickly grown to include 11,250 members who offer a mixture of constructive  support for the accused Boston bomber and conspiracy theories that paint him as  an innocent man

 

 

In a dark corner of Facebook, the younger Tsarnaev  brother is turning into a mixture of pop icon and Internet martyr, spawning  photo campaigns, posters, and a rubber ’cause’ bracelet

‘These lunatics are clearly in the minority,’  Fox News host Andrea Tantaros told MailOnline. ‘There is an obvious body of  evidence against these brothers. It’s disgusting that anyone would  choose to  ignorantly say otherwise to advance a preposterous conspiracy  theory.’

Yet some who have shared their thoughts on  the group’s Facebook wall believe Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Dzhokhar’s elder brother  who died in a shootout with police, believe authorities took him into custody  while he was alive, naked, handcuffed and walking under his own  power.

A leaked autopsy photo showed him with a  gaping wound in his torso, caused, police reported, when Dzhokhar ran him over  with a carjacked Mercedes.

The same skeptics argue that Dzhokhar still  had his backpack slung over his shoulder as he calmly walked away from the bomb  blasts in Copley Square.

Conventional thinking would hold that the  19-year-old terror suspect’s left arm is bent and extended backward, giving the  illusion of a large object on his back. ‘Totally Photoshopped,’ read the  response to that argument from one online believer.

Conspiracy theorists argue on Facebook that the younger  Tsarnaev brother shed his blood only when police shot him – and not inside the  boat where he was found

College kids: Young activists make up much of the  Facebook page’s fans, and many are filing petitions and taking other symbolic  actions to protest what they see as a controlling government railroading an  innocent Muslim man

Others believe the iconic image of Jeff  Bauman in a wheelchair, bloodied with his femur protruding through what was left  of his thigh, actually shows double-amputee soldier Nick Vogt, who survived an  encounter with an IED in Afghanistan a few years after his graduation from the  U.S. military Academy at West Point.

Bauman and Vogt share certain resemblances,  and on that basis the conspiracy theorists conclude they are one and the same,  with Vogt playing the role of volunteer ‘victim,’ complete with a bottle of fake  blood discarded at his feet.

‘Was Nick Vogt acting?’ one asked in a note  attached to a photo too grisly to show.

‘You think that’s enough blood for 2 lost  legs?’ came a reply. ‘When they took another photo he was lying on the ground,  pretending he was badly injured.’

‘I want to believe it’s real,’ chimed in a  third, ‘but damn, that blood just looks like someone spilled a can of red  paint.’

Neither Vogt nor his family has dignified the  accusation with a response, and neither has the U.S. Army, the FBI or the  Department of Homeland Security.

One of the most frequent conspiracy theories accuses the  government of faking the horrific injuries of Jeff Bauman by using  double-amputee veteran Nick Vogt as a stand-in

That’s reason enough to doubt them, the most  ardent believers insist, just as a vocal minority of Americans screamed after  9/11 that a series of controlled explosions, not a pair of jet aircraft, brought  down New York’s twin towers. The government, the theme goes, can’t be  trusted.

Indeed, the most common thread is an  anti-government conspiracy that rivals anything the so-called 9/11 ‘truther’  movement ever dreamed up.

Vocal fans of the ‘Dzhokhar  Tsarnaev is Innocent’ Facebook group have claimed that neither Tsarnaev brother  was responsible for the Boston bombing. Instead, they say, a government-funded  group of mercenaries from a private company staged the event and framed the  Chechen pair.

The company they accuse, Craft International,  trains military and police teams through tactical and combat scenarios. Its  founder, retired Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, wrote the best-selling book American  Sniper and recorded the most career sniper kills in United States military  history.

He was killed in February at a Texas gun  range, by a fellow veteran struggling with post-traumatic stress  disorder.

A man who seemed to be a security guard at the scene of  the Boston bombings wore a hat with an emblem that resembles that of private  security firm Craft International. This, conspiracy theorists claim, shows the  company was present on April 15. hey also claim the man and his companion, not  the Tsarnaevs, planted the bombs

The basis for the accusation, like much of  what’s found on the Facebook group’s page, is the thin gruel of  JFK-assassination grassy-knoll buzz, but still mesmerizes those who are inclined  to believe it. Central is a superficial resemblance between Craft’s distinctive  logo patch and one seen on a hat belonging to a Boston Marathon security officer in online photos.

MailOnline was unable to find mention on the  Facebook group’s page of the online store where visitors to the Craft  International website can buy the hat. Nor did anyone in the forum suggest that  its wearer might have been given the hat as a souvenir after completing the  company’s training course.

Craft chief operating officer Bo French,  reached via email, agreed that the idea of his company’s complicity was lunacy  but had no further comment.

The organization behind the amplified agora  of assorted Boston bombing conspiracy theorists is Action For Justice, which  goes by the initials AXJ. It’s a loosely organized, self-described  ‘international civil and political rights organization’ that organizes  disaffected segments of the political left in 16 countries, according to a map  on its website.

Most of the organization’s activity focuses  on the culture clashes and sometimes violent intersections of Europe and the  Muslim world. The United States is not noted as one of the group’s home  bases.

Grassy knoll: Conspiracy theorists claim a backpack worn  by a mysterious man in black matched the one recovered at the scene, and that  its owner was seen fleeing Copley Square without the bag

But a U.S.-based AXJ website exists, and it’s  registered to an Ed Vallejo in Valley Village, California. The same man, using  the same email address, also registered a web domain for a laundromat in North  Hollywood, using the street address of a drapery store.

Vallejo did not respond to an emailed request  for comment.

AXJ says it exists ‘to  publish the Truth  that Main Stream Media ( MSM ) will not publish.’ That includes the conclusion  that an able-bodied Dzhokhar Tsarnaev  willingly surrendered from his hiding place in a backyard boat, shedding his  blood only after police fired on him.

They base this on photographs that show blood  on the outside of the boat, but none on the inside. The photos, however, were  shot from an angle that may not show where Tsarnaev was lying during the manhunt  that consumed Watertown, Massachusetts.

And, they say, the audio from a YouTube video  shot during Dhokhar’s final firefight features his voice crying, ‘We didn’t do  it!’

Or, as a commenter conceded, ‘it could be  something the police are yelling. There’s too much noise.’

Does this news footage show the late Tamerlan Tsarnaev?  Believers in a government frame-up job say so, claiming that the elder brother  was taken into custody alive, naked and walking under his own power – not  bloodied, lacerated, and run over by his fleeing younger brother, as official  reports show

True believer: The Facebook page is full of comments  like this one, from someone inclined to distrust official accounts offered by  police and reporters

Other theories are as numerous as the people  offering them, many of them university-age students. One suggested that another  backpack, not Dzhokhar’s, exploded near  the marathon’s finish line. Her rationale was that a backpack seen on a security  guard – the same man accused of being on Craft International’s payroll –  resembled the shredded remains of the one at the bombing scene.

‘How convenient,’ one commented offered, with  another pointing out in pictures the similarity between the man who carried that  backpack and a Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal.

Others lean on conservative Internet  broadcast host Glenn Beck and radio conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, reinforcing  their diagnoses of government cover-ups and ‘false flag’ operations.

But most of them, the House of Saud aside,  believe that the Tsarnaevs drew the short  end of the criminal-justice straw because of their Islamic faith – a dramatic  departure from the more mainstream view that it was that believe in Islam that  drove them to kill.

‘Loads of children killed in Gaza,’ one  believer wrote, ‘and no one cares. One kid dies in Boston, and it’s OHMIGOD. Can  you say “Islamophobia”?’

 

‘Two men in drag planted the bombs … look closely!’ To  the untrained eye, even a purse in a crowd can look like a bomber’s  backpack

Many of the macabre photographic tributes to  Dhokhar feature Arabic writing or Quran verses. Visitors from Gaza, Egypt,  Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates left well-wishes, all invoking the Muslim  god Allah.

This may leave some readers of the group’s  Facebook wall – those who can see it – with the impression that defending the  Muslim faith requires defending Dzhokhar.

Or vice-versa.

Tantaros, who hosts a popular conservative  radio show in addition to co-hosting Fox News’s The Five, insisted that the  search for clues to the bombings begins and ends with the Tsarnaevs’  religion.

‘The more people choose to defend [him] and  distract attention from  radical Islam – the clear root of this attack – the  more in danger we  are as a nation,’ she said.

A Facebook spokesman did not immediately  respond to a request for comment about whether the company will allow the  ‘Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is innocent’ to remain.

A pro-Muslim, anti-Israel posture is seen in many of the  posts, fueling a narrative that Islam was the cause of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s  arrest, not the cause of his alleged crime

 

 

 

Political commentator Glenn Beck (L) said Monday that  the federal government quickly moved to deport a third conspirator, a Saudi man.  Radio conspiracy theorist Alex Jones (R) tweeted that official explanation of  the Boston bombings ‘stinks to high heaven,’ and suggested it was a ‘false flag’  attack

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Categories: Magnitsky Act Retaliation Hypothesis

Tags: Andrea Tantaros, Boston, Boston Marathon, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Facebook, Federal government of the United States, Fox News Channel, MailOnline