Rumors Abound

There is an old joke bumper sticker that goes something like this:

Paranoia? Or heightened awareness?

I am reminded of that every time I hear a conspiracy theory or see one start up. I wrote, early on in this blog, a piece called "Where's my tinfoil?" in which I pontificated on those all too willing to see conspiracies. I wrote a second post that apologized for making fun of those people. It's a fine line between paranoia and heightened awareness.

In the not too distant past, May 22nd of this year, a man (Ibragim Todashev) was shot and killed by an FBI agent in his condo in Orlando, Florida. The shooting occurred at the end of a lengthy interview of the man by the FBI agent. There were two Massachusetts State Troopers and possibly other unidentified police personnel there when it happened. It is not clear, however, who was in the room when the shooting occurred. In fact, many details about the shooting are not clear.

I engaged in a discussion about the event after reading an article in the Atlantic with the title "Why Did the FBI Kill an Unarmed Man and Clam Up?"

The story details the media reports after the incident and the contradictions in them. The suspect was armed with a knife, the suspect had a sword, the suspect was unarmed but lunged at the agent, the suspect may have pushed table and/or thrown a chair...

All of the reports related "facts" which were attributed to "officials" in either Massachusetts or the FBI, unamed officials. There are conflicting reportes of whether the agent sustained injuries and whether said injuries were "life threatening."

I have learned, over the years, to ignore all initial reports of any incident and assume there will be few actual facts in them. It will be days, even weeks, before the actual facts become known.

The man was Muslim and he was being interviewed because he had a (somewhat tenuous) connection to one of the Boston Marathon bombers; the older brother, Tamarlen Tsarnaev. There was also a triple homicide in Massachusetts in 2011 that he may have had some information about or was a "person of interest" in.

The father of the young man made this statement from Russia:

My son was in full cooperation with the F.B.I. but they just murdered him after an almost 8-hour-long questioning. Before this trouble I thought America was a free democratic country, where unlike in Russia, laws worked. I was deeply mistaken--now I think Russia is a golden place compared to the United States. My attitude for America flipped 180 degrees in one minute.

The head of the Tampa office of CAIR apparently made the claim that the young man was shot 7 times; 6 to the body and 1 to the head. This morphed into the "head shot" being a "kill shot" because the father of the young man thinks it is.

I do not. I do not think the young man was murdered nor do I accept the claims of the father. He is obviously distraught and he is far away in Russia. He claims he has 16 photos of his son's body that were taken "at a Florida morgue" by friends of his son who, he says, were given custody of the body. The father said he had 16 photos of the body.
I suspect the authorities would never turn over a body of a victim of a shooting to anyone other than a family member. They would make arrangements to have the body sent to the family, wherever that family might be. I especially question the idea that a body would be released if there was a cover-up involved.

I have seen only two of the photos (see them here) but the head shot appears to me not to be a "kill shot" (which would be a fairly clean bullet hole) but either an injury by some other object or a the results of a bullet grazing the top of the man's head. It is not in the back of his head, that much is very clear. I could not see the other wounds on the torso either.

Add to this, the "mysterious" death of two FBI agents in a training accident involving falling from a helicopter while attempting to rappel and rumors that these two men were at the scene of the capture of the younger of the Boston Marathon bombing brothers and you have the conspiracy in full bloom. The FBI says the two agents killed in the training accident were not involved in the Boston situation and were not even in Massachusetts at the time.

But that will not stop the conspiracy theorists.