MAYHEM
Unanswered Questions about the Tsarnaev Brothers, the US Government and the Boston Marathon Bombing
by Michele McPhee
Boston-based journalist McPhee spins a convincing conspiracy theory out of the knowns and unknowns of the Boston Marathon bombing of 2013. Tamerlan Tsarnaev died in a hail of bullets four days after the bombing, and his younger brother, Dzhokhar, awaits execution in a Supermax prison. The Chechen brothers had come with their parents from Russia and received all the benefits of refugees, including citizenship. Yet Tamerlan went back to Russia, becoming radicalized; when he returned to the U.S., he swayed his brother to become an Islamist terrorist. By McPhee’s account, numerous parts of the official story don’t quite add up: “I…believe,” she writes, “the federal government actively impeded a full investigation of the marathon bombings, as well as other crimes potentially involving Tamerlan and associates of his.” Among these crimes was triple murder two years before the bombing. As it had done with the notorious Mafia hit man Whitey Bulger, the FBI’s Boston office, writes the author, made efforts to recruit Tamerlan as an informant—which, she continues, explains why he was allowed to travel back and forth between Russia and the U.S. without a passport and without going through customs “even though he was on two terror watch lists.” In exchange for such privileges and a flow of cash, Tamerlan informed on Chechen rebels, some of whom disappeared or were killed soon after. McPhee holds that the Tsarnaevs did not act alone but instead worked with several associates, all of whom are free. Some of her evidence is circumstantial—she suggests, without hard proof, that the brothers were incapable of building the bombs they detonated by themselves—but the irregularities she notes should prompt a reopened investigation, such as the fact that Tamerlan’s wife was never called to testify: “To this day no one in the US Attorney’s Office will say why.” A readable and fascinating, if speculative, work of true crime.