Boston Marathon Wrap-up, Part Two:  Ten Challenges to the Official Story

by Mary W Maxwell, PhD, LLB

I have prepared fifteen challenges to the official story of the Marathon bombing of 2013, ten of which will appear below. These have to do with: Dun Meng, the Saugus Mall, Judy Clarke, MIT, Richard Serino, Tamerlan’s beard, the FBI’s Don’t-look policy, the Left-handed Dorito Boy, the boatwall confession, and the cropped photo. My principal tutor in matters of the court testimony was Josée Lépine who spent her life savings, at PACER.com, to purchase the transcripts of Jahar Tsarnaev’s 2015 trial.

Dun Meng

There would be no case against the Tsarnaev brothers, on the charge of having murdered Sean Collier at MIT, except that Dun Meng said that Tamerlan confessed it to him. There are reasons to think no such confession was made, for example:

1. Men who are fleeing from police do not confess a crime to a stranger.
2. If Tamerlan needed to impress his carjackee into submission it was enough that he had already said “I did the marathon bombing.”
3. The entire carjack story is implausible. Meng says he had parked, to read a text message. A car (Tamerlan’s) came along fast and parked behind him. How would Tamerlan know that the driver would be amenable to a carjacking, as he had no time to study the situation?
4. As journalist Russ Baker points out, Meng changed his story a few times, and in his early report to police did not mention the cop-killing. But the police said it on radio!
5. In the video where Meng is asking the Mobil Station man to help him, Meng’s car keys are visible near his back pocket. In a remake of the video, the keys are no longer visible. (Per the story, Tamerlan drove off, hence the keys should be in the ignition.)
6. At the point of being saved at the Mobile station, Meng phoned his Northeastern University professor, James Fox, who came and helped him. Fox also sat by Meng when he testified in court, and Meng looked at him the whole time.
7. Why do a carjacking at all? The boys had their own car that night, a Honda. By the way, on the back seat was an item that identified Tamerlan, namely his high school diploma!!!

Saugus Mall — Pressure Cookers and the GPS

The public will believe anything, and apparently jurors will, too. The Oklahoma City bombing of a federal building in 1995 was said to have been done by a truck bomb, but that was not physically possible, and explosives were found inside the building. In the 2002 Bali bombings, again the media showed us home-grown bombs that weren’t capable of doing the damage.

In the Marathon case, to know what was in the bombs, we had to depend on the FBI – whose history of evidence-planting is legion. They said it was “pressure cookers” with shrapnel, ball bearings, etc. How to find evidence of Tamerlan’s having bought pressure cookers?  The receipts were in his wallet, when he was captured.  Not something most people would keep, after buying naughty merchandise! And since it was a cash purchase, who could say that it was he who bought them, from the Saugus Mall? The prosecution worked out from a GPS gadget that a trip had been taken from Cambridge to Saugus on the right day. Whose GPS gadget was it? No evidence of that was submitted. It could have been anybody’s (such as the FBI’s).

Judy Clarke

This particular attorney was chosen to be Jahar’s defender allegedly because she is experienced in getting a person a life sentence in preference to the Death penalty. Her clients include the Unabomber (who was MK-Ultra’d while a student at Harvard); Eric Rudolph, convicted of the astonishing feat of bombing an abortion clinic, a lesbian bar, and the Atlanta Olympics, and Susan Smith who drowned her children.

The theory is that a lawyer can strategize by announcing that her client is indeed guilty but circumstances should allow leniency in sentencing.

Judy Clarke did announce her client’s guilt. The first words of her opening statement were “it was him.”

No doubt one can do this if the client allows it but there is no indication that Jahar allowed it. He pleaded not guilty at his first hearing in July 2013. Thus he had no defender.  A defender should have claimed he did not do it, and then knocked all the testimony by way of cross-examination — such as Dun Meng’s story and the Pressure cooker purchase.

MIT

1. Now look at how paltry is the evidence shown to the court as “proof” that the brothers were at MIT that night. It is a surveillance camera video, but from a great distance. We know a high tech outfit like MIT must have excellent security cameras. Now watch the “two ants” walking to the cruise car on left. You can’t possibly identify them.
2. Nathan Harman’s testimony must be false. He says he rode by the car at that exact moment and saw that Jahar wore a jersey with writing in it. Investigator Heather Frizzell did a test run on her bike and said she did not have time to turn towards the cruiser and see the man’s face, much less see writing on a jersey.
3. MIT compiled the video. They omitted from it the crucial five minutes around 10.20 when Collier died. Why? And why did the defense team put up with this (and other) compilations?
4. Remember, the only info came from Dun Meng. Allegedly the boys “needed a gun for their further exploits.” But surely no Cantabridgian would pop over to the MIT campus of all places. And who would try to take a gun from a cop of all people? It is absurd.
5. The boys are said to have had another gun, but that is not true either. Stephen Silva’s testimony for the prosecution was aimed at getting himself released from jail for drug-selling. The drug charge itself was arranged by the FBI.
6. Sgt Clarence Henniger who had worked 40 years at MIT was on duty that night. He says he drive by the cruiser at the key moment and did not hear any gunshot or see any visitors. Nathan Harman also did not report noise. Again, why didn’t the defenders make hay with this?

Richard Serino

This list of 15 challenges Is supposed to name the lowest-important ones first. Having a defender like Judy Clarke who won’t defend you should maybe be higher up than 13^th out of 15. This one, about Richard Serino, may seem of low importance. But it is the main one to indicate how early the Marathon bombing was planned.

In 2008, a meeting was held to discuss such ventures. Serino was head of Boston’s Emergency Management Committee. He gave a power point presentation, which is still available on the Internet. It treated the coming event as one in which the city would learn how to deal with medical issues, traffic jams, etc. Such “drills” occur frequently. There was one in Sydney in which a simulated plane crash left many dead.  The relevant employees of the city and state practiced “grief management.”

No one got hurt in that drill but some drills are exactly coincident with the real thing. It would take a disciplined mind not to see a pattern. During the London tube bombings of 2005, Peter Powers said his security firm was doing a drill at the very stations (out of dozens) that got hit. Everyone knows the US government ran a drill on 9-11 that involved planes hitting buildings. The US military was in Haiti doing a drill for an “earthquake scenario” when the 2010 earthquake occurred there. (220,000 died.)

Members of the Emergency Services must read the Internet now and again. It is surprising that they do not rise up in anger when something like this takes place. After all, they were in harm’s way.

Tamerlan’s Beard

As soon as Jahar was arrested, his pals were harassed, intimidated, and then arrested for “obstruction of justice.” One, named Khairullozhon Matanov, had gone to dinner with both Tsarnaev boys on the night of the Marathon. When he saw on TV that a clean-shaven suspect was being identified as Tamerlan, he thought, “I know that’s impossible. The Tamerlan I spent Monday night with had a beard. The man shown in the photo as Tamerlan, walking down Boylston St, is clean shaven. You can’t grow a decent beard in five hours.”

Matanov therefore walked into the Braintree Police Station and reported that observation. He did not win the Nobel Peace Prize for it. He was trailed for a few months and then arrested for interference in the investigation. He accepted a plea bargaining and spent 3 years in jail. Then he was deported to Uzbekistan.

The significance of the beard story, assuming Matanov is truthful, is that the man in the famous photo is an actor, a ring-in; it’s not Tamerlan. We see other pictures, too, where the person broadcast as Tamerlan may be a ring-in. Here are two slides where his body shape is “off.”

The FBI’s “Don’t Look” Policy

Does anyone know of any previous instance in which the government told people not to look at photos they themselves had taken? At a press conference on April 18, 2013, when announcing that Bomber 1 and 2 had been found in videos, the FBI said: “For clarity these images should be the only ones, I emphasize, the only ones that the public should view to assist us.”

The Left-Handed Dorito Boy

Think back to the testimony in court that supported the claim that the Tsarnaevs, as part of the carjack scenario, went into a convenience store to buy snacks. Dun Meng had just escaped and that could cause trouble — nevertheless, when you need Doritos you need Doritos. In this video we see a purported Jahar shopping. He reaches for each item with his left hand. Now see the Whole Foods video where the real Jahar uses his right hand. Also, the “Dorito boy” in the convenience store frequently puts his hand over his face. Does this mean he has been told to cover his less-than-perfect resemblance to Jahar? After all, if there was never a carjacking, there was never this trip to the shop for Jahar.

As for Tamerlan, he is seen in the window. This could be a photo-shopped insert. Note again that this is a moment that should have both boys in a panic, as the escaped Dun Meng could run for police. Would Tamerlan take the time to go into the store?

The Boatwall Confession

Recall that the entire story of the Tsarnaevs killing a cop at MIT came from the one allegation by Dun Meng that Tamerlan had boasted of being the killer. Another way in which Jahar got blamed was the confession written on the wall of David Henneberry’s boat. These words allowed the prosecution to pin Jahar as a religious Muslim, and to attribute to him some anger about the mistreatment of Muslims.

Aspects of the boat wall confession that invite scepticism, even from people who accept the official story of the Marathon, include the following. 1. If Jahar is a fugitive why is he making a confession? (Conversely, if he’s in the confessing mood, why doesn’t he just turn himself in?) 2. The wall of the boat is shiny and would be hard to write on. 3. The pencil found in the boat and displayed in court looks unused, pristine. 4. The discovery of the confession was not announced for months after the Marathon. 5. In the message, Jahar says that his brother died well, but how could he know that Tamerlan had died? 6. David Henneberry saw blood in the boat. If the boy were wounded he would not be well enough to compose a flowery speech, or crawl into an awkward position to pen it.

On top of this, Jahar made a confession in court, after being sentenced to death, and apologized to all his “victims.”  This sort of false confession is well known in law.  The proper way to handle it is to make the person describe every bit of his exploits. E.g., “How did you get from the finish line to Whole Foods in 23 minutes?”

Note: If Jahar was on Boylston St at 2.49pm when the bombs went off, how could he get to Whole Foods so fast? According to the store’s date stamp, he was shopping for milk at 3.12pm.  And looking mighty relaxed for someone who had just committed his first violent crime! The milk video may be exculpatory evidence that Jahar was not at the Marathon.

The Cropped Photo

Tampering with evidence is a felony. During Jahar’s trial, the prosecution showed this photo to the jury. It was not shown as a still, but appeared as a frame in a video. A cinematographer named Dee McLachlan happened to spot the fact that it was not the usual size of a portrait or a landscape photo. Rather, it was square.

On further inspection she noted a white circle drawn around Jahar. The lower part of the circle is missing. In other words, someone cropped out the lower part. A possible reason is that the person wanted to hide the backpack that would otherwise have been visible. McLachlan also notes that Jahar’s face is well defined but the other people are softened out. Thus the defense should ask: Who took this picture on the day of the Marathon? Why single out Jahar in this way? Also note that the lad is covering his chin with his hand in Dorito Boy fashion.

The cropped photo is exculpatory, in that it shows someone was trying to frame him.

Note: In March 2016, I sent the court a petition for a Writ of Error corm nobis, pointing to the cropped photo as a fraud-upon-the-court. Such a petition, sent to the original court, in this case the federal district court in Boston, can result in an overturning of the ruling. (I got a signature form the court saying that my document arrived, but no reply. A year later I sent the same to the Massachusetts legislature.)

Thus far, Part One presented the official story of the Boston Marathon bombing, and Part Two, above, listed ten challenges thereto. Stay tuned for Part Three’s continuation of those challenges – five more that should result in the prisoner Jahar being set free forthwith.

–Mary W Maxwell and other researchers would like Jahar to be acquitted a.s.a.p. so they can “have a life.”