Is Dzokhar Tsarnaev Still Alive? And Should We Rehash 9-11 and Resurrect Iran-Contra?

by Mary W Maxwell, LLB

On December 12, 2020 I attended the oral argument in Tsarnaev’s appeal, as reported here in GumshoeNews.com.

Nothing was said by the defense lawyer, or for that mater by the “government’s” lawyer, about the two amicus curiae briefs on file. The one to which I am a signatory was accepted by the court in November 2017 and the other one, tendered by seven lawyers and a retired Massachusetts judge, was accepted by the court in 2019.

Some people think Dzhokhar (Jahar) may be deader than a doornail in federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. I decided to test this out by sending him some Ghirardelli chocolates.  Of course I did not enclose a letter, or even a gift card, as he is under Special Administrative Measures, known as SAMs.

The purpose of SAMs is to prevent those fearsome little jihadists from communicating their hard-won knowlegde of explosives. That is, stuff they learned from the “Inspire” magazine’s online article “How To Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.”

Alternatively, the purpose of SAMs may be to prevent any leaks coming from behind bars as to what really went on, at the Boston Marathon in 2013, the towers on 9-11, the OKC Murrah Bldg (I’m not sure if Terry Nichols is under SAMs), etc.

The Candy Test

So, to find out if the convicted Chechen is still alive, I thought I’d try the candy test. I bought a pound of Ghirardelli caramel-filled chocolates, as shown in the photo, and shipped it to Jahar at Supermax.

This morning, March 6, 2020,  it came back to me, in New Hampshire, marked “Refused, return to sender.”  Oh, come on, who refuses caramel-filled chocolates?

Granted, the returned box did not say “gone to Allen St.”  That’s a codeword for death, used at Massachusetts General Hospital.  If you’ve sent a card to a patient who has died, you get it back with the message “Gone to Allen St,” that being the street where the MGH’s morgue is located.

So we still don’t know if Jahar is “there” there, in Colorado. Also, the “Refused” sticker does not enlighten us as to whether the recipient refused it, or was forbidden to take it under SAMs.  Note: in 2018 at Christmastime, I sent a Postal pack full of bars of Lindt chocolate to Supermax, “for Tsarnaev and the staff” and nothing came back to me.  I deduce the staff members are not a bunch of refuseniks.

Anyway, if Jahar is still in Colorado, his public defender has surely not shown him my amicus brief which would make his hair stand on end. Oh, I mean it would make the public defender’s hair stand on end — or bloody well ought to.

The 9-11 Connection

As suggested above, the purpose of SAMs may be to prevent prisoners from telling us what we need to know. For example, Jahar could recount how he got into that dry-docked boat. Let us not rule out that he rappelled down from an SOG helicopter.

The idea of “terrorists” in prison being able to enlighten us about 9-11 struck me when I was re-reading the book Another Nineteen by Kevin Robert Ryan (2013). Its subtitle is: Investigating Legitimate 9-11 Suspects. I reviewed it lightly at GumshoeNews more than five years ago. (God help us, we are making such slow progress.) 

I  wrote: “I will omit Ryan’s coverage of familiar figures, even though he does bring new information about them: Armitage, Bremer, Bush, Carlucci, Clarke, Eberhart, Giuliani, Goss, Perle, Rumsfeld, and, of course, Biggus Dickus  [and I will instead concentrate on] Duane Andrews of SAIC, Peter Janson of AMEC, Brian Jenkins of RAND, Barry McDaniel of Stratesec, and Wirt Walker of KuwAm.”

Nowhere does Ryan present an exact list of his 19 faves, but the Table of Contents guides us to these 19, which I print alphabetically:

Andrews, Duane

Armitage, Richard

Bremer, Paul

Canavan, Michael

Carlucci, Frank

Cheney, Dick

Clarke, Richard

Deutsche, John

Eberhardt, Ralph

Freeh, Louis

Giuliani, Rudi

Goss, Porter

Janson, Peter

Jenkins, Brian

McDaniel, Barry

Rumsfeld, Don

Sliney, Benedict

Tenet, George

Truscott, Carl

Walker, Wirt

Wolfowitz, Paul

Ah, but that’s 21, I hear you count.  Yes, because inside the book we discover that the author wants to tell us about Cheney, Rumsfeld, “and another 19.” Dick and Don were so major in the day’s activities of September 11, 2001, that their role is beyond dispute, says the author Kevin Ryan.

Charge Them Today, re 9-11

I note that Ryan points to only a few of the 21 suspects as being suitable for immediate charging with a crime (not the big crime of “doing” 9-11). For example, on page 141 he points to Gen Ralph Eberhardt of NORAD lying to Congress about the lack of air defense, an says the matter should be dealt with by subpoenas and formal charges.

Another person who is caught in this book’s vice grip is Rudi Giuliani. Ryan believes it would take little effort to charge Rudi with misleading the Manhattan population by his assurances that the air quality after 9-11 was not hazardous.

On page 118, Ryan notes that many of the important men on duty on 9-11 had past experience in special operations. “Investigators might consider that a number of special operations specialists were in place to ensure that the operation went off without a hitch and was not discovered.”  He refers to “longtime special operations leaders like Michael Caravan, Brian Jenkins, and Richard Armitage.”  Ryan says “These are worthy of further scrutiny.”

Too right. Consider the incredible congregating of some top stars. As stated on page 116, Brian Jenkins was deputy chairman of Kroll Associates, designer of security systems for WTC. (Just cogitate on that phrase — “security systems.”)

President Clinton had appointed Jenkins to a Commission on Aviation Safety where he collaborated with the head of Stratesec (James Abrahamson) and FBI Director Louis Freeh. Jenkins had also been a terrorism advisor (cogitate!) to Paul Bremer, who went on to be head of Marsh McLennan Insurance whose office was precisely the impact zone of the tower. Bremer then became governor of Iraq. Is this a club or what? Later, Jenkins returned to RAND where he had worked with Rumsfeld, Carlucci, and Condoleezza Rice.

Rice is not, at the moment, a listed suspect.  There are no females among the 19, or if you count Dick and Don, the 21.  Or if you count both presidents Bush, the 23. (Ryan does not say that Poppy is a suspect, as probably there’s no one on  Planet Earth who does not already think that.)

Please note that to get ahold of these 19 guys — and another 30 at least whom Ryan discusses peripherally, such as Richard Perle, former CIA Director George Tenet, and former Secretary of State George Shultz, who is now age 99 — all that is needed is that they be material witnesses.

You don’t have to bring any charges against them. Ever since 1793, and that wasn’t yesterday, the United States has had a Material Witness Law that allows the government to capture and keep, at its discretion, any person whose testimony may be needed.  Invest a bit of serious interrogating, and the mysteries of 9-11 could be solved in a jiff, I ween.

Iran-Contra

Kevin Ryan is the only research scholar I am aware of who underscores the connections between the attacks of 2001 and the IranContra fandangle — the way Mae Brussell used to show the amazing personnel overlap between Watergate and the JFK assassination. I now offer a breezy recap of IranContra before we get to its relevance for understanding  9-11.

If you are old enough to have been sentient in 1985, names of the following persons and entities may ring a bell: Oliver North, the Boland Amendment, arms for hostages, Ed Hasenfus (extra points if you twig on that one), Robert McFarlane, the Tower Commission, crack cocaine, and the Christmas Eve pardon parade of 1992.

The IranContra affair happened in the days when Congress jealously guarded its terrain. The announced policy of the Executive branch was that we do not negotiate with hostages. Lebanon’s Hezbollah was holding some hostages (not to be confused with the batch of hostages taken by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard in 1979 that ended Carter’s time in the White House).

But Iran, a supporter of Hezbollah, needed military supplies. Members of the US government secretly supplied Iran with weapons. This brought money.  The same secretive Americans fed some of that money to a right-wing group in Nicaragua — The Contra’s. Congress threw a fit and passed a bill known as the Boland Amendment, forbidding any continuation of the deals involving Iran and the Contra’s.

There must have been a lot more going on, as Poppy Bush mentioned that he’d be hung from a lamp post, or something like that, if people found out. Recall that Poppy was Reagan’s vice president.  Ronald Reagan denied, until 1987, that he was in on the deal. He then said: “What began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages”.

The Two Branches Face Off

Congressional committees, such as Foreign Affairs and Intelligence, got down to it and demanded information from the White House, the Pentagon, and so forth. They recommended people for prosecution and don’t ask me how but the DoJ cooperated. (I mean Huh?). Actually there was a Special Prosecutor, Lawrence Walsh.

Before you know it, real, live officials were on trial. Everybody remembers in particular Col Oliver North, in best khaki uniform, taking the oath and basically acting like God’s most beloved ally.

I’ll skip over the trials and convictions and move quickly to the pardon list. Other than Hakim having to fork out five grand as a fine, everybody walked. Here’s how they had been wondrously nabbed:

Elliott Abrams, for withholding evidence, got probation.

Duane Clarridge of the CIA, 7 counts of perjury, no conviction because he was pardoned before trial.

Alan Fiers of the CIA, for withholding evidence –got one year probation.

Albert Hakim, for making false front companies, fined $5k.

Robert McFarlane, for obstruction –two years probation.

Oliver North, for destruction of documents — but a technicality saved him: he had immunity for having testified to Congress.

John Poindexter, for perjury and conspiracy — acquitted at appeal

Gen Richard Secord, for false statements to Congress – yes, that’s a crime — got 2 years probation

Cap Weinberger, for obstruction of justice and perjury — but what’s a little perjury from a Secy of Defense? — got pardoned before trial (his trial would have yielded info on Poppy).

As I said, even the ones who got probation were pardoned. And since it was Christmas Eve, no one dared make a fuss.

For now I won’t go into the side issue of IranContra which was the importation of drugs by the CIA. That story was told by Gary Webb in his Dark Alliance series of articles in the Mercury News. Eugene Hasenfus’s plane was shot down in Nicaragua revealing tons of cocaine.

Ryan Connects 9-11 to IranContra

Kevin Ryan discusses the failed Pakistani bank, the BCCI, which I won’t go into here. It is connected to IranContra and other secret deals involving under-the-table trading of American weapons.  He writes:

“Ultimately, the lack of thorough investigation and prosecution of those responsible for IranContra led to a strengthening of the very institutions that made their abuses possible.”  Long term covert operators like Richard Armitage and Frank Carlucci, along with Cheney… and Rumsfeld, were in positions to make the events of 9-11 an extraordinary sequel to the IranContra crimes.

“…Carlucci and Armitage both worked with al Qaeda’s predecessor, the Mujahideen, when that alliance was being trained and funded by the CIA and [Pakistan’s] ISI.  Armitage later [oversaw] the provision of visas to the alleged hijackers.”

I have not begun to do justice to the amount of material Ryan provides to show who was where at the two big scenes on 9-11 — New York’s WTC and the Pentagon. I recommend his book as being on a par with David Ray Griffin’s The 9-11 Commission Report — Distortions and Omissions, and Elias Davidsson’s Hijacking America’s Mind on 9-11.  These are life-changing.

Bulletin:  Today, Federal Judge Walton of the DC District Court, yelled about the misbehavior of the DoJ.  We should be very pleased that he said he will not put up with “lie after lie” coming from Main Justice. Wow.

I shall send him my book The Soul of Boston and the Marathon Bombing, accompanied by my civil RICO suit which names at least one DoJ prosecutor from the Tsarnaev trial.  That trial began 5 years ago yesterday.

I believe, and hope, that it’s only a matter of time until Tsarnaev will have his hugely unconstitutional SAMs lifted. Then we can try the candy test again.

Things are looking up!   Didn’t I tell you?