What If Putin Asks Russia’s Ambassador to US To Help Jahar Tsarnaev?

(L) President Putin, Photo: Sergei Karpukhin/Tass (C) Jahar Tsarnaev with older brother Tamerlan (R) Ambassador Anatoly Antonov, photo Washington.mid.ru

by Mary W Maxwell, LLB

When a person is wrongly jailed, we sometimes hear of an ambassador speaking up for the person, if the prisoner was born in that other country.

Julian, Ghislaine, and Jahar

To date, we haven’t seen any Australian official intervening for Julian Assange despite his apparently wrongful prosecution by the US, his threatened prosecution by Sweden (now dismissed), and his being held “temporarily” in Belmarsh Prison, UK to await extradition.

Julian was born and raised Aussie; there is no excuse for the Australian ambassador to be other than helpful.

(I wonder how the Ecuadoreans came to be so helpful to Julian all those years.  Maybe acting as a discreet proxy for Australia?  Or just to keep the prosecuction effort percolating? Of course, I don’t rule out genuine human decency.)

Another example is that of Ghislaine Maxwell. She was arrested in New Hampshire in July 2020, was brought to trial in US federal court in December 2021, and was convicted last week in 2021. I suppose there was never any consideration of a British ambassador intervening on her behalf, as the matter was complicated by Prince Andrew’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein.

Not to mention the fact that two US presidents, Trump and Clinton are potential Lolita-island indictees.

What about Jahar Tsarnaev, born Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in Kyrgyzstan? He entered the United States in 2008 and became a US citizen on September 11, 2012.  He graduated from Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School and was a student at UMass when arrested.

I am unaware of any action taken by the government of Russia, or by Kyrgygz’s, during the time detainee Jahar was awaiting trial, nor any intervention on his behalf in the lead-up to the present appeal of his death sentence, currently before the US Supreme Court. (SCOTUS’s decision could be announced any day in 2022.)

Granted, Jahar is not an obvious “Russian” needing help. His father was born in Chechnya and mother was born in Dagestan. Those two republics are part of today’s Russian Federation. But ethnically, the Tsarnaev family does not consider themselves Russian. Moreover, the entry of Jahar’s parents to US was accomplished, I believe, on the basis of asylum as Chechen refugees.

Is Jahar Russian Enough To Qualify for a Diplomatic Nudge?

Russia became a communist state in 1917, owing to the Bolshevik Revolution, changing its name in 1922 to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR. Mikhail Gorbachev, who is now 90, was Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, from 1985, and president of the USSR from March 15, 1990 to December 25, 1991. He survived a putsch by traditionalists in August 1991 but did not have enough support to keep the Soviet Union intact.

On December 21, 1991, the Alma-Ata Protocol, apparently organized by Russian president Boris Yeltsin, declared a new entity The Commonwealth of Independent States, the CIS, of which Russia was one and Kyrgyzstan — now called the Kyrgyz Republic — was another.  (The other 9 were Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.)

Since 1993, the “Russia” part of the CIS has been governed as a federal republic called The Russian Federation.  Chechnya is one of its republics. Chechens are predominantly Muslim. They were in rebellion against Russian control until 2000. Jahar was born on July 22, 1993. As the son of a Chechen father, he could be considered to be ethnically Chechen.

Strictly speaking, though, Jahar was born in Kyrgyz Republic which had attained sovereignty on August 31, 1991. His parents were in Kyrgyz as refugees from their abode in Chechnya. (They went to live in Cambridge, MA and became US citizens, but returned to live in Dagestan, which is also in the Russian Federation.)

Note: the bombing of the Boston Marathon, for which Jahar Tsarnaev stands convicted, occurred in 2013; his trial was in 2015, his Boston-based federal appeal ended in 2020, and his case has been at the US Supreme Court in 2021.

Currently, Mr Anatoly Antonov, b 1955, is the Russian Federation’s ambassador to the United States. He was appointed by President Putin in August 2017. Let’s toy with what would happen if Russia felt that it had an interest in the matter based on Jahar’s “Chechen blood” and Russia’s parental relationship with Chechnya.

The Vienna Convention on Consular Relations states that a nation which arrests a “foreign national” must afford the prisoner access to his or her consulate. I am a dual citizen of US and Australia.  If arrested in Spain, I might expect either the American or Australian ambassador to Spain to assist me.

The two countries in which Jahar has citizenship are Kyrgyz, by birth, and US by naturalization. The cold hard fact is that the US won’t help him. So I am fishing around for outside assistance; after all Jahar’s life is at stake. One possibility is that Kyrgyz will help him.  Another possibility is that Russia will help him.

Sure it’s a stretch — some say Russia was the party that got the US to give the brothers a role in the Marathon affair….

Here is an imaginary cable (or email as the case may be) from President Putin to His Excellency Anatoly Antonov, Russia’s Ambassador to US, in Washington DC

Dear Anatoly,

How’s everything?

I hereby instruct you to seek assistance for a young man incarcerated in a US prison, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The Americans call him “Jahar” as They cannot get their tongue around the name Dzhokhar — too complicated.

Jahar was born to a Chechen father, Anzor Tsarnaev, who was living in Kyrgyz in 1993 when this son was born. The whole family fled to America (isn’t that ridiculous). Jahar got US citizenship in 2012 — to be exact, on September 11, 2012.

Under the Vienna convention, Jahar has the right to consular assistance from any country of which he is a national. As you know, he’s a national of Kyryg, not of The Russian Federation, but ethnically he is Chechen. We could maybe do some fancy footwork here.

In 2013, when Jahar was a boy of 19 years, he was accused of doing a bombing. He was a typical American college student, obviously not a “jihadist” as portrayed. There is a conspiracy book about it by Mary W Maxwell, an old lady in Australia, entitled “Boston’s Marathon Bombing: What Can Law Do?”  It purports to have proven the following:

Jahar’s older brother Tamerlan, age 26, was arrested by the FBI in the wee hours of Friday April 19, 2013 (Yes, April 19th.  You wonder how they coordinate all these things…)

CNN caught the arrest on camera; the arrestee looked to be in fine health.  CNN later removed the video of that arrest, but Maxwell found the relevant CNN transcript. It is definitive, and Tamerlan’s family is sure that the physique of the arrestee is Tamerlan’s.

That being so, the story that Tamerlan, about 30 minutes earlier, had engaged in shooting police on Laurel St Watertown, and got lethally run over by his brother in a carjacked SUV, can’t be sustained. I mean, you know, the MSM does sustain it but theoretically it’s unsustainable.

The arrestee on the CNN video is stark naked and has no apparent wounds.  No doubt the “shootout on Laurel Street” must have been manufactured as part of the setting up of both brothers as patsies.

The FSB tells me that Jahar was intended to die in the fracas, but he survived. He was found on a dry-docked boat, in a Watertown MA residential yard. “Law enforcement” proceeded to hit that boat with an acknowledged 228 bullets. From that moment on — almost 9 years ago — Jahar has been incommunicado.

They keep him in the ADX prison in Colorado, under SAMS — Special Administrative Measures — which means he cannot spill the beans to anyone regarding what really went on, on the night of April 18-19, 2013.  A couple of weeks after he was found on the boat, it was announced that he had written a wholly implausible confession, with a pencil, on the fiberglass wall of the boat.

The “confession” contains all the usual remarks that a jihadist would say. The Boston Globe did an amazing job of brainwashing the American public to believe the relevant hoopla.

Old Lady Claiming To Know the Law

The old lady, Mary Maxwell, and two other US citizens were accepted by the US Court, in 2017, to act as amici curiae. They presented the statement that the trial attorneys, for both the prosecution and the defense, had accepted two pieces of FBI evidence that contradict each other.

One is a photo of Jahar, allegedly at the Marathon, wearing a whitish grey backpack, said to have been taken a few minutes before the bombing.  The other is a black backpack which the FBI proclaims to have found at the scene, and says it housed the offending home-made bomb.

If either photo is accurate, the other cannot be accurate.

Friends of the Tsarnaevs who should have appeared as defense witnesses in the 2013 trial were unavailable, as the authorities had rounded them up in 2013.  One of them, Ibragim Todashev, age 27, born in Grozny, was admittedly killed by the FBI in his home in Florida in May 2013 “while writing a statement about Tamerlan’s religious feelings.”  You will need to tread lightly on this one. Todashev’s father is suing the US government for the loss of his son.

It appears that the FBI, or one of their contractors, murdered Tamerlan. After Tamerlan’s arrest at around 1am, in his birthday suit, he was declared dead by Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital. That was around 6am.  He is allegedly buried in a non-Muslim cemetery in Massachusetts.

In addition to the three amici curiae of which the old lady is one, there is another set of eight amici who pressured the appeal to consider the unsuitability of Boston as a location for the trial, and juror bias. Their brief, but not Maxwell’s, was discussed at the First Circuit Appeal.

Accordingly, the panel of three judges, on August 3, 2020, vacated Jahar’s death sentence, but did not consider his innocence. (There are more mistakes in Jahar’s conviction that you do not need to memorize, Anatoly.  For example, Jahar supposedly killed a cop at MIT but there is no evidence for it, and there is evidence against it.)

With Biden in office, the US government appealed that appellate ruling, asking for the death sentence to be restored, and that is the gist of what the US Supreme Court heard at oral argument on October 13, 2021. They are to render their decision soon. If they agree to restore the death sentence, Jahar is to be executed in Terra Haute, Indiana, although at the moment there is a moratorium on federal executions.

I’m not asking you to intervene at the judicial level in this case — that is, of course, prohibited. I don’t really know what is available in the diplomatic realm.  Perhaps the US Department of Justice, headed by Us Attorney General Merrick Garland, could be egged to withdraw its request for the reinstatement of Jahar’s death penalty?

An unjust execution is widely considered tragic and could bring down a government.  By the way, Ms Elena Teyer, the mother-in-law of the late Ibragim Todashev, collected 7,000 signatures, mostly in Russia, in support of Jahar’s innocence.

In general, the American public is not “clued in” as to what the real facts were in the bombing of the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013. See if the situation has any soft spots and report back to me personally.

All the best,

Vlad