http://www.blacklistednews.com/Neo-Cons_Trolling_for_Terrorist_Recruits_in_Caucasus_%E2%80%94_Did_CIA_Fund_and_FBI_Lend_Tamerlan_as_a_Spotter%3F/25708/0/38/38/Y/M.html
Revelations and significant new details on the Boston bomber story just keep on coming.
The latest appears in today’s Justin Raimondo’s column. It turns out there is a Georgian connection (not the state where Atlanta is located). Raimondo found that the Russian dailyIzvestia and the Russian-1 television network uncovered the identity of a fund that was set up to conduct “outreach” to Chechen youth. These media report that…
“…the contents of an intelligence dossier leaked by Col. Grigory Chanturia, of the Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs…claims that, in the summer of 2010, an organization calling itself the “Caucasian Fund,” or, alternately, the “Kavkazsky Fund,” co-sponsored with the Washington, D.C.-based Jamestown Foundation a series of “seminars” for North Caucasian youth – and that Tamerlan was one of the attendees. The Fund was set up after the Georgian-Ossetian war, with $2.5 million expended to do “outreach” to “North Caucasian youth.” The program brought in Chechens and others from the European diaspora, and reportedly encouraged the participants in their militance…”
But here’s the key takeaway (my emphasis):
“In response to these reports, the newly-elected President of Georgia, Bidzina Ivanishvili, made a remarkable statement that has been completely ignored in the Western media: “It is possible that terrorists had been trained in Georgia, but the investigation is underway. Let’s wait for its results. We will get a lot of new information, maybe even some shocking findings.There are suspicions that the authorities worked with terrorists and militants. If this information is confirmed, this will be shocking.” As Raimondo says, “To say the least.”
The previous Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili, responding “to the charge that the previous government had been in the business of harboring terrorists,” said “America will not take Ivanishvili’s words seriously.”
Raimondo’s response to this reinforces the notion of the Georgian government’s involvement in harboring terrorists (my emphasis):
“Perhaps not, but it seems passing strange that the elected President of one of our biggest allies in the Caucasus is investigating this possibility, while the American media – which has been obsessed with tracing the trail of the Boston Marathon terrorists – has so far ignored the Georgian connection.That the Saakashvili government had every interest in destabilizing Russia’s hold over neighboring Dagestan is beyond dispute: the two countries fought a war in 2008, and were bitter enemies well before that. According to Radio Free Europe, a report by the new Public Defender in Georgia says that the Georgian Interior Ministry under Saakasvili “recruited and flew to Tbilisi from Europe up to 120 refugees from the North Caucasus, primarily Chechens, to undergo training prior to crossing the border into Russia and joining the insurgency. The men were housed in apartments in Tbilisi, trained at the Shavnabada and Vaziani military bases, and issued with licenses for their weapons.”
The “Caucasian Fund” was supposedly gone in late 2012:
“Izvestia says the Caucasus Fund was shuttered in late 2012 because it had attracted the FSB’s attention, and one former official of the group is quoted as saying the organization has been almost entirely defunct since January. However, they do have a web site, and, conveniently an American office in Boston. They are described here as a commercial venture, with capitalization of $92 million. $30 million of that comes from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), a joint US government-private sector agency. Both the Fundand the Jamestown Foundation deny any involvement.”
They still have a web site and $92 million capitalization? Given this and Jamestown Fund’s co-sponsoring of a seminar involving the fund, as mentioned above, it is very hard to believe the fund is defunct or Jamestown had no involvement. This implies the American media may be deliberately ignoring the Georgian connection due to being in thrall to the neocons. One could infer this from Raimondo’s conclusion, given the mention of one of them, to the analysis he presents:
“The Georgian connection points to a classic case of “blowback.” A covert operation conductedagainst the Russian government, originally, that got out of hand – and came back to bite the hand that fed it. The irony here is that such figures as Zbigniew Brzezinski, who sits on the board of the Jamestown Foundation, were responsible for the anti-Soviet “strategy” that allied the US with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan when the Russians invaded – a ruse that backfired spectacularly on September 11, 2001.”
Indeed, to repeat what Raimondo said above, “to say the least.”
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/05/01/did-saudi-arabia-warn-the-us-and-uk-about-tsarnaev-in-2012/
( Similar to President not being familiar with whistleblowers being threatened if they testify about Benghazi , DHS knows nothing about the written Saudi warning..... )
and.....
http://www.infowars.com/saudi-arabia-warned-the-united-states-in-writing-about-boston-bomber-tamerlan-tsarnaev-in-2012/
( So the US ignored not just multiple warnings from Russia , but a written warning from the Saudis - I wonder why ? )
Russia’s Izvestia is reporting that Tsarnaev attended seminars run by the Caucasus Fund of Georgia, a group affiliated with the neo-conservative think tank, the Jamestown Foundation, between January and July 2012. The U.S. media has been reporting that during this six month time frame Tsarnaev was being radicalized by Dagestan radical imam “Abu Dudzhan,” killed in a fight with Russian security last year. However, in documents leaked by the Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs’s Counterintelligence Department, Tsarnaev is pinpointed as being in Tbilisi taking part in “seminars” organized by the Caucasus Fund, founded during the Georgian-South Ossetian war of 2008, a war started when Georgian troops invaded the pro-Russian Republic of South Ossetia during the Beijing Olympics. Georgia was supported by the United States and Israel, including U.S. Special Forces advisers. The Georgian intelligence documents indicate Tsarnaev attended the Jamestown seminars in Tbilisi.
Neo-Cons Trolling for Terrorist Recruits in Caucasus — Did CIA Fund and FBI Lend Tamerlan as a Spotter?
May 1, 2013
Source: Public Intelligence Blog
Who? Who?
The latest appears in today’s Justin Raimondo’s column. It turns out there is a Georgian connection (not the state where Atlanta is located). Raimondo found that the Russian dailyIzvestia and the Russian-1 television network uncovered the identity of a fund that was set up to conduct “outreach” to Chechen youth. These media report that…
“…the contents of an intelligence dossier leaked by Col. Grigory Chanturia, of the Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs…claims that, in the summer of 2010, an organization calling itself the “Caucasian Fund,” or, alternately, the “Kavkazsky Fund,” co-sponsored with the Washington, D.C.-based Jamestown Foundation a series of “seminars” for North Caucasian youth – and that Tamerlan was one of the attendees. The Fund was set up after the Georgian-Ossetian war, with $2.5 million expended to do “outreach” to “North Caucasian youth.” The program brought in Chechens and others from the European diaspora, and reportedly encouraged the participants in their militance…”
But here’s the key takeaway (my emphasis):
“In response to these reports, the newly-elected President of Georgia, Bidzina Ivanishvili, made a remarkable statement that has been completely ignored in the Western media: “It is possible that terrorists had been trained in Georgia, but the investigation is underway. Let’s wait for its results. We will get a lot of new information, maybe even some shocking findings.There are suspicions that the authorities worked with terrorists and militants. If this information is confirmed, this will be shocking.” As Raimondo says, “To say the least.”
The previous Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili, responding “to the charge that the previous government had been in the business of harboring terrorists,” said “America will not take Ivanishvili’s words seriously.”
Raimondo’s response to this reinforces the notion of the Georgian government’s involvement in harboring terrorists (my emphasis):
“Perhaps not, but it seems passing strange that the elected President of one of our biggest allies in the Caucasus is investigating this possibility, while the American media – which has been obsessed with tracing the trail of the Boston Marathon terrorists – has so far ignored the Georgian connection.That the Saakashvili government had every interest in destabilizing Russia’s hold over neighboring Dagestan is beyond dispute: the two countries fought a war in 2008, and were bitter enemies well before that. According to Radio Free Europe, a report by the new Public Defender in Georgia says that the Georgian Interior Ministry under Saakasvili “recruited and flew to Tbilisi from Europe up to 120 refugees from the North Caucasus, primarily Chechens, to undergo training prior to crossing the border into Russia and joining the insurgency. The men were housed in apartments in Tbilisi, trained at the Shavnabada and Vaziani military bases, and issued with licenses for their weapons.”
The “Caucasian Fund” was supposedly gone in late 2012:
“Izvestia says the Caucasus Fund was shuttered in late 2012 because it had attracted the FSB’s attention, and one former official of the group is quoted as saying the organization has been almost entirely defunct since January. However, they do have a web site, and, conveniently an American office in Boston. They are described here as a commercial venture, with capitalization of $92 million. $30 million of that comes from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), a joint US government-private sector agency. Both the Fundand the Jamestown Foundation deny any involvement.”
They still have a web site and $92 million capitalization? Given this and Jamestown Fund’s co-sponsoring of a seminar involving the fund, as mentioned above, it is very hard to believe the fund is defunct or Jamestown had no involvement. This implies the American media may be deliberately ignoring the Georgian connection due to being in thrall to the neocons. One could infer this from Raimondo’s conclusion, given the mention of one of them, to the analysis he presents:
“The Georgian connection points to a classic case of “blowback.” A covert operation conductedagainst the Russian government, originally, that got out of hand – and came back to bite the hand that fed it. The irony here is that such figures as Zbigniew Brzezinski, who sits on the board of the Jamestown Foundation, were responsible for the anti-Soviet “strategy” that allied the US with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan when the Russians invaded – a ruse that backfired spectacularly on September 11, 2001.”
Indeed, to repeat what Raimondo said above, “to say the least.”
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/05/01/did-saudi-arabia-warn-the-us-and-uk-about-tsarnaev-in-2012/
( Similar to President not being familiar with whistleblowers being threatened if they testify about Benghazi , DHS knows nothing about the written Saudi warning..... )
Did Saudi Arabia warn the US and UK about Tsarnaev in 2012?; Update: DHS denies knowledge of any warning
POSTED AT 8:01 AM ON MAY 1, 2013 BY ED MORRISSEY
So says the Daily Mail, based on an interview with an unnamed Saudi “senior government official” with direct knowledge of the letter sent to the US. According to the official, Tamerlan Tsarnaev applied in December 2011 to enter Saudi Arabia to visit Mecca, but the Saudis got suspicious of his actual intent and denied the visa application — at which point Tamerlan went to Dagestan. The reason for the rejection wasn’t Tsarnaev’s connection to Chechnya, but because the Saudis thought he had connections in Yemen(via Drudge):
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia sent a written warning about accused Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2012, long before pressure-cooker blasts killed three and injured hundreds, according to a senior Saudi government official with direct knowledge of the document.The Saudi warning, the official told MailOnline, was separate from the multiple red flags raised by Russian intelligence in 2011, and was based on human intelligence developed independently in Yemen.Citing security concerns, the Saudi government also denied an entry visa to the elder Tsarnaev brother in December 2011, when he hoped to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, the source said. Tsarnaev’s plans to visit Saudi Arabia have not been previously disclosed.The Saudis’ warning to the U.S. government was also shared with the British government. ‘It was very specific’ and warned that ‘something was going to happen in a major U.S. city,’ the Saudi official said during an extensive interview.It ‘did name Tamerlan specifically,’ he added. The ‘government-to-government’ letter, which he said was sent to the Department of Homeland Security at the highest level, did not name Boston or suggest a date for his planned attack.
If it’s true, then the FBI, DHS, and/or the CIA have a lot more explaining to do. This could be why the CIA added Tsarnaev and his mother to the TIDE system, although one would think that a Yemen connection might have prompted a higher profile in the database and a little more investigation. Since the warning came in 2012, presumably while Tamerlan was on his six-month pilgrimage to Dagestan, it should have set off all sorts of alarms when Tsarnaev returned that summer — or at least another look by the FBI, assuming they knew about the warning at all. If that was “stovepiped,” the FBI might have been unaware of it. However, if the Yemen connection was through Awlaki, that would raise questions about how much of Awlaki’s contact with the US was missed by the CIA and FBI, too.
On the other hand, let’s play skeptic for a moment. So far at least, we haven’t heard of any connection in the Tsarnaevs’ lives that would have drawn them to Yemeni jihadist groups in 2011. That doesn’t mean there weren’t opportunities — Anwar al-Awlaki was very successful in his on-line endeavors, but he had been dead for three months by December 2011. The connection to Islamist separatists and terrorists in Chechnya makes sense because of Tsarnaev’s heritage, but there isn’t anything obvious connecting the Tsarnaevs to either Saudi Arabia or Yemen.
Why would the Saudis claim to have sent the letter? Could be for PR, and it could be to further discredit Yemen, with whom they have a contentious relationship (which was one of the driving forces behind the initial radicalization of Osama bin Laden, remember). On the other hand, by claiming that they also warned the UK, it makes it more difficult to maintain a false claim — the UK has no reason to dispute that if it were true, while the US might be reluctant at this point to admit shrugging off an independent warning about Tamerlan.
On the whole, this makes for an interesting development, but it would be better to wait for some independent verification before fully embracing this single-source story.
Update: Allahpundit reminds me that an Awlaki connection had already been asserted last week:
As investigators sift through the lives of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev trying to understand their radicalization and descent into violence, one clue almost seemed expected. Two U.S. officials tell The Daily Beast that, during his hospital room interrogation, Dzhokhar told FBI agents that he and his brother were influenced by the Internet sermons of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born preacher who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in September 2011. The charismatic cleric was seen by the Obama administration as a uniquely dangerous terrorist because of his sermons (delivered in fluent, American-inflected English), his intuitive grasp of U.S. culture, and a burning desire to strike his birth nation.
It is unclear the extent to which—if at all—Awlaki’s preachings inspired the brothers to commit terrorism. Indeed, whatever his role, it is likely only a small piece of a complicated, multilayered puzzle. In recent days, there has been speculation that another piece of that puzzle could be a man known simply as “Misha,” whom relatives of the brothers have said held sway over Tamerlan. “This person just took his brain,” Tsarnaev’s uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, told CNN. “He just brainwashed him completely.” Now, The Daily Beast has learned that federal law enforcement officials have identified Misha—although one source suggested it might be a less important part of the case than previously thought.As for Awlaki, while we don’t know the extent of his influence on the brothers, we do know that there is a long trail of hardened terrorists who have acknowledged coming under his sway. Among them are Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American who attempted to set off a car bomb in Times Square in May 2010, and Nidal Malik Hasan, the U.S. Army officer who killed 13 people in a shooting spree at Fort Hood in 2009. Hasan, it turned out, had been in extensive email contact with Awlaki in the months before the shooting, but no evidence ever emerged that Awlaki knew about his deadly intentions.
That might have been the Yemeni connection discovered by the Saudis, but who would Tamerlan be trying to meet, if that was indeed his intention in going to Saudi Arabia? Awlaki was dead by that time for three months. Perhaps Tamerlan knew of other contacts … and perhaps Dagestan was a less-conspicuous place to meet?
Update: Via Instapundit, DHS issues a denial to Jake Tapper of any knowledge of such a warning:
and.....
http://www.infowars.com/saudi-arabia-warned-the-united-states-in-writing-about-boston-bomber-tamerlan-tsarnaev-in-2012/
( So the US ignored not just multiple warnings from Russia , but a written warning from the Saudis - I wonder why ? )
Saudi Arabia ‘warned the United States IN WRITING about Boston Bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2012′
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia sent a written warning about accused Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2012, long before pressure-cooker blasts killed three and injured hundreds, according to a senior Saudi government official with direct knowledge of the document.
The Saudi warning, the official told MailOnline, was separate from the multiple red flags raised by Russian intelligence in 2011, and was based on human intelligence developed independently in Yemen.
Citing security concerns, the Saudi government also denied an entry visa to the elder Tsarnaev brother in December 2011, when he hoped to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, the source said. Tsarnaev’s plans to visit Saudi Arabia have not been previously disclosed.
http://www.infowars.com/tamerlan-tsarnaevs-links-to-cia-operations-in-caucasus/
( Did the US ignore Russian and Saudi warnings because he was a CIA asset whom the CIA was training ..... )
Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s links to CIA operations in Caucasus
Evidence is mounting that the accused dead Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev became a “radicalized” Muslim while participating in a covert CIA program, run through the Republic of Georgia, to destabilize Russia’s North Caucasus region. The ultimate goal of the CIA’s campaign was for the Muslim inhabitants of the region to declare independence from Moscow and tilt toward the U.S. Wahhabi Muslim-run governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
What does U.S. ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul know about Tamerlan Tsarneav’s activities in Russia’s North Caucasus?
Tsarnaev also visited Dagestan in 2011. On December 16, 2011, WMR reported on the CIA’s and George Soros’s operations in Georgia that funded the Caucasus Fund, the Jamestown Foundation, and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) activities. It should also be noted that Tsarnaev’s Maryland-based uncle, Ruslan Tsarni (name changed from Tsarnaev) was also contracted to USAID.
“The money from USAID for Russian dissidents is being funneled through the Georgian Ministry of Education. The Georgian Minister of Education Dmitry Shashkin also attended the Tbilisi ceremony (a World AIDS Day ceremony also attended by U.S. ambassador to Georgia John Bass and Georgia First Lady Sandra Roloefs, the Dutch wife of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili), which provided cover for the covert aid program to the Russian dissidents. USAID money was used to fund scholarships in Georgia for exiled Chechen “students” who were being trained as CIA agenst to interface with Chechen guerrilla forces and the Caucasus Emirate terrorists of Doku Umarov.
Georgia has become the nexus for the U.S. aid to the Russian opposition trying to unseat Putin. In March [2010], Georgia sponsored, with CIA, Soros, and MI-6 funds, a conference titled ‘Hidden Nations, Enduring Crimes: The Circassians and the People of the North Caucasus Between Past and Future.’ Georgia and its CIA, Soros, and British intelligence allies are funneling cash and other support for secessionism by ethnic minorities in Russia, including Circassians, Chechens, Ingushetians, Balkars, Kabardins, Abaza, Tatars, Talysh, and Kumyks.”
Note: the Talysh and Kumyks live primarily in Dagestan.
The conference, held on March 21, 2010, was organized by the Jamestown Foundation and the International School of Caucasus Studies at Ilia State University in Georgia. If Georgian counter-intelligence documents had Tamerlan Tsarnaev attending Jamestown conferences in Tbilisi in 2011, could the Russian FSB have tracked him to the Jamestown Hidden Nations seminar in March 2010? In any event, a year later the FSB decided to contact the FBI about Tsarnaev’s ties to terrorists.
The first Russian request to the FBI came via the FBI’s Legal Attache’s office at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in March 2011. It took the FBI until June of 2011 to conclude that Tamerlan posed no terrorist threat but it did add his name to the Treasury Enforcement Communications System, or TECS, which monitors financial information such as bank accounts held abroad and wire transfers. In September 2011, Russian authorities, once again, alerted the U.S. of their suspicions about Tamerlan. The second alert went to the CIA. The Russians were well aware that the Hidden Nations seminar held a year earlier was a CIA-sponsored event that was supported by the Saakashvili government in Georgia. In their second communication with Washington, the Russians were likely making the CIA aware that it was on to one of Langley’s assets.
At some point in time after the first Russian alert and either before or after the second, the CIA entered Tamerlan’s name into the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment list (TIDE), a database with more than 750,000 entries that is maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean, Virginia.
On March 31, 2010, shortly after the Hidden Nations conference in Tbilisi, deadly mass casualty suicide bomb blasts in the Moscow Metro system and in Dagestan, and Georgia’s Georgia’s launching of a Russian-language TV channel targeting the north Caucasus and designed to whip up anti-Russian feelings in the volatile region, WMR reported:
“The Jamestown Foundation is a long-standing front operation for the CIA, it being founded, in part, by CIA director William Casey in 1984. The organization was used as an employer for high-ranking Soviet bloc defectors, including the Soviet Undersecretary General of the UN Arkady Shevchenko and Romanian intelligence official Ion Pacepa. The Russian FSB and the SVR foreign intelligence agencies have long suspected Jamestown of helping to foment rebellions in Chechnya, Ingushetia, and other north Caucasus republics. The March 21 Tbilisi conference on the north Caucasus a few days before the Moscow train bombings has obviously added to the suspicions of the FSB and SVR.
Jamestown’s board includes such Cold War era individuals as Marcia Carlucci; wife of Frank Carlucci, the former CIA officer, Secretary of Defense, and Chairman of The Carlyle Group [Frank Carlucci was also one of those who requested the U.S. government to allow former Chechen Republic 'Foreign Minister' Ilyas Akhmadov, accused by the Russians of terrorist ties, to be granted political asylum in the U.S. after a veto from the Homeland Security and Justice Departments], anti-Communist book and magazine publisher Alfred Regnery; and Caspar Weinberger’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Kathleen Troia “KT” McFarland. Also on the board is former Oklahoma GOP Governor Frank Keating, the governor at the time of the 1995 Murrah Federal Building bombing.
The Georgian International School for Caucasus Studies in a perfect partner for Jamestown. Its current major project is designed to stir up anti-Russian sentiments in the north Caucasus by creating such new research programs as “Tsarist Russian policy and state-sponsored Soviet ethnic policies conducted in the North Caucasus during the 19th and 20th century.”
Cooperating with Jamestown in not only its north and south Caucasus information operations, but also in Moldovan, Belarusian, Uighur, and Uzbekistan affairs, is George Soros’s ubiquitous Open Society Institute, another cipher for U.S. intelligence and global banking interests. Soros’s Central Eurasia Project has sponsored a number of panels and seminars with Jamestown. Soros and his NGO contrivances and constructs provided the impetus for Saakashvili’s themed ‘Rose Revolution.’ Jamestown’s Monitor and the Soros-influenced Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty often quote from each others’ sources and reports.
On March 9, 2005, the Jamestown Foundation, Soros’s Open Society Institute, and the Moldova Foundation sponsored a seminar in Washington on the Moldovan elections. Among the advisory board members of the Moldova Foundation are Bari-Bar Zion, CEO of A4E and Amin in Israel and a former business adviser to the head of the Israel State Lottery, and Sam Amadi, special adviser to the President of the Senate of Nigeria. The Moldova Foundation receives support from Soros’s Open Society Institute.”
Georgia was a major launching pad for anti-Russia operations by the CIA, Mossad, and Britain’s MI-6. Not only did Georgian Imedi TV presented a fake news report about a Russian invasion of Georgia — which also suggested that Russian troops had killed Saakashvili — but Caucasus Emirate terrorists were conducting a number of terrorist attacks inside Russia, including a suicide bombings in Moscow and Dagestan, at the same time NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen was hosting Saakashvili in Brussels.
The Russians indicated in their first communication with the FBI that Tamerlan had changed drastically since 2010. That change came after the Hidden Nations conference in Tbilisi. U.S. support for Chechen and North Caucasus secession came as a result of a public statement on August 2008 by GOP presidential candidate John McCain that “after Russia illegally recognized the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Western countries ought to think about the independence of the North Caucasus and Chechnya.”
What does U.S. ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul know about Tamerlan Tsarneav’s activities in Russia’s North Caucasus?
Upon becoming President in 2009, Barack Obama adopted McCain’s proposal and authorized CIA support for North Caucasus secessionists and terrorists with money laundered through the USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, Soros’s Open Society Institute, Freedom House, and the Jamestown Foundation. In January 2012, Obama appointed a Soros activist and neocon, Michael McFaul of the right-wing Hoover Institution at Stanford university, as U.S. ambassador to Moscow. McFaul immediately threw open the doors of the U.S. embassy to a variety of Russian dissidents, including secessionists from the North Caucasus, some of whom were suspected by the Russian FSB of ties to Islamist terrorists.
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