Death In The Homeland: The Mysterious Case of Ibragim Todashev.

THE TRAILERS have started running already for the third series of Homeland. The “wilderness of mirrors” (as James Angelton called the world of espionage and counter-espionage) against whichHomeland’s complex plot unravels, returns to our television screens in February – to the undoubted delight of its thousands of fans.

The name of the series (itself an American reworking of the Israeli hit series Prisoners of War) echoes the name chosen to describe the vast new security apparatus called into being by the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The Department of Homeland Security did not replace the National Security Agency (NSA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) but the sheer scale and weight of its national security cloak continues to overshadow all other US security agencies.

Indeed, it is now highly doubtful that there exists any one point in the American state apparatus from which it is possible to view and control the whole of that country’s national security effort. To grasp how peripheral the President of the United States has become to the process, one has only to look at the photograph taken of the National Security Council as US Navy Seals fulfil their assassination mission against Osama Bin Laden. Clearly, Barack Obama is neither the first mover nor the controller of this operation. Having wielded his rubber-stamp, the President is just another enthralled onlooker.

But if the left hand of the American government has no knowledge of what the right hand is doing in the name of national security, what guarantee can Barack Obama – or anyone else – have that it is operating ethically – or even legally?

What, for example, did the President make of the letter sent to him a few days ago by Abdulbaki Todashev? In an act of desperation, the Russian father of 27-year-old Ibragim Todashev had written to Obama, begging him to stop the FBI from interfering with his efforts to discover who is responsible for killing his son.

Ibragim Todashev’s singular misfortune was to be an acquaintance of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Chechen Muslims living in the United States, who are alleged to have carried out the terrorist bombing of the Boston Marathon on 15 April 2013. Three people died in that attack and 264 were injured. Four days after the bombing, on 19 April 2013, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed in a gun battle with Boston Police. His younger brother, wounded in the firefight, was captured a few hours later.

Within a month, the FBI had located Ibragim Todashev whose relationship with and knowledge of the Tsarnaev brothers made him a potentially vital witness in the trial of Dzhokhar. Tragically, Todashev never made it to the stand.

On 22 May 2013, at least four federal agents descended upon Todashev’s Florida home. For eight hours, and without the benefit of legal advice, he was subjected to intense questioning.

According to a report published in The New York Times, all but one of the interrogation team then left the room in which Todashev was being questioned. The one person remaining, an FBI agent, alleges that Todashev then “lunged” forward, wielding some sort of weapon (described variously as a knife, a metal pole, a broomstick and a Samurai sword!), obliging him/her to discharge his/her firearm multiple times at close range. Everything Todashev knew about the Tsarnaev brothers died with him in that room.

To date, the identity of the FBI agent and the other federal agents involved in Todashev’s interrogation and death remain undisclosed and no charges have been filed against the 27-year-old’s killer.

Exactly what Todashev may have known remains the subject of intense speculation.

Within days of the Boston Bombing journalists established that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was on a Homeland Security watchlist. Early in 2011, Russia’s Federal Fecurity Service (FSB) had warned the FBI that, as a radical Islamist and Chechen nationalist, Tamerlan constituted a potentially serious terrorist threat. In spite of this official “heads-up” from their opposite numbers in the Russian Federation, the FBI permitted the older Tsarnaev brother to cross the US border repeatedly without let or hindrance. Nor did Homeland Security or the FBI deign to pass on the FSB’s warnings to the local Police officials organising security for the Boston Marathon.

In the hours following his shooting on 19 April, and after Tamerlan’s mother had told Russian Television that the FBI had longstanding “contacts” with her son, the Bureau grudgingly acknowledge a prior relationship with the alleged terrorist.

Had Tamerlan confided to Todashev that he was secretly working for the FBI and/or Homeland Security as a double agent or, even more alarmingly, as an agent provocateur?

It has been a consistent feature of the publicly disclosed Homeland Security/FBI anti-terrorist “successes” that those charged with planning and attempting to carry out terrorist operations were encouraged to do so by radical “activists” who later turned out to be a federal agents operating undercover. In some cases theseagents provocateurs had even supplied their terrorist comrades with what appeared to be genuine explosive devices.

Did Todashev know that Tsarnaev and his brother had somehow turned the tables on the FBI and their shadowy overlords in Homeland Security? Is it possible that the individuals “running” Tsarnaev, were unaware that their agent had somehow been “turned” and slipped their leash? Had they supplied him with the wherewithal to construct the “pressure-cooker” bombs alleged to have been deposited near the Marathon’s finish line?

Pushing even deeper into Homeland’s dark realm of political paranoia, could Todashev have learned that three of Tsarnaev’s Islamist comrades, possibly part of a cell being readied for a terrorist attack to mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11, had somehow exposed Tsarnaev’s double game and been eliminated?

It is certainly true that “a close associate” of Tamerlan and “two others” were murdered on 11 September 2011. Tom Carter writing for The World Socialist Web Site has even suggested that the federal agents who interrogated Todashev in Florida had been “seeking to extract a signed confession to the murders committed before the Boston Marathon.”

Was Todashev part of the plot? Or, did he stumble into it by accident? Did he know that he knew too much? According to Carter: “before [his] interrogation, Todashev told his roommate, who was also questioned, that he feared for his life.”

Whatever the true explanation, a seriously compromised national security apparatus did not allow the crisis created by the Boston Marathon bombings go to waste. For four days in April 2013 the city of Boston found itself in a state of siege.

As Carter observed in his June 2013 article:

“In the days following the bombings, the city of Boston was placed under effective martial law. In a massive and unprecedented police-military operation, the population was ordered to “shelter in place”, armoured vehicles were deployed in the streets and heavily armed SWAT teams conducted house-to-house searches without regard to basic rights.”

Did any of this give President Obama pause? Was he outraged that Abdulbaki Todashev’s son could be gunned down with impunity by a US public servant? Or did the man who ordered the September 2011 drone strike that killed the Muslim cleric and American citizen, Anwar Al-Awlaki, in Yemen, merely shrug his shoulders at yet another “morally indefensible” but “absolutely necessary” casualty in the Global War on Terror?