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Home » Why Such Secrecy about Private Military Contractor’s Men Working the Event?
Craft International Services hired guns at the Boston Marathon:
Speaking as an investigative reporter with almost 40 years’s
experience, I can say that when government officials won’t talk, they’re
generally hiding something embarrassing or worse.
I tried, and nobody will talk about those Craft International
Services private security personnel who were widely observed and
photographed near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, wearing
security ear-pieces, hats and T-shirts bearing the company’s skull logo,
and all wearing the same dark coats, khaki pants and combat boots, some
carrying what appear to have been radiation detectors. (I got no hard
answers, though there were some inadvertent hints given.)
I first contacted a man identifying himself as Jack Fleming, a
public affairs person with the Boston Athletic Assn., sponsor of the
marathon. Fleming advised me that “If you want to ask about that you
should contact the Commonwealth (of Massachusetts) Executive Office of
Public Safety.”
I called that agency and spoke with the public information office
there, a man named Terrell. He first said, "Did you call the Marathon
organizers?" When I replied that I had, and that they had said to call
his office, he replied, "They did?" Then he said, “You should call the
City of Boston Police Department. They released a security plan to some
media organizations.”
Indeed they had released that plan to the
Boston Globe. Based upon the information it got from the police
the article the Globe ran,
did report that the Police had deployed “air patrols, K9 units, and
more than 1,000 uniformed officers and soldiers along the 26-mile course
and the finish line,” but it made no mention of the private contracting
of soldiers-for-hire, which is what Craft International does (see the
Craft website).
News agency Reuters
reported, meanwhile, that a top official for the Massachusetts state
Homeland Security Department, Undersecretary Kurt Schwartz, told a group
at Harvard U. that his agency had “planned” for a possible bombing
attack on the marathon, even running a “table-top” exercise about such
an event a week before the race.
I called the Boston Police to ask if they had hired the Craft
International personnel who were observed at the scene just before and
after the bombing, and was told by the public affairs office there that
“Anything having to do with the investigation of the bombing would have
to be referred to the FBI Boston Division office.” When I pointed out
that I wasn’t asking anything about the investigation, but was simply
asking who had hired the security personnel from Craft International,
the answer was simply repeated: “You’ll have to ask the FBI.”
So I called the FBI, and got a public affairs person there named
Amanda Cox. Her initial response to my question was, “I do not have any
information on that.”
Seven apparent Craft International rent-a-soldiers behind and departing (top rt. with backpack) a communications van
I then said I had been referred to her by the Boston Police
Department, and said that photos of the scene after the bombing had
shown Craft International personnel conversing with FBI agents. She then
put down the phone, and I could hear her turn to a supervisor and ask,
her voice muffled, “This guy’s asking about the Craft Security
Consultants -- who hired them and what they were doing.”
I next overheard the muffled voice of another woman to whom she had
been speaking reply, “I think you could safely say, ‘I do know we worked
with a lot of people who worked on security at the marathon...’” After
that I couldn’t make out what was being said.
Cox later returned to the phone, and instead told me, “I’d refer you
to the company on any information about who hired them.” (Taken
together the overheard conversation and the official answer from Cox
would at least seem to confirm that Craft's people
were hired for the event, and that the FBI knows a lot more than it is willing to say about them.)
My next step was to call Craft International. The company has no
phone number listed on its website -- just a general email address of
info@thecraft.com
(to which I wrote to asking for information, but which elicited no
response)--but I found one listed for their headquarters office at 2101
Cedar Springs Rd., Suite 1400, Dallas, TX, in a listing on the company
published in a directory in
Bloomberg Businessweek, This entry
noted that the company, in addition to “providing security, defense,
and combat weapons training services for military, police, corporate and
civilian clients in the US and internationally,” also “offers corporate
and private and civilian training services...” The number, published
in a business magazine, was clearly meant as a contact for potential
customers to call.
A woman answered the phone brightly with the company's name.
However, when I identified myself as a reporter, and said I was
wondering if someone could tell me who had hired personnel from the firm
to work at the Boston Marathon, she responded with a flummoxed: “Um, I
um, don’t really have any information on that. I’m just an answering
service.”
I replied, “Look, the number I called is listed as the number of the
company’s corporate headquarters at 2101 Cedar Springs Road. You’re not
an answering service.”
At that point she said, “Let me see who I can transfer you to.”
However, after a long pause, she was back, and said, “The answer
I’ve been given is that you should go to the website, where there’s an
email address you can write to with your question.”
I had already done that, I told her. She then said she couldn’t help me and hung up.
I also called the US Department of Homeland Security, but a women
named Angela who answered the press office number for this public
government agency (she refused to provide her last name despite being
the public information office) said the DHS media office was “only
taking inquiries sent in by email.” I sent in an inquiry asking if any
unit of the DHS had hired Craft International to provide security at the
Boston Marathon, but so far (note: two days later!) have received no
response.
As things stand, since it's highly unlikely that Craft
International, a private for-profit enterprise founded by the late ace
Navy Seal sniper Chris Kyle, would have "hired" itself to police the
Marathon gratis, it seems pretty clear that we had rent-a-special
forces-soldier people, hired by some agency, at the scene of the bombing
ahead of the bombing.
And we have
no reporting on this in the mainstream corporate media.
Why? I have no answer to that.
I did write to Andrea Estes, the lead writer of the
Globe’s piece on police security planning mentioned above, who is described in her bio on the
Globe’s website staff page as an “investigative reporter specializing in government accountability.”
I called and left a message on her phone, and sent her an email,
asking if she had looked into the Craft Security personnel, to see who
hired them, what they were doing at the race finish line, and why they
appeared be carrying radiation detectors. She has so far not responded
to my request for information and assistance concerning anything she had
done or learned about this, or whether she had looked into it at all.
Certainly there is a big accountability question. A bunch of them actually. Here are a few:
* If Craft International people were hired, who hired them and why?
* If it was the Boston Police or the FBI that hired them, why
won’t they just say so? Simply hiring outside security help should not
be a secret, and could in no way affect the investigation into the
bombing and the captured suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, so why the secrecy
about that? Given all the police presence, and the size of the FBI's
Boston division, why did they need those extra guys from a private
rent-a-soldier firm?
* If it was not the Boston Police or the FBI, what agency did hire the company, and why?
* If it was the state’s Homeland Security Dept. or or the state
Executive Office of Public Safety, or perhaps more likely, the US
Department of Homeland Security, did they notify the FBI that they had
done so, and tell the agency what had prompted them to do this?
* The big overarching question when it comes to who hired Craft
International is, what possible gain in security could have been
achieved by adding what appears to be seven guys (or perhaps a few more
who didn’t appear in photos) from a private security firm when the
Boston Police had in place over 1000 armed security people from their
office and the National Guard, and when, as became evident immediately
after the bombs went off, a large number of FBI personnel were also on
hand?
Unless, of course, the Craft Security people were aware of something
that we, the public, including the race participants and spectators,
and perhaps even the police and FBI, were not aware of.
Transparency is critical to accountability. At this point, it is
clear that we have had a massive failure of the national security state.
Despite the fact that the FBI was aware of concerns about Tarmelan
Tsarnaev, and the fact that the CIA had him on a watch list, he appears
to have been able to work on line to learn how to build a powerful
homemade bomb, to obtain the materials, including a substantial quantity
of black powder, to build a number of them, and, allegedly with the
help of his younger brother Dzhokhar, to place them near the finish line
and detonate two of them, killing three people and injuring as many as
200. That’s a huge intelligence fail.
It would be an even bigger fail if it turns out that some agency had
awareness of a credible threat and that it hired Craft International
personnel to prevent it. We clearly need to know, and have a right to
demand to know, who hired those men and why. After all, at a minimum, on
the face of things, they did an abysmal job of preventing a bombing
right in front of their supposedly well-trained noses.
And of course,
as I wrote earlier,
there is also another question, which is really disturbing: The image
of the exploded backpack released by the FBI and identified as the
remains of the pack that was carrying one of the two pressure-cooker
bombs, prominently displays a white square on a black background. This
is not a doctored photograph; it’s the photograph that was released by
the FBI. There are also at least two photos depicting one of the Craft
International men who is wearing a black backpack identical to several
of the other Craft International personnel. The same white square is
also visible on the top of his pack.
There does not appear to be any such white marking -- square or
otherwise -- on the top of the black backpack worn by Tarmelan Tsarnaev,
as observed in several security photos taken of him (Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
was shown carrying a smaller white or light-colored pack, slung over one
shoulder). Check out the images below of Tarmelan, the exploded bag and
the Craft International character:
FBI
image of exploded pack with white square, white square on Craft guy's
pack, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev (left.) with pack but clearly no white
square marking
I am not drawing any conclusions from any of this, but I will say
that when government agencies at all levels and a private contracting
firm are all this obtuse and secretive (and in some cases even
deceptive) about what should be a simple question -- who hired these
men? -- my suspicions are aroused.
Somebody’s clearly hiding
something.
And by the way, why aren't the mainstream media asking about this?
Are corporate media journalists so intimidated about being labeled
“conspiracy nuts” that they can't do their jobs? At a minimum, this goes
to the question of accountability. It also goes to the question of
inter-agency communication or lack of it. And given
what we know about how many times the FBI has been an active encourager and enabler of terror plots
which it later thwarts and claims credit for preventing, there’s the
question, too of potential official culpability.
Furthermore, when an
horrific incident like this is used to justify such new threats to our
Constitutional freedom as an unprecedented martial law-style lockdown of
an entire 1-million-person metropolitan area and a precedent-setting
deliberately Miranda-free, attorney-free interrogation of a
hospitalized, gravely wounded and sedated suspect, it is critical that
the whole story be told, not just the official one.
Award-winning investigative reporter
Dave Lindorff
has been raking the journalistic muck now for 40 years, since he started
out reporting the goings-on of three small towns at the mouth of the
Connecticut River for the
Middletown PressCounterpunch, he has also written for such diverse and seemingly mutually exclusive publications as
BusinessWeek, the Nation, Extra!, Treasury & Risk, and
Rolling Stone. In the late 1970s, he co-founded an award-winning alternative weekly, the
Los Angeles Vanguard, and later ran a bureau covering Los Angeles County government for the
Los Angeles Daily News. In the mid-'90s he spent several years as a correspondent in Hong Kong and China for
Businessweek.
Dave Lindorff
Co-author, along with Barbara Olshansky, of
The Case for Impeachment: Legal Arguments for Removing President George W. Bush from Office (St. Martin's Press, June 2006 and paperback 2007), he is also the author of three earlier books:
This Can't Be Happening! Resisting the Disintegration of American Democracy (Common Courage Press, 2004),
Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For Profit Hospital Chains (Bantam, 1992), and
Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003).
Lindorff stumbled into a journalism career late in his final
semester at Wesleyan University, where he had majored in Chinese
language. It all began on a whim, when, short three credits in his last
semester, he signed up for a journalism class offered by the editor of
the local paper, the
Middletown Press. Doing a homework
reporting assignment on a routine truck crash, he stumbled upon a secret
underground office for the Midldetown city government to use in the
event of nuclear war, set up behind a blast door under a new fire
department building. Appalled at the sight of labeled desks for
officials like “tax collector,” “assessor,” and “welfare director” in
this subterranean concrete catacomb, he wrote a story about the
discovery, received an A, and promptly decided, “This is the job for
me!” He’s been reporting on the madness ever since, winning two coveted
Project Censored awards along the way, including one in 2011 for
an article written and published in >em>ThisCantBeHappening!
In addition to writing, Lindorff is a folk musician (guitar, washtub bass and saw). You can hear some of his songs on his
myspace page.
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