Police State

Texas legislature unanimously passes bill requiring police obtain a warrant to read any email.

In a good reminder that it makes no difference which party is in power, Obama to nominate Bush official to head FBI.

Judge orders child porn suspect to decrypt his hard drives.

More questions about the Boston Marathon suspects including did they murder the MIT cop?

"At the time of Collier’s shooting, the FBI had just released video of two unnamed “persons of interest” walking with backpacks—shown amid many other people walking with backpacks. The still-anonymous Tsarnaevs were nothing more than people with whom the FBI wanted to talk. No hard evidence had been released that connected them to the bombing itself.
Within hours of the FBI video release, everything went nuts. First came word of “officer down” at MIT. Then, quickly, news of a carjacking. Then police swarming everywhere. Then a shootout and the death of one suspect, followed by a lull, and then the discovery and near-death of the second suspect.
Soon came the narrative to explain much, if not all. The suspects in the video had been behind both the bombing and the killing of the police officer. We knew that because the carjacking victim had escaped, and told police and later selected media how his captors had confessed to him.
Boston Globe reporter Eric Moskowitz gained cooperation from the still-unnamed hostage (nicknamed “Danny”). Here’s a portion of Danny’s tale, in which the elder Tsarnaev, Tamerlan, confessed during the carjacking:

He asked if [Danny] had followed the news about Monday’s Boston Marathon bombings…

[snip]

“I did that,” said the man, who would later be identified as Tamerlan Tsarnaev. “And I just killed a policeman in Cambridge.”

We’ll have more to say about the carjacking in a subsequent article. But for now, the key thing to remember is that in some ways, the shooting of Officer Collier immediately before the carjacking and the alleged confession in the car—to both crimes—were absolutely essential in creating the first profile of the Tsarnaevs as murder-minded individuals, not just two guys on a video wearing backpacks."

OK.

"Besides playing a central role in establishing a case against the brothers, Collier’s death also served a powerful symbolic purpose in the official narrative, with a huge memorial service for the MIT officer on April 24, addressed by Vice President Biden. Throughout, the spotlight has been on Collier as Hero—a kind of ritualistic hagiography devoid of any inclination to investigate the actual circumstances of his death.
For students of history, however, this part of the narrative had a familiar ring. Exactly half a century ago, another traumatic event took place: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The big break in that case came several hours later, when a police officer, J.D. Tippit, was shot and killed. Soon, one of the many employees in a tall building on Kennedy’s parade route, Lee Harvey Oswald, was connected to both events. Like Tamerlan Tsarnaev, he had recently spent time in Russia. Like Tamerlan Tsarnaev, he had been under scrutiny by the FBI before the crime.
In both cases, it was the killing of a police officer that turbocharged the police pursuit—and that, once the suspect was apprehended, convinced the public quickly that the police had their man.
Until the shooting of officer Collier, the Tsarnaevs were just two guys seen on a video wearing backpacks. And until the Tippit shooting, Oswald was just one of many employees in a building that most eyewitnesses felt was not even the source of the shots that killed Kennedy.
In both cases, the shooting of the police officer did not make a lot of sense in the context of the “main event” – but nevertheless gave the pursuit a jolt of adrenaline. Only later would crucial details of the narrative be changed—at a time when few would notice."

Interesting parallel.

"This is a false story, circulated days after the events. Collier was not outside a gas station and convenience store. Dzhokhar certainly appears to have gone into a gas station/convenience store later that evening, but Collier was not there and no murder took place at that time. Collier did not respond to a disturbance. He did not approach anyone. In fact, it’s likely he never even knew who shot him.
To this day, hardly anyone in the general public is aware of this glitch in the narrative. Yet it is very important. Because if the initial story had been, “unknown persons came up behind a police officer sitting quietly in his patrol car and shot him for no apparent reason, not even taking his firearm” – that would no doubt have triggered a very different media response."

Nice catch.

"Yet, even after it was clear that Collier had done nothing more than sit in his car while someone came up behind him and shot him, the authorities were still feeling it necessary to lay it on thick. On April 25, a week after Collier’s death, the New York Times was reporting

“I [still] consider him a hero,” Boston’s police commissioner, Edward Davis, said in an interview this week. “It was his death that ultimately led to the apprehension. The report of the shot officer led to all those resources being poured in.”

A cop had been shot, “all those resources” were poured into that general vicinity, and a juggernaut had been launched."

I've never heard of a US city city being locked down in martial law because a cop was murdered.

"It is also important to understand that the CBS News coverage—including the dubious claim that Collier was killed in an attempt to get his gun, and the belated story that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev scrawled a confession on the interior walls of a boat while he lay bloody and grievously wounded – is helmed by John Miller, CBS Senior Correspondent, who between journalistic stints served as the top spokesman for the FBI. In other words, it is an FBI insider who is guiding the narrative."

Now that's significant news.

"Something crucial is missing from this account. Collier was not parked on the street. He was parked on the pavement, a distance from the corner, between two campus buildings. When I asked students about the scenario Chief DiFava presented, they were baffled. They didn’t recall patrols sitting between those buildings, and it was not apparent how or why anyone would save a minute at a red light by climbing the pavement and driving between buildings."

 Another police lie. Then...

"What are the odds? Of all the law enforcement people who could get shot in Watertown, only Donohue was. Unlike Collier, Donohue was a Boston transit policeman—but the two were good friends.
And then, more….We learned later that Donohue was hit not by the Tsarnaevs, but by “friendly fire.” That is, an early witness on the scene of the mysterious shooting of Officer Collier shortly thereafter became himself the victim of a strange shooting— by fellow law enforcement officers."

What are the odds?

"Donohue survived and, according to the Boston Globe on May 19, is saying nothing about that night because he … can’t:

Officer Richard “Dic” Donohue of the MBTA Transit Police remembers almost
nothing of the night he was shot during chaotic gunfire on a normally quiet
Watertown street, or of the murder of his close friend, MIT police Officer
Sean Collier, hours before in Cambridge.

An editor at The Globe told me they’d received tremendous grief from police for reporting the fact that Donohue had apparently been shot by fellow officers. This despite the fact that the paper hardly focused on that, initially reporting it in an article where it was almost mentioned in passing. Nonetheless—or perhaps because of the sensitivity, we’ve seen surprisingly little coverage of this angle by the local and national media."

That's convenient. This guy at Who? What? Why? is doing a heck of a job.

If you get pulled over with lots of cash in your car, cops will legally steal it.