Bill Van Auken

Photo: Chechen Abdul-Baki Todashev holds a photo of his dead son Ibragim, during a news conference. His son was killed in Florida while being interrogated by the FBI about his alleged ties to a Boston Marathon bombings suspect. Mr. Todashev says FBI agents killed his son “execution style.” Abdul-Baki Todashev showed journalists 16 photographs of his son, Ibragim, in the morgue with six gunshot wounds to his torso and one to the back of the head. His son's body also appears to have been cut open (possible organ theft). The pictures were taken by his son’s friend Khusen Taramov. (AP/Zemlianichenko)

FBI and other law enforcement officials revealed Wednesday that Ibragim Todashev, the 27-year-old Chechen immigrant who was shot and killed after being interrogated for days about the Boston Marathon bombings, had been unarmed.

The killing of Todashev, and the rapid disintegration of the government’s official story—that he was shot after lunging at interrogators with a knife—is an extraordinary event. It casts into further doubt everything that has been said so far about the Boston Marathon bombings.

The report that Todashev was unarmed was followed Thursday by a press conference in Moscow, where the murdered man’s father, Abdulbaki Todashev presented a series of photographs of his son’s body taken at a Florida morgue showing that he had been shot six times in the torso and once in the crown of his head.

Philip Giraldi

Two time Medal of Honor recipient Marine Major General Smedley Butler once said “war is a racket.” He might have added that while enriching the few it victimizes and degrades everyone else who is caught up in the meat grinder, soldiers as well as civilians.

Consider how accounts of soldiers who are captured and subsequently turn on their own country are as old as warfare. American soldiers taken prisoner are only supposed to provide their names, ranks, and serial numbers to their captors though in practice many find themselves agreeing with their interrogators or even signing confessions to avoid abuse or obtain better conditions in their prisons. A number of American prisoners were described as having been “brainwashed” during the Korean War, the expression initially suggesting that they had been subject to psychological conditioning and indoctrination that made them question their loyalties and which subsequently produced episodes of aberrant behavior. In some cases the psychological conditioning was combined with physical torture, but in most cases not. In nearly all cases the victims later recanted the confessions they provided to their captors, were despondent over what they had done and said while under North Korean and Chinese control, and sometimes had difficulty in readjusting to life in the United States.