BAKER: We are looking at the actual facts of the case. And in the information that has come out, we're seeing tremendous anomalies, inconsistencies, out-right falsehoods, reversals by these agencies, and we are troubled by them. And so I and other members of our team have been working this story now for more than a month, and we're going to stay at it for a few more months.
We saw the clamp down on the freedom of movement. We've seen the increasing encroachment of military troops into our American cities. We see the public getting softened up and being made to become more and more comfortable with living in kind of a military state almost.
ROCKWELL: Now, you've actually been on the ground in Boston?
BAKER: I spent the last two weeks there. I'll be going back again. I can't stay there full time. I'm based in New York now, not in Boston. But I did spend two weeks there, and it was very, very instructive and I got a sense of a bunch of things. I met with and even drove around with journalists from major newspapers and radio shows; some good people, but I could see the limitations. There really is almost nobody there digging deeply into these problematical issues. And when I say problematical issues, what I mean is it is the job of the media to just find out what happened. It is not our job to pass along what somebody else says happened. That's not our job. And the media there, the major newspapers, the TV and the radio, by and large, just said what the authorities told them. In a few cases, places like "The Boston Globe," they do more than that, a little bit more than that; they've tried to talk to people. But I can tell you from my own experience that a lot of this stuff is being controlled.
We've done four pieces. We have another one coming up in a few days. That's going to be about this carjacking victim, which is a very, very important piece of this story that has not been investigated by the media. Another one we just did recently is about the shooting of an MIT police officer named Sean Collier. That story was treated -- it was not examined, Lew, in the context of what that story was. That story was actually a kind of a propagandistic moment. And those of us who study and read history remember that back in the Nazi era, there was the killing of a police officer, a Horst Wessel, and they even created a song for the Nazi movement, the "Horst Wessel" song. Killings of police officers that are magnified like this -- and if you go to WhoWhatWhy.com and read that article, there's a photo of all of these baseball players at a stadium standing with their hats off and their heads bent in a giant projection of this one police officer. And what is that for? Because, tragically, police officers are killed in the line of duty all the time. Why all of the focus on this one police officer? I have never, Lew, seen a news organization ask that question. Why are we focusing on this police officer? And more importantly, what actually happened with this police officer that would make us interested in him?
ROCKWELL: Well, of course, it's clearly become an unexamined assumption that police are worth more than regular people. So the killing of a cop is far worse than the killing of an old lady or a young father or whatever else, which happens all the time. And in fact, there actually are not that many police killed in the line of duty. You can actually find out that figure. It's far more dangerous to be a commercial fisherman or a logger or a farmer or many other occupations than to be a cop. So it's not actually true that they're always being killed.
But absolutely, it's made into a huge political deal, as Will Grigg puts it, with a Brezhnev-style funeral any time a cop is killed, whereas, if some poor store owner or whatever is killed in the line of duty, his family cares and that's about it.
BAKER: I agree with you, that's true. I guess what my point was that even in agreeing with you that there are not that many police officers killed, there still are nationally probably some.
ROCKWELL: Oh, sure. Actually, about 40 to 50, which is terrible.
BAKER: But what interests me here is this particular police officer. By the way, there were two police officers shot; one died and one almost died. And they're both very strange cases. And so, first of all, I was struck by the fact that they wanted to make it a big deal about this police officer's death. Biden flew in and addressed his funeral. It's literally said that thousands of law enforcement people came from all over the country to attend the funeral of this man they didn't know. Now, it is logical to ask, "Why would people attend a funeral of a person they didn't know?" It's for some reason. And what it really comes down to is it's propagandistic. And what this is, is this is focusing the public and it's very strongly sending out a message that the system is taking care of you and you have to honor the system. "This person died for you."
And what's very interesting was, if you go into that article and you read all the detail of what I investigated -- and we'll be doing more on this -- first of all, when Officer Collier was killed, we were essentially told either explicitly or implicitly that he had been killed by these two brothers. Now what's very interesting is, at the time that he was killed, all we knew was that these two brothers, whose names were not even public yet, were pictures from a video, wearing backpacks, walking along with dozens, hundreds of other people wearing backpacks and walking. And so it was the death of this police officer that set everything into motion.
And as soon as I heard about the death of this police officer, I thought, OK, when an officer is down, when that is announced, I can tell you this -- and I know a lot of police officers and many of them are very, very fine people, but they act with a kind of a pack mentality -- and it suddenly turbo charges. You know, there's a whole tradition, the Blue Wall of Silence and all this, and when anything happens to a police officer in any instance, immediately, all the other police respond in a very, very aggressive way. And so what you saw was, the second he had been shot, boy, whatever the police officers were doing, they were all going to get whoever did this. And so this became the justification for that shootout on the street in Watertown; later, going after the younger brother, the Tsarnaev brother, and peppering that boat with gunshots when he wasn't even armed. This was essentially a kind of retribution for their fellow officer. Except for one thing, and that is that about a week later, when they were doing this whole big memorial service with Biden and everything, they rather quietly announced that, oh, you know what, actually, the original story that he had maybe tried to stop these brothers and they had killed him was not right. It turns out, they don't know who shot this man. He didn't confront anybody. And he was assassinated. And do you know where he was assassinated, Lew? He was sitting in his patrol car. Just sitting there. Somebody came up behind him for no apparent reason and killed him in cold blood. We have no evidence right now that those brothers even did it. But that was the precipitating event that then unleashed all of this fire power.
The next thing that happened is this carjacking. And an unknown person, whose name is still not public, has said that he was carjacked by these brothers and that they told him, "We planted the bomb and we killed that cop." Now, those are two things that there is no hard evidence that they did either of them, but now you've got killed the cop and then you have a carjacking with an unnamed person saying these guys told me they did it. And then one of them is killed; the other one, I believe, they attempted to murder him. So what you would have had, Lew, is you would have had a situation where both of these suspects would be dead, an unknown witness would connect them to both of the things, the whole thing would be over; and that military, that huge military police response would have been accepted, and we would be used to the idea that there will be more of these things.
ROCKWELL: Well, that's right. And of course, then we had the younger brother writing out his confession on the side of the boat in the dark.
BAKER: Well, in the dark, but this guy was basically gravely injured. According to the story, which is a little bit strange, of the man who owned that boat, when he went out to check, he saw blood there. I mean, this guy was already in a pool of blood before they called the cops. Because we know he's gravely injured in the hospital. So the likelihood that he was in any shape, you know, to sort of heroically prop himself up and go to these incredible lengths to scrawl out a confession virtually with his dying breath is a little bit hard to believe.
At the end, I think the notion was that they thought this guy was going to die. With those shots that they fired, given the fact that he hadn't fired a single shot at them, you have to assume that at least one person in that group, whether it was local police or it was the FBI people on the scene, was shooting to kill. That was the intent, it seems. And so this confession, if it's even real -- and we haven't seen that in that confession. And other thing we've been reporting is that that confession was reported to us by John Miller, a senior correspondent at CBS News. It's very, very important to remember that John Miller's last major job was that he was a top official of the FBI. He was a lead spokesman for the FBI. He loves the FBI. He's very, very close with them. And this is the man who is now back in journalism telling us this story. He also has been a key figure throughout. He got one of those so-called exclusive interviews with the unknown carjacking victim. So in other words, this entire narrative is being constructed essentially by the FBI or its allies.
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