Most of the national and international media have left Boston -- and essentially moved on from the Marathon bombing story. But at WhoWhatWhy, we're just getting started.
Why? Because we see a lot of problems with what we've been told so far. We've been disappointed that the media have failed to demonstrate healthy skepticism while passing along, unchallenged, the (self-serving) assertions of "the authorities."
It is the
When it comes to falsehoods of all types, we've seen plenty of doozies, and you don't have to go all the way back to the Tonkin Gulf incident -- which helped pave the way for the escalation of the Vietnam conflict. Most people now understand that circa 2002-2003, the George W. Bush Administration knowingly exaggerated and deceived in order to justify a desired invasion of Iraq.
Things have not markedly improved with the Obama Administration. The 2011 "raid that killed Bin Laden" at Abbottabad, Pakistan, went a long way toward bolstering Obama's "toughness cred," and was probably a factor in his being re-elected. Yet staggering inconsistencies in official
Yet even partisans on the attack in each of these cases typically fail to get at the real story -- which, in the case of Benghazi, has to do with how the entire "humanitarian intervention" in Libya was, as we reported, a cover for a deadly geo-strategic gamble that has opened a can of worms from which have sprung untold Al Qaeda types.
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So what about the Boston Marathon bombing, in which innocent people died seemingly at the hands of anti-American monsters? While some insist that under these circumstances everyone, including the media, should prove their patriotism by shutting their eyes and ears, we hope you agree that especially at such times it's important to ask the tough, even unpopular questions. The Boston story, as we previously noted , is full of question marks and high-stakes implications -- all the more reason to dig beneath the screen of official handouts. And, in the coming weeks, that's just what WhoWhatWhy
For now, here are some examples of the things we wish to better understand:
Race Security
We have been told -- and see evidence -- of a security presence unprecedented at such athletic events. This includes the claims by Alastair Stevenson,
The JFK Library Fire
We're told that a fire broke out at almost exactly the same time as the Marathon bombing, a short distance away at the JFK library. Although initial reports indicated a possible explosion, we have since been told that it was just an "accident." We've had very few details since then, though the museum did reopen after a number of days.
MIT Cop
We originally heard from reporters that a police officer from MIT was killed during a confrontation with the Tsarnaev brothers. Later, around the time of a highly publicized funeral for the "hero cop," the authorities quietly revised their story; in the new account, the officer was shot while sitting in his car, perhaps during an attempt to take his gun, though we've seen no evidence of this. No explanation of why the Tsarnaev brothers would even have been on the campus, or wanted or needed his gun, nor has hard proof been produced that the brothers were in fact the cop killers.
7-11
In the midst of the manhunt, we were told that the suspects robbed a 7-11 convenience store to obtain cash for a getaway. But later, that scenario vaporized. How did the initial wrong story come about?
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