time once again for community forum and we're very lucky to have with us live in the studio this morning our own gupta is an independent journalist and regular contributor to the u k guardian in these times the progressive and truth out and he is co founder of the occupied wall street journal and a founding editor of the award winning grassroots new york city newspaper the independent thank you very much for coming and spending time with us again this morning great to be with you today mike so let's start out you have just printed last night hot off the press article in in these times regarding seattle's recent developments with the fifty nine dollar an hour wage minimum wage can talk about that yeah so last week mayor ed murray announced a proposal he had set up this income inequality advisory committee in december  basically we can say as a result of the election of schama so and who socialist who ran on a platform of raising the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour immediately so he set up this commission of twenty four people handpicked mainly business folk about twelve twelve of them are business people three city council members some labor leaders nonprofits and so on and  so they had been supposedly debating this idea for months and they finally came up with an ingredient so this is just a plan that does all sorts of headlines like seattle it now has the highest minimum wage no it has nothing of that of the sort this is just a proposal that will now be submitted to the city council and it's a very complicated proposal and i think that's one thing that is important to hone on there's two important definitions what is a big business or small business a small business is defined as having five hundred employees or less and that's nationwide that covers ninety nine percent of all businesses in seattle it covers seventy percent of all full time workers supposedly according to one source i talked to the big business definition over five hundred workers does cover two thirds of low wage workers low income workers you know so this is mcdonald's pizza hut target things like that then the other category is if workers receive health care and or if they receive tips and so you have all these different schedules about you know when the wages will go up when so the upshot is if you work at mcdonald's and they do not provide health care your wages will go up under the plan will go up to fifteen dollars an hour on january first two thousand and seventeen then of course the question is why does mcdonalds have to wait three years or rather why did the workers have to wait three years is a corporation that made five point five billion in its global operations last year vastly wealthy corporation and whose c e o is paid many millions of dollars a year or starbucks whose c e o paid ninety six hundred dollars an hour why do starbucks workers continue to have to live in poverty for all this time now then on for a small business it could take up to seven years and this is just under the proposal right this has to go through the legislative meat grinder that is the city council and of course we'll see all sorts of business interests weighing in and the word from members  on the mayor's advisory committee is like well this is you know the price of getting buy in from basically everyone and they need to get a supermajority twenty one of twenty four members description of it i think is a nagger one she said this is a step forward you know this will improve the lives of the working class and we should you know be proud of that particularly because this would not have happened without her campaign without the fifteen dollar now movement without the role of socialist alternative the party of which she's a leader of the thousands of people that fifteen now has mobilized but at the same time you know the political and business establishment are trying to water it down as much as possible and this is overly complicated because it i think it then makes an foresman hard people's eyes start to glaze over trying to figure it all out it took me a couple of days to really understand how it's supposed to work and i think in some ways that what they're potentially doing is opening the door to wait that aft because of the difficulty of figuring out the schedules in terms of if they have this thing called mint guaranteed minimum compensation  so if you're a worker in a small business and you're getting health care and say you're you know you're a bar and you're getting tips you're supposed to get a certain guaranteed minimum wage according to one schedule but then you're supposed to be getting a guaranteed minimum compensation according to another schedule and so i think it can just lead to all sorts of shenanigans and in fact we have seen this this has become an issue both in seattle and  nationwide to wage theft and especially in the fast food industry and when you think about it these are some of the largest corporations in the world mcdonald's burger king domino's and according to various reports out there there is just systematic and pervasive wage that there was one study commissioned by labor organizations in new york city but it was the study was carried out in the pennant lee it was a survey of five hundred fast food workers this is just last year and it found eighty four percent of them have ported some form of wage that and they counted seven different some workers were subjected to seven different types of wage that if so that can be everything from working off the clock to being forced to clock out earlier komin are only being forced to pay for uniforms or transportation  chair not supposed to be and this is how you know these fortunes are built and so for businesses they'll have incentives and you know like one of the questions i had is just like well you know if i'm a burger king manager why don't i just now put out a tip jar for employees and so this now counts towards their minute guaranteed minimum compensation and i can you know lie and say what exactly they're getting in the in the tip jar oh it could lead to business owners or managers stealing tips you know if they can be like well you're making the guaranteed minimum now so i'm going to take everything above that and  one person i said talk to is just like well that's illegal that's a felony well so what you know it's it's also illegal to fire workers during union drives and by some estimates over tens of thousands of workers are fired every year for you legally protected union activity the point is not whether it's legal or illegal it has to do with enforcement and there's talk about oh government is governments lie man we can also say that about corporations corporations lie and you know going a little further afield seattle is obviously a huge tech city in the news for the last couple months now a lot of people haven't really seen it the mainstream media has only picked up on it and in the last week this huge wage fixing scandal with apple and then steve jobs so over the last decade before he died he basically forced these agreements with other tech giants like google into it adobe and was shooting off these e mails telling them if you try estimates this involved well over one hundred thousand engine ears in the tech industry and the amount of stolen wages and i think this is probably a severe underestimate because we don't really know how many people were involved was something like eight point seven billion dollars ok so we hear if we have the most admired wealthiest corporations in the world are systematically stealing the wages from upper middle class professionals you know how how often do you think this happens at the lower and of the economic spectrum and the fact of the matter is it it it's it is absolutely systematic it's how wal mart began wal mart's model back in the one nine hundred sixty s i did a big report on the wal mart working class that was published in registering classicism and there's this book that's put out every year called the socialist register this year's the fiftieth anniversary and the title is registering class because it's a look at how classes constructed today and and also live so i kind of did this social logical overview of the wal mart working class and sam walton in the beginning when he founded wal mart  what they did what he did was he created all these dummy corporations all the shell corporate shell corporations to a vaid federal minimum wage laws so from the beginning wal mart's model was wage theft at one point about ten fifteen years ago while settled about seventy different class action wage theft lawsuits for half a billion dollars you know this just becomes a cost of doing business you just steal the wages and if you get caught you know you got your you pay some lawyers and you pay a small fee but in the end you're walking away with much more money than if you had to pay the proper wages so i think there's a lot of serious questions you know i think you know this should be something that is seen as a victory that the grassroots forced upon the political and business establishment in seattle but at the same time they were you know they were forced to do it they are trying to water it down it's not a done deal this still has to go through the legislative process where it can be weakened all sorts of ways where they can be more put more loopholes in it and the fact of the matter is is i think there's also a danger in having this really long term scheduled that it takes seven years to get to fifteen dollars an hour and the minimum compensation is not phased out for eleven years until twenty twenty five and we will see business interests come in whether you know that the u s chamber of commerce whether it's the  brothers americans for prosperity which is the koch brothers outfit or again oh alec american legislative i forget exactly what alec stands for but it's basically the body that rewrite state laws will see him come in almost guaranteed and try and overturn this try and weaken it in some way so the battle i think is really just begun on this but i think it is a hopeful si shows you know what can be done by a very focused and relentless grass grassroots mobilization i believe in your article you mentioned that seattle had recently passed a wage theft law and  organizing campaign that the service employees international union kicked off a couple of years ago and so they've been trying to organize workers with two demands fifteen dollars an hour and a union this is also something that was a significant might think impact and influence on the seattle campaign so in two thousand and eleven seattle passes this ordinance and it's something that the police are supposed to enforce and last summer there were hearings about this and all these workers came before the city council and were giving details about just systematic and perverse of wage theft in the fast food in industry and there hadn't been one prosecution in this whole time i'm not sure if there's been one since then but still that's that's rather appalling you know if i go in to a liquor store or if i break into someone's house when they're not home and know that they're not home because you know i don't want to have any chance of hurting someone and you know steal their money steal valuables i'm going to go to jail for years perhaps decades if i'm caught and the and yet corporations can freely steal from their workers and no one's trying to prosecute them i mean it it shows really where power lies and also it shows our conception of what crime is and isn't so it would  be our city attorney who would be responsible for prosecuting those cases yeah i magine so and the police are supposed to take complain and you know the i'm trying to remember i think it may have been the stranger that had some funny kind of anecdotes about contacting the police department and about wage theft and the police were basically like we don't know anything about this we were not responsible for this when actually they are responsible for  donald you know being forced to work off the clock at one am you know who are they going to call high are they going to get someone in there and you know a lot of it has to do with the fact that the workers don't want to raise a ruckus because they're on the edge economically they don't want to lose their job and they're afraid or they may be undocumented and so they work off they do whatever the boss tells them so labor was involved in local negotiating for murray's announcement what is your take on labor's role in all of this i think that this is a deal that is problematic you know i  union in the area and he and he said he expects this that this has to pass as it is with very few modifications if any because labor and business both signed off on it you know i i don't know the particulars of the various unions here but what i i do know for instance it is as i mentioned as cia you has  been behind the fast food organizing around the nation and that's a great thing you know to see fast food workers on the move but it's also it's a very it's a campaign that's for fraught with a lot of problems it's very much a top down movement where workers have very little control there is there's been activity in seattle there was some walkout last may but i've talked to being mistreated by the union to the point that the fast food workers they were organizing or planning to hold a protest in support of the ci staff the protests the poor working conditions that they were under and this is also gone on in other cities apparently in new york city the fast food workers organizers the cia used taff the ones who are organizing the fast food workers have filed to form a union because they were being mistreated essentially there they work fifty hour weeks when they ramp up for these regular actions there's going to be in a day of action coming up on may fifteenth this one is going to be international but they'll also be protests by fast food workers around the country organizers were telling me they'd have to work seventy to eighty hour weeks and yet they're getting paid maybe about thirty five thousand dollars a year and when they did the calculation they were being paid well under fifteen dollars an hour and so in new york city they apparently filed for a union election i talked to organizers in chicago as cia you again these are the ones who are organizing the fast food workers who they also tried  of power and wealth you know unions do have a lot of resources but i think a way of putting it in perspective is all the money that unions have at at their disposal that they get in du are less than what wall street bankers get in bonuses in any given year and you know wall street banks are just one sector of the economy so they're going up against the fortune five hundred who have one hundred times more money than that so the there is no such thing as a level playing field when it comes to union organizing in this country but at the same this same time i think a lot of  the big gaining ins are they have a very problematic structure and relationship they're not really interested in rank and file democracy they're not really they do not want any sort of militan they they sign these very complicated agreements you know there's a story from the one nine hundred thirty s about when after the united auto workers first unionized their contract was  o basic it fit on a business card a little three by five business card that was their entire contract and workers would take out the card and flash it  the management on the line basically saying you know i was their way of saying to them you know you can't do this to us because here's here's our contract and it's no longer like that you know when you have these overly complicated agreements what it does is it disempowers the workers and people off will often blame me for having all these rules and it's just like no it's the corporations who want all these rules because if they're forced to recognize  a union they want these highly complicated contracts because every rule is a chance to take something back it's a chance to force more time on to the workers it's a chance to get the workers to pay more towards health care or towards training or you know it's a chance to create different tiers of wages i was  in portland recently and covered the organizing around the public school teachers there and they successfully beat back a terrible contract from the city  it was just the contract i mean these things are just so hard to understand and i i'm not a lawyer but i know how to read legal contracts and what it amounted to is something like seventy five different give ba s that the city of portland was demanding from the teachers that it's just all these minute things because it's just a way to disempower the workers teachers or workers of course it's a way to you know you force them to pay more for health care you know you force more time on them that they would have to you know do more proper time they had less control over their job their sensually being treated as as drones and the teachers as a stage a very successful community organizing campaign because the contract and the school system and in portland was also very much an attack on on quality public education but you know it becomes hard to mobilize your membership around these things because the contracts are stream lee difficult to understand and so would seattle with this fifteen dollar an a proposal that has four different wage schedules that has this minimum compensation where you're going to have to have all these calculations and enforcement and you know does this health plan you know qualify or not what happens if they for a health plan be considered minimum compensation it has to be at least silver level under the affordable care act but what if a business you know suddenly cuts health care what happens to those workers do they shift schedules or what if a business adds health care does it's suddenly also shift so you know you're just i think really opening the door to all sorts of shenanigans that corporations  unions they don't seem to run into these problems that as you just give example of the teachers union yeah police are there are unique police unions you know correction officers like for decades  prison building boom in california which is being driven by correction officers unions because they were spending huge sums of money lobbying the state to build more more  more more prisons it got to the point i'm not sure what the present statistics are because they've had to scale back the prison building due to the economic crisis but it got to the point where california was spending more on prisons than it was on higher education and you know remember california at least at one point had one of the greatest higher education systems in the western world and yet here they are spending know that in new york city where i live a police officers pension now if you get a pension in almost any job it's basically it's about your income over the whole lifetime of your tenure whether you've worked there twenty twenty five thirty years but in new york city if you're a cop your pension is based on the last year that you work solely on that and so there's this incentive and this is what the cops do in the last year they're twentieth year is they will just pile on the overtime just as just work as much as possible and they'll have these six figure salaries in their last year they get something like sixty percent and so they all will be retired in their early forty's with you know a fifty sixty thousand dollar income for life and just the highest level health care and you know they would just continue to draw on this potentially for forty or fifty years you know the costs are absolutely enormous but let's also not forget you know during occupy wall street there were just the cops were literally protecting the banks then and it came out also that the big investment banks like goldman sachs j p morgan wired directly giving millions of dollars to the new york city police department every for having me mike time once again for community form and we're very lucky to have with us live in the studios this morning russ baker russ baker is an investigative journalist he is founder and editor in chief of who what wired dot com he has written for the new yorker vanity fair the nation the new york times the washington post the village voice and esquire and numerous other publications he has also served as a contributing editor to the columbia journalism review and he is the author of the book family of secrets the bush dynasty the powerful forces that put it in the white house and what their influence means for america russ thank you very much for coming in spend time with us this morning it's my pleasure so start about who what why dot com sure after many years in journalism i began to consciously note that there were topics i couldn't cover there w wanted to go to that i was unable to and so i decided it was time for a new sort of journalism who what why is a nonprofit we are nonpartisan i like to call it nonpartisan but f e meaning we really want to know what happened what is happening and what will happen and we will go to whatever length we can to figure that out and  to focus on what we think are the biggest stories facing humanity we try to focus on stories that we think other news organizations will not touch either because it doesn't fit their particular orthodoxy or because  it is just a little bit too sensitive for them and so we've been starting who what why kind of gradually for a number of years you might say and it's been growing terrifically with a combination  any corporate money and we rely i guess like this station entirely on their audience how did you how do you select your staff and writers complicated formula i would say we would look for people who think outside the box who are more interested in learning than they are in opining we look for people who who are very intelligent and well read but also go into every single story with an open mind and so we've got an interesting mix i mean certainly on the journalistic side of what we do meaning the actual writers and editors they tend to be people who have been professional journalists although we find that a lot of the best people were not professional journalists they may have been biologists or chemists or almost anything lawyers and they they bring the skills of that particular discipline to the stories and so we've got i think were kind of an amazing experiment which is i don't think has been tried before which is to i mean  it happens in radio let's say n g o s like this but in in sort of print journalism or online journalism it is rare to give that kind of an opportunity to people who have not been formally schooled in it but who really have a natural instinct and so they might also not necessarily be socialized as much as let's say a lot of the corporate media journalists are that's right and so they're often willing to kind of look at stories in a different way and so one of the subjects that you have been focusing on for just a year now because we also are just seeing the you know the anniversary of it is the boston bombing so talk about that maybe for those who can't remember specifics on it kind of give us an overview and i'm sure just to set the context at who what why we look at we look a lot at the security state we look a lot at  growing role of the military industrial complex to to use one classical term we look a lot at the role of fear in our society in government in what we are told we need to be concerned about we look a lot at propaganda we look at budget priorities look at changes in textures say for example the militarization of our police rollback of privacy and civil liberties these are very important to us and i've throughout my career covered the cia to some extent the i and so forth and so i've always been interested in their activities and with the boston marathon bombing that fit a pattern of what i guess you could call sort of major traumatic events that cause fundamental changes many of which we don't even notice at the time and in the case of the boston marathon bombing it was this sort of astonishing lockdown of a major american city people ordered to remain in their homes and although there was a brief flurry of commentary there really was no vigorous discussion about what was going on was this justified was this legal and where could this kind of thing be headed in the long run and so we began right from that first week in april of two thousand and thirteen looking at the boston marathon bombing trying to understand really everything about it including why it was that the authorities were so keen on assuring us that they had solved this crime so fast and that there was nothing else to look at and over the years i've looked at other major events like iran contra and watergate and the sasa nations of major leaders john f kennedy to martin luther king and have always been struck by the certitude particularly the assuring us that they immediately knew who had done it and you know it's an old saying nothing to see here folks move along move along and we were troubled by that we're always troubled by that and in the case of boston we begin seeing anomalies mike right from the beginning things that didn't add up stories a change this is kind of a theme at who what why we see so often we see it with the with the death or the purported death of osama bin laden the way they said we threw the body the ocean nothing the sea no you know nothing to look at that said no we can't show you photos over the video feed went out so the people the white house couldn't see what was going on you  know you can't talk to people who are involved this is very very common and to i think it open minded persons very suspicious it's not really normal in the boston bombing is just an astonishing i'd call it kind of a deep politics event in real time it's it's a case of the security services immediately creating a narrative almost a kind of a mythology based on inadequate investigation it was very very clear to us that he really had not invest gated all the possibilities and the other interesting thing is the way that the key witnesses in all of these situations you'd think you'd want to osama bin laden alive and to interrogate him you'd think that extraordinary efforts would have been made to to just capture both of these brothers and get them to talk but what would happen in the boston bombing case was the first brother was killed the second brother it looks like an attempted kill because he was unarmed and they fired more than one hundred shots into the boat in which he was hiding and then a third fellow a friend of the elder brother living down in florida being interviewed by the f b i and then shot and killed unarmed again in a in a room while being you know interviewed so we find these things important and we think that they need to be carefully investigated so let's stick on that subject for a bit talk about what incidents or items really set you off in terms of asking questions one of them is the lead danny the lead guy that so much is based on money i mean that basically in most of these stories we don't really remember how it came to be that we know what we know but we think we know what happened if you asked most people they say these two brothers and i did it we know that they planted the bombs we know that they made the bombs we know all of these things and we believe that they confessed and so it's very interesting that i talk to extremely intelligent educated people who tell me that oh i've seen video of them planting the bomb but actually we haven't seen video of them planting the bomb and they there are tremendous leaks from law enforcement which themselves are very very suspect because there's an upcoming trial of the younger brother these leaks are highly improper they're unfair and they prejudiced the public and really the whole legal system against the defendant which is not the american way and so so we were told all these things have been leaked saying you know that you can see them putting the backpacks down they released some stills will have some things to say about that on who what why as to the reliability of those photos they haven't released video of somebody actually putting it down but one of the key elements in there i think what you were referring to mike is that we are told that several days after the bombing the f b i well the f b i announced  five pm on thursday of that week the bombing was on a monday they suddenly put up stills from video and they said these are suspects or persons of interest if anybody knows who they are please let us know we don't know who they are  came out sometime later that the f b i did know who these people were and in fact had been interacting with the elder brother for a while several years earlier as a possible terrorist suspect  so it struck us that they were very quick to say we don't know who these guys are and it took the russians in a very strange situation the russians said well you do know they are because we warned you about from some years ago and then the f b i was forced to then admit that it had actually interacted with and been dealing with and been in and out of the house of temora landstar naive but then sometime later that evening suddenly we heard police officer was shooting and there was a dead police officer at mit we were quickly told that it was probably these brothers who had done it they gave me a little bit of a chill of recognition because  work looking at the kennedy assassination it was a similar situation where you could not really connect lee harvey oswald with the shots fired at the motorcade but then shortly after that a police officer was shot somewhere else they said that you know as well that done it in that he had dropped his wallet it was all very very neat and then this pointed him back to the to the fact that he worked at the book depository in this case it was almost identical and we were told that they had shot this police officer we've looked at that and there are real doubts as to whether they would have had the motivation whether they would have been in that location or what evidence there is but even more interesting later that evening we heard that there was a carjacking and that the victim escaped ran across the street from one gas station to another police and f b i run the scene literally and several minutes they were very fast to respond in we are told that this this carjacking victim explained to them that he had been carjacked by a man who was later identified as temple and sorry i haven't he said to the man not only had a gun which you'd think would be sufficient motivation to do what he said but that he actually said to him do you know who i am i am the bomber of the boston marathon and i also just shot a cop now that  struck me as a little bit odd because if in fact it tomorrow and star night have purpose was to lay low and to get out of town adding that element to the fact you already had a gun just seems extraneous and so we were interested in this this so called confession because this is the basis for the public believing that they definitely were behind these things and we were struck by the fact that we've never to this day been introduced to this carjacking victim they  used a nickname for him put him on camera without seeing his face recently they've started showing his face a little bit but they still are not telling us who he is and i tried through intermediaries to have access to him because i wanted to ask him specific questions about him consistencies in his own accounts and i've been denied that access he did several media interviews early on they were softball interviews they didn't really attempt to elicit information from him it was more of a kind of an affirmation of the official narrative softball and and but his story is fascinating might because in different accounts  the length of the carjacking from an hour and a half down to thirty minutes down to zero minutes there are questions as to whether he said in the official account he was sitting in the car with one brother who had a gun and he bolted out of the car when the fellow was distracted we found another account where he told a television reporter that he was alone in the car that they were outside of the car doing something else entirely when he escaped which makes you wonder how ruthless they were and how competent they were if they would just leave a if they would they would just leave somebody who was a captive alone and so all of these things raise questions as to what really happened  and whether this story that we're being told is credible who could tell us who's jamie fox he's one of the people you don't whether trying to get an interview with one of the stranger many many strange things on th story is the fact that this is this fella nicknamed danny has been sort of mentor or guided and his in his media interviews sort of controlled and monitored by a  professor of criminology at northeastern university and i was struck by the fact that to me a criminologist would be mostly interested in the crime and solving it but this fellow seems mostly interested in sort of protecting and protect the identity of this witness in even kind of intervening in the interviews and sort of steering them and i found that to be strange let me put it this way i get the feeling on a lot of these stories that the  security complex of this country is much larger than we understand that that academia that all sorts of institutions people within the media play roles in this and if we look back historically there has been such cooperation on our website who what why dot com i think it's still on the front page an article by a very good journalist named steve weinberg review of a book about the f b i and it's the cooperation of the media with the groover in crafting essentially a false image of the f b i for public consumption creating this notion of this sort of invincible highly competent extremely principled outfit which actually bored no resemblance to the truth at all and so we see in that book the extent to which media figures were like p r people for the f b i and on the boston story we see john miller  s a guy who himself was you know the head of public affairs for the f b i and they goes in and out of journalism and he's the guy sitting there interviewing this danny and just lobbing softballs at him so there are real questions about academic figures in institutions places like mit where this police officer was shot mit he actually sent me a letter and told me to stop asking people questions on campus because he said it made people uncomfortable and i thought that's an institution of higher learning and hi inquiry well you know mit takes a tremendous amount of money from the government very closely associated with large corporations involved in in the so called homeland security and in the war industry talk a little bit about some of the what you find are problems with the story around sean collier yes so that was the shooting on thursday night that's when all these events began happening very very fast and i believe that was the moment that this sort of potential myth was being created this sort of certitude that it was just these two guys they were lone wolves by the way we're always told that people are lone wolves except in cases where they want to create a kind of an exaggerated international conspiracy like with the idea of making al qaeda more then it may actually have been or be but in this case we were told initially that this very brave police officer first responder had shown up at a convenience store and or gas station and run into these two brothers and that they had shot and killed him if you ask the public now many people heard that people you know it's sort of that first impression that people that stick with people one of my favorite sayings is a lie gets around the world before the truth can get its pants on and so those first impressions are absolutely critical in what they call psyops psychological operations to shape public perceptions and then it then later on after people were not paying much attention it was like oh well no that report was wrong he actually was shot while in his police car and then it came out well he was sitting on this street in boston and they came up to him and shot him and took his gun and then it turned out well somebody shot him but they didn't take his gun and then i discovered that he wasn't on a street that he was parked between buildings on the dark indemnity campus and it was no was it near where they were or there was any clear reason why you would be on a darkened campus or even know that a police officer would be sitting in a police car between darkened buildings i mean that's not normal on campuses and then they told us that he was there because it was routine that he would sit there and prevent people from making illegal right turns and i went there and there was no place there to make illegal right turns and there was no traffic at that hour so that clearly was just bogus and the media has not followed up on the kinds of issues we've raised it who what why they read our stuff we know because we hear from them but they for whatever reason they cannot seem to ask a single good question of the authorities and talk a bit more about the friend or relation that was shot dead by the f b i in florida yeah talk to him they brought him in and had a number of interrogations he was uncomfortable with what was going on and he told a friend that he felt that they were trying to force some sort of information that was not even true to get him to say some things to possibly even confess to something they he had a sense they were trying to figure out what he knew about the boston bombing what he knew about and even what he knew about tomorrow and star naives past dealings with the f b i that he felt that there was some sort of a mop up going on and they interviewed him several times the final time the interviewed him he told a friend that he was scared that something bad was going to happen he asked a friend to come over and be there at his apartment the f b i kept him outside and eventually made the friend leave and go to a restaurant somewhere they said we'll bring your friend when we're finished against regulations there was only one i agent in the room there are supposed to always be true because the f b i has this very strange thing where with when they extract confessions they never tape record they never film very odd very at akron istic and so but they always have to have an extra officer there and supposedly witness this and so in this case something suppose he went wrong that he confessed to involvement in a triple homicide involving some low level drug dealers in the greater boston area some years earlier and that he suppose he confessed at tamarind sorry naive was involved but then apparently right after giving them this confession he supposedly went bizerk and lunged at them and the police the f b i agent shot him and killed him and it's all odd because they're trained if you know if somebody comes at you you shoot them in the leg or you apprehend them some other way it's all a very very strange story they told multiple versions they leaked and they kept changing it what happened that this fellow came at them with a ceremonial sword that he came at them with a baseball bat that he grabbed i think was the leg of a table and then later we find out you know they make a big deal of the fact that he did why crew martial arts but we later find out that he just had serious knee surgery and he was hobbled and we later find out look at the crime scene photos a pool of blood heading toward a hallway not even where the table is which kind of looks like he may have been heading toward the door when he was shot and so that all of these things raise very very serious questions about whether we can trust what the f b i tells us and of course historically we know that in the f b i s internal investigations of hundreds of shootings of people by f b i agents they in one hundred percent of the cases they said they were justified i mean that that can't be true in any situation so the inevitable question challenge would be a lot of people listening would be well why your conspiracy theorist why aren't you a conspiracy theorist well first of all i would love to study that term and in fact i have that term was suggested by the central intelligence agency as a tactic to discourage discussion of particular topics this was in the years after the kennedy assassination xp plural and there's a lot of discussion there was a man working for barack obama harvard professor who was very big on discouraging people from discussing and speculating he had this idea that they should have cognitive infiltration of chat rooms and online discussions about these kinds of deeper issues where people are suspicious of governmental statements claiming that inquiries into these kinds of things by trying to sort of lump them in with people who may be nuts and it's a it's a broad in an unfortunate term it doesn't actually even mean anything because the term conspiracy theorist or conspiracy theory relates to conspiracies which is two or more people working together planning in executing some kind of a crime it is a criminal category that is being prosecuted as we speak of cases the f b i routinely accuses people of being conspiracists and so theory is how we think about things so conspiracy theory is how we think about two or more people getting together to commit a crime and it's a completely non judge mental term that has been turned into one that when applied to anyone is intended to just and conversation it's kind of like saying i don't know if you want to invite that person to the dinner party she smells and it's really a very very problematical thing that we need to look at every time somebody uses that term you know just about two minutes left so you had mentioned that you're working on other forthcoming articles related to the boston marathon bombing what can we expect coming out here in the near future yeah we're going to have more articles on that i hope every few weeks it's very  time and labor intensive it's very difficult investigative work it is the kind of thing that we pride ourselves on is the reason i created who what why dot com it's the reason i wrote my book family of secrets which i spent five years on  investigating the rise of the bush family consistently relevant now with jeb bush making noises that he's going to run for president as a third bush you got a fourth bush jeb son has just been elected office in texas what do these dynasties mean what are their relationships to the one percent of the one percent the military industrial complex and the cia in the banks and so forth this is the kind of things that we look at we welcome people to come to our site to read family of secrets to become more stories as we can within the constraints of what is possible all right well with that we are unfortunately out of time i want to thank you very much for coming and spending time with us this morning thank you very much