In the six months since the Boston Marathon bombing, the FBI has by all appearances been relentlessly intimidating, punishing, deporting and, in one case, shooting to death, persons connected, sometimes only tangentially, with the alleged bombers.

All of these individuals have something in common: If afforded constitutional protections and treated as witnesses instead of perpetrators, they could potentially help clear up questions about the violence of April 15.

And they might also be able to help clarify the methods and extent of the FBI’s recruitment of immigrants and others for undercover work, and how that could relate to the Bureau’s prior relationship with the bombing suspects—a relationship the Bureau has variously hidden or downplayed.

Who Cares? We Do

The Boston tragedy may seem like a remote, distant memory, yet the bombing warrants continued scrutiny as a seminal event of our times. It was, after all, the only major terror attack in the United States since 9/11. With its grisly scenes of severed limbs and dead bodies, including that of a child, it shook Americans profoundly.

As importantly, in its aftermath we’ve seen public acquiescence in an ongoing erosion of civil liberties and privacy rights that began with 9/11—and to an unprecedented expansion of federal authority in the form of a unique military/law enforcement “lockdown” of a major metropolitan area.

Nonetheless, at the time, most news organizations simply accepted at face value the shifting and thin official accounts of the strange events. Today few give the still-unfolding saga even the most minimal attention. And it is most certainly still unfolding, as we shall see.

The Little-Noticed Post-Marathon Hunt

The FBI’s strange obsession with marginal figures loosely connected to the bombing story began last May, with the daily questioning of a Chechen immigrant, Ibragim Todashev, and of his girlfriend and fellow immigrant, Tatiana Gruzdeva.

Todashev had been a friend of the alleged lead Boston Marathon bomber, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died in a hail of police gunfire four days after the bombing. Tsarnaev’s younger brother Dzhokhar barely survived a massive police strafing of a trailered boat in which he was hiding, trapped and unarmed.

During one interrogation in Orlando, Florida, where Todashev was living, something went awry and he ended up dead from gunshots. Although to date the FBI has provided only hazy and inconsistent accounts of that incident, the killing of a suspect and potential witness in custody was clearly a highly irregular and problematical occurrence, replete with apparent violations of Bureau and standard law-enforcement procedure.

On the heels of those two deaths and the one near-death has followed what appears to be a concerted effort directed against a larger circle of people connected, if not to the Tsarnaevs, then to Todashev.

The purpose of this campaign is not clear, but it has raised some eyebrows.

In an interview with WhoWhatWhy, Hassan Shibly, executive director of the Florida chapter of the Center for American Islamic Relations (CAIR), described aggressive behavior directed by FBI agents at vocal friends of the dead Todashev: using suspected informants to monitor their press conferences, following targeted individuals around, interrogating them for hours—often without an attorney, and jailing them on what he says are trumped-up charges.

Shibly further claims that government agents are threatening these immigrants with deportation unless they agree to “cooperate”—a tactic which he portrays as seeking to enroll these people as de facto spies for the federal government.

Two people have left the country to escape further harassment. Another has been deported, while a fourth is currently facing deportation; none  of them has a criminal record. The bulk of this group were at most friends of a friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev—and apparently didn’t personally know either of the Tsarnaevs.

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Tatiana Gruzdeva

One of these targets was Tatiana Gruzdeva, Todashev’s 20-year-old girlfriend. She was deported to Russia on October 11.

Gruzdeva had been in the US on a student visa. According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) public affairs officer Carissa Cutrell, Gruzdeva had overstayed that visa—a common situation for foreign students studying in the US—but on August 9 she had been granted a “deferred action” status valid for one year, and therefore was for that period in the country legally.

Gruzdeva was nonetheless picked up by FBI and ICE agents on Oct. 1 while attending a scheduled meeting with an immigration officer to obtain a work visa.  According to Gruzdeva, she was told she was being taken because she had “talked to Boston Magazine” and had described Todashev as “a good guy.”

Actually, she had done more than that. She had described for the magazine in vivid detail what happened when several FBI agents back in May had showed up at the Orlando apartment she and Todashev shared and accused him of involvement in the Boston bombing.

Days of harassment and interrogation followed, she said, as the FBI tried to get Todashev to confess to involvement in the Boston bombing, and to get her to make statements implicating her boyfriend, but she continued to insist Todashev had been in Orlando with her when the bombing occurred.

Then, she said, the government agents surprised her with a new accusation: Todashev, they alleged, had been involved in a gruesome, drug-related, 2011 triple murder in Waltham, Massachusetts.  The agents tried, without success, to force her to implicate Todashev in that crime. Then, while she was still in shock from that latest assertion, they demanded she tell them what further criminal activities he had in store.

When she did not tell them what they apparently wanted to hear, she says, they had her arrested on immigration violation charges. Soon after, she was thrown into solitary confinement—treatment normally used only to protect inmates from other inmates, or to punish them for bad behavior. She was not released until August 8.

It was while she was held in solitary confinement that she learned of Todashev’s shooting death at the hands of an FBI agent.

Todashev and Gruzdeva during happier times.

Miraliev’s “Voluntary” Questioning Without an Attorney

Gruzdeva also told Boston Magazine about the FBI’s treatment of Ashurmamad Miraliev, a 20-year-old friend of Todashev’s also living in Florida.

Just days before the magazine interview, agents had grabbed Miraliev, she said, denied his request for an attorney, and then interrogated him for over six hours before dumping him in the Orange County Correctional Facility, a local jail.

Miraliev remained locked up for over three weeks on $50,000 bail on what CAIR’s Shibly contends were trumped-up charges of brawling outside a bar and “intimidating a witness.” According to Shibly, an attorney who is representing Miraliev, the charges were subsequently tossed out as baseless.

That didn’t end the young man’s problems, however. When the county no longer had grounds for holding him, the FBI had Miraliev transferred to an immigration detention center, where he is now awaiting deportation. (Shibly says his client is currently requesting to be allowed to voluntarily leave the country, rather than be forcibly deported by ICE.)

WhoWhatWhy tried without success to obtain comment from both the FBI and the immigration authorities concerning these two cases and the other examples of alleged harassment of Todashev associates. The FBI refused to respond.  A public affairs officer from ICE said she could not disclose reasons for why Gruzdeva and Miraliev were being deported because of “privacy concerns.”

Read the rest: http://whowhatwhy.com/2013/10/29/feds-accused-of-harassing-boston-bomber-friends-and-friends-of-friends/

By Dave Lindorff, Russ Baker and Milicent Cranor, WhoWhatWhy.org

“The following article was originally published at WhoWhatWhy.org”