The Boston Marathon Bombing "truth" movement

They think the whole thing was a false flag

Every journalist has a hand-full of stories in limbo, written for publications that no longer exist (or the websites are so glitchy that they might as well no longer exist). This is one of them

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The following story is about people who believe that the Boston Marathon bombing was an elaborate hoax — a bizarre belief, considering how this is probably the most-filmed terrorist attack since 9/11. It first appeared in Pando on May 15, 2015.

The Tsarnaev brothers caught on film at the bombing scene

The photos were all taken within milliseconds of each other, and they’re all very similar—if not practically the same.

A woman wearing a backpack purse gets pulled away from the danger by someone wearing a white sweatshirt. Two people who were dropped to the ground, one wearing a blue windbreaker, the other wearing sunglasses, are huddled together. Faces are twisted in what appear to be agony, or shock, or incomprehension. In the upper left hand corner, if you recognize the light grey sweatshirt with the dark gray sleeves, you can make out Jeff Bauman, the double-amputee who famously helped investigators identify Dzhokar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing.

These photos were taken by Ben Thorndike, an amateur photographer and self-described “marathon junkie” who spent April 15, 2013, snapping pictures of the finish line of the Boston Marathon. They capture some of the clearest shots of the infamous attack and its immediate aftermath, and in the days following the the bombing they were featured on NBC Nightly News, CNN, and a number of other outlets.

Considering the magnitude of the attack, the media attention is to be expected.

What Thorndike did not expect was the attention he and his pictures would receive from conspiracy theorists around the world. To them, the photos were the smoking gun that proved the Boston Marathon bombing never happened.

On April 8, Dzhokar Tsarnaev was found guilty of the bombing that killed three people and injured 264 others. His life now hangs in the balance, as jurors decide whether he should face the death penalty or life in prison. To jurors, Dzhokar’s guilt was a foregone conclusion. But for a small crowd of conspiracy theorists, the defense team’s admission of guilt was just the latest in a series of lies told to the public in service of a larger, false narrative.

 There’s no modern conspiracy theory that’s more counterintuitive or flat-out mean than the belief that the victims of the Tsarnaev brothers (three killed and roughly 260 injured) were merely actors. According to this theory, the dead and wounded are the real criminals, working in league with a secret government to hoodwink the American people.

(Ben Thorndike)