Major Questions Remain Unanswered in Boston Killing of Alleged ISIS Beheading Plotter

By Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain
The Intercept
Jun. 12, 2015

Last week in the Boston area, a 26-year-old black Muslim man was shot and killed by agents of the FBI and Boston Police Department (BPD). As we documented the following day, major media outlets immediately, breathlessly and uncritically repeated law enforcement claims (often anonymous ones) about what happened: that the dead man, Usaamah Rahim, was on the verge of executing an “ISIS-inspired” or “ISIS-linked” plot to behead random police officers, in a conspiracy with at least two others. When Rahim was walking to work near a CVS drugstore at roughly 7:00 a.m., the officers approached Rahim simply to question him about this plot; in response, he pulled out a “machete” or “military-style knife” that he refused to drop, forcing the officers to shoot him dead.

There were all sorts of obvious, glaring questions about these claims, yet they were largely ignored in favor of ISIS in Massachusetts! hysteria and melodramatic talk of beheadings. That is a profoundly disturbing aspect of this incident: the police can now accost someone in the street who, by all accounts, was doing nothing wrong at that moment, kill him, and then just scream “ISIS” and “Terrorist” and “beheading” enough times and no real questions will be asked.

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