THAT SONIC BOOM YOU HEAR IN THE DISTANCE IS A MILLION CONSPIRATORIALISTS' HEADS EXPLODING

Dave Weigel is a really smart guy, but on the day of the Boston Marathon bombing he wrote what may be the most naive thing he'll ever publish -- a post titled "Why the Conspiracy Theorists Will Have a Tough Time With Boston." Conspiracy theorists these days don't seem to have a tough time with anything, but it just became much easier for them to engage in their little hobby with regard to Boston as a result of this Daily Mail story:

An uncle of the Boston bombers was previously married to a CIA officer's daughter for three years, it emerged today.

Ruslan Tsarni, who publicly denounced his two terrorist nephews' actions and called them 'Losers', even lived with his father-in-law agent Graham Fuller in his Maryland home for a year....

[Fuller] told Al-Monitor that his daughter, Samantha, was married to Ruslan, whose surname was then Tsarnaev, for three to four years in the 1990s.

The couple divorced in 1999 more than ten years after he left the agency in 1987....

'I, of course, retired from CIA in 1987 and had moved on to working as a senior political scientist for RAND.'...

Now, why this should prove anything isn't clear -- the marriage broke up the year Tamerlan Tsarnaev turned 13 and Dzhokhar turned 6, and the marriage involved a relative who was estranged from the accused bomb plotters for years.

But, of course, "they" want you to believe it's all a coincidence!

Fuller has written several books, including one titled (gasp!) The Future of Political Islam, which, based on its publisher's description, seems rather middle-of-the-road ("The outcome of the struggle between extremists and liberals will determine the future of political Islam").

But there are already some off-the shelf conspiracy theories about him, because he's been a focus of 9/11 truthers (who don't really think he left the CIA in 1987):

Graham Fuller is on FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds' list of National Security State criminals who are known to be criminals by the FBI, but are being protected under the State Secrets Privilege.

During my three-week speaking tour of Turkey two years ago, I learned another interesting fact about Fuller: He led the CIA's 9/11 cover-up in Turkey.

By September 12th, 2001, most of the leading international-affairs journalists in Turkey knew or suspected that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had been an inside job. But few wrote about their suspicions. Why not? Because Fuller had threatened them, and they feared for their lives.

That's right: Graham Fuller, then the CIA's top man in Turkey, spent September 2001 phoning and/or visiting Turkey's leading journalists, telling them that they had better not publicly question the official story of 9/11 OR ELSE. The journalists, knowing the CIA's penchant for assassinations and Fuller's reputation as a dirty dealer, feared for their lives. And the Turkish press was steered away – or should I say scared away – from questioning 9/11.

Fuller's obvious role as a 9/11 perp is one reason why one of Turkey's top parliamentarians told me that the CIA – not just Mossad – "had a hand in 9/11."

Yikes.

The one saving grace (of sorts) is that this is where purely right-wing conspiratorialists part company from the Alex Jones-style conspiratorialists (who distrust the government no matter which party is in charge). The truthers are much more likely to believe this than the birthers. So we're not likely to hear much about this from Fox pundits and Republican members of Congress. But the truthers will probably never believe the official story of Boston.

And someday I imagine right-wing crazies will find a way to appropriate 9/11 trutherism ... by blaming 9/11 not on Bush, but on Obama and Soros and Bill Ayers and Valerie Jarrett. I'm amazed I haven't run across that idea already.