Two years ago this week, Glenn Beck set out on a crusade to blow the lid off the government conspiracy that was covering up the fact that Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi, a Saudi national who was injured in the Boston Marathon bombing, was really an al Qaeda “control agent” who was responsible for financing and orchestrating the entire attack.
In the days following the attack, Beck began warning that “this is a turning point in America history,” claiming that his The Blaze network had discovered that the government and the media were engaged in a cover-up of the truth behind the bombing, infamously giving the government three days to come clean before his network broke one of the biggest stories in history:
When those three days passed without the government admitting to this supposed cover-up, Beck then dedicated all of his coverage to reporting that Alharbi, who was briefly considered a “person of interest” by investigators before being completely cleared, had received a “212 3B” designation during the investigation, which Beck claimed meant that he was terrorist who must be deported.
For Beck, that was evidence that Alharbi was really an al Qaeda control agent who had financed the entire operation and recruited the Tsarnaev brothers to carry out the attack:
When other reporters investigated Beck’s claims and dismissed them, Beck grew more and more outraged about what he saw as an ongoing cover-up, proclaiming that the burden of proof rested upon the government to disprove his claims and boldy declaring that anyone who dared to try and refute his allegations would only wind up looking like a fool:
Shortly thereafter, Beck’s crusade was essentially derailed when he interviewed a former INS special agent who undercut much of his case by pointing out that the “212 3B” theory under which Beck had been operating “doesn’t make sense.”
After that, Beck more or less dropped the issue publicly, though he continued to insist that Alharbi was the “money man” behind the attack and that there was a conspiracy afoot to cover it up:
In 2013, Alharbi sued Beck for defamation and slander and late last year, a federal judge rejected Beck’s absurd attempt to have the lawsuit dismissed.
