[EDIT: OOPS, THE PHOTOS ARE INFAMOUS, NOT INAMOUS]

The Thorndike photos are these ones. They have been used by many people (including McGowan and Tracy) to show that the Boston Marathon bombing was a hoax.

It always seemed to me like a really amazing coincidence that this guy just happened to be taking pictures there, in just about the most perfect position you could imagine to get the shots that really helped expose the whole thing.

What we hear all the time in conspiracy land is that the press downplayed, buried or ignored these photos. But nobody has really questioned how unlikely it is that these photos were taken in the first place. (Yes, I know there was a Marathon going on, but the position of these pictures is just perfect for exposing the hoax.)

So in this post I'm going to offer some evidence that there's something fishy going on and that these photos were taken and distributed deliberately with some unknown goal in mind.

It started when I read this essay by Miles Mathis, where he argues that there is a split in intelligence (between an old guard represented by the CIA and a new guard possibly represented by DHS). On this reading, all these hoaxes are carried out by the DHS new guard, and for a variety of reasons the old guard doesn't like it. So they are trying (secretly) to expose the hoaxes. (You can read his essay for more details.)

So after I read that, I thought, maybe those pictures being taken from the perfect location was not a coincidence after all. Assuming the old guard knew what the new guard was up to, they could have positioned a photographer in just the right spot as part of their effort to 'secretly' expose the hoax. If this is correct, it means that well-intentioned hoax busters are being used in a turf war between competing factions of TPTB.

For the record, I'm not at all sure that this analysis is correct. It could be that the photos were used to encourage conspiracy theorists yammering about another hoax, so they could again be discredited in the mainstream media. Or that it was done to take attention off of Sandy Hook. The rationale is debatable, but in light of the evidence I'd say it's very clear the story behind these photos is bullpuckey.

So here is the TL;DR on the key reasons of why the story about the pictures is fishy, then I'll go into more detail:

1. Thorndike says he was taking pics from his office on the 3rd floor, but the company where he worked had its offices on the 10th floor.

2. In some versions of the story he says he contacted the FBI, in other stories the FBI contacted him. In either case, he first sent the pics to a friend who worked at CNBC, which is mentioned in some articles but not in others.

3. We are told in one article that the glass all around him was shattered by the second blast, which was way down the street. Photographic evidence proves otherwise.

4. In some stories he has just started taking pics when this happens. In others he has been taking pics of the marathon for awhile. But curiously those before shots are nowhere to be found.

First, starting with this article: http://boston.cbslocal.com/2013/04/17/photographers-images-of-boston-marathon-bomb-blast-may-show-suspect/

“Amateur sports photographer Ben Thorndike was working in his financial office above Boylston Street on Monday before the bomb blasts. He was snapping photos of the race from one of the office’s bay windows when suddenly — an explosion. Almost momentarily when I got there, directly in front of me, right in my sight-line, the explosion went off,” he said. “Just out of reflex, I had the camera on, had it in sports mode, which means I can shoot rapid-fire.”

This guy is almost always described first and foremost as an 'amateur sports photographer' (which gives his picture taking some plausibility). In a Boston Globe article his is described at first as a "passionate amateur photographer" and then later in the article as working "in marketing" at Feingold O'Keefe Capital (FOC Partners). Well according to LinkedIn, he was actually Senior Managing Director in charge of Business Development and Client Services. His entire career is in senior positions in investor relations. Er, make that "marketing." And they always put an emphasis on how the camera was in sports mode so he could shoot rapid-fire. As if they're working extra hard to make the story believable.

His narrative in the above article is that this happened pretty much just as soon as he started taking pictures. Well, he says "momentarily when he got there," but we don't know what he means. Got to the window? Got to work at 2:50 in the afternoon? Actually it's not even clear from this article. Sounds like he just happened to have a camera in his hand out of reflex. Other articles say he was taking pics of the marathon. The articles on this are riddled with inconsistencies.

For example, the article above says that he contacted the FBI:

"Thorndike shot a sequence of 25 photos right after the blast that shows injured and stunned victims on the ground below. But it was the behavior of one man — seen running from the scene — that prompted Thorndike to contact the FBI."

Now here from this Boston Globe story, we read a somewhat different narrative https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/04/17/concord-man-photos-marathon-finish-line-are-studied-fbi/MSGTXPg5qhRx4ZfQMlR1lI/story.html:

"Ben Thorndike of Concord is a “Marathon junkie,” a four-time runner at Boston, and a passionate amateur photographer who arrived at work near the finish line Monday with plans to chronicle the day in pictures.

"He had photographed the gathering crowd, the winners, and then the middle-of-the-packers. But at 2:50 p.m., from a third-floor window, a startled Thorndike captured the first explosion and its immediate, bloody impact in stunning, rapid-fire sequence."

So in contrast to the previous article, it wasn't "almost momentarily when he got there" because he had been taking pictures for a long time.

Notice also that it says 'third-floor window.' In this NYTimes article, it says it was his office on the 3rd floor:

"Ben Thorndike, a managing director at a hedge fund in Boston, was watching the marathon from his third-floor office, right above where Katie Carmona, a law clerk from Austin, Tex., was waiting for her husband, Paul, to cross the finish line." Here is from another story from the NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/11/us/friendships-arising-from-boston-marathon-horror-offer-solace.html?_r=0:

At first I thought, well, don't senior executives usually get cushy offices upstairs? I hunted around trying to find what floor this company was on. Their website (http://focpartners.com/) is down due to failure to pay their webhosting company (anyway they were bought out), and I couldn't find a suite or floor number anywhere. Then I tried the internet archive from 2014 and bingo: their address is given as the 10th floor!
https://web.archive.org/web/20141217075755/http://focpartners.com/

According to zoominfo, they didn't have more than 50 employees, so it's not like they're spread out all over the building. Or that it's plausible that a senior executive had a 3rd floor office, 7 floors below the main office. There is currently a 6,000 sq ft office space for lease in the building on the 10th floor. Maybe they vacated after being recently bought out.

Also in this story, it says that his suspicions about one man led "Thorndike to alert a friend in the broadcast media to the photos, which then led to ­interest from the FBI." So in this story the FBI is contacting him, not the other way around.

And here's another whopper in the Boston Globe article:

"When the second explosion happened 12 seconds after the first, Thorndike said, he found himself standing in the shards and broken panes of three or four windows. It was then that he and other office workers ­realized they had to flee the building."

Bullshit! The second explosion wasn't anywhere near there! It barely broke the glass next door let alone way down the street. What a load of crap.

Here is a picture from well after the explosions. We know that Thorndike was not in the third floor window here that is blown out for a couple of reasons, the most compelling of which is that from his own photos you can see another set of bay windows to the left of him between his location and the explosions. That window is shown in this picture as being blown out, not the one where the pictures were taken from.

Also, in another article he says:

"I had my camera in my hand, and I just pushed the rapid-shutter button down and just took 25 pictures over the course of what felt like a long time, but I think it was only 15 or 20 seconds."

So actually he knows it wasn't more than 12 seconds. But whatever.

And as I've pointed out, there are also contradictions about whether he gave the pics to the FBI or the FBI came to him for pics. Depends which article you read. In an interview he did, which I can no longer get to work but should be available in that boston cbs local link above, Thorndike says he first sent the pics to a friend at CNBC, and then only later called the FBI. (See the discussion about this on this forum thread. Apparently the FBI has too many 1-800 numbers, he got confused, so sent it to his journalist friend.)

Another funny thing about his pictures is that you only ever see the pictures of that moment. In some of the articles it says he had already taken lots of pictures, but those are the only ones we ever see.

Compare that to another set of pictures from a little further down the street, by another guy who was taking pictures of the marathon from his office. His photos are on flickr, and you can see that he's taking pictures of the marathon happening before the bomb goes off. https://www.flickr.com/photos/hahatango/with/8653921886/

Note that Dave McGowan was among the first (I believe) to pick up on these pictures and really pick them apart. Looking over at what Dave has to say about Thorndike, there appears to be some possible misdirection.

First, he says that Thorndike had snapped 263 boring shots. I couldn't find that number anywhere else, don't know where he got it from. But even it it's true, he then says: "I'm only going to present the even numbered images. You can view the full collection, along with all the pre-blast photos, at this link: http://imgur.com/a/Cza6V#13" But when you go to the link, there aren't any pre-blast photos. The only photos I've been able to find from Thorndike are only from this moment.

Another weird thing is that Dave hints multiple times that the story of these two photographers is suspicious, both in terms of the coincidence of being there with DSLRs on hand and then with Thorndike, that he stopped taking pics just as things were getting interesting. So he's kind of hinting at these things, but doesn't go anywhere with it. If the coincidence is unbelievable, then what does it imply about the photos? Why would people with inside knowledge of the event be taking photos of it?

Finally, Dave but especially other conspiracy theorists like James Tracy (http://memoryholeblog.com/2014/04/11/boston-marathon-bombing-and-media-disinformation/) always emphasize how the media downplays, ignores or buries these pictures. That is valid to a point, but it's also a kind of misdirection -- the amazing thing isn't that the pics were buried, but that they were taken in the first place!

[EDIT 2: I'M NOT SAYING THE PICTURES ARE FAKE, I'M JUST SAYING THAT THEY WEREN'T TAKEN AND DISTRIBUTED BY COINCIDENCE. THE INTERESTING QUESTION THEN IS: WHO DID IT, AND WHY?]

[EDIT 3: Oops, somebody pointed out that there are links to the rest of the Thorndike pics from the imgur page that McGowan linked to. My bad. Though that was the weakest part of the argument and kind of irrelevant. The rest still stands.]