Author Archives: News Sources

Libya faces growing Islamist threat

The Guardian reports: Diplomats are warning of growing Islamist violence against western targets in Libya as blowback from the war in Mali, following last week’s attack on the French embassy in Tripoli.

The bomb blast that wrecked much of the embassy is seen as a reprisal by Libyan militants for the decision by Paris the day before to extend its military mission against fellow jihadists in Mali.

The Guardian has learned that jihadist groups ejected from their Timbuktu stronghold have moved north, crossing the Sahara through Algeria and Niger to Libya, fuelling a growing Islamist insurgency.

“There are established links between groups in both Mali and Libya – we know there are established routes,” said a western diplomat in Tripoli. “There is an anxiety among the political class here that Mali is blowing back on them.”

That anxiety escalated last week after militants detonated a car bomb outside the French embassy, wounding two French guards and a Libyan student, the first such attack on a western target in the Libyan capital since the end of the 2011 Arab spring revolution.

“The armed groups we are fighting are fleeing to Libya,” said Colonel Keba Sangare, commander of Mali’s army garrison in Timbuktu. “We have captured Libyans in this region, as well as Algerians, Nigerians, French and other European dual-nationals.”

France sent troops to Mali in January after an uprising in the north started by the ethnic Tuareg National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (NMLA), named for the independent state it hopes to create.

The impetus for this uprising came from ethnic Tuareg soldiers who had fought alongside Muammar Gaddafi and fled south when his regime fell. They were later augmented by jihadists from Libya and across north Africa, who triggered international condemnation for their destruction of ancient Sufi Muslim shrines in Timbuktu. The fear across the Maghreb is that the French operation that has pushed them out of the northern cities has inadvertently compounded problems elsewhere in north Africa as jihadist units disperse.

“If you squeeze a balloon in one part, it bulges out in another,” said Bill Lawrence, of International Crisis Group, a political consultancy. “There’s no question that the French actions in Mali had the effect of squeezing that balloon towards Algeria and Libya.” [Continue reading…]

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Every drone strike is an execution — with no accountability

Steve Coll writes: In the summer of 1960, Sidney Gottlieb, a C.I.A. chemist, flew to Congo with a carry-on bag containing vials of poison and a hypodermic syringe. It was an era of relative subtlety among C.I.A. assassins. The toxins were intended for the food, drink, or toothpaste of Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s Prime Minister, who, in the judgment of the Eisenhower Administration, had gone soft on Communism. Upon his arrival, as Tim Weiner recounts in his history of the C.I.A., Gottlieb handed his kit to Larry Devlin, the senior C.I.A. officer in Léopoldville. Devlin asked who had ordered the hit. “The President,” Gottlieb assured him. In later testimony, Devlin said that he felt ashamed of the command. He buried the poisons in a riverbank, but helped find an indirect way to eliminate Lumumba, by bankrolling and arming political enemies. The following January, Lumumba was executed by the Belgian military.

For Eisenhower, who had witnessed the carnage of the Normandy landings and the Battle of the Bulge, and later claimed to “hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can,” political assassinations represented an alluring alternative to conventional military action. Through the execution or overthrow of undesirable foreign leaders, the thinking went, it might be possible to orchestrate the global struggle against Communism from a distance, and avoid the misery — and the risks of nuclear war — that out-and-out combat would bring. Assassination was seen not only as precise and efficient but also as ultimately humane. Putting such theory into practice was the role of the C.I.A., and the agency’s tally of toppled leftists, nationalists, or otherwise unreliable leaders is well known, from Mohammad Mosadegh, of Iran, in 1953, and Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, of Guatemala, in 1954, to Ngo Dinh Diem, of South Vietnam, in 1963, and Salvador Allende, of Chile, in 1973. Not all the schemes went according to plan; a few seemed inspired by Wile E. Coyote. The C.I.A. once planned to bump off Fidel Castro by passing him an exploding cigar.

Aside from the moral ugliness of violent covert action, its record as a national-security strategy isn’t encouraging. On occasion, interventions have delivered short-term advantages to Washington, but in the long run they have usually sown deeper troubles. Lumumba’s successor, the dictator Joseph Mobutu, may have been an ally of the United States until his death, in 1997, but his brutal rule prepared the way for Congo’s recent descent into chaos. Memory of the C.I.A.’s hand in Mosadegh’s overthrow stoked the anti-American fury of the Iranian Revolution, which confounds the United States to this day. Foreign policy is not a game of Risk. Great nations achieve lasting influence and security not by bloody gambits but through economic growth, scientific innovation, military deterrence, and the power of ideas. [Continue reading…]

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Syria nerve gas claims undermined by eyewitness accounts

The Observer reports: New questions have emerged over the source of the soil and other samples from Syria which, it is claimed, have tested positive for the nerve agent sarin, amid apparent inconsistencies between eyewitness accounts describing one of the attacks and textbook descriptions of the weapon.

As questions from arms control experts grow over evidence that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons on a limited scale on several occasions, one incident in particular has come under scrutiny.

While the French, UK and US governments have tried to avoid saying where the positive sarin samples came from, comments by officials have narrowed down the locations to Aleppo and Homs.

Last week the Obama administration suggested that Syrian government forces may have used the lethal nerve gas in two attacks. Opposition fighters have accused regime forces of firing chemical agents on at least four occasions since December, killing 31 people in the worst of the attacks.

A letter from the British government to the UN demanding an investigation said that it had seen “limited but persuasive evidence” of chemical attacks, citing incidents on 19 and 23 March in Aleppo and Damascus and an attack in Homs in December, suggesting strongly that samples were taken at these locations. [Continue reading…]

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No good military options for U.S. in Syria

For Reuters, Phil Stewart and Peter Apps write: Despite President Barack Obama’s pledge that Syria’s use of chemical weapons is a “game changer” for the United States, he is unlikely to turn to military options quickly and would want allies joining him in any intervention.

Possible military choices range from limited one-off missile strikes from ships – one of the less complicated scenarios – to bolder operations like carving out no-fly safe zones.

One of the most politically unpalatable possibilities envisions sending tens of thousands of U.S. forces to help secure Syrian chemical weapons.

Obama has so far opposed limited steps, like arming anti-government rebels, but pressure to deepen U.S. involvement in Syria’s civil war has grown since Thursday’s White House announcement that President Bashar al-Assad likely used chemical weapons.

After fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Pentagon is wary of U.S. involvement in Syria. The president’s top uniformed military adviser, General Martin Dempsey, said last month he could not see a U.S. military option with an “understandable outcome” there.

“There’s a lot of analysis to be done before reaching any major decisions that would push U.S. policy more in the direction of military options,” a senior U.S. official told Reuters. [Continue reading…]

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Islamist rebels create dilemma for U.S. on Syria policy

The New York Times reports: In Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, rebels aligned with Al Qaeda control the power plant, run the bakeries and head a court that applies Islamic law. Elsewhere, they have seized government oil fields, put employees back to work and now profit from the crude they produce.

Across Syria, rebel-held areas are dotted with Islamic courts staffed by lawyers and clerics, and by fighting brigades led by extremists. Even the Supreme Military Council, the umbrella rebel organization whose formation the West had hoped would sideline radical groups, is stocked with commanders who want to infuse Islamic law into a future Syrian government.

Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.

This is the landscape President Obama confronts as he considers how to respond to growing evidence that Syrian officials have used chemical weapons, crossing a “red line” he had set. More than two years of violence have radicalized the armed opposition fighting the government of President Bashar al-Assad, leaving few groups that both share the political vision of the United States and have the military might to push it forward.

Among the most extreme groups is the notorious Al Nusra Front, the Qaeda-aligned force declared a terrorist organization by the United States, but other groups share aspects of its Islamist ideology in varying degrees.

“Some of the more extremist opposition is very scary from an American perspective, and that presents us with all sorts of problems,” said Ari Ratner, a fellow at the Truman National Security Project and former Middle East adviser in the Obama State Department. “We have no illusions about the prospect of engaging with the Assad regime — it must still go — but we are also very reticent to support the more hard-line rebels.”

Syrian officials recognize that the United States is worried that it has few natural allies in the armed opposition and have tried to exploit that with a public campaign to convince, or frighten, Washington into staying out of the fight. At every turn they promote the notion that the alternative to Mr. Assad is an extremist Islamic state. [Continue reading…]

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What if the Tsarnaevs had been the ‘Boston Shooters’?

John Cassidy writes: Here’s a little mental experiment. Imagine, for a moment, that the Tsarnaev brothers, instead of packing a couple of pressure cookers loaded with nails and explosives into their backpacks a week ago Monday, had stuffed inside their coats two assault rifles — Bushmaster AR-15s, say, of the type that Adam Lanza used in Newtown. What would have been different?

Well, for one thing, the brothers would probably have killed a lot more than three people at the marathon. AR-15s can fire up to forty-five rounds a minute, and at close range they can tear apart a human body. If the Tsarnaevs had started firing near the finish line, they might easily have killed dozens of spectators and runners before fleeing or being shot by the police.

The second thing that would have been different is the initial public reaction. Most Americans associate bomb attacks with terrorists. When they hear of mass shootings, they tend to think of sociopaths and unbalanced post-adolescents. If the Tsarnaevs had managed to carry out a gun massacre unharmed and escaped, their identities unknown, would the first presumption have been that the shooters were Islamic extremists? Or would people have looked in another direction?

Third, had the attack been carried out with assault rifles rather than explosives and nails, the gun-control bills that perished on Capitol Hill just two days after the Boston bombings may have met a different fate. After yet another gun massacre, this one on the streets of Boston, it’s hard to imagine the White House wouldn’t have been able to summon up sixty votes in the Senate for expanded background checks. The proposed ban on assault weapons would surely have gotten the support of more than forty senators, too, and the proposal to ban multi-round magazines would also have gained more support — that’s if the gun lobby hadn’t managed to postpone the votes until emotions had cooled, which it would certainly have tried to do.

Finally, there’s the question of what would have happened to the Tsarnaevs after they had been caught — that’s assuming one or both of them had survived the attack. Just for the sake of argument, let’s say things had developed pretty much as they did, with Tamerlan, the elder brother, being killed, and Dzhokhar, the younger brother, being wounded and captured. Would the government have charged him with conspiring to use “weapons of mass destruction,” a count that could lead to the death penalty? And if they had done this, what would it have meant for the future of assault weapons? Once they’d been classified as W.M.D.s, would that have not made a difference to the public debate about how freely available they should be? [Continue reading…]

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Why is there a ‘red line’ on chemical weapons but not on 70,000 deaths?

Shadi Hamid writes: As evidence of the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons mounts, the Obama administration has further confused matters regarding its own stated “red lines.” The evidence appears to be strong but not necessarily “conclusive.” As the April 25th White House letter states, “the chain of custody is not clear, so we cannot confirm how the exposure occurred and under what conditions.” This sort of rhetoric points to an administration that finds itself cornered but, at the same time, seems intent on postponing any decisive action for as long humanly possible. The debate over whether, how, when, and to what extent lines were crossed not only seems petty (and undermines the very notion of a red line); it is also a distraction.

Presumably, the Obama administration’s red-lining of chemical weapons isn’t just about the risk of mass civilian casualties. After all, mass slaughter — with over 70,000 killed — has already happened and hasn’t apparently shaken the U.S. commitment to studied inaction. The real concern is over the security implications of chemical weapon use or transport. First, the weapons could fall into the hands of non-state actors, metastasizing the terror threat. Second (and related to the first), the spread of chemical weapons would lead to unprecedented regional destabilization in the form of a sharp increase in refugee flows, which, in turn, could threaten the stability of friendly autocrats like the Jordanian monarchy.

These concerns are of course justified, but the focus on security implications — rather than focusing on the 70,000 already killed by good old-fashioned artillery and aircraft — suggests an outdated (and morally problematic) calculus for action. In saying that chemical weapons are a red line, the Obama administration is also saying that the killing of 70,000 Syrians is not a red line, which, when you think about it, is a remarkable thing to say. [Continue reading…]

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How Putin has used the Boston bombing to justify his support for Assad

Alan Philps writes: In Mr Putin’s view, the Chechen struggle for independence from Russia was a stage in the break-up by Sunni Muslim militants of the Eurasian state system. It began with the US-supported mujahideen destroying the Afghan state, leading to the creation of Al Qaeda.

The Chechen bid for independence, Mr Putin has said, could have led to the break-up of Russia, where one seventh of the population is Muslim. By reconquering the Chechen territories in 1999-2000 and installing the Kadyrov family, former rebels turned Moscow loyalists, as rulers, he claims to have foiled the “Balkanisation” of Russia.

In Mr Putin’s view, the US has been doing the opposite. It has allowed Islamist governments to take over in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt; it has left Iraq in a state of low-level war; and now it wants to oust the Syrian leader, Bashar Al Assad, a Kremlin ally and a rare surviving example of a secular leader in the region.

For the past two years, Russia has helped the Syrian leader to follow Mr Putin’s playbook for defeating the jihadists. Thanks to its diplomatic support, the Kremlin has made sure that outside forces are impotent in the Syria crisis.

Mr Assad loses no opportunity to dismiss the rebel forces as Al Qaeda placemen, just as the Kremlin took to calling the Chechen rebels foreign “Wahhabis”. There are strong suspicions that Syrian intelligence even nurtured the jihadist forces (which in the previous decade they had funnelled into Iraq to fight the Americans) into the organisation now known as the Al Qaeda-linked Jabhat Al Nusra, to give the rebels a bad name.

Mr Assad is even using the domino theory: in a TV interview on Syrian independence day he warned Jordan that if it continued to support the rebels, it would be the next to face their fire.

Syria, of course, is not Chechnya. The Chechen conflict, for all its brutality and bloodshed, had few international repercussions. But every country in the region is affected by what is happening in Syria. Also, the armed force available to President Assad is nothing like the firepower that Mr Putin assembled to crush the chaotic and faction-ridden Chechen government in 1999.

The false parallel between Chechnya and Syria has not stopped the Kremlin from using the Boston Marathon bombing as a further argument against the arming of the anti-Assad rebels.

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How Assad’s chemical weapons strategy outfoxed Obama

Joseph Holliday writes: You’ve got to hand it to him. Bashar al-Assad may be a cruel and ruthless dictator, but he does know how to play his cards. His careful, incremental introduction of chemical weapons into the Syrian conflict has turned President Barack Obama’s clear red line into an impressionist watercolor, undermining the credible threat of U.S. military intervention. Despite Obama’s statement on Friday that “we’ve crossed a line,” Assad knows that the United States does not want to be dragged into a Middle Eastern civil war and is attempting to call Obama’s bluff.

The Syrian regime’s subtle approach deliberately offers the Obama administration the option to remain quiet about chemical attacks and thereby avoid the obligation to make good on its threats. But even more worrying, Assad’s limited use of chemical weapons is intended to desensitize the United States and the international community in order to facilitate a more comprehensive deployment in the future — without triggering intervention.

The advent of chemical weapons use in Syria should not come as a surprise, and neither should the manner in which Assad has introduced them. The gory details about chemical weapons use are still forthcoming, but one of the first likely instances took place in late March at Khan al-Asal, a regime military facility under siege by rebels. Opposition reports and videos showed symptoms and effects consistent with a chlorine or phosphate-based chemical weapon, which the rebels claimed was delivered by a short-range rocket. [Continue reading…]

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The Boston bombing and immigration

Andrew Rosenthal writes: Rep. Steve King, Republican of Iowa has … said that “[in light of the Boston bombings] we need to take a look at the big picture” before proceeding with immigration reform.

So, let’s look at the big picture. The slain older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, had a green card, while the surviving younger brother, Dzhokhar, is a naturalized citizen. As I said, they both arrived here fairly recently.

But then, so did Lu Lingzi, one of the three people killed in the explosions. She was from China, a graduate student at Boston University who played piano and liked dogs and blueberry pancakes.

The Tsarnaevs’ 26-year-old carjacking victim was also born in China. According to a Boston Globe story on his harrowing experience “his quick-thinking escape…allowed police to swiftly track down” the brothers, “abating a possible attack” on New York City.

Guess who else was foreign born? The gas station clerk who sheltered the carjack victim and called 911. His name is Tarek Ahmed. He is 45 years old,. He told a Times reporter, Wendy Ruderman, that he is Muslim and came here from Egypt seven years ago.

Mr. Ahmed also told The Times: “I love this country. My heart goes out to everybody who is affected by this.”

The story of the Boston marathon attacks is not just about two immigrant brothers suspected of committing a horrific act of violence. It is also about the foreign residents and immigrants they victimized and those who assisted in their capture.

The “big picture” is the same as it ever was: Visa shortages and the millions of people living in the shadows, doing jobs no one else wants.

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The NSA has been planning cyber attacks since Clinton era

Jeffrey T Richelson and Malcom Byrne write: At a time when Chinese malware is targeting America’s computer infrastructure and U.S.-Israeli worms (e.g., Stuxnet) have reportedly attacked Iranian centrifuges, a recently declassified item from the National Security Agency (NSA) offers a little history on how at least one part of the U.S. government foresaw its role in the growing field of “Information Warfare.”

This short item from a classified NSA publication reveals that as far back as 1997 the super-secret agency was tasked with finding ways not just to listen in on our enemies (the NSA’s usual stock-in-trade), but actually to attack hostile computer networks. The document proclaimed that “the future of warfare is warfare in cyberspace,” and it sketched out how tomorrow’s “Information Warriors” would think, act, and fight on the new digital battlefield.

The NSA’s involvement in cybersecurity is an outgrowth of its longtime role in ensuring communications and information security for various components of the government and private sector, in addition to its need to guarantee the security of the computers it has relied on heavily for decades. Its role in computer-network exploitation — of gathering electronic “data at rest” — is a natural extension of its decades-old role of gathering “data in motion” via signals intelligence. [Continue reading…]

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How Monsanto GMO crops may threaten your health

A new scientific study links the use of Roundup — the most popular herbicide used worldwide, manufactured by Monsanto and used in conjunction with Roundup-ready GMO crops whose derivatives can be found in most processed foods — with “most of the diseases and conditions associated with a Western diet, which include gastrointestinal disorders, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression, autism, infertility, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.”

Reuters: The peer-reviewed report, published last week in the scientific journal Entropy, said evidence indicates that residues of “glyphosate,” the chief ingredient in Roundup weed killer, which is sprayed over millions of acres of crops, has been found in food.

Those residues enhance the damaging effects of other food-borne chemical residues and toxins in the environment to disrupt normal body functions and induce disease, according to the report, authored by Stephanie Seneff, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Anthony Samsel, a retired science consultant from Arthur D. Little, Inc. Samsel is a former private environmental government contractor as well as a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“Negative impact on the body is insidious and manifests slowly over time as inflammation damages cellular systems throughout the body,” the study says.

We “have hit upon something very important that needs to be taken seriously and further investigated,” Seneff said.

Environmentalists, consumer groups and plant scientists from several countries have warned that heavy use of glyphosate is causing problems for plants, people and animals.

The EPA is conducting a standard registration review of glyphosate and has set a deadline of 2015 for determining if glyphosate use should be limited. The study is among many comments submitted to the agency.

Monsanto is the developer of both Roundup herbicide and a suite of crops that are genetically altered to withstand being sprayed with the Roundup weed killer.

These biotech crops, including corn, soybeans, canola and sugarbeets, are planted on millions of acres in the United States annually. Farmers like them because they can spray Roundup weed killer directly on the crops to kill weeds in the fields without harming the crops.

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Everything is rigged: The biggest price-fixing scandal ever

Matt Taibbi writes: Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world’s largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that’s trillion, with a “t”) worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it “dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets.”

That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world’s largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world’s largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps. [Continue reading…]

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Obama hints the U.S. will turn a blind eye to Syria’s occasional use of chemical weapons

Spencer Ackerman writes: Blink and you’ll miss it, but President Obama just revised and extended his “red line” for stopping Bashar Assad from using chemical weapons against Syrian civilians.

“We cannot stand by and permit the systematic use of weapons like chemical weapons on civilian populations,” Obama said today, per Reuters’ Jeff Mason. It was Obama’s first comments about what he acknowledged was a potential “game changer” since his White House acknowledged yesterday that U.S. intelligence considers reports of chemical weapons use in Syria credible.

The key word in that statement is systematic. The surprise White House acknowledgement, in a letter to senators yesterday, said that the Syrian regime used chemical weapons, particularly sarin gas “on a small scale.” Danger Room reported that the evidence underlying the U.S. intelligence assessment included blood samples that indicated the effects of sarin. Behind the scenes, as Danger Room has earlier reported, the Obama administration has spotted Assad prepping its chemical stocks for use last year, and attempted to block shipments of precursor chemicals.

The statement gives the president wiggle room — something Obama has wanted to preserve throughout the two-year Syrian civil war. Combined with Obama’s call for to investigate and substantiate the assessment of the chemical use, Obama has now implied it would take a widespread use of the chemicals to prompt the U.S. to involve itself more deeply in the rebel effort to overthrow Assad, which is the stated objective of U.S. Syria policy. Foreign Policy managing editor Blake Hounshell suspected yesterday that it would take a much larger use of chemical weapons by Assad to spur a U.S. military response. But even “systematic” use of chemical weapons begs the question of how much sarin and other deadly gasses Assad can use before Obama feels compelled to stop him. [Continue reading…]

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Despair drives Guantánamo detainees to revolt

The New York Times reports: In the early afternoon quiet, guards in camouflage fatigues walked the two-tiered cellblocks of Camp Six, where the most cooperative of the 166 terrorism suspects held in the military prison here are housed. From a darkened control room, other guards watched banks of surveillance monitors showing prisoners in white clothing — pacing, sleeping or reading — in their cells.

But the relative calm on display to visiting reporters last week was deceiving. Days earlier, guards had raided Camp Six and locked down protesting prisoners who had blocked security cameras, forbidding them to congregate in a communal area. A hunger strike is now in its third month, with 93 prisoners considered to be participating — more than half the inmates and twice the number before the raid.

“They are not done yet, and they will not be done until there is more than one death,” said a Muslim adviser to the military, identified as “Zak” for security reasons, who fears there may be suicides. Only one thing, he predicted, will satisfy the detainees: if someone is allowed to leave.

The spark for the protest is disputed. Detainees, through their lawyers, say that when guards conducted a search of their cells on Feb. 6, they handled their Korans in a disrespectful way. Prison officials dispute that.

But both military officials and lawyers for the detainees agree about the underlying cause of the turmoil: a growing sense among many prisoners, some of whom have been held without trial for more than 11 years, that they will never go home. [Continue reading…]

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Republican lawmakers opposed to judicial independence

The Wall Street Journal reports: A federal judge decided to advise Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev of his Miranda rights, even though investigators apparently still wanted to question him further under a public-safety exception.

The judge’s move, made on Monday in the hospital where Mr. Tsarnaev was recovering, has prompted some Republican lawmakers to press the Justice Department as to why it didn’t make a stronger bid to resist the judge’s plans.

Those lawmakers say Mr. Tsarnaev’s interrogation should have continued without him being advised of his right to remain silent, because they say agents should have had more time to determine if there were other undetected bombs or plotters. After being read his rights, the suspect stopped talking to investigators, officials said.

“There will be more instances like this, and we will need to have a much better understanding about what is appropriate,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R., Mich.) said in an interview Thursday. “We have a long-standing tradition that the judiciary does not interfere with investigations. This sets a very dangerous precedent.”

Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said Thursday, “The rules of criminal procedure require the court to advise the defendant of his right to silence and his right to counsel during the initial appearance.” Mr. Boyd said Magistrate Judge Marianne Bowler made it clear on Sunday, after the first sealed charges were filed in her court against Mr. Tsarnaev, 19 years old, that the hearing would be held the following day.

Federal rules require that defendants appear before a judge without unnecessary delay—usually defined as within one business day. [Continue reading…]

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