Salon: Of all the ways in which last week’s horror in Boston showed the resilience and cooperation of a community in the wake of disaster, the tragedy will also inevitably go down as a shining example of the desperate, despicable scramble to hunt, to accuse, to blame first – and worry about ethics and responsibility later. If ever.

We saw it in the epic bungling of mainstream media outlets like CNN and the New York Post. We saw it in the frenzy of Redditors and overeager tweeters. We saw it, most cruelly, in the story of a missing student, a young man whose body may have been pulled Tuesday night from the Providence harbor. [Tripathi’s death has now been confirmed.]

Sunil Tripathi was already making headlines before the Boston Marathon bombing. The Brown undergraduate was last seen on March 16, wearing “a black jacket, blue jeans and a Philadelphia Eagles cap.” In the early days of his disappearance, the news focused on his friends and Pennsylvania family, who posted a video on YouTube pleading for him to come back. “Hey, Sunny,” they say to the man whose nickname belied a reported history of depression. “We miss you.” It was, at first, the haunting mystery of a philosophy student with a “warm smile and generous gentle spirit,” who’d taken a leave from school while he was “trying to figure out his future.”

And then Boston happened. In what was later far too generously referred to as the “confusion” of its aftermath, the amateur detectives of Reddit decided that the missing man could be seen in images at the scene of the bombing. [Continue reading…]

The Associated Press reports: Sixteen hours after investigators began interrogating him, the surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings went silent: he’d just been read his constitutional rights.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev immediately stopped talking after a magistrate judge and a representative from the U.S. Attorney’s office entered his hospital room and gave him his Miranda warning, according to four officials of both political parties briefed on the interrogation. They insisted on anonymity because the briefing was private.

Before being advised of his rights, the 19-year-old suspect told authorities that his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, only recently had recruited him to be part of the attack that detonated pressure-cooker bombs at the marathon finish line, two U.S. officials said.

The CIA, however, had named Tamerlan to a terrorist database 18 months ago, said officials close to the investigation who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case with reporters.

The new disclosure that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was included within a huge, classified database of known and suspected terrorists before the attacks was expected to drive congressional inquiries in coming weeks about whether the Obama administration adequately investigated tips from Russia that Tsarnaev had posed a security threat.

Shortly after the bombings, U.S. officials said the intelligence community had no information about threats to the marathon before the April 15 explosions that killed three people and injured more than 260.

Scott Atran writes: “Americans refuse to be terrorized,” declared President Barack Obama in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings. “Ultimately, that’s what we’ll remember from this week.” Believe that, and I’ve got a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.

The Boston bombings have provoked the most intense display of law enforcement and media coverage since the 9/11 attacks. Greater Boston was in full lockdown: “a ghost town,” “a city in terror,” “a war zone,” screamed the headlines. Public transit was stopped, a no-fly zone proclaimed, people told to stay indoors, schools and universities closed, and hundreds of FBI agents pulled from other pressing investigations to focus exclusively on the case — along with thousands upon thousands of other federal, state, and city agents equipped with heavy weapons and armored vehicles. It all came close to martial law, with all the tools of the security state mobilized to track down a pair of young immigrants with low-tech explosives and small arms who failed to reconcile their problems of identity and became suspected amateur terrorists.

Not that the events weren’t shocking and brutal. But this law enforcement and media response, of course, is part of the overall U.S. reaction to terrorism since 9/11, when perhaps never in history have so few, armed with so few means, caused so much fear in so many. Indeed, as with the anarchists a century ago, last week’s response is precisely the outsized reaction that sponsors of terrorism have always counted on in order to terrorize.

Nothing compares to the grief of parents whose child has been murdered like 8-year-old Martin Richard, except perhaps the collective grief of many parents, as for the 20 children killed in last December’s school massacre in Newtown, Conn. Yet, despite the fact that the probability of a child, or anyone else in the United States, being killed by a terrorist bomb is vastly smaller than being killed by an unregistered handgun — or even by an unregulated fertilizer plant — U.S. politicians and the public seem likely to continue to support uncritically the extravagant measures associated with an irrational policy of “zero tolerance” for terrorism, as opposed to much-more-than-zero tolerance for nearly all other threats of violence. Given the millions of dollars already spent on the Boston bombing investigation and the trillions that the national response to terrorism has cost in little more than a decade, the public deserves a more reasoned response. We can never, ever be absolutely safe, no matter how much treasure we spend or how many civil liberties we sacrifice. [Continue reading…]

Erwin Chemerinsky writes: On Monday morning, Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was charged with using a weapon of mass destruction. According to a transcript of that proceeding, a magistrate at Tsarnaev’s hospital bedside read him the Miranda warning, informing him of his right to counsel and his right to remain silent. But among the things we don’t know is if, or to what extent, Tsarnaev was interrogated before being informed of his rights.

Over the weekend, Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. gave every indication that he intended to have Tsarnaev questioned without the Miranda warning. We have to hope that didn’t happen. The Constitution is not like a deck chair, to be brought out in good weather and then put away and ignored when the seas get rough. Tsarnaev is entitled to the same constitutional protections as any other criminal defendant.

The Constitution provides protections to all those accused of crime, including the privilege against self-incrimination, the right to counsel, the right to a speedy trial in front of a jury, and the right to have guilt proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

There is no exception in the Constitution, or ever recognized by the Supreme Court, for especially horrible crimes or for ones that can be labeled terrorism. [Continue reading…]

The Associated Press reports: The elder suspect in the Boston bombings regularly attended a mosque and spent time learning to read the Quran, but he struggled to fit in during a trip to his ancestral homeland in southern Russia last year, his aunt said.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev seemed more American than Chechen and “did not fit into the Muslim life” in Russia’s Caucasus, Patimat Suleimanova told The Associated Press. She said when Tsarnaev arrived in January 2012, he wore a winter hat with a little pompom, something no local man would wear, and “we made him take it off.”
[…]
Suleimanova, who wore a pea-green headscarf, said her nephew prayed regularly and studied the Muslim holy book. “He needed this. This was a necessity for him,” she said.

Every day, using Skype, he spoke to his American-born wife, who had recently converted to Islam, and at times she instructed him on how to observe religious practices correctly when he lapsed, Suleimanova said Sunday from her home in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan. She said her nephew was considering bringing his wife to Dagestan.

Charles King writes: Ever since the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing were identified as ethnic Chechens, the national conversation about the incident has seemed to focus on the connection between the violence and Chechnya. The two brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, certainly lived in two places at once: in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in an imagined homeland in Chechnya and the North Caucasus more broadly. And although their ancestral land was something they knew mainly through family stories and nationalist mythology, they reveled in that part of their identity — at least judging from their social media profiles and the other traces they left in the public domain. In other words, the Tsarnaevs seemed quintessentially American. Perhaps that is one reason their involvement in the Boston bombing is so horrifying.

Observers have already pointed out two elements of the brothers’ story that investigators will no doubt pursue: Tamerlan’s being visited by U.S. law enforcement officers in 2011 on a tip from an unnamed foreign government and his six-month visit to Russia, including to his father’s home in the North Caucasus republic of Dagestan, in 2012.

The North Caucasus region has seen no shortage of bombs and assassinations, and people from the area have been responsible for spectacularly brutal attacks on civilians in other parts of Russia, including the 2004 hostage crisis at an elementary school that left 380 dead and the 2010 suicide bombings on the Moscow subway that killed forty.

So far, however, there is no direct information linking the North Caucasus to the attack in Boston; armed groups in the region, including the Dagestani branch of the so-called Caucasus Emirate — the jihadist network in the North Caucasus headed by Chechen warlord Doku Umarov — issued a formal statement denying any connection to the Tsarnaev brothers. The jihadists claimed instead that the brothers were pawns in an elaborate attempt by Russian security services to turn American opinion against the North Caucasus underground and against Muslims more generally. That might be far-fetched, but it would hardly be the line of argument the Emirate would pursue if it were suddenly using American operatives to expand attacks outside of Russia. The logical thing would have been for the Emirate to claim responsibility. [Continue reading…]

Haaretz reports: Ron Dermer, a diplomatic advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and candidate for the post of Israeli ambassador to Washington, told a closed meeting of U.S. Jewish leaders in New York last week that the Boston marathon bombings would increase American support for Israel – just as that support increased following the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Dermer made his remarks last Wednesday, two days after explosions rocked the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding nearly 200 more. Dermer, considered one of Netanyahu’s closest associates, is currently on vacation, after having finished his stint as a senior adviser at the Prime Minister’s Bureau.

“The bulk of the American people stand firmly with Israel and identify with Israel,” Dermer said, in a video filmed by blogger Jacob Kornbluh. “If you can look, historically, there was a big change after 9/11, and I am sure that after the tragic bombing in Boston, people will identify more with Israel and its struggle against terrorism and we can maintain that support.”

Joshua Foust writes: Early reports suggest that the two suspected Boston Marathon bombers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, are ethnically Chechen. Media reports suggest their family lived in Chechnya in the 1990s and later moved to neighboring Dagestan and then Kyrgyzstan. The Tsarnaevs moved to the United States about a decade ago, and the younger brother, Dzhokhar, became an American citizen last year. The connection between Chechen expatriates and the former Soviet Union might prove critical to understanding why these two men allegedly turned to terrorism.

Russia and Chechnya do not get along, to put it lightly. Chechnya is a tiny, autonomous republic in the southwest of Russia — part of the Caucasus region between Europe and Asia between the Black and Caspian Seas. In 1944, Josef Stalin deported the entire population of the North Caucasus — about 600,000 people in the republics of Ingushetia, Chechnya, and North Ossetia — across the Caspian Sea to the Soviet republics of Central Asia on the suspicion they were collaborating with Nazi Germany.

The mass deportation was catastrophic: Crowded, poorly ventilated trains dumped people in the middle of the steppe between Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, stranding them in the vast wastelands with no supplies. Although Nikita Khrushchev eventually returned the displaced Chechens to the Caucasus in 1957, the scars of that dislocation never went away. In many ways, the Caucasian displacement led to the militancy and separatism that still haunt the region.

After the fall of the U.S.S.R., some Soviet republics gained their independence. The “stans” of Central Asia — Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan — all became independent countries. So, too, did the countries of the South Caucasus — Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. The North Caucasus, however, never gained independence from Moscow, though many wanted it. In the years after independence, the South Caucasus was ravaged by brutal ethnic wars in Georgia and between Armenia and Azerbaijan. By 1994, Chechnya had declared its own independence, and the Russian military surged into the country.

The first Chechen war killed thousands of people, mostly civilians, and thousands more fled the republic looking for refuge. A lot of them settled in Central Asia because a sizable Chechen population had remained there since Stalin’s forced relocation, particularly in Kazakhstan. But, over the subsequent two decades, they had trouble integrating and settling down. Refugees living in the former capital of Almaty reported being harassed by the police after the 9/11 attacks on the assumption they were terrorists. Chechens who settled in the northern part of the country faced arbitrary arrest and deportation back to Russia. In 2007, Refugees International wrote a scathing assessment of Kazakhstan’s treatment of Chechen refugees, noting that the Kazakhstan government prioritized its relations with Russia over treating refugees fairly. [Continue reading…]

Rafia Zakaria writes: As a weekly columnist for the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, I’ve become adept at writing about bombings. Pakistan suffered 652 of these last year; terrorist attacks took down everything from girls’ schools to apartment buildings and felled members of Parliament, singers, and school children—each person sentenced by coincidence to be at a given location in the moment it became a bomber’s target. Through my columns, I have offered up fumbled expressions of grief and comfort to Pakistani readers whose stores of empathy are bled daily without any promise of replenishment. I believe that these rituals of caring, made so repetitious in Pakistan by the sheer frequency of terror attacks, are crucial; in preventing the normalization of violence and senseless evil, they keep a society human.

The bombings in Boston on April 15, 2013 pose their own conundrum to those like me who are in the habit of writing about bloodier conflicts with more frequent conflagrations. There is an inherent cruelty in every terror attack — an undeniable reverberation of evil in the destruction of an ordinary moment and the forced marriage of that moment to sudden violence. Boston is no different, no more or less tragic than the bombings that have razed the marketplaces of Karachi, the school in Khost, the mosque in Karbala.

And yet it seems so. Attacks in America are far more indelible in the world’s memory than attacks in any other country. There may be fewer victims and less blood, but American tragedies somehow seem to occur in a more poignant version of reality, in a way that evokes a more sympathetic response. Within minutes American victims are lifted from the nameless to the remembered; their individual tragedies and the ugly unfairness of their ends are presented in a way that cannot but cause the watching world to cry, to consider them intimates, and to stand in their bloody shoes. Death is always unexpected in America and death by a terrorist attack more so than in any other place. [Continue reading…]

Amy Davidson writes: A twenty-year-old man who had been watching the Boston Marathon had his body torn into by the force of a bomb. He wasn’t alone; a hundred and seventy-six people were injured and three were killed. But he was the only one who, while in the hospital being treated for his wounds, had his apartment searched in “a startling show of force,” as his fellow-tenants described it to the Boston Herald, with a “phalanx” of officers and agents and two K9 units. He was the one whose belongings were carried out in paper bags as his neighbors watched; whose roommate, also a student, was questioned for five hours (“I was scared”) before coming out to say that he didn’t think his friend was someone who’d plant a bomb — that he was a nice guy who liked sports. “Let me go to school, dude,” the roommate said later in the day, covering his face with his hands and almost crying, as a Fox News producer followed him and asked him, again and again, if he was sure he hadn’t been living with a killer.

Why the search, the interrogation, the dogs, the bomb squad, and the injured man’s name tweeted out, attached to the word “suspect”? After the bombs went off, people were running in every direction — so was the young man. Many, like him, were hurt badly; many of them were saved by the unflinching kindness of strangers, who carried them or stopped the bleeding with their own hands and improvised tourniquets. “Exhausted runners who kept running to the nearest hospital to give blood,” President Obama said. “They helped one another, consoled one another,” Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, said. In the midst of that, according to a CBS News report, a bystander saw the young man running, badly hurt, rushed to him, and then “tackled” him, bringing him down. People thought he looked suspicious.

What made them suspect him? He was running — so was everyone. The police reportedly thought he smelled like explosives; his wounds might have suggested why. He said something about thinking there would be a second bomb—as there was, and often is, to target responders. If that was the reason he gave for running, it was a sensible one. He asked if anyone was dead — a question people were screaming. And he was from Saudi Arabia, which is around where the logic stops. Was it just the way he looked, or did he, in the chaos, maybe call for God with a name that someone found strange?

What happened next didn’t take long. [Continue reading…]

MSNBC: One avenue of investigation is already closed off to forensic officials working the Boston Marathon bombing case due to efforts dating back decades by the National Rifle Association and gun manufacturers.

The FBI said Tuesday that gunpowder, along with pieces of metal and ball bearings, were packed into at least one pressure cooker and another device to make the crude bombs that killed three people—including an 8-year-old boy—and wounded more than 170 more during the Boston Marathon Monday.

But a crucial piece of evidence called a taggant that could be used to trace the gunpowder used in the bombs to a buyer at a point of sale is not available to investigators.

“If you had a good taggant this would be a good thing for this kind of crime. It could help identify the point of manufacturer, and chain of custody,” Bob Morhard, an explosives consultant and chief executive officer of Zukovich, Morhard & Wade, LLC., in Pennsylvania, who has traced explosives and detonators in use in the United States and Saudi Arabia, told MSNBC.com. “The problem is nobody wants to know what the material is.”

Explosives manufacturers are required to place tracing elements known as identification taggants only in plastic explosives but not in gunpowder, thanks to lobbying efforts by the NRA and large gun manufacturing groups.

Rabail Baig writes: “Shave your stubble before you come to bed, Haider,” I told my husband Monday night. He looked up at me from the computer chair without the slightest hint of protest and smiled, “of course”. A couple of hours into the night, with him sound asleep right next to me – asleep like nothing had happened – I shivered from post-traumatic stress. Cold sweat trickled down the side of my forehead meeting warm tears at the corner of my eye and disappearing into a big, wet circle on the pillow. It was my second Patriot’s Day Boston Marathon, my husband’s third. I recalled spending all evening answering calls from back home in Pakistan, saying often, “Allah nay bachaya,” (Allah saved us). But did he?

Earlier on Monday, I was sitting with Haider and three other friends around small tables at the Prudential Center food court when we heard, and felt, the loud thud. If we were around a table somewhere in Karachi, Pakistan, my hometown, we would have said a little prayer in our hearts and continued eating, hoping that by the time we were done, the roads would re-open and life would resume. Such is our threshold for bomb-like noises and actual life-consuming explosions.

But in the heart of Boston, on a day of celebration, it could only be Godzilla, or some other giant lizard, someone joked. Within 20 seconds, though, buried under a horde of people and after the ensuing stampede, we ended up on the terrace looking over Boylston Street – a stone’s throw away from where the second blast had just occurred. Soon, a distraught mob pushed us right back into the food court. Unfinished bites and sentences, deserted strollers and upturned chairs – the large mall appeared ghastly.

As we rushed out on to Huntington Avenue, unable to wipe that dreadful sight from our heads, my phone rang. A call from Pakistan. Just then, in those very few seconds, our lives, our identities, made me want to not answer it. Our future – my husband’s career in medicine and mine in journalism, our plans of having a baby, of buying a home of our own, living the American dream someday – ran through my head. I had and have never been more afraid. But I had to answer it. It was Haider’s sister calling to say hello, completely unaware of what had taken place. I quickly hung up after telling her we were safe. Were we? [Continue reading…]

I don’t have a problem with the word terrorism. An act designed to kill and maim large numbers of people and provoke fear in many more, can reasonably be called an act of terrorism. But to conflate terrorism and terror is to treat cause and effect as one, when they are not.

The ability to spread fear lies largely outside the hands of the terrorists. How terrorized a population becomes depends on public officials and above all on the media. The media are most often and in the most literal sense, the agents of terror.

Simon Jenkins writes: I know who the real terrorists are. Some of them set off a bomb during the Boston marathon, killing three people and injuring 176. Such things happen regularly round the world. For those in the wrong place at the wrong time it is a personal catastrophe.

Such deeds are senseless murders, but they are not terrorism as such. What makes them terrorist is the outside world rushing to hand their perpetrators a megaphone. Murder is magnified a thousandfold, replayed over and again, described and analysed, sent into every home. A blast becomes a mass psychosis, impelling a terror of repetition and demands for drastic countermeasures. An act of violence that deserves no meaning is given it.

Today in Britain Margaret Thatcher’s memorial service was being “reviewed in the light of the intelligence and security environment”, as if Boston had suddenly rendered London insecure. Sunday’s London Marathon was likewise “under discussion”, as officials had to deny that it might be cancelled. David Cameron had to speak. Boris Johnson had to speak. Could the Boston bomber have been awarded any greater accolade?

I heard a radio reporter intone that it was “incredibly difficult to make sporting events safe and security”. It is not incredibly difficult, it is impossible. But who dares say so, when the great god terror stalks the land, hand-in-hand with the BBC’s World at One?

Joseph Conrad’s secret agent declared that the bomber’s aim was not to kill but to create fear of killing. That is why the terrorist and the policeman “both come from the same basket”. The terrorist’s achievement would be to generate such fear that the police would be reduced to “shooting us down in broad daylight with the approval of the public”. Half his battle would be won “with the disintegration of the old morality” – by which Conrad meant liberal tolerance.

At present terrorism draws strength from the west’s adoption of extra-legal violence as a countermeasure. A democracy acting in what it regards as self-defence may differ from the mindless rage of the jihadist. But America is now taking the “war on terror” away from any specific theatre into a realm of “out of area” assassination, rendition and drone killing. As such it is easily seen as giving itself a license for random violence. [Continue reading…]

In the immediate wake of deadly explosions at the Boston marathon, Jack Ass and his website Boneheads.com have breathlessly preached conspiracy theories about the as-yet-unknown perpetrators of the attack, claiming the blast was set off or staged by the U.S. government in what Mr Ass called a “false flag operation.” The theorizing culminated in a Boneheads correspondent asking a visibly angry Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, “Is this another false flag staged attack to take our civil liberties and promote Homeland Security while sticking their hands down our pants on the streets?”

OK. That isn’t exactly a quotation (even though I put it in blockquotes) because I changed the name of the individual and his site. But he already jumped into the media spotlight yesterday. Does he really deserve any additional attention?

Christopher Dickey writes: You remember the scene at the end of the movie Casablanca, of course, when Claude Rains, playing the French police chief, wants to cover up his complicity in the crime just committed by his friend Humphrey Bogart. As more cops arrive on the scene Rains, completely at ease with his own cynicism, orders them to “round up the usual suspects.”

That is what the French government has been doing since the tragic, horrifying, and embarrassing murders of three French soldiers, a rabbi, and three Jewish children in and around Toulouse last month. But as it tries to obscure its past mistakes, it may well be complicating future investigations.

The latest arrests came in the early hours of Wednesday morning, when ten radical Islamists suspected of alleged terrorist ties or sympathies were picked up in just about every corner of the country, from Roubaix in the north to Marseille in the south. Five others were thrown out of France in recent days, and another 13 were charged with participation in a “terrorist enterprise.” Not one of those is alleged to have had any connection at all with Mohamed Merah, the 23-year-old Toulouse shooter.

“The government shows its firmness against radical Islam,” headlined the left-leaning daily Le Monde last night. “Sarkozy’s warning to Islamist associations in France,” proclaimed the front page of Le Figaro this morning. Earlier, Sarkozy vowed that people who visit jihadist Web sites would be liable to arrest. His blunt message: zero tolerance for radical Islam. And as the hard-fought presidential campaign against challengers on the right and left enters its final weeks before voting starts on April 22, that seems to be working. Ever since the Toulouse killings, Sarkozy has been climbing in the polls.
French Islamist arrests

Yet while these arrests and proclamations may be good politics—may even help to obscure the phenomenal intelligence failure that allowed the Toulouse shooter to carry out his nine-day killing spree in the first place—the headline-grabbing measures of today may weaken defenses against terrorist attacks in the future, and not only in France.

The New York Times reports: Investigating judges on Sunday filed preliminary murder and terrorism charges against the older brother of the man who confessed to killing seven people in southwest France, saying that the killer acted with the guidance of his brother, an Islamic radical who reportedly had ties to at least one jihadist network. The brother denies involvement in the fatal shootings, his lawyer said.

The police detained the gunman’s brother, Abdelkader Merah, 29, at his home outside Toulouse early on Wednesday, saying that they suspected Mr. Merah and his brother, Mohammed, 23, in the killings. Simultaneously, the police tried to detain Mohammed Merah, who repeatedly fired on officers and claimed responsibility for the attacks before being killed in a shootout with police commandos on Thursday, after a standoff that lasted more than 30 hours.

Although Mohammed Merah told the police that he had acted alone, investigators believe that he operated “under the influence of his brother,” said Élisabeth Allannic, a spokeswoman for the office of the prosecutor in Paris, which handles terrorism cases. The preliminary charges of “complicity in murder” and conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism allow a panel of judges more time to investigate whether there is enough evidence to move forward with a case against Abdelkader Merah. He has been jailed pending further investigation.