Boston bombers: FBI hunting 12-strong terrorist “sleeper cell” linked to brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/boston-bombers-fbi-hunting-12-strong-1844844#.UXM54Yqm6hA.twitter

The FBI was last night hunting a 12-strong terrorist “sleeper cell” linked to the Boston marathon bomb brothers.

Police believe Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were specially trained to carry out the devastating attack.

More than 1,000 FBI operatives were last night working to track down the cell and arrested a man and two women 60 miles from Boston in the hours before Dzhokhar’s dramatic capture after a bloody shootout on Friday.

A source close to the investigation said: “We have no doubt the brothers were not acting alone. The devices used to detonate the two bombs were highly sophisticated and not the kind of thing people learn from Google.

“They were too advanced. Someone gave the brothers the skills and it is now our job to find out just who they were. Agents think the sleeper cell has up to a dozen members and has been waiting several years for their day to come.”

A specialist team of CIA and FBI interrogators was yesterday flown to a Boston hospital to grill wounded Dzhokhar, 19, about the secret group. The University of Massachusetts student was caught on Friday after hiding out in a boat parked in a garden in locked down Watertown the day after a gun battle with police left his 26-year-old brother and a rookie cop dead.

Dzhokhar is said to have run his brother over as he escaped in a stolen car while Tamerlan lay handcuffed on the ground. They were carrying six bombs with them at the time, three of which ­exploded, as well as a handgun and rifle. The devices were thought to be pipe bombs.

Last night Dzhokhar – badly wounded but alive – lay handcuffed to his hospital bed under armed guard. The other three arrested in the port of New Bedford are also believed to be of college age.

zhokhar even went to a college party two days after the bombs wreaked havoc at the finish line. According to fellow students, he “looked relaxed” as he joined in a party at the campus on Wednesday night.

Hours later he was involved in the shootout which saw his brother killed.

Investigators have begun piecing together how the “well-mannered” brothers of Chechen origin were radicalised. Neighbours of the family said older brother Tamerlan had recently become obsessed with Islam. He mysteriously left the US in January last year to spend six months in Russia. Yesterday senior FBI counter-terrorism official Kevin Brock said: “It’s a key thread for investigators.”

It also emerged the Bureau interviewed Tamerlan two years ago, at the request of the Russian government, but could not establish that he had ties to terrorist radicals.

This was despite his worrying Russian-language YouTube page featuring links to extremist Islamic sites and others since taken down by YouTube.

One link showed an hour-long speech by an Islamic teacher called Shaykh Feiz Mohammed, while other videos are labled “Terrorists” and “Islam”.

The radical cleric, with links to extremist British Muslims, encouraged his followers to become martyrs for Islam. He said: “Teach them this: There is nothing more beloved to me than wanting to die as a mujahid.”

Yesterday the brothers’ mother Zubeidat, speaking from her home in Russia, added further intrigue to her sons’ murky past when she claimed the boys had been framed by the FBI over the two bombs last Monday that left three dead and 178 injured.

She claimed the FBI had been keeping watch on her eldest boy for up to five years. She said: “They knew what my son was doing. They knew what sites on the internet he was going to.

“They were telling me that he was really an extremist leader and that they were afraid of him. They told me whatever information he is getting, he gets from these extremist sites. They were controlling him.”

The bombers’ father Anzor wept at news that his youngest son had been captured alive. In a phone interview with a US news channel he told his

son: “Tell police everything. Everything. Just be honest.”

US Government officials have said the brothers were not under surveillance as possible militants. And an FBI statement said the matter was closed because interviews with Tamerlan and family members “did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or foreign”. But now they believe the pair, who emigrated to the United States from Dagestan about a decade ago, were part of a terror cell.

College dropout Tamerlan’s American wife Katherine Russell, 24, and their three-year-old daughter Zahara were yesterday thrown into the spotlight. She was a Christian before they married but converted to Islam. Her parents Warren, a doctor, and Judith were said to be “stunned” by their son-in-law’s involvement in the tragedy.

Judith and Warren issued a joint statement saying: “Our daughter has lost her husband today, the father of her child. In the aftermath of the Patriot’s Day horror, we know we never really knew Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Our hearts are sickened by the horror he has inflicted.”

Katherine, wearing a black hijab, was picked up by FBI agents at their home in Cambridge near Boston on Friday. Dope-smoker Dzhokhar was captured after a Watertown resident called police to say the fugitive was hiding in a boat in his back garden.

David Henneberry had gone into his garden for a cigarette after police lifted restrictions on people leaving their homes, believing the bomber had left the area. He noticed that the cover over his boat had blood on it and a strap had been cut. He went back into the house to get a stepladder and looked inside.

His stepson Robert said: “He stuck his head under the tarp and noticed a pool of blood and something crumpled up in a ball. Instead of being a hero of the moment and yelling at what we now know was the suspect, he did the right thing and called 911.”

Police immediately evacuated the family and surrounded the house, using a megaphone to tell Dzhokhar to come out with his hands up.

When he failed to respond they opened fire at the boat’s hull. Robert said: “They wound up ­shooting a couple of rounds through the boat. He wasn’t going to like that.”

Dzhokhar was wounded by the volley of gunfire and police were able to move in and arrest him. They later released infrared pictures taken from a helicopter showing Dzhokhar hiding in the boat.

Investigators will interrogate the bomber, still seriously ill last night, without reading him his rights – using special “public safety” powers.

The family of eight-year-old bombing victim Martin Richard welcomed the arrest of Tsarnaev. “Our community is once again safe from these men,” the family said in a statement.

Shortly before Dzhokhar’s capture, President Obama spoke by phone to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The White House said Obama “praised the close co-operation the US has received from Russia on counter-terrorism, including in the wake of the Boston attack”.

There were scenes of celebration across Boston as news spread of the capture of the remaining bomber.

BOSTON BOMBING SUSPECT CAPTURED, BROTHER KILLED

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/police-converge-neighborhood-outside-boston

WATERTOWN, Mass. (AP) — Lifting days of anxiety for a city and a nation on edge, police captured the surviving Boston Marathon bombing suspect, found bloodied in a backyard boat Friday night less than 24 hours after a wild car chase and gun battle that left his older brother dead and Boston and its suburbs sealed in an extraordinary dragnet.

"We got him," Boston Mayor Tom Menino tweeted. A cheer erupted from a crowd gathered near the scene.

"CAPTURED!!!" police added later. "The hunt is over. The search is done. The terror is over. And justice has won. Suspect in custody."

During a long night of violence Thursday and into Friday, brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev killed an MIT police officer, severely wounded another lawman and hurled explosives at police in a desperate getaway attempt, authorities said.

Late Friday, less than an hour after authorities said the search for Dzhokhar had proved fruitless, they tracked down the 19-year-old college student holed up in the boat, weakened by a gunshot wound after fleeing on foot from the overnight shootout with police that left 200 spent rounds behind.

He was hospitalized in serious condition, unable to be questioned about his motives.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, died in the shootout early in the day. At one point, he was run over by his younger brother in a car as he lay wounded, according to investigators.

The violent endgame unfolded four days after the bombing and just a day after the FBI released surveillance-camera images of two young men suspected of planting the pressure-cooker explosives that ripped through the crowd at the marathon finish line, killing three people and wounding more than 180.

The two men were identified by authorities and relatives as ethnic Chechens from southern Russia who had been in the U.S. for about a decade and were believed to be living in Cambridge, just outside Boston. But investigators gave no details on the motive for the attack.

President Barack Obama said the nation owes a debt of gratitude to law enforcement officials and the people of Boston for their help in the search. But he said there are many unanswered questions about the Boston bombings, including whether the two men had help from others. He urged people not to rush judgment about their motivations.

The breakthrough came when a man in a Watertown neighborhood saw blood on a boat parked in a yard and pulled back the tarp to see a man covered in blood, authorities said. The resident called 911 and when police arrived, they tried to talk the suspect into getting out of the boat, said Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis.

"He was not communicative," Davis said.

Instead, he said, there was an exchange of gunfire — the final volley of one of the biggest manhunts in American history.

Watertown residents who had been told in the morning to stay inside behind locked doors poured out of their homes and lined the streets to cheer police vehicles as they rolled away from the scene.

Celebratory bells rang from a church tower. Teenagers waved American flags. Drivers honked. Every time an emergency vehicle went by, people cheered loudly.

"They finally caught the jerk," said nurse Cindy Boyle. "It was scary. It was tense."

Police said three other people were taken into custody for questioning at an off-campus housing complex at the University of the Massachusetts at Dartmouth where the younger man may have lived.

"Tonight, our family applauds the entire law enforcement community for a job well done, and trust that our justice system will now do its job," said the family of 8-year-old Martin Richard, who died in the bombing.

The FBI was swamped with tips — 300,000 per minute — after the release of the surveillance-camera photos, but what role those played in the overnight clash was unclear. State Police spokesman Dave Procopio said police realized they were dealing with the bombing suspects based on what the two men told a carjacking victim during their night of crime.

The search by thousands of law enforcement officers all but paralyzed the Boston area for much of the day. Officials shut down all mass transit, including Amtrak trains to New York, advised businesses not to open, and warned close to 1 million people in the entire city and some of its suburbs to unlock their doors only for uniformed police.

Around midday, the suspects' uncle, Ruslan Tsarni of Montgomery Village, Md., pleaded on television: "Dzhokhar, if you are alive, turn yourself in and ask for forgiveness."

Until the younger man's capture, it was looking like a grim day for police. As night fell, they announced that they were scaling back the hunt and lifting the stay-indoors order across Boston and some of its suburbs because they had come up empty-handed.

But then the break came and within a couple of hours, the four-day ordeal was over. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured about a mile from the site of the shootout that killed his brother.

Chechnya has been the scene of two wars between Russian forces and separatists since 1994, in which tens of thousands were killed in heavy Russian bombing. That spawned an Islamic insurgency that has carried out deadly bombings in Russia and the region, although not in the West.

The older brother had strong political views about the United States, said Albrecht Ammon, 18, a downstairs-apartment neighbor in Cambridge. Ammon quoted Tsarnaev as saying that the U.S. uses the Bible as "an excuse for invading other countries."

Also, the FBI interviewed the older brother at the request of a foreign government in 2011, and nothing derogatory was found, according to a federal law enforcement official who was not authorized to discuss the case publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The official did not identify the foreign country or say why it made the request.

Authorities said the man dubbed Suspect No. 1 — the one in sunglasses and a dark baseball cap in the surveillance-camera pictures — was Tamerlan Tsarnaev, while Suspect No. 2, the one in a white baseball cap worn backward, was his younger brother.

Exactly how the long night of crime began was unclear. But police said the brothers carjacked a man in a Mercedes-Benz in Cambridge, just across the Charles River from Boston, then released him unharmed at a gas station.

They also shot to death a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer, 26-year-old Sean Collier, while he was responding to a report of a disturbance, investigators said.

The search for the Mercedes led to a chase that ended in Watertown, where authorities said the suspects threw explosive devices from the car and exchanged gunfire with police. A transit police officer, 33-year-old Richard Donohue, was shot and critically wounded, authorities said.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev somehow slipped away. He ran over his already wounded brother as he fled, according to two law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation. At some point, he abandoned his car and ran away.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev died at a Boston hospital after suffering what doctors said were multiple gunshot wounds and a possible blast injury.

The brothers had built an arsenal of pipe bombs, grenades and improvised explosive devices and used some of the weapons in trying to make their getaway, said Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., a member of the House Intelligence Committee.

Watertown resident Kayla Dipaolo said she was woken up overnight by gunfire and a large explosion that sounded "like it was right next to my head ... and shook the whole house."

She said she was looking at the front door when a bullet came through the side paneling. SWAT team officers were running all over her yard, she said.

"It was very scary," she said. "There are two bullet holes in the side of my house, and by the front door there is another."

Tamerlan Tsarnaev had studied accounting as a part-time student at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston for three semesters from 2006 to 2008, the school said.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was registered as a student at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Students said he was on campus this week after the Boston Marathon bombing. The campus closed down Friday along with colleges around the Boston area.

The men's father, Anzor Tsarnaev, said in a telephone interview with AP from the Russian city of Makhachkala that his younger son, Dzhokhar, is "a true angel." He said his son was studying medicine.

"He is such an intelligent boy," the father said. "We expected him to come on holidays here."

The city of Cambridge announced two years ago that it had awarded a $2,500 scholarship to him. At the time, he was a senior at Cambridge Rindge & Latin School, a highly regarded public school whose alumni include Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and NBA Hall of Famer Patrick Ewing.

Tsarni, the men's uncle, said the brothers traveled here together from Russia. He called his nephews "losers" and said they had struggled to settle in the U.S. and ended up "thereby just hating everyone."

___

Sullivan and Associated Press writers Stephen Braun and Jack Gillum reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Mike Hill, Katie Zezima, Pat Eaton-Robb and Steve LeBlanc in Boston and Jeff Donn in Cambridge, Mass., contributed to this report.

Chris Matthews blames radical right for Boston Marathon bombings

http://redalertpolitics.com/2013/04/16/chris-matthews-blames-radical-right-for-boston-marathon-bombings/

Leave it to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews to make the most ridiculous comments about who was behind Monday’s Boston Marathon bombings.

While Boston police, city officials and the FBI were just beginning their investigation into the cause of the bombings – which killed at least three people and injured at least 150 – Matthews was busy adding his own two cents as to whom the perpetrator may have been.

“Normally, domestic terrorist people tend to be on the far right, although that’s not a good category,” Matthews said on Monday’s show. “Extremists, let’s call them that. Do they advertise after they do something like that? Do they try to get credit as a group or do they just hate America so much, or its politics, or its government, that they just want to do the damage – that they don’t care if they get public credit if you will.”

Fortunately, his guest – NBC terrorism analyst Michael Leiter – quickly shifted the focus of his answer away from Matthews’ outlandish assertions. He rightly said that that while many groups, including al-Queda, will likely take credit for the bombing, it is the job of the FBI and the Boston police to determine if the claims are actually real.

As if that wasn’t enough, Matthews then goes on to blame those who have a vendetta against the Kennedy family for the bombings, as it was thought at one point Monday that a fire at the JFK Presidential Library just outside downtown Boston may have been related as well.

“Again, it’s an early situation, but looking at the Kennedy library, not something at Bunker Hill, not something from the freedom trail or anything that kind of historic, but a modern political figure of the Democratic party,” Matthews asked Leiter. “Does that tell you anything?”

Truthfully, we’re shocked that he didn’t attribute the bombings to racism as well!

You can watch Matthews’ ridiculous allegations in the video below:

DZHOKHAR TSARNAEV, LOST AND FOUND

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/04/dzhokhar-tsarnaev-is-found.html

As always in America, what actually happened today near Boston braided entirely into what was being shown and said, so that the two became inseparable. There were two, and then one, terrorists on the run in a Boston suburb; there were two, and then one, terrorists at large in the American imagination. The strange grim day wore on into the blue-and-white flashing night, with the apparent and blessedly peaceful and rightly well-applauded surrender of a more or less intact Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Then, of course, the cops spoke and officials stepped forward to claim credit, or at least a piece of the spotlight, for the arrest. U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz announced that now “my journey begins.” One imagined the real heroes and heroines of the occasion standing back in the shadows, smiling ironically at the politicians’ posturing. All the while, though, you couldn’t help separate thinking about terrorism from thinking about the way that we represent it.

The incomparable A. J. Liebling wrote once that there are three kinds of journalists: the reporter, who says what he’s seen; the interpretive reporter, who says what he thinks is the meaning of what he’s seen; and the expert, who says what he thinks is the meaning of what he hasn’t seen. The first two—reporters and interpretive reporters—have been largely undermined by economics and incuriosity. But the third category never stops growing. We are now a nation of experts, with millions of people who know the meaning of everything that they haven’t actually experienced.

There are still paradoxes and ironies, surprising heroes and unexpected goats in the new reign. Sometimes the professional experts really are undone by the amateurs. Waking up at six-thirty on Friday morning and hearing what had happened in the night, I followed my own generational instincts, honed on Vietnam and Watergate and the Gulf War, and turned on the television to see the usual stern-jawed “terrorism experts” being stern, scary, and obviously not knowing what the hell they were talking about. Within an hour, with the help of my eighteen-year-old, who insisted on turning from television toward the Web, we had the Tsarnaev brothers’ names, school history, wrestling involvement, vKontakte (Russian Facebook) pages, YouTube videos, and boxing photos.

And we already had a glimpse of how this might be a tragedy of assimilation and its discontents. A well-liked student at a good public school, a Golden Gloves boxer—somehow they had transformed their souls in ways that made it possible for them to casually drop devices meant to rip human flesh apart next to an eight-year-old boy and his family. Of course, the pseudo-expertise of the official experts was more than matched by the pseudo-expertise of the amateurs. The night before, the attempt to hang this thing on a poor—and still missing—Indian-American student at Brown, had been crazy, not to mention libelous, not to mention heartbreaking to his family.

However the details turn out, this is certainly a tragic story about America far more than it is a tale about the exotic elsewhere. Whatever had happened, it had happened here. Surprises surely await us as we go on, but an intuitive scenario—in which an older brother who had struggled with the promise and disillusion of American life and turned to extremist Islam for comfort dominated and seduced a younger brother not born or made for violence—seemed plausible. But all of our experience suggests that it is not “fundamentalism” alone but an aching tension between modernity and a false picture of a purer fundamentalist past that makes terrorists.

And it was an American story, too, in what could only be called a hysterical and insular overreaction that allowed it to become the sole national narrative. I happened to be in London on 7/7—a far more deadly and frightening terrorist attack—and by 7 P.M. on that horrible day, with the terrorists still at large (they were dead already, but no one knew that), the red double-decker buses were rolling and the traffic was turning and life, though hardly normal, was determinedly going on. The decision to shut down Boston, though doubtless made in good faith and from honest anxiety, seemed like an undue surrender to the power of the terrorist act—as did, indeed, the readiness to turn over the entire attention of the nation to a violent, scary, tragic, lurid but, in the larger scheme of things, ultimately small threat to the public peace.

The toxic combination of round-the-clock cable television—does anyone now recall the killer of Gianni Versace, who claimed exactly the same kind of attention then as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev did today?—and an already exaggerated sense of the risk of terrorism turned a horrible story of maiming and death and cruelty into a national epic of fear. What terrorists want is to terrify people; Americans always oblige.

Experts tell us the meaning of what they haven’t seen; poets and novelists tell us the meaning of what they haven’t seen, either, but have somehow managed to fully imagine. Maybe the literature of terrorism, from Conrad to Updike (and let us not forget Tolstoy, fascinated by the Chechens), can now throw a little light on how apparently likable kids become cold-hearted killers. Acts of imagination are different from acts of projection: one kind terrifies; the other clarifies.

THE CULPRITS BY DAVID REMNICK

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2013/04/29/130429ta_talk_remnick

In the midst of the Second World War, Joseph Stalin, seized by one of his historic fits of paranoia and cruelty, declared the Chechen people disloyal to the U.S.S.R. and banished them from their homeland in the northern Caucasus to Central Asia and the Siberian wastes. Tens of thousands of Chechens, along with members of other small ethnic groups from the Caucasus and the Crimean Peninsula, died in the mass deportation or soon after—some from cold, some from starvation. The Tsarnaev family eventually settled in a town called Tokmok, in Kyrgyzstan, not far from the capital, Bishkek. Most who survived the next thirteen years in exile were permitted to return home, in the late fifties, under Nikita Khrushchev, and they reëstablished a sense of place as well as identity. Some remained expatriates. Chechens speak Russian with a thick accent; more often they speak their own language, Noxchiin Mott. The Caucasus region is multicultural in the extreme, but the predominant religion in the north is Islam. The Chechen national spirit is what is invariably called “fiercely independent.” When the Soviet Union collapsed, in 1991, nationalist rebels fought two horrific wars with the Russian Army for Chechen independence. In the end, the rebel groups were either decimated or came over to the Russian side. But rebellion persists, in Chechnya and in the surrounding regions—Dagestan and Ingushetia—and it is now fundamentalist in character. The slogan is “global jihad.” The tactics are kidnappings, assassinations, bombings.

Anzor Tsarnaev, an ethnic Chechen who lived much of his life in Kyrgyzstan, emigrated a decade ago to the Boston area with his wife, two daughters, and two sons. Despite arthritic fingers, he made his living as an auto mechanic. Members of the family occasionally attended a mosque on Prospect Street in Cambridge, but there seemed nothing fundamentalist about their outlook.

Anzor’s elder son, Tamerlan, appeared never to connect fully with American life. “I don’t have a single American friend,” Tamerlan told a photographer named Johannes Hirn, who asked to take pictures of him training as a boxer. “I don’t understand them.” He studied, indifferently, at Bunker Hill Community College, for an engineering degree. He described himself as “very religious”; he didn’t smoke or drink. Twenty-six and around two hundred pounds, he boxed regularly at Wai Kru Mixed Martial Arts. He loved “Borat” (“even though some of the jokes are a bit too much”). He had a daughter, but scant stability. Three years ago, he was arrested for domestic assault and battery. (“In America, you can’t touch a woman,” Anzor told the Times.)

David Bernstein, a retired mathematician from Moscow, who emigrated thirty-three years ago, said he knew the family because he used to take his car in regularly to Anzor. He noticed that Tamerlan sometimes worked at the body shop, although he didn’t seem happy about it. “I talked with Tamerlan about stupid things,” Bernstein recalled. “I asked him if he knew about his name, the great warrior. He talked a little about religion and politics. I said everyone is religious in a certain sense, and he said I should become a Muslim. I put him off, saying everyone invents his own religion.” When Bernstein discovered that his acquaintance was believed to be responsible for an act of terror at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, he was mystified. “I feel like Forrest Gump,” he said. “Suddenly, he is famous through this terrible act, and I had these conversations with him. But who can say they know him, really?”

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Dzhokhar, nineteen, had graduated from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, where he was a locally celebrated wrestler, described as slight, agile, and a little shy. He won a scholarship from the City of Cambridge. He worked for a couple of years as a lifeguard at a pool on the Harvard campus. A fellow-lifeguard remembered him as a “nice” kid with a “good sense of humor.” Dzhokhar’s high-school friends remembered him fondly, too. “He was a cool guy,” Ashraful Rahman said. “I never got any bad vibes from him. He wasn’t a star student, but he was smart. We met sometimes at the mosque in Cambridge. Dzhokhar went to the mosque more than I did, but he wasn’t completely devoted. When I think about this, I have to ask, was he forced to do this? Was he brainwashed? It’s so out of character. And you have to remember—he was a stoner. He was really into marijuana. And generally guys like that are very calm, cool.”

Essah Chisholm, a fellow-wrestler, said, “He was a cool dude.” But when Chisholm and a couple of his friends saw photographs of the Tsarnaev brothers on television Thursday night, they called the F.B.I. tip line. Late that night, the armed confrontation began—a shoot-out, a furious chase, hurled bombs. “It’s mind-boggling,” Chisholm said on Friday afternoon. “Every time I see his name on TV, it’s just unbelievable. To see Dzhokhar’s name, to see his face. I think this had to do with his older brother. Unless he was some sort of sleeper agent, I think his brother had a pretty strong influence. Tamerlan maybe felt like he didn’t belong, and he might have brainwashed Dzhokhar into some radical view that twisted things in the Koran.”

The sense of bland unknowingness—“He seemed so nice!”—began to evaporate the closer we got to the Tsarnaev brothers. Tamerlan’s YouTube channel features a series of videos in support of fundamentalism and violent jihad, including a rant by Feiz Muhammad, an Australian cleric and ex-boxer based in Malaysia; in one video, the cleric goes on about the evil “paganism” in the Harry Potter movies. Another video provides a dramatization of the Armageddon prophecy of the Black Banners of Khurasan, an all-powerful Islamic military force that will rise up from Central Asia and defeat the infidels; it is a martial-religious prophecy favored by Al Qaeda.

Dzhokhar’s Twitter feed—@J_tsar—is a bewildering combination of banality and disaffection. (He seems to have been tweeting even after the explosions at the finish line last Monday.) As you scan it, you encounter a young man’s thoughts: his jokes, his resentments, his prejudices, his faith, his desires.

March 14, 2012—a decade in america already, I want out
August 16, 2012—The value of human life ain’t shit nowadays that’s #tragic
August 22, 2012—I am the best beer pong player in Cambridge. I am the #truth
September 1, 2012—Idk why it’s hard for many of you to accept that 9/11 was an inside job. I mean I guess fuck the facts y’all are some real #patriots #gethip
December 24, 2012—Brothers at the mosque either think I’m a convert or that I’m from Algeria or Syria, just the other day a guy asked me how I came to Islam
January 15, 2013—I don’t argue with fools who say islam is terrorism it’s not worth a thing, let an idiot remain an idiot
March 13, 2013—Never try to fork a mini tomato while wearing a white shirt, it will explode
April 10, 2013—Gain knowledge, get women, acquire currency #livestrong
April 15, 2013—Ain’t no love in the heart of the city, stay safe people
April 15, 2013—There are people that know the truth but stay silent & there are people that speak the truth but we don’t hear them cuz they’re the minority
April 16, 2013—I’m a stress free kind of guy

Gregory Shvedov, the editor of a Web site based in Moscow called Caucasian Knot, visits the Caucasus regularly and studies both the jihadist movement and the Russian government and military’s draconian behavior in the region. He was hardly shocked that two ethnic Chechens, raised largely in the U.S. but with a strong attachment to their homeland, might carry out such an act on a “soft target” like the marathon. “These days there are social networks, and people make their decisions from them,” he said from Moscow. “I would not be surprised if they had another life over social media. What kind of videos are they watching? What kind of lectures and YouTubes about jihad?” If Tamerlan did what he is suspected of doing, he might not have got his education, or instructions, entirely through digital means. On January 12, 2012, he flew from New York to Moscow, a regular target of Chechen rage; he didn’t return until seven months later.

The greatest sympathy is reserved for the families of those who were killed by the bombing and in the violent pursuit that followed—and for the dozens who were severely injured in the blasts. Even the most ardent New Yorkers felt a profound allegiance to, and love for, the people of Boston. But, as the day was coming to an end, you could not help but feel something, too, for the parents of the perpetrators, neither of whom could fathom the possibility of their sons’ guilt, much less their cruelty and evil. Interviewed at their apartment in Makhachkala, the capital city of Dagestan, they spoke of a “setup,” an F.B.I. plot. The mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, told the television station Russia Today, “Every single day, my son used to call me and ask me, ‘How are you, Mama?’ Both of them. ‘Mama, we love you.’ . . . My son never would keep a secret.” The father described Dzhokhar as an “angel.” By the end of Friday (Saturday morning in Dagestan) their sons were gone—one dead, the other wounded, hospitalized, and under arrest.

The Tsarnaev family had been battered by history before—by empire and the strife of displacement, by exile and emigration. Asylum in a bright new land proved little comfort. When Anzor fell sick, a few years ago, he resolved to return to the Caucasus; he could not imagine dying in America. He had travelled halfway around the world from the harrowed land of his ancestors, but something had drawn him back. The American dream wasn’t for everyone. What they could not anticipate was the abysmal fate of their sons, lives destroyed in a terror of their own making. The digital era allows no asylum from extremism, let alone from the toxic combination of high-minded zealotry and the curdled disappointments of young men. A decade in America already, I want out. ♦

Boston Bomb Suspect Alarmed Russian Relatives With Extremist Views

http://abcnews.go.com/US/boston-bomb-suspect-alarmed-russian-relatives-extremist-views/story?id=19006449#.UXMvf9JmjjY

One of the Boston bombing suspects set off alarm bells among his family a year ago during a trip here to visit relatives, ABC News has learned.

According to a family member, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a devout Muslim, was kicked out of his uncle's house because of his increasingly extremist views on religion.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and his brother Dzhokhar, 19, are believed to have placed bombs at the Boston Marathon, killing three and wounding 170. Tamerlan was killed in a shootout with police early Friday and Dzhokhar was badly wounded and captured by police Friday night.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev spent roughly six months in Russia in 2012, but the relative, who insisted on anonymity to avoid offending other family members, insisted the young man had been radicalized in the United States before his trip.

Dagestan is one of the poorest and most violent regions of Russia, home to an Islamist insurgency that seeks to establish an independent state. So far, no links have tied him to militant groups here.

Members of Congress, however, say those six months last year were a turning point in Tamerlan Tsarnaev's radicalization.

"When he came back he starting posting more radical jihadist YouTube videos and started becoming more of a fundamentalist Muslim," Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, told ABC News Friday.

"My concern is that he may have gone over there to visit his father and he received training and then became radicalized and then came back. Something happened in that period of time. He was not like that before," McCaul said.

The FBI, meanwhile, also looked into Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011.

In a statement Friday, the bureau said it investigated Tsarnaev on behalf of a foreign government, though it did not reveal which one.

"The request stated that it was based on information that he was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer, and that he had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country's region to join unspecified underground groups," the FBI statement said.

The bureau said that in response to the request it combed through its databases and interviewed the man and members of his family, but did not find any evidence he was tied to terror groups.

"The FBI did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or foreign, and those results were provided to the foreign government in the summer of 2011. The FBI requested but did not receive more specific or additional information from the foreign government," the FBI statement said.

The family member described Tsarnaev's father and mother as good parents who are distraught at the news. They tried to evade the media today after granting several interviews a day earlier, even instructing family members to tell reporters they had left for Chechnya. The pair were briefly spotted, however, by journalists waiting outside their home.

The relative said he saw them Friday and that the mother was sobbing and the father suffered some sort of panic attack in the evening. Also on Friday, according to a security source, the parents were questioned by security services.

The relative said Tsarnaev's father is a "traditional Muslim" who eschews extremism. He couldn't imagine his son would do such a thing, the family member said.

Analysis: Boston lockdown

http://www.jpost.com/Features/Front-Lines/What-message-is-US-sending-with-a-Boston-lockdown-310424

Millions of residents were ordered to stay in a “lockdown” on Friday as police hunted down the second Boston Marathon bomber.

BOSTON – Millions of residents of the Boston metropolitan area were ordered to stay on “lockdown” on Friday as police and the FBI hunted down the second of the Boston Marathon bombers.

I was among them and for most of the day, my family and I stayed inside our home behind locked doors, watching the news and following the Twitter feed. On Friday night, Boston synagogues even cancelled Shabbat services and one local Orthodox rabbi permitted his members to leave a radio on over the weekend for updates.

When I eventually ventured outside, the eerie silence on Boston and Cambridge’s empty streets was something strange. It was midday and all of the stores were closed, including supermarkets, the neighborhood Starbucks and even gas stations.

With time on my hands as I walked the empty streets, I had the opportunity to think back to the aftermath of terrorist attacks I had covered in Israel before leaving for a sabbatical at Harvard University.

I might be wrong, but my feeling is that in the aftermath of those attacks the opposite always happened.

There was no lockdown in Israel and there was no order by the mayor to seek shelter.

Instead, people were out in the streets, filling up coffee shops right next to the one that had been bombed or standing at bus stops waiting for the next bus from the same line that had just exploded. This has always impressed me as a sign of true resilience, of a refusal to allow terrorism to change our way of life.

I am not judging the people of Boston and their leaders and yes, there is something to be said about being safe rather than sorry. But, I wonder about the long-term strategic ramifications and if this won’t be viewed as a near-surrender to terrorism.

Yes, on Friday there was a 19-year-old terrorist on the loose, but did that mean that nearly 5 million people needed to stay locked inside their homes? Did it warrant the complete suspension of public transportation, of taxis, of Amtrak trains between Boston and the rest of the East Coast? The postponement of the Red Sox-Royals game, the Bruins-Penguins game? I’m not sure.

Also, it was strange when considering that from Monday – when the bombings took place – until Friday, there were two terrorists on the loose and there was no consideration of a lockdown.

Now, with one terrorist still free there is a lockdown? Shouldn’t the opposite have happened? But even ignoring the operational considerations, there is symbolism when one of the US’s largest cities paralyzes itself in face of terrorism.

Is this the message the US wants to send around the world: That a single terrorist can disrupt so many lives and possibly more important – the American way of life? I’m also not sure.

The writer is The Jerusalem Post’s military affairs reporter and currently on sabbatical in Boston.

Why Should I Care That No One’s Reading Dzhokhar Tsarnaev His Miranda Rights?

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2013/04/dzhokhar_tsarnaev_and_miranda_rights_the_public_safety_exception_and_terrorism.html

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will not hear his Miranda rights before the FBI questions him Friday night. He will have to remember on his own that he has a right to a lawyer, and that anything he says can be used against him in court, because the government won’t tell him. This is an extension of a rule the Justice Department wrote for the FBI—without the oversight of any court—called the “public safety exception.”

There is one specific circumstance in which it makes sense to hold off on Miranda. It’s exactly what the name of the exception suggests. The police can interrogate a suspect without offering him the benefit of Miranda if he could have information that’s of urgent concern for public safety. That may or may not be the case with Tsarnaev. The problem is that Attorney General Eric Holder has stretched the law beyond that scenario. And that should trouble anyone who worries about the police railroading suspects, which can end in false confessions. No matter how unsympathetic accused terrorists are, the precedents the government sets for them matter outside the easy context of questioning them. When the law gets bent out of shape for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, it’s easier to bend out of shape for the rest of us.

Here’s the legal history. In the 1984 case New York v. Quarles, the Supreme Court carved out the public safety exception for a man suspected of rape. The victim said her assailant had a gun, and he was wearing an empty holster. So the police asked him where the gun was before reading him his Miranda rights. That exception was allowable, the court said, because of the immediate threat that the gun posed.

Fine. Good, even—that gun could have put other people in danger. Things start to get murkier in 2002, after the FBI bobbled the interrogation of Zacarias Moussaoui, the 20th9/11 hijacker—the one who didn’t get on the plane—former FBI special agent Coleen Rowley wrote a memo pleading that "if prevention rather than prosecution is to be our new main goal, (an objective I totally agree with), we need more guidance on when we can apply the Quarles 'public safety' exception to Miranda's 5th Amendment requirements." For a while, nothing much happened.

Then the Christmas Day bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was apprehended in December 2009, before he could blow up a plane bound for Detroit. The FBI invoked the public safety exception and interrogated. When the agents stopped questioning Abdulmutallab after 50 minutes and Mirandized him—after getting what they said was valuable information— Abdulmutallab asked for a lawyer and stopped talking. Republicans in Congress denounced the Obama administration for going soft.

Next came Faisal Shahzad, caught for attempting to bomb Times Square in May 2010. He was interrogated without Miranda warnings via the public safety exception, and again, the FBI said it got useful information. This time, when the suspect was read his rights, he kept talking. But that didn’t stop Sen. John McCain and then Sen. Christopher Bond from railing against Miranda. "We've got to be far less interested in protecting the privacy rights of these terrorists than in collecting information that may lead us to details of broader schemes to carry out attacks in the United States," Bond said. "When we detain terrorism suspects, our top priority should be finding out what intelligence they have that could prevent future attacks and save American lives," McCain said. "Our priority should not be telling them they have a right to remain silent."

Holder started talking about a bill to broadly expand the exception to Miranda a few months later. Nothing came of that idea, but in October of 2010, Holder’s Justice Department took it upon itself to widen the exception to Miranda beyond the Supreme Court’s 1984 ruling. “Agents should ask any and all questions that are reasonably prompted by an immediate concern for the safety of the public or the arresting agents,” stated a DoJ memo to the FBI that wasn’t disclosed at the time. Again, fine and good. But the memo continues, “there may be exceptional cases in which, although all relevant public safety questions have been asked, agents nonetheless conclude that continued unwarned interrogation is necessary to collect valuable and timely intelligence not related to any immediate threat, and that the government's interest in obtaining this intelligence outweighs the disadvantages of proceeding with unwarned interrogation.”

Who gets to make this determination? The FBI, in consultation with DoJ, if possible. In other words, the police and the prosecutors, with no one to check their power.

The New York Times published the Justice Department’s memo in March 2011. The Supreme Court has yet to consider this hole the Obama administration has torn in Miranda. In fact, no court has, as far as I can tell.

And so the FBI will surely ask 19-year-old Tsarnaev anything it sees fit. Not just what law enforcement needs to know to prevent a terrorist threat and keep the public safe but anything else it deemed related to “valuable and timely intelligence.” Couldn’t that be just about anything about Tsarnaev’s life, or his family, given that his alleged accomplice was his older brother (killed in a shootout with police)? There won’t be a public uproar. Whatever the FBI learns will be secret: We won’t know how far the interrogation went. And besides, no one is crying over the rights of the young man who is accused of killing innocent people, helping his brother set off bombs that were loaded to maim, and terrorizing Boston Thursday night and Friday. But the next time you read about an abusive interrogation, or a wrongful conviction that resulted from a false confession, think about why we have Miranda in the first place. It’s to stop law enforcement authorities from committing abuses. Because when they can make their own rules, sometime, somewhere, they inevitably will.

The Saudi connection linking the Boston Marathon to September 11

http://www.haaretz.com/news/world/the-saudi-connection-linking-the-boston-marathon-to-september-11.premium-1.516572

The dimensions are somewhat smaller, but the pain, fear, and anger are the same. America has again been caught off guard by foreign terrorists seeking to sow destruction and death.

By Ksenia Svetlova | Apr.20, 2013 | 4:47 PM |  63

Almost 12 years have passed since that “great tragedy,” the attacks of September 11, and the United States has yet again experienced a national tragedy. Albeit the dimensions are somewhat smaller, but the pain, fear, and anger are the same. America has again been caught off guard by foreign terrorists seeking to sow destruction and death.

In September 2001 the terrorists were Saudis (15 out of 19) and Egyptian. This time, the culprits were two Chechen brothers, Tamerlan and Dzokhar Tsarnaev. If it turns out that their motivations were religious, the context of their country of origin will not be coincidental. Until now there has not been any testament from the two, neither written nor filmed – which is generally common practice in the case of such attacks – nor has there been any claim of responsibility from Al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri. Al-Qaida also tends to take responsibility for attacks to which it was unconnected at the operational level if it shares an ideological bond with those responsible. Despite this, it is very likely that there is a strong, ideological and operational connection between the attacks of 2001 and 2013.

Back in the early 1990s, Chechnya and neighboring Dagestan became a stronghold in the Caucasus region for the radical stream of Sunni Islam, Wahhabism. Mosques and madrasas were opened; training camps for young combatants were established to prepare them for the “jihad against the infidels.” Until this day, the teachings of Said Buryatsky, a charismatic, Wahhabist radical, are among the most downloaded files in Chechnya.

This radical Islamist movement was founded in the Arabian Peninsula and adopted by tribes that founded a kingdom in the 18th century that later became Saudi Arabia. This puritan, aggressive movement is considered by orthodox Muslims as heretic. Many approached it with suspicion and rejected it, but the situation changed once the “black gold” began to flow from Saudi Arabia’s soil. Thus the Wahhabists gained their much-wanted recognition, and began to send money to religious institutions around the world, including in Chechnya and Dagestan.

In addition to the money that began to emanate from Saudi Arabia in the late 1980s, “preachers” began to travel the world as well. Scholars, religious figures, and jihadist combatants trained in battles against the Soviets began to spread. One of them was Ibn al-Khattab, the well-known military commander of Saudi-Jordanian descent, who was killed by Russian forces in March 2002.

The spread of Wahhabism in Chechnya sparked a great deal of opposition within the local society, the strong ideals of which contradicted the traditional Islam practiced in the area, as well as the way of life in Chechnya and Dagestan. Fierce battles and political conflicts ensued in the 1990s, and continued after the war in Chechnya. The institutionalization of Wahhabism in Chechnya happened not without a significant amount of force, as its supporters fought both the Chechnyans and the Russians. Despite the efforts of current Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov to prevent his capital Grozny from becoming the “Dubai of the Caucasus,” the Wahhabist extremism attracts many youths from Chechnya and Dagestan.

Only recently, video clips were published featuring Chechen jihadists that traveled to Syria to fight against President Bashar Assad’s regime. Kadyrov came out with a statement that “no Chechen is fighting in Syria,” later altering his statement by claiming that those fighting in Syria were mercenaries.

The extremist propaganda is functioning as always, and a new generation in Chechnya has grown up with conflict and propaganda. This generation is attracted to the simple ideological base of Wahhabism, and to the murderous romance of the jihad its leaders are calling for. The members of this new generation go to Syria and Iraq. Some of them maybe go to the United States and other places in the world in order to join the “army of believers,” according to them. It is not impossible to rule out that the Saudis who flew planes into the World Trade Center and the brothers from Chechnya who set off bombs at the Boston Marathon subscribed to the same radical Wahhabist ideology.

Immediately after reports were published that the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing were of Chechen origin, Kadyrov tweeted that “terror has no nationality.” Currently, his followers in Chechnya and Ingushetia will once again have to “deal with” the Wahhabist problem in Russia’s backyard. The question is if even a leader as powerful as Kadyrov can dismantle the Wahhabist institution fostering in the Caucasus for decades, receiving monetary and ideological support from Riyadh.

Ksenia Svetlova is a writer and analyst on Arab affairs for Channel 9, and has a doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Middle Eastern Studies.

The Boston bombers have already scored a tremendous victory for terror

http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/west-of-eden/the-boston-bombers-have-already-scored-a-tremendous-victory-for-terror.premium-1.516532

The whole world is watching the gripping drama of U.S. security forces invading an American metropolis and shutting it down. Terrorists around the world couldn't ask for anything more.

By Chemi Shalev | Apr.19, 2013 | 8:40 PM |  18

This was terrorism’s great victory, its spectacular triumph, its abhorrently glorious day in the sun. Never, in the history of violence aimed at innocent civilians, have the lives of so many been disrupted so much by the relatively amateurish actions of so few.

More than a million people cowered in their homes on Friday, under curfew, gripped by fear. The U.S. army and other security forces invaded and occupied an American town. Helicopters, armored vehicles, soldiers in full battle gear and crack SWAT teams sealed off streets and conducted house-to-house searches.

And the entire world was glued to its radios, television sets, computers, tablets and mobile phones, riveted by the almost incomprehensible scenes hitherto confined to outlandishly scripted Hollywood movies.

For five straight days, even before Friday’s surrealistic firefights and manhunts in Cambridge and Watertown, the Boston bombings had captured American hearts and minds and taken them hostage. The news networks went into breathless breaking news mode, erasing any and all hitherto cardinal issues from their agenda. Syria, Iran, North Korea, immigration and gun control – including the “routine” murder of about 150 other Americans in the hiatus – all were put on hold or relegated to the back burner.

Of course, the killing of three precious people and the injury of dozens of others are a painful tragedy and an unforgiveable crime. Of course, the disruption of an iconic marathon in the heart of one of America’s proudest cities is a significant event that warrants the full attention of the media and the justice authorities. Of course, Americans are justifiably concerned that after the first street bombing, others may follow.

But this was not 9/11, the Bombay bombings or the Beslan slaughter of children, also carried out by Chechen terrorists. It wasn’t the Bali nightclub bombings, the downing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie or the destruction of the federal building in Oklahoma. And it didn’t come close even to the Tel Aviv Dolphinarium carnage, the killing of students in Maalot or the murder of 39 Palestinians in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron.

Therefore, in terms of cost-benefit analysis, from the evil terrorist’s point of view, the Boylston Street bombings and their after aftermath can only be viewed as a resounding triumph. If the primary goal of terror attacks is to instill fear and intimidate people, to influence governments and to attract world attention, then the Boston bombers have probably succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

Explanations and justifications are plentiful and probably pertinent. There is no doubt, for example, that the Internet-era, social media, instant multiplication and proliferation of every minute piece of data increasingly obliterate competing narratives. And the mesmerizing pictures of the moments of drama captured on all-pervasive cellphones and security cameras make it harder and harder for audiences at home to tear their eyes away from the unfolding epics playing out on their screens. And these, in turn, magnify the impact of terrorist events on the public and influence the decisions of their government.

Americans might have also been shocked by the sudden realization that the 12-year lull in terrorist attacks following 9/11 has come to an end. Just like a “trigger trauma” for people suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the Boston terror incidents have taken many Americans back, psychologically and emotionally, to those terrifying days of fear and uncertainty following the Twin Towers attacks.

Politicians and pundits in America and around the world will now debate whether the events of the passing week were a manifestation of American resoluteness and strength of purpose or worrying signs of alarm, anxiety and panic. There are good claims to be made on both sides of the argument.

But just like the shots fired at Lexington Square exactly 238 years ago, the bombs detonated this week at Copley Square 13 miles away have also been heard around the world. The question is, however, whether the sounds from Boston will once again touch the hearts of lovers of freedom and liberty, or whether this time it will be malevolent terrorists and those who wish ill for America who will be encouraged and inspired.