Quote Originally Posted by carl View Post
timed to go off when there were a maximum number of people around,
at a very high profile event,
The bombing occurred after the professionals and serious amateur runners had already finished – skipping the timeframe where there would be the most live-tv coverage. The people it targeted, who were finishing at that time, were the types who run to raise money for charity – normal Joes. The people who were standing around cheering, were likely to have been friends and families of those normal Joes.

Quote Originally Posted by carl View Post
From this, my civilian, untrained self concludes, whoever did this was a pretty proficient terrorist, who either is a natural born genius who read a lot or was pretty well trained by people who knew what they were about.
Yeah, maybe. But the last few years of thwarted domestic terrorist attacks has involved a cavalcade of retards (literally in several cases) – so maybe the bar has just been set so low that “average” looks like “genius”.