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Thread: Terrorism in the USA:threat & response

  1. #361
    Council Member bourbon's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by jmm99 View Post
    that there were not a platoon of them, intent on a re-enactment of the Beslan School slaughter.

    Regards

    Mike
    The majority of the Beslan hostage takers were Ingush, and Beslan is in North Ossetia. There was a nasty little conflict between the Ingush and Ossetians in 1992, and the Beslan school was used as an internment camp for the Ingush in Ossetia. Ingush women and children were held hostage in that same school gymnasium by Ossetian militia, the men and at least one newborn were executed.

    The Beslan siege was a diabolical plot Shamil Basayev, that was in all likelihood designed to provoke another Ingush-Ossetian conflict. Because the massacre of children is so disturbing and incomprehensible, simplistic narratives about both the siege and “Chechens” are propagated.

    The suspects here in Boston better hope the BPD/FBI catch them before the Chechen-community in Boston does. BPD/FBI will at least try to take them alive, the Chechen-community will handle things.....well, in the Chechen way.
    “[S]omething in his tone now reminded her of his explanations of asymmetric warfare, a topic in which he had a keen and abiding interest. She remembered him telling her how terrorism was almost exclusively about branding, but only slightly less so about the psychology of lotteries…” - Zero History, William Gibson

  2. #362
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    Elder brother dead, younger captured.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22228151

    Not surprising that someone will declare that it is some government conspiracy that involves framing two young men...

    I won't be so quick to declare that the threat is over. There is no telling whether there are more like minded people involved. I think the forensics work will be crucial in reconstructing how the pair obtained the materials for the bomb, and if external assistance was required for it.

  3. #363
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    Second suspect caught, in "serious condition" but alive. Will be interesting to see how the investigation of background and connections develops.

    http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world...1367226?page=1
    “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”

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  4. #364
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    Default Tangential Question re motives etc

    morality, gratitude, ingratitude and other fun stuff

    http://www.brownpundits.com/2013/04/...f-ingratitude/

  5. #365
    Council Member davidbfpo's Avatar
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    Default No friends and angry

    From the WaPo, by Anne Applebaum an article 'The connection between Boston and Europe’s train bombers', which ends with:
    “I do not have a single American friend,” Tamerlan Tsarnaev reportedly said of himself. That’s the kind of statement that might have been made by a young Pakistani living in Coventry, or a young Algerian living in Paris.

    We don’t expect to hear it from someone who grew up in Boston, a city that has taught generations of foreigners to become Americans in a country that likes to think of itself as a melting pot. But now it might be time to change our expectations. These terrorists are a lot less like the 9/11 attackers — or the Columbine attackers — and a lot more like the men known as the Tube bombers of London or the train bombers of Spain. Our response is going to have to be different — very different — as well.
    Link:http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...87f_story.html
    davidbfpo

  6. #366
    Council Member carl's Avatar
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    Ms. Applebaum is leading the charge in the predictable "What did we do to bring this upon ourselves?" onslaught of articles. Geesh a couple of guys commit mass murder and maiming and its our fault. But I guess that is how some members of the media, maybe a lot of members, make their living, blame the Americans.

    Black hat saying he didn't have any American friends is what black hat says about himself. Woe is him. There were apparently two black hats, the one before he became a jerk and the one after. Jerks don't generally have a lot of friends.

    http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/...ts?ft=1&f=1001

    http://www.wnyc.org/articles/wnyc-ne...rlan-tsarnaev/

    It is no surprise the after black hat didn't have friends, if in fact he didn't.

    Ms. Applebaum also didn't do full research about Beslan. (see Bourbon's post above.)
    "We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again." Gen. Nathanael Greene

  7. #367
    Council Member bourbon's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by carl View Post
    Ms. Applebaum is leading the charge in the predictable "What did we do to bring this upon ourselves?" onslaught of articles. Geesh a couple of guys commit mass murder and maiming and its our fault. But I guess that is how some members of the media, maybe a lot of members, make their living, blame the Americans.
    Carl, I can see where you are coming from this perspective; but I am going to have to disagree with you. I just don't think that was her intent with the article. More importantly though - I think davidbfpo is more interested with her observation that Tamerlan's case may be similar to Tube bombers of London or the train bombers in Spain, as opposed previous cases we have seen in America.
    “[S]omething in his tone now reminded her of his explanations of asymmetric warfare, a topic in which he had a keen and abiding interest. She remembered him telling her how terrorism was almost exclusively about branding, but only slightly less so about the psychology of lotteries…” - Zero History, William Gibson

  8. #368
    Council Member carl's Avatar
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    Bourbon:

    There is room for disagreement of course but in any event the article is half baked. Most of the words concern Chechnya. Neither one of those guys lived in Chechnya for very long. She implies they couldn't integrate into the community. The limited things I've read show they integrated quite well. She acts as if this is something new. This has been happening for years and years. The Fort Dix people, the Times Square bomber, Major Nidal, all those guys fit the same profile, not of people unable to assimilate, but of Muslims who got radicalized. In that sense she is barking up the wrong tree. Perhaps even the Puerto Ricans who tried to kill Truman were in the same boat (residents of the country who got radicalized), as were the various 60s and 70s radicals, as was McKinley's assassin.

    All those people got angry for some reason or other and decided to kill or try to kill. And all could be shoehorned into the 'unhappy immigrant or immigrant's child' profile. But they weren't, because it doesn't fit and it still doesn't. Their motivations were attributed to other things. This isn't anything like Europe with its Algerian suburbs the police can't go into. The fact that immigrants assimilate very will into the US is so blindingly obvious that we don't see it anymore.

    Ms. Applebaum ended her article with the statement that this time was different and our response should be different. That may not be blame America first, we can disagree on that, but it sure as heck is a statement born of great ignorance of even the recent past.
    Last edited by carl; 04-21-2013 at 01:44 AM.
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  9. #369
    Council Member slapout9's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by carl View Post
    Ms. Applebaum is leading the charge in the predictable "What did we do to bring this upon ourselves?" onslaught of articles. Geesh a couple of guys commit mass murder and maiming and its our fault. But I guess that is how some members of the media, maybe a lot of members, make their living, blame the Americans.

    Black hat saying he didn't have any American friends is what black hat says about himself. Woe is him. There were apparently two black hats, the one before he became a jerk and the one after. Jerks don't generally have a lot of friends.

    http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/...ts?ft=1&f=1001

    http://www.wnyc.org/articles/wnyc-ne...rlan-tsarnaev/

    It is no surprise the after black hat didn't have friends, if in fact he didn't.

    Ms. Applebaum also didn't do full research about Beslan. (see Bourbon's post above.)
    We should have done what was talked about briefly after 911 and that was to close our borders to any immigration for 10 years. And start deporting anybody left that doesn't swear total and complete allegiance to the USA. Post a very large Peace Bond and surrender their first born male child...ok maybe that is a little bit to much but we should stop all immigration for 10 years, should look at the Peace Bond idea to especially from Muslim countries.

  10. #370
    Council Member davidbfpo's Avatar
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    Default People matter in CT investigations

    We all now know it was a citizen's call that led to the second suspect's hiding place being identified, so I was interested to read this in a WaPo summary:
    (Boston Police Commissioner Edward) Davis said he was told that facial-recognition software did not identify the men in the ball caps. The technology came up empty even though both Tsarnaevs’ images exist in official databases: Dzhokhar had a Massachusetts driver’s license; the brothers had legally immigrated; and Tamerlan had been the subject of some FBI investigation.
    Plus:
    Once the photos of the men in caps were made public Thursday, the FBI tip line filled with calls, including one from the brothers’ aunt, who provided her nephews’ identity, according to federal law enforcement officials.
    Link:http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...1_story_3.html
    davidbfpo

  11. #371
    Council Member davidbfpo's Avatar
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    Default The times are a changing?

    Carl in his response to Anne Applebaum's article commented:
    This isn't anything like Europe with its Algerian suburbs the police can't go into.
    I don't know about the French suburbs, often mainly North African around Paris and other high density, mainly non-indigenous suburbs across Europe, but know something about those here in urban England.

    The police here can go into such areas, it is whether they are effective once there in their law enforcement role and in gaining public support (usually referred to as trust & confidence in the UK). There is a big difference between responding to emergency calls alongside undertaking overt 'normal' criminal investigations and the often covert way of investigating terrorism, organised crime and drugs. The differences are not religious or party political or ethnic, but a mixture.

    In my limited time with US LE in urban areas it was quite obvious in some urban areas LE had access, little overt public support and could easily be seen as an 'occupying' power. A topic SWC have discussed before.

    Now back to Boston. Amidst all the media reporting and I have read only a little I have yet to see a report(s) that US LE had been alerted by the suspect's family, friends and community about their changing character. Yes that is a big issue itself, for example do families notice and want to tell others?

    Maybe that is what Anne Applebaum is talking about:
    Our response is going to have to be different — very different — as well.
    davidbfpo

  12. #372
    Council Member slapout9's Avatar
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    Thumbs up Zenpundit

    Link to zenpundit and his excellent series on the Boston attack.

    http://zenpundit.com/

  13. #373
    Council Member Kiwigrunt's Avatar
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    US gun law bigger threat than terrorists

    Unfortunately this irrational behaviour is not limited to the US. Another article in the same paper is titled: ‘Heightened security at London Marathon’. This is the same London that the author mentioned here:

    But Londoners, who endured IRA (the Irish Republican Army - the paramilitary group who fought for Northern Irish independence from the UK) terror threats for years, might be forgiven for thinking that America over-reacted just a tad to the goings-on in Boston.
    That other article starts with:

    The London Marathon takes place amid a heightened police presence following the Boston Marathon bomb attacks…
    So how much of this is real versus media hype? Was the heightened presence a real attempt at increasing the probability of thwarting a similar ‘terrorist’ action? Was it an attempt to satisfy the ‘something must be done’ syndrome? But mostly, what was security in London like during those IRA days? Is our true approach to security different now from what it was then, or is our perception of it different? I was a child at the time so my memory of it is irrelevant.

    Here is one of the more interesting terrorist actions in Dutchland in that same period. Again, I have no recollection of how that affected our attitude, fear, and behaviour towards the ‘threat’ of violence and terrorism.
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    ONWARD

  14. #374
    Council Member carl's Avatar
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    If you go back 100 years you can see the same type of thing happening, disenchanted people in various parts of the world blowing up innocents. They were the Anarchists. People calling themselves Anarchists killed a US President, set off a bomb on Wall Street killing dozens, knocked off a Tsar etc etc etc.

    This is an article I found about the Anarchists. It was written in 2009. It could have been written yesterday.

    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...s-1801195.html

    The article contains these words about the motivations of the Anarchists then and the Jihadists now:
    But neither had a very clear picture of what the world would look like after the smoke from their bombs had cleared. Their visions of the future were vague: both no-state and the caliphate were hazy hope-dreams. Below and beneath them, there were deep structural similarities.

    Both groups believed their violence was justified by the larger illegitimate state violence they witnessed as young men.

    They justified their attacks to themselves by claiming they were trying to give the wealthy, or the West, a taste of how "their people" felt. Yet in both movements, intriguingly, it was largely middle class intellectuals who turned to violence.


    There is a lot more in the article. I was impressed. What we are seeing doesn't seem to be all that new in its essence. It may be new that the impulse is being given a slightly, only slightly, more coherent political direction by groups like AQ this time around.

    One thing I noted during the manhunt for white hat was they got nowhere until they told the people of Boston they could move around, then white hat got made seemingly within minutes. So the authorities in Boston, by locking down the city, deprived themselves of millions of eyes to help in the search. When they availed themselves of those eyes things went much better.

    I know why they did it, they were afraid that white hat had a suicide belt and they didn't want to chance it. But they could find him until they chanced it. That is something that will have to be considered in the future.
    Last edited by davidbfpo; 04-22-2013 at 07:04 AM. Reason: Cited text in quotes
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  15. #375
    Council Member carl's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by davidbfpo View Post
    Now back to Boston. Amidst all the media reporting and I have read only a little I have yet to see a report(s) that US LE had been alerted by the suspect's family, friends and community about their changing character. Yes that is a big issue itself, for example do families notice and want to tell others?
    There was a guy on the Fox News Sunday show today that made a point about false positives. He said that if you pursue every thing that comes along, you will end up tracking thousands of people who would have done nothing. The main point he and other guests made was that sometimes, there are things you aren't going to stop. Perfection isn't possible.
    "We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again." Gen. Nathanael Greene

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    Here's a question that I haven't seen a lot of speculation on. These two young men were able to make at least 3, and likely more, homemade bombs that all went off as designed. Judging by the ineffectiveness of other bombmakers (unibomber took a little while to figure it out, the guy who tried to blow up Times Square got it wrong, and others), that's a pretty good record. So, where'd he get this expertise from? Or did he have the expertise? I'm a smart guy, and a smart guy who worked with explosives (in a limited capacity)...I don't think I could have pulled it off, or would have without a few test shots. Even military grade stuff doesn't always work as desired.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Kiwigrunt View Post
    But Londoners, who endured IRA (the Irish Republican Army - the paramilitary group who fought for Northern Irish independence from the UK) terror threats for years, might be forgiven for thinking that America over-reacted just a tad to the goings-on in Boston.
    Aside from the fact that this author is wrong about how the Brits are reacting to Boston (as you pointed out), the comparison falls flat for another reason: The IRA's bombings in London were always preceded by a phone warning to ensure that authorities evacuated civilians from the blast area. Jihadists and their ilk aren't the same way; civilian deaths are the intent, not just collateral, in their bombings. So I think Americans can be forgiven for not feeling the same way about them that the Brtis felt about the IRA.

    (Of course, after the 2005 bombings in London, I imagine that most Brits, contrary to what this guy claims, actually do feel the same way about radical Islamic terrorism.)
    Last edited by MattClimbs717; 04-22-2013 at 06:31 PM.

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    Council Member Firn's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by KenWats View Post
    Here's a question that I haven't seen a lot of speculation on. These two young men were able to make at least 3, and likely more, homemade bombs that all went off as designed. Judging by the ineffectiveness of other bombmakers (unibomber took a little while to figure it out, the guy who tried to blow up Times Square got it wrong, and others), that's a pretty good record. So, where'd he get this expertise from? Or did he have the expertise? I'm a smart guy, and a smart guy who worked with explosives (in a limited capacity)...I don't think I could have pulled it off, or would have without a few test shots. Even military grade stuff doesn't always work as desired.
    The older one studied engineering, as far as I know. I think a key factor of those quite 'efficient' bombs might have been his long stay in his home region. Without knowing much it could be a good place to learn the craft and test your knowledge if you know the right guys and if you come with the right intentions...

    Just a potential facet of his long visit, among others like political, family and religious ones.
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    Council Member Stan's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by KenWats View Post
    Here's a question that I haven't seen a lot of speculation on. These two young men were able to make at least 3, and likely more, homemade bombs that all went off as designed. Judging by the ineffectiveness of other bombmakers (unibomber took a little while to figure it out, the guy who tried to blow up Times Square got it wrong, and others), that's a pretty good record. So, where'd he get this expertise from? Or did he have the expertise? I'm a smart guy, and a smart guy who worked with explosives (in a limited capacity)...I don't think I could have pulled it off, or would have without a few test shots. Even military grade stuff doesn't always work as desired.
    Ken,
    Most of us that know don't talk about it.

    The pressure cooker has been around for at least 13 years in Greece, India and France. They are not expensive and by no means even remotely remarkable. What's inside besides all the fragmentation ? Fuel (sensitizers) and an oxygen source (oxidizers) and voila

    The great thing about a pressure cooker vs a pipe bomb, is you don't have to do anything other than close the lid
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  20. #380
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    Default The CT dilemma; well here is one suggestion

    A commentary by Raffaello Pantucci, now @ RUSI, whose has written on 'lone wolves' before and this point is well made:
    The key conclusion for security agencies is that such terrorist cells are notoriously difficult to uncover prior to event. Some work can be done in targeted public information campaigns aimed at chemical companies, storage firms or other industries that might be conduits for individuals to obtain transformative material for homemade explosives. This will help give authorities leads like those that led to Khalid Aldawsari's detention.
    The case referred to in Texas I'd forgotten:
    ...Aldawsari attempted to purchase chemicals from the Carolina Biological Supply company, using a commercial shipping company to have them delivered to his home in Lubbock, Texas. Both the chemical company and the shipping company flagged the purchase as one of concern to authorities, leading to an investigation by the FBI that uncovered Aldawsari as a loner terrorist cell building a bomb whose diary was full of menacing jihadist ideas. He was convicted in November last year and sentenced to life imprisonment.
    Link:http://www.rusi.org/analysis/comment...ikPxU1.twitter
    davidbfpo

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