Terrorism in the USA:threat & response

[TheCurmudgeon]

Nah. That is an ego trip. I would think part of the trip would be having a cool device to brag about. These devices weren't cool, they just worked. I think the minds behind this were looking for something in addition to ego enhancement.

But my spec is just spec too.

Yeah, but that has its contradictions. If the point is to kill in a manner that there is no to track it back to you then you don't want something cool nor are you really going to brag - it is between you and your buddy. You have two bombs so that neither was in a position to be able to rat out the other. Just coming from there that town is full of college kids who are sure they know more than everyone else and are infallible. If all you wanted to do was kill you could do that at any shopping mall, but the placement of these bombs ensures they get great video for free from the internet without having to do anything other than download it like hundreds of thousands of other people. You and your buddy can watch it over and over again to your dark heart's content.

I guess I just can't see a good reason to attack this event. The day has meaning in both being tax day and Patriots day (and probably a hundred other anniversaries that have meaning to someone). But if it was tied to an attack on the US government by a homegrown group why not attack a federal building? The event is a international event but if that was your aim than why not attack when the winner was crossing the finish line? I am just not seeing a lot of international value to an attack four hours into the race. Plus no one is taking credit. Political terrorism is usually tied to some aim. It losses value if it is not tied to a cause or is not part of a larger barrage of attacks intended to cause widespread fear and panic. I guess I am not seeing a political or ideological tie in here. Seems murder is as good a reason as any.

[Dayuhan]

Just coming from there that town is full of college kids who are sure they know more than everyone else and are infallible.

Those qualities are in no way unique to college kids, and generally don't lead to mayhem on this scale. Possible, yes... but probable?

But if it was tied to an attack on the US government by a homegrown group why not attack a federal building? The event is a international event but if that was your aim than why not attack when the winner was crossing the finish line?

They might have felt that a Federal building would be more likely to have some sort of security or surveillance system in place, and that there would be more of a security presence at the marathon when the winners were coming in. If you're looking for a soft target with significant visibility the tail end of an open air athletic event is a reasonable candidate. Of course a parade would be as good or better, but we obviously don't know the thinking involved. It may have been the most appealing target available in a given time window. It's not just a question of who they wanted to target, but of what sort of target they thought (not necessarily for entirely logical reasons) would give them the best chance of getting away with it.

At this point most of the speculation tells us more about the inherent prejudices of those doing the speculating than it does about the bombing: people will suspect whoever they are personally inclined to suspect. At this point nobody knows: it could be foreign or domestic, it could be from any number of different ideological extremes, it could be non-ideological. Best to keep an open mind until more information is available.

I personally hope it will turn out to be domestic, regardless of ideology, simply because I'd hate to see more overseas military complications, but that's hope, not expectation or assumption.

I do think that as the US draws down in Afghanistan there will be significant risk of major attack from jihadi sources, simply because the jihadis need to keep US boots on Muslim ground, but that's just an opinion.

[carl]

I guess I just can't see a good reason to attack this event. The day has meaning in both being tax day and Patriots day (and probably a hundred other anniversaries that have meaning to someone). But if it was tied to an attack on the US government by a homegrown group why not attack a federal building? The event is a international event but if that was your aim than why not attack when the winner was crossing the finish line? I am just not seeing a lot of international value to an attack four hours into the race. Plus no one is taking credit. Political terrorism is usually tied to some aim. It losses value if it is not tied to a cause or is not part of a larger barrage of attacks intended to cause widespread fear and panic. I guess I am not seeing a political or ideological tie in here. Seems murder is as good a reason as any.

There are a lot of reasons to attack this event I think. First, it was an easy target and there was an escape route right there as Bourbon pointed out. Second, picking that particular spot insured there would be video that would be flashed around the world without having to lift a finger, even though the famous runners had finished hours before. Third, that the international types had left already is a good thing if you are playing to an international audience, you made sure you would mostly kill and maim Yanks, the occasional Chinese notwithstanding. Fourth, the Boston Marathon is known throughout the world, just like Times Square or the Twin Towers were so it would play as a symbolic strike at the US. Maybe the marathon isn't known to the extent those were but it is known in a lot of countries because those countries have runners there and their media will report on how they do.

A disadvantage too is all the video available. They had to know that they would be photographed during the event and probably there is video evidence of them rehearsing the route in the days and weeks beforehand. But they didn't care. White hat was so insouciant about it he wore his hat backwards (or maybe he just forgot). But if they already had a good escape route set up, as Slap suggested, they wouldn't care because they might figure they would be long gone by the time the video evidence was processed to the point where their photos were circulated. The names of those guys will be known within hours now but if they are gone, why should they care. Or maybe too they will make a last stand like the guys in Spain did.

Figure this speculative scenario. They do their op and get out of the country by a preplanned route. They make it back to someplace in which they feel safe. That might take a few days or weeks. Then when they get back they make a video 'splaining what they did and how and why they did it. That would play huge in various countries throughout the world. They hit the Yanks and they got out and got away with it. It wouldn't matter if in a few years or months we got them. Their hero status would have already been established and if they got killed they would be martyred heroes.

And then again I may be entirely wrong about it all and it was a couple of guys who were upset because the Starbucks customers had been undertipping them for years.

[bourbon]

http://www.barstoolsports.com/boston...as-gone-viral/

Releasing the images is paying dividends already.

This picture which has gone viral, places the white-hat suspect on the same block as the second bomb at the intersection of Boylston and Fairfield, turning onto Newbury St - after what looks like the explosion of the second bomb.

* Could be Photoshoped, but it isnt using the FBI released photos.

[bourbon]

Reports of active shooter at MIT... Breaking. Reported MIT police officer.

At a bar across the bridge, now.

May be unrelated to bombing. Also had false report of gunman on MIT campus last month.

[Dayuhan]

Figure this speculative scenario. They do their op and get out of the country by a preplanned route. They make it back to someplace in which they feel safe.

Why would you assume that they're leaving the country? Wouldn't the simplest explanation for the absence of any claim of responsibility be that the perpetrators are still in the country, have no intention of leaving, and don't want to provide evidence that might point to their identity or location?

[carl]

Why would you assume that they're leaving the country? Wouldn't the simplest explanation for the absence of any claim of responsibility be that the perpetrators are still in the country, have no intention of leaving, and don't want to provide evidence that might point to their identity or location?

Because.

No.

[bourbon]

Gunfire & explosions reported in Watertown....breaking on Mass tv.

[slapout9]

Looking at the pictures and adding to that no claim of credit, the choice of target and the specific location, I am going to speculate that this was not terrorism at all. It was two college kids, probably from Harvard or MIT, who just wanted to kill people and see if they could get away with it. They picked a location they knew would be filmed so they could watch their handiwork over and over again.

Interesting? One of the photos I saw was one of the bombs placed near a USA Government mailbox those things are made out of solid steel in order to contain a mail bomb in other words that was an amateur place to put the bomb, it had to block or deflect a great deal of the blast. Not something a pro would do but a amateur-wannabe-big shot-college kid.......maybe.

[bourbon]

S##t is going down in Watertown...

[bourbon]

One marathon suspect reported captured, another on the loose in Watertown after firefight.

[slapout9]

One marathon suspect reported captured, another on the loose in Watertown after firefight.

Boston Globe is reporting that it's them!

[jmm99]

from 0121 thru 0254 (currently), with video of shooting, is here.

Good morning to Europe.

Regards

Mike

[Firn]

The guardian live-blogs the whole story, which worked pretty well in other instances.

Summary [written 2 hours ago]

Ed Pilkington has just been in touch from Watertown. To summarise what we know so far:

• Police have confirmed that they are carrying out an ongoing manhunt for one of the two suspects in the Boston marathon bombing, and have sealed off a 20-block radius of a suburb of the city where the suspect is believed to be holed up.

• Ed Davis, the police commissioner of Boston, confirmed that they were trying to apprehend a man identified on Thursday night as Suspect Two. He was captured in video footage released to the public carrying a black backpack amid the marathon crowd shortly before the bombings and wearing a white baseball cap.

• Suspect Two was believed to be hiding somewhere within the Watertown area, at the end of a dramatic police chase in which explosive devices were thrown out of a Mercedes SUV that had been car-jacked from MIT. The police have confirmed that in the course of the night one MIT officer was killed and another officer injured.

• During the car chase, one of the two assailants - who police said was Suspect One from the marathon bombing photographs - was injured and later died at Beth Israel hospital.

• Watertown residents within the 20-block radius have been told to stay in their homes. They have also been told not to offer a lift to anyone in the streets in the vicinity of the area.

• Suspect Two is “considered armed and extremely dangerous”, Colonel Timothy Alben, head of Massachusetts state police, said. Davis had the following advice for Watertown residents: “Do not open your doors. Stay in your home. We believe this man to be a terrorist and we need to get him into custody.”

• Alben said Suspect Two was dressed in a grey, hoodie-type sweatshirt. He is a light-skinned, Caucasian male with longer brown curly hair.

Let us hope that no more innocent people get harmed.

Interesting in regard to our debate about visual data..

A Twitter user identifying himself as @jraske said the shootout occurred outside his Watertown house, on Laurel Street.

He tweeted photographs purporting to show a suspect car being searched by bomb disposal experts. The pictures are geotagged to Laurel Street.

The Middlesex County district attorney's office said earlier: "The suspects and police also exchanged gunfire in the area of Dexter and Laurel streets."

@ganulv: I pretty much agree and it is especially important to consider the time lag of the whole process. It takes considerable amounts of that precious ressources to get all those files, put them into the data base, filter them, sort them and look at them even if we have readily processable exact geolocation and time.

With the sort of manpower and ressources available to the case you will have many of them working at that. As I have written above CCTV should however be much more smoothly integrated into the system and be much easier to work with. bourbon makes the excellent point that those CCTVs are relative high up and placed&pointed with surveillance in mind so the guys working on that stream should be much more efficient and faster. Think of the work/time flow and critical path in a project.

As we have seen time can be incredibly important in this case to get the guys who did this. The vast amount of not so accessible visual data should help to slowly reconstruct the whole event and offer additional evidence, be it for a trial or not.

[Dayuhan]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...d-8579362.html

The missing suspect has been identified by the Associated Press as 19-year-old Dzhokhar A Tsarnaev from Cambridge. NBC News is reporting that the dead suspect was his 20-year-old brother.

Both are reportedly from a Russian region near Chechnya and have been living in the US for at least a year.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev appears to been educated at at a Cambridge high school before receiving a scholarship to pursue higher education in 2011. His name appears on a list of 45 recipients of the Cambridge City Scholarship, handed to students from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School.

Much yet to be determined... did they arrive in the US with terrorism in mind or were they radicalized locally, were they working on behalf of an organization or did they come up with the plan on their own, etc.

[jmm99]

that there were not a platoon of them, intent on a re-enactment of the Beslan School slaughter.

Regards

Mike

[Dayuhan]

More bits and pieces...

http://rt.com/news/chechnya-suspect-boston-bombing-110/

The older brother is now being reported as 26, not 20, and has apparently been in the US for some time. I'm sure in the next few days we'll know all too much about them. I would guess at this point that we're looking more at angry alienated young men finding the gospel according to jihad online rather than operatives of a Chechen Islamist conspiracy directed from abroad, but that's only a guess. More will be known soon enough.

[Stan]

The Estonians think that the POTUS will support a Russian intervention into Chechnya now and even provide the correct munitions

[slapout9]

that there were not a platoon of them, intent on a re-enactment of the Beslan School slaughter.

Regards

Mike

Yes we should.

[davidbfpo]

An article on the FBI Bomb Technicians, a good read; nice to see international co-operation given space:http://www.boston.com/news/local/mas...BYJ/story.html