About the guns used by the Tsarnaev brothers in their firefights with the police last Friday morning and evening:
Two U.S. officials say investigators in the Boston bombings have recovered only one handgun believed to have been used in a gun battle with police.
One official said the serial number on what they described as a 9 mm pistol was scratched off. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss details of the investigation still in progress….
Guess the story of one or both of those firefights will have to be sent to the rewrite department.
The rightwing is going a bit nusto over the reports of the Tsarnaev’s receiving welfare:
Marathon bombings mastermind Tamerlan Tsarnaev was living on taxpayer-funded state welfare benefits even as he was delving deep into the world of radical anti-American Islamism, the Herald has learned. State officials confirmed last night that Tsarnaev, slain in a raging gun battle with police last Friday, was receiving benefits along with his wife, Katherine Russell Tsarnaev, and their 3-year-old daughter. The state’s Executive Office of Health and Human Services said those benefits ended in 2012 when the couple stopped meeting income eligibility limits. … In addition, both of Tsarnaev’s parents received benefits, and accused brother bombers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan were recipients through their parents when they were younger, according to the state.
Can we not recognize that the family entered this country legally as asylum seekers? And such immigrants, unlike the working-their-asses-off undocumented immigrants, are entitled to government financial assistance. Katherine Tsarnaev and her child were entitled to any of the meager social services any citizen of this country qualifies for.
One last item, John Kerry, Secretary of State, really is a jackass or has taken to using Sarah Palin glasses to see what’s going on in Russia.
“We just had a young person who went to Russia, Chechnya, who blew people up in Boston,” Kerry said. “So he didn’t stay where he went, but he learned something where he went and he came back with a willingness to kill people.”
Update [2013-4-24 20:38:51 by Marie2]:Officials: Boston suspect had no firearm when barrage of bullets hit hiding place IOW there was no suspect v. police firefight Friday evening. Just a whole lot of police shooting. With one or more of those fired bullets hitting Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
Update: Interview with carjack victim Ninety minutes driving around with two stops to load stuff from the car and trunk of the brother’s car into the carjacked SUV. For two guys headed to Manhattan to blow up some more bombs, they were sure taking their time in getting out of town.
Do we know that Dzhokhar was wounded in that final incident? I wasn’t clear on that.
Also, from your previous thread, I take your point that this differs from Columbine in respect of the perpetrators immediate suicide in the first instance although it could be argued ‘death by cop’ was ultimately a factor for the Tsarnaev brothers. But that just highlights a question about the period after the bombing; what could they have been thinking? That they were going to get away with it?
And surely the FBI must have presumed that these guys were long gone when they released the images, no?
If he’d incurred the neck wound in the confrontation about 1:00 am, he would likely have bled out before being captured the next evening.
Other than the report of Dzhokhar showing up at his dorm room and the gym at school on Wed and behaving perfectly normal, it’s unknown what they did after the bombings and until Thursday evening. It’s not beyond my ability to imagine that they thought they got away with it. (Presuming they were guilty of the crime.) But when the FBI released pictures of them, they would have had to know that the game is up. And yet it wasn’t until four hours later that they are alleged to have shot the MIT cop. But it was another two and half hours after that that the police were in pursuit of a reported stolen vehicle (after being car-jacked).
Is it possible the BPD didn’t have the suspects identified within minutes of the press briefing? That they hadn’t run the names through all the databanks and weren’t at there residences before the MIT shooting?
I’ve always suspended judgement on his wounds; all we seem to know for sure is that he was present at two gun battles. And as for what they ‘did’ after the bombings we know that they didn’t flee which strikes me as the salient point and one I am having a hard time reconciling with any more ominous scenario; with the possible exception of totally unwitting, and witless, patsies. Even then if they were part of some grand, unlikely conspiracy in which they were told to drop a couple of backpacks somewhere they must have soon realised their peril, no?
And as for conspiracies I fail to see a narrative which credibly advances the agenda of any potential actors; the national security state, the cold warriors, the jihadis, the Chechens, the oil-field scavengers or the Kazakh royal family all have no interest served by this hapless pair and yet receive unwelcome attention and even embarrassment. The FSB was a possibility, one supposed, but even they have disclaimed any connection between these two and the real Chechen militants; thwarting what slender motive they may have had while reinforcing perceptions these two acted alone or were radicalised domestically.
It’s a sorry tale, to be sure, but seems, in spite of some pretty normal law enforcement clumsiness, more like simple alienation and disaffection leading to dissociative violence than anything else.
There’s this report
Or maybe to NYC to blow up more bombs.
Tim Murphy at Mother Jones is also baffled and asking questions
The NY destination reported in near real time from the scanner; well before the shoot out in Watertown. As to motive, that’s just assumption. That they would have thought they could escape to NY to “party” after having their faces plastered all over the news and shooting a cop strikes me as beyond credible assuming they were mentally competent.
Take a look at the third photo titled: “Hiding place: This image, taken from a surveillance camera shows Dzhokhar Tsarnaev climbing into a boat Friday morning after a police gun battle. He was later found in the boat and captured.”
Was this taken in the early morning hours last Friday? Twelve or more hours before the police were tipped off to the suspect’s hiding place? Where was the camera? When was the picture discovered? BPD and FBI didn’t include it in the story about how the suspect was found. Or could it have been a picture of the suspect climbing out of the boat and giving himself up? But that would mean that he surrendered before being shot in the neck.
From your link to the Post:
I guess not. By the way your link to the third photo (above) seems broken.
Odd. try again
your link doesn’t work.
try this
They probably had someone from the mail-room captioning those photos. Reading the Mail over the past few days assures me that the editors assume every edition is promptly pulped.
But they get stuff up fast. It’s the least buggy site for photos which is the only reason I check it out. Text close to worthless.
Get it stuffed up, mostly.
wound looks like it was self-inflicted. Guess they were lying. If he didn’t have a gun in the boat, he couldn’t have shot himself.
Also, if BPD opened fire on Tsarnaev when he was in the boat, that makes them no better than LAPD or NYPD.
If there was no return fire from the boat, why did BPD keep firing? Too many recordings from there for them to deny that they weren’t a bit trigger happy.
Difficult (impossible?) to tell much of anything from that photo of Dzhakhar on the ground beyond serious bleeding in the neck area. Personally didn’t find the self-inflicted gunshot wound credible.
A senior officer broke in on the radio during that night and implored the cops not to shoot each other. It was apparently, and probably rightly, considered a real and present danger.
But they didn’t stop claiming that Dzhokhar fired repeatedly at them.
But one of the oft quoted accounts refers to firing coming “…from behind the house.” We may have assumed it was Dzhokhar all up and down the chain-of-command but it is just as likely another bunch of trigger-happy cops. And fair enough, as far as the cops are concerned these are cop killers with two notches on their guns at that point.
I can see how that would be forgiven; I just can’t believe they didn’t kill the suspect under the circumstances. The flash-bangs may even have been the inspiration of a senior officer to restore the situation.
For characterising the pair as, “knock-off jihadis.” Let it be remembered thus.
Wouldn’t that be more apt for the shoe and underpants wannabe bombers? At least we know they aspired to be jihadis. The aspirations of the Tsarnaevs is still murky. And whatever they were, they inflicted horrendous damage to the lives of so many. Would you endorse calling the Aurora killer a “knock-off Brevic?”
Was he? I didn’t get the impression Holmes had a coherent motive whereas Anders is a dangerous megalomaniac who sought to reprise Hitler’s Munich performance when on trial and is still considered a threat to public safety in prison.
I endorse Biden for mocking these two and any whom might choose to follow them; I can think of no better prophylactic against this kind of random, dissociative violence than our sincere and collective derision.
Brevic is only coherent within the confines of the alternative reality he constructed. Like the Unibomber and McVeigh. All three political but also nutso. It’s not publicly known if Holmes had a coherent motive much less a political one — but that Batman movie did give me pause. Nor do we know that Tsarnaev had a coherent motive. However, doesn’t derision and mockery, forms of bullying, just add to the substrate of what leads to the murderous rage these killers experience?
About Brevic; the Norwegian court has determined he’s sane, for one thing. He planned the attack for quite some time and cobbled together a manifesto which still makes folks’ heads spin, from his Wikipedia page:
I’m all for mocking derision in this instance; my only scepticism regarding this hapless pair remains doubt at their competence to construct the devices and execute the attacks on their own, which is a pretty low bar. They seem absolutely incapable of conceiving of the harm they have caused with anything resembling empathy, at least on primary evidence.
Given the ease with which such an attack can be perpetrated on a soft target derision is perhaps all that stands between us and more of the same in future from others equally selfish and superficial.
Would they be talking to Dzhokhar and selectively leaking what he’s alleged to have said if they weren’t under the impression that he’s sane?
Derision and mockery don’t produce the intended effect when used against the powerless that are prone to violence. It can be extremely dangerous for a woman to use against a man. Not different from the horrible consequences of the Dutch Muhammed cartoon.
This pair are nuts in the conventional sense; just disconnected from any emotional responsibility for their actions. Otherwise they seem pretty normal, sadly. As to the piecemeal revelations of what Dzhokhar has or hasn’t said in recent days I remain profoundly sceptical.
I take your point about the dangers of derision in some circumstances but as a disincentive to a couple of “losers” attempting, it would seem, to compensate for their lack of identity and self-esteem by an act of violence it might prove useful. Granted, I am struggling with the motive just as much as anyone else.
From TPM Injured, alone, nineteen years old, and scared. Many a false statement has been made under such circumstances.
Plenty of politicians and Wall St figures in the public eye that have no regard for the people they injure and destroy and take no responsibility for their actions.
No argument there.
I honestly don’t think that the aspirations of the Tsarnaevs are murky at all. Several news outlets have quoted “officials” as saying that the younger brother told investigators that they were motivated by the U.S. wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. Why should we doubt this? This explanation is not something the powers that be want us to hear.
My main question on this issue at this point is whether the brothers were also “motivated” by Obama’s drone killings, as some bloggers have suggested.
Disagree. It’s well within the tapestry constructed for American consumption and will to continue the “War on Terror.” Only seeming somewhat crazier in this instance because the perpetrators weren’t directly related to one of the countries subjected to these US military actions.
How credible are the reports and how credible is Dzhokhar at this time? Considering that he’s also claiming that his brother made him do it, and even though there’s no evidence that he shared his brother’s religious and conspiracy obsessions, he couldn’t say no to participating in killing and maiming random innocent people.
It wrote about the brothers’ “extremist Islamic beliefs” as their motivation. Look at the current Wikipedia article about this. Some papers tried to present this as incomprehensible “religious extremism”, without noting that the U.S. is engaged in a war on Islam; if the latter fact is taken into account, the brothers’ actions become much more comprehensible.
Given that Dzhokhar went to a party after the bombing, I think it’s pretty clear that he didn’t think that he did anything wrong by killing and maiming those people. Thus, I think it’s fair to say that he shared his brother’s ideology.
By the way, the reason you think that “killing and maiming random innocent people” is wrong is because you come from a Christian background, your contempt for Christianity notwithstanding. I don’t mean to be condescending, but I really think you do not appreciate the extent to which Christianity is constitutive of Western civilization.
Really? Is it only a matter of time before the US gets around to the largest of all Muslim populations in Indonesia?
Terrorism and other religions from Juan Cole:
More from Cole: Jesus and Mohammad and the Question of State
Atheistic lapsed Catholics are identifiable to each other. We’re not naive, unconscious boobs. Nor are we so arrogant as to believe the humanitarianism that we obtained from our former religion and chose to retain is unique to Catholicism or any religion or no religion.
motivations are murky, either:
What Motivated the Boston Bombers
He also covered the point I attempted to make a couple of days ago:
Eye-witness stuff of the firefight, for what it’s worth:
http://www.getonhand.com/blogs/news/7743337-boston-bombing-suspect-shootout-pictures
Another chronology bites the dust:
But wasn’t it the FBI investigation which was closed, not the CIA interest? Embarrassing miscues between the two agencies at the least.
Odder still is that it was Russian authorities that informed both the FBI and CIA and those two agencies seem not to have communicated with each other. (Wasn’t that one of the 9/11 Commission’s criticisms and wasn’t that supposed to have been corrected with the creation of creepily named Homeland Security Agency?)
But what were the Russians seeing that eluded US agencies? Did they track him when he later returned to Dagestan for six months? Did they remain concerned when he returned to the US?
Don’t think this changes the timeline; just adds another federal player to the mix.
That his name was misspelled by the airline and we missed his outbound journey. Now we discover that he ‘pinged’ outbound but somehow he was removed from the database or we missed him returning. I’m curious what passport he was travelling on, myself.
Asked and answered:
So… Then what passport did he return on?
A better article on the Tamerlan identity story:
It’s starting to look like a proper JAAFU. The FSB must be having a pretty good laugh about now.