Putin on Boston bombings: We suffered from terrorists almost never labeled such in the West
(RT.com) – Putin was commenting in Moscow during his annual Q&A session on the flood of comments in the US, many of them from common people, which blamed Russia, where the suspects in the bombing were born, over the crime.
“Common fold in the US are not to be blamed, they don’t understand what is happening. Here I am addressing them and our citizens to say that Russia is a victim of international terrorism too.”
Putin lashed out at the double standards that spring up when terrorism is concerned. He explained:
“I was always appalled when our western partners and the western media called the terrorist, who did bloody crimes in our country, ‘insurgents’, and almost never ‘terrorists’.”
“They [the terrorists] were receiving help, informational, financial and political support. Sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly. And we were saying that we must do the job and not be content with declarations proclaiming terrorism a common threat. Those two have proved our position all too well.”
Putin criticized the idea voiced by some Republican politicians – including Senators Lindsey Graham, John McCain and Kelly Ayotte, and Representative Peter King – to declare the surviving Boston bomber an enemy combatant.
They want “to declare this criminal a prisoner of war. Are they out of their mind? What kind of a PoW is he? Do they fight the Civil War between the North and the South again?” he said.
By declaring the man an enemy combatant like many `War on Terror’ detainees, the US would be able to prosecute him in a military tribunal and deny him some of his basic rights as a civilian and US citizen. The White House has rejected this suggestion.
Jon Stewart and Our Weak Constitution: Following the Boston bombing, the freedom lovers at Fox jettison
Constitutional amendments like Han Solo dumping his cargo at the first sign of an Imperial cruiser.Putin said that Chechnya’s painful common history with Russia should not be grounds for speculation, and does not justify branding all Chechens as terrorists: “It’s not about nationality or religion. It’s about the extremist mindset of those men.”
“I’m saying all this not to put the blame, but to call on bringing ourselves closer together in resisting our common threats, of which terrorism is one and more dangerous. If we truly join our efforts, we will not allow these strikes and suffer such losses,” Putin concluded.
on this:
The Russians Warned Us – Why Didn’t We Listen?
Our anti-Russian foreign policy trumped security concerns
Is this a conflicting claim?:
I recall reading several versions of this discounting links to known terrorists by an unnamed Russian security source in recent days; seems to contradict this latest from Dagestan or am I just not parsing the words carefully enough?
Looks like a conflicting claim to me.
i guess the Russians have their wires crossed about as much as the Americans do. The FBI closed the case on Dzhokhar, and yet the CIA put him on a secret list of known and suspected terrorists.
This is sheer speculation on my part, but maybe what is going on with the Russians is that Moscow is trying to establish good relations with their various ethnic groups that have inclinations towards separatism, so Moscow is trying to put in a good word for such groups as far as the Boston Marathon bombings are concerned.
The article I quoted cited a local policeman; maybe he didn’t get the memo.
Of your Dagestan policeman:
Says the same thing about his contacts with a militant but concludes “no reason to arrest him.” I can see how that would be variously interpreted.
Nice find. In Russia, hanging out with a suspected terrorist is not a crime. Maybe these Russkies have a potential for understanding the concept of the rule of law after all?
That’s more than can be said for Obama and Holder, for whom due process has nothing to do with the judicial branch
We are getting a bit of static on this point:
Signal to noise ratio is not very good on this particular aspect of the investigation.
So now his visit to Dagestan was for five months during 2011-2012? That conflicts with US reports that he was there from Jan to June 2012.
This FSB tip/overseas trip time-line is getting worse with each new report; in any case didn’t Napolitano assert that the FBI investigation ended between the time he left and his return? While the CIA was, by implication, still interested? That in itself is curious.
From The Guardian
That’s clearer than several other articles that I checked. Napolitano would not have been speaking for the FBI as it’s not her turf. What I understood from the FBI is that they interviewed Tamerlan and closed the file by the summer of 2011. The CIA acting on its tip (not to be confused with the first and earlier tip that went to the FBI) from Russian authorities put his name on some low level list which apparently “pinged” when he left the country in January 2012.
The other answer is that the information is classified and therefore, we don’t get to know.
FBI & CIA claimed the tips from Russia happened in 2011. FBI cleared Tamerlan months before he left for Russia in Jan 2012.
If the FBI received another report in November of 2012, months after Tamerlan returned from Dagestan and did nothing, some heads are going to roll.
Raimondo’s link to the NBC now points to an article scrubbed of that specific quote but I have found it elsewhere, after a fashion:
So this needs a bit more sunshine, it seems. “Several months after he left” seems incongruous, however with “a five month visit he made to the North Caucasus region of Dagestan in 2011-2012” from the same article. Puzzling.
Thinking out loud here.
I think Mr. Katz knows what he’s talking about. It seems plausible that it all began as a provocation, whether Misha was FBI or FSB. But even if it was FSB, the FBI got onto it and must have seen the potential for a sting.
However once the Russians contacted the CIA about the brothers it became an international issue and an international game (as well described by Booman on this thread). The FBI closing their file may well signify nothing more than the CIA taking over, giving the FBI deniability. “We didn’t find anything”. – “Who could have predicted?” Anyway, that’s why their sting operation went into limbo. Meanwhile the brothers proceeded.
Of course the FBI ends up looking really stupid. But they didn’t close the file on their own, they had to when the CIA took over. But the CIA had to take over when the Russians contacted them.
Either way, the FBI look like the jackasses they are, the CIA are opaque but it looks like the Russians suckered them very nicely.
If the FBI doesn’t stop this kindergarten crap (deadly as it is) they’re going to get us into some real trouble.