David Montgomery, Sari Horwitz and Marc Fisher have put together a good article on how the intelligence community set up their operation in the aftermath of the Boston bombings and then went about their investigation. But I have some questions. The first thing that bugged me when the FBI held their briefing in which they provided video footage of the two suspects, was that they didn’t include any footage of either suspect dropping a backpack at the site of the explosions. I understood that the priority was to make an identification and so the pictures that were chosen were those most likely to lead to an identification. But why not show the evidence that they were guilty, too?
During the first FBI press conference on April 16th, Special Agent in Charge Richard DesLauriers’ only mention of video was a reminder for businesses and individuals to preserve their footage. At the April 18th press conference, when the surveillance video was revealed, DesLauriers said, “Suspect 2 set down a back pack at the site of the second explosion just in front of the Forum Restaurant.”
If you look at the latest piece at the Boston Globe, you will see further corroboration of that fact.
And Governor Deval Patrick said surveillance video from the attack shows the suspect putting his backpack down and moving away in time to avoid being injured by the blast of the bomb inside it.
Speaking Sunday on NBC, Patrick said the video clearly puts 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev at the scene of the attack.
Patrick says the video is ‘‘pretty clear about his involvement and pretty chilling, frankly.’’
He said he hasn’t viewed all the surveillance tapes but has been briefed by law enforcement about them.
Here’s what is bothering me. I believe Governor Deval Patrick and I believe Special Agent in Charge Richard DesLauriers when they say that this video exists and they have seen it. My question is why haven’t I seen it. Additionally, what took investigators so long to find the footage?
Yes, I know that it took time to collect the footage and sift through it. But the first thing they would do is get any footage of the actual explosions and then look for the person that put down the back pack. Yet, here is how the process is described in the Washington Post:
Quickly, the authorities secured a warehouse in Boston’s Seaport district and filled the sprawling space: On half of the vast floor, hundreds of pieces of bloody clothes were laid out to dry so they could be examined for forensic clues or flown to FBI labs at Quantico in Prince William County for testing. In the other half of the room, more than a dozen investigators sifted through hundreds of hours of video, looking for people “doing things that are different from what everybody else is doing,” Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis said in an interview Saturday.
Yes, fine, you are looking for suspicious activity and behavior, but the first thing you are looking for is footage of the explosion sites and anyone who might be caught placing the back pack there. Right?
The work was painstaking and mind-numbing: One agent watched the same segment of video 400 times. The goal was to construct a timeline of images, following possible suspects as they moved along the sidewalks, building a narrative out of a random jumble of pictures from thousands of different phones and cameras.
It took a couple of days, but analysts began to focus on two men in baseball caps who had brought heavy black bags into the crowd near the marathon’s finish line but left without those bags. The decisive moment came on Wednesday afternoon, when Massachusetts Gov. Deval L. Patrick (D) got a call from state police: The investigation had narrowed in on the man who would soon be known as Suspect No. 2, the man whom police captured Friday night bleeding and disoriented on a 22-foot boat in a Watertown driveway.
Patrick said the images of Suspect No. 2 reacting to the first explosion provided “highly incriminating” evidence, “a lot more than the public knows.”
I admit that it would take a very long time to figure out that two individuals arrived with back packs and left without them, but only if you didn’t have footage of one of them placing his back pack at one of the explosion sites just moments before it went off. This account makes it sound like they first identified Subject Two (Dzhokhar Tsarnaev) by his reaction to the bombing and not by, you know, him being on tape placing the bomb.
It is easier to see how Suspect One was connected to Suspect Two. You may have seen graphic pictures of one of the victims being carried away with his lower legs blown off. His name was Jeffrey Bauman and once he awoke from surgery he was able to write enough down on a piece of paper to attract FBI investigators to his bedside. There, they were told by Bauman that the bagman had a black cap and sunglasses. That means that Bauman was a victim of the first bomb set by Subject One (Tamerlan Tsarlaev). From there, investigators knew what to look for.
As investigators reviewed images, the young men in the black and white baseball caps came to stand out from the rest, [Boston Police Commissioner Edward] Davis said.
By Wednesday afternoon, [Gov. Deval] Patrick said in an interview Saturday, investigators had narrowed in on images of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as the most likely suspect. “It was a remarkable moment when they narrowed in on Suspect Number 2,” he said.
I’m still having trouble over why there was any doubt about who the most likely suspect was when they had footage of him planting the bomb. If they had that footage on Wednesday (or even on Tuesday) then this doesn’t make much sense:
During a briefing Thursday afternoon, President Obama was shown the photos of the suspects by senior members of his national security team. Senior administration officials said that although Obama was not asked to approve release of the images by the FBI, the president offered a word of caution after viewing them. Be certain that these are the right suspects before you put the pictures out there, he advised his national security team, according to the administration officials.
Did the president not get to see the footage of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev placing the bomb, either? Because, if he did, then why would he want assurances that they had the right guy?
In any case, they had their suspects but they couldn’t figure out who they were.
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.
The facial recognition software totally flunked. I can accept that. But didn’t the Special Agent in Charge for Boston show these images to his officers, some of whom would presumably have interviewed Tamerlan two years ago? Unless the relevant agents had retired, been fired, or been transferred, it seems like someone should have recognized the face.
I am not positing some conspiracy here, other than to suggest that we are not getting straight answers on some pretty important elements of this story. The FBI should release their proof that they have footage of Suspect Two placing his back pack at the scene of the second bombing and also show us his inappropriate reaction to the first bombing. If they don’t, this thing will grow conspiracy theories faster than you can say Lee Harvey Oswald.
And, by the way, Oswald also spent time in Russia, was visited by the FBI, and killed a local cop after the commission of his crime. Remember?
Not a fan of conspiracy theory, so I’ll just ask how exactly does someone get a fair trial if all the evidence of guilt circumstantial or otherwise given to the public before jury selection?
I know you can do much about a jury’s pre-conceived notions, but you can certainly poison the jury-pool pre-trial by releasing certain inquiries and circumstantial evidence pre-trial.
In fact, isn’t this what’s happening right now in the trial of George Zimmerman in Florida. It seems daily that the defense lawyers are releasing or “leaking” things that are meant to malign the victims character.
In this case, I think the jury pool is already gonna be poisoned anyway, but I would think that releasing the video you talk about will mean there is no where that the bomber will be able to get a “fair” trial.
That is if you believe in all that due process stuff
If that’s their rationale, I think it is a pointless and self-injuring one. Protecting this guy from a biased jury is not going to be possible, but the public’s trust is still up in the air.
And Congress is going to investigate this to figure out why the FBI let this guy slip through their fingers. Might as well get it all out there as quickly as possible, cuz the b.s. is going to come back to haunt them.
I do believe conspiracies happen and that sometimes no one involved with admit it or talk about it (see: Operation Northwoods, Texaco racial discrimination lawsuit, Baseball Collusion I, II, III). But I’m not apt to look for a conspiracy until the evidence points that way.
In this case we’re looking at a number of statements from difference sources all at a time of chaos. In most cases they, including the governor, are recalling information they’ve seen or been given that was part of a massive set of information given to them at the same time.
In such a situation I my conspiracy detectors would be on full alert if there were NOT apparent contradictions and pieces of wrong information amongst what has been provided. Because it is normal for humans to get stuff wrong when they are describing what they’ve seen or heard. If everyone’s story is perfectly coordinated, and if the situation is highly complex, then the most likely answer is that the stories were scripted and rehearsed in advance. In this case, what you are reading actually fits what we should expect.
Let’s not omit the Lance Armstrong conspiracy — a more obviously sports doping conspiracy than that of the baseball players doping.
So…this surprises you, Booman?
We haven’t gotten a straight answer from our government on anything of real import since the JFK assassination.
Not one.
We won’t get one here, either.
Why?
Because it is not in the best interests of the Permanent Government to have a populace that really knows what is going on.
Why?
Because that populace would kick the bastards out if it knew, that’s why. Some PermaGov people undoubtedly rationalize this practice by believing the “the people” are simply too stupid, too cowardly and too venal to be able to deal with the machinations of empire.
The “You can’t handle the truth!!!” thing.
Like dat.
But the others? The real hustlers? The real thieves?
They just don’t want to get busted.
My ol’ granpa once told to me “Never expect anything from an asshole except shit.”
Well…never expect anything from this government except lies. It is a serial liar and it has gotten to the point now where it is a compulsive liar as well. It lies just to be on the safe side. Just in case anything dirty gets turned up by accident.
It also lies just to keep in practice, I think.
Nice.
Station WTFU signing off once again.
Gotta go see a man about a duck.
Later…
AG
Boo, I am what would be called a conspiracy theorist (a lefty though) and I’m making a request that you don’t conflate conspiracies.
I see nothing much here besides two brothers, and maybe some help from the internet boogeymen on why God wants you to blow up stuff and how to do it.
While I am not terribly worried about much more than what we know (I suspect that the older brother was abused as a child, and family details will be interesting to learn), there is pretty much nothing about the official JFK assassination narration that should be trusted. The guy who shot Tippit was wearing different clothes than the guy arrested at the theater. There was an Oswald wallet at his boarding house, at the scene of the Tippit shooting, and on Oswald when he was arrested.
Please do not invoke JFK. Just back away slowly. Thank you.
Imagine if we had had video surveillance of Oswald pulling the trigger and the government didn’t let the public see it because it might prejudice the jury or whatever. That would have been a stupid decision, right?
There is plenty of evidence from the JFK case which the government hasn’t allowed the public to see. There is evidence that the FBI seized immediately after the assassination which has disappeared. If that is the basis for suspecting a conspiracy, then you should onboard with the JFK conspiracy.
I’m not denying the possibility of something much greater than what this instant case appears to be. I’m just saying that I don’t feel that not instantly having all information revealed is a sign of a conspiracy.
I do find it interesting that the older brother was being watched by the FBI. Anyone who followed the Judi Bari case knows that the FBI has not always been above-board. There was also the case of the guys who shot up marchers in North Carolina (I think) who were led by an FBI informant (the shooters).
I think Booman is on board with a JRK conspiracy of some sort from his earlier posts.
I think to say that the FBI was watching the older brother may be over stating it. It appears he was investigated briefly a year and a half ago, but there really hasn’t been any evidence to suggest it went beyond that.
I agree with you, Bob.
This doesn’t have the feel of a set up to me, or if it is, it would not be emanating from the US but the Russians, and the brothers, though the actual perpetrators, would be their dupes. I’m not saying this is the case, only that IF there was any setup that would make more sense. In 2005, journalist Vyacheslav Izmailov of Novaya Gazeta reported that in separate incidents several journalists and representatives of NGOs from different countries had been kidnapped in the north Caucasus by FSB agents masquerading as Chechen terrorists.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/chechnya-sl/message/42717
And apart from real Chechen terrorists, there have been allegations of Russian-govt involvement in false-flag operations blaming Chechens. But it’s a murky area.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_apartment_bombings
In short, my questions are not so much about who placed the bombs, but about how and why they came to do that. I imagine US intelligence is asking the same questions.
Yes, this is exactly how conspiracies ‘grow legs’.
Some semi-informed member of the public sits in his living room at his computer and goes through every little bit of quoted material, picks out every tiny discrepancy that they can find, then adds just a taste of doubt in people motivations, puts in a reference to the POTUS, and presto!, you have a conspiracy.
Yep, that is just how you grow legs on a conspiracy.
.
I’m not picking at discrepancies. I am advising them to release the footage.
They say they have it, so it shouldn’t be a problem. I believe they have it.
I specifically said that I am not positing a conspiracy theory.
You’re looking at this with the hindsight of what? A few days, almost a week? C’mon, Booman, you’re better than this. What is so outrageous that they singled out Suspect #2 in footage and pics based on how he reacted to the explosion and proceeded from there? Lack of video showing him set the backpack down doesn’t really undo the fact that he was apprehended following the murder of a cop, a carjacking, and gunfight with police in the company of Suspect #1. You’re asking some pretty ridiculous questions, too, like, how couldn’t they know who they were immediately? Or that they started laying out debris from the explosion in a warehouse as some sort of proof that they didn’t immediately start looking for video, which they obviously must have, on top of acquiring cell phone videos. Righ? They were looking for footage, but for some reason because you read an article that says they quickly set up a warehouse to review material from the explosions, they were somehow going about this the wrong.
This is one of those moments when folks in the blogosphere really need to acknowledge that they don’t have every detail, that they don’t know everything law enforcement knows, and that your confusion and second-guessing is largely an artifact of your distance from the investigation based on what you think should happen or what you think they should have, all cobbled together from various media reports.
True and we don’t know the sequence of acquired intel. The magnitude of the data and evidence must have been overwhelming. I don’t know that this article is correct on the timing or the account of how everything happened.
Man, I hate to do this, but.
Yep.
Simple answer, perhaps–The government is being careful about what they release, and the media is not. I think it’s all just very confused at this point and we should just be patient.
VIDEO: Final Moments Of Boston Bombing Suspect’s Capture
So are there really reports that the suspect’s upper injury may have been caused by a failed suicide attempt?
Boo, you said that it’s hard to believe that facial recognition software failed and that no one at the Boston FBI office would recognize Tamerlan.
As I said a couple of times, it’s even worse than that. Don’t police keep lists of known possible offenders, at least when it comes to terrorism? Wouldn’t the FBI keep a list of people in the Boston area who have been flagged as having possible connections to Islamic extremism? And wouldn’t Tamerlan be on that list? And once they had a photo of Suspect No. 1, wouldn’t they go through that list to see if Suspect No. 1’s picture comes up (especially since he looks “ethnic”)? That just seems to be standard police work.
I’m not saying there’s a conspiracy. What I am saying is that it’s hard to avoid the impression that the FBI was incompetent as usual.
I didn’t say that it was hard to believe that the facial recognition software didn’t work. I said, “I can accept that.” We buy a lot of high-priced toys that don’t work.
However, yes, it is hard to understand why the FBI had not identified him based on their own records and relatively recent contact and interest in him. Perhaps, they have a high volume of suspects or the right people to ask were not present. I don’t know.
In any case, if you track mentions of @J_tsar on Twitter, you’ll see most of the mentions are people expressing the opinion that he was set up.
So, that’s just gonna grow if the government doesn’t provide the evidence.
The FBI interview didn’t come up with anything on him. the terrorism looks to me more connected with the upcoming Olympics than anything USA related.
by this I mean what’s the motive? no one picked up on anything particularly anti-usa from him. so what’s the motive, except that it’s a major sports event with large crowds
All that gee-whiz hi-tech stuff is better at making few people richer than it is at performing the promised task.
Why would BPD, FBI, etc. have been singularly focused on Boston Muslim extremists within the first three days? And even if one team was tasked to cover that, Russian immigrants wouldn’t have been at the top of the list if one the list at all.
Tsarnaev wasn’t just a Russian immigrant. He was also someone who had been flagged as a possible Muslim extremist. Also, the Tsarnaevs do not look Arab, but they do look as if they might be Indian/Pakistani or from the Caucasus. I thought that the bombings were done by members of a right-wing militia, until I saw the photos of the suspects. Those photos reminded me of the people in Four Lions, to be honest.
I think that part of the problem is lingering antipathy on the part of U.S. government bureaucrats towards Russia. If the Russians are suspicious of someone, he’s probably a good guy. (Same with Britain refusing Russia’s extradition requests of oligarchs taking shelter there.) Note that the FBI initially didn’t say what country tipped them off about Tamerlan. They were embarrassed that it was Russia.
Yes. We Americans don’t do nuance or color — it’s all either black or white. As I noted a few years ago
The forensic evidence is likely better than what was captured by the Lord&Taylor camera. What that would be are the two blast sites, how the bombs were detonated, an estimate of how long the bombs were likely to have been in place before exploding, and the backpack materials. If it’s true that Bauman was right next to bomb #1 and recalled a guy wearing a black baseball cap and sunglasses and setting down a backpack that was a huge break.
More curious to me is that this picture wasn’t included in the FBI release as it more clearly demonstrates that they were together than the videos of them suggest. If this image had yet to surface, it’s more remarkable that that they were able to tie the two together.
The FBI, ATF and AG are parts of the DOJ. What is the status of the DOJ? Last I heard it was infested with Liberty/Regent loyal bushies. The new sheriff came to town and did nothing with regard to the bushies. Since then Issa etc. have intimidated Holder. Turns out Holder is an accomplice with the Wall Street Mafia. Then Wayne LePew is found to have a long term vendetta defunding the ATF. The Bircher Fascists and the WSMafia owned GOP have been actively complicit.
Is the DOJ capable of much beyond pot smokers and whistle blowers? I could use an update.
Typically, the Times doesn’t help the reader by stating that “the agency involved” was Russian domestic intelligence, although that’s now a matter of public record.
What the public sees is less important now than what the defense lawyer for the accused sees. Under our system of law, the prosecution is obligated to disclose both the accusatory and the exonerating or mitigating evidence to the defense. It is the jury that must see the evidence. And juries have tended to prove their fairness when there is complete presentation of the evidence without the prosecution trying to rig the deck to make a reputation.
We have a political culture that is secretive and a popular culture that is more fascinated by the ideas of conspiracies than by the practical and effective delivery of real justice. Does it take a conspiracy theory to make people pay attention anymore?
reported by the Independent (haven’t heard it anywhere else):
His mother believes 9/11 was a black flag operation, by the way.
Presumably, once they had identified both men they would want to retrace their steps as much as possible to see if they left any other bombs and if they interacted with anyone else.
Remember too that the FBI cautioned everyone to rely solely on the photos they released, no others, for identification. And then there’s the victim who woke up, asked for pencil and paper and wrote down that he had looked one of the brothers in the eye just as he set down the bomb package. And then I believe the story goes that he was indeed able to identify a brother off a picture shown to him.
Maybe the Jack Nicholsen reason is the best; seeing the actual frame of a bomb being set on the sidewalk would be too strong a visual for Americans.
Denying direct responsibility. Interesting because they are pretty much the only game in town, however:
What’s the point of a terrorist act you can’t claim responsibility for? Consider me puzzled.
Some ‘unnamed source’ from the Russian intelligence establishment is also putting distance between the bombers and the Russian conflict with Caucasian jihad:
If the FSB was trying to create a pretext, say, for some action in the region, as has been suggested, this seems a counter-intuitive way of going about it.
I am not at all sympathetic to Chechen separatists (I’m ethnically Russian lol), but it never occurred to me that Chechen separatist organizations have any connection to the bombings. This is simply because committing acts of terrorism against the U.S. is not in their self-interest. (They can always hope for some covert aid from the U.S., if US-Russian relations get sufficiently bad.)
But I disagree with a comment quoted in the article you linked to:
There are a lot of Muslims in America, but this is the first significant act of home-grown Muslim terrorism in America, as far as I’m concerned. (I’ve ignored all the others, as they struck me as being mostly about the government trying to stir up fear.) Here is what a former Green Beret has to say about Chechens:
I think that the motive for the attacks is the continuation of the War on Terror–including Obama’s intensified drone strikes–which is a war on Muslims. Robert Right suggested today that the Boston bombings are blowback. Lots of American Muslims are against the War on Terror, I’m sure. But in my opinion, Chechen Muslims are more prone to “do something about it” precisely because they come from “a very martial society”, with a long history of violent resistance.
That these two cooked this physical attack up by themselves? Early days yet but if it turns out to be the case it strikes me as more like Columbine than Chechnya; disaffected, sociopathic youngsters with slender grasp of their own identities. Makes little sense to me so far.
Beats me how either of these two could convince themselves they were victims of genuine oppression on present evidence; or that America was the source. It will be interesting to find out. If I had to guess at this point I would suppose we will be left wondering; much like Columbine.
One minor point: I wouldn’t make much of the fact that the footage of the guy setting down the backpack didn’t jump out at them until they were looking for footage of that particular guy. Backpacks are heavy, so lots of people at events like this will be settn common sense, probably applies legally in specific ways.ing them down. The footage of him setting down the backpack, and the footage of him not having it later could have been separated by time, location, and source of footage.
Accidental cut and paste:
“Backpacks are heavy, so lots of people at events like this will be settn common sense, probably applies legally in specific ways.ing them down.”
should read:
“Backpacks are heavy, so lots of people at events like this will be setting them down. And the principle of biasing the jury, though unavoidable in common sense terms, probably has a specific legal interpretation here.”
Let me spell this out for you a little since it warrants a response.
If I were in charge of the investigation, I would of course want all the video and photos that I could get from the public. But what I’d be most interested in is any surveillance or television cameras that were capturing the actual site of the explosions. I would collect all of that first and find the time of the explosion. If the backpack is was the picture, I would simply rewind slowly until the moment that the backpack is placed there. It was only a few minutes earlier.
Now, all of the reports seem to indicate that there was no camera directly on the backpack during the first explosion, only the second. They had to infer that that Suspect One planted the first bomb, and that took some time.
It was Suspect Two who was captured on a “surveillance camera” dropping the bag. No one said it was from someone’s still shot or someone’s iPhone video recorder. They all said it was from a surveillance camera. That’s the first footage they would have collected and the first footage they would have looked at. And they would have found the backpack placement almost immediately.
But that is not the story we are being told. We are told that this footage played absolutely no role in them ID’ing Suspect Two. Instead, it’s almost incidental.
That’s why the story doesn’t add up. That’s why so many people are beginning to doubt the story.
What they are saying is that it went like this:
If that’s how it really went down, they’re idiots.
Number 6 should have accomplished within hours of the blasts.
maybe in #6 he has his back to the camera
Fair enough.
Perhaps they needed to correlate white baseball cap man to someone else with a better captured image.
But that is nowhere in the narrative, is it?
They are not saying that almost immediately they knew they were looking for a guy wearing a white baseball hat.
Instead, they are saying that they spent hours and hours and hours looking at footage of the crowd and they discovered a guy who reacted inappropriately when the first blast went off, and then they realized that he was “probably” involved, and then they got the tip that the other bomber was wearing a black hat, and then they put it all together. At no time is the fact that they had the guy on camera placing the bomb given as being helpful in any way to their effort to identify the bomber.
It’s just, oh by the way, we have this guy nailed, dead to rights.
They don’t even do us the courtesy of explaining that they only found the smoking gun footage after they’d already figured out who did it.
But that would be bullshit anyway because this was published in the Boston Globe on Wednesday.
If that initial report is somewhat circumspect, later statements have been less so. Later statements have no “perhaps” and no alternative cameras with better angles.
It strikes me as unlikely that they got the wrong guys. If they were innocent, they probably wouldn’t have gone on a shooting/carjacking spree trying to get away. Why they didn’t leave the area in the two or three days before they were identified is a mystery, though.
However, if there isn’t footage of Dzhohar planting the second bomb, it’s a pretty flimsy case. Backpacks pre-explosion/no backpacks post-explosion isn’t enough to remove reasonable doubts.
Again, as I said in the piece, I believe that the footage exists. What I am being critical of is the decision to not share the smoking gun with the public because that arouses doubts and leads to conspiracy theories which, as we’ve seen, can linger for decades.
I see your point, booman, but I also don’t see any reason for authorities to have shown video of the backpack being left. First off, it’s not as if folks are going to be more or less likely to come forward with a possible identification based on whether they think the evidence of guilt is “solid.”
Second, evidence of guilt will presumably be offered at trial. Why should the government show its hand now?
Third, a defense attorney could claim “tainting the jury pool” if evidence of guilt is shown to the public at large.
Relying on some of the evidence, just some of the evidence released to the media and then to the public is always under scrutiny because less is not enough for our addictive obsessiveness. If its not enough to squash our scrutiny, lets make more….you guys are sick and letting that conspiracy virus turn you into those kooky zombies.
Official reports that are later retracted. The NPR Thurs/Fri Timeline. There was five hours between the FBI release of the bombing suspects and a report of a 7-11 robbery that is alleged to have initiated the manhunt. Two problems: a) bomber suspects didn’t rob the 7-11 (were they there at all? if so, what’s the time stamp on the recorder?) b) the names of the suspects would have been received within minutes of their pictures being presented. Where they lived and had lived would have been known a few minutes after that. So, why would the various law enforcement agencies have been waiting for an unrelated robbery before moving?
MIT police officer found shot in his car at 10:30 pm. How is that related to the bombers? Or is it?
Time stamp on carjack victim’s ATM withdrawal? Victim released or escaped? Either way, suspect(s) continued driving the car?
I was watching the excellent local coverage that night. They reported that it turned out the 7-11 robbery was unrelated. The officer responded to a disturbance and was killed by the bombers who then carjacked a car and told the driver that they had done the bombings and had just killed a cop. They let him go and then led the police on a merry chanse into Watertown.
What day and time did the excellent local coverage report that the 7-11 robbery was unrelated?
Doesn’t it bother you just a tiny bit that the MIT police officer is reported to have been investigating a “disturbance” (was that a radio message from him? at what time?) and was later found shot in his car and it was the bomber suspects that did it? Not saying it isn’t true — but officials haven’t bothered to place the suspects at MIT, much less what they would have been doing there, and why shooting the cop would have been necessary when later they allegedly release their car-jack victim unharmed after allegedly confessing to the Marathon bombings. Sorry, it’s not adding up for me.
From when the car-jacking incident occurred right through the night and as you can imagine the story came in very confusing snippets of chatter, some quite dramatic and visceral, while others were wholly unrelated. Responding police and dispatchers were sometimes equally confused for a time.
From memory the car-jacked motorist left the car after they stopped at a Shell petrol station. The Watertown chase and shoot-out occurred shortly thereafter. There was an apparently unrelated 7/11 incident around the same time which has been confounded with the manhunt ever since; not least by the media in their embarrassing overnight coverage of the incident.
But that overnight security camera image of the younger brother had to come from somewhere.
Boston Marathon bombings
According to the timeline there, the photos were taken by an ATM. The “Reporting mistakes” section mentions that photos of them were also taken while they were buying gas.
It is bothersome that no explanation has been given of what they were doing at MIT or why they shot the MIT policeman. Since MIT policemen rarely get shot, I’m not particularly doubtful that they shot him, however (unlike the case with Oswald and the cop lol).
We know absolutely nothing about the MIT incident except that the fugitives apparently mentioned it to the car-jacked motorist. Interesting to note also the motorist’s abandoned phone was used to track the fugitives; another unintended consequence which proved crucial.
Also reported that it was the SUV’s GPS that tracked the vehicle. That sound more probable than the guy’s cell phone.
Their fate was sealed, it seems.
WaPo report that they’d decided it was over before they shot the MIT cop.
WaPo claim
Massachusetts has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation. But hey, America is a free country. Terrorists have Second Amendment rights, too.
Tend to doubt that they had a gun arsenal as large as what has been reported or that they fired anywhere near the reported number of rounds. Guns aren’t cheap (the pressure cooker bombs were cheap) and nobody is asking how these two even managed to support themselves.
i got the impression at the time that their itinerary after the bombing wasn’t known. Since then the investigators have been trying to piece it together. So the fact that they were at MIT and nobody knows why does not seem so strange to me. Although clearly we want to know why they were there.
I do not see these guys as innocent patsies. All evidence is they were armed to the hilt and gave the cops a very tough run.
But there is definitely more to the story.
“It emerged that a man and two women were arrested 60 miles from Boston in the port of New Bedford in the hours before Dzhokhar’s capture. The three are believed to be of college age.
“A source close to the investigation said: “We have no doubt the brothers were not acting alone. The devices used to detonate the two bombs were highly sophisticated and not the kind of thing people learn from Google.
“They were too advanced. Someone gave the brothers the skills and it is now our job to find out just who they were. Agents think the sleeper cell has up to a dozen members and has been waiting several years for their day to come.”
http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2013/04/boston-marathon-bombings-fbi-hunts-terror-sleeper-cell-
2626492.html
Wait a sec. That story may be a fake.
http://theothermccain.com/2013/04/21/the-blair-glass-sleeper-cell-british-tabloid-fabricates-a-phony
-scoop/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheOtherMccain+%28The+Oth
er+McCain%29
No, they demonstrated that they weren’t innocent patsies by not stepping forward when the FBI released their images and assert their innocence. As the high school boy that the NYPost fingered did.
But I don’t like it when authorities lie. Often because the truth makes them look like incompetent boobs. But the stories they’ve been putting out on this is that the manhunt didn’t begin as soon as they had names and more stumbled into the suspects than that they were hunting for them. That seems more incompetent to me than looking and not finding just as they had to admit occurred in the hours after the first suspect was captured.
I don’t think there is going to be a major rise in Islamophobia from this, because Chechens are not a people that the U.S. or Israel has a conflict with.
At this point, I think the biggest aspect of this story is that we have learned that the national security state that has been assembled since 9/11 is useless for protecting Americans from terrorism. And the FBI is as incompetent as ever.
It puts some Republicans in a dilemma considering their almost unequivocal support for Chechen “freedom fighters” over time. If that is what you mean I would have to agree. On the other hand it is pretty clear that, as usual, beyond the actual perpetrators it is probably harder to sort out the “good guys” from the “bad guys” than we might want to believe.
Agree. It doesn’t compute for most Americans and they aren’t being guided by official propaganda expanding the concept of scary terrorist beyond the predefined enemies of the US.
Fifty-five years of the national security state and who knows how many trillions of 2013 dollars to thwart another Pearl Harbor and the day it was needed it was AWOL.
I guess neither the Tsarnaev brothers nor Christopher Dorner have ever watched a spy movie where the hero hits someone on the back of the neck with a pistol to keep him unconscious for a couple of hours. (I assume that if you do it right, that does actually happen.) Both got caught because they hijacked a car and then let the driver go.
Dorner tied up the couple before taking their vehicle. He was also selective in his murders.
Not that it ultimately matters, but it’s interesting that there is no mention whatsoever of the murder of a police officer in the criminal complaint against Tsarkaev.
I noticed the same thing and wondered if they weren’t leaving that for the state so that MA will also get their chance to take him to court.