Two explosions at Boston marathon finish line

[Joe Hillshoist]

Yeah same re the timezone. Fuck - what is it with this thread? Come back here and there's basically 10 pages of someone losing the plot and going ballistic.

What mac said was over the top and way too harsh and I just want to register my irritation at it.

[compared2what?]

I'm in a different time zone so missed the above furore .

I think asking how Tamerlan died is a pertinent and interesting question.

I agree. But it's unrelated to asking why it says "Unknown" in the time of death slot on his death certificate, which is a dull one.

The press release and statement from Chief Deveau states he was walking towards them firing till he ran out of bullets , they tackled him to the ground and tried to handcuff him , then he was run over . Either the side gash was as a result of a medical proceedure or something else . Either he was shot after he was run over and handcuffed or he wasn't. Either way they did not appear to feel a need to capture him alive . Why was that ? Rage at the shooting of the MIT cop , or just got carried away , at what point did the assurances that there were no other plotters emerge, pretty soon I seem to remember . So they felt no desire to catch them alive and unravel the plot ? And Dzhokhar got away , was this because they were busy shooting a handcuffed run over man ?

That sounds like the cops as I know them, when they think they're dealing with a cop-killer. I mean, think about how close they came to shooting Dxhokhar dead when he was unarmed and helpless and they were virtually doing it in front of the watching eyes of the whole world. If it had just been front-page news in-state, they might well not have been so reserved.

There's a very long history of that here. Along with black men who get arrested for doing something that challenged raciall taboos who the coroner later finds somehow wound up beating themselves to death in their own cells while handcuffed and unconscious, it's one of the two commonest unexplained generic police mysteries in America.

The only way to get an inquiry into that is via community/local outcry. They almost always get cleared by those. But you have to demand it anyway, imo. It really just means that you also have to demand changes to the system on a sustained, ongoing basis. People lose interest after they've exhausted their emotional response, though. Story of the world since time began. Progress takes forever. Or so I imagine. ***

But yet again I ask, presumably there has to be some kind of inquest and a more coherent narrative has to emerge to explain the death of Tamerlan?

There'd have to be a demand for them not to do it by self-clearing in house.***

______________

***ON EDIT: Sorry. Accidentally didn't finish.

Besides people losing interest, the other reason this doesn't happen is that it very disproportionately affects racial minorities. So a lot of the majority community never takes enough interest to know it's an endemic problem to begin with. Pretty much all of it around here, except for black people and big-city liberals, I'd say. Most of the country takes the same approach Rand Paul does in my sig-line, more or less. Just more tacitly.

[compared2what?]

Yeah same re the timezone. Fuck - what is it with this thread? Come back here and there's basically 10 pages of someone losing the plot and going ballistic.

What mac said was over the top and way too harsh and I just want to register my irritation at it.

You should be a diplomat.

I don't think he's going to apologize, which is horrible if it means he's also not going to post. I don't want that. So....I'll get out of the way, at least for a while, I guess.

[Canadian_watcher]

I followed along closely and this is an honest question - what did Mac 'say' that was 'over the top?'

I didn't see it, and I wouldn't want to repeat the same mistake.

[Bruce Dazzling]

I followed along closely and this is an honest question - what did Mac 'say' that was 'over the top?'

I didn't see it, and I wouldn't want to repeat the same mistake.

I explained the situation to Canadian_watcher via PM, but the short version is that Mac accused c2w of editing her posts in order to rewrite the history of their debate, which is a pretty heavy accusation to make if one can't back it up.

Let's move beyond deconstructing the interpersonal interactions of the board, and get on topic.

[FourthBase]

https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/didnt ... 582f5e841/

For now, I want to start with one of the biggest "What The Fuck?!" elements of the bombing story, a detail so far completely overlooked: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's high school project "mentor," Brian Glyn Williams. Brian Glyn Williams happens to work for the CIA, on Islamic suicide bombers, Chechnya, and jihadi terrorism. Williams is also an associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, the university where 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was enrolled, and where he spent many of his last free hours between the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15, and his arrest on April 19.

The day after Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was arrested, Brian Glyn Williams, the CIA man at U Mass-Dartmouth, confessed to a local reporter for the New Bedford Standard-Times,

"I hope I didn't contribute to it."

It's still available to read for free or whatever.
I suggest everyone read it, the whole thing.

The local story:

http://www.southcoasttoday.com/apps/pbc ... /304200341

It was a perfectly logical thing to do. English teacher Steve Matteo at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School put his Chechen-born student in touch with a friend who happens to be one of the top experts on Chechnya, UMass Dartmouth's Brian Glyn Williams.

That was two years ago. The assignment was to have each student in the very diverse class research their own ethnicity and write about it. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, whose family fled the horrors of the Russian occupation, was about to learn about some harrowing things he escaped from at a very young age.

Williams, whose classes on the War on Terror are routinely packed, obliged by exchanging emails with the then-17-year-old student.

On Friday morning, Williams awoke to hear that this young man was the suspect being sought in the Boston Marathon bombing Monday.

Williams shot me an email. I phoned him and at one point I heard a rare twinge of worry in his voice. "I hope I didn't contribute to it. That kid and his brother identified with the Chechen struggle," he said.

Matteo said he couldn't talk to me, which is understandable given the circumstances.

But Williams recalled the student clearly, though the two never met and communicated by email, Williams sending him links to academic papers he's published and books he recommended.

"He was learning his Chechen identity, identifying with the diaspora and identifying with his homeland," he said.

"He wanted to learn more about Chechnya, who the fighters were, who the commanders were. I sort of gave him background." Those who are curious can read Williams' material on his website.

But Tsarnaev's older brother Tamerlan had taken things to a new level. Friendless in the United States, he returned to Russia for six months last year and was drawn in by the story.

"If there is trauma in the homeland, I think some in the diaspora become radicalized and that causes them to resort to terror," Williams said.

Tsaraev may have simply followed his older brother's lead.

In Williams' view, Chechnya has an undeserved reputation as a hatchery of terrorists, including al-Qaida and the Taliban.

"Foreign fighters did come in and radicalized people," Williams said. For some, "they transformed the form of war from a national one to a full-blown terrorist jihad."

But he charges there is no basis for an al-Qaida link, or even a Taliban link, for that matter. But years of Russian disinformation, 9/11, and a sloppy American media worsened Chechnya's reputation.

In a book to be published next year, "Inferno in the Caucus: The Chechen insurgency and the Mirage of Al Qaeda," he says that no matter what the Chechens are, "they are not al-Qaida. Repeat: They are not al-Qaida."

Steve Urbon's column appears in The Standard-Times and SouthCoastToday.com. He can be reached at 508-979-4448 or surbon@s-t.com.

If you believe that their relationship was limited to emails, a CIA rogue has a bridge to sell you.

[hiddenite]

I'm in a different time zone so missed the above furore .

I think asking how Tamerlan died is a pertinent and interesting question.

I agree. But it's unrelated to asking why it says "Unknown" in the time of death slot on his death certificate, which is a dull one.

The press release and statement from Chief Deveau states he was walking towards them firing till he ran out of bullets , they tackled him to the ground and tried to handcuff him , then he was run over . Either the side gash was as a result of a medical proceedure or something else . Either he was shot after he was run over and handcuffed or he wasn't. Either way they did not appear to feel a need to capture him alive . Why was that ? Rage at the shooting of the MIT cop , or just got carried away , at what point did the assurances that there were no other plotters emerge, pretty soon I seem to remember . So they felt no desire to catch them alive and unravel the plot ? And Dzhokhar got away , was this because they were busy shooting a handcuffed run over man ?

That sounds like the cops as I know them, when they think they're dealing with a cop-killer. I mean, think about how close they came to shooting Dxhokhar dead when he was unarmed and helpless and they were virtually doing it in front of the watching eyes of the whole world. If it had just been front-page news in-state, they might well not have been so reserved.

There's a very long history of that here. Along with black men who get arrested for doing something that challenged raciall taboos who the coroner later finds somehow wound up beating themselves to death in their own cells while handcuffed and unconscious, it's one of the two commonest unexplained generic police mysteries in America.

The only way to get an inquiry into that is via community/local outcry. They almost always get cleared by those. But you have to demand it anyway, imo. It really just means that you also have to demand changes to the system on a sustained, ongoing basis. People lose interest after they've exhausted their emotional response, though. Story of the world since time began. Progress takes forever. Or so I imagine. ***

But yet again I ask, presumably there has to be some kind of inquest and a more coherent narrative has to emerge to explain the death of Tamerlan?

There'd have to be a demand for them not to do it by self-clearing in house.***

______________

***ON EDIT: Sorry. Accidentally didn't finish.

Besides people losing interest, the other reason this doesn't happen is that it very disproportionately affects racial minorities. So a lot of the majority community never takes enough interest to know it's an endemic problem to begin with. Pretty much all of it around here, except for black people and big-city liberals, I'd say. Most of the country takes the same approach Rand Paul does in my sig-line, more or less. Just more tacitly.

So an inquest after a violent death is not automatic in USA ? I assumed it was . Here in UK there has to be an inquest if someones death is untimely . So does that mean at no future point will those involved have to give chapter and verse to account for their actions in the case of the death of Tamerlan ?

[compared2what?]

So an inquest after a violent death is not automatic in USA ? I assumed it was . Here in UK there has to be an inquest if someones death is untimely . So does that mean at no future point will those involved have to give chapter and verse to account for their actions in the case of the death of Tamerlan ?

Cops have guns so that they can shoot at armed suspects here, though. Ostensibly. (Meaning: The reason. They actually do have guns.)

The standard response to that should be a public inquest. But it's not. It's usually an Internal Affairs investigation. Sometimes there's a Civilian Review Board. We have one here, in NYC. They're mostly toothless, due to one side being overwhelmingly better organized and positioned to protect its interests by fair means and foul than the other.

It's such a mind-bogglingly horrifying and blatantly bad system it's hard to even know what to say about it, except that the reason it persists is that it has so little impact on anyone who isn't either a minority or part of an equivalently impoverished permanent underclass that it could well be invisible to many/most who aren't, for all practical purposes.

That's to the best of my knowledge, anyway. It's a big country. And police are a state/local phenomenon. Also, on an individual level, good cops aren't, like, a totally unknown phenomenon. But that's a separate issue. Institutionally speaking, it's bad.

The coroner/ME's office usually takes the police side, btw. I just don't think they had to do that here. Whatever else the witnesses say, they seem to agree that he was killed by being shot and run over during a police chase under circumstances that it isn't difficult to imagine would make estimating the time of death anybody's medical guess. Even when they have the wrong person entirely, that's not a crime if they can argue it was a good-faith error. It's just a pay-out. And maybe disciplinary measures.

Bad system.

[Burnt Hill]

.
I suggest everyone read it, the whole thing.

The local story:

http://www.southcoasttoday.com/apps/pbc ... /304200341

It was a perfectly logical thing to do. English teacher Steve Matteo at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School put his Chechen-born student in touch with a friend who happens to be one of the top experts on Chechnya, UMass Dartmouth's Brian Glyn Williams.

That was two years ago. The assignment was to have each student in the very diverse class research their own ethnicity and write about it. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, whose family fled the horrors of the Russian occupation, was about to learn about some harrowing things he escaped from at a very young age.

Williams, whose classes on the War on Terror are routinely packed, obliged by exchanging emails with the then-17-year-old student.

On Friday morning, Williams awoke to hear that this young man was the suspect being sought in the Boston Marathon bombing Monday.

Williams shot me an email. I phoned him and at one point I heard a rare twinge of worry in his voice. "I hope I didn't contribute to it. That kid and his brother identified with the Chechen struggle," he said.

Matteo said he couldn't talk to me, which is understandable given the circumstances.

But Williams recalled the student clearly, though the two never met and communicated by email, Williams sending him links to academic papers he's published and books he recommended.

"He was learning his Chechen identity, identifying with the diaspora and identifying with his homeland," he said.

"He wanted to learn more about Chechnya, who the fighters were, who the commanders were. I sort of gave him background." Those who are curious can read Williams' material on his website.

But Tsarnaev's older brother Tamerlan had taken things to a new level. Friendless in the United States, he returned to Russia for six months last year and was drawn in by the story.

"If there is trauma in the homeland, I think some in the diaspora become radicalized and that causes them to resort to terror," Williams said.

Tsaraev may have simply followed his older brother's lead.

In Williams' view, Chechnya has an undeserved reputation as a hatchery of terrorists, including al-Qaida and the Taliban.

"Foreign fighters did come in and radicalized people," Williams said. For some, "they transformed the form of war from a national one to a full-blown terrorist jihad."

But he charges there is no basis for an al-Qaida link, or even a Taliban link, for that matter. But years of Russian disinformation, 9/11, and a sloppy American media worsened Chechnya's reputation.

In a book to be published next year, "Inferno in the Caucus: The Chechen insurgency and the Mirage of Al Qaeda," he says that no matter what the Chechens are, "they are not al-Qaida. Repeat: They are not al-Qaida."

Steve Urbon's column appears in The Standard-Times and SouthCoastToday.com. He can be reached at 508-979-4448 or surbon@s-t.com.

If you believe that their relationship was limited to emails, a CIA rogue has a bridge to sell you.

Thanks for reposting what I have already posted.You missed it? Yet you belittled me for forgetting a name.
Excuse me
Oh will you excuse me
I'm just trying to find the bridge... Has anybody seen the bridge?
(Have you seen the bridge?)
I ain't seen the bridge! (Where's that confounded bridge?)
[spoken by Robert Plant]

[FourthBase]

Dude, lol. Re-posted to get this thread back on the rails. I know you already did. Bravo!

[Burnt Hill]

From the comments in the above article.

NB_Paleface
This is the same professor who was duped by a student into believing that Homeland Security agents visited him for taking a book out of the UMass library, causing an international event. And it's the same professor who testified as a defense witness in the trial of the driver and bodyguard of Osama bin Laden. And now this. Does it ever end with this guy?

Williams is too "out there" to be considered a "handler" of the brothers. Was he a dot in "connect the". Maybe.
Did he influence them, certainly.
I still believe the Brothers acted of their own volition, I am well aware of the connections.
Not all CIA are "deep".
Was Matteo also part of a terrorist plot?
I asked this earlier.
I wonder if we could find CIA links for any Chechnyan immigrant. I suspect so.

[Burnt Hill]

From the comments in the above article.

NB_Paleface
This is the same professor who was duped by a student into believing that Homeland Security agents visited him for taking a book out of the UMass library, causing an international event. And it's the same professor who testified as a defense witness in the trial of the driver and bodyguard of Osama bin Laden. And now this. Does it ever end with this guy?

Williams is too "out there" to be considered a "handler" of the brothers. Was he a dot in "connect the". Maybe.
Did he influence them, certainly.
I still believe the Brothers acted of their own volition, I am well aware of the connections.
Not all CIA are "deep".
Was Matteo also part of a terrorist plot?
I asked this earlier.
I wonder if we could find CIA links for any Chechnyan immigrant. I suspect so.

The connections I/we mentioned would be considered circumstantial. Coincidence theorist? whatever..
Way too "sloppy" to be agency work.

[Burnt Hill]

From the comments in the above article.

NB_Paleface
This is the same professor who was duped by a student into believing that Homeland Security agents visited him for taking a book out of the UMass library, causing an international event. And it's the same professor who testified as a defense witness in the trial of the driver and bodyguard of Osama bin Laden. And now this. Does it ever end with this guy?

Williams is too "out there" to be considered a "handler" of the brothers. Was he a dot in "connect the". Maybe.
Did he influence them, certainly.
I still believe the Brothers acted of their own volition, I am well aware of the connections.
Not all CIA are "deep".
Was Matteo also part of a terrorist plot?
I asked this earlier.
I wonder if we could find CIA links for any Chechnyan immigrant. I suspect so.

The connections I/we mentioned would be considered circumstantial. Coincidence theorist? whatever..
Way too "sloppy" to be agency work.

Also, if Williams is more involved than the obvious, then he went off on his own, not as ordered from above.

[FourthBase]

Also, if Williams is more involved than the obvious, then he went off on his own, not as ordered from above.

Very possible!

For decades, we proud tinfoilers have scoffed at any portrayal, in the movies or on television or in books, of plots limited to "rogue elements" within one or another obviously-completely-corrupt shady institution within the national security complex. Limited hangout! Inoculation! Et cetera. But, what if it's true? The size of the various rogue elements might be drastically understated and their breadth vastly underconnective in these entertainments, but...it might still be that (gasp!) our national security institutions are not 100% corrupt. Hell, for all we know, they might only be, like, 15% corrupt, viciously corrupt. And what we might only usually see, in the events and stories we devoutly busy ourselves with, is the work of that minority. Just like how you only usually notice bad refs, bad umps, bad cops.

[Burnt Hill]

Also, if Williams is more involved than the obvious, then he went off on his own, not as ordered from above.

Very possible!

For decades, we proud tinfoilers have scoffed at any portrayal, in the movies or on television or in books, of plots limited to "rogue elements" within one or another obviously-completely-corrupt shady institution within the national security complex. Limited hangout! Inoculation! Et cetera. But, what if it's true? The size of the various rogue elements might be drastically understated and their breadth vastly underconnective in these entertainments, but...it might still be that (gasp!) our national security institutions are not 100% corrupt. Hell, for all we know, they might only be, like, 15% corrupt, viciously corrupt. And what we might only usually see, in the events and stories we devoutly busy ourselves with, is the work of that minority. Just like how you only usually notice bad refs, bad umps, bad cops.

We need a public/journalistic demand to get those e-mails released.