More emerging Boston bombing stories
I speculated some time ago that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev might kill himself before capture. And in fact, I was very surprised later to learn that he’d been taken alive. It turns out, though, that there’s a very good chance he made a serious attempt at suicide and failed, succeeding only in robbing himself of speech (perhaps permanently) because of injuries from a gunshot wound to his tongue and throat.
A few days ago I also wondered why the bombers released the guy whose car they hijacked. Now there are reports that they didn’t release him, but that he escaped at a gas station when the two left the car to buy snacks. I can’t say that makes a whole lot more sense to me, since it would seem to be an obvious rule of thumb that two perps shouldn’t both leave the car together if they want the victim to stay put. Perhaps the report is in error, or perhaps they were so rattled (or so hungry?) they forgot the most elementary rule that any moviegoer would know.
Since the FBI had already been alerted to older brother Tamerlane as a potential terrorist, why didn’t his 6-month visit to Dagestan and his attendance at a militant mosque there raise some very large red flags? Did he, perhaps, travel under an alias? And why, even after the photos were released, did the FBI seemingly fail “to cross-reference the photograph with a man whose picture they already had on file”? the kindest interpretation might be that his sunglasses may have obscured enough of his face to make the photos hard to match.
Here’s an article about Tamerlane Tsarnaev’s American-born wife, who met him and converted to Islam. She will certainly be asked a lot of questions by the authorities, but my guess is that her husband didn’t confide in her very much about his plans to blow up a crowd of people.
Nor does the article shed all that much light on her own transformation from all-American college student to dropout and Muslim wife. (And just as an aside: I had no idea there were leopard-print hijabs.)
Some of these inconsistencies are probably due to bad reporting. Some are purposeful obfuscation by the authorities, perhaps to hide their methods and knowledge. Some are probably the result of the fog of terrorism, and as more facts emerge they may come clearer. And those of a conspiracist bent will no doubt have a field day with it all.
[ADDENDUM: Re Tamerlane Tsarnaev’s recent travel going undetected, Lindsay Graham says it was because his name was misspelled by the airline. This is pretty shocking; doesn’t the FBI have capacities like Google, to alert to alternate spellings? If not, it should. Or at the very least we shouldn’t be relying just on airlines for this, since a passport had to be involved as well.]
I posted the comment below in an earlier thread where it wasn’t really on topic. I’m posting it again here because I’m still wondering about this and also starting to wonder why nobody in the MSM seems to be asking about what looks to me like an obvious and important question.
“Is anyone besides me wondering where the Tsarnaev brothers got their money? The father worked in this country as an auto mechanic, the mother as a cosmetologist. There’s no indication that there’s money in the extended family. The younger brother was a college student; Tamerlane did not finish college and was apparently unemployed, yet people who knew him speak of his nice car and say he paid for things. That boxing photo essay shows him on his cell phone in front of his Mercedes, in a scarf, stylish jacket and white leather European shoes. The money for all that came from someplace. Where?”
Good question Mrs Whatsit.
Gateway Pundit has a link to a Fox story indicating the brothers told the driver they would not hurt him because he was not American.
Story just posted, Wall Street Journal: Details Emerge of Alleged Carjacking
The victim told police he was driven to a Shell Gas Station on Memorial Drive in Watertown. Inside the car, the brothers “declared to [the victim] that they were the Boston Marathon bombers and would not kill him because he wasn’t American,” the report said.
I’ve often been amazed at how women will transform for a man. My own stepdaughter became a raving Kansas Jayhawks fan for her husband. Now that they are separated, she could care less. Let’s hope this woman can refind her family and community.
Good question, Mrs Whatsit. According to this USA Today article, their move to Russia indicated financial means before making it to America: http://tinyurl.com/csawc7a
“The Tsarnaev family apparently moved to Dagestan after the outbreak of the Russia-Chechnya war in 1999. The fact that they resided in Makhachkala and not in Khasavyurt, as most other ethnic Chechens in the republic, indicates that they had the financial means to live in the capital of Dagestan, which is quite expensive, says Mairbek Vatchagaev, a Chechen analyst for the foundation.”
Another interesting bit from the article:
“Dzhokhar…was likely named after the first separatist president from Chechen who died in 1995.”
Looking like these kids were radicalized before they ever set foot in America.
Mrs. Whatsit raises an important issue. Where did their money come from?
I trust such intelligent questions as Mrs.Whatsit asks do not fall under the “conspiracist bent” of which Neo unnecessarily warns us. I find the reular posters here, like Mrs. Whatsit, a remarkably well-informed, diligent bunch, quite unlikely to leap to conspiracy fantasies sans evidence. I try to live up to that standard.
I have in recent years tried to think deeply and often about the words of The Lord’s Prayer, which has been around as long as has Christianity, particularly “…but deliver us from evil”. The Prayer speaks to me and for me.
To me, as the facts and truth slowly unfold and emerge about these guys, their backstory, their lives, and their family, friends, and associates, I’m finding the facts and the truth to be much more interesting and compelling than the free-wheeling speculation that precedes it, which is in the nature of tabloid fodder. But maybe that’s just me.
There’s no end to the despair inducing behavior that grinds away at Western Civilization. It does not surprise that the good, nice, friendly, Chechen immigrants had in them an incubating immoderate Islam. But it never ceases to surprise me that seemingly normal women have incubating in them a death thrill. Katherine Russell is a manifestation. Amanda Palmer is a carrier. If a female spokesperson could enlighten me I would appreciate it. Otherwise I am left to rely on the growing prejudice that women’s feelings most always trump women’s thinking and, in this respect, Islam may be right — women aren’t all that. Every single young woman should be assigned a patriarch until, at least, they have read this.
I seriously doubt that we are looking at anything remotely like an intellectual conversion here.
And I’m not sure what an “All American” girl is supposed to mean in her context. Apparently it’s having grown up among the dwindling trappings of a cultural and political tradition largely eclipsed and increrasingly empty, or having a doctor and nurse as parents.
Seems to me she just floated along, with hidden issues [see the obscure bit of nihilism referenced in the article] until she found someone who would dominate [and apparently batter] her with enough self-assurance to give her the feeling of being part of something meaningful.
You can seemingly pour anything into an empty vessel, no matter where it is found or how it is decorated on the outside.
Mrs Whatsit asks the question I’m sure the Feds are looking into now, but I’m not holding my breath we will get those answers anytime soon. If it’s a terrorist network or connection, they surely aren’t dumb enough to tell the public which network or connections until they unravel it (if ever). If it’s their parents depositing money in their account, that would interesting too, but I understand they are conveniently out of the country now, and I would have expected the feds to disclose that if it were obvious. If they’re on government assistance, that won’t be a convenient story for the current immigration debate, and I wouldn’t expect to hear about that angle until all this is safely in the Obama administration’s rearview mirror.
The gun question is just as interesting – they live(d) in a state where gun laws require a permit to purchase any gun. The irony is so obvious it doesn’t need to be stated, suffice it to say, that’s one point which will not be acknowledged by Piers Moron and the rest of the gun control = safety crowd.
The requirement for handgun permits meant that the Watertown people huddled in their houses were unarmed with an armed terrorist loose in the neighborhood. The NRA is right. Gun laws affect the law abiding.
George Pal:
Thanks for the Palmer link. How can you go there? She makes my skin crawl. The best there is the comments, and the best of these is
“WhatIsThisShit >Amanda Palmer – 3 hours ago
−+
Flag as inappropriateYeah, it’s probably about Jeff Bauman. You should write this on his prosthetic legs that he lost because this misunderstood symbol of alienation and child-killing took them from him. You know. That 19-year-old adult who killed an 8-year-old because he had no empathy for those around him nor who he would be killing. This isn’t about everyone. It’s some post-modern bullshit trying to put words and emotions into the mouth of a guy who has yet to say a word about what he did.”
With respect to women, I recently read a book on the Comanches:
http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful/dp/1416591060
The book mentiones the captives taken, in particular there were three girls who were adopted into the tribe who eventually ended up back in white society.
When taken, these girls would have seen their family brutalized, and any “adult” women gang raped and usually tortured to death. Yet all three, and they all remembered the fate of their family, converted to comanche life.
Two of them were only with the comanches for only about a year. They adopted to white life again but always showed sypathy for the indians. The other, Cynthia Ann Parker, was nearly 30 when she was taken back by whites, and she never again was part of white society.
Mr Frank, I think that is the left’s intent. They want us to huddle, scared, waiting for the government’s protection.
Where did they get their money? It’s not clear how much money they had, but the chances are it was from either drug deals, or their associates.
I believe it’s highly likely they had confederates and/or handlers and are allied with a larger group. It stands to reason they’d be getting some money from those sources. I assume this will come out in time.
The man in car may tufn out to be connected (the one idea that is not on the table)
hy didn’t his 6-month visit to Dagestan and his attendance at a militant mosque there raise some very large red flags?
Because the sequester??? /sarc/
Because the fbi cant afford soundx and a mispelling could derail them
I don’t know if they were rolling in money, but they seem to have somehow come up with enough to live pretty well without working. For instance, the younger one was described by some classmates as a dopehead — not a cheap habit, if it turns out to be true.
I agree with you, Neo, that the money likely came from drugs or a larger group or both. true, that requires money. One fascinating detail connecting Tamerlane to drug culture is that at one time he supposedly introduced a boxing associate to his “best friend” — Brendan Mess, who was later murdered in Waltham with two others, all found with bodies covered with marijuana, in a crime that has not been solved.
Oops, bad editing, ignore “true, that requires money” in comment above. Someday I’ll learn to proofread before hitting send — maybe!
And just as an aside: I had no idea there were leopard-print hijabs
Shows one how much reality does not inform
In fact… shows u how much the norm is out of wack in that u imagine as feminism used to paint it a certain way n u brlidve it!!!!! Imagine women not wanting to compete in clothing!!!!
And r u zhure its a hijab??? Do u know how many different things there are n what defines them???
Kind of shows hiw disinterested but fir entertainment discussions are…. in ten years what did the discussers learn if basic reality was never able to intrude
Tiny litgle things like this r what i add up to know
And often the person giving ghe clues doesnt
What is the sound of one hand clapping???
To most they make up stuff to sound good and believe their assumptions are the same as reality..
To those that dont restore missing with mental spackle n not mark it as such… they r suprised…
But rarely is the example so clesr cut
Ur surprised becausecthe reality is not ur assumptive fact, nor was the idea marked as a guess….
It also makes it very hard for u to understand why an attractive woman would choose it…
But then again… ghe italians had similar coverings as others used other methods
But all those reasons and nuances were removed by feminista so that u could hate the mdn for forcing the women
But if men r reallly in control, would feminism dxist at all????
Its just how the femjnistas raised u to not ghink
I bet it also confuses why modern feminism born in terrorism and sexual blackmail woul find terrorism n sexual blackmail appealing in islam….
No hostile male gaze there….
Artfldgr: it was a joke.
Re: The airline misspelling his name – How did he get through the TSA screening with a name mismatch? Also, why wasn’t he on the TSA watch list? My dad managed to get on it (we don’t know why), so for years he’s had to arrive early and endure extra scrutiny. If they can do this to septuagenarian American citizens why not Chechen non-citizens?
Basically, its Chechen jihad 1 DHS-FBI-TSA 0. However, we taxpayers can be assured the DHS empire will grow, become more intrusive, and fail to stop future attacks of this nature.
Don-
Tr Fehrenbach is the greatest source on the Comanche.
http://www.amazon.com/Comanches-History-People-T-R-Fehrenbach/dp/1400030498/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
It is the disturbing that the FBI can investigate people, ncluding Nidal Hassan, who go on to commit terrorist acts. Apparently, this has happened multiple times.
Don Says:
April 22nd, 2013 at 3:49 pm
I’ve read that women tend to be rather adaptable in those circumstances.
That’s been the normal pattern of war from time immemorial. The victorious side kills or enslaves the men of the defeated side, and rapes the women and takes them for their wives. Eventually the women get used to their new situation. They have no choice, since no one will come to rescue them. Maybe that’s why women are attracted to alpha males. It’s sort of ingrained from thousands of years of history.
Spelling is difficult:
“Misspelling Abdulmutallab’s name [the underwear bomber] prevented the State Department from finding his visa and revoking it. ”
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/underwear-bomber-couldve-stopped-senate-report/story?id=10681367
As someone whose entire professional life was about building things, I’m an experimetal physicist, the fact that they could build bombs that worked is really surprising. Typically, the first and even second time you build something, it doesn’t really work right. It takes practice and experience to get it right.
Yet there is apparently video of young Tsarnaev calmly standing at the Forum restaurant where he’d dropped his bomb waiting for the first bomb went off and then walking way a few seconds before his exploded. That tells me that he knew the radius of the blast so that he’d be out of harm’s way and that it was radio controlled, by a cell phone or otherwise. A timer would be too dangerous for delivery so close to the event because you have no control over the time of the explosion once the clock is ticking.
The older brother was a car mechanic so he no doubt had good mechanical skills but that still leaves the design of the explosive and being certain that the trigger will work, not something one learns at Mercedes repair school.
There have been a number of these jihadis, including the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, and the Times Square bomber who failed. This is the first one that I remember where the explosive worked, and not just one, but three. The third worked during the shootout in Watertown. Tamerlan threw it at the police and it was partly responsible for the destruction of one of the police cruisers.
They had help, or at the very least practiced somewhere. Dagestan?
That be some good deducin right at ought thair, Paul in Boston!
I wonder how that escapes so many of our bright interlect-jewels.
Robert Spencer, the man to go to regarding Jihad, writes “The absurdity of 1,000 FBI agents hunting for a jihadi sleeper cell while investigators searched for a motive for the attack was compounded by the fact that on the same day that AP made this bizarre claim, the Los Angeles Times reported that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was “identified by a foreign government as a ‘follower of radical Islam and a strong believer’ whose personality had changed drastically in just a year, according to the FBI.”
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/robert-spencer/sleeper-cell-in-boston/
Oh how I admire reporting after the attack:
“… compounded by the fact that on the same day that AP made this bizarre claim, the Los Angeles Times reported that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was “identified by a foreign government as a ‘follower of radical Islam and a strong believer’ whose personality had changed drastically in just a year, according to the FBI.”
They expect 99% to gaze at navel lint and resume watching American Idol or the expansion of Kim Kardashian’s thighs. Its the PC-DC nexus.
Darth Tamerlan’s ‘buddies’ / cannabis buyers have f i n a l l y tumbled to the fact that he was the perp who murdered his ‘best American friend’ — while skipping town to miss the funeral.
Whence, time to strike up a doobie.
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Debka makes the interesting case that the pair were being run as assets by the Feds — trying to penetrate AQ.
We know that such operations are certainly attempted — typically only failures — if American — generally successful if British or Saudi.
http://debka.com/article/22914/The-Tsarnaev-brothers-were-double-agents-who-decoyed-US-into-terror-trap
Of particular note, Debka details a number of fiascos that have become known — wherein jihadis bite the infidel hand. It’s a sobering list of failure.
=========
And in other news, the RCMP have popped a jihadist cell in Toronto.
Again, it’s a STEM educated brainy crew that was planning a really high tech attack against Americans — by way of Via Rail.
http://gatesofvienna.net/2013/04/railway-jihad-thwarted-in-canada/#more-28235
We’re talking about genius level IQ here.
Again: it’s a categorical error to educate muslims in the West on our dime in STEM fields — or medicine…
This cadre is the absolute heart of AQ’s jihad.
They serve absolutely no purpose in their own societies. Typically, they’re descended from the wrong tribes.
When they get here, they immediately flip into jihader than thou fanatics.
Like M. Atta, they BECOME fanatical in a Western college setting.
Islamism = Islam + Communism
Wahhabism = Islam + Nazism
Allowing for permutations.
Not surprisingly, the Islamists hate, hate, hate, the Wahhabists — and vice versa.
Wahhabism, like Nazism, doesn’t travel well. It places Saudi Arabs at the pinnacle of humanity — shades of the new Aryan man.
Islamism is more loaded with Communism (its re-creator) than Islam. This latter point is suppressed by the MSM. However, if you spend scarcely any time at all reading their screeds — you can’t help but think they were written in Berkeley. Islamist economic theories are new-wave Marxism. They leave the camels and dung behind.
BOTH factions despise infidels and hold an intense, insane, Jew-hatred. What a surprise.
(It’s weird to call them anti-Semitic, Arabic being Semitic and all.)
Not withstanding their ‘modernity’ their ultimate game plan is to function as warrior-shamans — kicking it back to enjoy the jizya after smiting the worker castes.
How Neolithic of them.
They’ve been reading too many Conan scripts.
“If they can do this to septuagenarian American citizens why not Chechen non-citizens?”
Because if they don’t “gun control” American citizens, they will lose their wealth, power, and influence.
It’s better some Americans die to terrorists than the elite rulers in DC born to rule be sacrificed. Their lives, and their children, are worth a lot more than yours.