The confession specifically named US military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq as motives for the attack, and called the Boston Marathon bombing victims ‘collateral damage’ in the same vein that Muslim civilians had been killed in American led wars, CBS news reports.”When you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims,” the note allegedly added. Dzhokhar reportedly declared he did not mourn the death of his older brother Tamerlan – the other suspect in the bombings, who died from injured received during a shootout with police – saying he was already a martyr in paradise. Dzhokhar added that he expected to join his brother in the afterlife. Law enforcement sources told the network the wall the note had been scribbled on was riddled with bullet holes. Police unloaded a volley of shots after Dzhokhar lifted up the tarpaulin, claiming they feared he had another bomb. He had sustained multiple gunshot wounds and was severely bleeding from injuries to his left ear, neck and thigh. Initial reports said his neck wound was possibly from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a botched suicide attempt, though it was later revealed that Dzhokhar was unarmed when captured in Suburban Watertown Massachusetts on April 19. His arrest followed a massive manhunt which brought the greater Boston area to a standstill. Police say the contents of the confession mirror many of the things he communicated to investigators while recovering from his injuries at a hospital several days later. The confession will be admissible in court. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, is currently convalescing in a federal prison hospital in Massachusetts and has been charged with using a weapon of mass destruction in the deadly attack which killed three people and injured 264 near the marathon finish line on April 15.If found guilty, he could face the death penalty. … Read More
Quantum computer dominates traditional PC in head-to-head battle
Computer scientists have been singing the praises of quantum computers for years but the question remains: How do they stack up against a traditional high-end PC? We finally have an answer to that question as Catherine McGeoch from Amherst College, Massachusetts, recently put a commercially available quantum computer from D-Wave… … Read More
US anti-terror policy ‘creates hundreds of new enemies’
Arguably the world’s leading authority on contemporary Islam believes the US authorities greatly underestimate the tribal nature of most of the Muslim societies in their war on terror. RT: Post 9/11 the US has been all over the map chasing terrorists. But then you see terror growing right here in the US in a well-educated area like Cambridge Massachusetts, referring to the Boston bombers. What slipped through the cracks in America’s understanding of terror?Dr. Akbar Ahmed: This is a new phenomenon and a challenge. When people say home-grown terrorism it really means Muslim youth – those who grew up in the US and have turned against the US. I believe that several causes are to be identified. You have the problem of youth growing up in a culture, not of their own. Many of these people are from the Middle East, south Asia or, in the case of the Boston bombers, from the Caucasus. They grow up in a culture, which sort of accepts them and sort of doesn’t.RT: But by so many accounts they did fit in.AA: As I said, they fit on one level, but on the other level they don’t. They are hearing around them so much talk of islamophobia, someone attacks their religion, Koran, not necessarily on the religious level. So their response isn’t necessarily an Islamic response, but also a cultural one. The same phenomenon can be seen in the UK where you have many of these young British-born Muslims being accepted, playing cricket, going to pubs and so on, and yet being involved in terrorism. There aren’t many such cases, but these cases, I believe, are consequences of several failures of society, which is unable to integrate them fully, and their own community not being able to detect who they are and give them a certain direction. RT: Apparently Tamerlan Tsarnaev didn’t fit into FBI’s profile of who would be a jihadist. Can we talk about the danger of profiling in law enforcement?AA: I was in charge of law and order myself in the tribal areas of Pakistan, in Balochistan, which is one of the most difficult areas to administer. We were taught when the cat is about to jump and when it will jump. When you profile people broadly, for example all Middle East-looking people, and you only look at them then your mentality is that a blue-eyed or blond-haired cannot be a terrorist. But as we know terrorism comes in every form and every shape. We’ve had many terror attacks in the US by people who weren’t Muslim. Timothy Mcveigh is just one famous example of that. So the aim is to prevent violence whoever commits it.RT: Why do those people, many of them presumably well-read and educated, find what they find in Islam?AA: First, the assumption that education means a person is compassionate, sensible, pluralist or inclusive is not really correct. Secondly, what is coming from Islam is equally not correct. Perhaps the most terrible example in history is what the Germans did to the Jewish community in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. From 25 to 30 percent of SS personnel were PhDs or had higher education decrees. Where did that leave their humanity? They were completely unsympathetic to the Jewish community. So we have to be very careful making these generalizations. Very often these people act as they do, which is completely unacceptable, they come out of their own broken societies and distort the understanding of Islam.RT: What difference have drones, the new US tool for fighting terrorists, really made?AA: In my opinion the debate around drones has just started. There is one side of the debate, which is the most problematic, and that is how the Americans see the usefulness of drones. What they don’t see is an impact drones are having across the world on local tribes, local communities. You may have 1, 2, 3 intended targets killed, the so-called bad guys, but then you have 100, 200, 300 completely innocent people killed including women, and children. There are many reports confirming this. That creates hundreds of new enemies.RT: It seems that the main point of discussions around drones was whether or not they should kill American citizens. The fact it could kill innocent people without due process remained sidelined. What was your impression?AA: My sense was that the Americans were very ethnocentric when dealing with this issue. They aren’t really connecting this to people across the world, who are being killed in drone strikes. But I’m sure that this debate will continue. The Americans have great social conscience. If you pick up an idea and they feel there is injustice they pick it up themselves and they go for it. But right now this isn’t happening. Also we have to understand that when you have a place like Waziristan, which is the focus of my book. A small place, really impoverished, tribal society, no hospitals, no roads, no education facilities, and you are hit with drones again and again. They’ve ended up by killing over 300 people in drone attacks in Waziristan alone. Think about the impact it could have on a small society. It just rips it apart. In that vacuum you will certainly have violent angry killers, as you call, who then go down to Karachi and other bigger cities and blow themselves up. Once they killed a ten year old boy, a Pakistani army officer, in a mosque. They killed him and said ‘Now you know how we feel and what we go through every day’.RT: In your book ‘The Thistle and the Drone’ you write how the US props up central governments, which then go out and fight tribes. It’s true for Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen. Is it because the US doesn’t understand tribal society or just doesn’t want to understand? AA: The war on terror, as I see it, resembles a triangle. I call it a ‘triangle of terror’. You have the US at one point, you have the central government at another point and the third point is tribal society. So far in the discussion we don’t hear much about the tribal society. Very often we see the US and central governments in alliance, but what they don’t realize, and this is a very important point, that terrorist are coming out of societies, which have nothing to do with supporting them. In fact, they are the victims now – they’ve been killed by the drones, by their own armies, and they’ve been blown up by suicide bombers. Tribal society lies underneath a vast number of Muslim population from Morocco across North Africa to the Middle East and to the Caucasus. The Code of honor, the code of hospitality, the code of revenge – all these things are very important and defining these societies. Not so much Islam but the tribal code. And there you have a kind of an internal tension, which hasn’t been resolved after centuries.RT: The Pakistani government condemns the US strikes in very strong terms but at the same time allows them. That kind of a two-faced policy, is it sustainable?AA: No, it isn’t. I called it duplicities in my book. On the one hand they are telling the Pakistani people that they have nothing to do with that. On the other hand they align with Americans to go ahead with the drone strikes. The Pakistani PM has many times said that he would object to it, that he would go to parliament and say that the Americans shouldn’t do these terrible things. But he goes ahead with that. The people of Pakistan aren’t stupid. They understand the game. But again you ask yourself does it help law and order, does it help peace and stability, and does it help check the men of violence? And the answer is ‘No’.RT: Why isn’t Pakistan saying the real ‘No’?AA: I think it’s because they have a weak government. They want to stay in power. It takes a lot of courage to stand up and say to a superpower ‘Guys, we are your friends, but you are messing it up for us’.RT: Afghanistan past 2014, is it going to move back to the rule by tribes?AA: That’s a very important question. I asked someone who lived there and worked with the tribes. The country is going to face a lot of challenges both internally and regionally.RT: If the structure of their society is tribal maybe it’s a natural way for them to go back to tribal society?AA: Don’t forget what happened to Afghanistan in the last few decades. First, there was the Soviet invasion, which disrupted all the old structures – chiefs, the elders, the religious structure, the central government, the King of Afghanistan. So you have a tribal society in a state of destruction. Then 1990s with the Taliban, which brought even more disruption. Then you have 9/11 and the American invasion with more disruption. Three decade later this tribal society is different, the tribal code has mutated, Islam has mutated. And from those mutations you see violence, violence, violence. … Read More
Dead Boston bombing suspect finally buried: police
Slain Boston Marathon bomber suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev has finally been buried, ending a growing row over what to do with his body, police in the Massachusetts town of Worcester said Thursday. “As a result of our public appeal for help, a courageous and compassionate individual came forward…
‘Our homeland defense system failed’ – Congress holds first hearing on Boston bombing
Authorities attribute three casualties and more than 260 injuries to a pair of ethnic Chechens brothers accused of detonating explosives near the finish line of the Boston Marathon last month in the state of Massachusetts. But as investigators learn that the Tsarnaev family raised international red flags in the years before the April 15 tragedy, congressional leaders are looking to see what could have been done to thwart the attack.Investigators say 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his 19-year-old brother Dzhokhar plotted the attack and intended to detonate more explosives in New York City if they could ever made it out of Massachusetts. During the Thursday morning hearing, Commissioner Davis was grilled over what the city of Boston — as well as state and national law enforcement — could have done to curb plots to terrorize the citizens of both cities.Davis said the Boston Marathon bombing created “the most complex crime scene we ever processed in the city.”In a statement published before the testimony began, the commissioner advocated for having more resources that might be able to give law enforcement the upper-hand in instances where future plots are being hatched. Ultimately it was footage of the Tsarnaev brothers caught on surveillance cameras that led authorities to identify them as suspects in the bombing, and many have made a push in the weeks since to increase the number of cameras across the city. Speaking to the committee on Thursday, Davis suggested he stands in line with this take but does have reservations about what it could lead to.“I strongly support the enhanced ability to monitor public places,” Davis said. “This monitoring . . . violates no constitutionally protected rights but gives police the ability to investigate and effectively prosecute. Images from cameras do not lie. They do not forget.”But in the wake of what unfolded in his city last month, civil liberty proponents have condemned the response in Boston and elsewhere. Davis’ city was placed on lock-down after the bombings during a manhunt for the Tsarnaev brothers, and heavily armed police conducted warrantless searches of homes across the region. Coupled with calls for increased surveillance, critics have blasted Boston’s response and have warned of what could come next.“I do not endorse actions that move Boston and our nation into a police-state mentality, with surveillance cameras attached to every light pole in the city,” Davis added with his statement.Elsewhere in the hearing, Massachusetts Undersecretary for Homeland Security Kurt N. Schwartz said Boston’s transit and traffic cameras are already linked to “a quite complex, sophisticated system,” but that admission didn’t deter members of the House from inquiring about other means of foiling future plots.Joe Lieberman, a former Independent senator from Connecticut and co-architect of the US Department of Homeland Security, opined at the hearing that the DHS was designed after the September 11 terrorist attacks essentially to prevent events like Boston from ever unfolding.“Though it would not have been easy, it was possible to prevent the terrorist attacks in Boston,” Lieberman said.The former senator took several opportunities throughout the hearing to offer criticism aimed at the DHS. “To put it bluntly, our homeland defense system failed in Boston,” he said in a statement offered before he took the microphone.Of particular concern, he would later explain, was how information sharing between agencies didn’t occur to a degree that ended with Tamerlan Tsarnaev being detained, or even deported, after Russian intelligence notified the US Federal Bureau of Investigation about him years before the attack.“Why didn’t the [Department of Homeland Security] notify the FBI and the Boston JTTF [Joint Terrorism Task Force] when its system ‘pinged’ that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had left America for Russia on his way to Dagestan?” Lieberman asked.But while Lieberman suggested that US agencies didn’t do their job properly, he had powerful words for Moscow too. “It could be that the most consequential failure to share information was the failure of the Russian intelligence to explain in more detail to us why they were interested in Tamerlan Tsarnaev,” he said.“I’m agitated by,” he said, “why nobody was particularly looking for the name Tamerlan Tsarnaev by the time he came back.”“Someone should have been on him,” he said.Commissioner Davis admitted during the hearing that the FBI failed to inform the Boston Police Department about the Tsarnaev family despite Russian intelligence issuing a warning to the US.When Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) asked, “Were you aware of Russian intelligence warning?” the police chief responded that he was “not in fact informed of that particular development.”“[W]e would have liked to know,” Davis said.“The whole point of the fusion centers and the Joint Terrorism Task Forces is to share information,” McCaul said. “The whole idea of information not shared defies why we even have a Homeland Security Department in the first place.” … Read More
Body of suspected Boston marathon bomber eventually buried
Link to original: Body of suspected Boston marathon bomber eventually buried
Watch live: House committee holds hearing on Boston bombings
House Homeland Security Committee hears testimony from Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis, Sen. Joe Lieberman and Massachusetts Homeland Security official Kurt Schwartz about the Patriots’ Day attacks and the investigation that followed. Watch live, broadcast via NBC News on May 9….
