The news stories are saying the likely Boston bombers are/were Chechen brothers (one has been killed). One story says they are ethnic Chechens who lived in Turkey before coming here. The younger one (the one still at large, age 20, give or take) appears to have been in the U.S. for a while.
This means it’s likely they are Sunni Muslims, although giving the mess in Chechnya it may be their motivations, whatever they were, were more political than religious.
Update: See Gawker headline that delicately suggests the New York Post‘s coverage of the bombings has fallen short of professional standards.
Chechens.
CHECHENS?!?!
If you asked me, out of all of the f*cking countries that we’ve f*cked with over the f*cking decades, I’d have put f*cking Chechnya right around dead @!$%#ing last – after all, they’re Russia’s favorite whipping-boy.
And vice-versa.
I’d have put New Zealanders ahead of Chechnians.
What, Moscow doesn’t have any @!$%#ing marathons?
(Btw – I was chaperoning a college trip to Moscow, back in Jaunuary of ’95, when Chechen rebels were threatening to set off nuclear irradiating devices in parks around the city – fun times —NOT!!!)
What’s their beef with us, the US?
Couldn’t get dates for some prom?
I can “get†terrorists from the Middle East coming here and killing people – even foreigners running a marathon.
But people from the former USSR’s, or, now Russia’s, sphere of influence?
WTF?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
FTW?!?!?!?!?!
TFW?!?!?!?
Etc…
I’m still baffled as to what their motivation is/was.
Hopefully, they’ll catch the surviving brother, alive.
But, I doubt it.
Everybody in authority is better off with him dead.
And they’ve LOCKED-DOWN the entire city of f*cking BOSTON?
WTF?!?!?!?!
BOSTON!
BOSTON, AND SORROUNDING TOWNS?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
FOR ONE F*CKING GUY?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
I’m more nervous about that, than I am about anything else in this story!
Btw:
Cue the flying-monkey’s!
There goes immigration reform!
Our Conservatives will blame any and everyJaun!
I always said of that awful situation, one day the Chechens will come home to roost.
Seriously though, I still get a Columbine vibe from these two. Of course, if the younger suspect is also killed, we may never know exactly what motivated them.
I think it is a good idea to let this thing play out before making any suppositions.
I just heard the family of the boys is from “the Chechen region”, another said their from Kyrgyzstan. So their origin is either from the caucasus or Central Asia.”Perhaps”.
As this plays out, I’ll bet the military training is from some of these outlandish video games like “call to duty”, and the motivation may be more like that of Adam Lanza than political or religious.We all want to know, but haste makes waste.Or worse.
In “American Raj”, Eric Margolis fully explains the Chechen situation.The only “link” to the US could be the support of the Republic of Georgia( which has strong ties to the government of Israel) or the TBC pipeline.
Somebody on the news just made a comment linking Al-Qaeda. I think this is a BIG mistake.
Even with their history showing, they could be coptic.
There are some Liberals worrying about anti-Muslim blow-back.
I’m not as worried, because if it’s true that the brothers are Chechen, that will confuse the living livid sh*t our of a lot of the morons on the right.
But if I were Chick-fil-A, or KFC, I’d hire extra security to protect their stores from people looking to take revenge on “Them Chickens!!!”
Hope not, gulag. MSNBC’s Chris Jansing, in her best ‘stir the pot’ mode has just informed us that authorities want him “dead or alive.”
The vibe I get is that they are a lot like the Columbine boys, and Lee Oswald yelling that he’s just a patsy.
We always knew it would come down to a scene like this. No matter what – the show must go on.
Well they have brown eyes and funny last names, thats enough for me. I say man the battle stations, re-ignite the cold war, onward to to Kurgystan!!!!!
I’m kind of impressed with how quickly they found these guys. It’s easy enough to see how they spotted the suspects in the video, but how did they identify them?
YEAH!
Screw them Kurgz! Kyrgz? Kyrgs?
I bet Malkins flying monkey’s are already gathering to snoop in the guy’s Uncle’s house, to see if that MOOOOZLUM Kyrg IMMIGRANT has marble countertops!
how did they identify them?
I heard it was via the younger brother’s Massachusetts driver’s license. Don’t know how accurate that report is. I have heard there is software the FBI & NSA uses to sort through millions of photo or video images to make matches, which is how the two suspects were IDed from the scene so fast.
I keep thinking of the lady in the aqua jacket, carrying some yellow balloons, seen walking just ahead of the older suspect in video footage. I wonder what went through her mind when she saw herself walking down Boylston Street with one of the bombers right behind her.
As far as putting this in the context, of the Glorious War on Terror, it makes me think of this post from Steve Benen the other day. As a terrorist attack, this is actually pretty amateurish, so it fits in with the idea that it’s difficult to maintain a terrorist network anymore.
So it gets back to the issue of drone strikes too, because whatever else you can say about them they do seem to be pretty effective. Well, I don’t just mean the drone strikes, but the program of relying mainly on intelligence gathering to fight terror. And with the technology we have now, if it’s used intelligently there is just no way for anyone to communicate without the US national security apparatus knowing about it.
So of course it’s terrifying. With the combination of the intelligence networks and the drone program, the president of the United States basically has the equivalent of Zeus’s thunderbolt. He can smite anybody he wants to.
Chechnyan teabaggers…just like I predicted… 🙂 Well, there are known knowns, unknown knowns,unknown unknowns, known unknowns,but who could have known those teabaggers were Chechnyans?
On the bright side, Michelle Bachmann gets a whole new store of ammo. I can hear her now…Benghazi,Boston!
Well it’s obvious that had Obama continued waterboarding these two shmeds would have never step foot in the USA. When will the impeachment start. Remember 43 kept us safe (except for 9-11 which was really Clintons fault)
“We may never know exactly what motivated them”
Since they are both young men living in America in 2013, I’ll go out on a limb and suggest it just may have been “Call to Duty” or one of those other violent video games.
I truly think those games induce psychosis.
erinyes,
Actaully, that was the same thing Mayor Fiorella Laguardia said, when he was banning pin-ball games in NY City, way back when.
Too many children were wasting time and money on the games, which featured flashing lights, and all sorts of mayhem, around the flippers.
People didn’t believe that then.
No reason to believe that now about video games.
Don’t believe it?
Let’s call the Hayes Office, and ask them about the ties between seeing near-nekkid nymph’s in movies, and what they had to do with rape, incest, shacking-up, and the birth of unwanted children.
They’ll tell us, the promiscuity in the 1930’s society was the result of the near-nekkid nymph’s in our movies.
The “Flappers,” Prohibition, and more acceptance of sexual freedom in the 1920’s, and escapism in the midst of The Great Depression, had nothing to do with it.
Oh, and while we’re at it, let’s ask them about how the crime movies of that time caused more violent crimes, like armed robbery, and murder, than the poverty caused by The Great Depression?
Don’t fall for the new meme.
Violent video games have as much to do with the ills of our present society, as pin-ball games, near nekkid nymphs, and movies about Murder Inc., had with the ills of society in their time.
BREAKING NEWS:
Reports of shots fired in Watertown, Mass. Developing.
Probably the end.
erinyes … http://www.ted.com/talks/daphne_bavelier_your_brain_on_video_games.html
I disagree with you on this one, “gulag.The newer violent video games are quite different. Add to that the young man testosterone, and anger, and that’s a dangerous mix.
I couldn’t open your link, Swami. My computer is running a bit strange tonight.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130326121605.htm
The study published in the April issue of Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice examined the level of video game exposure for 227 juvenile offenders in Pennsylvania. The average offender had committed nearly nine serious acts of violence, such as gang fighting, hitting a parent or attacking another person in the prior year.
The results show that both the frequency of play and affinity for violent games were strongly associated with delinquent and violent behavior
erinyes..I can’t put my finger on it, but something intuitively tells me that something is wrong with that study.. Sort of like knowing before going in what to expect coming out. Achieving an objective? Buttressing an preconcieved notion?
“The study published in the April issue of Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice examined…”
Swami,
Yeah, it’s almost like the April issue of Caffiene Lovers determining that the people in the Starbucks had a higher rate of caffiene addiction than people at the hot dog stand.
And just the other day, Tony Perkins (not the one who was a fine actor) found a way to blame women having access to abortions, on the murders at the Boston Marathon.
And I’m pretty sure that if I tried hard enough, I could prove that the cause of the murders at that marathon, was children getting formula, instead of being breast-fed. Especially if I went to the April issue of MMM – Mother’s Milk Monthly.