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Boston bombing thread. Please keep all talk here.

DonLever

By DonLever
in Off-Topic General

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Common sense Canucks Second-Line

Common sense

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Exactly the phenomenon that I was just pointing out. People who ask questions or go against the norm of thinking get called out as crazy.

None of these people asking question are crazy. Some of the extreme ones may be a little paranoid, but most are quite intelligent people just looking for answers. After 9/11 Americans would be crazy to not ask questions of their government.

But it's easier for people who are too lazy to look for any kind of truth to just accept it, and try and discredit anyone that is suspicious.

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The defence is applying to bring in additional counsel experienced in death penalty cases.

Three attorneys from the Massachusetts federal public defenders office - Miriam Conrad, Timothy Watkins and William Fick - were listed as representing Tsarnaev in court filings. The office did not immediately return a call for comment Monday evening.

Conrad filed a motion late Monday seeking the appointment of at least two attorneys with experience in death-penalty cases. U.S. law requires that at least one experienced attorney be appointed in every potential capital case. "Given the magnitude of this case," Conrad said it would be appropriate to appoint at least two additional lawyers with death penalty experience, in addition to his federal defenders, according to the motion.

http://news.yahoo.com/next-boston-bombing-suspect-021835222.html

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canucks since 77 Abbotsford Star

canucks since 77

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US cable news fostering a climate of fear

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing and while a massive police manhunt continued for the suspected perpetrator, 19 year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, NBC journalist David Gregory would say to American television viewers: "This is a new state of terror the country has to get used to." Given the breathlessly hyperbolic coverage provided by NBC, CNN and many other cable news organisations during the search for Tsarnaev, it is by no means surprising to hear Gregory make such a comment. Whether in the context of entertainment or news media (a distinction which has been increasingly blurred by cable organisations) fear and hysteria always makes for compelling if counter-informative viewing.

However, it nonetheless bears asking the question in response to Gregory's assertion: why should Americans - whose country possesses the most powerful military in human history and who spend more on defence than the next 13 countries combined - have to resign themselves to living in "a state of terror"? Can the actions of a disaffected teenage boy and his older brother, however heinous, be enough to terrorise a military superpower into paralysis and compel Americans to relinquish their Constitutionally-enshrined rights and freedoms?

From the outset, the establishment media's coverage of the Boston bombing and its aftermath has been marked by a combination of hysteria and ineptitude. From the initial reports of police seeking a "dark-skinned male" to wholly erroneous and still-unexplained Day One reporting which claimed that a suspect had actually been detained, the average viewer of Fox, CBS or MSNBC would arguably be far less informed from their coverage than they would have been by completely abstaining from television news during the crisis.

After several hours of reporting to their millions of credulous viewers important "facts" which later turned out to be little more than unsubstantiated rumours, CNN's Chris Cuomo would admit: "Ok. Now, that would be, you know, we don't know what's right or not at this point." One would hope for such forthcoming honesty from a major news organisation before the subsequent reporting of a major story instead of afterwards, but unfortunately the reverse proved to be true.

Media ratings

While the fast-paced reporting of rumours, hyperbole and innuendo serves very little to the cause of informing and enlightening the millions who rely on cable news for information, it undoubtedly does well at generating widespread fear and hysteria. This is less the result of a grand conspiracy than of simple market economics. Throughout the crisis, ratings at major cable news stations surged - shooting up 194 percent from normal averages at CNN while also posting smaller yet still materially-significant gains at Fox News and MSNBC.

Boston suspect captured after manhunt

For an advertisement-driven industry where these ratings are the standard bearer of success and financial viability, the Boston bombings provided a major boost. In this light, the impetus to avoid salacious rumour-mongering and speculation - something which would inevitably trigger great fear in a viewing audience devoid of its own means of gauging events - markedly diminishes. Fear and uncertainty may be bad for the populace at large as well as for the functioning of a healthy democracy, but they are undeniably good at generating bigger and more lucrative audiences for news media. In an oligarchic media landscape where both barriers to entry and competitive pressure among existing players are high, cable news outlets have every reason to keep pumping up the hysteria if it means greater viewership. As their hyperbolic coverage of the Boston crisis has shown, they have little hesitance about doing this when the opportunity arises.

Being a victim in America

While violent terrorism is undoubtedly real, it is worth restating a few basic statistical facts about the level of threat it poses to the average American. In their 2010 report for Foreign Affairs, John Mueller and Mark G Stewart constructed a comparative analysis of terrorism compared to other potential causes of death to Americans. What the results showed was that the average American on an annual basis is more likely to be killed by one of their home appliances, drowning in a bathtub, or in a car accident involving a deer, than they are to be killed in a terrorist attack. This is to say nothing of the threat of ordinary violent crime, which poses a greater threat by several orders of magnitude than that of terrorist violence and continues to churn on at an industrial scale throughout the country.

Nevertheless, due in large part to unbalanced and sensationalist media coverage, Americans have been more willing to part with their rights and freedoms in response to perceived threats from terrorism than they have from violent crime - the latter of which receives proportionately scant media attention. Viewed in this light it is easier to reconcile how tens of thousands of gun deaths a year can be taken in stride as "the price of freedom", while a single bombing can prompt calls for the suspension of the once-cherished civil liberties granted to citizens by the American Constitution.

Terrorism by media

Aside from the millions of Americans who are regularly victimised by a media which they trust to provide them with information - but which instead manipulates their deepest existential fears for financial gain - the aftermath of the Boston bombing coverage produced another, unique, type of media-victim. On April 18, 17 year-old high-school student Salah Barhoum woke up to find his image plastered on the front page of the New York Post along with the suggestion that he was in fact the perpetrator of the Boston Marathon bombing.

Boston bombing suspect charged

The directionless chaos and hysteria provoked by the media's designation of an amorphous "brown-skinned suspect" had led internet forums to circulate Barhoum's own brown-skinned visage as a potential threat - something which the Post had no qualms about reporting as fact in order to gain a scoop on a major story. The allegation turned out to be completely unfounded, as Barhoum was merely an innocent bystander whom Boston Police had never viewed as a suspect in the crime; but the damage to him was nevertheless done.

Despite acknowledging his innocence, the Post refused to apologise for the reputational damage and potential danger they have put Barhoum in by falsely identifying him as the perpetrator of a crime which provoked the anger and fear of an entire country. In his accounting of the days after being falsely implicated by a major news organisation, Barhoum described running home from school in terror after seeing a man whom he thought was tailing him from a nearby car. In his own words he would say of his future: "I'm going to be scared going to school... workwise, my family, everything is going to be scary." In many ways, he is another individual whose life has been terrorised by a major media outlet, except that due to their actions his fears today are far more well-founded.

Stoking the flames

The American citizenry today is being compelled to give up their sacred rights and freedoms over a threat which is more remote than that which emanates from their own home furniture.

In a rational assessment of future policies, the problem of terrorist violence must be addressed in a manner which is both sober and reflective of the true level of threat it poses. This however will continue to be impossible when a pliable public is subject to the unscrupulous 24/7 noise machine which passes for news media today. The same establishment news organisations which peddled the hype and lies that convinced millions of Americans to fight a ruinous war against Iraq on utterly false pretenses are today attempting to convince them to submit to more government surveillance and further diminishment of their civil liberties.

While there are many culprits, the lion's share of the blame must go to the cable news networks upon whom millions of Americans today rely for up-to-date and reliable information. The dismal and negligent coverage of the Boston bombing and its aftermath may perhaps be looked at in future as the "Tobacco moment" for cable news.

Until Americans either demand tangible improvement or definitively tune-out from these organisations, the country will see nothing but a heightening of the deleterious fear and hysteria they consciously help to provoke.

http://www.aljazeera...2124223136.html

This is our future if we're not careful.

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Wetcoaster Canucks First-Line

Wetcoaster

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US cable news fostering a climate of fear

Until Americans either demand tangible improvement or definitively tune-out from these organisations, the country will see nothing but a heightening of the deleterious fear and hysteria they consciously help to provoke.

http://www.aljazeera...2124223136.html

This is our future if we're not careful.

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Remember Sunil Tripathi , the Brown University student who was incorrectly identified as one of the bombing suspects and his name and likeness were plastered across social media sites? NBC News is reporting he has been found dead.

A body pulled from the Providence River earlier this week has been confirmed as a missing Brown University student who was wrongly rumored to be a possible suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings.

Officials confirmed through dental records that it was him, according to a spokesperson for the Rhode Island Department of Health.

Sunil Tripathi was last seen on March 16. His name recently popped up in social media circles over the marathon bombings, adding to his family's anguish over his disappearance.

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/25/17913288-missing-brown-university-student-found-dead-in-providence-river-authorities-confirm?lite

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RUPERTKBD Canucks Hall-of-Famer

RUPERTKBD

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Remember Sunil Tripathi , the Brown University student who was incorrectly identified as one of the bombing suspects and his name and likeness were plastered across social media sites?  NBC News is reporting he has been found dead.

A body pulled from the Providence River earlier this week has been confirmed as a missing Brown University student who was wrongly rumored to be a possible suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings.

Officials confirmed through dental records that it was him, according to a spokesperson for the Rhode Island Department of Health.

Sunil Tripathi was last seen on March 16. His name recently popped up in social media circles over the marathon bombings, adding to his family's anguish over his disappearance.
http://usnews.nbcnew...es-confirm?lite

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It is being reported that Russian security agencies raised concerns about Tamerlan Tsarnaev with both the FBI and CIA.

The FBI investigation began on March 4, 2011 from a request by the Russian internal security service, the FSB and was closed in June 2011 and the CIA investigation was opened in September 2011. He was added by the CIA to a federal database of known and suspected terrorists 18 months before the attacks called TIDE, the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment.. This was separate from the earlier FBI investigation. He also was added to a Homeland Security Department database used by U.S. officials at the border to help screen people coming in and out of the U.S. That database is called the Treasury Enforcement Communications System, or TECS. This system did generate an alert at one point.

That is going to raise more questions as the actions of the FBI come under more scrutiny from congressional inquiries in coming weeks about whether the federal agencies adequately investigated tips from Russia that Tsarnaev had posed a security threat.

It is also being reported that the FBI and CIA used different spellings of his name in their respective databases and that the airlines misspelled his name when it was submitted for security screening on his trip to Russia and he was not correctly flagged.

The federal government added the name of the dead Boston Marathon bombing suspect to a terrorist database 18 months before the deadly explosions, a U.S. official told CBS News.

CBS News senior correspondent John Miller reports that the CIA made the request to add Tamerlan Tsarnaev's name to the terrorist database after the Russian government contacted the agency with concerns that he was associated with Chechen terrorists. About six months earlier, the FBI had separately investigated Tsarnaev, also at Russia's request, but the FBI found no ties to terrorism, the official told Miller.

Miller, a former assistant director of the FBI, said on "CBS This Morning" Thursday that the FBI did a full background investigation on Tsarnaev, running his name against databases and investigating whether he had come up in any cases or if any informants had mentioned him or if he was on any wiretaps. Then they questioned him and his parents.

"They write that up, send it back to the Russians and the important caveat, as they say, 'If you have more information that will allow us to dig deeper, please send it,'" said Miller. "The Russians never follow up with that."

The new disclosure that Tsarnaev was included within a huge, classified database of known and suspected terrorists before the attacks was expected to drive congressional inquiries in coming weeks about whether the Obama administration adequately investigated tips from Russia that Tsarnaev had posed a security threat. Shortly after the bombings, U.S. officials said the intelligence community had no information about threats to the marathon before the April 15 explosions.

Tsarnaev died Friday in a police shootout hours before his younger brother, Dzhokhar, was discovered hiding in a boat in a suburban back yard.

The terrorist database is called TIDE, the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment. Analysts at the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center submit names and even partial names into TIDE. About a year ago, there were some 745,000 people listed in the database. Intelligence analysts scour TIDE, trying to establish connections and update files as new intelligence is uncovered.

For entries with a full name, date of birth and intelligence indicating a reasonable suspicion that a person is a terrorist or has terror ties, the person's name is sent to the database, which feeds into lists like the one that bans known or suspected terrorists from traveling on planes.

The official said the U.S. never found the type of derogatory information on Tsarnaev that would have elevated his profile among counterterrorism investigators and placed him on the terror watch list.

Five days after the U.S. determined who was allegedly behind the deadly Boston marathon terror attacks, Washington is piecing together what happened and whether there were any unconnected dots buried in U.S. government files that, if connected, could have prevented the bombings.

Lawmakers who were briefed by the FBI said they have more questions than answers about the investigation of Tsarnaev. U.S. officials were expected to brief the Senate on the investigation Thursday.

"The review is just beginning, but I haven't seen any red flags thus far," said Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who sits on the House Intelligence Committee and was briefed on the investigation Wednesday. House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., however, said lawmakers intend to pursue whether there was a breakdown in information-sharing.

Miller said the various agencies involved will assess how the investigation was performed in the months leading up to the bombing.

"This was not a big terrorism case when it was set," said Miller. "This was a fairly routine foreign-police cooperation issue."

"What the agencies will say is, 'We've got to go back over what we did with a fine-toothed comb because the question is not did we do it by the book. Sure we did. Could we have done it better if we had dug deeper or done it different?'" Miller said.

The official described to Miller what the government knew about Tsarnaev since he was first placed on the intelligence community's radar 18 months ago. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the ongoing investigation.

Russia's internal security service, the FSB, sent information to the FBI about Tamerlan Tsarnaev on March 4, 2011. The Russians told the FBI that Tsarnaev, an ethnically Chechen Russian immigrant living in the Boston area, may be associated with Chechen terrorists and had changed drastically since 2010. Because of the subsequent FBI inquiry, Tsarnaev's name was added to a Homeland Security Department database used by U.S. officials at the border to help screen people coming in and out of the U.S. That database is called the Treasury Enforcement Communications System, or TECS.

The FBI's Boston office opened a preliminary review of Tsarnaev and searched government databases for potentially terror-related communications. Investigators looked into whether Tsarnaev used online sites that promoted radical activity. They interviewed Tsarnaev and his family members but found nothing connecting him to terror activity. The FBI's review into Tsarnaev was closed in June 2011.

Then, in late September 2011, Russia separately contacted the CIA with nearly identical concerns about Tsarnaev. The Russians provided two possible birthdates for him and a variation of how his name might be spelled, as well as the spelling in the Russian-style Cyrillic alphabet.

The CIA determined that Tsarnaev should be included in TIDE, and the National Counterterrorism Center added it into the database. The spelling of Tsarnaev's name in TIDE was not the same as the spelling the FBI used in its investigation. The CIA also shared this information with other federal agencies in October.

In January 2012, Tsarnaev traveled to Russia and returned to the U.S. in July. Three days before he left for Russia, the TECS database generated an alert on Tsarnaev. That alert was shared with a Customs and Border Protection officer who is a member of the FBI's Boston joint terrorism task force. By that time, the FBI's investigation into Tsarnaev had been closed for nearly six months because the FBI uncovered no evidence that he was tied to terror groups.

On Jan. 21, 2012, the airline on which Tsarnaev was traveling misspelled his name when it submitted its list of passengers to the U.S. government for security screening. Airlines are required to provide the list of passengers on international flights so the U.S. can check their names through government databases, including the terrorist watch list. Because his name was misspelled, there was not another alert like there was three days earlier.

In July 2012, Tsarnaev returned to the U.S., and another alert was generated in TECS. This information was again shared with the Customs and Border Protection officer on the FBI's Boston joint terrorism task force. But because the FBI had closed its investigation into Tsarnaev a year earlier, there was no reason to be suspicious of his travels to Russia.

"Later on, these agencies will be judged," said Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. "But right now, it's way too soon to criticize or to start making political arguments or who failed or whatever."

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57581350/cia-had-boston-bombing-suspect-tamerlan-tsarnaevs-name-added-to-terror-database-before-attack/

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Before being advised of his constitutional rights, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev admitted to interrogators that that his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, only recently had recruited him to be part of the attack that detonated pressure-cooker bombs at the marathon finish line.

He is now reportedly exercising his right to remain silent.

Sixteen hours after investigators began interrogating him, the surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings went silent: he'd just been read his constitutional rights.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev immediately stopped talking after a magistrate judge and a representative from the U.S. Attorney's office entered his hospital room and gave him his Miranda warning, according to four officials of both political parties briefed on the interrogation. They insisted on anonymity because the briefing was private.

Before being advised of his rights, the 19-year-old suspect told authorities that his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, only recently had recruited him to be part of the attack that detonated pressure-cooker bombs at the marathon finish line, two U.S. officials said.

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Boston+bomb+suspect+says+brother+recruited+goes+silent+after/8293542/story.html#ixzz2RUNnUWhz

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