Terrorism For Dummies?
So I was listening to a collection of ‘pundits and experts’ on my Mother’s television and they all had their knickers in a twist of the ‘training’ that Tamerlan Tsarnaev absolutely, positively had to have received during his six-month stay in Russia.
Let’s see, the only component of the bombs that Tsarnaev built that would likely be available in the Russian Caucasus would be the pressure cooker in a very large city. The Chechens have always used captured military explosives and cell phones for remote detonation. Tsarnaev used American components, as one would expect given the genesis of Inspire magazine. There is no evidence that Tsarnaev followed any of the basic rules of a terrorist in building the bombs or setting them off.
He didn’t get false identification, so we know the source of the explosives. He didn’t have an escape plan. He made no effort to disguise himself. He obtained a handgun with an obliterated serial number that is a felony in its own right. He showed no indication that he was aware of the surveillance cameras on the street. They hijacked a high-end vehicle that was almost guaranteed to have GPS tracking built-in. This was amateur hour from beginning to end, so it is highly unlikely that he had ever received any real training in any aspect of this attack.
The Russian FSB was suspicious of him, so there is near zero possibility that he wasn’t being watched the entire time he was in Russia. If he had disappeared long enough for real training, he would still be in Russia. He was 15 when he left for the US – old enough to have learned how to do what he did in the unsettled Caucasus of the time.
8 comments
Terrorist training *in Russia*? In *Tsar Putin’s* Russia?! What planet are these people living in?! Tsar Putin is hell on wheels when it comes to terrorists and dissidents (he doesn’t appear to differentiate between them). The notion of a terrorist training camp in Tsar Putin’s Russia is about as rational as the notion of a weight loss clinic in North Korea.
/snark.
Putin’s whole schtick is being tough on ‘evil-doers’, especially in the Kavkas, so there is no way anything would be established in that region without attracting a massive response. The talking heads just don’t pay attention to anything outside of the Beltway.
Anyone who can’t score a fake ID in a college area like Boston just isn’t trying.
This is the kind of thing that most people get over by getting drunk at a frat party, or the guys from work, you don’t ever go through with it … except for Columbine, Aurora, Sandy Hook, and now, Boston. This is about a blaze of glory, not some political conviction, which is why so few of the prime movers survive. These are very messy suicides that unfortunately kill other people so ‘the world’ will remember the losers who do it.
The owner of the SUV says Tamerlan admitted killing the MIT officer, but it isn’t at all clear why. He also explains the car swapping that went on until he escaped. He was careful to note details and directions, and his statements can be verified by iPhone records even before the car’s GPS locator was turned on remotely. With the ballistics from the recovered Ruger autoloader that case should be a quick and simple win. The state has enough without the bombing to give Jokhar life – auto theft, armed robbery, kidnapping, and murder should do the job, even with a plea bargain. I can’t see the state offering anything other than the possibility of parole on a plea deal, with charges limited to the single count of murder.
The bobble heads in your media are seriously living in fantasy land. Crazy as a bunch of loon’s!
If I’d been near the kid, I’d have slapped him silly just for being such an idiot and making us look bad!
I would dearly love to show the bobble heads a real example of how a pro operates! But they wouldn’t survive the lesson. *shrug* Too bad, so sad… Then again, the collective IQ of the USA would increase. Win all around! I should get a medal! But, in the *real World*, I’d get no thanks for doing the World a favor!
Morons.
These guys think you need a course to change the toilet paper roll or reset a circuit breaker, because they did.
Tamerlan goes to the fireworks store and bought based on the fireworks that made the loudest noise, and he is supposed to be sophisticated and trained?! He could have gone to a gun show and gotten a hell of a lot more bang from half the money buying black powder with ID relatively optional, same for the hand gun.
With the fireworks he did get some quality fuses.
Fireworks and toy cars – this is something a teenager would do, and the more they talk about the more teenagers who will do it. They don’t mention the shared frequency of the toy cars and how a child with one of those cars near the finish line could have set off the bomb while the Tsarnaev’s were still carrying them, the same way a robo-call sales pitch could set off a bomb that uses a cell phone.
These people get paid to give their opinion to the general public, and there are still questions about why the public is so ignorant.
@Brian
You’re pretty much spot on: These guys were amateurs with an attitude. A very bad attitude. What they did isn’t that dificult to do. And when they did it they had no endgame in sight. Any educated person could easily do better but probably wouldn’t because,of that same education.
Frank Herbert had an interesting epigram: “Here lies a fallen god, his fall was not a sma;ll one. We did but build a pedistal, a narrow and a tall one.” I submit our society in this country is on such a pedistal. All our political efforts seem to narrow the base while proudly increasing the height of mammon
I haven’t the slightest idea how to turn that around.
Shirt we have so concentrated all of the power and wealth at the top, making the entire system unstable. This was the situation in France before their very bloody and prolonged revolution. We are setting ourselves up for a collapse by making the people at the bottom desperate.
At some point you have to wonder if all of the claims of ‘special training’ aren’t really agitprop to keep people from realizing how simple it is to make a bomb. I won’t go into any detail because I don’t want to encourage people to do it, but you don’t have to go to an extremist site to find a recipe. There are Chinese illustrations over a thousand years old that show guns and grenades, so there is a lot of experience around the world. In Pakistan most village blacksmiths can make an AK-47 by hand. The so-called ‘undeveloped world’ is quite good at making things go boom with whatever is at hand, so anyone who has lived there would have no problem producing a bomb in the US if they felt the need.
Bryan, it doesn’t take being Pakistani to know how to make things go boom. We did that a lot in our trips to the desert, many interesting ways to make things go boom, nobody cares if the desert gets a few craters in it after all :twisted:. Sadly we had to stop all that once the Department of State Security (SS) started getting all hyper on things that go boom, because folks started freaking out, nevermind that we’re out in the empty desert doing this, a big boom happens and suddenly we have a British tourist berating us for doing something dangerous (talk about lack of survival skills, dood hears a big explosion and drives/runs *towards* it? And starts fussing at the people who made the explosion happen? We were all standing around looking at each other like, WTF is the matter with this dude, fussing at obviously armed and dangerous people!), visits from The Authorities saying they don’t want to hear about any explosions, and so forth. Sigh. We had a free country once…
Uhm, yeah. What the kids did is pretty much playschool when it comes to boom. Lots of folks out there know how to go boom. Several of our group are ex-military, and a couple are miners with explosives licenses. None of us blow up people though, because we’re not homicidal, we’re just crazy ;).
The rural US and real family farms tend to be ‘undeveloped’ and I know that I got up to all kinds of dangerous stuff when I was child. Farmers blew up stumps and rocks to clear land, and didn’t need to go to courses to learn how.
Miners. civil engineers, a lot of veterans, farmers, et al. know how, and have made things go boom. The tough job is EOD when you are trying to stop things built by other people from going boom.
Hell, even the Shrubbery figured out how to blow up frogs, so you know it doesn’t take much talent.