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by smiths » Wed Apr 17, 2013 2:28 am
by FourthBase » Wed Apr 17, 2013 2:33 am
smiths wrote:just calm down, and keep on diggin the dirt
by 8bitagent » Wed Apr 17, 2013 2:43 am
by 8bitagent » Wed Apr 17, 2013 2:49 am
by FourthBase » Wed Apr 17, 2013 2:52 am
8bitagent wrote:If that neo Nazi's bomb had gone off in Spokane Washington, or if that student a few weeks ago hadnt been stopped before his massacre everyone(including probably myself) would be listing a laundry list
of "interesting" syncs, patterns, people, topology, etc. Other than the Quincy/Braintree realm of alleged jihadist business fronts, I really had not heard of Boston in relation to terrorist activities.
Now the bomber/s had to have known that in 2013, HD camera captures can and do happen everywhere of every second. So they probably understood the risk of just hand delivering these backpacks. He/they most likely do not care.
It could be a Mcveigh couple of days, an Eric Rudolf couple of years or a Zodiac lifetime of guessing. But as others have pointed out, perhaps ultimately the point is not necessarily some grudge or political ideology, but introducing the newest now-age of the new normal.
by justdrew » Wed Apr 17, 2013 3:07 am
by FourthBase » Wed Apr 17, 2013 3:47 am
justdrew wrote:a doubly false flag is as possible as anything else.
bombs go off in America periodically. always have. it's rare. it's not a big deal. it doesn't signal the imminent collapse of civilization or anything else. Most likely it was a nut (or two?). They should be checking on any post-bombing suicides in the area.
by 82_28 » Wed Apr 17, 2013 4:05 am
FourthBase wrote:8bitagent wrote:If that neo Nazi's bomb had gone off in Spokane Washington, or if that student a few weeks ago hadnt been stopped before his massacre everyone(including probably myself) would be listing a laundry list
of "interesting" syncs, patterns, people, topology, etc. Other than the Quincy/Braintree realm of alleged jihadist business fronts, I really had not heard of Boston in relation to terrorist activities.
Now the bomber/s had to have known that in 2013, HD camera captures can and do happen everywhere of every second. So they probably understood the risk of just hand delivering these backpacks. He/they most likely do not care.
It could be a Mcveigh couple of days, an Eric Rudolf couple of years or a Zodiac lifetime of guessing. But as others have pointed out, perhaps ultimately the point is not necessarily some grudge or political ideology, but introducing the newest now-age of the new normal.
8bit, lol. You gotta be shittin' me. Uh, Logan Airport ring a bell? The hotels? The connected cab driver jihadist? Saddiqi? (The IRA?) (Anarchists a century ago?) (Organized crime?) Air force bases? Defense contractors? The elite universities? Shall I continue? Or is Boston-as-a-supernode coming back to you?
by justdrew » Wed Apr 17, 2013 4:06 am
one of the 3 was a woman from China ...... so now some of you are free to be angry finally, since it wasn't just white Americans who got hurt
by FourthBase » Wed Apr 17, 2013 4:35 am
justdrew wrote:yes, and retribution is called for once responsible persons are identified, but that doesn't change what happened, and it wont stop it "next time" not sure what will stop it next time, maybe nothing, but some new ideas are called for.one of the 3 was a woman from China ...... so now some of you are free to be angry finally, since it wasn't just white Americans who got hurt
gimmie a break 4B, I can't believe you think that's true
by justdrew » Wed Apr 17, 2013 4:48 am
by FourthBase » Wed Apr 17, 2013 5:12 am
justdrew wrote:but also earlier in the thread about how many had been killed by bombing in iraq the very same day. context is not minimization.
I really think some making an example of is called for should the responsible persons be found. This shit has to be tamped down a bit. but I don't know how that's going to be done other than sending a message to future bombers, yet I don't really believe they are generally thinking rationally at all, so that's out too. fuck if I know what the answer is.
by 8bitagent » Wed Apr 17, 2013 6:07 am
by seemslikeadream » Wed Apr 17, 2013 9:29 am
The Boston Marathon Bombings, Selective Empathy, and State Worship
Apr 16th, 2013 @ 07:46 am › John Glaser
I’ve held back on writing something about the Boston Marathon bombings because there is little to comment on about the actual incident before something is known about the perpetrators. But here are a few reflections on the public reaction to the attack.
Selective Empathy
As many people have already pointed out, the collective empathy that Americans feel for victims of similar attacks when they are carried out by our own government is virtually zero compared to what is being felt now for Bostonians. It was just indubitably confirmed through hard investigative journalism last week that large portions of the 3,000-4,000 people killed in the drone war have been unidentified individuals without any connection to any terrorist or insurgent groups in conflict with the US. For years, there have been indisputable reports of massive civilian casualties in drone bombings in Pakistan, Yemen, and beyond.
“How different are the images produced by such attacks—shattered bodies, dismembered limbs, severed arteries, frantic aid givers and terrified survivors—how different from the moving images of the tragedy in Boston now being broadcast and rebroadcast on TV stations around the globe?” Barry Lando asks.
Within hours of the Marathon bombings, more than 75 people were killed in a bombing in Iraq. The perpetrators were part of a group called Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), a group that only exists as a result of the illegal US war and invasion, which itself got hundreds of thousands of people killed. This is a regular occurrence in and around Baghdad, and has been since the start of the Bush administration’s elective war there. But most Americans have been unconcerned.
The most important thing to glean from this discrepancy in empathy for senseless acts of violence inflicted on our own countrymen as compared with the senseless acts of violence carried out by our own countrymen on equally innocent people abroad was articulated brilliantly by Glenn Greenwald today:
Regardless of your views of justification and intent: whatever rage you’re feeling toward the perpetrator of this Boston attack, that’s the rage in sustained form that people across the world feel toward the US for killing innocent people in their countries. Whatever sadness you feel for yesterday’s victims, the same level of sadness is warranted for the innocent people whose lives are ended by American bombs. However profound a loss you recognize the parents and family members of these victims to have suffered, that’s the same loss experienced by victims of US violence. It’s natural that it won’t be felt as intensely when the victims are far away and mostly invisible, but applying these reactions to those acts of US aggression would go a long way toward better understanding what they are and the outcomes they generate.
I’ve reviewed on this blog over and over again the abundance of commentary from locals in Yemen and Pakistan who give testimony to the fact that the US drone war breeds deep resentment that can be immensely consequential.
“People are afraid to go to weddings because, whenever large groups of men gather, they are afraid a drone will hit them,” a sheikh from Bayhan district in Shabwa told The Economist last year.
After a September 2012 drone strike that killed 13 civilians, a local Yemeni activist told CNN, “I would not be surprised if a hundred tribesmen joined the lines of al Qaeda as a result of the latest drone mistake. This part of Yemen takes revenge very seriously.”
There is an important lesson to be learned from the despair Americans feel today: it is universal.
Tragedy Elicits State Worship
Whenever there is a horrible attack like this one, Americans invariably morph their feelings of anger and sadness into overt expressions of state worship. It seems almost instinctual. Everybody starts proclaiming their love for the USA – their pride and admiration for the police, military, and elected officials.
This is not trivial. States are violent institutions by their very nature, but they thrive on what is called “stability” because stability means people aren’t unsatisfied and disillusioned and are therefore less likely to question the authority of the government and “cause trouble.” It is a testament to hundreds of years of ideological propaganda in concert with state formation that the first instinct of most people after such an incident is to rally around the flag, the government, its officials, and its armed militias.
In times like these, patriotism and nationalistic fervor take over – which is just another way of saying dissent and self-criticism are met with heightened hostility.
It’s too early to say what the consequences of these reactions will be in the near future. But as I warned on Twitter hours after the bombing yesterday, we should be prepared for one set of reactions if this turns out to be concocted by Islamists, and a very different set if not.
A Recent History of Homemade Bombs Built in the United States
The Boston Marathon's bombs are not a unique terror tactic.
April 16, 2013 |
Since the Oklahoma City in 1995 where Timothy McVeigh used a homemade truck bomb with two tons of fertilizer, racing fuel and a blasting cap to destroy the federal building and kill 167 people, there have been a dozen domestic bombings where domestic or foreign-born attackers have sought or tried to kill people to send a message.
These bombing are distinct from the 34 police officers who have been “murdered by domestic right-wing political extremists” since Oklahoma City, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. And they do not include the worst gun massacres in the U.S. since then, which include: Littleton, CO in 1999 (15 dead); Blacksburg, VA in 2007 (32 dead); Ft. Hood, TX in 2009 (12 dead); Tuscon, AZ in 2011 (6 dead); Oakland, CA in 2012 (7 dead); Aurora, CO in 2012 (12 dead); and Newtown, CN last December (28 dead).
On Tuesday, police said that the two bombs that killed three and injured 176 people at Monday’s Boston Marathon was a homemade device—a metal pressure cooker filled with nails, ball bearings, metal shards that were left in duffle bags near the finish line. This is similar to roadside bombs used against U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, various news organizations reported.
What follows is a list of other domestic bomb attacks and attempts dating back to 1995, with additional details on the types of bombs used.
• Jan. 17, 2011. White supremacist Kevin Harpham put a backpack bomb along a Martin Luther King Day parade route in Spokane, WA., but it was found and disabled. “The pipe bomb was loaded with lead fishing weights coated in rat poison, which can inhibit blood clotting in wounds,” AOL.com reported. Harpham was sentenced to 32 years in prison.
• May 1, 2010. Pakistani immigrant Faisal Shahzad left an explosives-laden SUV in New York’s Times Square. Smoke was seen coming from the car and the bomb was found and disabled. The car was “packed the car with more than 100 pounds of fertilizer, but not the kind that would explode,” ABC-TV reported. Other news reports said he put the fertilizer in pressure-cookers—like the Boston bombs—and used firecrackers as the trigger. Shahzad was taken off a plane by police and was sentenced to life in prison.
• Dec. 25, 2009. A Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was subdued by passengers and the crew after trying to blow up a plane in midflight from Paris to Detroit by using plastic explosives hidden in his undergarments. He was sentenced to life in prison.
• Sept. 11, 2001. Four commercial jets were hijacked by 19 al-Qaida militants and used as suicide bombs, destroying New York City's World Trade Center towers, crashing into the Pentagon and into a field in Pennsylvania en route to Washington. Nearly 3,000 people were killed in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.
• Jan 22, 1998. Theodore Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber, pleaded guilty in federal court in return for a life sentence without parole. He was responsible for 16 attacks that started in 1978 and lasted until 1995, killing three people and injuring 23 others. His first bombs used smokeless explosive powders, while his later devices were complicated nail-and-splinter-loaded bombs that were made with wooden parts and designed to explode when opened by intended recipients who received them in the mail.
• July 1996 to January 1998. Eric Rudolph, an anti-abortion activist, was responsible for four bombings from 1996-98, all using slightly differing homemade devices. Speaking of the most infamous attack, at Centennial Park in Atlanta, HistoryCommons.org said:
“Rudolph plants a US military field pack containing three pipe bombs surrounded by five pounds of nails (which function as shrapnel) underneath a bench near the base of a concert sound tower, and flees the scene. The bomb, a 40-pound construction considered to be the largest pipe bomb in US history, has a directed charge and could have done even more damage, but is knocked over sideways sometime between its planting and its detonation; FBI agent Jack Killorin will later say it is a “fluke” that the bomb did not kill dozens of people.
On Jan. 20, 1998, he bombed an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Ala., killing a guard and maiming a nurse. On January 16, 1997, he put two bombs outside of an abortion clinic in an Atlanta suburb, Sandy Springs, injuring six. The second bomb went off after police arrived. On Feb. 21, 1997, he put a bomb outside a lesbian bar in Atlanta that injured five people. And on July 27, 1996, he bombed the Summer Olympics, killing two people and injuring more than 100. He was arrested in 2003 and was sentenced to life in prison.
The New York Times said Rudolph’s bombs used different explosives. “The Centennial Olympic Park bomb, for instance, used Accurate Arms-brand smokeless gunpowder, while the bombs set at the office building and the nightclub contained sticks of dynamite… [But] bombs in all three incidents, for instance, were timed with a Westclox-brand Baby Ben windup alarm clock and made use of steel plates.”
• April 19, 1995: Timothy McVeigh used a truck bomb outside the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City to kills 168 people and injure more than 500. His attack was the deadliest U.S. bombing in 75 years, only supplanted by the 9/11 attacks in 2001. He was convicted and executed in 2001. He accomplice, Terry Nichols, got life in prison.
“The truck bomb weighed an estimated 4,000 pounds and was believed to be composed of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and nitomethane racing fuel and detonated by a blasting cap,” Yahoo.com reported.
Bombs frequent in U.S.; 172 ‘IED’ incidents in last 6 months, by 1 count
By Matthew Schofield and Erika Bolstad | McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — The two explosions that killed three people and wounded more than 170 Monday in Boston were dramatic, the deadliest bombing in the United States since April 19, 1995, when a truck loaded with fertilizer blew up outside the federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168. But the method of attack wasn’t particularly surprising to anti-terrorism experts: a homemade bomb that officials refer to as an IED, or improvised explosive device.
In fact, in the last six months, there have been 172 IEDs reported in the United States, according to a government count that an official revealed Tuesday in answer to questions about U.S. preparedness. The official shared the figures, which were gathered before Monday’s explosion, only on the condition that neither the official nor the official’s office be identified.
The official shared information in an email that indicated most American IED attacks were small: “Homemade fireworks, childish pranks and other such non-terror related activities.”
But the information also notes that American officials have long understood the threat, and includes a warning that’s been distributed to other agencies: “Expect IED attacks by Homegrown Violent Extremists (HVEs) and individuals to continue throughout the United States. High profile events will present additional targets for HVEs and other individuals.”
The bombs in Boston were more powerful and deadlier than any seen in the United States in years. Even so, initial reports from investigators indicate that they were made using gunpowder or black powder as an explosive, not higher grade and more dangerous explosives such as C-4, a military-grade plastic explosive.
The explosives were packed into two pressure cookers, an increasingly popular container for bomb makers from Pakistan to the United States. A pressure cooker bomb allegedly was discovered in the Killeen, Texas, hotel room of a soldier absent without leave from Fort Campbell, Ky., who later was convicted of plotting a 2011 attack on Fort Hood, Texas.
Officials say that with the growth of Internet instruction videos on bomb making, little stands between someone wanting to make a low-grade weapon and being able to do so.
A YouTube video titled “Easy Gunpowder Bomb” shows the viewer everything from extracting gunpowder from fireworks and bullets to setting a fuse. The video is narrated by a young man who answers a comment by noting that he was wearing shorts while filming the clip.
Another commenter asks: “Do you have video of it going off? How did it go?” The answer: It left a big hole in the backyard.
Officials say there are much more sinister bomb-making websites. One online video shows a young man demonstrating how to make a cellphone detonator for a bomb. Investigators think that Monday’s bombs were set off with timing devices.
The use of pressure cookers as bomb shells has become so common that some Internet sites call them “trendy.” Officials have said they think that Army Pvt. Naser Jason Abdo learned to make the pressure cooker bomb they say he intended to use at Fort Hood from instructions found in an al Qaida online magazine. Abdo was sentenced last year to two consecutive sentences of life in prison, plus 60 years.
Pressure cookers reportedly were used for bombs during the civil war in Nepal in the 1990s, and they were the method for a series of railcar bombings on July 11, 2006, in Mumbai, India, that killed more than 200 people.
Daniel Byman, a terrorism expert at Washington’s Brookings Institution, when asked about the attack in Boston, noted simply: “There’s no surprise on the type of attack – improvised bombs are very common.”
Over the past few weeks alone, authorities across the country have investigated several explosions, threats or suspicious devices involving improvised bombs.
The Boston Globe reported last month that police in a town south of Boston were investigating who’d set off three homemade explosive devices. Several more undetonated explosives were unearthed after blasts were reported March 12.
In mid-March, the Associated Press reported that police had found 26 guns, thousands of bullets and dozens of high-capacity ammunition magazines at the home of Everett Basham of Santa Clara, Calif. Authorities also reported finding what they describe as a homemade “destructive device.”
Basham was charged with threatening to kill Sen. Leland Yee, a state lawmaker, over proposed gun-control legislation. A Democrat from San Francisco, Lee has proposed a law that would limit the sale of high-capacity magazines.
In rural western Pennsylvania, a man blew up himself with a device in his truck, leveling an acquaintance’s home. Prosecutors said the man had tried to commit suicide the previous summer with a 1,600-pound fuel bomb similar to one used to blow up the Oklahoma City federal building.
The day of the explosion, the man had faced charges of illegally possessing liquid ammonia for non-industrial or agricultural use, local newspapers reported. Some of the chemicals could be used to make explosives or methamphetamine.
In Arizona last Friday, authorities say, a package addressed to controversial Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio would have exploded if it had been opened, causing serious injury.
The government official who provided details of his agency’s count of IED attacks in the United States said there’d been 31 in March, 23 in February and 31 in January, though none as deadly or as high-profile as what occurred in Boston. According to the official, Afghanistan suffered far more IED attacks than any other nation but the United States had more such attacks than Israel, Somalia or Yemen. In fact, the United States trailed only Afghanistan, Colombia, Pakistan, India and Syria in the sheer number of IEDs over the past six months.
In an introduction to a White House report on the threat of IEDs that was released in February, President Barack Obama noted that it had been 20 years since the 1993 World Trade Center attack, when an explosives-laden van blew up in a parking garage, killing six people, and said a great deal of progress had been made in countering such weapons.
He added, however, that “We must not become complacent, but must continue to challenge ourselves and each other to be more effective against these threats.”
“IEDs remain one of the most accessible weapons available to terrorists and criminals to damage critical infrastructure and inflict casualties,” the White House report said.
“To better meet the IED threat at home, we will seek to incorporate lessons learned abroad,” it added.
Internationally, anti-IED efforts focus on denying would-be bombers access to chemicals and materials. Beyond that, U.S. policy relies on vigorous security screening and citizens reporting suspicious activity.
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, noted in March, however, that interest in using bombs continues. “Homegrown violent-extremist planning in 2012 was consistent with tactics and targets seen in previous plots and showed continued interest in improvised explosive devices,” he said.
Reaping the Whirlwind
A Violent Act Again in a Violent Nation
by DAVE LINDORFF
I ran the Boston Marathon back in 1968, and, my feet covered with blisters inside my Keds sneakers, dragged across the finish line to meet my waiting uncle at a time of about 3 hours and 40 minutes. It was close enough to the time that the current bombing happened in this year’s race — about four hours from the starting gun — that had I been running it this year, I might still been near enough to the finish line to have heard the blasts.
That really brings home to me the horror of what just happened.
At the same time, I’m reminded that back when I ran my Boston Marathon, which was only weeks after the Viet Cong’s bloody Tet Offensive, we didn’t give a thought to the idea of the Viet Cong bringing their war home to America. Now you have to at least wonder whether this bombing might in some way have been linked to America’s various wars abroad.
We don’t at this point have a clue who was behind this atrocity, but whether it was some foreign terrorist organization, a contingent of Taliban fighters seeking to bring the Afghan War to the US, or a domestic right-wing group protesting abortion, the income tax or the country’s “Kenyan” president, it should be a wake-up call to the nation that our violent national culture and our imperial pretensions will eventually reap us a whirlwind.
A country that goes around blowing up children in Afghanistan by the score, as happened last week in Kundar Province, Afghanistan, that claims for itself the right to kill anyone, anywhere, if the president or his designees in the Pentagon and the CIA decide that person is a threat or an annoyance (and that is willing to kill lots of innocent bystanders, including women and kids, to do it), a country that encourages its police to act like an occupying military force in their jurisdictions, breaking into homes in SWAT gear at dawn, pointing assault rifles in people’s faces, arresting people on trumped-up charges, such a country and its people at some point must realize that such behavior invites a violent response.
This time, it was apparently crudely made IEDs that killed three and tore the limbs from other people innocently participating in or watching a road race. Note, though, that we had never even heard of IEDs until Bush’s and Cheney’s criminal invasion of Iraq. Next time, it could just as easily be a home-made remotely piloted drone aircraft carrying a load of TNT or some other deadly explosive.
The point is you reap what you sow. Violence begets violence.
So America, the most violent country in the world today, lurches from one act of mayhem to another. It really matters little whether the slaughter is caused by a wack-job armed with a few high-capacity-clip automatic pistols or a foreign or domestic terrorist armed with a couple of crude IEDs. The victims are just as dead or maimed either way.
We cannot hope to escape this kind of thing if we go on as we are going.
If the government responds to this latest tragedy by doubling down on its domestic spying campaign, by enhancing police powers, by stepping up its deadly global drone war, and by invading or meddling in more countries abroad, we can expect more and more violent attacks aimed at killing Americans here at home.
I’m especially contemplating the danger of blowback because we learned here in Philadelphia only two weeks ago that the Pentagon has decided to set up a drone piloting base just two miles from my house on the site of the mothballed Willow Grove Naval Air Station. None of the local pols who were effusively praising the announcement, hailing it as a job-creating phenomenon, gave a thought to the reality that this was bringing the front line of the Afghan War to the suburbs of Philly, and that besides putting a bunch of killers in uniform in our midst, it was putting a big bull’s eye right in a suburb full of civilians. (See my article about this in the latest issue of CounterPunch’s new monthly magazine.)
Clearly we need a new approach — one that relies on fostering international peace and cooperation, and that here at home seeks to rekindle some sense of community, and of reverence for the rights and freedoms that many people have died for, but which have over last two decades been whittled away until they are vestigial or barely recognizable.
Maybe too, we Americans could look at the latest carnage in Boston and recognize it as the very thing that our military has been engaged in doing in our name in places like Iraq and Afghanistan — right down to the deliberate and sick timing of a second bomb to blow up people who are coming to the aid of victims of the first bomb, which is the wretched MO of the US bombing and drone strike campaigns along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border.
I’m disgusted by the attack on the Boston Marathon, and whoever did it is truly twisted, but no less twisted are the Pentagon officers and who planned the attack that killed those 10 children in Kundar, or the president who ordered the leveling of the Iraqi city of Fallujah. We Americans are far too selective in our sense of horror and outrage.
It all makes me sick. I’m going out for a run.
by compared2what? » Wed Apr 17, 2013 10:01 am
FourthBase wrote:justdrew wrote:but also earlier in the thread about how many had been killed by bombing in iraq the very same day. context is not minimization.
Please understand this:
I get your point. I appreciate context. I know.
But, yes that is absolutely minimization in this thread's context.
Start a "Context" thread. Bump an Iraq thread.
You may not mean minimization. But it is.
One of those things where: It depends.
But it's my ignore button, my call.
I give extra credit for effort, care.
But it's all about me, my trust.
I trust some more than others.
Seventeen mere hints may elicit nothing from me, if I trust the person.
Whereas the mere hint from a person I already clash with? Bye. bye. bye.
Imagine, you bump that Iraq thread. 55 people killed in Iraq. Awful. Here comes someone to point out that 55 isn't so bad because that same day in China 138 people choked to death, and to complain that China is woefully neglecting to teach its citizens the Heimlich, that chicken bones are being choked on because livestock bones are getting too big from steroids, etc. All worth being mindful of. Just not as some direct juxtaposition to other deaths and injuries. Unless it's a separate "Direct Juxtaposition of Death Tolls" thread.
I really think some making an example of is called for should the responsible persons be found. This shit has to be tamped down a bit. but I don't know how that's going to be done other than sending a message to future bombers, yet I don't really believe they are generally thinking rationally at all, so that's out too. fuck if I know what the answer is.
Catch them all. That's the example to set. The task. The answer. Nothing less.
You non-Boston guys might see this attack as just #526 in a series of 2,592 or infinity. No. That's the point. Yes, it may still be a lone wolf; or a rogue black bloc cell; or a quartet of lone white supremacist buddies; or a marathon version of Tonya Harding, et. al. If it's more than that, darker and deeper than that, then this is probably the best chance we'll ever have to bring the big perps, all of them, to justice. If it's them, once again, then...this time they actually seem to be begging the world, "We're tired of this, tired of being evil, it's no fun anymore, please catch us." Let us oblige. Sleuth, goddamn it, sleuth.
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