Explosions at Boston Marathon

JulesWinnfield said:
Must be terrible to be boarding planes or even generally being around Boston if you're of Asian ethnicity at the moment. Pretty ridiculous behaviour that frankly is the kind of thing that would radicalise someone.

At any rate if it was Al Qaeda they surely would have claimed it. A lot of the IRA bombings no one was ever found guilty for so its hardly a given they'll find someone either.
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Apparently 2 passengers of Arab descent had to be taken off the plane in Boston on the evening of the blasts - some passengers refused to fly whilst they were on the flight.
 
Sultan said:
Apparently 2 passengers of Arab descent had to be taken off the plane in Boston on the evening of the blasts - some passengers refused to fly whilst they were on the flight.
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I commented on that yesterday. What ought to happen is that the frightened people should be removed from the plane. It's despicable behaviour.

They were probably Sikhs anyway.
 
The Boston bombing produces familiar and revealing reactions:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/16/boston-marathon-explosions-notes-reactions

Personally, I find it hard to criticise those are judgemental and, so often, ignorant; after all, they've grown up in an atmosphere of expedient demonisation of 'the Other' ("Communists"/"Libyans"/"Al Qaeda"/"Arabs"/"the Taliban"/"Muslims"/"Liberals"/"Socialists"/"Anti-capitalists"/Whoever the enemy du jour happens to be...not uncoincidentally, these people just happened to be the perceived enemies of American business).

As an example, I grew up witnessing distinct and expedient changes in the way Colonel Gaddafi was presented to me via the press - first, he was the "mad terrorist"; then, he became "the friend of the West, with funny & lovable eccentricities"; finally, he was a "scourge of his people, ripe for assassination". The Taliban too were "friends of the West" until they stopped doing business with Western companies; then they became "women-hating terrorist monsters" once again...
 
SteveJ said:
The Boston bombing produces familiar and revealing reactions:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/16/boston-marathon-explosions-notes-reactions
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Loved this part:
Obviously, it's possible that the perpetrator(s) will turn out to be Muslim, just like it's possible they will turn out to be extremist right-wing activists, or left-wing agitators, or Muslim-fearing Anders-Breivik types, or lone individuals driven by apolitical mental illness. But the rush to proclaim the guilty party to be Muslim is seen in particular over and over with such events. Recall that on the day of the 2011 Oslo massacre by a right-wing, Muslim-hating extremist, the New York Times spent virtually the entire day strongly suggesting in its headlines that an Islamic extremist group was responsible, a claim other major news outlets (including the BBC and Washington Post) then repeated as fact.
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Some more frightening points later, though.
 
Sultan said:
Apparently 2 passengers of Arab descent had to be taken off the plane in Boston on the evening of the blasts - some passengers refused to fly whilst they were on the flight.
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Richard_reid_1.jpg


UmarFarouk.jpg


Likely the two most recognised faces among Western populations for attempting attacks against civilian aircraft in recent years, and the reason why when security officials are profiling passengers that behavioural patters are probably most important.
 
SteveJ said:
The Boston bombing produces familiar and revealing reactions:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/16/boston-marathon-explosions-notes-reactions

Personally, I find it hard to criticise those are judgemental and, so often, ignorant; after all, they've grown up in an atmosphere of expedient demonisation of 'the Other' ("Communists"/"Libyans"/"Al Qaeda"/"Arabs"/"the Taliban"/"Muslims"/"Liberals"/"Socialists"/"Anti-capitalists"/Whoever the enemy du jour happens to be...not uncoincidentally, these people just happened to be the perceived enemies of American business).

As an example, I grew up witnessing distinct and expedient changes in the way Colonel Gaddafi was presented to me via the press - first, he was the "mad terrorist"; then, he became "the friend of the West, with funny & lovable eccentricities"; finally, he was a "scourge of his people, ripe for assassination". The Taliban too were "friends of the West" until they stopped doing business with Western companies; then they became "women-hating terrorist monsters" once again...
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I thought the linked article at the end of the one you posted was good too.

A twenty-year-old man who had been watching the Boston Marathon had his body torn into by the force of a bomb. He wasn’t alone; a hundred and seventy-six people were injured and three were killed. But he was the only one who, while in the hospital being treated for his wounds, had his apartment searched in “a startling show of force,” as his fellow-tenants described it to the Boston Herald, with a “phalanx” of officers and agents and two K9 units. He was the one whose belongings were carried out in paper bags as his neighbors watched; whose roommate, also a student, was questioned for five hours (“I was scared”) before coming out to say that he didn’t think his friend was someone who’d plant a bomb—that he was a nice guy who liked sports. “Let me go to school, dude,” the roommate said later in the day, covering his face with his hands and almost crying, as a Fox News producer followed him and asked him, again and again, if he was sure he hadn’t been living with a killer.



Why the search, the interrogation, the dogs, the bomb squad, and the injured man’s name tweeted out, attached to the word “suspect”? After the bombs went off, people were running in every direction—so was the young man. Many, like him, were hurt badly; many of them were saved by the unflinching kindness of strangers, who carried them or stopped the bleeding with their own hands and improvised tourniquets. “Exhausted runners who kept running to the nearest hospital to give blood,” President Obama said. “They helped one another, consoled one another,” Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, said. In the midst of that, according to a CBS News report, a bystander saw the young man running, badly hurt, rushed to him, and then “tackled” him, bringing him down. People thought he looked suspicious.



What made them suspect him? He was running—so was everyone. The police reportedly thought he smelled like explosives; his wounds might have suggested why. He said something about thinking there would be a second bomb—as there was, and often is, to target responders. If that was the reason he gave for running, it was a sensible one. He asked if anyone was dead—a question people were screaming. And he was from Saudi Arabia, which is around where the logic stops. Was it just the way he looked, or did he, in the chaos, maybe call for God with a name that someone found strange?



What happened next didn’t take long. “Investigators have a suspect—a Saudi Arabian national—in the horrific Boston Marathon bombings, The Post has learned.” That’s the New York Post, which went on to cite Fox News. The “Saudi suspect”—still faceless—suddenly gave anxieties a form. He was said to be in custody; or maybe his hospital bed was being guarded. The Boston police, who weren’t saying much of anything, disputed the report—sort of. “Honestly, I don’t know where they’re getting their information from, but it didn’t come from us,” a police spokesman said. But were they talking to someone? Maybe. “Person of interest” became a phrase of both avoidance and insinuation. On the Atlas Shrugs Web site, there was a note that his name in Arabic meant “sword.” At an evening press conference, Ed Davis, the police commissioner, said that no suspect was in custody. But that was about when the dogs were in the apartment building in Revere—an inquiry that was seized on by some as, if not an indictment, at least a vindication of their suspicions.



“There must be enough evidence to keep him there,” Andrew Napolitano said on “Fox and Friends”—“there” being the hospital. “They must be learning information which is of a suspicious nature,” Steve Doocy interjected. “If he was clearly innocent, would they have been able to search his house?” Napolitano thought that a judge would take any reason at a moment like this, but there had to be “something”—maybe he appeared “deceitful.” As Mediaite pointed out, Megyn Kelly put a slight break on it (as she has been known to do) by asking if there might have been some “racial profiling,” but then, after a round of speculation about his visa (Napolitano: “Was he a real student, or was that a front?”), she asked, “What’s the story on his ability to lawyer up?”



By Tuesday afternoon, the fever had broken. Report after report said that he was a witness, not a suspect. “He was just at the wrong place at the wrong time,” a “U.S. official” told CNN. (So were a lot of people at the marathon.) Even Fox News reported that he’d been “ruled out.” At a press conference, Governor Deval Patrick spoke, not so obliquely, about being careful not to treat “categories of people in uncharitable ways.”



We don’t know yet who did this. “The range of suspects and motives remains wide open,” Richard Deslauriers of the F.B.I. said early Tuesday evening. In a minute, with a claim of responsibility, our expectations could be scrambled. The bombing could, for all we know, be the work of a Saudi man—or an American or an Icelandic or a person from any nation you can think of. It still won’t mean that this Saudi man can be treated the way he was, or that people who love him might have had to find out that a bomb had hit him when his name popped up on the Web as a suspect in custody. It is at these moments that we need to be most careful, not least.



It might be comforting to think of this as a blip, an aberration, something that will be forgotten tomorrow—if not by this young man. There are people at Guanátanmo who have also been cleared by our own government, and are still there. A new report on the legacy of torture after 9/11, released Tuesday, is a well-timed admonition. The F.B.I. said that they would “go to the ends of the earth” to get the Boston perpetrators. One wants them to be able to go with their heads held high.



“If you want to know who we are, what America is, how we respond to evil—that’s it. Selflessly. Compassionately. Unafraid,” President Obama said. That was mostly true on Monday; a terrible day, when an eight-year-old boy was killed, his sister maimed, two others dead, and many more in critical condition. And yet, when there was so much to fear that we were so brave about, there was panic about a wounded man barely out of his teens who needed help. We get so close to all that Obama described. What’s missing? Is it humility?
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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/04/the-saudi-marathon-man.html

30 years ago I suppose they would have been grabbing anyone with an eastern European accent.
 
Maroon Lucifer said:
This popped up on my facebook.
"4chan has very likely found the Boston bomber".

533811_504388036283119_823988708_n.jpg


what do you think?
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Surely there would be tonnes of people with the exact same backpack used anyway at an event like that anyway, virtually everyone there to meet a runner at the end would likely be carrying one, as would quite a few spectators generally.

A lot of people have the exact same backpack I have for example, most tend to just be black and generic in design anyway so look fairly similar.
 
Nick 0208 Ldn said:
Richard_reid_1.jpg


UmarFarouk.jpg


Likely the two most recognised faces among Western populations for attempting attacks against civilian aircraft in recent years, and the reason why when security officials are profiling passengers that behavioural patters are probably most important.
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I thought this quote was quite apt.

"As I have spent more time thinking about the injustice of racial profiling, I have come to a sad and disturbing realisation. Somewhere along the line in my years on this planet, I have gone from being the victim of racial profiling, to being both a victim and a perpetrator of racial profiling."
 
Be careful about assuming a kind of monolithic response to this terrorist attack. Yes there are some media outlets and people pathetically pointing the finger at certain groups and some people doing the same on the internet. But there are also many who are not.

Watching the news this morning for over an hour and so far not one mention that it must be a Muslim. Most people I am talking to (now granted a very small sampling of the US population) are leaning more towards a domestic terrorist (non-Muslim) or just a nut job or both.

There are some media reports that have run through many of suspect types and yes that has included muslims, but also included right wing groups, lone nut jobs, etc.

Most media I saw referred to the Saudi man being questioned only as a person of interest and they made sure that they added that a person of interest is not the same as a suspect. At the same time police officials were at ALL the hospitals trying to talk to as many people as possible, to make sure they did not miss anything.
 
JulesWinnfield said:
Surely there would be tonnes of people with the exact same backpack used anyway at an event like that anyway, virtually everyone there to meet a runner at the end would likely be carrying one, as would quite a few spectators generally.

A lot of people have the exact same backpack I have for example, most tend to just be black and generic in design anyway so look fairly similar.
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Sure there would be alot of people, but perhaps the strapping is distinctive.

Either way hopefully the police are 10 steps ahead of 4chan and are already investigating into whether he is of interest.

1 thing for sure is that certainly looks very much like the backpack used.
 
But the rush to proclaim the guilty party to be Muslim is seen in particular over and over with such events.
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From what I've seen the media has generally been very careful not to do this, and have limited themselves to speculating that the perpetrator of this attack is likely to be either a Muslim fundamentalist or a right-wing extremist, which should be perfectly fair in my opinion.

He raises some valid points in that article (though no new ones), but I really can't stand the extremely tendentious and zealous anti-American tone that seems to always be present in his work (from what I've read anyway), and I find it difficult to conjure up much respect for someone so masochistic that he vehemently defends (and shelters from criticism) a religion whose majority of followers want nothing more than to see his head on a stick for no other reason than his sexual orientation. He even approvingly cites CAIR in his article, an Islamist organization hostile toward gays. People like him will never learn - not even when they're standing on the gallows with a noose around their necks.
 
Out of interest, when was the last time a 'left wing agitator' bombed a public place
 
jakec said:
Out of interest, when was the last time a 'left wing agitator' bombed a public place
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In the US? Probably during the 70s. Likely the Weathermen or someone like that.

After that it is widely argued that states were responsible for a lot of small bombings. Google search Operation Gladio to learn more.
 
Saliph said:
From what I've seen the media has generally been very careful not to do this, and have limited themselves to speculating that the perpetrator of this attack is likely to be either a Muslim fundamentalist or a right-wing extremist, which should be perfectly fair in my opinion.

He raises some valid points in that article (though no new ones), but I really can't stand the extremely tendentious and zealous anti-American tone that seems to always be present in his work (from what I've read anyway), and I find it difficult to conjure up much respect for someone so masochistic that he vehemently defends (and shelters from criticism) a religion whose majority of followers want nothing more than to see his head on a stick for no other reason than his sexual orientation. He even approvingly cites CAIR in his article, an Islamist organization hostile toward gays. People like him will never learn - not even when they're standing on the gallows with a noose around their necks.
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The rush to judgement that he criticizes is exactly what he's done himself. The Saudi "person of interest" might have been suspicious for his skin or for other reasons. To assume it was only his appearance is lazy. Also, these are the actions of a person in the immediate aftermath of a bomb attack after a decade of the War on Terror.

Obviously the immediate gut suspicion is going to be that it was likely a middle easterner. Is it fair to the person it happened to? No, but the largest terrorist attack in US history was carried out by a group of middle eastern men. Additionally, the most recent attempts have been by Islamist terrorists plus the original WTC bombings in 1993, etc. The lack of right-wing terrorist attacks since roughly 1996 means that the most obvious perceived threat is from Islamist groups.

As for the treatment by law enforcement as a result of the civilian stopping the poor Saudi guy, it would be irresponsible for them to ignore the potential lead and let him go. What does he expect them to do? Yes, the guy may have been stopped only because he's Saudi, but the police don't know that and can only treat it as a lead, especially when it's their only one.

His whole article seems to be about how not-racist the author is and ignores the realities of what happened in a short space of time in a highly stressful/dangerous environment. It's clearly unfortunate, but what does he expect to happen?
 
jakec said:
Out of interest, when was the last time a 'left wing agitator' bombed a public place
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I think there was a group called the "May 19th Communist Organisation" or something like that, think they bombed some buildings in the 80's. Obviously some nationalist terrorist groups claim to be socialist as well (like ETA or the IRA) but that's slightly different I guess. Just google "left wing terrorists" and you'll probably find a list somewhere.

Edit: Would eco-terrorists count as well? There are also a few left wing terrorist groups in countries like Greece, though I'm not sure if they actually bomb places or whatever.
 
Nick 0208 Ldn said:
Richard_reid_1.jpg


UmarFarouk.jpg


Likely the two most recognised faces among Western populations for attempting attacks against civilian aircraft in recent years, and the reason why when security officials are profiling passengers that behavioural patters are probably most important.
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Why did you quote Sultan's post? It wasn't profiling passengers from the airline, it was passengers refusing to fly with other passengers. The above is irrelevant. Doc had it exactly right, people who are scared of travelling on a plane because two passengers happen to be of Arab descent should be removed, or opt not to fly. Why should the other two be forced to do anything just because a ton of people are acting retarded?
 
Hectic said:
Why did you quote Sultan's post? It wasn't profiling passengers from the airline, it was passengers refusing to fly with other passengers. The above is irrelevant. Doc had it exactly right, people who are scared of travelling on a plane because two passengers happen to be of Arab descent should be removed, or opt not to fly. Why should the other two be forced to do anything just because a ton of people are acting retarded?
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Just emphasising that the thought processes of these passengers can equally [in addition to the moral basis]not be supported by the evidence of two high profile attempted attacks.

It wasn't a direct response to Sultan but a thread which led off from the initial incident.
 
Nick 0208 Ldn said:
Just emphasising that the thought processes of these passengers can equally [in addition to the moral basis]not be supported by the evidence of two high profile attempted attacks.

It wasn't a direct response to Sultan but a thread which led off from the initial incident.
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Indeed. If more people listend to Public Enemy they wouldn't fall for that crap.

"A colour just as well could be undercover"

"Every brotha ain't a brotha 'cause a black hand squeezed on Malcolm X the man..."

Books, covers and all that.
 
CNN reporting that video from a nearby Lord and Taylor store and a Boston TV station may have led to the identification of a suspect (well not a identification as in a name, but at least pointing a specific person in the crowd).
 
What happens when you give 4chan the pictures?

They are more likely to troll the affected families by emailing them gruesome pictures of their loved ones.

Google Nikki Catsouros.
 
An arrest is imminent, according to AP.
 
Sources for that are Boston PD and FBI, allegedly. Let's hope it's the right guy.
 
Kaush949 said:
Cold war, communism, spies etc....
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Maybe back during the McCarthy days (which is 60 years ago) but 30 years ago no the average citizen in the US was not thinking that commie spies were ready to plant bombs all over. A movie or two played out that scenario but nobody mistook that for reality.


CNN no reporting an arrest has been made. Video from Lord and Taylor shows person placing bomb. Male (didn't think it would be female).
 
A bit of speculation. Now they get a guy on video, so how do they so quickly find the person or put more bluntly how do the place a name with the face? Either they had some other tips or the person may have in some way been known to law enforcement.

This is of course assuming they have the right guy and that they have made an arrest.
 
BAMSOLA said:
I'd be surprised if it isn't the guy in the earlier photo with the bag.
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A couple of other photos showed different men in the same area carrying similar black bags, so it's far from clear. I imagine that it will be one of the men featured in the photos doing the rounds, though.
 
JustAFan said:
A bit of speculation. Now they get a guy on video, so how do they so quickly find the person or put more bluntly how do the place a name with the face? Either they had some other tips or the person may have in some way been known to law enforcement.

This is of course assuming they have the right guy and that they have made an arrest.
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They had probably identified dozens of potential suspects on the day of the bombings from the hundreds of photos that were taken, so they have had a couple of days to track them all down/find out who they are.
 
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