Explosions at Boston Marathon

I was just reading a thread about a Fox interviewee who stated that the attack "bears the fingerprints of Al Qaeda"...numerous replies asked: how can they tell somebody's nationality from their fingerprints?
 
me & my 11 yr old were doing a geography quiz last night.

me: what's the capital of Jordan?
him: Al Qaeda.
me: no, check the map again.
 
This is the problem with the 24/7 news media. In light of not having any actual cold hard facts they turn to finger pointing and insinuations. Not to mention the hollywood style graphics and sound effects to stir emotions up even further. They have to fill up 24 hours worth of news when the actual "cold hard news" of the day barely takes an hour to cover on an average day.

Let the guys get on with their investigation and show some respect for the families.

I rarely watch the news networks for this reason.
 
SteveJ said:
Some interesting, though amateur, film & photographic analysis here:

http://imgur.com/a/sUrnA

puvQAoAh.jpg
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Surely the fact he has a bag with him AFTER the explosion isn't suspicious? Not too mention going to take shelter round the corner when a bomb's just gone off is a pretty logical thing to do.

In general you'd surely expect the bomber would have taken a safe distance from the bomb, not be standing right near it and risking injury to themselves.
 
JulesWinnfield said:
Surely the fact he has a bag with him AFTER the explosion isn't suspicious? Not too mention going to take shelter round the corner when a bomb's just gone off is a pretty logical thing to do.

In general you'd surely expect the bomber would have taken a safe distance from the bomb, not be standing right near it and risking injury to themselves.
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Yeah exactly, it'd be slightly suspicious if they were there just before the bomb went off. But they might have just been sitting down resting their legs. The stupidest ones are those highlighting people not paying attention in the photos. They could literally have turned their heads for a second and they're being called terrorists. :rolleyes: A marathon is hardly the most interesting sport to keep focussed on.

I'm very intrigued to see who they do pinpoint as the bomber and if they're in any of those pics though.
 
No one knows exactly why the Arabs were taken off the plane.

So there is no need to make conclusions.
 
Right now a lot of internet and news media talk is focusing on a few pictures, but as far as I know law enforcement has not said that those are the same pictures they are looking at in terms of showing a person of interest or two. In fact I think they have purposely not released the info. on what photos/video they are looking so as not to hurt the investigation.

So understanding the nature of people and the news media, we will talk a lot about certain photos/video but the investigators may have other images they consider important.

Not only will they be looking for a smoking gun, ie images of a person or persons placing the bombs, but in general they will look for anyone acting differently from everyone else. Of course there are lots of explanations for this, but in many cases (not just terrorist attacks) the police do ask people if they remember seeing anyone who seemed out of place or acting differently.
 
JulesWinnfield said:
Surely the fact he has a bag with him AFTER the explosion isn't suspicious? Not too mention going to take shelter round the corner when a bomb's just gone off is a pretty logical thing to do.

In general you'd surely expect the bomber would have taken a safe distance from the bomb, not be standing right near it and risking injury to themselves.
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You could also think maybe it's someone trying plant a secondary bomb (or even a suicide bomber) to take out first responders. It's been know to happen in IED attacks by AQ in Iraq. I think you're probably right that it's just some scared guy taking cover but you can't exclude anything at this point.
 
This is the problem with people just speculating - it's human nature, and I don't think we can blame people for doing it. But when the media does it, and does it with such malice, it really is messed up.

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The New York Post’s front page today is given over to a photo of two purported suspects in the bombings at the Boston Marathon.

One problem: they’re not actually the suspects.

That’s what CBS’s John Miller stated this morning. CBS News was one of the outlets, unlike CNN, the AP, and Fox News, that did not report an arrest during yesterday’s flurry of misinformation; the Post, meanwhile, has been pilloried for its reporting in the immediate aftermath of the bombing, including its claim that 12 had died.

And the Post’s article, coming as it does after a provocative front page that calls the pair “Bag Men” (common slang for a criminal), surprisingly comes short of actually calling the two men suspects. Those readers who choose to parse the Post’s reporting on a crowded subway car will find that the men are in photos (one of a crowd scene) being purportedly circulated by authorities, but “two potential suspects” caught on video who’ve been fingered may or may not even be the same people.

“It was not immediately clear if the men in the law-enforcement photos are the same men in the surveillance videos.”

The Post story, then, is that two young and dark-skinned men are in some among the photos being distributed by the FBI (the Post does not provide any context as to whether or not any more photos are being circulated), and that two people who are or are not the same people are “potential suspects.” That’s before it moves on to aggregation of what is known about the bombings so far (including the correct number of fatalities) and listing recent evacuations.

As Deadspin and Gawker are reporting this morning, one of the two whose faces are still on the Post’s website is a local high-school track runner who’s been protesting his innocence on a Facebook on which he’s changed his name.
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The Post’s ‘Person of Interest’ Is a Local High-School Track Runner
Max Read
"BAG MEN," the New York Post's front cover brays this morning, underneath a photo of two Boston Marathon spectators. "Feds seek these two pictured at Boston Marathon." After its embarrassing performance on Monday in the aftermath of the marathon bombings, has the Post redeemed itself by scooping the first, much-discussed photos of the suspects?

No. As CBS' John Miller reports, neither man is likely to be a suspect in the bombings, and these are not the pictures of the possible suspects that authorities plan on releasing. But I didn't need John Miller to tell me that— the "persons of interest" in the photos are two local kids who had already been checked out by Reddit and other message-board "crowd-sleuthing" efforts yesterday, and found to be a incredibly unlikely suspects.

As we documented yesterday, the a large and active community of amateur detectives, dedicated to the close examination of photographs of the scene, emerged on the link-sharing site Reddit (and elsewhere) in the aftermath of Monday's bombing. Their efforts were going about as well as you might imagine, which is to say, not very well—lots of MS-Paint circles and lots of near-baseless speculation.

But thanks to their ability to do really basic internet detective work, they managed to figure out pretty quickly that the guy in the blue track jacket almost certainly isn't a bomber. All they had to do was find his Facebook. I was able to do it pretty quickly: He's a Moroccan-American kid, a local high-school soccer player and track runner (possibly he and his friend's track outfits could have been a tipoff that they were actually interested in the race?) who works at Subway and likes How High and The Hunger Games. On Monday, he took a couple of geekily enthusiastic photos of himself at the marathon. These were the latest posts on his News Feed (since deleted; he's also changed his name on Facebook):

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Now: Were cops circulating his photo, as the Post reports? Probably, yes, they were circulating them internally, sanely, and responsibly, along with many other photos, the way police do (or should). Are or were he and his friend "persons of interest"? Sure! Maybe.

It took Redditors a few hours to find that Facebook page; it took me about ten minutes in the wake of their work. If you have even a little faith in the FBI, it's difficult to imagine that its investigators didn't figure out who this kid is, and how unlikely he is as a suspect, yesterday—especially after he went to authorities to clear his name.

Which means there are two possibilities: one, the Post newsroom couldn't even be bothered to do the bare minimum of follow-up reporting—that after reporters had spoken to their sources, who gave them at best outdated information, they didn't (or didn't know how to) spend the ten minutes it would have taken to learn that the person in the photos had been identified already—by message board posters!—as a person who did not plant a bomb at the Boston Marathon.

Or, two, that the the Post did the followup reporting—that its reporters found out that the kid had been identified online, that he'd contacted authorities, that he's just some poor teenager who posts "SWAG" image macros on his Facebook page—but is institutionally so committed to identifying an Arab, any Arab, as a terrorist, that it still splashed his photo on the front page and insinuated his suspect-hood.

http://gawker.com/5994955/the-posts-person-of-interest-is-a-local-high+school-track-runner
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JustAFan said:
So 4 guys from an ethnic group that has been known to be racially profiled, racially profiled a guy based on his supposed ethnicity. Brilliant.
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If a white guy had been attacked - Rep. Peter King would have been going on about illegal immigrants committing crime :lol:
 
How on earth did they find that guy's facebook from a picture?

Also, just the fact he's interested in running doesn't automatically prove innocence.

The whole thing is stupid.
 
Has anyone mentioned conspiracy hack Alex Jones is claiming Obama met with Saudi PM and is deporting a bombing suspect? The right-wing loons on FB are going apeshit on this tripe. They didn't believe Jones' crap about Bush and 9/11 inside tripe but jump on his claims about Obama. Sigh.

Btw, if anyone has viewed liveleak... shudders... horrific images.
 
Officials now saying the two people in the photos are no longer of interest. This will happen several times at least during the investigation I bet, and may have already. They will see something in some photos, go find out who the person is, just to clarify what they are seeing and rule that person out.
 
JustAFan said:
Officials now saying the two people in the photos are no longer of interest. This will happen several times at least during the investigation I bet, and may have already. They will see something in some photos, go find out who the person is, just to clarify what they are seeing and rule that person out.
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Another two suspects now in their sight, they're saying they are going to release the images to the public for more information in a few minutes at the FBI conference.
 
They released pictures. One light skinned guy in a white hat. One dark skinned guy in a black hat.
 
PhilipB said:
What did he ask?
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He asked why the police were telling people over the loudspeakers(that didn't exist) to stay calm shortly before the bomb. And asked if this was just another "false flag" attack.
 
In the internet age media accreditation has naturally expanded beyond the traditional outlets, however some moron using the press conference to advertise is not one of the positives.
 
Greg Gutfeld somehow extrapolating from the footage that one of them is foreign.


ETA: His seeming lac of nervous and willingness to be recognised is an indicator that they are not an American resident according to Gutfeld

Or they've disguised their face, or see themselves as a martyr e.t.c.
 
I wonder if they'll attack again now that their photos are out there? They're hardly likely to just wait to be arrested. How easy is it to get access to firearms in Massachusetts and its neighbouring states?
 
rednev said:
I wonder if they'll attack again now that their photos are out there? They're hardly likely to just wait to be arrested. How easy is it to get access to firearms in Massachusetts and its neighbouring states?
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All they have to do is go to a gun show......




Sorry couldn't resist. :p
 
Reddit has figured out what hat #1 is wearing. It's a Bridgestone golf hat that is sold all over the place(Walmart, TJ Maxx, etc).

Edit: Well, lots of people have, I suppose. Someone posted a picture of the back of the guy's head.

http://imgur.com/a/34wtj
 
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