These are the things I'm having trouble with on this

[Ken Burch]

(if there are other threads dealing with these points, please point me to them)

1)Why would Chechens be attacking THIS country? They've got beef with Russia, not us.

2)Why would the younger kid be wearing something insanely conspicuous like a white baseball cap when he was carrying the bomb? Wouldn't he or his older brother realize that would show up big time on the surveillance cameras?

This is a horrible thing...not meaning to be in any way frivilous about it...but these two points are genuinely throwing me

[Sheldon Cooper]

1. My first thought on hearing this:

What the hell did we do the piss off the Russians (used generically but referring to Chechans)?

[Marrah_G]

12. It really makes perfect sense if you think about

What better kid for the extremists to manipulate then a young, caucasian, american muslim? They would fit right in and no one would suspect them. THEY didn't get tackled after the blast... the innocent Saudi student did.

[Marrah_G]

5. Why would they have been shooting and throwing bombs at the cop afterwards?

Just a coincidence that they had them on hand?

[arcane1]

10. Those several people are idiots n/t

[Ken Burch]

18. Not sure about that, but they look like possible patsies.

n/t.

[EOTE]

26. What do you know to make you believe such a thing?

Do you really think that patsies would respond with such violent force? Are patsies often armed with grenades?

[EOTE]

30. If he's a nut, yes.

And it's typically nuts who do things like this. Now, would a sane, innocent person lob grenades at police? Would they engage in firefights with the police?

[Ken Burch]

31. Not themselves alone. But people who were using them could well do so.

In any case, we'll see.

[Nay]

21. The man whose legs were blown off ID'ed the older one as a bomber -- he looked straight in

the bomber's face as he dropped his backpack. 2 min. later the backpack blew up.

[geek tragedy]

3. The problem is that you are too rational.

People who do this kind of thing are not rational and don't behave rationally.

The main elements appear to be not nationalism, but rather a combination of religion and loserism.

As far as the baseball cap is concerned, this is a 19 year old student, not a trained operative.

[marions ghost]

27. exactly

...a combination of religion and loserism...

white hat = not real experienced at this stuff

[KittyWampus]

28. the problem is a lot of DU'ers watch too much tv whilst thinking they're so savvy

[Marrah_G]

4. could be they were recruited by extremists because they don't look arab

because they would fit in.

There were a bunch of white hats.... no one thought he was conspicuous at the time. Just looked like another kid on the sidewalk.

[elehhhhna]

6. no airfare $? this is two assholes, not a sophisticated cell, imo --

the arrogant idiots never even left town!

[TwilightGardener]

7. 1) They're more general radical-Islam than nationalist Chechen, maybe?

2) He probably thought he was blending in, or didn't realize that in America, we have cameras everywhere.

[truebluegreen]

8. My first thought is,

why would anyone, Chechen or Czech (that's a joke) or Martian, do anything like this?

Are you saying that bombs are inherently political, in a way that gun violence is not?

[Ken Burch]

15. I don't pretend to understand why anybody would do this.

And, while not inherently political, I'd say that bombs are generally more political(though not always)than guns. It takes a greater effort to aquire or create bombs than to simply purchase a gun, for one thing, so bombings are less likely to be random or spontaneous.

[Poll_Blind]

9. The Chechens are NOT attacking America. Two dudes who were born in the area are.

That's what everything I've seen points to. If two Japanese guys did the same thing, it doesn't automatically imply that Aum Shinrikyo has it out for us though, honestly, I can see why one might first wonder about it.

2. I have on idea. These guys are losers. Poor crime fashion sense is just one of their many shortcomings.

PB

[Ken Burch]

13. I didn't say "The Chechens"...I said "Chechens"

I wasn't referring to everybody in Chechnya or of Chechen descent.

[Poll_Blind]

14. Apologies- I misunderstood what you meant! nt

PB

[Ken Burch]

16. It's all good.

Have a safe weekend.

[HiPointDem]

11. add to the mix the fact that some believed the US was supporting the chechen opposition to russia...

The Chechens' American friends

The Washington neocons' commitment to the war on terror evaporates in Chechnya, whose cause they have made their own

An enormous head of steam has built up behind the view that President Putin is somehow the main culprit in the grisly events in North Ossetia. Soundbites and headlines such as "Grief turns to anger", "Harsh words for government", and "Criticism mounting against Putin" have abounded, while TV and radio correspondents in Beslan have been pressed on air to say that the people there blame Moscow as much as the terrorists. There have been numerous editorials encouraging us to understand - to quote the Sunday Times - the "underlying causes" of Chechen terrorism (usually Russian authoritarianism), while the widespread use of the word "rebels" to describe people who shoot children shows a surprising indulgence in the face of extreme brutality.

On closer inspection, it turns out that this so-called "mounting criticism" is in fact being driven by a specific group in the Russian political spectrum - and by its American supporters. The leading Russian critics of Putin's handling of the Beslan crisis are the pro-US politicians Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Ryzhkov - men associated with the extreme neoliberal market reforms which so devastated the Russian economy under the west's beloved Boris Yeltsin - and the Carnegie Endowment's Moscow Centre. Funded by its New York head office, this influential thinktank - which operates in tandem with the military-political Rand Corporation, for instance in producing policy papers on Russia's role in helping the US restructure the "Greater Middle East" - has been quoted repeatedly in recent days blaming Putin for the Chechen atrocities. The centre has also been assiduous over recent months in arguing against Moscow's claims that there is a link between the Chechens and al-Qaida...

This harshness towards Putin is perhaps explained by the fact that, in the US, the leading group which pleads the Chechen cause is the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC). The list of the self-styled "distinguished Americans" who are its members is a rollcall of the most prominent neoconservatives who so enthusastically support the "war on terror".

They include Richard Perle, the notorious Pentagon adviser; Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame; Kenneth Adelman, the former US ambassador to the UN who egged on the invasion of Iraq by predicting it would be "a cakewalk"; Midge Decter, biographer of Donald Rumsfeld and a director of the rightwing Heritage Foundation; Frank Gaffney of the militarist Centre for Security Policy; Bruce Jackson, former US military intelligence officer and one-time vice-president of Lockheed Martin, now president of the US Committee on Nato; Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, a former admirer of Italian fascism and now a leading proponent of regime change in Iran; and R James Woolsey, the former CIA director who is one of the leading cheerleaders behind George Bush's plans to re-model the Muslim world along pro-US lines.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/sep/08/usa.russia

[notadmblnd]

17. I think they are a couple of guys that were brought here as kids and wern't happy

with their lives in this country. I read that the older one was denied citizenship because of a domestic abuse charge and the younger one was failing many classes in college.

Their uncle said they were losers. I read that their mother was charged with shoplifting. I've read that the older one went to Russia in 2012 and came back radicalized (who knows who he associated with there?). And lastly, I've read that the younger one was warned about being influenced by his older brother.

So who knows? I don't think this was any sort of terrorist attack by any organized radical group. I just think the older one snapped for some reason and took his younger brother along for the ride. Time will tell, I guess

[John1956PA]

19. As for Q. 2, the cap made it easier for the older brother to track the younger brother in the crowd.

The facts that the cap was white and worn backwards enabled the older brother to spot the younger brother at all times.

I am not sure that any camera caught the younger brother dropping his backpack to the ground. I realize that a few days ago there were reports that there is a video or a photograph showing such a drop, but I am skeptical of such reports. In my opinion, the crowds on the sidewalks were so great and tightly packed that the brothers thought that it would be unlikely for there to surface any videos or photographs establishing such a drop.

As I understand it, the break came when one of the surviving blast victims who lost both legs awoke in the hospital and asked for a notepad. The survivor wrote that he saw the bomber drop the bag and that the bomber wore a white ball cap turned backwards.

[cthulu2016]

20. Point One: Many outside jihadists are in Chechnya

It is a place to go fight the enemy. Sp there are plenty of people in Chechnya with different messages to impart. We ought not think of all Chechen's as being the same, and this guy even less so since he was really an American.

Point Two: They were not thinking about it much, clearly. Whatever they wore, they were going to be on a zillion cameras so only active disguise would address the problem.

[Warpy]

22. They didn't think about getting the hell outta Dodge

once the bombs went off. I sincerely doubt they considered the headgear they were wearing when they placed them.

[Ken Burch]

24. It just looks to me like they were put at the bomb scene to BE seen.

There's just a little TOO much cluelessness in the faces of these guys, from the photos I've seen.

[Spider Jerusalem]

23. I would be looking at more personal motivations

according to what I saw...Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older brother (who was killed) was denied US citizenship after being arrested on domestic violence charges. He's known to have been in Russia (Chechnya? Not sure) relatively recently; perhaps his religious inclinations became more radicalised, perhaps that fed into his resentments at being denied citizenship, we can't know, really, but we can guess, and that seems to make as much sense as any other possible explanation.

[alarimer]

25. I don't think Chechens are doing anything.

I think these are a couple of idiots wanting attention for some reason; I doubt there's a larger group behind it. It seems to me that they are rank amateurs, if there is such a thing.