Teen Stunned at Portrayal as Boston Bomb Suspect The Post reported later Thursday that the pair weren't considered suspects, and the FBI has since identified two other men as suspects in Monday's bombings, which killed three people and injured more than 180. But Barhoum, a track runner at Revere High School, said he is convinced some will blame him for the bombings, no matter what. He was so fearful on Thursday that he ran back to the high school after a track meet when he saw a man in a car staring at him, talking into a phone, he said. Barhoum added he received more than 200 messages online Wednesday, with one commenter from Oregon asking: "How could you do that? Barhoum said he won't feel safe until the bombers are caught. "I'm going to be scared going to school," Barhoum said. Attempts to reach Zaime were not immediately successful. Barhoum's father, El Houssein Barhoum, who moved his family from Morocco five years ago, said he is worried his son will be shot and fears for his wife and two young daughters.
It Wasn't Sunil Tripathi: The Anatomy of a Misinformation Disaster - Alexis C. Madrigal How a terrible mistake falsely linking two people to the Boston bombing spread so far so fast In the middle of the last night's nearly unbelievable turn of events, for a few hours, hundreds of thousands of people received a message about the identity of the alleged Boston Marathon bombers that was painfully false. Word got out that the Boston Police Department scanner had declared the names of the two suspects. But the names that went out over first social networks and then news blogs and websites were not Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, which the Federal Bureau of Investigation released early this morning. This is the story, as best as I can puzzle it out, about how such bad information about this case became widely shared and accepted within the space of a couple of hours before NBC's Pete Williams' sources began telling the real story about the alleged bombers' identities. But not at first. A single tweet references Mulugeta at the time his name was said on the scanner.
We know when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sleeps It is a strange reality of our times that we have no idea what motivated Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to attack the Boston Marathon, if indeed he was involved, but we do know when he sleeps: That’s our visualization of tweets by @J_tsar, a Twitter account that has been linked to Dzhokhar, one of the alleged Boston bombers. The darker the pink, the more tweets. What it tells us, quite mundanely, is that Dzhokhar stays up late, often smoking weed, and sleeps past noon. Less than 12 hours ago, we had never heard of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Nor had we heard of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Dzhokhar’s brother who was killed in a gunfight overnight. We know the brothers Tsarnaev lived at Apartment 3, 410 Norfolk Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and we know what the house looks like. Where it was once only reporters and the police who dug up information about people of interest, a whole nation is at it today. Of course, we don’t really know whether we know the things about the Tsarnaev brothers that we think we do.
A Reading Guide to What’s Going on in Boston As the hunt for suspects in the Boston bombings continues, we’ve pulled together some of the best reporting so far and who to follow for breaking news. A Boston SWAT team member searches for 19-year-old bombing suspect Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev. (Mario Tama/Getty Images) Update (4/20): Suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was taken into custody last night. Boston is on lockdown as the hunt for suspects in Monday’s Boston marathon bombing is ongoing. Waking up to the news this morning was being thrown into a sea of breaking updates, emergency warnings, and more than one conspiracy theory. Breaking Updates: Full Coverage: 1 Marathon Bombing Suspect Dead, Other Suspect At Large [2], WBUR (Boston’s NPR affiliate) Live blog: Bombings at the Boston Marathon [3], Boston Globe Boston on lockdown as details pour in: Suspects told carjack victim they were marathon bombers [4], NBC News Background on the brothers: Boston Bombing Suspects Echo Home-Grown Terrorists in Madrid, London Attacks [5], ProPublica For the latest:
Fathers and Sons and Chechnya The anger and embarrassment visible in the interviews given on Friday by the uncle and the aunt of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the alleged Boston Marathon bombers, are entirely understandable. But I see clues here to family dynamics that may be important in understanding what happened. In Ivan Turgenev’s 1862, novel, “Fathers and Sons,” the old man’s son, Arkady, comes back home after studies with a friend, Bazarov, after both had adopted the radical philosophy of Nihilism. Their radicalism roiled the family for a while, until Bazarov’s death. The key back in 2013, I think, is Maret Tsarnaeva’s assertion that the father, Anzor, ‘worked in the enforcement agencies’ in Russian Chechnya. Update: It appears she meant he worked as an attorney for the prosecutor’s office in Soviet Kyrgyzstan, i.e. for the Communist, Stalinist state. Update: If he had been a Soviet era prosecutor, a lot of people in Kyrgyzstan would have had a grudge with him. This is the transcript of Ruslan’s remarks
What rights should Dzhokhar Tsarnaev get and why does it matter? | Glenn Greenwald (updated below [Sun.]) Shortly before Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, an American citizen, was apprehended last night, GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham advocated on Twitter that the Boston Marathon bombing suspect be denied what most Americans think of as basic rights. Once Tsarnaev was arrested, President Obama strongly suggested that he would eventually be tried in court, which presumably means he will at some point have a lawyer (something that Graham, along with John McCain and Liz Cheney, last night opposed). Graham's tweets quickly created a firestorm of outrage among various Democrats, progressives, liberals and the like. But while I shared the reaction of these Democrats to Graham's decrees, it nonetheless really baffled me, as I quickly noted. First, the Obama administration has already rolled back Miranda rights for terrorism suspects captured on US soil. The Court's liberals, led by Justice Thurgood Marshall, warned that this exception would dilute Miranda and ensure abuse. CAIR speech
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Miranda Rights: The public safety exception and terrorism cases Photo provided by FBI via Getty Images Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will not hear his Miranda rights before the FBI questions him Friday night. He will have to remember on his own that he has a right to a lawyer, and that anything he says can be used against him in court, because the government won’t tell him. There is one specific circumstance in which it makes sense to hold off on Miranda. Here’s the legal history. Fine. Then the Christmas Day bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was apprehended in December 2009, before he could blow up a plane bound for Detroit. Next came Faisal Shahzad, caught for attempting to bomb Times Square in May 2010. Holder started talking about a bill to broadly expand the exception to Miranda a few months later. Who gets to make this determination? The New York Times published the Justice Department’s memo in March 2011. And so the FBI will surely ask 19-year-old Tsarnaev anything it sees fit.
Day After Boston Manhunt - The Day After: Midnight On Franklin Street WATERTOWN, Ma. — There was something very comforting about the sawhorses. There were three of them at each end of the loop that Franklin Street makes between Mt. Auburn Street and Walnut Street here. There were no metal fences. There were no concrete barriers. The sawhorses were comforting because the events of the past week are now getting fed into a number of gigantic maws, none of which are likely to do the rest of us any good. (His older brother, Tamerlan, however, whom Dzhokar apparently ran over and killed while fleeing the firefight that erupted on Thursday night, seems to have been a different, tougher character. But invoking the exception to Miranda keeps the "international terrorism" balloon aloft. The comfort of the ordinary. Let the consequences be what they will, I am determined to proceed. "I had no hesitation in answering that Council ought to be the very last thing that an accused Person should want in a free Country.
What You Should Know About Chechnya as the Boston Story Unfolds - Thor Halvorssen For centuries, the small Muslim country has been subject to a series of Russian occupations. Expect Vladimir Putin to use the marathon bombing to further rationalize Moscow's brutal rule. A policeman keeps watch at the site of a suicide bombing in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, on September 16, 2009. (S. Dal/Reuters) Breaking reports indicate that the alleged perpetrators of the horrific Boston Marathon terrorist attack were born in Chechnya. On social networking profiles, the Boston bombers reveal themselves as supporters of "Chechen independence." Chechnya has been ripped apart by Russian aggression for centuries. Umarov's rebels claim responsibility for numerous bloody attacks in Moscow and elsewhere. This has been Putin's game for the past 15 years. In the 2000 elections, Putin ran on a successful platform of restoring national pride and identity, and taking back the former colony of Chechnya was a major talking point. The goal of these executions?