Well, they were white guys, just like the press was fervently hoping. But who knew that the Tea Party was so active in Chechnya?
I’m sure that all that Islam stuff on his web page is just to camouflage his right-wing militia racism.
[Update a while later]
Let’s hope that this isn’t the beginning of a trend:
Yet such freakouts [as the one today in Boston] are nothing compared to what is in store if the the Marathon bombing means that Chechen jihadis has come to U.S. shores. The Chechens mounted one of the most vicious terror campaigns ever against Russia in the 1990s, blowing up apartment buildings, and launching massive attacks on theaters and even schools. They are known as among the most violent and dedicated terrorists in the world. They can be found fighting in Libya, Syria and every other major jihadi campaign. Though usually they have to sneak into the target countries, rather than coming on a visa as the Boston bombers apparently did.)
Russia only succeeded in suppressing the Chechen Islamists with extremely brutal tactics that would never find support in the U.S – essentially leveling the Chechen capital. Yet dealing with such a threat would also be impossible with a politically correct approach to counter-terror that, for example, turns away from talking frankly about the terrorists profiles and motives.
But they’d rather talk about the Tea Party and militias, and “workplace violence” at Fort Hood.
[Update a while later]
What we know about the terrorists. Dan Foster has a roundup.
[Update a few minutes later]
It occurs to me that I’d have been a little nervous knowing someone who was named for Tamerlane:
Scholars estimate that his military campaigns caused the deaths of 17 million people, amounting to about 5% of the world population.
He reportedly built pyramids of human skulls of the vanquished. It would be sort of like naming your kid “Stalin” or “Mao.” Or Hitler, though he was actually a piker when it came to murdering humans compared to those two.
[Update a few minutes later]
Three places to know to understand the terrorists.
[Update a few minutes later]
An important point:
Because we know so little, and because the stakes are so high, it is imperative that the remaining suspect — if caught — should not be permitted to “lawyer up.” Were they an isolated pair, merely inspired by foreign terrorism? Did they have links to al-Qaeda? Did they have links to Chechen terror groups? Were they even inspired by jihad or something else entirely? Did they have help? Foreign terrorists with potential links to our deadliest enemies do not have the right to remain silent.
But the fools running Eric Holder’s Justice Department will probably give them one anyway. The smart media would start to ask now if this will be treated as a domestic crime or foreign terrorism, and it’s a decision that should be made before capture, it we’re lucky enough to capture him.
[Update a while later]
Here’s some dark humor — the hijacked car had a “Coexist” sticker on it.
[Bumped]
Perhaps Axlerod will apologize. Na, and neither will MSNBC and CNN.
What is galling is that none of them will be forced to defend themselves on camera.
To some extent I can understand the speculation. Everyone was engaged in it but none of these people brought up OWS, ELF, or some other leftest group as a possibility.
Guess what Jim?
They were registered to vote.
Is that really true? Where did you hear/read that?
http://www.buzzfeed.com/chrisgeidner/what-we-know-about-boston-marathon-bomb-suspect-dzhokhar-tsa
Scroll down.
The same article states that the younger suspect became a naturalized citizen on September 11, 2012 (according to CBS).
If true, he was eligible to vote, and not just in local elections, and he has the same claim to 5th Amendment protection as Timothy McVeigh or any other citizen.
Other stories are claiming that both brothers were naturalized citizens.
Tamerlan was registered to vote and hoped to become naturalized which I assume means he was not.
What’s your point? The Cambridge MA town council voted a while back to allow non-citizen voting in local elections, so they may be legally registered even if they aren’t citizens.
And if they are registered illegally, it argues for stricter checks on voter registration, not photo id requirements for voting. Checking id at the polls only tries to tell you whether the voter is the person on the rolls, not whether he or she is eligible to be on the rolls.
It appears that they managed to acquire guns, which they used to kill an MIT security officer. Doing that was of far greater consequence than managing to register to vote. Should buying guns be subject to as much checking as registering to vote?
Ok Jim, let me make sure I am understanding you rihgt.
You want ot make sure a background check is done before a terrorist can steal a security guards gun and shoot him with it.
You do know he was shot with his own gun right?
I, on the other hand, would more rationally argue that is makes cause for more strignent training of guards in weapnons retention and a back-up weapon instead of some fantasy, make-believe gung control fairy-tale nonsense.
BTW Jim, Mass already has stricter gun ownership requirements that the ones you speculate about. It already has some of the strictest gun laws in the nation FYI.
You do know he was shot with his own gun right?
How do you know that? How would anyone know that? The Middlesex County DA’s statement says just:
So they stole the officer’s gun while he sat in his car? Or got him out of the car, stole his gun, shot him multiple times, and he managed to climb back into the car before dying?
The suspects went on to engage in an extended firefight with police. You’re saying that they did all of that with the campus officer’s gun? That they prepared for this confrontation by building IEDs, but didn’t buy any guns, despite their constitutional right to do so?
It already has some of the strictest gun laws in the nation
And it’s near other states with much looser laws.
These guys were building bombs. Do you really, stupidly imagine that there would be any law that would prevent them from getting rifles?
You could certainly make it riskier, more expensive, and more difficult. Making it harder for someone like them to buy guns seems like a higher priority than making it harder for them to register to vote.
And it’s near other states with much looser laws.
Like Vermont and New Hapshire?
You mean two states with the lowest violent crime rates in the nation?
And in so doing, you’d make it harder for everyone to buy guns, while doing little to prevent them from doing so. How many people do you think there are in Boston today saying, “I wish I had a smaller magazine”?
You mean two states with the lowest violent crime rates in the nation?
Right. If MA law makes it hard for you to buy a gun, you can easily drive up to NH or VT or ME. It’s like letting ineligible purchasers avoid background checks by buying a gun on Craigslist or in a gun show parking lot — it’s a gaping loophole.
Jim,
Federal Law requires you to be held to the standards of your home state when you buy a goun in another state. it doens’t work the way you think it does. Stop associating with the retards over at Kos and DU.
For example:
A North Carolina Dealer can not sell a New York Resident an AR-15.
A NC Dealer cannot sell any handgun to a non-NC resident….peroid!
He CAN sell an AR-15 to a Vermont resident however.
Federal Law requires you to be held to the standards of your home state when you buy a goun in another state
Not if you buy your gun in a private sale.
Now do tell us again why we should be concerned that the suspects were registered to vote, and how the MIT officer was killed with his own gun.
“You could certainly make it riskier, more expensive, and more difficult.”
You cold most certainly make it riskier if the farging Obama administration and the Sate of Massachusetts would actually PROSECUTE the 15,000 or so known violations rather than just 44 of them.
But of course, if you are going to blow people up with pressure cooker bombs you probably don’t care about risk or expense.
It is difficult enough to get weapons – as now thousands of people in Watertown and Cambridge have probably considered over the last few days.
” it argues for stricter checks on voter registration, not photo id requirements for voting.”
But if someone were to propose that you would say it is aimed at disenfranchising minorities.
“Checking id at the polls only tries to tell you whether the voter is the person on the rolls, not whether he or she is eligible to be on the rolls.”
It should do both.
“Should buying guns be subject to as much checking as registering to vote?”
Already is and more so.
It should do both.
So driver’s licenses aren’t enough, every voter has to bring a passport or U.S. birth certificate? Really?
Already is and more so.
Not if you buy the gun in a private sale.
No, I am saying that voting officials should be able to easily check to see if the person is appropriately registered to vote. Something that they should be able to do with access to a person’s ID.
“Not if you buy the gun in a private sale.”
These guys were fine upstanding young citizens and a background check would not have prevented them from buying anything.
voting officials should be able to easily check to see if the person is appropriately registered to vote. Something that they should be able to do with access to a person’s ID.
So as each voter checks in at the polling place, a ballot clerks takes their ID, and uses information on that ID to verify the voter’s citizenship, using some national database of citizens (like E-Verify)? You’d need many times as many ballot clerks, and tens of thousands of computers, not to mention a new database of citizens eligible to vote with the real-time performance to handle the election-day crush. And even then it would slow down voting tremendously.
background check would not have prevented them from buying anything
It hardly matters, since background checks are effectively optional.
But if we required checks for private sellers then the private market would disappear, much like it did for pot when we outlawed private drug transactions.
if we required checks for private sellers then the private market would disappear
No, you’d have a legit private market with checks, where law abiding customers would go, and a black market without checks, where criminals would go. Today those two types of customer are mixed together in the private market.
Today you can privately sell a gun to a felon without committing a crime, as long as no one can prove that you knew the buyer was a felon. In most of the country you can not sell pot to anyone without committing a crime; clearly pot must be a more serious threat to public safety than felons buying guns.
I guess they don’t have self check out at the grocery stores where you live.
“It appears that they managed to acquire guns, which they used to kill an MIT security officer”
“You want ot make sure a background check is done before a terrorist can steal a security guards gun and shoot him with it.
You do know he was shot with his own gun right?”
These two lines from the posts above tell everyone all they need to know about Jim and his ‘commnets’. He can’t even bother to read the biggest story in the US for information. He just goes to the progressive “They got guns legally and this shows how bad guns are” rap and forgets to do an even cursory fact check.
Show me the story that says they did not acquire any guns legally.
And what if they did get the guns legally? How could anyone possibly know what was in their hearts and minds when their outward appearance to everyone that knew them would leave no clues that this would happen?
Later you speak about whiplash when it comes to people’s rights but how intrusive do you think a background check should be? How deep would you have to dig to find out what these guys were planning? What about the 4th amendment?
You accuse others of throwing away the constitution but you appear ready to do the same in a very draconian way.
Perhaps, just perhaps, the best way to catch these guys before they acted is not background checks that would not have stopped them and would’ve squashed the rights of a hundred million gun owners but some other form of investigation?
And what if they did get the guns legally
Then Tom W and M Puckett are wrong.
you appear ready to do the same in a very draconian way.
Even Scalia has written that the 2nd Amendment does not protect a felon’s right to buy guns. Therefore, a system that checks every gun sale to verify that the purchaser is not a felon would not violate anyone’s 2nd Amendment rights.
Jim, they had no felony record. They were clean.
One of the problems with almost all of the suggested gun laws is that non a single one of them work well for the demographic that commits the vast majority of violent crime, young people who are just starting out on their criminal endeavors. To stop people like these, the gun-check provisions would have to be more intensive than getting a top-secret security clearance.
They were clean.
Good for them. But even if they’d been convicted felons they’d have been able to buy guns, as long as they did so privately.
the demographic that commits the vast majority of violent crime, young people who are just starting out on their criminal endeavors
So most felons stop committing crimes after their first conviction? I think you’re wrong there. There are a lot of active criminals with felony records, and thanks to the gun lobby it’s easy for them to buy guns without a background check.
Jim, how is a background check going to stop the felons who currently buy guns against the law? Who’s going to do a background check? I used to have about a dozen guns that would at best trace back to some Democrat perhaps a couple of decades ago, not to me, so why would I bother with all the trouble of going down to a gun store in a state where a jury wouldn’t convict someone of selling a weapon unless they were supplying rocket launchers to Al Qaeda?
If checks were always required, anyone buying or selling a gun without a check would know he was breaking the law. Today it is very hard to prove that a seller knew he was selling to a felon; with universal checks, it wouldn’t be.
There are hundreds of thousands of campus drug buys per day, and all parties both know and don’t care that they’re breaking the law.
Serious criminals would of course use fake ID’s, keeping their real names completely out of any paperwork. Of course to do that they’d have to slip a fake ID past another criminal, one who would likely have used your name to purchase the gun in the first place (or second or third place). Even if you got them into court, neither one could be compelled to testify because both could be charged with a crime, and since there wouldn’t be any other witnesses the likelihood of getting a conviction is near zero.
People who did buy a gun legally would probably make a straw sell to themselves just to put the gun under another name. If they get caught with it, they can say the fictitious guy returned it. If that’s a crime, the cops can go charge the fictitious guy who’s probably just a name on a tombstone.
So you haven’t stopped the criminals, and the young folks don’t have records so you don’t stop them either. You might stop a few non-enterprising random crazy people, but probably now more than we stop now.
He can’t even bother to read the biggest story in the US for information.
I’m not sure you’re bothering to read the stories either. The reports I’ve seen say the campus officer was found dead in his cruiser with his gun holstered. Also, they robbed the 7-11 before the campus officer was killed — presumably they didn’t do that with a pocket knife. Later they engaged in long gunfight, and police say the guy who escaped had an assault rifle.
” The reports I’ve seen say the campus officer was found dead in his cruiser with his gun holstered.”
That’s what I heard as well, though that was hours and hours ago and there’s a lot of misinformation out there.
Even if he was found without his gun, you’d need an eyewitness or ballistics tests (with the recovered gun) to know that it was the murder weapon.
Russia only succeeded in suppressing the Chechen Islamists with extremely brutal tactics that would never find support in the U.S – essentially leveling the Chechen capital.
I don’t think this is correct. The terrorist attacks were a response to the Russians leveling Grozny. Chechnya is of strategic importance to the Russians, which is why they occupy it, much to the chagrin of the locals. I’m not so sure the Russians have definitively succeeded in suppressing Chechen terrorism.
It’s not easy to sort out the degree to which Chechen terrorism is driven by ideology and how much is just natural antipathy to the brutality of the Russians. But it’s hard to see how what happened in Boston would be related to the latter.
Yeah, I’m just saying that even if you did use such force, it probably still wouldn’t help. I don’t know what would help. The British operation against the IRA at Loughgall was very successful, but those were very different circumstances, where a significant percentage of the local population supported the IRA.
It is not quite as simple as that. Even after Yelstin botched the first Chechen war and Chechnya got to live under a tense cease fire in which they had de facto autonomy, they still chose to invade the neighboring republic of Dagestan and bomb apartment buildings in Moscow. It was their invasion of Dagestan which provided Putin with the casus belli to start the second Chechen war which effectively put an end to their irritating existance.
The Chechens were not interested in peaceful cohexistence with the Russian Federation. They were interested in carving a place for their murderous caliphate in the area. Good riddance.
it is imperative that the remaining suspect — if caught — should not be permitted to “lawyer up.”
Why not? The underwear bomber was read his rights, and he told us everything. Ditto the Times Square bomber. The Bill of Rights has not proved to be an obstacle to successful terrorism investigations.
I don’t understand the logic that says we must grant Timothy McVeigh all his constitutional rights, but that we’re doomed if we grant them to this 19 year old who’s lived in the US for most of his life. Is our country really that fragile?
“I don’t understand the logic that says we must grant Timothy McVeigh all his constitutional rights”
Who said that? I am sure that the people who want this guy questioned without lawyering up would say the same about the other guy. You are implying that people like and support what McVeigh did and they don’t.
Personally, I want the law followed and for this person to get the maximum punishment.
You are implying that people like and support what McVeigh did and they don’t.
No, I am implying, perhaps too charitably, that David French (the National Review writer quoted above about lawyering up) does support the Bill of Rights, at least when applied to citizens like McVeigh.
Conservatives have been vocal lately on the sanctity of the 2nd Amendment, and how wrong it would be to infringe anyone’s right to bear arms, regardless of any associated mayhem. I get whiplash when they so quickly jump to the position that public safety requires we suspend the 5th Amendment.
“I get whiplash when they so quickly jump to”
Ya, I get that a lot too when I read the written words of liberals and listen to them speak.
“does support the Bill of Rights, at least when applied to citizens like McVeigh.”
Does he? And why do you think he does? Are your suspicions related to melanin or religion? Can’t be both this time…
Don’t question him until he’s been told by a lawyer not to answer questions. Otherwise, we’re fragile.
Jim, you are a mess.
Of course they should question him, as they question every suspect. But if he does lawyer up, we should follow the Constitution.
I agree with this.
There is a big difference between capturing an American citizen on our own soil after an attack like this and apprehending someone on the battlefield in Libya or Afghanistan. The manner in which a person is adjudicated should fit the context of their actions.
When I heard about the Chechnyan/Muslim background of the suspects, I thought: “Well, at least we’re spared some of Moby Matula’s Tea Party Derangement Syndrome for some brief but pleasant time.” Although I’m sure Moby will soon be back arguing that Harry Reid is less of a threat to the liberty of the Republic than people trying to preserve what little is left of it from the Obama Gang.
I have to admit – the first thing I thought when Obama actually said the word “terrorist” was that he would only have said that if the perpetrator was known to be a white conservative…
Shame on both the “right” and “left” factions of the Blogosphere represented here in this bickering discourse.
So we know that the suspected perpetrators are Caucasian in the most strict sense, that is, immigrants from the Caucusus region of Former-Soviet Asia.
We have had their uncle Ruslan Tsarni on TV (Tsarni is how he is legally named in English-speaking America, I am thinking Tsarniaev may be a noun-declension ending of a proper name in the original language), self described as Muslim and from Chechnya, proclaim his patriotism and devotion to his adopted American homeland, denounce his nephews as “losers” for bringing shame to their Chechyn heritage and Muslim faith, declaim that there is “no excuse for what they did” and look into the camera to demand that his surviving nephew “Turn yourself in, and beg for forgiveness from the victims (of his murders) and the many who were injured.”
Do you know any family members of you-know-who who would make a similar statement. OK, OK, maybe the Bin Laden family members did such a thing, but the denunciation of violence and terror was made quitely.
Did any of you see that interview before offering your opinions on ethnicity, religion, terrorism, and international ties?
OK, OK, let’s gloat that these two “losers” were not right-wing Militia people in the style of Nichols and McVeight. But who are these guys? Who “sent them”? What is their grudge? Not you, not you, nor you, or even me knows a thing right now.
The one uncle seems pretty cool to me. Some of the other members of the family not so much.
“OK, OK, let’s gloat that these two “losers” were not right-wing Militia people in the style of Nichols and McVeigh”
You do understand the context right?
“But who are these guys? Who “sent them”? What is their grudge? Not you, not you, nor you, or even me knows a thing right now.”
We do know a little bit about their ideologies but we certainly don’t know the details of their plot and if there were other actors. I am interested in finding out where they were radicalized.
I think they might have a grudge. From one of the above links:
“Loss prevention from Lord & Taylor called to report they had detained a shoplifter. Zubeidat K. Tsarnaeva, 45, of 410 Norfolk St., Apt. 3, Cambridge, was arrested and charged with larceny over $250 (women’s clothing valued at $1,624), and two counts of malicious/wanton damage/defacement to property.”
The bomb they set off was outside Lord & Taylor (the FBI was relying on L & T’s security footage of the crowd outside to identify suspects). The bombing no doubt closed Lord & Taylor to business for many days.
That sounds more like messing with the Chechen mob than anything Islamic.
That would really be interesting. Is the Chechen mob as brutal as the Russian mob? Bombing marathons is going to draw the type of attention they don’t want but who knows maybe its a cultural thing and they don’t understand how we will respond.
But the fools running Eric Holder’s Justice Department will probably give them one anyway. The smart media would start to ask now if this will be treated as a domestic crime or foreign terrorism, and it’s a decision that should be made before capture, it we’re lucky enough to capture him.
You do realize that the younger brother is an American citizen, right? He gained citizenship in 2012. Or are you suggesting that we give the federal government broad powers to declare any citizen on US soil to be some sort of “enemy combatant” and strip them of due process?
I don’t think that the powers should be broad, but when one is at war (and we are, despite the fact that many remain in denial about it), and an act of war is committed by American citizens, perhaps with aid from enemies abroad, that it’s at least worth considering treating them as enemy combatants. As someone once said, the Constitution isn’t a suicide pact.
No. A thousand times, no.
The surviving suspect is an American citizen, goddammit, and you want to strip him of his rights? Do you want Obama to be judge, jury, and executioner while you’re at it? This is a slippery slope down which you do not want to start, because it ends at your door and my door and the door of any United States citizen who dares to criticize our government.
This isn’t an “act of war”, any more than Timothy McVeigh committed an “act of war”; it was a reprehensible act that killed three people and maimed several times that many, but it falls squarely within the criminal justice sphere. Talk of suspending the suspect’s constitutional rights is un-American, at this time when we need to remember that we are a nation of laws not of men. Shame on David French, and shame on you, sir; shame on you.
This isn’t an “act of war”, any more than Timothy McVeigh committed an “act of war”; it was a reprehensible act that killed three people and maimed several times that many, but it falls squarely within the criminal justice sphere.
One of these things is not like the other. Though in fact we still don’t really know who all was involved in the OK City bombing.
Time to adjust the tinfoil hat.
it’s at least worth considering treating them as enemy combatants
I honestly don’t understand your willingness to grant the government that much power against your individual freedom, but I guess opinions vary.
On a much more practical note, I’d like to see this guy get the death penalty. If we declare him an enemy combatant, we’ll ship him off to Gitmo for relaxation and waterboarding, corrupt any kind of confessions he might offer up, subject him to a poorly defined judicial process, and basically leave him in the same limbo as all of the other prisoners there. On the other hand, if we give him a lawyer and a fair trial, he’ll most likely end up with the same lethal cocktail injected into his veins as Tim McVeigh. And that would be justice.
If we declare him an enemy combatant, we’ll ship him off to Gitmo for relaxation and waterboarding, corrupt any kind of confessions he might offer up, subject him to a poorly defined judicial process, and basically leave him in the same limbo as all of the other prisoners there.
There is no intrinsic reason to do that. We could simply extract information from him, roll up the other conspirators, and then give him a firing squad. That’s how it used to work when we were serious about being at war.
So this is really an argument about what constitutes “war”. Not surprisingly I guess, our differences are based on how we define fundamental concepts like this one. But even in the case of “war” however we might define it, I don’t believe that an American citizen should be subject to the government deciding that they’re an enemy combatant and then lining them up against the wall to be gunned down. That’s fascism my friend. You like to say you’re against authoritarianism, but you’re not.
We could simply extract information from him, roll up the other conspirators, and then give him a firing squad.
I refuse to countenance situational ethics applied to the constitutional rights of American citizens. You do. We’re done here.
“Communication is only possible between equals.” Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
Just keep telling yourselves that we are not at war. What you think is rather irrelevant, what matters is whether these attackers and the others think they are at war.
How many attacks do we need to suffer before you call it war? How many countries do we need to be droning people for us to be at war?
the Constitution isn’t a suicide pact
How, exactly, would letting this guy lawyer up be suicide? We let the underwear bomber have a lawyer, and he talked. We let the Time Square bomber have a lawyer, and he talked. We can adequately investigate the actions of a 19 year old stoner without violating his Constitutional rights.
when we were serious about being at war
The Constitution should trump your desire to feel “serious”.
We let the underwear bomber have a lawyer, and he talked. We let the Time Square bomber have a lawyer, and he talked.
How do you know we got all the info? We didn’t in the OK City case.
Just because people “talk” doesn’t mean that the “talk” is truthful, or full.
The DOJ says that both of those guys cooperated fully. You are the one arguing that such a result is tantamount to national suicide.
The DOJ says that both of those guys cooperated fully.
And of course, you are completely on board with what the DoJ says. Why am I not surprised?
You are better informed?
I know that there is a lot that the department chose not to investigate. I also know that the Reno’s Justice department was corrupt.
Constitution is not a suicide pact
What does this even mean?
If it means that we have to bend the Constitution to get at this guy, then where does that end?
If we bend it here, then it creates a threat and a precedent that Obama could use against me. So, in order to protect myself, I have to “protect’ this guy. Meaning, due process applies here to this guy, or someday due process doesn’t exist when I need it.
I reject pure emotionalism when dealing with justice in everything. Meaning, we can’t let emotionalism say that we place more and more restrictions on the 2nd Amendment for free people making free market decisions with their Constitutionally protected right to firearms just because one crazy shoots up one school. The parents of Newtown got their justice: the murderer gave himself a death sentence.
And we can’t use emotionalism to say that we will toss the 5th when dealing with this terrorist. Of course he should fry, and there’s more than enough evidence to do make sure he does.
And if it is an act of war, then charge him with treason under the Constitution as intended and follow that process. If it worked for the Rosenburgs, then it will work for this guy.
And before I am accused of being out of touch or whatever with what this guy did because I “reject emotionalism”…
What I am saying and what I mean is that the processes exist to channel the emotional outrage, while those same processes exist to make sure the innocent are not railroaded by any tyrant in the White House, regardless of the D or R after their name.
If it means that we have to bend the Constitution to get at this guy, then where does that end?
It’s not “bending the Constitution” to not Mirandize an enemy combatant. All that not Mirandizing means is that we can’t use anything he said to convict him. There is plenty of other evidence against him, and we don’t need to use his testimony in trial, so we’re free to get him to talk about his co-conspirators.
I’m hearing “Suspect in custody”
“The DOJ says that both of those guys cooperated fully. ”
The fact that you actually *believe* Holder is quite telling…
So you don’t trust the DOJ, and that’s your argument for why it should be given a free hand to ignore the Constitution?
1) No I don’t trust the DOJ – they burned that out long ago
2) As is typical of you you haven’t read carefully – have you read where I advocate no Miranda rights, here in this thread? Where have I suggested we throw away the Constitution.
Please provide the quote.
You won’t be able to because it never happened.
And this is one reason why what you say is so supremely dismissable…..
Jim:
How many lives were saved and crimes thwarted last year by private citizens defending themselves with legal firearms?
Jim? Jim? Got an answer?
…. crickets………….
Jim, how many lives were saved and crimes thwarted last year by private citizens defending themselves with legal firearms?
The Boston Marathon bombing suspect captured Friday night will not be immediately read his Miranda rights, a Justice Department official said.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/04/no-miranda-rights-for-now-for-bombing-suspect-90362.html#ixzz2Qy20ZIXe
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/04/no-miranda-rights-for-now-for-bombing-suspect-90362.html?hp=f1
The thing about Tamerlane and the pyramids of skulls is pretty much standard fare. He was a descendant of Genghis Khan which did the same thing to any place which failed to pay taxes after being conquered. The Golden Horde which Tamerlane led had its fair share of Mongol descendants converted to Islam in it. He was one of those people.
Which is sort of interesting considering how Genghis himself was against conversion to either Islam or Christianity. He was particularly feared in the Middle East back then. That is what happens when you try to create an empire too large for your own people to handle. You get absorbed by the culture of the peoples you supposedly conquered.
Ya, pretty much run of the mill brutality that was common in those days and even today in different parts of the world. It wouldn’t take much for humanity to slip back into that lifestyle, especially considering that this Tamerlane didn’t live so long ago.
We have a mess because we allow the waters to be muddied and do not adhere to clear distinctions.
Islam requires war with us. It does not require us to defend ourselves, but we probably should. In war, you do not wait to be attacked, you limit the enemies ability first. You keep doing that until one side wins.
Or the shorter, Reagan version, “We win, they lose.”
Any American citizen that sides with the enemy during time of war forfeits many of their rights. That’s what makes war different. War has meaning that can not be ignored. Politicians do of course.
In this case, limiting the enemies ability to attack means the FBI should be doing a more thorough investigation of potential threats. This requires human intel. Spies. Not everywhere but focused on the threat. These two obviously did not get the attention they deserved.
Because of the danger of taking away rights, siding with the enemy should be clearly defined. Terrorism, also clearly defined, should be included in that definition.
I think Rand’s comments have shown he’s not the friend of freedom any of us thought he was. When the chips are down, he wants to give the government unlimited power.
He’s a fair weather libertarian; a libertarian only when it suits him.
he wants to give the government unlimited power.
That creaking sound you hear is me rolling my eyes. Wanting to get intelligence from an enemy combatant is not “wanting to give the government unlimited power.”
Trent, that’s unfair. Wanting a limited government doesn’t mean no government at all. No one is more for limited government than I am. I don’t think the government should be involved in ANYTHING OTHER than defense. That’s a pretty extreme view. But that means people retain their rights with one exception… war! If you engage in an act that is clearly an act of war, you waive all but your inalienable rights.
Hey now, Lincoln didn’t have a problem with suspending more than a few Constitutional protections if it meant preserving the Constitution by not losing a war. If Winston Churchill caught such a suspect, the question wouldn’t be whether his rights would be violated, it would be whether the suspect would survive the most ingenious tortures and interrogations the British could devise.
There’s already a Miranda exception carved out to cover questions asked to protect public safety (“Where are the other bombs you planted?”) because the civil rights of the accused do not outweigh the right to life of other innocent citizens yet to be harmed. When this principle is applied to a situation that has escalated to war, it holds that the civil rights of a suspect do not outweigh those of all the other citizens who will see their rights, and possibly their very lives, stripped away in the whirlwind.
One of the founders’ complaints about King George, as listed in the Declaration of Independence, is not just that he abused or ignored our rights, but that he failed to protect us from our enemies.
Refusing to lift a finger or lay a hand on a suspect who knows where a ticking time bomb is set to blow up a school or other public place is to become at some level complicit in carrying out the subsequent attack, tacitly accepting the demented will and intent of someone in custody. As the Supreme Court ruled, we’re not to be accused and condemned for trying to beat a confession out of someone if what we’re doing is trying to save lives from an immediate and ongoing threat.
We can have a government that both doesn’t abuse our rights and protects us from enemies bent on harm, once you rule out the case that people have a right to keep doing us harm on behalf of our enemies. If there are no bombs gong off then the government (us) will play nice. Otherwise the government will perform job one, stopping the bombs and the bombers and protecting our citizens.
Looked at another way, the police can use lethal force on a suspect who presents a clear and immediate threat to the public. Normally this changes as soon as we have him in custody, because historically most weapons were wielded by hand and a suspect no longer presented a threat once custody was established. So by happenstance custody marked the end of the immediate threat and the point where the court system took over, making a nice dividing line between two rules of conduct. (No one is complaining about the fate of suspect #1 and the government killed him in the street.)
The Boston bombers were wielding one of those unusual weapons that can still kill people after be taken into custody. That’s something unusual in criminal cases, so much so that we didn’t bother to design our system around it.
Imagine some future case where people have cell-phones implanted in their brains, something that everyone finds extremely convenient and something that is barely in the realm of fiction even today. So suppose some wacko builds a bunch of cell-phone activated smart bombs and drone delivery systems and starts causing havoc.
We accept that idea that a cop who sees the suspect, and sees the suspect’s drones closing in, can kill him dead in the street to stop the attacks, in defense of himself and the public. But if the drones were all busy across town, then the cop can just walk up and throw the cuffs on. What did the cuffs really change? Nothing.
The suspect could be just as busy as ever flying drones into school buildings. You could drag him into court and present him to a judge and he could sit at the defendant’s table and grin like an idiot while blowing up more innocent people. In effect, he’s still at large even in a courtroom full of lawyers and while staring at a judge. Hopefully the bailiff would have sense enough to shoot him between the eyes. But then we get to semi-autonomous drones that have to be given an encoded shutdown command, where just shooting the defendant wouldn’t work. In that case, some enhanced persuasion is called for.
Maybe you find that upsetting, but I don’t. Regular people have rights that shouldn’t extend to wetware that is still actively functioning as part of a deployed weapon’s command and control system. The presence of handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit doesn’t change that any more than wearing bright-orange Nikes would protect an ad-hoc anti-tank missile team from the army’s return fire.
Our civil legal protections for those who are acting as enemy command and control systems should start after a dire threat has abated (or a war has ended), not when mere physical custody begins. It’s certainly more convenient for us to treat physical custody as marking the change in the rules (between being shot dead in a liquor store with no questions asked versus lawyering up), and in almost all normal cases that works, but that’s a convenient custom based on the historical nature of our common hand weapons, not holy writ based on immutable laws of nature.
In aerospace terms, I think Rand is looking at what the various black boxes are doing, not what we’ve labeled them out of habit (because we like labeling things and it takes two weeks to get new labels from the label guy).
White hat guy is acting as a foreign enemy combatant. He might still be functioning as part of an active weapon system (is Boston still booby trapped?). Dressing him in an orange jumpsuit with a number on the back doesn’t instantly make him like everyone else wearing an orange jumpsuit around the Boston courthouse. Noting that he’s a US citizen doesn’t make him like every other citizen who isn’t acting as an enemy combatant and who still might have ticking time bombs emplaced in one of our cities.
But rest assured, once he’s become a normal defendant and all outstanding questions have been answered, the might and majesty of our legal system, our protections for the rights of the accused, the greatness of this nation’s civil liberties, will soon see him on the tenure track to a professorship at Harvard, or at least Stanford, plus raking in an awesome forward on a book deal. Our country is great that way. Just thank G-d we know he was born on foreign soil so nobody can run him for President.
I know all you folks, and the media, have been hyping this is some kind of extension of the 9/11 war.
But the reports that are coming out about these two brothers make it look more and more like a Columbine style attack by a couple of losers mad at the world at large for their troubles.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/04/19/tale-two-immigrants/m3alkAoSFQWPwVJ3FXvBkI/story.html
[[[I wouldn’t doubt that Tamerlan Tsarnaev encountered some jerks over the years. We all do. It’s called life. If Tamerlan Tsarnaev nursed murderous grudges because it was so hard to grow up and live in Cambridge, then he was indeed, as his uncle put it, a loser.]]]
I will not be surprised that when all is said and done no links will be found to any formal terrorists groups or training. What you have here is just a couple more losers like the ones in Newtown and Aurora shootings. Only these losers happened to be Chechens instead of belonging to some other group.
“It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.” Sherlock Holmes
Bullshit Thomas. I don’t care if they’re just dumb kids. They did what they did because they accept an ideology that says it’s right. This isn’t just about these two. It’s also about everybody that cheers about it.
No links? NO LINKS??? What links do they need, it’s an ideology that fosters death? You’re looking for a squad leader??? The only link required is that they are ‘for it.’
Links, unexpected by Thomas.
They had links to some very radical foreign imams right on their online accounts. Real links!
Their activities were so foreign-inspired that a foreign government asked the FBI to keep a watchful eye on Tamerlan.
I find this continuing denial amazing:
Of course, being an Islamist nutjob is not incompatible with being a loser.
TM writes:
“I know all you folks, and the media, have been hyping this is some kind of extension of the 9/11 war. ”
That’s because, as you now see, it is.
I like the fact that one of the guys was named “Tamerlane.” That’s like naming your kid “Hitler.”
Hi All,
I selected Columbine as a reference deliberately, because everyone knew what happened and why. Of course it took the experts reviewing all the evidence as least 5 years to figure out the real story. And it was different than the popular opinion and myths claimed it was. But of course by then all the Monday morning quarterbacks and “blogger experts” had moved on to other things and so the myths still persistence about it.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/assessment/2004/04/the_depressive_and_the_psychopath.html
The Depressive and the Psychopath
At last we know why the Columbine killers did it.
By Dave Cullen
By of course go right on spinning theories without real data or confirmed facts to base them on, it is a lot more fun generating urban myths than waiting for the whole story…
Elvis has left the building. Thomas, the light always gets brighter over time. That doesn’t mean there’s none to start with.
Just because you choose not to like the real data and confirmed facts does not mean it doesn’t exist.
As your favorite author Isaac said, it’s not right or wrong, it which is more right (In answer to the question, is science right.) Truth is almost always something you come upon gradually. That doesn’t mean the truth you know is wrong, only that it will get more right over time.
But this does not excuse you from ignoring the facts, data, or… links.
Ken,
if anyone is ignoring data its you and the other folks here.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/20/boston-bombers-mosque-cambridge_n_3125192.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular
[[[Anwar Kazmi, a member of the mosque’s board of trustees, told a USA Today reporter that 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died early Friday morning after a shootout with police, was an infrequent attendee for about a year-and-a-half, while 19-year-old Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, who was captured hiding in a boat in Watertown on Friday night, attended only once. ]]]
and
http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_23080206/white-house-defends-fbi-query-into-boston-suspect
[[[He says the FBI interviewed him and his relatives and didn’t find any domestic or foreign terrorism activity.]]]
[[[The bureau says it also checked U.S. government databases and other information to look into his telephone communications, possible use of radical online sites, personal associations, and travel and education history.]]]
But most important, where are the press releases from the other side claiming victory in this attack?
BTW other security experts are also noticing the similarity…
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/terror-expert-boston-attack-more-columbine-more-than-911-these-are-murderers-not-terrorists/
Terror Expert: Boston Attack More Columbine More Than 9/11, These Are ‘Murderers Not Terrorists’
by Noah Rothman | 10:49 am, April 21st, 2013
[[[Philip Mudd, former counterterror expert for the CIA and the FBI, joined Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday to discuss the nature of the threat posed by the Tsarnaev brothers and any network they may have been associated with in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings. He said the Boston attack reminded him more of the 1999 attack on Columbine than a terror event orchestrated by a foreign network. “I would charge these guys as murders not terrorists,” Mudd said of the suspects in the attack on the Boston Marathon.]]]
But then what would a CIA/FBI counter terrorist expert know?