Summary
Jared Wickerham/Getty Images
Timothy Alben (C) of the Massachusetts State Police and Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis (Center R) in Watertown, Mass., on April 19
The identities of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing -- Chechen brothers Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26 -- appear tentatively to confirm several of Stratfor's suspicions. From this profile, the simple nature of the attack, their efforts to rob a convenience store and their lack of an escape plan, we can at least say at this point in time that they were what we refer to as grassroots militants. Despite being amateurs, such militants clearly still pose a significant threat.
Analysis
Just after 10 p.m. on April 18, the Tsarnaev brothers were identified after having robbed a convenience store in Cambridge, Mass., just three miles from Boston, hours earlier. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer, who responded to the robbery, was shot and killed and found in his car by fellow responding officers. The two suspects later hijacked an SUV at gunpoint, releasing the driver unharmed. Authorities later caught up to the suspects, and a car chase ensued.
Read more on decentralized, grassroots militancy
Just after midnight, the car chase ended with a gunfight in Watertown, Mass. The suspects reportedly threw explosive devices at police, though it is not yet confirmed what types of explosives allegedly were used. During the firefight, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was wounded, taken into custody and later reported dead. Some press reports suggest he may have been wearing some sort of suicide belt or vest. Dzhokhar escaped by driving the stolen SUV through the police barricade and remains at large. According to media reports, a third accomplice was detained earlier this morning by authorities and is being questioned.
According to The New York Times, the two men are from Chechnya. Their family also reportedly lived briefly in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, before moving to the United States in 2002. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's profile on VKontakte, a Russian social media website, said he attended school at the School No. 1 of Makhachkala, spoke English, Russian and Chechen and listed his worldview as Islam. A school administrator from the School No. 1 said the two suspects and their family had previously lived in Kyrgyzstan before moving to Dagestan.
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Given that they are grassroots actors, there is likely only a small chance that the authorities will discover a formal link between the suspects and a state sponsor or a professional terrorist group such as al Qaeda or one of its franchise groups. Any link will likely be ideological rather than operational, although it is possible that the two have attended some type of basic militant training abroad. Given what we have learned about the suspects and the nature of the improvised explosive devices they constructed, it is very likely that the authorities will find that the brothers had read and studied al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's Inspire Magazine.
This case also highlights our analysis that the jihadist threat now predominantly stems from grassroots operatives who live in the West rather than teams of highly trained operatives sent to the United States from overseas, like the team that executed the 9/11 attacks. This demonstrates how the jihadist threat has diminished in severity but broadened in scope in recent years -- a trend we expect to continue.
There will always be plenty of soft targets in a free society, and it is incredibly easy to kill people, even for untrained operatives. In this case, the brothers conducted an attack that was within their capabilities rather than attempting something more grandiose that would require outside assistance -- and which could therefore have put them in jeopardy of running into a government informant as they sought help. It is thus important for citizens to practice good situational awareness and to serve as grassroots defenders against the grassroots threat.
stratfor says "explosive devices" whereas the news this morning was reporting "grenades." I would like to know how two immigrants got ahold of grenades, if that is indeed the case.
They are Chechan and have no link to any terror group and no real motive, so they must be grassroots terrorists... Yeah, grassroots. Grassroots... Grassroots. Chechnya. Grassroots. Al qaeda. 9/11. Got it kid, dumbass, basketball, Nietzsche. Rinse & repeat.
no link to any terror group and no real motive
We'll get a motive in a few days. The link to a possible terror network could also be ascertained, my guess is, through NATO and the US involvment with them in Eastern Europe right after the cold war. "Grassroots" simply means that they live in the US; it is not going to be a US nationalist/militia thing. It might even be a leftover grudge from fighting Russia's state terror networks in much the same way that al qaeda (who fought as proxies for the US in Eastern Europe back then) is a leftover from US terror networks. They could also just be fucking dumbass kids that hate the US because they were taught to or learned to...i'll have to see more before I believe that they were Islamic converts, but i suppose it's possible. For instance, did the US kill their parents or friends in Eastern Europe when they were kids?
I love it when people's minds are static, thanks hubba. But, I don't think Nietzsche would do you any good. Just play basketball and memorize your statistics.
Do you understand how conspiracy fearmongering molds your mind in the same way that state propaganda does? by using fear? Moron.
So, you're saying that it's blowback that might have cause these kids to do what they did; just like what Ron Paul says was the case during 9/11?
To paraphrase Marc Faber: We're all doomed, but that doesn't mean that we can't make money in the process. Rabbi Lapin: "Let's make bricks!" Stephan Kinsella: "Say you and I both want to make a German chocolate cake."
pfft. No, I am just an apologist for the state... (/sarcasm).
But seriously, i cannot think of any other motive outside of them wanting to cause mayhem (which I doubt). I think 9/11 was state sponsored from SA/Isr/Pak - I think that is what we are not told (and that there were moles in the USAF and WH). I differ from Ron paul on 9/11. But, yes, "blowback," something else the CIA wrote about 30 years ago...but we don't trust them right?
Why would Saudi Arabia sponsor 9/11?
this is all american propaganda are u kidding.
terrorists doesnt exist. How much u want to bet, they gonna say that the perpetrator commit suicide, and then they gonna bury him in ocean for muslim ceremony, and not release any pics of his dead face?
EDIT: want to bet he will die of his wounds in the hospital?
“Since people are concerned that ‘X’ will not be provided, ‘X’ will naturally be provided by those who are concerned by its absence.""The sweetest of minds can harbor the harshest of men.”
http://voluntaryistreader.wordpress.org
To extort the bush family and their in common business associates at Carlyle Group and Raytheon (the bushes, bin ladens, and house of saud are financially and business-cooperation-ally connected through those businesses).
you know what SA, Israel, and Pakistan have in common? Their main geopolitical enemy in each case is.. dun dun dun duuun, Iran. Well, Pakistan might have India geopolitically...but, religiously, it is Iran.
Iran = Shia, SA and Pakiston = Sunni; Israel, self explanatory.
It doesn't take a genius to see that Afghanistan and Iraq were chosen to further isolate Iran. You know where the US didn't have military bases before 2001 and 2003? Afghanistan and Iraq. We shrunk the Iranians ability to expand their sphere of influence. And Israel or the US never struck Iran as I think has been the plan all along.
And Israel or the US never struck Iran as I think has been the plan all along.
any speculations as to why that was the plan?
haha are you serious?
Because Iran is openly hostile towards Israel, Israel wants to remain the only true nuclear threat in the area (because it makes them by default regional hegemon) (Pakistan doesn't even have their nuclear weapons assembled at any given time because they themselves are fearful of what could happen to them.). And the US wants to prevent the 600 million arabs from all turning on Israel at once since it will destroy the world economy. the US defense establishment is not ignorant of the influence that israel has over them. In fact, most of the things I've read say that the US acts on behalf of Israel because the heat that is caused by US actions is lesser than the heat that Israel would stir up if it acted unilaterally.
The entire world economy is dependent on Israel?
Why the US acts on behalf of Israel:
http://thezog.info/
ok, but why fuck with iraq and afghanistan when you could just invade iran and remove the threat?
It is a strategy of "further isolation."
It is done that way because Iran can fight back in a way that Iraq and Afghanistan could not; thus, you have work your way up from the bottom of the possible allies or strategic territory available to the main enemy. (Think of the amount of children that US sanctions on Iraq did over 8 or 9 years. 400,000 people died. 200,000 of which could be potential soldiers in 18 years - from 1991/92. Do the math. That is why the US State and Defense justified it. And only after this policy had taken a big effect was iraq taken off of the terror list and added to regime change. Because we had shrunk their potential army and crippled their infrastructure at the start of it.) It is a way of knowing that you'll fight wars in the future and planning accordingly...
Enemy list in order of threat level:
Iran, Syria, Iraq, then the rest of them; it doesn't matter because, either, we had bought them off (Egypt, Libya) or they lacked any significant power anyway.
So, if Israel or the US were to attack Iran first, say in 2000, then all of the potential allies of Iran or the weaker enemies that Iran can take over (a real problem) get to kick in. So, we are talking Lebanon, Syria, and the various terror networks that Iran and they toy with plus Iran itself. First thing Iran does is attack the SA oil fields in order to cripple the entire Western economy. When Iran's oil can no longer make it to China, they get involved. This would be, i think, why directly attacking Iran was out of the question. It would be starting a war where your enemy takes a significant chunk of land from Afghanistan, where the taliban does the same shit to iran theat they do to us, and taken Iraq since Iraq was much much weaker than Iran.
Also, interesting thing I learned from reading (JJ), was that Saddam Hussein told us that he claimed that he had WMD and refused to let UN weapons inspectors in was because he was bluffing Iran. Saddam was scared of Iran and tried to deter them with a WMD bluff (remember they were at war not to long before). it was a dangerous game that a state with many enemies, and for all different reasons,was playing...
Remember when Z. Brzezinski suggested to Obama that if Israel tried to strike Iran (this is how you know there are two main factions of foreign policy interests and not one well thought out "conspiracy") that,
We are not exactly impotent little babies. They have to fly over our airspace in Iraq… we have to be serious about denying them that right. That means a denial where you aren’t just saying it. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not. No one wishes for this but it could be a Liberty in reverse. ... The Russians have their own interests in Iran, which are far more complex than the simplistic notion that the Russians want to help us with Iran. The Russians have a complicated agenda with Iran. They also know in the back of their heads that if worse came to worse… which is an American-Iranian military collision, who would pay the highest price for that? First, America, whose success in ending the Cold War the Russians still bitterly resent. And we would also pay a high price in Iraq, Afghanistan, and massively so with regards to the price of oil. Second, who would suffer the most? The Chinese, who the Russians view as a long-range threat and of whom they are very envious, because the Chinese get much more of their oil from the Middle East than we do, and the skyrocketing price would hurt them even more than us. Third, who would then be totally dependent on the Russians? The West Europeans. And fourth, who would cash in like crazy? The Kremlin.
...
The Russians have their own interests in Iran, which are far more complex than the simplistic notion that the Russians want to help us with Iran. The Russians have a complicated agenda with Iran. They also know in the back of their heads that if worse came to worse… which is an American-Iranian military collision, who would pay the highest price for that? First, America, whose success in ending the Cold War the Russians still bitterly resent. And we would also pay a high price in Iraq, Afghanistan, and massively so with regards to the price of oil. Second, who would suffer the most? The Chinese, who the Russians view as a long-range threat and of whom they are very envious, because the Chinese get much more of their oil from the Middle East than we do, and the skyrocketing price would hurt them even more than us. Third, who would then be totally dependent on the Russians? The West Europeans. And fourth, who would cash in like crazy? The Kremlin.
On those factions in the US policy wonks, there are the nationalists and internationalists (the neorealists and the neoliberals). The neocons are a faction within the nationalist faction. The internationalists (TC oriented) know that most of the world wants Israel to behave. Brzezinski is a hardliner, but that is how twisted geopolitics in the region is.
if they had any sense at all they would have put a million man army on the hoof and stomped a mudhole across all three of those bitches then come right the fuck back home. this shit is ridiculous.
well, this was all not to mention the war-profiteers (the M-IC) that are among those who make policy and strategize...
No. Israel uses their geography as a strategic asset, however. They just happen to be in a spot where the entire oil trade in the middle east can be disrupted. As does Saudi Arabia, Egypt (partially), and Iran...
yah but theyre dumbasses. they should have destabilized the region then went right to private defense contractors so they could try to be robber-barons in the ancap golden age that is to come. instead its gonna be other people, basically anyone who has a successful security company between now and 2025.
you know they dont know what theyre doing because they didnt have a plan for iraq after deposing the government. thats because there were no good options. that should have been a clue, keep moving east.
the problem is that they didnt have the combat experienced army. now theres a combat experienced army but a war-weary populace that cant support another 10 years of expeditionary warfare. it doesnt have to cost this much but you try telling some fat infantry ssgt that he has to walk most places.
you know they dont know what theyre doing because they didnt have a plan for iraq after deposing the government.
Pretty much, but this is the fault of the Bush administration. iraq had a one party system that bush & co. systematically disbanded. they ran the whole fucking country water treatments, schools, etc! And no one stepped up to run the place "like they should have."
the problem is that they didnt have the combat experienced army.
I don't think that matters as much when you fight guerillas.
what I mean is that they had the capability to rampage across southwest asia and trample the armies of the moslems. they didnt have the confidence to dare that greatly because the vast majority of the forces were unblooded. if there were no light speed communications it might have been different. have you seen generation kill? those guys were moving hot and fast, killing everything that posed a threat to them. the iraqi army dissolved. read roughneck 9-1 and see how a handful of rednecks with various personality disorders could not fuck up badly enough to avoid destroying enemy mechanized forces much larger than them. he who dares, wins, for a variety of reasons but often because people in general arent very good at fighting. not even when they are paid to it.
if youre alluding to the idea of the iranians putting up a guerilla defense against the initial invasion, I could hear more. what I envision is an american led coalition supported theater raid campaign on the order of about 3-4 weeks. we kill shit and bounce, mid-2004.
I have seen generation kill and do know what you mean.
if youre alluding to the idea of the iranians putting up a guerilla defense against the initial invasion, I could hear more. what I envision is an American led coalition supported theater raid campaign on the order of about 3-4 weeks. we kill shit and bounce, mid-2004.
Iranians spearheaded the tactic of suicide bombing in the 80s in Lebanon. It, as far as I can tell, is the only improvement of the guerilla strategy that the CIA taught the mujahadin. I don't mean makes, it better in a moral sense, but it makes it more effective. And the Iranian guerilla network is in several countries and would likely target Israel just as much as the US, even if Israel didn't help the US (they never seem to do they?).
I don't know if the world would have tolerated that. The UN would never go along with it, meaning that UNSC would have at least two vetoes, but probably three(Russia and China for sure and I bet France). Any military maneuver that the US does the Russians think is aimed at them. So, I'm guessing the potentiality for a world war is why the "smash and grab" method wasn't chosen. And the M-IC doesn't make as much money.
yah probably.
.
There is no plan, there is just a bunch of implacable biases (anti-South American nationalist, anti-Communist, anti-Arab nationalist, anti-Iranian, anti-Russian, anti-Serbian, anti-Chinese), and an addiction to exercising power.
Or could it be that anyone who stands in our way we term anti-xxx? They are mostly cultivated biases.
You do not think that US has any long-term geostrategy? I'm not saying they planned any of it for any particular time in the future, just at some point. Look up Kissinger's State Dept. paper on "controlling the population in the third world." The policy was started in 1967. The plan didn't work, but they were attempting long term strategy based on World Bank projections. Look at Brzezinski's strategy of turning China against Russia. We've been pursuing his suggested policies since the mid 80s regarding Chinese energy exploration and he himself said it was a 50-75 year time frame for effectiveness. Look up the War and Peace Studies Project group; it was a series of long term strategy suggestions from 1940 that ended up putting the skeletons of IMF, WB, and UN together.
The US has long term strategy; to the extent that they can hold it together is another question. We have been pursuing preponderance for almost 20 years and it is obvious that it cannot work forever. not that history won't tell us that.
The idea the moronic American Empire
Yeah, everyone in the government is dumb. There is nothing to learn from them. No bias there.
Also, if you are referring to the 10 year planning of the crippling of Iraqi infrastructure and army capabilites (like we knew in 1991 that we'd go back to Iraq in 12 years)...it just worked out that way for 2003, but it was a policy designed to decimate the population...
EDIT: Oh yeah, I forgot, PNAC and the neocons wanted to go into Iraq, in official capacity, six years before the war (they are an aberration within nationalist policy makers though), but my guess is that they all didn't just decide one day in 1997 to invade...
What did Wolfowitz tell him in 1991?!?!
found the rest the rest of it.
yeah, I arrived at almost that same conclusion, but independently.
Thanks, Malachi!
Yeah, everyone in the government is dumb.
They are mostly cultivated biases.
Being a social construct all bias is cultivated, rather than inherent.
race and gender bias is inborn.
In connection to the bombers these two takes seem the most likely to me so far: 1, 2. Also I should say this points to it being more of a pseudo-terrorism act. You have individuals who are pychologicaly alienated from society lashing out and grandstanding and searching to assert their identity, when they're actually rootless and detached from their people. It's more Anders Breivik, than the IRA. Also I should say I think this sort of pseudo-terrorism is something quite new, and would have been out of place outside our contemporary era and culture.
Even if you could call their burning desire to invade Iraq a plan, they weren't behind the steering wheel of the American Empire in 1991. So that's not the plan of the America, it's a Christmas wish of the neocons.
I think you'll find that the neocons had been in the bureaucracy from Bush Sr. through Clinton. only Bush Jr. gave them head of DoD and cabinet positions (rather than "deputy undersecretary of defense," as Gen. Clark mentions, if you'd watch those videos... R-tard). Also, having a broad geostrategy is not the same as having specific plans for the inner workings of each of the like 10 wars they wanted to start.
And, again as clark mentions, the neocons planned on hitting all of the countries that went down in the Arab Spring. Are the neoliberalis behind Obama following the same plan, but doing a better job? YES. The answer is yes. They have had much more success in rolling the die than Bush had in forcibly moving pieces. Brzezinski is the one who suggested we use Islamic movements as cover for proxy wars...he was one of Obama's professors at Columbia (Obama wrote his thesis on soviet nuclear disarmament and Brzezinski is a Russo-phobe) and his first term NS Adviser. What did we do in Libya? What are we doing in Syria? We're using fucking islamic sects as fucking cover for fucking proxy wars. What I outlined IS the US medium to long term geostrategy. Clark even says, way more specific than I could get, is to prevent China and Russia from establishing ties with regimes that will not compromise with the US and Israel.
I don't care if people in government are smart or dumb. Either way, the government itself is dumb, and that's a fact. American government more than most. Are you going to dispute it?
hahaahaahahhaahahhahahahahahahaahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah
how can a nonexistent thing have human-like qualities? And since it is a fact, you could probably prove it, huh?
So, yes, I'll dispute that and say than non-extant things cannot have human features. At all. Dumbass. And I've got to say, it's pretty libertarian to group everyone together and call them dumb like that. you're truly a great thinker, moralist, and symbol of libertarianism. Now, go read your Ayn Rand.
and specificaly instituted them in order to kill people in order to make its invasion of Iraq which it had already decided upon at the time easier,
Well, I already said that i didn't mean to imply that in 1991 they were planning the 2003 invasion. It just worked out that way. but, you bet your ass State and Defense knew what the sanctions would do. The main thing Iraq used chlorine for was to CLEAN THEIR WATER. you cripple strategically significant resources. just like in the Korean war were NATO blew up dams in order to flood rice fields; the purpose was to kill civilians through starvation.
or else we have very little to talk about
General Clark straight up SAYS we were planning to go back into Iraq in the video if you'd watch it you dumb fucking hillbilly. you don't have anything to talk about because you don't know what you are talking about. you're just an ideologue.
Aristophanes I have to say I think your name calling is counterproductive.
Aristophanes, didn't you claim in another thread that cops are liars? Yet in this thread's OP, you seem to be taking everything the cops have said on faith. Which is it? Do you blindly trust cops or not?
The keyboard is mightier than the gun.
Non parit potestas ipsius auctoritatem.
Voluntaryism Forum
actually what neocons want has jack shit to do with what the US intends at the time.
I never claimed that they did. In fact I'm pretty sure that I named them specifically as an "aberration" within the nationalist faction of US policy. I told you that the TC and neoliberals still had more influence in the 80s than the neocons. Bush Sr. was a TC politician. He is/was not a nationalist.
government actions, intentions and plans can be judged as dumb or smart.
Prove that inanimate things or collective things can have intentions. You're a libertarian, or at least you think you are I assume, but you think like a collectivist, no? and as you call me a moron... or should I link you to some papers written on whether or not we can even say "collective" action/intention etc. How versed are you in action philosophy? Cause that is where I'll take you if you want...
The norm in implemented US foreign policy is that it 1.) all but disregards its own national interest, 2.) most of the time actually works against it 3.) implements policies which actually contradict each other. So tell me, genius, is that smart, or dumb?
It is called democracy. That is what you described in that paragraph. An executive under the influence of various sometimes competing interest groups.
1 - is not true, again you've never actually looked at the papers and studies that have been conducted according to the national interest. Look back at my last posts, I mentioned several.
2 and 3 are the same thing (so you don't need to claim to have three talking points, two of them the same). And I'm not gonna argue there. All you have to do is look at why we continued the Vietnam war to see the contradiction in virtually all policy (win a war to maintain credibility by fighting a war that decreases our credibility)...that doesn't mean that geostrategy is "not a thing." It just means that the people who get ahold of the reigns every once in awhile fuck up in accordance with it. if the bush Jr wars would have been successful (if the governments had formed to the wishes of the neocons) then the strategy might look saner.
My guess is you've never ever read anything at all on long-term politics and that is why you are so bent out of shape. "There cannot possibly be any reasoning by governments, they are all dumb." You're a worthless ideologue that sees in black and white.
arbritrary decisions of the revolving door
haha, yeah. It might be arbitrary to you. The interest groups involved probably don't think that, however.
What you claimed was that the US (not the neocons who are irrelevant to US Iraq policy under Bush I)
Did you listen to Clark? he said wolfowitz wanted in 1991 when he was depunsecdef wanted to go back into Iraq...
What you claimed was that the US (not the neocons who are irrelevant to US Iraq policy under Bush I) was decided on reinvading sometime in the future, even as much as 10 years or more into the future, if Saddam was still in power and if Iraq could be sufficiently weakened before that.
I already said that it worked out that way. and watch the clark video I posted.
You also claimed sanctions were instituted with a view to this future, potential invasion, specifically to make certain there would be less Iraqis alive that could resist it.
All I said was that the sanctions were designed to decimate the population. From a military POV it is easy to infer the benefits of a decreasing population...they knew the effects 2/3 years into the sanctions as well...It was during the Clinton administration that the neocons entrenched themselves in the bureaucracy. And they did have a plan to go back in in 1991 (according to Clark) that was made official as a suggestive think tank in 1997.
ooooh, I don't care.
I don't think that it is impossible to learn things from establishment perspectives. It is about filtering what is true or relevant from the things that are misleading or irrelevant. When you read about how analysts think you see how they have to sort through politicians lies to find what is relevant. Sometimes analysts are looking at information that was crafted for them for the purposes of deception. Just think about it. Every piece of information can tell you something. See this.
plus, I don't think the boston bombing was planned so they aren't lying about it. The worst they could do is associated them with arab terrorists in order to further that narrative...
Your question is phrased as a 1 or a 0. Why don't you ask JJ for an answer like that?
http://www.globalresearch.ca/contractors-at-boston-marathon-stood-near-bomb-left-before-detonation/5332069
who feels like playing detective and running down this lead?
http://www.globalresearch.ca/boston-suspect-arrested-stripped-naked-so-when-was-he-shot-and-killed/5332316
http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2013/04/nyt-fbi-hatches-terror-plots.html