Boston marathon bombing

[ArtK78]

From a technical legal standpoint, much of the above discussion is downright silly (with all due respect).

 

The definition of WMDs for purposes of US criminal law is just that - it is a definition for the purposes of US criminal law. It has nothing to do with international conflicts, the war in Iraq, etc. So please do not try to use that definition in discussing any issue involving WMDs in international conflicts.

 

The point is that this 19 year old is charged with, among other things, violating the US criminal law in that he employed WMDs (as defined in the statute) and thereby caused death and destruction. It is really that simple.

 

In international conflicts, WMDs typically include chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Explosive devices are thought of as "normal" weapons. But we are not discussing an international conflict.

[mike777]

From a technical legal standpoint, much of the above discussion is downright silly (with all due respect).

 

The definition of WMDs for purposes of US criminal law is just that - it is a definition for the purposes of US criminal law. It has nothing to do with international conflicts, the war in Iraq, etc. So please do not try to use that definition in discussing any issue involving WMDs in international conflicts.

 

The point is that this 19 year old is charged with, among other things, violating the US criminal law in that he employed WMDs (as defined in the statute) and thereby caused death and destruction. It is really that simple.

 

 

no

 

fwiw I agree with your point about wmd no the rest

 

--

 

let me throw out comment that many on bbo will lhate

 

jhiad =most of terrorists.

 

 

many of the so called conser. point of view= this

 

most of the leftwing...=not

 

If you don't think that radical islam is huge issue ok.

[blackshoe]

As it turns out, they were not making any effort to escape until they were identified. This baffled me: they had almost three days, they could have been anywhere in the world, but there they sat still in Boston.

As a friend of mine used to say "criminals are stupid".

[blackshoe]

OK, I'm curious. What is the definition of a "weapon of mass destruction"? A nuke? Yup I guess that would fit the bill. Bio weapon? Yup, genie-out-of-the-bottle type microbe that is out of control when unleashed, I would have sympathy with including that. Scud missile? Hmm, beginning to stretch it a bit there in my view. Pressure-cooker bomb? Oh, come on! An automatic assault rifle would have the capacity to do more harm, and I'm betting that there is at least one in every Boston street.

 

Ah, well, I guess that the US administration can at long last say that they have found one.

I'll take that bet, and you'll lose. Automatic weapons are not nearly as widespread in the US as TV and the movies would have us believe. They aren't easy to get, either.

 

For the general purposes of national defense, the US Code defines a weapon of mass destruction as:

 

any weapon or device that is intended, or has the capability, to cause death or serious bodily injury to a significant number of people through the release, dissemination, or impact of:

toxic or poisonous chemicals or their precursors

a disease organism

radiation or radioactivity[26]

By this definition, the bombs used in Boston were not "weapons of mass destruction". At least, so says the Wikipedia article on WMD. Apparently there is another view. It seems the lawyers have, over the years, considerably extended the definition. I suppose pretty soon my penknife will be classified as a WMD. As for me, after twenty years in the military, I'll stick with large scale chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. IEDs don't qualify.

[billw55]

I'll take that bet, and you'll lose. Automatic weapons are not nearly as widespread in the US as TV and the movies would have us believe. They aren't easy to get, either.

Sorry blackshoe, laws restricting or banning guns don't work to keep them out of the hands of criminals. Ergo fully automatic weapons must be almost everywhere despite the lack of evidence of such ;)

[barmar]

From a technical legal standpoint, much of the above discussion is downright silly (with all due respect).

I suppose. It's just kind of Orwellian that we can say that the Tzarnaev brothers deployed WMDs, but we didn't find any in Iraq. Tell that to all the victims of IEDs over there.

 

The legal definition of WMD suggests that the explosive versions should have significant destructive power, by specifying the minimum explosive power. But the chemical, biological, and radioactive versions seem to allow any amount -- a hypodermic containing poison seems to fit the description. So even though "mass destruction" is in the name, it doesn't actually have to be able to cause massive destruction. Newspeak at its best.

 

But I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I read the police blotter section of the town paper, and they'll report someone being arrested for "assault and battery with a dangerous weapon on a person over the age of 65", and then in the description, it turns out that the "dangerous weapon" was a cell phone thrown at the victim's face.

[blackshoe]

yeah, right. And the moon's made of green cheese. <_<

[1eyedjack]

Sorry about the thread drift but talking of Orwell:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2185494/Olympics-2012-Parkinsons-sufferer-Mark-Worsfold-54-arrested-police-smiling-cycling-road-race.html

[kenberg]

If you can keep your head when all about you men are losing theirs....

 

I'm not all that big a Kipling fan, or Orwelll fan either for that matter, but we do seem to go a bit nuts sometimes.

[Zelandakh]

jhiad =most of terrorists.

Please do not try to tell this to the people of Norway, Germany, Spain, etc. Heck, as I have pointed out before (somewhat tongue in cheek but nonetheless) George Washington could easily have been labelled a terrorist by a modern definition. The differences between terrorists and freedom fighters is often more a factor in who is making the judgement than what is actually being done. Similarly, the line between criminal and mentally instable is somewhat blurry. Quite frankly, your comment is bigotted and a complete distortion of the world picture. I would suggest you withdraw it but I know better than to think you will read this post in any form other than the meaning that you would like it to have.

[barmar]

Sorry about the thread drift but talking of Orwell:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2185494/Olympics-2012-Parkinsons-sufferer-Mark-Worsfold-54-arrested-police-smiling-cycling-road-race.html

From that article: ‘All too frequently people with Parkinson’s tell us how are they are accused of being drunk, or acting suspiciously as they go about their daily lives. We hope that Mark’s experience will help to raise awareness of this distressing problem.’

 

There's an old adage: When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. Unless you happen to know that someone has Parkinson's, these are reasonable and appropriate assumption. "Raising awareness" doesn't change this -- it's still a rare enough condition that there's no reason to expect that some random stranger has it.

 

In the case of the police action, it's better for them to err on the side of public safety. After getting an apology from the police, the guy who was arrested said that he "fully understands and appreciates" what they did. It's nice to see that even victims can understand the common sense of their situation.

[1eyedjack]

In the case of the police action, it's better for them to err on the side of public safety. After getting an apology from the police, the guy who was arrested said that he "fully understands and appreciates" what they did. It's nice to see that even victims can understand the common sense of their situation.

 

I have no doubt that the reporters "bigged it up" for the sensationalism, but there remains to my mind a concern that had the victim not had the excuse of suffering from Parkinson's, perhaps his 5 hour stretch in the cells might have been somewhat more aggrevated; just for looking grumpy.

[y66]

From No Room For Radicals by Suhaib Webb and Scott Korb:

 

JUST hours after the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing were identified as Muslims, Representative Peter T. King of New York, the Republican chairman of the House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, called for an “increased surveillance” of Islamic communities in the United States. “I think we need more police and more surveillance in the communities where the threat is coming from,” he told National Review. “The new threat is definitely from within.”

 

Mr. King’s hypothesis, and the widespread surveillance policies already in effect since 9/11, assume that the threat of radicalization has become a matter of local geography, that American Muslims are creating extremists in our mosques and community centers.

 

But what we’re learning of the suspects, the brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, suggests a different story, and one that has itself become familiar: radicalization does not happen to young people with a strong grounding in the American Muslim mainstream; increasingly, it happens online, and sometimes abroad, among the isolated and disaffected.

 

The YouTube page of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, for example, does not contain a single lecture from a scholar, imam or institution in America. One report suggests that he found the theology taught in a local Cambridge mosque, the Islamic Society of Boston, unpalatable: while attending a Friday service in which an imam praised the life and work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. Tsarnaev shouted that the imam was a “nonbeliever.” The younger Tsarnaev brother seems to have rarely attended a mosque at all.

 

Representative King’s theories also fail to explain why, if young people are being radicalized within mainstream Islamic communities, there aren’t more attacks like the one in Boston. By some measures Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the United States, and the last decade has seen a rapid expansion of Muslim institutions across the country.

 

Yet what’s most obvious to anyone who has spent time in these communities is that whether they are devotional or educational, focused on the arts or on interfaith cooperation and activism, this mediating set of American Muslim institutions is keeping impressionable young Muslims from becoming radicalized.

 

Take the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center and its range of devotional, arts and educational programs, from preschool to a seminary. Or Chicago’s Inner-City Muslim Action Network, complete with a medical clinic, civic leadership education and a summer music festival that draws on the biggest names of Muslim hip-hop to promote peace through community organizing. Or Zaytuna College in Berkeley, Calif., the nation’s first four-year Islamic liberal arts school.

 

These institutions and others have different aims, but they abide by a common idea: if the center of Judaism is the law, and the heart of Christianity is love, what Islam requires, above all else, is mercy. And whether on display in health care provided for the poor at South Los Angeles’s UMMA Community Clinic, or in a patiently handled Arabic lesson that will one day lead a new convert into the fullness of the tradition, Islamic mercy, preached and practiced within the community, allows no room for radicalization.

 

Representative King and others have it exactly, completely wrong — the American Muslim community has actively and repeatedly, day in and day out, rejected such radicals on religious grounds: they do not know mercy.

 

More than a decade since 9/11, this should no longer be any secret. Across the nation, the doors are open, and more are opening every day. And despite whatever misplaced fears the Boston bombings evoke about radical Islam and homegrown terror, we’ll all find ourselves increasingly secure as more Muslims heed the call — coming to Islam as it is in the United States, as a real, living community.

Suhaib Webb is the imam of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center. Scott Korb, who teaches writing at New York University and the New School, is the author of “Light Without Fire: The Making of America’s First Muslim College.”

[mike777]

Please do not try to tell this to the people of Norway, Germany, Spain, etc. Heck, as I have pointed out before (somewhat tongue in cheek but nonetheless) George Washington could easily have been labelled a terrorist by a modern definition. The differences between terrorists and freedom fighters is often more a factor in who is making the judgement than what is actually being done. Similarly, the line between criminal and mentally instable is somewhat blurry. Quite frankly, your comment is bigotted and a complete distortion of the world picture. I would suggest you withdraw it but I know better than to think you will read this post in any form other than the meaning that you would like it to have.

 

 

to be fair that is the danger, that is being thought of as a bigot if you state such things. You get called names if you claim most terrorism in our world today is by jihadists. I do understand you and to be fair others state the counter argument that OF GW and one is a bigot to claim otherwise.

 

Once one is labeled a bigot or at least one's comments the discussion stops.

 

It would be helpful if you at least define who you believe most of the terrorists are in our world today not 1776. I mean we all know this is a complex subject so that does not add to the discussion. OTOH are you making the claim that most terrorists are simply freedom fighters in your judgment and the moral equivalent of GW?

[Cyberyeti]

It would be helpful if you at least define who you believe most of the terroists are in our world today not 1776. I mean we all know this is a complex subject so that does not add to the discussion.

 

In the UK terrorists largely fall into 2 groups, Islamists and Irish (on both sides of that conflict).

 

In the US I'd say Islamists, Americans with a problem with the government (McVeigh et al) and I'd consider the most extreme anti abortionists (the guys who shoot doctors) to fall under the terrorist label.

 

Many countries have their own separatist terrorists, but I have to say that much of the international terrorism is Islamist.

[dwar0123]

It would be helpful if you at least define who you believe most of the terrorists are in our world today not 1776. I mean we all know this is a complex subject so that does not add to the discussion. OTOH are you making the claim that most terrorists are simply freedom fighters in your judgment and the moral equivalent of GW?

 

 

In any conflict, terrorists are the ones that are losing.

[mike777]

In any conflict, terrorists are the ones that are losing.

 

 

 

Since we assume the goal is to defeat and stop these killer terrorists one would hope so.

 

To be fair those who sympathize with or justify the terrorists may be sad if they are losing and defeated.

[hrothgar]

To be fair those who sympathize with or justify the terrorists may be sad if they are losing and defeated.

 

It's amusing to watch Mike expanding his repertoire and trying to fill the role that Lukewarm used to play.

 

We used to just get drug addled ramblings.

Now we get asinine snark as well...

[TimG]

In the US I'd say Islamists, Americans with a problem with the government (McVeigh et al) and I'd consider the most extreme anti abortionists (the guys who shoot doctors) to fall under the terrorist label.

Don't forget about the terrorism that the US government conducts. Some would say that drone attacks are terrorism.

 

Or this.

[dwar0123]

Don't forget about the terrorism that the US government conducts. Some would say that drone attacks are terrorism.

 

Or this.

 

The drone attacks may be terrifying, as would any form of lethal force being applied to you or your community would be. But to suggest it is terrorism is to rob terrorism of any meaning that would differentiate it from violence.

 

Trying to find a more narrow meaning, you can't really say that civilians are the target of the drone attacks, but you could perhaps suggest that they are expected victims and thus define terrorism in such a way as to include attacks which might be expected to have innocent casualties. But that definition would again include pretty much every significant conflict in every war, ever. Again, robbing the word of any defining meaning.

 

One thing you can say about drone attacks is that from a certain point of view, they are immoral. You are bringing violence to others without personally putting yourself at risk. This will strike many as being cowardly and killing people like a coward is certainly immoral by many moral standards.

 

I would like to point out how entirely unlike terrorism this is.

 

Terrorism is about staying relevant when the rest of the world is ready to move on. It is about being noticed and being taken seriously. People respect violence, they notice it and when you have thoroughly lost, violence may be the only way to stay relevant. Rarely do you blow yourself up to stay relevant(once at most), you convince others to do it for you.

[Cyberyeti]

Don't forget about the terrorism that the US government conducts. Some would say that drone attacks are terrorism.

 

Or this.

That may be done BY the US and may be terrorism, not going there, but I was talking about IN the US.

[mike777]

Don't forget about the terrorism that the US government conducts. Some would say that drone attacks are terrorism.

 

Or this.

 

 

yes insanely many believe drone attacks that don't target civilians but kill during a time of war are morally equivalent to terrorist attacks that lay a bomb next to an 8 year old in Boston. But I agree many use this argument.

[mike777]

The drone attacks may be terrifying, as would any form of lethal force being applied to you or your community would be. But to suggest it is terrorism is to rob terrorism of any meaning that would differentiate it from violence.

 

Trying to find a more narrow meaning, you can't really say that civilians are the target of the drone attacks, but you could perhaps suggest that they are expected victims and thus define terrorism in such a way as to include attacks which might be expected to have innocent casualties. But that definition would again include pretty much every significant conflict in every war, ever. Again, robbing the word of any defining meaning.

 

One thing you can say about drone attacks is that from a certain point of view, they are immoral. You are bringing violence to others without personally putting yourself at risk. This will strike many as being cowardly and killing people like a coward is certainly immoral by many moral standards.

 

I would like to point out how entirely unlike terrorism this is.

 

Terrorism is about staying relevant when the rest of the world is ready to move on. It is about being noticed and being taken seriously. People respect violence, they notice it and when you have thoroughly lost, violence may be the only way to stay relevant. Rarely do you blow yourself up to stay relevant(once at most), you convince others to do it for you.

 

 

You made many interesting points, well said.

[nige1]

I'm a US admirer. As a Scot, I'm particularly grateful for US involvement in WW2. Nevertheless, the US has a history of supporting and arming doubtful allies such as:

• Revolutionaries overthrowing democratically elected South American governments.
• The Mujahideen (including Osama Bin Laden) in their jihad against the Pro-soviet Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.
• Saddam Hussein's army in its illegal war with Iran.

[mike777]

I'm a US admirer. As a Scot, I'm particularly grateful for US involvement in WW2. Nevertheless, the US has a history of supporting and arming doubtful allies such as:

• Revolutionaries overthrowing democratically elected South American governments.
• The Mujahideen (including Osama Bin Laden) in their jihad against the Pro-soviet Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.
• Saddam Hussein's army in its illegal war with Iraq.

 

 

 

all excellent points.....but I ask what did the scots do? anything?

 

I hope you understand my point but you make excellent points.