A Family Terror: The Tsarnaevs and the Boston Bombing
When I first met Tamerlan Tsarnaev, now familiar as the elder of the two alleged Boston Marathon bombers, he gripped my hand like he was wringing out a rag. It was 2004, and Tamerlan had been in the U.S. for about a year, but he already had an outsize American dream. He planned to box for the U.S. Olympic Team one day, and he wanted to earn a degree, perhaps at Harvard or MIT, and to hold a full-time job at the same time, so he could buy a house and a car. I suggested he forget the house and the car during college, as most American students do. He didn't see why he should.
I was on sabbatical that year, taking classes at Harvard on a journalism fellowship, and had wanted to meet some of the refugees from Russia's war to reconquer the breakaway Muslim region of Chechnya. I expected to write about Russia's Islamist insurgency in the future, and I thought some Chechen expatriates might help me with my stories.
A friend told me that his mother had rented an apartment to some Chechens. He drove me to a weather-beaten three-family home crammed between others in a tattered corner of Cambridge, Mass. I was led up a narrow stairway, littered with shoes and slippers, to their third-floor apartmentthe start of a relationship that came full circle last April, when I encountered the Tsarnaevs again under very different circumstances.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304477704579254482254699674
lofty1
(62 posts)Their eyes need some more dark circles under them in the photo. Maybe some sterner looks on their faces might help.
"I expected to write about Russia's Islamist insurgency in the future" Alan Cullison -WSJ
Really? How prescient of Alan S. Cullinson of the Wall Street Journal. Sounds like some more of this to me.
Frank Cannon
(7,570 posts)Because then you would be either horribly misinformed or terribly willfully ignorant.
lofty1
(62 posts)Because then you would be one that never questions authority or believes everything he reads in the paper to be the unvarnished truth.
Frank Cannon
(7,570 posts)There was plenty of evidence that those guys planted those bombs there, not the least of which a detailed eyewitness description from a victim who provided his information to the cops in the OR while his FUCKING LEGS WERE BLOWN OFF. Sorry if you don't trust that information because it was reported in "the paper".
Sorry, but this is not a "JFK" thing. We now live in an age where cameras are literally everywhere, and good luck trying to cover anything up.
lofty1
(62 posts)...since what you read in the paper is all that you need to know. Sorry that you do not believe in the right to a fair trial.
soundsgreat
(125 posts)what is your actual state of information regarding the color of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's bag?
The indictment specifies two black backpacks containing two 30-pound bombs, fueled with fireworks powder. In the FBI video, we saw Dzhokhar carrying a white bag lightly on one shoulder. It didnt look like a 30-lb weight. And, fireworks powder is woefully inadequate to accomplish a lethal explosion.
http://my.firedoglake.com/lauraw/2013/12/15/boston-bombing-news-what-have-we-learned-up-till-now/
Sienna86
(2,147 posts)The family dynamics, cultural differences and psychological factors.
davidpdx
(22,000 posts)It puts some context to what the uncle said about the family right after the bombings and before the manhunt ended.
treestar
(82,383 posts)Interesting read.