Things go boom

[Cain]

That's a good point.

And I've just fallen for the same line of thinking in that other thread about Utah, and justifying treating humans decently as an economic thing.

It happens to everyone, from time to time.  We're caught up in societies which do justify a lot of things on the basis of economic utility, and sometimes that isn't always a bad thing.  I mean, in the case of the death penalty, it's an additional data point in favour of abolition.  But it certainly shouldn't form the majority of the argument.

[Cain]

If the voices in your head tell you to do crazy shit, you tell them to fuck off!

I mean, I know they sometimes scream at you for hours and all, but eventually they will shut up if you don't listen.

Um, yeah.  Because that seems like a totally sound psychiatric assessment.  "Try harder".

[Left]

If the voices in your head tell you to do crazy shit, you tell them to fuck off!

I mean, I know they sometimes scream at you for hours and all, but eventually they will shut up if you don't listen.

Um, yeah.  Because that seems like a totally sound psychiatric assessment.  "Try harder".

...Was kidding. Explaining why I found it funny?  Even more unfunny. And annoyingly personal. 
Apologies.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I prefer the vengeance debate, to be honest.  At least it makes sense.

Arguing over whether it's cheaper to let a man live or die as if it's a determining factor is worse, IMO.  It's trying to reduce justice to economics, which is about as big as a category error as possible.

I see your point, and it's similar to what Roger was saying about people using economic justification for giving homeless people homes.

On the other hand, if the motivation is to keep a dangerous person from doing more harm to people, it makes more sense to simply keep him locked up. I think the economic debate comes into play when people are trying to force pro-death-penalty arguers to examine their real motivations.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

If the voices in your head tell you to do crazy shit, you tell them to fuck off!

I mean, I know they sometimes scream at you for hours and all, but eventually they will shut up if you don't listen.

Hylie, not every single thread is actually about  you.

[Left]

If the voices in your head tell you to do crazy shit, you tell them to fuck off!

I mean, I know they sometimes scream at you for hours and all, but eventually they will shut up if you don't listen.

Hylie, not every single thread is actually about  you.

Faack, doing it again.

*leaves*

[Cain]

Russ Baker has a two-parter up on the mysterious "Danny", who was car-jacked by the Tsarnaev's...allegedly.

As you'll find from reading, there are some pretty major inconsistencies in his story:

http://whowhatwhy.com/2014/03/11/9006/
http://whowhatwhy.com/2014/03/13/something-dead-wrong-investigating-mysterious-central-character-danny-part-2-2/

An exclusive WhoWhatWhy investigation has found serious factual inconsistencies in accounts provided by the only witness to the alleged confession of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects.

Why does this matter? Because this witness is the sole source for the entire publicly accepted narrative of who was behind the bombing and its aftermath—and why these events occurred.

Where was Danny Carjacked?

Danny said: Brighton Avenue, Allston (across the river from Cambridge)

Conflicting version: 3rd Street, Cambridge, the Middlesex County District Attorney initially said.

How Long Was Danny Held Hostage?

Danny said: 90 minutes (reported by The Boston Globe, NBC and CBS).

Conflicting version 1: 30 minutes according to a joint statement by Middlesex acting district attorney Michael Pelgro, Cambridge police commissioner Robert Haas and MIT police chief John DiFava:

"Authorities launched an immediate investigation into the circumstances of the shooting. The investigation determined that two males were involved in this shooting.

"A short time later, police received reports of an armed carjacking by two males in the area of Third Street in Cambridge.

"The victim was carjacked at gunpoint by two males and was kept in the car with the suspects for approximately a half hour."

Conflicting version 2: "a few minutes," according to the Boston Globe and this report by the Associated Press, citing the Cambridge Police Department:

"Police said Friday at a Watertown news conference that one of the brothers stayed with the carjacking victim for a few minutes and then let him go."

Pervaiz Shallwani of the Wall Street Journal, one of the very few who was able to see at least part of the Cambridge police report, supports this shorter time span when he writes:

"Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the brothers accused of the bombing, crossed the Charles River into Boston and stole a Mercedes SUV at gunpoint, briefly holding the driver hostage, according to an excerpt from the Cambridge Police Department report filed by the driver and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal."

How Did Danny Gain His Freedom?

Danny said: He escaped when Tamerlan, seated next to him, was momentarily distracted, according the Boston Globe, NBC and CBS.

Conflicting version 1: He simply got out of the car when both brothers were outside the car, having left him alone, according to WMUR.

Conflicting version 2: The Tsarnaev brothers never held Danny as a captive, according to the Associated Press and Cambridge Police Department. They simply detained him for a few minutes, then left him by the roadside, essentially confiscating his vehicle. In this scenario, he had almost no interaction with the brothers, raising questions as to whether they would have confessed to the two crimes before taking off with his car.

[LMNO]

If his defense team is any good, they'll probably be asking these questions.

[Cain]

If it goes to trial.  Remember, death penalty is on the table to induce a plea bargain.

[LMNO]

Point.

In other news, in honor of the first anniversary, the Powers That Be have decided to firmly close that empty barn door.  Just about anything that can be used to carry anything else is banned from getting near the race.

[Cain]

So...people?

[LMNO]

Arms must be at one's sides at all times, open hands, palms down.


No pants.

[Cain]

It's going to be a hell of a race, this year.

[Sir Squid Diddimus]

I clicked on this and it took me an entire page to realize the date it was started.
I thought to myself "Oh fuck! Not again with this shi---- ooooooh."
What a fucking idiot.
Just thought I would share with the globe how stupid I can be sometimes.

[Cain]

Bump.  Russ Baker again has an important piece up about inconsistencies in the report into the bombings, which he believes are suggestive of intelligence community "games"* taking place.

The other day, we explained a key point missing from most coverage of the Boston Bombing story: that the US government may have been in contact with the alleged bombers before the Russians ever warned about them.

In March 2011, the FBI received information from the FSB alleging that Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Zubeidat Tsarnaeva were adherents of radical Islam and that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was preparing to travel to Russia to join unspecified underground groups in Dagestan and Chechnya. The FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force in Boston (Boston JTTF) conducted an assessment of Tamerlan Tsarnaev to determine whether he posed a threat to national security and closed the assessment three months later having found no link or "nexus" to terrorism.

So, in March 2011, the FBI received information from the FSB (Russian internal security service, comparable to the FBI), warning about terrorist threats posed by the Tsarnaev family.

We have long been told that this Russian warning was the first time the Tsarnaevs were on the US government's radar.

But wait. Go to Page 18 of the summary report, and take a close look at Section V, under a heading "INFORMATION OBTAINED OR FIRST ACCESSED AND REVIEWED AFTER THE BOMBINGS."

That heading seems to suggest that what follows in Section V was unknown to American law enforcement prior to the bombings. The first item in the list–and the only one to be redacted—is of primary interest:

This information included certain [approximately two lines redacted] to show that Tsarnaev intended to pursue jihad...

After that paragraph comes a sub-section labeled JANUARY 2011 COMMUNICATIONS. The entirety of that section, including a lengthy footnote, has been redacted.

Reading a government report with redactions is like reading tea leaves in the bottom of a dirty cup. You can't know for sure what's been suppressed, but you can hazard some educated guesses about why certain material was deemed too dangerous for the public to know.

Consider that the Tsarnaevs lived in Cambridge—home to members of a ring of Russian spies that was broken up shortly before the Tsarnaevs came under scrutiny. Remember that the US rolled up a spy ring in June of 2010—after monitoring it for a decade, and that an exchange of prisoners quickly followed. An American mole inside Russian foreign intelligence, Col. Alexander Poteyev, who was back-channeling to American intelligence while simultaneously directing the stateside ring from Russia, fled to the US before the arrests. His role was obscured by American officials; and his identity was only revealed when a Russian court later found him guilty in absentia.

The defense's claim that the FBI tried—but failed—to get Tamerlan to work for the US is hard to accept, not because the FBI doesn't regularly try to recruit immigrants like the Tsarnaevs through a carrot-and/or-stick approach, but because it's hard to imagine the FBI failing in such an endeavor. The "failure" part of the defense claim seems like a concession to the likelihood that detailed information about FBI recruitment would not be admissible in such a case. Also, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's lead federal public defender is accomplished at getting her clients charges reduced—in this case, presumably to avoid the death penalty—not at exposing giant falsehoods perpetrated by her government.

If the defense is half-right—that the feds pushed Tamerlan Tsarnaev to become an operative—would they simply have accepted, willingly, if he said, "No, thanks"? Intelligence and security services don't tend to take no for an answer, and traditionally have played very rough with those who decline. So it is unlikely that a foreign national like Tamerlan Tsarnaev—whose family arrived less than a year after 9/11 and who was given "derivative asylum status"—could simply decline to cooperate. (Family members, including Tamerlan, were later made Lawful Permanent Residents—with the hope of full citizenship. And as we shall see, the FBI agent whose job was to interact with Tamerlan Tsarnaev later said he had no objection when Tamerlan was being processed for citizenship, suggesting that he was not unhappy with Tamerlan in the least.)

The DOJ OIG also determined that the CT Agent did not attempt to elicit certain information during interviews of Tsarnaev and his parents, including information about Tsarnaev's plans to travel to Russia, changes in lifestyle, or knowledge of and sympathy for militant separatists in Chechnya and Dagestan. The CT agent told the DOJ OIG that he did not know why he did not ask about plans to travel to Russia,

The rest of this paragraph is blacked out. In fact, that's the first redaction you come to in the whole report. For some reason, the OIGs do not make more of this—though it demonstrates that the FBI counterterrorism officer failed to ask the questions that mattered most.

The report concludes that a Customs and Border Patrol officer most likely notified the FBI when Tamerlan Tsarnaev traveled to Russia in 2012. The Customs officer also flagged Tamerlan so his record would be visible for his own colleagues when Tsarnaev re-entered the country.

For some reason, that notification was turned off before Tsarnaev returned. (This is not to be understated—Michael Springmann, a former US consul to Saudi Arabia, has repeatedly stated that his efforts to prevent jihadists from traveling to America were somehow overridden at higher levels)

Could the notice to the FBI have been a warning that the Russians knew the US was already in contact with the Tsarnaevs? Given the possibility that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was supposed to infiltrate anti-Russian jihadists, that essentially puts the two intelligence services on the same side in this matter. Or were the Russians worried that the Americans were playing a double game, seemingly hunting jihadists while simultaneously using those jihadists to put pressure on the Russians in their majority-Muslim, oil-bearing southern flank?

There is also the possibility that, as with the US mole in Russian intelligence, Colonel Potayev, both sides thought they were controlling the Tsarnaevs. This would have made them players in a still more dazzling game. Pull out your old spy novels for this one.

*Obligatory reference:

Turner: Do we have plans to invade the Middle East?
Higgins: Are you crazy?
Turner: Am I?
Higgins: Look, Turner...
Turner: Do we have plans?
Higgins: No. Absolutely not. We have games. That's all. We play games. What if? How many men? What would it take? Is there a cheaper way to destabilize a regime? That's what we're paid to do.
Turner: So Atwood just took the games too seriously. He was really going to do it, wasn't he?
Higgins: A renegade operation. Atwood knew 54/12 would never authorize it, not with the heat on the company.
Turner: What if there hadn't been any heat? Suppose I hadn't stumbled on their plan?
Higgins: Different ballgame. Fact is, there was nothing wrong with the plan. Oh, the plan was all right, the plan would've worked