terrorism

The 19 year old Boston Marathon bombing suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was captured alive Friday night. While he had sustained some major injuries, thankfully he is still alive and now answering questions through writing:

The 19-year-old suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings, who was seriously wounded and unable to speak, is awake and responding in writing to questions from authorities, according to tweets by ABC and NBC news networks.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who is in the intensive care unit of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, is responding sporadically, the ABC news network reported on its Twitter feed.

NBC's Pete Williams is also reporting Tsarnaev is writing answers to questions from law enforcement.

I saw and heard so many people upset that the suspect was still alive, instead wishing that the police would have just killed him. But we live in a world of terrorism, where intelligence is the best key. The best place to gain that intelligence is through captured suspects we can question. It's really hard to question someone once they are dead.

So I am thankful we were able to capture Tsarnaev and not kill him. We may be able to get information from him to prevent the next attack, which could be much larger. We may also find out motive and connections, which can lead to a much larger picture.

Sure we want to see the worst happen to a monster that can so easily kill and injure so many innocent people, but we also want to stop this from happening in the future. Hopefully law enforcement gains lots of valuable information from him. After that, give him a trial and let him face the death penalty, but not until we use him for everything we can.

CNN is reporting that an arrest has been made in the bombing of Monday's Boston Marathon. The suspect was identified via numerous videotapes. No further details are available yet, but a nation is anxiously waiting to see who could cause such a horrible act of carnage and for what reason.

UPDATE (2:40pm edt)

Now they are saying no arrest has been made and Boston Police just sent out this tweet

Despite reports to the contrary there has not been an arrest in the Marathon attack.

— Boston Police Dept. (@Boston_Police) April 17, 2013

Sounds like another day of "no one knowing".

Sorry wingnuts. It wasn’t terrorism. The “mooslims” weren’t trying to torch Israel. Instead it was a 14 year old boy that accidentally started the fire:

A 14-year-old boy from the Carmel region admitted Monday to throwing a piece of burning coal into the forest and causing what later became the largest and most devastating forest fire in Israel's history.

Police arrested the teen early on Monday, and he admitted during his interrogation to smoking a Hookah pipe in the forest, and later disposing the burning piece of coal into an open area in the woods, which caused a fire to erupt.

The teen said that he was so astounded at what had happened that he ran back to school and didn’t report the incident to anyone.

He will be brought before the Haifa Magistrate's Court on Tuesday for deliberations on extending his remand.

For more info on how the wingnuts have been spinning this, see my earlier post “Liberals Hate Israel”.

I've been realy busy this week getting the final remaining bugs worked out of the Crooks and Liars update, but I still have all these thoughts running around in my head. Here's one that has been sticking with me.

Shouldn't we start protesting the building of any new Catholic churches, especially ones built close to schools? Think of the terrorism that the Catholic church put young children through with the sex abuse scandal. It seems like it would only be appropriate given today's news surrouding ground zero.

Now I also know that many will say "but that was only some rogue priests acting on their own". While that is very true, it also applies to 9/11. These were some rogue terrorists acting alone.

So who is with me? Let's start protesting these churches.

Just received a breaking news alert from the Washington Post regarding this:

The FBI illegally collected more than 2,000 U.S. telephone call records between 2002 and 2006 by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist or simply persuading phone companies to provide records, according to internal bureau memos and interviews. FBI officials issued approvals after the fact to justify their actions.

E-mails obtained by The Washington Post detail how counterterrorism officials inside FBI headquarters did not follow their own procedures that were put in place to protect civil liberties. The stream of urgent requests for phone records also overwhelmed the FBI communications analysis unit with work that ultimately was not connected to imminent threats.

A Justice Department inspector general's report due out this month is expected to conclude that the FBI frequently violated the law with its emergency requests, FBI officials confirmed.

There is a lot to digest in the 4 page article, so I’ll just direct you over to the Washington Post’s site to read the rest.

I been meaning to post about the whole notion the wingnuts (including Lieberman) have been pushing; that we should go to war in Syria. Let’s think about this for a minute. The war started in Afghanistan. That then pushed the terrorists in Pakistan. We are fighting some in Pakistan and now they are moving to Yemen. This is the problem with fighting a war on an ideology – it’s very mobile.

So if President Obama decided that we are going to start fighting in Yemen, then where will the terrorists move next? Maybe Syria or Nigeria. Will we then expand the war into those countries? If we had President McCain right now, I’m sure we would already be in those places. We would be stretching our military so thin that Afghanistan would again descend further and we have to start all over again.

The focus to fight terrorism shouldn’t be the brute force of the military, but rather the surgical approach of law enforcement and intelligence.

We saw it after Ft. Hood and now we are seeing it again – a Republican Party that cares nothing about actual terrorism, but rather playing politics with it. A perfect example of this is Mary Matalin, who said on CNN yesterday that Bush “inherited” the 9/11 attacks.

Inherited to the point that Bush ignored a memo in August of 2001 stating “Bin Laden determined to attack the United States” and even that he was going to use airplanes.

But it’s interesting. I have heard numerous Democrats talk about the failures of the Bush administration and Clinton administration when it comes to the 9/11 attacks. That’s just like Ft. Hood and Detroit – both men were “on the radar” under the Obama administration and Bush administration, yet if you bring that up to Republicans you get accused of “shifting the blame” or “looking backwards”.

Instead of addressing the problems that allowed both men to slip through the system, the Republicans would much rather play politics. This is also evident when Republicans claim that Detroit was a terrorist attack, yet Richard Reid wasn’t. Both cases are extremely similar and to claim one was an attack and the other wasn’t is again, playing politics with the issue.

I had a feeling this would happen. In all honest I don’t blame President Obama for it, I blame the weak-kneed Democrats:

Rebuffed this month by skeptical lawmakers when it sought finances to buy a prison in rural Illinois, the Obama administration is struggling to come up with the money to replace the Guantánamo Bay prison.

As a result, officials now believe that they are unlikely to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and transfer its population of terrorism suspects until 2011 at the earliest — a far slower timeline for achieving one of President Obama’s signature national security policies than they had previously hinted.

I’m sure many will blame Obama for this, but in all honesty these obstacles were things we knew about from the get-go. It takes money to shutter the Torture-Inn, and that money has to come from Congress.