Many politicians in the West and elsewhere know that to achieve their aims the innocent must suffer. Quite how Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev masterminded the Boston Marathon terrorist tragedy remains a mystery. The Tsarnaev brothers were terrorists, and not politicians, yet Dzhokhar worked as a lifeguard at Harvard University for at least two years. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was tipped by Moscow that the Chechen brothers were up to mischief. Misha and Moscow, two weeks after the Boston Marathon bombings, have become the buzz words as revelations pertaining to the tragedy continue to unfold and hit the headlines in the United States of America. Nevertheless, the Americans are at their wits end. The FBI posits that the mother of the Tsarnaev brothers' determination to save her surviving 19-year-old son, Dzhokhar, is rooted in her older son, Tamerlan's friendship with a mysterious and hitherto unidentified man named Misha. The American authorities are increasingly relying on Russian tips to resolve the mystery of Misha, the Tsarnaevs and the Boston Marathon bombings. The FBI wrestles with whether Al-Qaeda could have been using the Tsarnaevs, Misha and perhaps other Chechen residents of Massachusetts. And, less convincingly, draw parallels between 9/11 and the Boston Marathon explosions. When Americans use the word terrorism these days, they think of a caste of hard-knuckled, hard-nosed Muslim Americans affiliated to Al-Qaeda. Two weeks on, the Boston Marathon explosions continue to predominate in the American media. Massive police presence is palpable and yet the Tsarnaev brothers were captured primarily because they were Muslim and widely seen as terrorists. Muslim and terrorist have become irrevocably interchangeable in the contemporary American vocabulary. Moscow's views have a special piquancy in this matter. Few would deny that the America has become a more unequal society in the past three decades. The setting off two bombs that killed three marathon spectators and wounded more than 260 others is a symptom of the alienation, cultural, social and economic of a considerable segment of Americans, especially the relatively new arrivals. The surviving Tsarnaev suspect, Dzhokhar has some explaining to do. Before he was read his legal rights and stopped talking, the younger brother reportedly told interrogators that the two acted alone. But he would do better to reveal the true identity of the mysterious Misha. Is he one of Al-Qaeda's heavyweights? Al-Qaeda, two years after the demise of its notorious leader, the Saudi-born Osama ben Laden, there is some justification for frustration in America that Al-Qaeda is still a formidable terrorist organisation to be reckoned with. It was reported on Saturday that Russian authorities secretly recorded a telephone conversation in 2011 in which one of the Boston bombing suspects vaguely discussed jihad with his mother. The Tsarnaevs are no Chechen nationalists, they are militant Islamists, Moscow asserts. In a second call, Zubeidat Tsarnaev spoke with a man who said that it can take centuries to change the image of a people. Yet the Tartars of Russia have managed the trick in half a century. The same cannot be said of the Chechen people of the northern Caucasus. To understand the Caucasus one must know its history. The problem with the Chechens dates almost as far back as the 13th century when the Mongol Golden Hordes and later Tamerlane invaded their territory a century later isolating the warlike, martial-oriented people who emerged from their relative isolation but were soon absorbed into the Ottoman and much later the Russian empires. They persevered and rebelled against Russian rule in World War II. Subjugation to foreign rule has fostered a culture of contention and conflict. The Tsarnaev brothers are, alas, archetypical. The stereotype stuck to this day, but the Americans were not familiar with the fact that Chechen people have a chip on their shoulder, a gloomy outlook no matter where they are, and instinctively expect the worse. This is a gross generalisation, and actually is not my own opinion. Rather this is what Russia would have the world to believe. Chechnya's problems go beyond the national self-determination question. Chechen people provide the bulk of Al-Qaeda recruits in Russia and disparate parts of the Muslim world, from Bosnia to Syria and Afghanistan. The mildly pro-American proclivity of most Muslims in the profligate United States, the Chechens not excluded, is besides the point. The Chechen people are notorious for shrugging off danger to achieve their goals, Moscow insists. It is a curious coincidence that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was named after the 14th century conqueror of his Chechen people, the Mongol Tamerlane. But, that is an aside. The FBI has a disturbing tendency to try and micro-manage everything. Moscow, on the other hand, is convinced that America needs new spine. The Russians claim that they are far more experienced in combating terrorism than the Americans. The Americans concede that the Russians are more experienced when it comes to containing militant Islamists. They, therefore, are broadening their team to include Moscow's old “militant Islamist” hands. The number of days it took for the American authorities to execute Osama ben Laden since 11 September 2001 was exactly 3,519 days. The heavy-handed “Big brother” approach in Boston meant that it took a mere four days to catch the Tsarnaev brothers, the presumably more dangerous one dead and the other, the younger one, alive. The older Tsarnaev suspect in the Boston Marathon explosions spoke to his mother about “jihad” in a 2011 phone call secretly recorded by Russian officials. Tsarnaeva and the suspects' father told reporters on Thursday in Makhachkala, the capital of Russia's Dagestan region, that they believed their surviving son, Dzhokhar was innocent. Americans now worry about the democratic deficit. Many are concerned that the deplorable security situation in some areas of the country requires the militarisation of the police force. Images of the police pouncing on the defenceless Dzhokhar, the younger brother who was hiding unarmed in a boat, were terrifying. It was reminiscent of the capture and summary execution of Osama ben Laden in Pakistan. SPW, the new euphemism for a “shelter in place” warning, so to speak, has entered contemporary American nomenclature as a byword for fear and terror. It is a term for the mandate to seek immediate and short-term shelter, usually from the horrors of chemical or terrorist attacks. SPW is a device not only to protect the multitudes from danger, but to also provide the necessary space for emergency workers to go about their business with sufficient room for manoeuvrings and efficiency. The FBI interviewed him in 2011 but did not find enough cause to continue an investigation. Tamerlan Tsarnaev's name was listed on the US government's highly classified central database of people it views as potential threats, sources close to the bombing investigation have said. Law enforcement authorities in America do not closely monitor the list of suspects, which includes about 500,000 people. This creates deeply worrying incentives for manipulation by Moscow and other concerned parties. Terrorism has consumed American society, so much so that most Americans are oblivious to what is happening elsewhere in the world, and worse, even equally portentous events in their own country. Dave Lindroff, founder of “This Can't Be Happening” and a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, examined the possible implications of the drone base in Philadelphia which is now a legitimate target of Al-Qaeda. He linked the question of drones to the Boston Marathon explosions and claimed that there was an unquestionable correlation. “The way I see it, we had two acts of terrorism in the US this week. The first took place at the end of the historic Boston Marathon, when two bombs went off near the finishing line, killing three and seriously injuring dozens of runners and spectators. The second happened a couple of days later in the town of West, Texas, where a fertiliser plant blew up, incinerating or otherwise killing at least 150 people, and probably more as the search for the dead and the injured continues. It is pretty clear that the Boston Marathon bombing was an act of terrorism, with police making arrests and having killed one of the two suspects who had earlier been captured on film and video at the scene of the bombings. The villains in the West Fertilizer Corporation explosion can be much more easily identified: the managers and owners of the plant,” Lindroff extrapolates. So why has the Boston Marathon bombings and not the West Fertilizer Corporation explosion captured the collective American psyche? Why has the media focussed on the former rather than the latter blast — on Massachusetts and not Texas? And, why is militant Islamist terrorism is supposedly taken far more seriously than environmental terrorism — even when far more people are susceptible to the latter? “Aside from the ridiculousness of West Fertilizer management's reported assertion that the plant wasn't handling flammable materials (a claim that the current deadly catastrophe has demonstrably proved was false), consider the incredible response of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to this incredible assertion: the agency, emasculated by the Bush administration, and still a joke under the Obama administration, levied a pathetically small fine, but did nothing to shut the operation down until it put in place critical safety measures,” Lindroff notes. “The other agency that could have acted, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), is even more of a paper tiger than the EPA,” he asserts. “A classic terrorist is trying to kill while the corporate executive is often ‘just' concerned about profits ahead of concerns about the safety of workers and people who live nearby,” Lindroff explains. But, in the final analysis the victim of a terrorist bomb is the same as the victim of an industrial disaster as this week's in Bangladesh demonstrates. “The difference is that we won't see the FBI or the local police tracking down and arresting the killers and those who maim in the case of the fertiliser plant explosion. The real terrorists in our midst are not men with knapsacks and white baseball caps who plant homemade bombs. They are not swarthy terrorists from the Middle East. Rather they are the mostly white men (and increasingly women) in business suits on Wall Street and Main Street who callously use their wealth to subvert the political system to their short-term advantage, causing common-sense safety and health precautions to be ignored, or getting those laws watered down or outright cancelled,” Lindroff concludes. The sad truth is that America has traditionally been a playground for war. Boston is the city where the American Revolution was staged. Patriot's Day, 19 April, is the anniversary of the opening battles of the American Revolution. The attack on the Waco Branch Davidian compound was (coincidentally?) 19 April 1993. The Oklahoma city bombing also occurred on 19 April 1995. The Boston bombing was 15 April. It is no secret that terrorists of all ideological strands make plays for power in contemporary America. And, they are pressing for political influence. The Marathon scene is a case in point. Tamerlan is dead, and Dzhokhar lies wounded in a small cell with a steel door at a federal medical detention centre west of Boston. Injured in his throat? Was he silenced? The conversations between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his mother were recorded in 2011 and gave Russian officials concern, however the specifics weren't revealed to US officials until this week. Why? This is a pertinent question. Federal investigators are hoping for several clues, including a Russian wiretap and a laptop. “We will get to the bottom of this,” United States President Barack Obama said in a brief statement from the White House. “We will find out who did this, and we will find out why they did this. Any responsible individuals, any responsible groups will feel the full weight of justice.” Many new details are now emerging. New documents are currently being scrutinised by the FBI and the Obama administration, as well as the CIA, America's Central Intelligence Agency. Obama did not refer to the attacks as acts of terrorism, and he cautioned people against “jumping to conclusions” based on incomplete information. The Russian link to Tamerlan Tsarnaev is crucial. American authorities spent several days searching for Tamerlan's laptop in a New Bedford landfill near the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth campus, where younger brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev attended college. His cellphone was found in a nearby apartment, but it is Moscow's tip concerning the elusive Misha that is critical to unravelling the Boston Marathon bombing mystery. US terror in predominantly Muslim nations, its political interference in their domestic affairs, all come into play. The suspects' mother was called a religious militant. Indeed, the mother was added to a terror list in 2011. All these revelations deal a deadly blow to the credibility of American intelligence. Analysts see such blunders as one of many tools being manipulated by outside forces in the world's presumably most powerful nation whose turmoil and vulnerability to terrorist attacks provides a chance for militant Islamists to shape global political change. Boston's police commissioner, Edward Davis, described how the suspect was caught. The suspects' mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, inadvertently provided more clues as to the true motives of her sons. “There was a call that came in to the Watertown Police,” Davis disclosed in a news conference, from a man who had left his house for the first time following an effective police lockdown. “He saw blood on the boat in the backyard. He opened the tarp and saw a man covered with blood, he retreated and called us.” Was the man the Misha in question. Murder, mystery and suspense surrounds the Boston Marathon bombings. Police officers, and agents from the FBI “set up a perimeter around the boat, and over the course of the next hour or so exchanged gunfire,” with the suspect, Davis professed. Police Commissioner Davis said that no further devices had been found in the Boylston Street area, where the victims fell before the twin explosions at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. The father of the two Boston bombing suspects, Anzor Tsarnaev, cancelled plans to visit the US. Why? He cited poor health as the reason why he had to abandon plans to fly from Russia to the US to bury his son Tamerlan and support his surviving son Dzhokhar. The chair of the US House Homeland Security Committee, Michael McCaul, said Sunday that he believed the suspects' mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, played a “very strong role” in the apparent radicalisation of her sons. She appeared distraught on television. Yet another mystery is the type of explosive device used in that terrorist incident — a pressure-cooker bomb packed with shrapnel — gave rise to suspicions that the Tsarnaevs may have received assistance from Al-Qaeda. Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and Boston Mayor Tom Menino have announced the formation of The One Fund Boston, Inc. to help the victims of the Tsarnaevs' heinous act of terror. Washington is looking to Moscow for answers. Terrorists by definition do not care who suffers by the atrocious acts as the Russians know all too well from their battles with Chechen nationalists and militant Islamists. The New York Times, incidentally, suggested that the FBI staged the Boston attack supposedly executed by the Tsarnaev brothers. But many analysts dismiss such allegations as hogwash. Alvi Tsarni, an uncle of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, told CBS News last Friday that his nephew Tamerlan, killed in a gunfight with the police on Thursday night, called just hours before his death to apologise for “problems between family” that had estranged him from his uncle in recent years. He added that there was no family feud. He added that he could not believe that his nephews could have been involved with the Boston bombing. “It's crazy,” he told CBS. “It's not possible. I can't believe it.” The riddle of the Tsarnaevs has confounded the experts. Harvard University evacuated its prestigious Kennedy School, according to an update posted to Twitter by Yaakov Katz, an Israeli journalist and Nieman fellow at Harvard, complicating the picture further and conspiracy theorists had a field day. An Israeli agenda? It is crazy as Tsarni extrapolated.
