Tsarnaev tells investigators: We acted alone

What happened

As Boston buried its dead, and wounded survivors began leaving hospitals, federal investigators this week began piecing together the motives of the two ethnic-Chechen brothers suspected of bombing the city’s marathon with shrapnel-packed pressure cooker bombs. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, who suffered multiple gunshot wounds during a showdown with police and may have later tried to commit suicide, told investigators from his hospital bed that the attacks were masterminded by his slain 26-year-old brother Tamerlan. Communicating by writing because of a bullet wound in his throat, Dzhokhar said the attacks were motivated by their hard-line Islamic fervor and anger over the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. No foreign militant groups helped plan or direct the bombing, he said, although he and his brother built the pressure-cooker-based bombs after consulting a how-to guide in Inspire, the online English-language magazine of al Qaida in Yemen.

The bombings killed three people—including an 8-year-old boy—and injured more than 260; the brothers also shot and killed an MIT campus police officer whose gun they wanted to aid their escape, authorities said. After a firefight with police in Watertown, Mass., Tamerlan Tsarnaev died after sustaining several wounds and then being run down by a speeding car his fleeing brother was driving. Dzhokhar has been charged with using a weapon of mass destruction and could face the death penalty if found guilty.

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The FBI confirmed that it had received a tip from Russian intelligence in 2011 that Tamerlan was “a follower of radical Islam,” and questioned him and his family. The FBI said its investigation turned up no evidence of terrorist or illegal activity, and the Russians didn’t reply to a request for additional information. But a senior bureau official admitted that they didn’t know Tamerlan spent six months in 2012 in Dagestan, a violence-plagued Muslim region in southern Russia adjacent to Chechnya. The FBI is now investigating that trip with help from Russian security services, to see if it played a role in Tamerlan’s transformation into a terrorist. Republican Rep. Peter King said the bureau must be held responsible for failing to monitor Tamerlan, saying, “This is at least the fifth case I’m aware of where the FBI has failed to stop [a terrorist].”

What the editorials said

The FBI has a lot of explaining to do, said The Wall Street Journal. Tamerlan did not appear out of nowhere. He’d been interviewed by FBI agents for possible radical views, visited Dagestan—a known hub for Islamist terrorists—and posted jihadist videos to the Internet. Why wasn’t he under active surveillance? “Someone dropped the ball, and dozens of Americans will be scarred forever.”

It’s not humanly possible to stop all plots, said The Washington Post. But the Boston bombings showed that our “homeland security forces are better prepared to respond to terrorism” than ever before. Authorities used videos from surveillance cameras to single out the Tsarnaevs in just three days, forcing the brothers to attempt to flee. A day after their pictures were broadcast across the nation, Tamerlan was dead and Dzhokhar in custody. Following the 1996 bombing of the Atlanta Olympics, it took authorities months to identify perpetrator Eric Rudolph, who wasn’t found and arrested until 2003.

What the columnists said

“This terrible bombing has shattered our post-9/11 complacency,” said Max Boot in CommentaryMagazine.com. Many Americans thought that because Osama bin Laden is dead and there has been no repeat of the World Trade Center attacks, the threat of terrorism was gone. Now we know differently. “We cannot afford to let down our guard or to repeal the measures that have kept us (relatively) safe since 9/11.” Indeed, authorities may need to increase security around “soft targets” like malls and sports arenas, which are easy terrorist targets.

We also need to step up surveillance on the communities that produce these jihadists, said Andrew McCarthy in NationalReview.com. That means “committing to a proactive, intelligence-based counterterrorism strategy—one that scraps political correctness and ferrets out the jihadists before they strike.” We need closer monitoring of Muslim neighborhoods, mosques, and radical imams where home-grown terrorists are bred, or else “Boston’s hellish week will remain our recurring nightmare.”

Succumbing to panic and bigotry would be a terrible mistake, said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross in the New York Daily News. In the 1970s, terrorist groups ranging from leftist radicals to Puerto Rican separatists carried out 60 to 70 bombings and other attacks every year on U.S. soil—that’s 15 to 20 times more terrorist activity than we’ve seen in most years since 9/11. Al Qaida’s failure to launch more operations on the U.S. mainland is proof that its nihilistic message doesn’t appeal to American Muslims. The few disaffected losers who do become radicalized are inevitably “hapless, disorganized, and irrational,” said John Mueller in Slate.com. Unlike dozens of other would-be terrorists, the Tsarnaevs did successfully build and detonate their bombs, but they stupidly “chose to set their bombs off at the most-photographed spot on the planet at the time.” They had no getaway plan. When the police published their photos, they “mindlessly blew whatever cover they had” by killing a campus cop, hijacking a car, and “engaging in a brief Hollywood-style car chase and shootout.”

Now that terrorism has returned, let’s not give in to self-pity and paranoia, said Michael Tomasky in TheDailyBeast.com. The Boston attack was just the fourth-worst terrorist attack in the world last week in terms of casualties; the Middle East, Britain, Europe, and Israel have been living with terrorism for decades. In Israel, a bomb killed and injured more than a dozen people in a restaurant a few years back. The restaurant opened the next day, and customers calmly filled the tables. The U.S. is no longer immune to lunatics with bombs, so “what we need is precisely that kind of I’m-not-changing-a-thing resilience.”