<p>When asked whether there was something about Tsarnaev that has led her to join a Facebook group calling for him to be freed, she said: “I can sort of relate to him. He’s a handsome kid, and obviously there are going to be girls attracted to him because he’s good-looking. But that’s not why I’m interested in his innocence.”</p>
<p>Apparently, the Rolling Stone’s cover did not hurt print sales. I read they doubled. </p>
<p>I guess the unauthorized pics (especially the one with the sniper’s red dot on his forehead) do not belong to the city employee who took/released them. Think of their value.</p>
<p>And as a note of contrast, last week a young woman was killed after being forced to drive around the city taking money out of ATMs. The guy then had her drive to a park where he stabbed her. A day of terror. </p>
<p>For all the praise of police work, this young woman died because Boston police didn’t do their jobs. A detective is now under investigation because the same guy, who is now tied to the murder victim by DNA and surveillance video, attacked a woman last year. How do we know? The victim grabbed something as she fell nearly unconscious. It was this guy’s wallet. Not kidding. They had his wallet with his ID, his actual ID. And if you looked him up in the system, you found a guy with literally dozens of arrests, many for violent acts. The police never looked for him. They had his wallet in the hand of a victim and now a girl is dead after hours of terror. </p>
<p>So the police … sometimes they do good and sometimes they do lousy … and you’re not a hero because you’re a cop; you’re a hero if you do heroic things.</p>
<p>This isn’t exactly a new subject. The Founders dealt with it as rebels and G. Washington had no qualms about using troops to quell resistance to taxes, etc. </p>
<p>And there are legions of writings about the morality of war. </p>
<p>My own first test is mostly one of rationality, meaning specifically a reference to expectations theory, not psychology. That is, the Marathon bombing, the McVeigh bombing, the Baader-Meinhof attacks in Germany, etc. classify as gestures. The more violent equivalent of throwing a shoe or a shaving cream pie. They don’t relate except through long threads of if and maybe to “victory”, however defined. </p>
<p>We can say pretty clearly they’re not part of a war. The Ft. Hood shooter may have thought the US is waging war on Muslims but his killings were a gesture, not part of combat.</p>
<p>Lergnom, I guess by those standards the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings were “successful,” since they led to withdrawal of peacekeeping forces. (I’m not disagreeing with you–just thinking about this more.)</p>
<p>We were engaged in a war. We sent troops to Lebanon, did a hideously bad job of protecting them, and the enemy successfully attacked. In context, the Lebanese Civil War had been running for years and then Israel invaded to try to destroy the PLO and that degenerated into a real mess which was “solved” temporarily by inserting foreign troops and evacuating the PLO (was that to Tunisia? I don’t remember anymore.) So we stuck our people in a war. Bad things happen. We didn’t take more than the most basic steps to protect ourselves, which was really, really stupid. </p>
<p>Another example would be an attack on civilians within Israel. From the Israeli perspective, that’s criminal … but from your perspective the other side has to be wrong. It is part gesture but it’s also part of a continuing war in which civilians are targets. When that expands to other countries, like killing Israelis in Bularia or killing Americans in France, then that’s terror because murder is illegal under the laws of the country where that happened and that country isn’t at war.</p>
<p>My comment is about the label. The Ft Hood shooter should be executed, whether one calls this terror or not. That was part of my argument over the police massive reaction to the bomber chase: the entire region shut down because of the label “terrorist” as though that is like “nuclear explosion”. It was 2 guys with a handgun and some pressure cooker bombs. To me, they were and are murderers who deserve the full force of criminal law. That law includes special sections about bombings and the like because those are considered really bad. I don’t need to label beyond that.</p>
<p>I’m not entirely sure what makes something a terror attack–my initial thought is that if the purpose of the attack is to intimidate or frighten the civilian population–as opposed to a military objective–it’s a terror attack. But there are plenty of attacks in the context of war that are designed to soften up the civilian population in order to weaken the military. Those are terror attacks, too, in a sense.</p>
<p>The word “terror” is a just a label. Nearly all military attacks have a “terror” element to them. When the Marines on Guadalcanal were shelled by Japanese cruisers, the huge shells terrified them because there was no escape. The idea was to break the will, which didn’t happen. We blew the heck out of places for the same reason: to break the ability to resist, both physically and mentally. </p>
<p>We bombed Hamburg into oblivion to terrorize Germany. We fired battleship guns into Lebanon to terrorize. Creating terror is the idea.</p>
<p>But we use the label “terrorist” or “terrorism” to distinguish things we think are criminal … and which are criminal under our laws. The labels are kind of meaningless. </p>
<p>Let’s say Israel stopped using the label. They’d still arrest and imprison attempted bombers. So would we if we called these people “Islamic freedom fighters”. Labels don’t matter much if the underlying behavior stays the same when the labels change. We would still arrest and punish people if we called their behavior “jello”.</p>
I do think there is a difference between trying to break the will of military personnel, and trying to break the will of the civilian populace, but I basically agree with you.</p>
<p>DOCS: DEAD MARATHON SUSPECT TIED TO 2011 KILLINGS</p>
<p>According to the filing made Monday, Ibragim Todashev told investigators Tamerlan Tsarnaev participated in a triple slaying in Waltham on Sept. 11, 2011.</p>