CHRIS MATTHEWS & MSNBC REPORTEDLY VERY DISAPPOINTED IN NATIONALITY OF BOSTON BOMBERS

Have we identified the U.S. pilots that killed the 11 Afghan children last week?

Here’s a summary of what we know so far:

• Police have confirmed that they are carrying out an ongoing manhunt for one of the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing, and have sealed off a 20-block radius of Watertown, a suburb of the city where the suspect is believed to be holed up. The suspect has been named by Boston police as 19 year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev of Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is “considered armed and extremely dangerous”, Colonel Timothy Alben, head of Massachusetts state police, said.

• Residents across the whole of Boston have been told to stay indoors with their doors locked and only open them to a police officer. All public transport has been shut down in the Massachusetts Bay area. Davis had the following advice for Watertown residents earlier: “Do not open your doors. Stay in your home. We believe this man to be a terrorist and we need to get him into custody.”

• The other Boston bombing suspect – who the Guardian confirmed was his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev – was fatally injured during a dramatic police chase in which explosive devices were thrown out of a Mercedes SUV that had been car-jacked from MIT. The police have confirmed that in the course of the night one MIT officer was killed and another officer injured.

• Alben said Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was dressed in a grey, hoodie-type sweatshirt. He was described as a light-skinned, Caucasian male with longer brown curly hair.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, has been identified as the surviving suspect in
the Boston marathon blast. Currently the subject of a massive manhunt,
photographs of Tsarnaev appear to match the man who became known as
“suspect number two” or “the suspect in the white hat”.

Miriam Elder writes from Moscow:

According to his account on the Russian social networking site Vkontakte, Tsarnaev graduated from the Cambridge Rindge & Latin School, a Massachusetts high school, in 2011, and attended School No. 1 in Makhachkala, the capital ofDagestan, from 1999 to 2001.

He appears to have been a good student, having received a a $2,500 scholarship from the city of Cambridge in 2011 to pursue college. He was also named a wrestling all-star at his high school the same year.

On his VKontakte page, Tsarnaev says he considers “career and money” most important in life. As his worldview, he wrote: “Islam”.

The page says Tsarnaev speaks English, Russian and Chechen, and belongs to a number of groups devoted to Chechnya. Dagestan, a republic neighbouring Chechnya, maintains a small Chechen minority.

Tsarnaev was born on 22 July 1993, just before a fierce battle for independence broke out in the republic of Chechnya, attempting to secede from Russia in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Over time, the independence movement grew increasingly Islamist in character. Largely quashed by Moscow, a low-level insurgency persists in Chechnya and has leaked into neighbouring Dagestan.

On VKontakte, Tsarnaev follows several pages devoted to Islam. He also lists one of his favorite songs as “Hey Sexy Lady” by Shaggy.

An acquaintance from high school told Sarah Mahmood that Tsarnaev appeared to be a “very relaxed” person, in contrast to his brother. The acquaintance said Tamerlan Tsarnaev had “said things that made him seem anti-American”, once saying Thanksgiving was haraam (forbidden)

NYPD Warns Of White Male In Honda CRV Headed To Manhattan Who May Be Wearing Suicide Vest

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/19/2013 08:56 -0400

The Friday morning chaos in Boston appears to be headed toward Manhattan, following an advisory from the NYPD that a white male who may be wearing a suicide vest is headed to the city in a Honda CRV, MA license plate number 36ES9.

Borat was his favorite movie. I should have known. His motive was to meet Pamela Anderson.

Case closed.

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Admin’s Honda CRV is being driven by his 19 year old son. I sure hope he is in class at PSU this morning.

Miriam Elder has more on Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, who has been identified as the man killed during a massive manhunt launched in the early hours of Friday.

A YouTube account that appears to have been run by Tsarnaev includes a playlist devoted to “terrorism”, including one video in English titled “The Emergence of Prophecy: The Black Flags from Khorasan. He also maintained a playlist devoted to Islam and one devoted to Timur Mutsuraev, a Chechen singer now in exile who sang of the republic’s battle for freedom from Russia.

Tsarnaev’s precise background is murky. A teacher at School No. 1 in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, said that the Tsarnaev family lived briefly in the republic before moving to the United States. They had previously lived in Kyrgyzstan, in Central Asia, she said.

Alvi Karimov, a spokesman for Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Chechnya, said that the family had lived in Kazakhstan, which maintains a large Chechen minority. The Tsarnaevs “moved to a different region of the Russian Federation from Chechnya many years ago”, he told the Interfax news agency.

Tsarnaev appears to have been a competitive boxer, according to a photo report by photographer Johannes Hirn, who photographed Tsarnaev in 2010. Tsarnaev told the photographer that he was born in Chechnya and had been living in the US for five years.

“I don’t have a single American friend, I don’t understand them,” Tsarnaev said.

He also appeared to support Chechen independence: “Unless his native Chechnya becomes independent, Tamerlan says he would rather compete for the United States than for Russia,” one caption reads.

Tsarnaev presents himself as a devout Muslim, saying he had given up drinking and smoking. “I’m very religious,” he said, explaining why he doesn’t take his shirt off while training. The photographs were taken at the Wai Kru Mixed Martial Arts centre in Allston, MA. The report says Tsarnaev was a student at Bunker Hill Community College in Charleston, MA.

In 2009, Tsarnaev was reportedly arrested for assaulting his girlfriend.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has released the name of a campus officer shot dead last night by the suspects as he sat in his car.

The officer is Sean Collier, 26 (photo). He had just joined the MIT force in January 2012, the school said. Collier was previously a civilian employee with the Somerville Police Department just north of Boston.

Separately, a metro transit officer was wounded last night in an altercation involving the bombing suspects. The officer, Richard H. Donahue Jr., 33, is undergoing surgery this morning, WBZ-Boston reported.

The attacks in Boston seem to mark an extraordinary and unprecedented development, reports Luke Harding, former Guardian Moscow correspondent: the first time Chechens have allegedly carried out a deadly attack outside Russia.

In their long, violent struggle against the Kremlin, Chechen radicals have hit soft targets before. In 2010 two female suicide bombers from Dagestan blew up the Moscow metro, killing at least 40 people and injuring 100. A year later another suicide bomber struck Moscow’s Domodedovo airport; he killed 37 and wounded 180. There have been murderous attacks on a school in Beslan in 2004, where 334 hostages died, most of them children.

But the bombings of the Boston Marathon, allegedly perpetrated by two Chechen brothers, Dzokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, are something altogether new. It is so far unclear how significant is the trail that appears to lead from the mountains of the North Caucasus – the scene of a simmering ongoing insurgency – to the boulevards and suburban houses of north America.

After 18 years, two wars, and the loss of hundreds of thousands of civilian lives, the conflict in Chechnya and Russia’s southern backyard more generally has changed. From 1994-96 Boris Yeltsin fought a war against mainly secular Chechen separatists who wanted – like other ethnic republics after the collapse of the USSR – their own nationalist and constitutional state. In the period 1999-2004 Vladimir Putin – Yeltsin’s steely successor – fought a second Chechen war. The aim was to definitively crush Chechen separatism.

In recent years, however, the Kremlin and its regional proxies have been battling a different kind of enemy. This new generation of insurgents has an explicitly Islamist goal: to create a radical pan-Caucasian emirate ruled by Islamist law, a sort of Afghanistan under the Taliban. The movement’s leader, Doku Umarov, unveiled this ambitious vision in 2007. He vowed to liberate not only Russia’s Muslim North Caucausus but a large chunk of European Russia.

Umarov also suggested that devout Muslims should think internationally. His comments, later softened, said: “Today in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Palestine our brothers are fighting. Everyone who attacks Muslims wherever they are are our enemies, common enemies. Our enemy is not Russia only, but everyone who wages war against Islam and Muslims.”

This call to global jihad may perhaps offer a possible motive for an attack inside the US. The new generation of twenty-something rebels is also exploiting a powerful new weapon: the internet. The main Chechen rebel website, kavkazcenter.com, posts reports from the jihadi movement worldwide: from Syria, where Chechen diaspora fighters are battling government forces in Aleppo, from Pakistan, and from Turkey.

Over in the North Caucausus, meanwhile, the Kremlin is carrying out a brutal and rolling counter-insurgency campaign. Its focus is Dagestan, the neighbouring state to Chechnya, and now a hotbed of violent jihadist rebellion. Three weeks ago Umarov appealed to Chechen fighters abroad to come home to take part in the fight.