• Tag Archives Boston
  • Boston Tried a Police State and it Failed

    Yesterday a major US city – perhaps as many as 1 million people – was put under martial law. Business and universities were closed. Public transit and Amtrak were padlocked. Paramilitary cops from multiple states rolled down Boston’s residential neighborhoods in humvees with manned machine gun turrets on top. In full battle gear, these guys – they looked like soldiers – called people out of their homes. They then searched the homes. Boston became a ghost town and a police state for a day. And Bostonians cheered them for it. Some even called for a parade to honor the men who treated them like prisoners in their own homes.

    This grand show of force, which even the FBI admits is unprecedented, was carried out for the purpose of catching a suspected terrorist – a 19-year-old honor student – who stands accused of deploying pressure cooker bombs at the Boston Marathon. These bombs reportedly killed 3 people and injured 170.

    Think about that. Boston was turned into a giant prison for a day to catch a teenager with pressure cooker bombs.

    What does this mean?

    1. Terrorism “Works”

    For a maximum investment of perhaps $1 or $2 thousand dollars, ideologically-motivated individuals can cost the economy perhaps as much as $1 billion dollars in economic output. Nobody yet knows how much it costs to shut down down Boston for a day but $1 billion is about how much the city produces on a daily basis. The return on investment for an enterprising terrorist could be as much as 500,000%.

    The brothers Tsarnaev succeeded in gaining a lot of attention for themselves. Chechnya will benefit from this attention. People will want to travel there. People will want to understand what has been going on in Chechnya. We all want to understand why people do these kinds of things and people now want to understand these brothers.

    In short, the boys in blue created a tantalizing incentive for others to copy the Tsarnaevs. The Tsarnaevs’ terrorism “worked” but only because the Boston government helped them make it work. This is not a conspiracy theory. By overreacting, the governments at work here magnified the Tsarnaevs’ effectiveness. The Tsarnaevs didn’t shut down Boston. They didn’t put paramilitary troops on the streets of a major US city. The governments at work here did that.

    Full article: http://georgedonnell … -police-state-failed


  • Boston Bombing Lessons: Martial Law Doesn’t Work

    Only after the curfew in Watertown, Massachusetts, was lifted and alert resident David Hanberry went outside his home to get a smoke, according to news reports, did the case of the Boston Marathon bombing manhunt for suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev crack open. That was when Hanberry saw blood on the tarp of his dry-docked boat and called the police.

    Up until that time, a wide assortment of local, state, and federal officials were engaged in a dragnet that essentially shut down the city of Boston, and included house-to-house searches in the neighborhoods of Watertown, Mass. and New Bedford, Mass., the latter being near where 19-year-old Russian immigrant Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had enrolled in college. Tsarnaev, a Muslim from the Dagestan area of Russia that abuts Chechnya, became a U.S. citizen on September 11 of last year.

    In essence, the lessons from the Boston Marathon mean that the following procedures employed in the week-long manhunt proved to be completely ineffective in apprehending Tsarnaev:

    • House-to-house searches in a dragnet-style;

    • Use of military-style helicopters across the state;

    • Use of tanks and armored vehicles on the streets of Boston, Cambridge, Watertown, and New Bedford;

    • Shutting down the city, except for limited coffee shops;

    • Stopping all public transportation;

    • Banning taxi service across the city of Boston; and

    • Abandoning the federal Posse Comitatus law banning the use of soldiers in law enforcement.

    Moreover, the use of curfews in a number of towns actually likely delayed apprehension of the suspect, as the curfew essentially took more than a million pairs of eyes off possible getaway scenes.

    Veteran police investigators have traditionally rejected the dragnet because they see it as a waste of police resources, but in the post-bombing panic, politicians demanded that police on the beat appear to be doing everything they could to solve the crisis. In this case, that appearance included a curfew that amounted to searching and hassling people who were clearly not in cahoots with the bombing suspects. Police detained and searched anyone on the streets of Boston and Watertown, even searching famous local news reporters multiple times during the course of the manhunt. In some instances, news reporters received death threats from over-zealous police officers.

    In the end, if the goal of the terrorists was to terrorize, the terrorists won in Boston. Rather than returning to its ordinary business, one of the world’s greatest cities was terrorized, and even shut down, for days by the two suspects identified by authorities as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his older (deceased) brother Tamerlan. The two presumably hated America for its freedom, and were able to get the government to take away much of those freedoms from its citizens for a period of time.

    Full article: http://www.thenewame … ial-law-doesn-t-work


  • Sen. Feinstein: Treating Bombing Suspect as an Enemy Combatant Would Be Unconstitutional

    On Fox News Sunday, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Dianne Feinstein D-CA said she “believes very strongly” that the Boston bombing suspect should be read his Miranda rights and given a lawyer.

    “I think that’s the only legal way to proceed. I do not believe under the military commission law that he is eligible for that enemy combatant status. It would be unconstitutional to do that,” Sen. Feinstein said.

    via Sen. Feinstein: Treating Bombing Suspect as an Enemy Combatant Would Be Unconstitutional

    I do not agree with Feinstein on much (in fact, this is the only specific case I can recall) but she is right here. If the Constitution is only going to apply when it is popular or when the government says so then it may as well not apply at all. This guy is an American citizen and he gets the same rights as everyone else or we have already lost the freedoms we are supposedly protecting.