So, right on cue, just when it is needed most, arrives the Boat Note -- it turns out Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has scrawled a goodbye note on the boat where he was hiding, wounded and bleeding, before the police got him. Maybe he thought that his favourite Russian rap tune, Budu Pogybat' Molodym [I Will Die Young] was going to come true.
The note fits perfectly into the lone-wolf/self-radicalization/America's war chickens coming home to roost concept (which I will abbreciate as the Rooster Theory) -- because he just happens to have written exactly the same thing as what he replied to the FBI when he was interrogated in his hospital bed. That he and his brother got the idea for their deadly act from the Internet, from reading Inspire magazine, and "How to Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom", that jihadist cult classic. The answer was so pat, and so fit the "progressive" theory of the case, that you had to wonder if they asked leading questions.
The note says he and his brother were mad at the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and considered the deaths of people in terrorist acts the "collateral damage" that had to be inflicted on America, for having "collateral damage" in their wars.
Never mind that this sort of thinking has never been manifested by Chechen resistance leaders, terrorists in the North Caucasus, emigres from Chechnya and the North Caucasus abroad on their various websites and social media.
Never mind that the overwhelming number of civilians killed in the Afghan war have been killed by the Taliban and its allies.
It fits the narrative the Obama Administration has about terrorism -- which is that it is homegrown (even when it is abroad), not a war, just a tale of unhappy childhoods that can be fixed by Development.
Of course, if the narrative is true, you wonder why these jihadists don't cut us some slack, since our Nobel Peace Prize winner is actually winding down America's wars -- he withdrew troops from Iraq and will be out of Afghanistan next year. Right?
I guess it's like those Palestinian boys who throw rocks at the IDF to provoke them. Or maybe it's that the jihadists feel that America is down and out, weakened after these expensive wars -- expensive in people's lives above all and in treasure and credibility -- and they feel they can lash out when the US is admitting defeat. But then, wait, that would mean the homegrown Rooster Concept wouldn't be so true as another notion, which is that Islamism is a war, or that Islam is a cover for a thuggish movement of jihadists trying to come to power opportunistically all over the world who will stop at nothing.
In any event, I can understand how people get attached to conspiracy theories. Once you've rejected a narrative you feel is contrived, every new fact that comes in feels wrong and doesn't fit, and the mind casts for another answer.
But...what can you do if you don't believe the constructed narrative? If the feel of the construct is just too artificial?
I feel as if the Administration needs like air the Rooster Theory because they need to keep justifying the finishing of the wars -- and most importantly, not starting new ones. And so they need this note to exist. But wait, am I saying they made it up? Well, no, if it exists -- and there are two law-enforcement agents leaking the fact to CBS that it exists -- it's a question of how relevant it is.
Likely the prosecution will make it highly relevant, because the beauty part is that it is outside the Miranda zone. It's not something Dzhokhar said when they were questioning him under the public safety law and hadn't Mirandaized him -- something that a lawyer or judge might throw out. This is something he wrote, and they found, like a blog -- and it was in a place where he was hiding from the law, this man's boat, so there isn't any 4th amendment notions here. It couldn't be better, eh? No fourth amendment, no privacy issues, no Miranda, no nothing.
Of course, gosh...you know, I always make sure I take a pen with me whenever my brother and I decide we have to just set off two bombs and kill 3 people and maim more than 200 people, then wander around for 3 days, smoking pot, and then decide to kill a policemen and set off some more bombs and steal a car...and then if my brother was shot and I decide to run over him, then, filled with bullet holes myself and bleeding dangerously, I decide to make sure I have that pen with me, in case I need to write a note. Yep, I always do that.
Or hey, if I don't do that, I always make sure I can be sure to find a pen in the bottom of a...boat...with a tarp over it in somebody's driveway. Because you never know, I might have to write a Rooster Theory note before I die...
Okay then. There was a pen, er, I accept that, like I accept the wigs and the compass on the guy in Moscow. There probably were wigs and a compass. Or something. Money and a map. Whatever. Spy stuff. And so there was probably a pen in the boat or maybe in a backback or something.
So here we all are, the perfect note, under the perfect conditions, you couldn't have scripted it better, the case is closed, nothing to see here now.
The only other explanation is that if Dzhokhar, even at his tender age, was brainwashed, or conditioned in a cult, or pledged in a secret society or cell, that he would give this cover story, as he fulfilled the script of someone else, some other agency or group, possibly for money, possibly just to help out his bro.
In any event, I just hope there are people somewhere still keeping an open mind, even though they are surrounded by people who want to shut theirs, and somebody asks, "Where did you get the pen?"
If you don't like jihadists, get the U.S. government out of the business of facilitating allies who arm them to the teeth. Simple. You and @LibertyLynx and Pirrong can't handle that simple fact.
Posted by: Mr. X | May 17, 2013 at 12:53 AM
Cathy, has anyone said what their native language was? Was it Russian? Did they speak Russian with their Kazakh friends? How well did they read it?
I agree that their "justification" (revenge for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) doesn't sound like Chechen resistance leaders, etc. But it does sound exactly like the paid posts on Ekho Moskvy and every other Russian site. There's one guy who has a set piece on how many people were killed by the US military in every conflict (he always says the US military killed them). Isn't it possible that their "self-radicalization" was a mix of Russian anti-Americanism + Islamist stuff? To me, the chicken is coming home to roost in Russian blogs.
Posted by: mab | May 17, 2013 at 07:13 AM
Hi, in all the news articles I've read, they are described as being half Chechen and half Avar (their mother is Avar) and their native language is described as Chechen, but like a lot of people in this region, they speak Russian, and maybe because that's their parents' own lingua franca. On Dzhokhar's social media, and on Tamerlan's, you find them speaking Russian, either with Cyrrilic or with Latin letters. And that's because they are communicating with other Russian-language jihadists or admirers of all the Islamist videos who are of all kinds of ethnic groups. It's like the Uzbek suspect I've written about here:
http://3dblogger.typepad.com/different_stans/2013/05/youtube-feed-of-uzbek-suspect-fazliddin-kurbanov-hate-for-russians-americans-love-for-jihad-explosiv.html
who has a classic "self-radicalizer" (a term I don't really believe in) Youtube with a mixture of Russian-language jihadist, Arabic, Uzbek, anti-American films from all over, and who writes his Youtube comments sometimes in badly spelled Russian, sometimes in Uzbek.
Indeed, the entire thing is so perfectly concocted that you wonder if he is an NSS agent sent to spy on other Uzbeks. Wouldn't it be funny if the people the FBI were catching in their sting operations were in fact KGB-successor agents?
Yes, indeed, this sounds like the stock 50-ruble club or whatever the Russian equivalent of the paid Chinese 50 cent club is. The paid posts on the Russian sites always have this stock set of anti-American tropes and it is so often artificial in that way that you wonder if there are actually an real human beings that have these views, but maybe there are, because maybe these propagagndists are successful.
Yes, I've been meaning to do a post on those stock propagandist points and how the US should work harder to refute them.
They all have that smarmy, nasty superior feel that the KGB stuff has always had. Obviously, most of the people killed in Afghanistan have been killed by the Taliban, and in Iraq, the militans and terrorists of Iraq and supported by Iran and Syria did the lion's share of killing even if you read the leftist site Iraq Body Count. These facts are constantly portrayed falsely and to explain that is not to justify the invasion of Iraq, but to simply report that every week, it was terrorists, not US troops blowing away 50 people in the marketplaces.
I think the reason they sound like the paid posts is because they're a paid post themselves. I realize this isn't a popular point of view but it's my hunch and a few others feel the same way but they don't publicize it because they then get viciously attacked (as I did by even Andrew Sullivan, it's insane how reluctant people are to blame the Russians for anything).
And yes, a more sophisticated and subtle version of my hypothesis is that the anti-American propaganda the Russian intelligence services have been blasting for decades, which has become really vile everywhere, is really having its desired effect. I certainly see its effect from Central Asians who have less free media. At least, that's what I'm understanding you to say -- that after years of having all those paid trolls show up and claim that America is the worst, America killed the most people, America is waging war on Muslims (instead of terrorists waging war first on their fellow Muslims and in fact killing the most people) -- that they have gotten it to succeed with people like the Tsarnaevs or Kurbanov.
Every time my blog is translated on Inosmi.ru I get hundreds of hate notes and hate emails all "of a type". Sure, some of them may be opinions genuinely held. But so many of them feel like they are sprayed by bots or inserted by the 50-cent crowd. It reminds me of the hundreds of hate letters the Sakharovs would receive in their mailbox which was blocked from receiving anything from abroad -- suddenly there were all these perfectly-scripted hate letters right out of Pravda editorials.
Before he became far less critical (and silent) about Putin and Russia, Evgeny Morozov had this great article about how the KGB outsources hate and has those paid trolls and the debilitating effect they have. It's an article on Open Democracy, one of his first in the West in English.
Posted by: Catherine Fitzpatrick | May 17, 2013 at 11:40 AM
"At least, that's what I'm understanding you to say -- that after years of having all those paid trolls show up and claim that America is the worst, America killed the most people, America is waging war on Muslims (instead of terrorists waging war first on their fellow Muslims and in fact killing the most people) -- that they have gotten it to succeed with people like the Tsarnaevs or Kurbanov."
Yes, that's what I think. I don't have any inside information, but my hunch is that the Russian anti-American screeds combined with jihadist stuff were a perfect storm for the Tsarnaev boys.
Posted by: mab | May 17, 2013 at 12:08 PM