Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Charged in Hospital as a Few Questions are Answered

     Or at least they're becoming clearer. First and foremost, we now know that he will be criminally charged through the federal court system-rather than as an enemy combatant as some Republicans had been asking for-Lindsay Graham, John McCain, Dan Coates.

     " Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was charged by federal prosecutors in his hospital room Monday with using a weapon of mass destruction to kill — a crime that carries a possible death sentence."

      The charges represented a decision by the Obama administration to prosecute him in the federal court system instead of trying him as an enemy combatant in front of a military tribunal. Under the military system, defendants are not afforded some of the usual U.S. constitutional protections."

     http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/court-boston-marathon-bombing-suspect-charged-complaint-sealed.php?ref=fpb

     I think that's the right decision. The fact is that as Jay Carney says we've had quite a bit of success in prosecuting terrorist suspects through the court system.

     "Tsarnaev, an ethnic Chechen from Russia who has lived in the United States for about a decade, is a naturalized U.S. citizen, and under U.S. law, American citizens cannot be tried by military tribunals, White House spokesman Jay Carney said. Carney said that since the Sept. 11 attacks, the federal court system has been used to convict and incarcerate hundreds of terrorists."

     We also for that matter, have seen that designating suspects as enemy combatants has hardly been a panacea in terms of convicting those suspects truly guilty. While there has been some worry about Tsarnaev not being Mirandarized quickly this is kind of the "moderate" or "Centrist" position meant to push back on calls to send suspects to Guantanamo.

 
    The 19 year old suspect is still not speaking and it's not known when he will-if at all. Another thing coming into sharper focus is that Boston police think the two brothers likely acted alone.

   This means that they were "home grown terrorists" contrary to some Congress critters engaging in demagoguery that they're "sure" these weren't home grown terrorists.

    No doubt, the conduct of the two young men is rather hard to believe. The younger one was actually back on his campus on Tuesday night expressing shock and the brutality of the attacks. The authorities do think they may have planned further attacks but it seems likely at this point that they were in fact home grown.

     http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/21/tom-menino-boston-marathon-suspects-bombings_n_3127215.html


       http://www.leaderpost.com/news/Boston+officials+suspects+planned+further+attacks+likely+acted/8273566/story.html

     We still far from know what motivated these two young men. It seems that the older brother was the ringleader. The amazing schizophrenic nature is whats stands out at this point. How particularly the younger Tasarnaev was able to seem so "normal" while participating in such a wild attack. Again, he seems determined to make Hannah Arednt's point about the "banality of evil." Whether evil is always "banal" in this case it certainly is.

    http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/04/in-dzohkhar-tsanaev-banality-of-evil.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DiaryOfARepublicanHater+%28Diary+of+a+Republican+Hater%29

    We do get substantiation of a point I made the other day: our country has overall responded very well to this attack and a big part of it is having President Obama in the White House rather than former President George W. Bush. The other day I pointed out that a President Mitt Romney would probably have sent Dzhokhar to Guantanamo. I admitted that it's not easy to make such counterfactual arguments but I nevertheless felt it was correct.

     http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/04/if-mitt-romney-were-president-dzhokhar.html

     However, at the time I was making an assumption: it was still possible that Obama could have buckled to the demand to make him an enemy combatant. Now we know definitively that he won't. The usual GOP chicken hawks have been demanding that this be done, John McCain, and especially Lindsay Graham. Slate totally called him out on this today.

     A group of Republican senators, led by Lindsey Graham and John McCain, spent the weekend clamoring for Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to be held as an enemy combatant. This is not going to happen.

    "The White House said so Monday, for a few excellent reasons. For starters, it’s probably against the law. If Obama decided to flout the law by taking this step anyway, it would be a truly scary grab for executive power. It would also be exactly the wrong message to send the world about American justice—especially if you think, as surely many Americans do, that Tsarnaev deserves the death penalty."

    "Graham in particular should know this, since he helped write the 2009 law that says Tsarnaev may not be tried as an enemy combatant and thus points away from holding him as one. But that’s not stopping Graham and the others from trying to score terror points—and, of course, trying to make the president appear weak. This isn’t about actually fighting terrorists. It’s about running for election."

        http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2013/04/tsarnaev_an_enemy_combatant_john_mccain_and_lindsey_graham_s_harmful_campaign.html

    Graham has been making the argument that maybe he should have been an enemy combatant because "we're at war"-ie, the War on Terror of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. This is exactly the wrong way to construe it and it likely would be construed this way with a President Romney. 

    Indeed, this attack has been handled much differently than 2001. Admittedly the two attacks on levels of scale are nothing like apples to apples. Still, the Bush-Cheney Neoconservative argument has always been that you can't handle terrorism as a law enforcement issue. Law enforcement looked pretty good last week and as the White House argued, has often done very well over the last 12 years.  Meanwhile it's quite debatable what we have gained from all these "enemy combatants"-there are still 166 of them at Guantanamo now. 

     As long as we're doing Lindsay Graham call outs, he's also called out for his demagogic attack on the FBI-the usual Monday morning quaterbacking. Supposedly the FBI should have arrested the older Tsarnaev in 2011 based on just one tip from the Russians. 
   
     http://www.politico.com/story/2013/04/lindsay-graham-fbi-90454.html?hp=l2