Where Did The Brothers Get Their Weapons?

Christopher Dickey, Eli Lake and Daniel Klaidman review what we know. On possible ties to al Qaeda, given their firepower:

The trail of the Tsarnaevs seems, for the moment, to remain one of lone wolves. But counterterror operatives see details that suggest a wider organization may yet be discovered. Most telling: the sheer firepower the Tsarnaevs were able to bring to bear in their shootout with police. They appeared to have several unused bombs. And because terrorists learn from each other’s actions, some counterterror analysts are speculating that they may have planned a bigger operation at the marathon, or perhaps to come. One possible example is the bloody Mumbai attack in 2008, carried out by a handful of men, which killed 164 people.

“These are ‘wise guys,’” said one veteran counterterror official. “These are intelligent individuals who thought they could outsmart everybody and get away with it. They didn’t want to die. But they prepared a lot of stuff.”

Why these types of individuals are so hard to stop:

These sorts of lone wolves—whether inspired by al Qaeda or a domestic agenda—are in many ways the toughest cases for law enforcement. “Mobile homegrown types are difficult to stop and to find,” says Rep. Michael McCaul, the Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. “There is not a conspiracy ring to penetrate. It’s very difficult to stop them and find them.”

“The toughest risk to address is the motivated individual with no known connection to groups, who takes it upon himself to do something,” says Roger Cressey, who worked on counterterrorism in both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. “The best example of that is Eric Rudolph.”