Category: Marathon Bombing

What The Hell Is Happening Around Cambridge?

[Updates from 1.03 am to 1.25 am. Watch live local-news feed here.]

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(Screenshot via Matt Novak)

On Top Of Their Heads

Screen shot 2013-04-18 at 8.32.05 PMHere’s a photo of a baseball cap, worn by one of the Boston bombing suspects, as examined by Reddit from a photo submitted by a contributor. Could it be this one? Very preppy. The other photos of the dude – from the front – seem to confirm it. The second suspect is wearing what looks to be a Ralph Lauren Polo cap, with the “3” on the side clearly visible here. It’s a fascinating thread.

Email Of The Day

A reader writes:

I’m watching the FBI briefing with the photos of the two bombing suspects and it struck me that this is a job for the VFYW contest devotees.  The black hat on the one suspect seems very distinctive.  Can you put your readers to work to identify that hat and pass it on to the proper authorities?

Update: Reddit has been on top of it.

Boston’s Finest: Not Just The Cops, Ctd

Tim Murphy connects the lessons learned from IEDs in Iraq to the outstanding performance of Boston’s hospitals:

Chief among the lessons of roadside bombs was the resurgence of the tourniquet. A staple of pre-World War II trauma care, it had fallen out of favor in recent decades because of misuse. Going into the invasion of Afghanistan, “This was still being taught in EMS courses and in trauma literature as a bad thing,” says Donald Jenkins, director of the trauma center at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and a 24-year Air Force veteran. But military doctors soon found that when applied correctly and in the right situation, tourniquets pay enormous dividends—dropping the mortality rate in such instances from 90 percent to 10 percent. Now they’re standard procedure among first responders.

The Disgrace That Is The New York Post

Its coverage this week of the Boston bombings puts it, it seems to me, in the same area as the British Murdoch equivalent, the News of the World. No, they have not committed any legal crimes, or systematically replaced reporting with illegal taping of private phone conversations. But crimes against journalism should also count. They have reported the news of this week with reckless indifference to the truth.

On Monday, they published that twelve people had been killed. That story remained on their website all day, as I kept checking back in amazement. I have yet to see a correction. I searched for one. Do they ever print corrections? But to be wrong on such a critical fact, and to resist withdrawing or apologizing for it, is not journalism. Deadspin – which has higher standards than the New York Post – takes on today’s front-page featuring two guys with backpacks and dark skin:

They are most assuredly innocent.

They carry large bags. They are dark-skinned. This was enough for internet sleuths to peg them as suspicious. (They show up here, in Gawker’s rundown of “suspects” identified by crowdsourcing on Reddit and 4chan.) And that was apparently enough for the Post to run with its front-page story today, claiming investigators are circulating photos of the two. (The photo on the paper’s cover is a cropped and zoomed-in version of the one taken by Ben Levine, which appeared on Deadspin on Tuesday.)

But maybe there was a reason for them to be at the marathon, wearing track jackets and carrying bags: they’re runners. The kid in the blue jacket is a middle-distance runner at Revere High School. Last week he ran the two-mile in 11:20 … Today on CBS This Morning, John Miller specifically said these two are not the suspects the FBI is seeking.

The smearing of private individuals as terrorist murderers with reckless indifference to the truth because they have dark skin is almost a text-book case of libel compounded with racism.

Why Are Bombings So Rare In America? Ctd

US-ATTACKS-BOSTON

Douthat goes through various theories. Among them is the idea that we’ve “just gotten lucky”:

That’s the case Will Saletan made for Slate [Tuesday], after running through the F.B.I.’s list of cases involving explosives going back to the beginning of 2012. He found plenty of intercepted plots against soft targets (malls, synagogues, restaurants, etc.), several cases where only a last-minute break prevented the plot from going forward, and plenty of plotters canny enough to cobble together their devices out of ordinary household materials. ”When you look at the 20 cases,” Saletan writes, “you realize that Boston is just the tip of the iceberg. What’s surprising isn’t that the marathon bombing succeeded, but that so many other plots failed.” And given the combination of an expanded target list and the ongoing innovations of bombmakers, he suggests, we should expect more of them to succeed in the future.

Douthat’s two cents:

Like Saletan I fear that we’ll see more Boston-style atrocities in the near future, but even his examples of failed and foiled plots don’t add up to anything like the kind of sustained campaign that everyone feared we’d face, understandably, after 9/11.

Earlier Dish on the subject here.

(Photo: A running shoe and US flag are part of a memorial on the Boston Marathon route on April 18, 2013 in Boston. By Don Emmer/AFP/Getty Images)