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Boston Marathon Bombers' Next Target was Times Square, says Bloomberg

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Photo Credit: snorpeyThe Boston Marathon bombing suspects had Times Square in their sights before law enforcement authorities put an end to their bloody terror spree, according New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

“New York was next on their list of targets,” Bloomberg said of brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Bloomberg said he received confirmation of the chilling second phase of their plot from the FBI. “The fact is, New York City remains a prime target for those who hate America and want to kill Americans.”

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said the brothers, Muslims from Dagestan, a breakaway republic in Russia, hatched their plot to attack Times Square while driving the streets of Cambridge last Thursday in a Mercedes SUV they had carjacked from a man who later escaped. Kelly called the New York plot “spontaneous,” and said they had six bombs with them in the car, some of which they hurled at police cars hours later when they were being pursued in a chase that culminated in Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s death.

One of the bombs the brothers had in the stolen car was a pressure cooker bomb, identical to one used in the marathon attack, and packed with gunpowder and shrapnel, Kelly said. Both Kelly and Bloomberg noted surveillance cameras, a contentious subject in New York, played a key role in solving the bombing in Boston, Bloomberg’s hometown. Still, the mayor said there was no way of knowing if the brothers could have pulled off a second attack in America’s largest city.

“We don’t know if we would have been able to stop the terrorists had they arrived here from Boston,” Bloomberg said. He said he did not know of a specific target within Times Square.

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Time to Re-Think Islamic Terrorism…it’s a War Stupid

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Photo Credit: Irish CentralThe Boston terror bombing brings home the fact we are in a state of war, even though our government leaders don’t want to acknowledge it.

The attitude by the present administration is eerily similar to what the Clinton administration had, that lead up to the 9/11/2001 terror attacks. Criminalizing terror is in fact ignoring the active war being waged against our country and western society. As if we don’t name it, then it doesn’t really exist.

During the Clinton administration, our world trade center was attacked with a truck bomb and our embassies in Africa were bombed killing hundreds.

The reaction by the Clinton administration was to classify them as criminal acts, to be dealt with as if they are common lawbreakers.

Later, in a frank moment, Clinton admitted he screwed up when he had a chance to kill Osama Bin Laden and didn’t take it, because: He had “no controlling legal authority to do so.”

This is lawyer talk, not a commander in chief who is responsible for the safety of American citizens….

The terror war against our country is by radical Islamic terrorists,

The Obama administration still refers to the slaughter of American soldiers at Ft. Hood Texas by Major Hassan, as workplace violence, even though he had ties to radical Islam and he was uttering Allah Akhbar as he squeezed the trigger killing our unarmed soldiers.

The underwear bomber who tried to blow up a passenger airplane over Detroit was whisked away and given Miranda, although he wasn’t an American citizen.

This administration downplayed the attack on our embassy in Benghazi that killed 4 of our personnel including our Ambassador. They initially tried to put the blame on an unruly mob enraged by a cheesy internet video. When in fact it was a well organized attack by an Al Qaeda connected group.

But the Boston bombings have brought this war squarely in our face, on our soil again. From preliminary reports, Russian intelligence warned us one of the bombers was tied to radical Islamic organizations. Why didn’t the administration pursue this? Were they afraid to offend someone?

But Islamic radicals want to kill us in the name of their religion…Why? Because we are Americans. Boston was an act of war, not a criminal act.

Shortly after the bombings, a gunfight erupted outside of a nuclear power plant in Tennessee. The assailants escaped on a boat and the FBI is investigating. See Fox story

In this same time frame, a terrorist plot was foiled in Canada when authorities arrested two radicals with ties to Al Qaeda in Iran. They were planning to blow up a passenger train bound for New York.

How long will it be before Al Qaeda and other radical Islamic groups are equipped with far more lethal means of attacking us? Iran is close to nuclear weapons capability and is closely tied to Syria with vast supplies of chemical and biologic weapons.

These are not criminals who are trying to destroy us and our way of life, they are soldiers in a war against us.

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Ed Farnan is the conservative columnist at IrishCentral, where he has been writing on the need for energy independence, strong self defense, secure borders, 2nd amendment, smaller government and many other issues. His articles appear in many publications throughout the USA and world. He has been a guest on Fox News and a regular guest on radio stations in the US and Europe.

Video: O’Reilly Explodes on CAIR Executive Director – ‘I Don’t Want to Hear About What Islam Means to You’

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Fox News host Bill O’Reilly on Tuesday clashed with Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), during a segment focused the impact of radical Islamic terrorism around the world. CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial, the largest terrorism financing trial in U.S. history.

After reminding his guest that radical Islam has been identified as a motivating factor in the Boston bombing suspects’ decision to attack the Boston Marathon, O’Reilly asked Awad to explain why he is wrong to target radical Islamic groups in the aftermath of the tragedy.

Rather than providing a direct answer to O’Reilly’s question, Awad instead gave an account of his personal emotional state following the Boston bombings and argued many Muslims felt the same way he did.

O’Reilly attempted to get Awad back on topic, telling him “I don’t have time for a speech.”

“You have got to go back and forth with me, OK? You not admitting that radical Islam drives worldwide terrorism puts you in the category where you have no credibility because the facts are the facts. Ninety percent of worldwide terrorism is radical Islam, period,” O’Reilly added.

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Search of Tsarnaevs' Phones, Computers Finds no Indication of Accomplice, Source Says (+video)

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Photo Credit: compujerameyA preliminary examination of the cellphones and computers used by the Tsarnaev brothers has found no indication of an accomplice in the Boston Marathon bombing, according to a U.S. counter-terrorism source briefed on the FBI investigation.

The source stressed that the investigation is ongoing, but bureau officials at this point appear increasingly confident that “nobody else was involved,” said the source.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has told investigators he and his brother acted alone, learned to build the pressure-cooker bombs over the Internet and were motivated by a desire to defend Islam because of “the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said the source, who has received multiple briefings on the probe.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has also told investigators that he and his brother got instructions on building bombs from an online magazine published by al Qaeda, federal law enforcement officials told NBC News.

He told investigators that the brothers read the instructions in Inspire, an online, English-language magazine that terror monitoring groups say al Qaeda began publishing in 2010.

Watch video here:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Steyn: There Ain't Nobody Here but Us Chechens

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As is now traditional in these stories, we’re now being told that the Brothers Tsarnaev are merely the latest card-carrying members of Local 473 of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves. No broader pattern can be discerned, or should be discerned. All jihad is local. Nobody could have seen this coming:

Boston bombing suspects Tamerlan, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev appeared to lead normal lives

If by “normal lives”, you mean reported to the US Government by a major foreign power as possible terrorists, interviewed by the FBI, had your citizenship application put on hold, and cheerily posting a series of videos to YouTube as part of your “Terrorists” playlist. No doubt millions of people in America lead lives that “normal”.

The beatification of the pre-Marathon Tsarnaevs obscures a very disquieting pattern. As Michael Mukasey writes: “Tamerlan Tsarnaev is the fifth person since 9/11 who has participated in terror attacks after questioning by the FBI. He was preceded by [Fort Hood “workplace violence” facilitator] Nidal Hasan; drone casualty Anwar al Awlaki; Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad (born Carlos Leon Bledsoe), who murdered an Army recruit in Little Rock in June 2009; and David Coleman Headley, who provided intelligence to the perpetrators of the Mumbai massacre in 2008. That doesn’t count [Detroit’s incoming Pantybomber] Abdulmutallab, who was the subject of warnings to the CIA that he was a potential terrorist.”

That’s quite a high failure rate, with quite a cumulative death count.

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Source: Boston Bomb Suspect Says Brother was Brains Behind Attack (+video)

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Photo Credit: Ninian Reid

Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has told investigators his older brother Tamerlan was the driving force behind last week’s attack and that no international terrorist groups were behind them, a U.S. government source said Monday.

Preliminary interviews with Tsarnaev indicate the two brothers fit the classification of self-radicalized jihadists, the source said. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, wounded and held in a Boston hospital, has said his brother — who was killed early Friday — wanted to defend Islam from attack, according to the source.

The government source cautioned that the interviews were preliminary, and that Tsarnaev’s account needs to be checked out and followed up on by investigators.

And a federal law enforcement official told CNN that while investigators have seen nothing yet to indicate the suspects were working with anyone else, a lot of work remains before they can say confidently that no others were involved. That official would not comment on any motive or specifics on what Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has communicated to officials.

The 19-year-old has been charged with using and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death, and one count of malicious destruction of property by means of an explosive device resulting in death. He was heavily sedated and on a ventilator at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital, but was “alert, mentally competent and lucid” during the brief initial court appearance at his bedside on Monday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Marianne Bowler found.

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FBI Not Alerted to Suspected Boston Bomber's Russia Trip Because of Misspelling

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Photo Credit: AP

The FBI did not know that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older Boston Marathon bombing suspect, took a six-month trip to Russia because his name was misspelled, according to a key Republican senator on national-security issues.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican, said Monday that he had spoken to an assistant director at the FBI about the agency’s failure to monitor Tsarnaev after interviewing him in 2011 following a tip from the Russian government that he could be dangerous. Late Friday, the FBI said it found nothing “derogatory” after that initial questioning.

“He went over to Russia, but apparently when he got on the airplane, they misspelled his name, so it never went into the system that he actually went to Russia,” Mr. Graham said.

Tsarnaev, 26, died early Friday morning after a gunfight with police in Watertown, Mass. Younger brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, was taken into custody Friday night and is in as hospital being treated for gunshot wounds.

The revelation that the FBI looked into Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s possible link to terrorist groups but gave him a clean bill of health, has drawn several days of criticism from lawmakers and now the promise of congressional probes.

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Did US-Russia Deal in 2011 Lead to Boston Bombings?

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Among the more unusual aspects of what has been learned thus far about the Brothers Tsarnaev is that in January 2011 Russian officials encouraged their U.S. counterparts to take notice of Tamerlan, the older of the two, for possible Chechen terrorist links.

The only known result of the interviews that followed was to delay processing of Tamerlan’s U.S. citizenship application. (His younger brother, Dzhokhar, became a citizen on Sept. 11, 2012.) But the Russian tip was part of the process that led to a subsequent agreement between that country and the U.S. concerning Chechen terrorists.

The May 26, 2011, agreement — the Joint Statement of the Presidents of the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Counter-terrorism Cooperation — can be found on the White House website.

The key passage from that agreement with respect to the events in Boston is this: “We reaffirmed our common view of the threat to global security posed by Al Qaeda and advocated continued cooperation to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Al Qaeda. Identifying and isolating terrorists is integral to our efforts. We welcomed Russia’s efforts to update and enhance the implementation of the sanctions regime under United Nations Security Council Resolution 1822, and the decision by the United States to list Doku Umarov of the so-called ‘Caucasus Emirate’ as a specially designated global terrorist under U.S. Executive Order 13244.”

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Boston Bombers: FBI Hunting 12-Strong Terrorist “Sleeper Cell” Linked to Brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

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The FBI was last night hunting a 12-strong terrorist “sleeper cell” linked to the Boston marathon bomb brothers.

Police believe Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were specially trained to carry out the devastating attack.

More than 1,000 FBI operatives were last night working to track down the cell and arrested a man and two women 60 miles from Boston in the hours before Dzhokhar’s dramatic capture after a bloody shootout on Friday.

A source close to the investigation said: “We have no doubt the brothers were not acting alone. The devices used to detonate the two bombs were highly sophisticated and not the kind of thing people learn from Google.

“They were too advanced. Someone gave the brothers the skills and it is now our job to find out just who they were. Agents think the sleeper cell has up to a dozen members and has been waiting several years for their day to come.”

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Saudi Students in U.S. Up More Than 500% Since Sept. 11, 2001

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(CNSNews.com) – The number of Saudi Arabian students in the United States has increased by more than 500 percent since Sept. 11, 2001–when Hani Hanjour, a Saudi national who came here on a student visa flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, killing 189 people.

According to the Institute of International Education–whose numbers on foreign students in the United States are used in official reports published by the U.S. Department of Education–there were 5,579 Saudi nationals enrolled in U.S. institutions of higher education in the 2001-2002 school year. The Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks took place near the beginning of that school year.

In the 2011-2012 school year, the most recent year for which data are available, there were 34,139 Saudi nationals enrolled in institutions of higher education in the United States.

The 34,139 Saudi Arabian students in the United States for the 2011-2012 school year was more than the total of 30,256 undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in the University of Connecticut this school year.

From the 2001-2002 school year to the 2011-2012 school year, the number of Saudi nationals enrolled in U.S. institutions of higher education increased by 28,560.

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