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Immigration Officials Holding Two Fellow Students of Boston Bombing Suspect

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsTwo people seen in a photo with suspected Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in New York’s famed Times Square are being held by authorities on administrative immigration violations, Fox News has confirmed.

The two men were identified to Fox News as Dias Kadyrbayev and Azamat Tazhayakov, both citizens of Kazakhstan. They can be seen standing next to Tsarnaev in a photo believed to have been taken in April 2012 in Times Square, which authorities suspect was another of the bombers’ intended targets.

Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov were arrested April 20 — five days after the attack at the marathon — at the Hidden Brook apartments by the FBI and Homeland Security in New Bedford Mass., and they are being detained by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement at the Suffolk County House of Corrections in Boston because of problems relating to their student visas, sources told Fox News.

New York City officials held a news conference Thursday confirming that the city was another target following the bombings in Boston, which killed three and wounded more than 200 near the finish line of the Boston race.

“We learned through the Joint Terrorist Task Force that the Boston Marathon bombers had planned to travel to Manhattan to detonate remaining bombs in Times Square,” New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said, though it is unclear when this information was relayed to New York City officials.

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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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Blaming the Tea Party for Mayhem: “Journalistic Malpractice”

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ABC News’ Brian Ross speculated this morning that the alleged shooter who attacked a Batman premier in Colorado might be a member of the Tea Party. His suggestion — since retracted by ABC — continues a trend of media figures wrongly tying such tragedies to the Tea Party since 2010.

In February 2010, Joseph Stack became a Tea Partier for purposes of the media after he committed suicide by flying his small airplane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas. New York Magazine, after reading his online suicide note/manifesto that day, immediately declared that “a lot of his rhetoric could have been taken directly from a handwritten sign at a tea party rally.” The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart added that “his alienation is similar to that we’re hearing from the extreme elements of the Tea Party movement.”

Neither Capehart or NYMAG mentioned that Stack quoted the Communist Manifesto approvingly and denounced capitalism as a system that teaches, “From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.” That would seem to put him at odds with the Tea Partiers, who often attacked Obamacare as a socialist government program.

A few months later, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg speculated that the failed attempt to bomb Times Square was carried out by someone “with a political agenda who doesn’t like the health care bill or something.” The would-be bomber, a Pakistani immigrant, said in court “If I’m given 1,000 lives I will sacrifice them all for the life of Allah.”Most famously, politicians and media figures attacked Sarah Palin and the Tea Party after the Tucson shooting that wounded Rep. Gabby Giffords, R-Ariz., and killed six others. Palin was faulted for having put “crosshairs” over Giffords’ district when she was targeting Democratic seats that might be vulnerable to Republican takeover. Even a year after the shooting, Democratic National Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., was willing to cite the shooting as proof that politicians need to “tone things down, particularly in light of” the Tucson shooting. “I hesitate to place blame, but I have noticed it take a very precipitous turn towards edginess and lack of civility with the growth of the Tea Party movement,” she said.

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Publisher’s Note:  Please also read the Wall Street Journal’s excellent article, Extreme Prejudice.  It gives a brief background on the innocent Jim Holmes (he “is a 52-year-old Hispanic conservative who joined the Tea Party after becoming disillusioned with the Republican party. . . . He disconnected his telephone and says that he is worried about members of his family who might be contacted by the media”) and notes that

There was one other factor, and this is what makes the ABC error not just amateurish but sinister: the innocent Jim Holmes’s involvement with the Tea Party. For more than three years liberal journalists have falsely portrayed the Tea Party as racist and potentially violent. After the January 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, Ariz., speculation immediately began that the suspect was a Tea Partier. Even after it was proved that he was not, the New York Times published a despicable editorial blaming conservatives anyway.