Boston Marathon Terrorist Pleads Not Guilty

by John M. Curtis
(310) 204-8700

Copyright July 10, 2013
All Rights Reserved.                                      

             Facing a courtroom of surviving victims of the April 15 Boston Marathon pressure-cooker blasts, a detached 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev dispassionately pled “not guilty” in a Russian accent.  When the blasts occurred near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, stunned onlookers couldn’t fathom the motives behind the carefully orchestrated attack with the help of his now deceased 30-year-old older brother, Tamerlan.  White House officials cautiously avoided the terrorism label, fearing political backlash after missing the obvious signs leading up to the twin blasts.  Even today, Homeland Security officials, despite close coordination with Russian authorities, refuse to characterize the Tsarnaev brothers’ bombings as “terrorism.”  Dzhokhar’s demeanor in court proved, beyond any reasonable doubt, that he sees himself a soldier in a terrorist war against the U.S.

             Repeating “not guilty” over-and-over, Dzhkhar told U.S. Magistrate Marianne Bowler what any good soldier would say behind enemy lines:  I know nothing.  Dzhokhar’s denials were said in the presence of his death penalty-specialized defense counsel Judy Clarke.  Pleading “not guilty,” Dzhokhar didn’t deny that he planted and detonated bombs at the marathon site or, for that matter, gunned down 27-year-old MIT police officer Sean Collier the night of the mayhem.  Standing stoically before Clarke, Dzhokhar showed the same aloofness as Guantanamo Bay enemy-combatants plucked off the Afghan battlefield.  FBI and CIA officials ignored Russian warnings in 2011 that  Tamerlan had been radicalized in Chechnya before returning back to Boston in 2012.  Whatever happened in Chechnya, Tamerlan, like Russian authorities told the FBI, came back to Boston a radical.

             Whatever the denials by the FBI and CIA, they clearly dropped the ball when it came to Tamerlan returned to Boston taking more than a year to plot out the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings.  While dismissed as amateurs, the Tsarnaev brothers followed a very carefully set of plans s to get the gun powder from “legal” fireworks, acquire the shrapnel from hardware stores and buy Wall-Mart-sold pressure cookers with which to make their bombs.  Dismissing the Tsarnaev brothers as amateurs or lone-wolf- terrorists completely ignores Tamerlan’s radicalization and return to the States to commit mayhem.  Making eye contact with his family Boston courtroom today, Dzhokhar smirked, making a kissing gesture to his two sisters.  His cavalier attitude reveals his close adherence to jihad, where ordinary human emotions get in the way of completing terrorist missions.

             Brainwashed by his now dead brother Tamerlan, Dzhokhar shows all the signs of a zealous cog in the Islamic jihad’s wheel.  “I don’t see a lot of remorse.  I didn’t see a lot of regret,” said MIT Police Chief John DiFava, observing the Dzhokhar looked “smug.”  If Dzhokhar were like almost any other murder suspect, he would have shown some human emotion.  “I just wanted to see him.  I wanted to see the person that so coldly and callously killed four people, one of whom being an officer or mine,” said DiFava, struck by Dzhokhar’s cold demeanor.  Watching Dzhokhar in open court reminds most observers that the U.S. remains at war with radical Islam.  Dzhokhar and his dead brother Tamerlan did their utmost to further radical Islam’s credo of bringing the battle to enemy.  Swearing his life to jihad, Dzhokhar sees nothing wrong murdering innocents in the name of Islam.

             Captured hemorrhaging in a boat April 19 after an intense four-day manhunt, Dzhokhar inscribed his terrorist credo into boat’s cabin.  “We Muslims are one body, you hurt one you hurt us all,” Dzhokhar wrote, not knowing whether he’d survive the ordeal.  Once read his Miranda rights at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Dzhokhar clammed up about his mission.  Blaming the U.S. government for “killing innocent civilians,” Dzhokhar displayed the terrorist hypocrisy in all its psychopathic glory.  Terrorism, by definition, targets innocent civilians to apply pressure on governments to make political concessions—a kind of blackmail.  When Tamerlan and Dzhokhar carefully planned their mayhem in Boston, they carried the same message—though smaller—as Osama bin Laden when his programmed assassins flew jetliners into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

             Today’s day in court, Dzhokhar showed why terrorism remains the most dangerous threat to the U.S. in the 21st century.  Difficult to track, next-to-impossible to completely prevent, the White House swallowed another bitter pill allowing terrorism rears its ugly head on U.S. soil.  When 39-year-old Army psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan gunned down 13 soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas Nov. 5, 2009, it took the President Barack Obama months to acknowledge that a new terrorist attack took place on U.S. soil.  Dismissing Hasan as a lone-wolf nut-job did little to disguise the fact that he was in close contact with Yemen-based, al-Qaeda’s deceased leader U.S.-born Anwar al-Awlaki.  Praised by al-Qaeda and others for their jihad, the Tsarnaev brothers are etched into the Pantheon of terrorist lore.  Watching his cold disposition up-close in court showed that the Islamic terror war goes on. 

John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news.  He's editor of OnlineColumnist.com.and author of Dodging the Bullet and Operation Charisma.