They had quite a few more bombs in their possession, I don’t think it’s out of the question that they might have been planning on using them In a subsequent attack.
Nobody questions whether or not McVeigh was a terrorist, he got pulled over for not having a license tag IIRC. Just being a terrorist doesn’t imply being a criminal mastermind.
I’ve been flipping through the coverage through the day, one word keeps popping up - unprecedented.
Another word - terrorist.
There’s a retired FBI agent on TV right now, said he was there for 30 years and has never seen anything even close to the mobilization in place over this attack.
Dorner killed cops in California, cop killers are extremely high priority, and his manhunt wasn’t a fraction of what these guys have unleashed. He was a psycho with a gun.
This is pretty much the textbook definition of terrorism.
It’s been reported that the police found seven more bombs in Watertown and in their home, that they threw at least one more bomb at police during the shootout, and that the older brother may have had another bomb on him when he died. We also know terrorists have used bombs made this way. Who knows what escape plans they had. They may have had one and screwed it up or they may have thought they’d get away with it, stupid as that sounds. We know the older brother went to Chechnya last year, and there’s a link between the struggle for independence and Islamic radicalism. He also seems to have been an admirer of this guy.There are reports that he’d recently become very religious. That’s not a new pattern in guys who become terrorists.
It’s possible these guys were just disaffected and crazy and did this for no particular reason like the Aurora shooter, but there could be at least some type of link to terrorism. They may not be linked to a larger organization as such, or there could be links in terms of training or ideas. The type of terrorism people talk about these days often doesn’t involve a cell of people in the same place- it’s one person supplying ideas and experience to one or two people somewhere else who do something without a lot of advance notice or activity that could attract attention. That’s more or less what happened in Fort Hood.
The September 11 hijackers had notes referring to the people they murdered to take over the planes in language of sacrificial animals, using a religious justification to try to fool themselves into pretending that they were not slitting the throat of an innocent person.
I’m aware of that. In my own German ancestry one branch dropped the German *hauer part of the last name and anglicized it to *hower. There is also a bit of family legend that there was some sort of falling out that accompanied that change. I wondered if that may be the situation with this family since the uncle says he has pretty much had nothing to do with them since 2005.
Wait, so if the theater shooter had run away after killing a buncha people… and there was a massive manhunt for him… then that would have been terrorism? But not as it was?
I think aceplace is making a cogent argument: terrorism us defined by the intent and methodology of the actors. If other random psycho killers aren’t “terrorists”… and there’s nothing to distinguish these guys from those except our response, then they aren’t either.
He was arrested right at the spot. So I brought up another shooter, Dorner. He was able to run. But as much as cops hate cop killers, they did not shut down LA. Dorner was a former cop and ex-military, he was arguably much more dangerous than a 19 year old.
But this particular event was terrorism. That’s the reason for the massive manhunt, not a massive manhunt as definition of terrorism. That the 19 year old kid was a terrorist is why the mobilization dwarfs even that for a dangerous cop killer.