Breaking: Explosion Reported at Boston Marathon's Finish Line

[Magda Hassan]

Oh, you internet sleuths, go home and leave it to the experts.

And who is the Eurasia Group I hear you ask?

Well, co-author David Gordon of the cited article is Head of Research at Eurasia Group and former Director of Policy Planning at the US Department of State.
http://eurasiagroup.net/about-eurasia-gr...vid-gordon
[URL="http://eurasiagroup.net/"]http://eurasiagroup.net/
[/URL]Willis Sparks is CFR (via the Juilliard School ?!)
http://eurasiagroup.net/about-eurasia-gr...-is/sparks
They're wheeling out the big guns.

When linking Boston to Chechnya, exercise caution

By David Gordon and Willis Sparks
APRIL 19, 2013



Editor's note: This is a memo originally published by Eurasia Group, a political risk firm. It is being reprinted with permission.
It now looks like the two perpetrators in the Boston Marathon bombing are ethnic Chechens who were raised as Muslims. But before we leap blindly into geopolitical speculation on what this all means, let's take a step back and a deep breath. These bombers may well have more in common with the shooters at Columbine than the 9/11 hijackers.
Early reports suggest these young brothers arrived in the United States by way of Central Asia. The family may or not have fled Russian-Chechen violence in Chechnya in the early 1990s. The two boys appear to have arrived in the Boston area at a tender age-the older brother was about 16, and the younger was about 9.
The early portrait emerging seems to be of a deeply religious young man who saw no place for himself in American culture after a decade in the Boston area and his teenage younger brother. Though the greater Boston area is home to a substantial community of people from the Caucasus/Caspian region, there does not as yet appear to be evidence of a cell or a disaffected community of politically or ideologically active people from this area who pose a threat to their neighbors, to Massachusetts or to the United States.
Unfortunately, there will be those who assume an al Qaeda link, given that Chechin extremists have been directly involved in a range of al-Qaeda-related operations and insurgencies from Afghanistan to Iraq to the Middle East and North Africa. Russian officials have also consistently asserted a very tight link between Chechin nationalists generally and and al-Qaeda, largely to justify the repressive Russian policy in a hostile corner of its territory.
But the question is does this have anything to do with the alleged actions of these brothers in Boston? Is there evidence of that? That's what we should be looking for.

Something may emerge, but unless and until it does, skepticism is our best weapon against misinformation. Unless some linkages do emerge, the Boston Marathon bombing is unlikely to reshape US counter-terrorism approaches, either at home or abroad. At the international level, it may open up some room for greater collaboration with Russian security and intelligence agencies, but will not be a game-changer in US Russian relations.