Whatever one’s criticisms of the NYPD approach, it has worked. You can’t beat that with a stick. We may not have the luxury to adopt more idealistic/ideological approaches that pretend ideology isn’t a factor, as the ex-FBI-turned-ACLU advisor is telling us (see NYT piece).

Christian Caryl has accomplished what no other journalist has done and contacted the mysterious “Misha,” which is a diminutive of the name “Mikhail” and therefore is just as much his “real name”. But from the sound of it, he didn’t have much time with him and spoke with him outside his home, for perhaps 20 minutes. It doesn’t sound like he sat down with him for 4 hours. So while I respect that he made a judgement that Misha “wasn’t Salafist,” we can’t be sure. And I’m not sure what the “10 ways you can recognize a Salfist instantly” are anyway. Beards? Quoting certain prophets?

I’m troubled by the way in which we are all being driven to this “self-radicalizing” narrative that seeks to minimize the role of organized terrorist groups so opportunistically just when Obama needs to wind down two big wars against Islamic countries.

Religious cults of any stripe usually have two key features: a) pressure to advance yourself spiritually by recruiting others, and therefore having to proselytize aggressively not just out of zeal but out of an imperative to advance in the organization b) a demand to think from the cult’s ideas and discard old ways of thinking, i.e. love of music as proof of progress.

But both of these factors need a personal bond or connection, it seems to me, and can’t just make do with a Youtube. For one, the “youtubized” theory seems to overlook that in fact very organized, funded, resourced, determined, planned operations are the ones making persuasive videos and disseminating them — and also socializing with people in comments on Youtube and forums that go with the video. For two, the obvious sequence of the video account beginning *after* the trip to Dagestan seems to be underplayed.

The tendency with either the “self-radicalization” or “Islamist plot” hypotheses is that they completely leave out the possibility of a staged Russian intelligence operation which isn’t some wild conspiracy theory when we take into account that Kadyrov ordered a Chechen leader assassinated in Vienna and former FSB agent Litvinenko was murdered with polonium 2010, pointing to the state as actor. These and many, many more incidents involving hired Chechens or turned Chechens or mysterious assassins sometimes posing as Islamists means that you have to keep an open mind about this option, as both Putin and Kadyrov could be motivated against the US for revenge, both over the Magnitsky List and the larger issue of the war in Syria and US support of rebels there.

But whatever the version of the story, there likely had to be a person or persons who mentored Tamerlan, even if they didn’t train him formally in some camp, and this person doesn’t have to be a Salafi to push him toward more rigid thinking (and that may have been Misha’s role). Someone has to give him the moral green light to kill and overcome what would be a natural conditioning of conscience not to kill — and Misha spent enough time with Caryl to let us know that if he had been Tamerlan’s teacher, he wouldn’t have countenanced violence. So likely there are others (or Misha is misleading us).

There’s an awful lack of curiousness about the glaring hole in the Russian intelligence story to the US. Here’s the Dagestanti anti-extremism center of the MVD (police) telling Novaya gazeta (a deliberate leak) that they know Tamerlan was in touch with Nidal, the 18-year-old jihadist killed by Russian forces, and yet Moscow neglects to tell the FBI *that* — and talks only about a Youtube account? A man from America is in touch with at least one or maybe two jihadists in Dagestan (there are multiple jihadists discussed as possible contacts), and nobody questions him? He is allowed to leave the country without incident? Really, guys?

We keep hearing about the two incidents in the Cambridge mosque as somehow exonerating this mosque of radicalism. Yet reportedly Tamerlan met Misha at this mosque in 2009 when it opened, and his family members described him as becoming more radicalized after this meeting; he was also not expelled from this mosque but returned again after these incidents, so perhaps *some* of his thinking was more radical than the black Muslims in the mosque who wished to honour Martin Luther King, Jr., but was exactly in line, for example, with other hate concepts, i.e. with at least some members’ radical rejection of the Jews and Israel, as you can see in this video:

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/minding_russia/2013/04/the-angry-young-men-in-tamerlans-mosque.html

At the end of the day, the entire “self-radicalization” theory hinges on watching Youtubes or joining in Internet fora. Yet Tamerlan made his Youtube with the radical jihadist films, some of which were removed by Google, in *August 2012* which was *after* he returned from his six months’ sojourn in Dagestan, which also included side trips to Chechnya and started and ended in Moscow.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/22/tamerlan-tsarnaev-youtube-jihadist-radicalisation

So how was he self-radicalizing via the Internet before that? Perhaps the FBI’s forensic studies of his Internet use may shed some light on this question. Until then, I’m going to continue to look for clues in the Russian side of this story where there are contradictions and gaps, and not just listen to former FBI agents and Harvard psychologists recruited by the Times to fit a narrative they’ve constructed. Any narrative is a construct, but I think we should challenge those that are designed to sooth us into complacity and fit White House foreign policy after the fact rather than reject those that seem too awful to contemplate.

Why not stop using the terms JIHAD (holy war) and MUJAHEDDIN (warriors).
The use of such a vocabulary has served to reinforce adversaries’ claim to legitimacy in the Islamic world.

Instead, use the terms HIRABAH (unlawful war) and IRAHABI (terrorist).

So far Western media have placed heavy emphasis on the “radicalization” (and “self-radicalization”) motif, and likewise Russian media have been at pains to highlight it in their reports and op-ed discussions. Copious amounts of information have been deliberately leaked by high-level Russian sources to newspapers like Novaya Gazeta and Izvestia, nearly all of it designed to show that Tamerlan was somehow mixed up with shadowy forces in Georgia, Canada and the U.S. (CIA) intent on aggravating Islam-fueled tensions in the North Caucasus and Russia. This line of approach has even been adopted by the Georgian prime minister in his ongoing campaign against members of the previous government, especially Mikheil Saakashvili, accusing them and him of collaboration with Chechen Islamist terrorists (http://goo.gl/Fpbfj). This essentially pro-Moscow line is obviously advantageous to the Kremlin as it seeks to weaken U.S. and Western influence in the region.

What we currently appear to be witnessing in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing is a revitalization of the now well-established attempt by the Kremlin authorities and siloviki to implicate Western governments in a hypothetical plan to further destabilize the North Caucasus – and ultimately Russia itself. There may indeed be more to it than that, but at all events, as one political analyst has pointed out in an article recently published by the Jamestown Foundation – now under attack by Izvestia as an “organ of the CIA”:

“The Moscow papers’ stories about Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s visit to Georgia (http://izvestia.ru/news/549252), about his contacts with Mansur Mahmud Nidal (www.novayagazeta.ru/inquests/57925.html), or even his possible contacts with the Canadian William Plotnikov (http://www.mk.ru/social/article/2013/05/01/849704-amerikanskoe-sledstvie-izuchaet-kontaktyi-tamerlana-tsarnaeva-na-severnom-kavkaze-s-kanadskim-dzhihadistom.html) are nothing more than attempts to deflect attention from what Tamerlan Tsarnaev was really doing on his last visit to Russia.”

http://www.jamestown.org/single/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=40828