The answer may be 'yes'.
There has been some speculation that these two may have been part of a terrorist cell. I don't think their actions AFTER the bombing look like they were part of a cell.
1. Both should have worn sunglasses to the bombing, and Dzhokar should have turned his cap around.
2. Their actions after the bombing. Go to parties? Rob a convenience store? Doesn't sound like the plans of dedicated terrorists.
3. And finally: WHY? How could bombing the Boston Marathon be a boost for Chechnya?
On the one hand, the bombs were assembled with a degree of sophistication. On the other hand, the bombs were made with readily available equipment. On one hand, you had the brothers complaining of no money. On the other hand, they were able to amass a pretty good arsenal.
Obviously we don't have all the facts, but the Boston Bombing could born of the clash between modern cultural nihilism and a desperate wish to have identity and purpose.
From the London Times:
Gaby Hinsliff wrote:he Boston bombers may have been driven more by a warped desire for notoriety than by real fanaticism
Zachary Adam Chesser was just an average kid from North Virginia, a high school athlete apparently destined for a blameless suburban life. Nothing in his high school yearbook suggested he was the student most likely to end up serving 25 years for terrorism offences, Yet that’s exactly what happened. And what’s unusual is how articulately Chesser describes his astonishingly fast transition from all-American boy to radicalised extremist. As the West struggles once again to understand the post 9/11 generation of homegrown terrorists from which the Boston marathon bombers seemingly emerged, his story is worth recounting — not least for the light it sheds on why they are so difficult to stop.
Had Holden Caulfield stumbled across radical Islam, the result might have sounded not unlike the 37 pages of letters Chesser wrote to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, attempting to explain. All teenage bravado on the surface, with flashes of fragility underneath, they dwell less on his sudden conversion to Islam than on how he finally discovered something that he was good at and for which he got gratifying amounts of attention. This wasn’t so much terrorism as promoting it via social media (Chesser was eventually picked up trying to get to Somalia but maintains that he was expecting not to fight, but to continue blogging from the jihadi frontline).
What’s odd is that he sounds disturbingly like any other 22-year-old trying to get fame by posting attention-seeking clips on YouTube. It’s just that his channel, like that of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, dealt in jihadi rantings, not skateboarding dogs.
Chesser boasts at self-aggrandising length of his blog traffic and YouTube rankings, his “above average” communications skills, his strategy to reach the widest audience: he was posting online “with the intention of playing off of the egos of various counter-terrorism analysts. I was somewhat successful in building audience and influencing them.” To Chesser, this is the cutting edge of terrorism: not fighting, but “open source jihad”, the spewing out of political theory, religious zealotry and ideas for wreaking destruction from which others can create what they will.
It’s not just about using the internet to foment real-life violence (although Chesser is best known for trying to incite hatred against the creators of South Park over a joke about the prophet Muhammad) but about seeing online battle as an end in itself. For that reason, radicals increasingly don’t plot in password-protected chatrooms, but brazenly in the open, in the public square of social media, since the whole point is to attract attention — even if it all feels faintly theatrical and unreal. “Essentially you have Hollywood meets al-Qaeda,” writes Chesser. It’s an oddly prescient description of the aftermath of the Boston bombings, as the two brothers panicked: the robbed convenience store, botched carjacking and chaotic shootout with police seem more influenced by bad movies than jihadi theory.
Logically this new openness among wannabe terrorists should make life easier for the security services: yet they are swamped with information, too little of it useful. How to extract the one dangerous needle from a haystack of offensive but mainly harmless terror trolls spouting claptrap online? It’s not easy to tell which of the endless dumb teenagers posting that 9/11 was an “inside job” is a future Dzokhar Tsarnaev – not even, perhaps, if you know them well. The wife of a British wannabe bomber was acquitted last week of any involvement in his plot after telling the court that while her husband had indeed talked about taking up jihad, she had dismissed this as “crap”, finding the whole conversation so boring that she ended up texting a friend instead of listening.
And while both Zachary Chesser and Tamerlan Tsarnaev quickly showed up on the radar — both experienced an FBI “disruption”, being hauled in and warned — this seems to have had tragically little effect.
So are there lessons to draw for preventing another Boston? One, perhaps, is that there is no point in a man’s life when he is more dangerous to himself or to others than during the now-prolonged transition from boy to man. Chesser’s was an all-American success story until the end of high school: he flunked out of higher education quickly, never got a proper job. By 26, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was unemployed with a failed marriage; his brother, more successful, was still chopping and changing college courses.
The security services can hardly track every adolescent struggling to find his feet in the adult world. But a concerted public policy focus on those who aren’t safely making the leap — most of whom won’t become terrorists but may well become petty criminals, absent fathers, Saturday-night brawlers, low-level but persistent spreaders of misery — couldn’t hurt. What we are dealing with feels less like pure fanaticism and more like an incoherent rage against a life that hasn’t lived up to expectations, with radical Islam providing a convenient hook for many grievances.
In an odd sense the Tsarnaev brothers seem less like terrorists than like perpetrators of American school shootings, narcissists and nihilists with a burning desire for notoriety and vengeance — usually against their peers. There is something curiously personal about how, unlike the 7/7 or 9/11 bombers, they struck on their own doorstep. As one of his teachers said of the younger Tsarnaev: “This kid blew off the legs of two children, in their twenties, of a faculty at the school. He bit the hand that fed him.”
Yet afterwards they slotted back into their Boston lives; Dzokhar even turned up at a student party. Were they too arrogant, or too unimaginative, to flee the manhunt? Or on some level did they want to be caught, even martyred?
Tamerlan may have died charging the police but he is, of course, no martyr, not even on al-Qaeda’s own questionable terms: martyrdom, like terrorism, requires bearing witness to a cause, making a political point. That’s why suicide bombers record videos, and conventional ones issue long statements claiming responsibility. Yet from the Boston bombers so far all is incoherence and silence — a week on, we have little idea what message, if any, they meant to send.
And so, while the solidarity of black-banded runners and defiant spectators at yesterday’s London Marathon was a healing reminder of all that is good and altruistic in our world, the questions remain. We must rather grimly hope that the younger Tsarnaev brother lives long enough to answer them.