And The News Is....

"We don't know if we will ever be able to question the individual", Boston Mayor Thomas Menino said of 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, hospitalized in critical condition after he had been captured by Boston police, as he lay bloodied in a backyard boat while an urgent city-wide lockdown was in effect and armoured police and their armoured vehicles scoured the streets in search of the suspected bomber.

Of course, it's always the 'alleged' culprit in the news, irrespective of whether or not evidence exists that makes it near impossible not to reach the inevitable conclusion of guilt as charged. And, as it happened, the badly injured man was questioned by skilled interrogators, who managed to dredge from him some information they found interesting and perhaps even useful.

Denying that there might have been an extended network that the brothers were involved with, should have been expected. They had self-radicalized evidently, through energetically searching the Internet for sites encouraging jihad, reminding the faithful that jihad is an elemental, fundamental precept in Islam; as they surrendered, so must all others, willingly or not.

Yet there remains the distinct possibility that there were other contacts who aided in the nefarious plot to shock a nation and commit an unforgettable atrocity. Two disaffected young men succeeding in wreaking havoc and slaughter where other, more skilled and devious aspirants to martyrdom failed to succeed?

From New York, Washington and Pennsylvania on 9/11/2001, to Fort Hood's massacre courtesy of Nidal Malik Hasan in 2009, to Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in Boston in 2013.

The enemy, Islam enjoins its faithful, must be sought out and disciplined for his errant ways; those who spurn Islam are hateful to Islam and must pay the ultimate penalty. Enabling the penalizers in the process to consecrate their actions to the goals sought by Islam, a very idiosyncratic form of proselytization, an ancient one, never out of vogue entirely, but fairly recently resuscitated.

Now that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been informed of his Miranda rights, his right to a lawyer, his right to be silent lest he further incriminate himself beyond informing his interlocutors that he and his mastermind brother were next set to arrive in New York to try their hand at murder and mayhem in Times Square, but were spectacularly and inconveniently diverted, voluntary confessions are out.

The news that came out of the harrowing search and the city's lock-down spoke breathlessly of firefights between the 19-year-old and the police, as he desperately attempted to fend off his capture. His face and neck gunshot injuries that rendered him incapable of speech so that he communicated by writing, were said to have been self-inflicted.

Newer information indicates that, while in hiding after running down his brother in the SUV, he was unarmed.

And, now that he has spoken initially, being finally advised of his right to remain silent, he remains silent. Just as he was capable of casually walking by a crowd of innocent people including an eight-year-old boy, and leaving in his wake a backpack containing a deadly exploding device certain to maim and to kill, he now has no intention of co-operating with a government that has justice on its mind, which to him is merely revenge.