Excoriating The United States

She is quite the piece of work. Although the malignant presence of an Armenian whose single name of 'Misha' has been highlighted as the likely source of persuading Tamerlin Tsarnaev to embrace jihad as a faithful Muslim immersed in fundamentalist Islam, there is also the influence of the mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, that cannot be overlooked. As she would have it in interviews, it was her son who influenced her to become a pious Muslim woman, taking on the garb she had previously shunned.

Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, the mother of the two Boston bombing suspects, speaks at a news conference as her sister-in-law, Maryam, listens in Makhachkala, in the southern Russian province of Dagestan, Thursday, April 25, 2013. The suspects' father, Anzor Tsarnaev, said Thursday that he is leaving Russia for the United States in the next day or two, but their mother said she was still thinking it over. (AP Photo/Musa Sadulayev) 

She, fearing her son was falling into hedonistic ways, drinking and taking drugs and partying, convinced him to examine a life worth living as a practising Muslim, and she would join him. According to her account, he became so immersed in Islam he persuaded her to follow his example. But whose example was he really following when he turned to fascistic Islamism dedicated to jihad? Revelations that she had been placed alongside her son on an FBI terrorism-suspect list is revealing enough.

But this revelation, spurred by the results of an investigation by internal Russian security and shared with the FBI, is spurned by Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, as "lies and hypocrisy", for she had never been linked to crimes or terrorism. Russia has now further revealed that they have taped evidence of the woman discussing terrorism, but that too obviously represents lies and hypocrisy. As for crimes, there are those of a more domestic variety, of theft of which she has been accused.

Of one thing she is dead certain of, and immovable in her conviction; that her sons are innocent of all alleged crimes and the charges to which they have been exposed of taking part in terrorist acts, of conspiring to murder innocent people. They could never have been behind those deadly attacks. Such dreadful actions do not reflect who and what they were; super-achievers academically and in the field of sports; likeable, modestly talented, law-abiding.

She should know. Don't mothers know their sons? And no one can really deny she knows her sons. Except that what she knows and what she expounds are crucially at variance with reality. A reality for example such as the Russians asking the FBI to investigate the activities of both mother and son. The concerns that they had become religious fanatics with a plan to inflict harm on either or both Russia/United States a mutual concern to both countries.

As things turned out, Russia had no need to be concerned, and the United States did. And although the United States had the pair in their focus, the focus was slightly off kilter and the picture came out askew. The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment seemed a good first resort in theory and proved a dismal failure in fact when it failed to adequately alert those who would depend on it for guidance.