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HARI SREENIVASAN: The Boston police commissioner told Congress today that the FBI never passed along Russian warnings about Tamerlan Tsarnaev before the Boston bombings. Edward Davis testified at a House hearing that police didn't know the bureau checked out Tsarnaev when he visited Russia last year. The investigation was later closed. Davis said he would like to have known, but he conceded it might not have changed anything.

POLICE COMMISSIONER ED DAVIS, Boston: If we knew everything that we know now, absent the blast, or before the -- without the blast being involved in it, but if we knew all of these things that have come out since then, we would have taken a hard look at these individuals. But at this point in time, I can't say that when we knew things that we would've done anything differently.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Tamerlan Tsarnaev ultimately died in a shoot-out with police. Today, there was word that he's been buried at an undisclosed location near Worcester. That followed a weeklong search for a community near Boston that would accept the remains.

Federal prosecutors in New York have announced what may be the biggest ATM heist ever, affecting dozens of countries. Cyber-criminals drained $45 million dollars from cash machines around the world, after they hacked a database of debit cards. Prosecutors described the gang as a virtual criminal flash mob and said some took pictures of themselves waving wads of cash in Manhattan. Seven people are under arrest in the U.S.

Gunmen in Pakistan attacked a political rally today and abducted the son of a former prime minister, the latest violence before Saturday's nationwide elections. Ali Haider Gilani is running for a provincial assembly seat for the ruling Pakistan People's Party. He's the son of ex-Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, who was forced out of office last summer. The attack and abduction happened in Multan, in the southern Punjab province. Two of Gilani's bodyguards were killed during the abduction.

In neighboring Bangladesh, another fatal accident hit the country's troubled garment industry overnight. A fire broke out at a factory in the capital city of Dhaka, killing eight people, including the factory director. The fire engulfed the lower floors of the 11-story factory which had closed for the day. People still inside suffocated on poison gases as they ran down the stairs. The fire came two weeks after a garment building collapsed in Dhaka. The death toll there grew to nearly 1,000 today.

For the first time in more than five decades, Americans are spending less on prescription drugs. That finding came today from a pharmaceutical market research firm, the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics. The institute pointed to a surge of new cheaper generic drugs. It also said consumers have been putting off doctor visits and drug refills to save money.

First-time claims for unemployment benefits have hit a new five-year low. The Labor Department said today that layoffs are now back to pre-recession levels. Despite that news, Wall Street took a break from its ongoing rally. The Dow Jones industrial average lost 22 points to close at 15,082. The Nasdaq fell four points to close at 3,409.

Those are some of the day's major stories -- now back to Judy.

House Hearing Is Latest Chapter in Political Dispute Over Benghazi Attack

Wed, 08 May 2013 18:02:00 EDT

JEFFREY BROWN: The battle over the Benghazi Consulate attack was renewed today in Congress. At a lengthy hearing, a House committee heard new testimony about what happened during the deadly assault and after.

NewsHour correspondent Kwame Holman has our report.

KWAME HOLMAN: From the opening gavel, the political battle lines were clear. Republicans still accuse the Obama administration of deception about the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi eight months ago that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

California Republican Darrell Issa chaired today's hearing.

REP. DARRELL ISSA, R-Calif.: I want those watching this proceeding to know that we have made extensive efforts to engage the administration and to see and hear their facts. The administration, however, has not been cooperative, and, unfortunately, our minority has mostly sat silent as we have made these requests.

KWAME HOLMAN: But Maryland's Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the Government Oversight Committee, led his party's response that Republicans merely are pursuing political gain.

REP. ELIJAH CUMMINGS, D-Md.: What we have seen over the past two weeks is a full-scale media campaign that is not designed to investigate what happened in a responsible and bipartisan way, but rather a launch unfounded -- of unfounded accusations and to smear public officials.

Let me be clear. I am not questioning the motives of our witnesses. I am questioning the motives of those who want to use their statements for political purposes.

KWAME HOLMAN: Committee Republicans invited three State Department officials whose statements about the U.S. response to the attack have resurrected the issue.

Veteran Foreign Service Officer Gregory Hicks was deputy chief of mission in Libya at the time of the attack.

GREGORY HICKS, Former Deputy Chief of Mission, Libya: That none of us should ever again experience what we went through in Tripoli and Benghazi on 9/11/2012.

KWAME HOLMAN: Hicks was based in Tripoli, more than 600 miles from Benghazi. He spoke with then-Secretary of State Clinton in the early hours of the assault.

GREGORY HICKS: She asked me what was going on, and I briefed her on developments. Most of the conversation was about the search for Ambassador Stevens.

It was also about what we were going to do with our personnel in Benghazi. And I told her we would need to evacuate, that was the right -- she said that was the right thing to do.

KWAME HOLMAN: But Hicks said his staff also was wary of walking into a trap. And he described futile attempts to call in help from the U.S. African Command and a U.S. air base in Italy.

GREGORY HICKS: I asked the Defense Attaché who had been talking with Africom and with the joint staff, is anything coming? Will they be sending us any help? Is there something out there? And he answered that the nearest help was in Aviano, the nearest where there were fighter planes. And he said that it would take two to three hours for them to get on site, but that there also were no tankers available for them to refuel.

KWAME HOLMAN: In an e-mail on Monday, Pentagon spokesman George Little defended the U.S. military's response. He said: "Department officials started taking action immediately after learning that an attack was under way. But our forces were unable to reach it in time to intervene to stop the attacks."

Today's hearing is the latest chapter in a political dispute arising from the attack on the Benghazi facility last fall. A total of five House committees, led by Republicans, have conducted investigations. Last month, they issued a report together charging that the Obama administration had -- quote -- "willfully perpetuated a deliberately misleading and incomplete narrative."

In the days just after the attack, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and others in the administration suggested it could have been triggered by Muslim protests, like an earlier incident at the U.S. Embassy in Egypt.

U.N. AMBASSADOR SUSAN RICE, United States: What this began as was a spontaneous, not a premeditated, response to what had transpired in Cairo.

KWAME HOLMAN: The administration has said Rice was simply following unclassified talking points based on the best information available at the time.

Republicans insist officials knew almost immediately that it was a terrorist attack, but didn't want to say so in the midst of President Obama's reelection campaign. Secretary Clinton, a potential presidential candidate in 2016, confronted the claims at a January hearing just before stepping down.

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON, Former U.S. Secretary of State: The fact is, we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because some guys out for a walk one night who decided they would go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make?

KWAME HOLMAN: But at the hearing today, Eric Nordstrom, the former regional security officer in Libya, said it does make a difference.

ERIC NORDSTROM, Former Regional Security Officer, Libya: It matters to me personally, and it matters to my colleagues -- to my colleagues at Department of State. It matters to the American public for whom we serve. And, most importantly, excuse me, it matters to the friends and family of Ambassador Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and Tyrone Woods, who were murdered on Sept. 11^th, 2012.

KWAME HOLMAN: A review board led by former Ambassador Thomas Pickering and Former Navy Admiral Mike Mullen found that serious management and leadership failures at the State Department led to grossly inadequate security in Benghazi.

Republicans argued today the review did not get at all the facts and that a cover-up continues. In turn, White House spokesman Jay Carney insisted the administration has cooperated fully, and he lashed out at the critics.

JAY CARNEY, White House Spokesman: Attempts to politicize this, which have guided Republicans unfortunately since the hours after the attack, and the Republican nominee for president issued a highly misguided press release about it in an attempt to turn it into a political issue, have been unfortunate and haven't been focused on the problem itself.

KWAME HOLMAN: Today's hearing may have resolved little, but there's more to come. Republicans say the investigations will go on, and they say former Secretary Clinton may be subpoenaed to testify again.

Watch Live: Hearing on Benghazi Attack on Wednesday

Tue, 07 May 2013 14:10:00 EDT

The burnt U.S. consulate in Benghazi a day after the attack. Photo by Gianluigi Guercia/AFP/Getty Images.

Updated Wednesday 3:40 p.m. ET:

Gregory Hicks, deputy chief of mission in Tripoli, Libya, during the time of the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, testified at a House hearing Wednesday that a second mortar attack on the compound might have been prevented if his calls for jet fighters had been heeded.

There were two waves of attacks on the U.S. facility in Benghazi the night of Sept. 11, 2012, that ended up killing U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

Hicks said he was told the fighters could reach Libya in several hours to try to fend off attackers, but U.S. military officials later said it would have taken more like 20 hours since the aircraft weren't on alert status. (Read his full testimony.)

Video streaming by Ustream Wednesday's House hearing on Benghazi compound assault.

Original Story:

Gregory Hicks, deputy chief of mission in Tripoli, Libya, during the time of the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, reportedly told House investigators that U.S. officials in Libya knew the assault on the compound was a premeditated terrorist attack from the start. He'll be testifying at a House Oversight Committee hearing on Wednesday.

"I think everybody in the mission thought it was a terrorist attack from the beginning," Hicks said, according to a transcript supplied to CBS News' "Face the Nation".

His testimony would contradict what U.S. officials, including U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice, told media outlets in the days following the deadly attack that it stemmed from a spontaneous demonstration against an Internet video depicting the Muslim Prophet Muhammad -- rather than a preplanned siege.

Hicks said in the investigation that U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens would have reported a demonstration, but instead he said the compound was "under attack." Stevens was one of four Americans killed during the raid on the consulate on Sept. 11, 2012.

Also testifying at the hearing are Mark Thompson, acting deputy assistant secretary for counterterrorism (read his testimony), and Eric Nordstrom, diplomatic security officer and former regional security officer in Libya (read his testimony), both of the State Department.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif. The hearing begins at 11:30 a.m. ET.

Related Resources

The same House committee held a hearing on the matter when more information came to light in October.

Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, also testified at a Senate hearing on the investigation into how the State Department handled the consulate's calls for more security before the attack.

View more of our World coverage.

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At the CIA, a 'Sisterhood' of Analysts Who Helped Find Bin Laden

Wed, 01 May 2013 18:46:00 EDT

MARGARET WARNER: Joining me now to discuss the hunt for bin Laden and al-Qaida, I'm joined by two members of so called sisterhood of CIA analysts who appear in the film "Manhunt" and whose work was so crucial to the U.S. effort, Cindy Storer and Nada Bakos.

And welcome to you both.

Like most CIA analysts, you have worked in secret. Your identities have been kept secret all these years. Why did you decide to speak so openly through this film?

Nada?

NADA BAKOS: I just wanted to be able to tell the firsthand account story for essentially a lot of people that are still there, in addition to my former colleagues.

I thought this was a good opportunity to be able to give the viewer a sense of what national security is like and how the CIA works.

MARGARET WARNER: Cindy, what about you?

CINDY STORER: My motivations were very similar.

And I -- on a personal level, I really hoped this would help people understand what our colleagues are doing, and they wouldn't just be sort of faceless colleagues in the bureaucracy that you can put blame on for whatever goes wrong.

MARGARET WARNER: This was -- at least informally, your unit within the bin Laden or al-Qaida hunting unit was known as “The Sisterhood.” Do you think there's something different about women analysts?

CINDY STORER: Yes, it's funny, because I honestly don't know.

I have gone through so many theories with so many different people. For me, personally, in those years, I never thought of myself as a woman, except when we were lumped together that way by other people who were trying to criticize the program.

Other than that, I was just another analyst doing what needed to be done, I thought anyway.

MARGARET WARNER: And, Cindy, what was the hardest thing? Let's go back to the '90s. When you were trying to piece together that puzzle that was al-Qaida, the organization, what was the biggest challenge in recognizing and identifying that what looked like separate attacks around the world from the East Africa bombings to the Cole were in fact the work of this one organization and its name was al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden was the head of it?

CINDY STORER: There's the technical difficulties, if will you, of just trying to figure out -- going through all these mounds of little bits of information, and trying to make it -- see if there's a picture there.

And to do that, you have to have a model -- you have to have several models in your head about how organizations look like, how they work, how they might not work. What could it be besides a certain kind of organization? And then you are constantly testing the information you get against all these various ideas you have in your head. And then it turns out to be something that you recognize or something that you don't.

MARGARET WARNER: And, Nada, how was the work that this unit did viewed, let's stay before 9/11, within the agency?

NADA BAKOS: You know, I -- when I joined in 2000, I wasn't in the Counterterrorism Center, but my understanding -- and, Cindy, you weigh in on this -- is that, you know, counterterrorism work wasn't initially viewed as important as some of the traditional analytical work.

CINDY STORER: I mean, most analysts in the agency are -- it's kind of -- it's scholarly, really. It's a combination between scholarship and journalism, a lot of the job is.

And doing counterterrorism or doing really any transnational issue is a little bit different, not that you are not achieving those levels of scholarship on the issues, but you are also digging down into all of these little details that most people don't have to worry about.

If you are working a state -- a country, you already know the wiring diagram, how the state is organized, even if you have to figure out who really has the power. Well, with a group like this, we had to figure out they even existed. And doing that kind of detailed worked was looked down upon.

MARGARET WARNER: And then, in 2001, your unit and the CIA in general was warning the administration, the rest of the government, that something big was coming, yet 9/11 happened.

When that happened, did you blame yourselves, or were you angry at the criticism that it was due to an intelligence failure?

CINDY STORER: Well, you can't help but feel guilty and blame yourself, even if there really is nothing you could have -- more you could have done.

It's just human nature. And then, yes, it was very difficult to deal with everyone blaming you for something that you tried so hard to prevent.

MARGARET WARNER: Nada, what would you add to that?

NADA BAKOS: For -- in large part, everybody at the CIA takes their job incredibly seriously. That sense of responsibility is not lost on the people who do that job.

So, to have to point out that there was maybe some issues leading up to 9/11 or points missed, I mean, certainly, the people doing the work understood exactly what had happened.

MARGARET WARNER: After 9/11, the unit and -- expanded, but really shifted to focusing on targeting individuals for kill or capture. How big a shift was that?

NADA BAKOS: You know, from my perspective, it was pretty dramatic.

I mean, I went from a traditional analytical role and then moved over to the operations side. And, even informally, there were obviously some people already doing that targeting work.

MARGARET WARNER: When targeting, you are targeting someone to be captured and interrogated or killed. What kind of a moral dilemma did that pose for you? You talk about it in the film a little.

NADA BAKOS: I do.

When you -- you are evaluating the problem, if it's determined that this person or individual is doing something that is harming the United States' national security interest or doing something within the country that -- and in this case, it was a war theater inside of Iraq -- it's -- I think the onus is upon us to be able to control that situation. And if the only way to do that is to capture or kill an individual, then I think it's warranted.

MARGARET WARNER: After decades working on this, bin Laden is dead, a lot of al-Qaida senior leadership is dead. How confident are each of you that the United States is going to be able to manage this ongoing threat in the decades to come?

Cindy?

CINDY STORER: That's a hard question, because, obviously, you know, as we go into the future decades, we're not going to be just looking at this threat. There will be something new coming down the line. It's probably going to look different.

And, as we always do, we focus on the current, the current war, which we have to do. And I'm always concerned that we're not going to listen to the next people who are standing and jumping up and down with their hair on fire trying to get people's attention to something totally new and different.

MARGARET WARNER: Nada Bakos and Cindy Storer, thank you so much.

NADA BAKOS: Thank you.

CINDY STORER: You're welcome.

GWEN IFILL: Online, Margaret compares "Manhunt" with some of the other recent retellings of the hunt for bin Laden. You can find that on our World page.

Documentary Focuses on Analysts Behind 'Manhunt' for Osama Bin Laden

Wed, 01 May 2013 18:44:00 EDT

GWEN IFILL: Today marks the second anniversary of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Tonight, we bring you the previously unknown story of the sisterhood of CIA analysts who chased the al-Qaida leader.

Margaret Warner reports.

MARGARET WARNER: It was the news most Americans had waited nearly a decade to hear.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.

MARGARET WARNER: But for many of the people who'd helped find Osama bin Laden, their work had started nearly two decades earlier, long before the most-wanted man on earth had earned his infamy.

Their story of the CIA analysts and officers who'd tracked down the al-Qaida chief is told in the documentary HBO film "Manhunt" debuting tonight. It's based on the book by CNN's Peter Bergen.

PETER BERGEN, CNN: In '97, Osama bin Laden had declared war on the United States, but no one paid any attention.

CINDY STORER, Former CIA Analyst: There were just warning after warning. We knew something huge was going to happen.

MARGARET WARNER: But long before that September day, their chase began in a near-total information vacuum.

WOMAN: Well, we certainly didn't know that al-Qaida existed. We didn't know there was a terrorist organization.

MARGARET WARNER: The group tracking the elusive Saudi militant was known as Alec Station and was novel in its approach.

MAN: The unique thing about Alec Station was the fusion of analysis and operations.

MARGARET WARNER: The analytical team at CIA was comprised mostly of women. Before 9/11, it wasn't a prime assignment. Cindy Storer was an analyst, part of what was called “The Sisterhood.”

CINDY STORER: I was counseled once in a performance review that I was spending too much time working on bin Laden. They said we were obsessed crusaders, overly emotional, using all those women stereotypes.

MARGARET WARNER: Nada Bakos followed Storer on the mostly female team.

NADA BAKOS, Former CIA Analyst: We picked up that end of the spear, where some of the operations officers tend to be mostly men.

MARGARET WARNER: After 9/11, the tempo of operations shifted to hunting al-Qaida figures in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Many analysts moved into new jobs as “targeters.” Nada Bakos was among them, forward-deployed in Iraq to track Abu Musab al Zarqawi.

She also targeted a vital al-Qaida emissary who, after capture, gave up the name of the courier who eventually led the U.S. to bin Laden's door two years ago today.

Three College Friends of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Arrested for Roles After the Bombing

Wed, 01 May 2013 18:03:00 EDT

GWEN IFILL: The Boston bombings investigation took another new turn today with federal charges filed against three college buddies of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. They're accused of trying to get rid of evidence or lying to investigators after the attack. Two of the three are from Kazakhstan.

Azamat Tazhayakov is on the left, and Dias Kadyrbayev is in the center in this undated photo with Tsarnaev taken in New York. The third new suspect was identified as Robel Phillipos.

We get more now from Dina Temple-Raston of NPR.

Dina Temple-Raston, give us a sense what we know, if anything, about these three.

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON, National Public Radio: Well, we know that, as you said, two of them are from Kazakhstan and the third one is American.

We also know that they -- that two of them, the two Kazakhstan students, were arrested 11 days ago. They were arrested on immigration charges. And officials had some idea that they might be involved somehow with the main suspect in the Boston bombing, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and so they basically kept them on these immigration charges until they could build a case that at least would give them some idea of what role they might have played.

It's important to realize that the role they played is after the bombing, not before it.

GWEN IFILL: Right.

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: It appears what they did is tried to help their college friend.

GWEN IFILL: Let's walk through the complaint that was filed today in Boston as these men were charged. It says that they intentionally obstructed justice. How did they do that, allegedly?

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: Well, what they -- what -- there are two things that we think that happened, according to the criminal complaint.

The first is that when they first saw the photographs that were released of the suspects, remember, suspect number two is who authorities believe is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the one with the white hat. When they first saw that picture, they actually texted him and said, hey, dude, that looks like you. And he wrote back, LOL, laugh out loud.

And then when they started to realize that maybe it was in fact him, they went to his dorm room. And when they went there, they found a backpack that was filled with fireworks that had actually been emptied of their explosive powder. And apparently there was Vaseline in the backpack and I guess an assignment from the university, a homework assignment.

And so they grabbed the backpack basically and decided that they would dispose of it. From the criminal complaint, it seems like something that they did very much on the spur of the moment. This wasn't something that they had sort of really thought through.

GWEN IFILL: And then they began to talk -- when the authorities began to talk to these young men, they began to uncover a pattern of not only obstruction of justice, but also lying and concealment of their role after the fact?

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: Well, not exactly.

Robel Phillipos, the third person who was arrested today, this 19-year-old student also from this university, he is the only one who is being charged with lying to federal agents. He is not being charged with obstruction of justice.

And, apparently, when federal agents asked if he had had any contact with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev after the bombing, he denied it. Then they asked him if they'd gone to the dorm room or if his friends had gone to the dorm room, and he denied that, too. And he was basically caught in a lie to federal agents.

GWEN IFILL: So the stories changed as the -- in the days -- it's important to remember that the Tsarnaev brothers were at large for, what, four days, and during that period of time authorities were talking to these young men and we assume others?

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: Yes, exactly.

And these young men, the other thing that was interesting that they mentioned in this criminal complaint that one of the young men went to the dormitory to meet Dzhokhar Tsarnaev just days after the bombing, like two days after the bombing, and he had given himself a short haircut, and he mentioned that to FBI agents.

GWEN IFILL: How did they get into his room? They showed up and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev -- this is his dorm room at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, and his roommate let them him? Dzhokhar wasn't there himself?

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: That's what we understand, that at least in the time when they took this backpack out that.

He was there the first time they went. He was not there the second time they went. The roommate let them in. And according to the criminal complaint, they took the backpack and they actually took his laptop as well, because they didn't want it to seem like -- rouse any suspicion of the roommate by just taking the backpack.

And authorities say in the criminal complaint that they found the backpack in a landfill a couple of days ago with these fireworks without the powder in them that backpack, but they didn't find the laptop. And in fact that was why they had gone to the landfill to try and find this laptop. Presumably -- it's not mentioned exactly in the criminal complaint, but presumably these two students hung onto the laptop and that's something authorities have now.

And that's important because it gives them an ability to take a look at what Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was doing before the bombing, because they can mirror that hard drive.

GWEN IFILL: Do we have any idea about the history of these young men, how long they have known each other, how close friends they are?

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: It seems that they are very close friends.

Apparently, Dzhokhar spent a lot of time in the New Bedford apartment of these Kazakh students. And they took classes together and that sort of thing. And it sort of seems that they came together over the last couple of years, as foreign students often do when they are together in this sort of college environment.

I don't think anybody necessarily thinks there's anything particularly nefarious about their friendship. One of Kazakh students had actually gone to Kazakstan back in December and had come back. And there's been some question about whether or not there was something nefarious or suspicious about that.

But a lot of foreign students actually go back home for the Christmas holiday. And there hasn't been any real suggestion that that's a problem, although what is interesting about these visa violations is apparently part of what was going on with these visa violations is that these kids didn't attend class much. But, you know, there are a lot of college students who do that.

GWEN IFILL: But that can be used as a pretext to hold you.

To be clear again, in this charge today, they are not being charged with any complicity with the bombing itself. But for what they are being charged with, how stiff is the potential penalty?

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: Well, they can get years in prison for this.

But I think what is important here is that we have understood from officials that they are following as many -- or they're tracking as many as a dozen people who might have something to do with this case. And what these arrests today shed light on is not what happened before the bombing, which is what they are really interested in.

How did they make the bombs? Did they test the bombs? Did someone help them put together this plot? What this sheds light on is what happened perhaps afterwards. And they seem to be having a lot more evidence on that than they do beforehand. And that's what they're really focused on now.

GWEN IFILL: So, it's fair to say the hunt is still under way.

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: There's more to come.

GWEN IFILL: Dina Temple-Raston of NPR, thanks so much.

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: You're very welcome.

Live Chat: Is 'Top Secret America' Making Us Safer?

Wed, 01 May 2013 12:43:00 EDT

Watch Top Secret America - 9/11 to the Boston Bombings on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, Americans are asking why the country's intelligence agencies failed to prevent the devastating attack.

On Tuesday, FRONTLINE aired "Top Secret America: 9/11 to the Boston Bombings," a documentary that looks at the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on counter-terrorism efforts since September 11, 2001 and asks whether they have made us safer.

Wednesday at 2 p.m. ET, FRONTLINE hosts a live chat with Boston Globe columnist Kevin Cullen, Washington Post reporter and film correspondent Dana Priest and FRONTLINE producer Mike Wiser. Watch the conversation below.

Top Secret America Chat

In Hindsight of Boston Marathon Bombing, Trying to Figure Out What Went Wrong

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 18:26:00 EDT

GWEN IFILL: We turn to the investigation into the Boston bombings, and to Ray Suarez, who has the latest.

RAY SUAREZ: It's been just over two weeks since the attacks and investigators are pursuing several lines of inquiry both here and abroad.

Those include, according to several news organizations, widening the investigation to see if others may have helped the suspects before or after the bombings, and continuing to speak with the widow of the 26-year-old suspect who was killed, Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

And, as the president said at his news conference, the director of national intelligence will oversee a review of how 17 agencies handled earlier tips and questions about the older brother.

For the latest, we turn to Evan Perez, who is covering the case for The Wall Street Journal.

And, Evan, first of all, it's a good reminder that there are 17 agencies involved with questions like these. What are the kinds of questions that they're going to be asking themselves about the last several months?

EVAN PEREZ, The Wall Street Journal: Well, you know, this happens after every one of these types of events.

And I think it's sort of a natural response that happens, especially from the White House. Obviously, something went wrong here. Two bombs exploded and people died. So they want to know if there is anything else that they could have done. We know, for instance, that the Russian security agencies in 2011 expressed some concern about Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his mother.

And we know those concerns were sent over to the FBI and to the CIA. The FBI looked at it, investigated for about three months, didn't find enough, asked the Russians for more information. They never got any. And so right now, I think -- the president spoke about this today -- was, you know, I'm not sure that we can say a ball was dropped, per se.

RAY SUAREZ: He defended the FBI.

EVAN PEREZ: He defended the FBI and said they did what they could based on what -- the authorities they have under the law.

The Russians didn't provide further information when they were asked. It's only now that they have come forward and said, well, we had some wiretaps that had her speaking with some suspicious people, and him, and his mother -- Tamerlan and his mother discussing very -- in very broad terms, the concept of jihad.

So, now we know a lot more. Perhaps the FBI could have done more then. But that's hindsight.

RAY SUAREZ: Meanwhile, the criminal investigation continues. And now they're looking more closely at Tamerlan Tsarnaev's widow. What do we know about her?

EVAN PEREZ: Well, we know that the FBI has been wanting to talk to her for -- you know, face-to-face for several days here since the bombings or since they identified Tamerlan and Dzhokhar.

So they have been wanting and they have been trying to negotiate with her lawyers to, A., get more time to talk to her, and also to get some DNA samples. As we reported yesterday, the FBI found some female DNA on remnants of the bombs. And so they want to know whether -- you know, basically cross her off the list, if that's the case, that she had nothing to do with it.

She basically has said, you know, that she had nothing -- she was completely shocked about the events. And I think what they want to know is, you know, the key period between the bombings on Monday, April 15^th, and Friday, what was going on then? Where was Tamerlan? They know a lot more about Dzhokhar because he was at a dorm. And he was in college. And he's in and out. And there's more recordings of what he was doing.

Tamerlan is a little bit more of a mystery, and I think she might be able to shed some light on that.

RAY SUAREZ: The net seems to be widening to up to a dozen more people who may have some idea about the whereabouts of the two brothers.

EVAN PEREZ: Right.

There are plenty of associates, I think, that the FBI is very interested in, some more than others. There is some concern that perhaps some of these folks might have helped get rid of evidence, unwittingly, perhaps not on purpose, but a brother might have asked one of them to get rid of some materials and so on. And so the FBI has been essentially looking into that.

They have been doing a lot of searches. One of the big problems with the case right now is trying to figure out where they put the bombs together. It's still somewhat of a mystery. They did searches of the home the brothers shared in Cambridge and found no residue. And so these are messy things to put together. These are black powder bombs.

So it's very unusual for you not to be able to find this. You would have to be really good at cleaning up to be able to erase all proof of this. So that's something that I think they hope these folks can help them figure out.

RAY SUAREZ: All during this time, more attention has been focused on the journey that Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar's mother, has taken during these years.

EVAN PEREZ: Right.

RAY SUAREZ: We see a couple of years ago a woman in stylish clothes and stylish hairstyles, and now a woman in black with her head covered, a very different kind of person.

EVAN PEREZ: Well, yes.

And, you know, her religious turn sort of mirrors her son's. And it appears what has happened -- what happened is after a few years here in the United States, the family was struggling. The boys are beginning to party. They're starting to enjoy American life. And she becomes worried. And she turns to religion as sort of a way to bring them back.

It happens a lot with immigrant families. And I think she was trying to do that. She used religion. And it looks like, at least from what we can see right now, she is key to the beginning of his religious turn. He at some point goes off in a different direction. She says that she never put him into -- on to the path of extremism. But it's clear that she was very key, at least in the beginning, for his religious turn.

RAY SUAREZ: There's been a lot of speculation about someone named Misha. Who is it? Have we talked to this person? And what have they said for themselves?

EVAN PEREZ: The FBI was very mystified.

This is something that was brought up by members of the family, who -- the Tsarnaev family, who essentially said that they were very worried that there was this mysterious Armenian figure who was very key to radicalizing Tamerlan.

The FBI tracked done this person. He is of Ukrainian, Armenian descent, lives in Rhode Island. They have interviewed him. They have gotten his computer. They have gone through everything. At this point, they believe he had nothing to do with this. He has told and said in interviews that he hasn't seen Tamerlan in three years, and that if indeed he knew about this, he would have tried to stop it.

So I think the FBI believes him and thinks that this might just be another one of those blind alleys that these cases tend to generate.

RAY SUAREZ: Evan Perez of The Wall Street Journal, thanks for joining us.

EVAN PEREZ: Thank you.

News Wrap: Boston Suspect Transferred From Hospital to Prison Medical Center

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 18:13:00 EDT

HARI SREENIVASAN: The surviving Boston Marathon bombing suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, is now at a federal prison medical center. The 19-year-old was transferred overnight to a facility in Central Massachusetts 40 miles west of Boston. He had been treated at Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center since his arrest one week ago. Tsarnaev is facing federal terror charges in the April 15^th attack that killed three people and wounded more than 260.

In Afghanistan, 45 people died early today when a bus collided with the wreckage of a truck that the Taliban attacked. The bus rammed a stranded oil tanker that had been left in the road for several days. It happened near the borders of Helmand and Kandahar provinces. In addition to the dead, 10 others were injured.

The government of Japan will let Japanese airlines resume flying their Boeing 787 Dreamliners. The transport ministry gave the official approval today. The Dreamliners were grounded in mid-January after incidents of their lithium ion batteries overheating and smoldering. They could return to service in June, with newly installed systems to minimize the fire risk.

Police in New York City think they have found a piece of one of the airliners destroyed in the 9/11 attacks. A police spokesman said today it's part of a landing gear with a Boeing identification number. Surveyors found the five-foot-tall object on Wednesday as they inspected the planned site of an Islamic community center. The site is about three blocks from Ground Zero. Police have secured the scene for further examination.

The pace of the U.S. economy picked up at the start of the year. Commerce Department figures today showed an annual growth rate of 2.5 percent for the first quarter. That was up sharply from the end of 2012, but Wall Street had hoped for more. As a result, the Dow Jones industrial average gained more than 11 points to close at 14,712. The Nasdaq fell 10 points to close at 3,279. For the week, the Dow gained one percent; the Nasdaq rose more than two percent.

Those are some of the day's major stories -- now back to Judy.

Weighing Options for U.S. Response if Syria Chemical Weapon Use Is Confirmed

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 18:04:00 EDT

JEFFREY BROWN: And we pick up the debate now with Kori Schake, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institute and professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and David Cortright, director of policy studies at the University of Notre Dame's Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.

Well, I would like it to ask you both, starting with you, Kori Schake, where are we in this? What do you make of the evidence of chemical weapons so far?

KORI SCHAKE, Stanford University Hoover Institute: It looks to me like the evidence is pretty strong.

And that the British, French, and Israelis came to the same conclusion I think strengthens the merits of the case against the Assad government, but the president's not wrong that we should be careful and deliberate and -- as we go forward. I'm a little bit worried, though, that the administration is trying to set a standard so high out of concern for not repeating the mistakes of Iraq that we will make a different set of mistakes this time and prevent action out of fear of taking wrong action.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, let me -- we will pick up on that.

But, first, David Cortright, what do you make first of the evidence that at least we know publicly so far?

DAVID CORTRIGHT, University of Notre Dame Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies: Well, it seems that the evidence is very thin.

So far, all we have are some tissue samples, some blood samples. These have gone through several different hands, so the chain of custody is very unclear. To really be certain about this, we need to have actual physical evidence from a site. We need to know when and where these attacks took place.

And that will require on-the-ground inspection. The U.N. was asked about a month ago to send some inspectors. Syria has refused. There are discussions about the terms for those inspections to go in. I think the inspectors are sitting right now in Cyprus. So, I think the top priority is to get more evidence, send in an inspection team, work out the modality so that we can find out what really has taken place here. That's the top requirement.

JEFFREY BROWN: And let me just stay with you to pick up on the idea that Ms. Schake brought up about the president raising the bar at this point. What do you see the president -- how do you see the president's response so far?

DAVID CORTRIGHT: Well, the bar has to be raised to the point where it's convincing. The evidence has to be bulletproof, because in order to deal with this, if it is, indeed, a serious use of chemical weapons by the regime, there has to be international action. We have to take it to the U.N.

And we have to convince not just U.K. and France and some others, but all of the members of the Security Council, most especially Russia, that there has been indeed this kind of violation. And if we have that, then we can take action, we can work diplomatically through the U.N. and begin to take more measures to isolate and weaken the regime through diplomatic actions.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, Kori Schake, so are you saying we are at the point you think where we have enough evidence, enough to go on to take some action, and what should be done? What are the options at this point?

KORI SCHAKE: Well, in truth, it's not clear to me that the evidence has -- enough of the evidence has been made public that we can make judgments about it.

So we need to know that, and we don't know it yet. But it sounds like the intelligence services of the United States, Britain, France, and Israel have come to that conclusion. Moreover, the government of Syria has come to that conclusion. The Syrian government -- the reason the U.N. started an investigation was that the Syrian government claimed that chemical weapons had been used by the rebels and invited the U.N. to investigate.

Once the U.N. took them up on it, they refused to allow them in the country. So even the Syrians admit that chemical weapons have been used.

JEFFREY BROWN: So, what do you think should happen?

KORI SCHAKE: I agree that further investigation is probably needed, but it does -- if I were the Syrian government, what I would have done to be the most diabolical choice would be to use just enough and make it difficult enough to prove that you persuade the intelligence agencies, but you have a difficult time making the case in public, because then you can put the president of the United States in the position where he has threatened grave action, but doesn't carry it out.

And that may dishearten the rebels in Syria. And if I were the Syrian government, that's what I would want to do.

JEFFREY BROWN: But that's the Syrian government. What do you think the American government should do now, given the state of things? What do you think? What kind of action should be taken?

KORI SCHAKE: Well, I think there are lots of actions we should take.

It does seem to me that if the Syrian government has killed 80,000 civilians and has used chemical weapons, that that makes a very strong case for creating humanitarian corridors, take some of the pressure off of the surrounding states, like Jordan and Turkey, who are currently housing so many refugees from Syria.

Establish safe areas inside of Syria. Allow the Syrian rebels to guard and police them, and us, prevent the Syrian government from using military force against them, in particular the way the Syrian government has been terrorizing its own population. It's firing artillery, and using helicopter gunships.

We have the ability to prevent them from doing that. And I think at a minimum, on safe areas on the borders of Syria's territory, we ought to be doing that.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, David Cortright, your response?

DAVID CORTRIGHT: Well, that's, I think, very dangerous. We don't need another war in the Middle East.

Let's focus this discussion on the chemical weapons threat, the possibility of use of these weapons. That is a dangerous concern. And let's concentrate on what it will take to get the evidence that's needed and then, if it's there, to put pressure on them diplomatically through the U.N.

There's a lot we don't know yet, and the -- just a few incidents that have been reported, even the U.S. intelligence agency itself says there's varying degrees of certainty about the evidence. So, we shouldn't be talking about military action, I don't think, under any circumstance.

Even if we were -- confirmed now that there are chemical weapons that have been used, using military force will not deal with that situation. Syria has a huge arsenal of these weapons. If you attack them militarily, that could cause explosions and the release of some of these toxic gases. So military force is not the way to go about this.

We need to first get the evidence. If it's there, then let's mobilize the U.N. Security Council, begin to take measures, including possibly targeted sanctions. We tried to get sanctions against Syria at the beginning of this crisis. Russia balked. But if we have solid evidence that Syria has used chemical weapons, this might begin to move Russia and get it on our side in terms of putting some pressure on the regime.

That, I think, is the right step to take. That would begin to weaken them and isolate them diplomatically, and would help to perhaps begin to get a solution to this crisis. We don't need another military engagement here in the Middle East. The Pentagon has said it would take as many as 70,000 troops on the ground to be able to get some certainty about controlling those weapons.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right.

DAVID CORTRIGHT: We're talking about another full-scale war.

JEFFREY BROWN: Kori Schake, feel free to respond to that, but I want to put it in the context of also what the congressman we heard in our setup talk about, the American public, the lack of an appetite, I think, for more intervention after 10 years.

KORI SCHAKE: Absolutely. The American public is war-weary, and they should be war-weary.

The problem is that the Syrian government is taking advantage of that war-weariness to do truly atrocious, inhuman things. It's a war crime to use chemical weapons. Right? So they are capitalizing on our desire, as the president said, for the tide of war to be receding.

But, unfortunately, we don't get to choose whether the tide of war is receding. The government of Bashar al-Assad is making that choice. And the choice that they have made is to kill 80,000 of their own citizens. And the longer that we let this civil war burn on, the greater the likelihood that the rebels will take assistance wherever they can get assistance.

We already begin to see the Al-Nusra Front and al-Qaida-related organizations ...

JEFFREY BROWN: All right.

KORI SCHAKE: ... who are willing to help fight the evil that the Syrian government is doing ...

JEFFREY BROWN: OK.

KORI SCHAKE: ... and thereby win a foothold of support in the Syrian public. That is just not in American interests, even though we are war-weary.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, and David Cortright, a very brief last word, please.

DAVID CORTHRIGHT: Well, use of these weapons would be a war crime, and we should take action against it. That's why I think we need to go and get the evidence solid, then go through the U.N. Security Council, start with condemnations, get sanctions, and especially begin to get Russia on our side in putting pressure on that regime.

That's the most important thing we could do to counter their use of these kind of weapons.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, David Cortright, Kori Schake, thank you both very much.

Tsarnaev Brothers Planned Times Square Attack After Boston Bombing

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 18:02:00 EDT

JUDY WOODRUFF: New York City was supposedly going to be the next target of the suspected Boston Marathon bombers. Mayor Michael Bloomberg disclosed that during a news conference today.

Bloomberg said FBI officials were told by Dzhokhar Tsarnaev that he and his brother decided spontaneously to attempt an attack on Times Square last week.

New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly filled in other details of the plan after Bloomberg spoke first.

MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG, I-New York City: He told the FBI apparently that he and his brother had intended to drive to New York and detonate additional explosives in Times Square. They had built these additional explosives, and we know they had the capacity to carry out these attacks.

POLICE COMMISSIONER RAYMOND KELLY, New York City: They discussed this while driving around in a Mercedes SUV that they had hijacked after they shot and killed an MIT police officer in Cambridge, Dzhokhar said.

That plan, however, fell apart when they realized that the vehicle that they hijacked was low on gas and ordered the driver to stop at a nearby gas station. The driver used the opportunity to escape and call the police. That eventually led to the shoot-out in Watertown, where the older brother was killed in an exchange of gunfire with the police.

Up until that point, the two brothers had at their disposal six improvised explosive devices. One was a pressure cooker bomb similar to the two that had exploded at the marathon. The other five were pipe bombs.

JUDY WOODRUFF: For more now on what was reported and the continuing investigation, we are joined again by Dina Temple-Raston of NPR.

Dina, welcome to the NewsHour again.

Just fill us in on what investigators are learning that they're passing on.

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON, National Public Radio: Well, in this particular case, when we're talking about the New York plot, what they learned actually happened in 16 hours, a couple of marathon interrogation sessions that a special interrogation team had at Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's bedside.

And it was during that time, before he was Mirandized, before he was read his rights that he provided some of these details about the spontaneous attack that they thought about having in New York. And they did have the capacity to do it, as Commissioner Kelly said. They had the bombs.

It was a question of whether or not they would actually get all the way to New York. And they had a gas problem and then ultimately the police surrounded them and ended up killing the elder brother, Tamerlan.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But this came out, as you said, in the course of some -- you said some 16 hours of interrogation over several sessions with the younger Tsarnaev brother. So they were piecing the story together; is that the way it worked?

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: Well, basically what's going on now is exactly that, that the FBI is trying to piece together what happened in the days and months leading up to the attack.

So, for example, there are FBI agents who are now in Asia who are interviewing the Tsarnaevs' parents to try and find out, for example, what Tamerlan, who had been in Russia for six months last year, what he was doing while he was there. They are looking for actual gaps in the schedule, for some sort of indication that perhaps he wasn't with his family or wasn't with his father and might have trained at a terrorist training camp.

And that would have given him the capacity to build these bombs. They're very curious to know whether or not the two young men were able to do this on their own, to build these kinds of bombs and allegedly wreak this kind of havoc just by use a recipe that they may have found on the Internet.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Dina, how does this New York angle though square with what seemed to be coming out earlier that they didn't have any other attacks planned or if they were going to go to New York, it was just to party?

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: Well, that's what we had heard that the young man Dzhokhar originally said.

But, you know, the way this works is he says something. And then they try and check it out. If it's inconsistent, then they come become and talk to him again. And we did hear from the FBI early on that they were trying to corroborate a lot of what Dzhokhar was telling them.

And this was clearly something that they feel that he was holding back. And they were able to go a little bit further. I mean, we do know that they interrogated the man whose SUV they carjacked. And he said that they had discussed New York. So I think that's how they put these two things together.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Are you getting an understanding of how these interrogations are working? Are they surrounding Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in his hospital bed and peppering him with questions? I mean, how is this working?

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: Well, I think originally, the first 16 hours, what they were trying to do is actually build a rapport with him to try to get him to talk.

And once they had established that there were no -- there weren't any other co-conspirators and that they didn't think that there would be any other bombs going off or any other attacks, they actually Mirandized him. So they had 16 hours of trying to establish whether or not there was a public safety concern. And once they had satisfied themselves that there wasn't, they Mirandized him.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And as you said, still -- they are not taking what he is saying at face value, but they do seem to be passing it along.

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: Well, I think after it's corroborated, they seem to be passing it along.

They’re not taking anything the parents in Russia are saying at face value either. They are claiming that the entire time that Tamerlan was in Russia that he was -- they knew of his whereabouts. And they are saying that the reason why he went to Russia was because he needed to get a Russian passport, that his passport was going to expire. He hadn't become a naturalized citizen here in America, so he needed a passport, and that's why he went for six months to visit his father.

I mean, that's not beyond the pale -- it's not beyond the realm of possibility, given that his father was living there and he was there for six months.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Separately, Dina, what about these reports that the Russians notified not only the FBI, but now we learn today the CIA, with information, warnings about the older brother, Tamerlan? What do we know, and what happened to those warnings?

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: Well, our understanding is that those warnings came into the FBI, and the FBI took them seriously and actually interviewed Tamerlan three times and interviewed his parents and actually did a rather extensive database on them.

And they were told by the Russians in kind of vague terms, our reporting is showing, that he was somehow connected to Muslim extremists in Russia. And he -- they were told that he was a threat to Russia, not to the U.S., but to Russia. So the FBI tried to run this to ground. They didn't find any derogatory evidence. They said as much. And they put him on something called the TIDE list, which stands for Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment database.

And basically what it is, the lowest level database that they have is a so-called terrorist watch list. They have about three quarters of a million people on it. So it is a very low level database. And he was put on that. And then after the Russians contacted the CIA, the CIA also suggested that he be put on the TIDE list. And he was. So that -- those things seem very consistent.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And rising now criticism from some Republican senators that the administration, that the CIA, the FBI didn't do enough to be on guard with Tamerlan Tsarnaev after they got these warnings.

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: Well, that is the big question.

And I think there is probably going end up being some sort of inquiry about that. But the FBI's line on this is that he wasn't doing anything illegal. And they did as much investigation as they could and they couldn't find anything, a predicate for them to go beyond just putting him on this TIDE list.

And because of that, I think there is some criticism, why wasn't he, for example, put on the selectee list, which is a slightly higher list? There is basically a hierarchy of lists. And a selectee list, there are about 14,000 people on that list, we think. And that would be someone who would be secondarily screened and perhaps tracked a little bit more closely.

And then, of course, there's the famous no-fly list. And we all know about that one, which has about 10,000 people on it. And no one knows if they are actually on the no-fly list until they get to the airport, and then they're not allowed to fly.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, the investigation continues.

Dina Temple-Raston, thank you.

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: You're very welcome.

JEFFREY BROWN: And beyond the news of the investigation, there were some powerful moments today from a severely injured patient who spoke at a press conference at Brigham and Women's Hospital.

Heather Abbott, a 38-year-old woman from Rhode Island, recounted her experience and her choice to have her lower leg amputated. Doctors had tried to save her foot for nearly a week. Abbott had come to Boston on the day of the bombings to watch a Red Sox game. She was standing in line to get into a bar near where the second bomb went off.

HEATHER ABBOTT, Bombing Survivor: It blew a bunch of us into the bar.

And I suppose it hit me because I was the last one. I was on the ground. Everybody was running to back of the bar to the exit. And I felt like my foot was on fire. I knew I couldn't stand up. I didn't know what to do. I was just screaming, somebody, please help me.

And I was thinking, who is going to help me? I mean, everybody else is running for their lives. And to my surprise, and from what I'm learning now, I'm kind of just learning how I was sort of rescued out of there, there were two women and two men involved in helping me get out of the bar and into an ambulance.

And you can't sit there and say what if. What if I arrived five minutes later or five minutes earlier, or what if I decided not to go to the game this year? And I think I did that for a little while, but this is the situation I'm faced with. It's not going to change. So for me to just kind of dwell on negative is sort of a waste of time for me.

JUDY WOODRUFF: That was Heather Abbott, a 38-year-old woman from Rhode Island who had one of her legs, lower legs amputated at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

Judy's Notebook: Witnessing the Events in Boston From 5,000 Miles Away

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 10:07:00 EDT

Kauai, Hawaii. Photo by Judy Woodruff/PBS NewsHour.

When the events at the Boston Marathon unfolded last week, I was about as far away as one could be, and still be in the U.S. Yes, halfway across the Pacific Ocean, in Hawaii.

While the reporter in me hates to miss a big story, I admit I felt a touch of relief, especially on the first day, at not having to pry for details in the gruesome aftermath of the bombings. But even from a distance of over 5,000 miles, I was glued to the news; on television, radio and online. Returning to my hotel room from a dinner Thursday night at around 10 p.m. local time, I watched the frantic police manhunt underway at what was 4 a.m. in Watertown, Mass.

It contributed to a kind of dual identity all week: on the one hand, I couldn't take my eyes off what was happening in Boston. On the other, I was conscious of how fortunate I was to have been invited to participate in a special gathering of Hawaii's business, educational and philanthropic leaders, on the beautiful island of Kauai.

Called the Hawaii Executive Conference, it has convened once a year since 1963, making this their 50th anniversary. I spent time with a diverse group of remarkable men and women, all looking for the best ways to confront the nation's and their own state's future challenges, especially in the economic and educational realms.

They share many of the same worries familiar to us in Washington, over jobs, government spending and the fate of their children's and grandchildren's generations. One striking difference I saw is the youth of some of their most impressive leaders: co-chairs were the 47-year-old president of the Bank of Hawaii, Peter Ho, and the 42-year-old private equity executive, B.J. Kobayashi.

I listened as they spoke of the need for better schools, a clean environment and greater innovation and risk-taking, to attract new jobs to the Aloha State. They heard a pep talk from AOL founder and entrepreneur Steve Case, a Hawaii native who urged them to look for ways to invest in their own state. Case's wife, Jean, who has become an expert in interactive technologies and social media, also spoke. The message from the Cases and other internet and investment pioneers was "take risks" and "embrace failure," advice they said applies to anyone interested in innovating.

The group also heard from Gary Knell, president of our sister news organization, NPR, explaining how news gathering today has to innovate in its own way to survive, given dizzying changes in technology. The era of one or two deadlines a day is gone; they are constant and the public not only expects us to keep up, but also to embrace their growing engagement in what we do. I agreed with his analysis and devoted much of the rest of my remarks to Washington's gridlock and the country's current partisan divide.

Still, that dual identity meant that for all of us at the conference, for all the focus on what's new and how do we keep pace with change, there was an ever-present concern with Boston. Before we understood the magnitude of what had happened, there was a little conversation around whether the news media was making too much of it.

But as the toll of dead and wounded quickly became clear, that shifted to a sense that, once again, that the United States had been the target of something terrible. And unlike other countries where attacks have sadly become commonplace, in the Middle East and parts of Europe and Asia, the U.S. doesn't treat them with complacency.

Four innocents killed in Boston by ruthless terrorists -- strikes just as hard at the heart of Americans living in Hawaii, as it does in Florida, Texas or North Dakota. We Americans mourn every death and every person injured. There is nothing to be "accepted" about what happened in Boston. It's a measure of our national character, of the value we place on human life, that we celebrate every soul lost, from eight year old Martin Richard, to 23-year-old Lu Lingzi the Chinese graduate student studying at Boston University.

As far away as we were on the remote island of Kauai, in Hawaii, we never doubted we were part of the same community as the people of Boston, horrified at the violence, mourning the loss of life, thinking of how Hawaiians might help by sending aid, and reminded that we share common values of respect for political differences and for human life. The national partisan divide that many deplore, seemed to fade for a day or two. The awful events so far away, reminded us of what binds us together as Americans.

Editor's note: An original version of this story was incorrectly edited to state that events on April 19 occurred in Watertown, Conn. They happened in Watertown, Mass.

Mining Online History for What May Have Radicalized, Informed Tsarnaev Brothers

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 18:02:00 EDT

JUDY WOODRUFF: Federal investigators pieced together more of the Boston bombings puzzle today, as one of the victims, a policeman, was honored. The service featured a mass turnout by other police officers.

Police officers by the hundreds lined up in the late morning sun to pay respects to Sean Collier, the MIT officer shot and killed last Thursday night, allegedly by the bombers. The college canceled classes for the day, as thousands turned out to memorialize the 26-year-old Collier.

ROBERT RANDOLPH, Chaplain to the Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology: We do not understand why Sean Collier was taken away from his family, his brothers and sisters in law enforcement, his friends on this campus. And we shout into the darkness. Even if no one hears, we say thank you for Sean, for his gifts, compassion, his energy, his sense of right and wrong.

JUDY WOODRUFF: The singer/songwriter James Taylor played an interlude, and later came Vice President Biden.

VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I’ve known the Colliers my whole life, and today's the first time I met them. I grew up in the same neighborhood. I was telling them that -- like a lot you have a badge, shield pined on.

You went out in my neighborhood, when I moved to Claymont, you either became a firefighter, a cop, a priest, or you joined the trades. I wasn't capable of doing any of them, so I ended up where I am. But I know you. I know you.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Mr. Biden also spoke of the terrorist threat that gripped Boston last week.

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Whether it's al-Qaida central out of the FATA or two twisted, perverted, cowardly knockoff jihadis here in Boston, why do they do what they do?

They do it to instill fear, to have us, in the name of our safety and security, jettison what we value most and the world most values about us: our open society, our system of justice that guarantees freedom.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Meanwhile, the scene of the Boston Marathon attack, Boylston Street, reopened to the public.

And in the investigation, the Associated Press quoted unnamed U.S. officials who said the bombs were triggered by rudimentary remote controls. Some of the gunpowder in the devices may have come from this store in New Hampshire, where Tamerlan Tsarnaev bought $400 dollars worth of fireworks in February.

WOMAN: He just wanted the biggest, loudest stuff that we have in the store, pretty much.

JUDY WOODRUFF: The surviving Tsarnaev, Dzhokhar, has reportedly told investigators that the brothers learned to make the pressure cooker bombs from an online magazine called Inspire. It's published by al-Qaida's affiliate in the Arabian Peninsula and includes a section called "Open Source Jihad" that explains bomb-making techniques.

The ideology that apparently sparked the attack remained on display on Tamerlan Tsarnaev's YouTube page, links to videos from, among others, an Islamist fighter in the North Caucasus.

This afternoon, The Washington Post reported that the CIA asked to place Tamerlan Tsarnaev's name on a watch list more than a year before the attacks. It wasn't immediately clear when his name was added to the list. But The Post said it happened after the FBI closed its initial inquiry.

For more on what may have turned two young men into violent terrorists, I'm joined now by Dr. Jerrold Post, who had a 21-year career at the CIA, where he founded the Center for Analysis of Personal and Political Behavior. He's now a professor of psychiatry, political psychiatry and international affairs at George Washington University. And Jessica Stern, who is a lecturer at Harvard and former National Security Council staffer who's interviewed dozens of terrorists to try to understand what motivates them.

Welcome to you both.

Dr. Post, to you first.

How does radicalization like what we have seen here happen? How does a young man living in the United States go from reading material to acting in a violent way trying to kill people?

DR. JERROLD POST, The George Washington University: The phenomenon of radicalization online is really quite alarming.

It's been estimated that there's some 4,800 radical Islamist websites. And I am struck that young men and women who are isolated, not feeling they belong, this way, can belong to a virtual community of hatred. Anwar al-Awlaki, who was known as the bin Laden of the Internet, was very adroit at manipulating individuals who were no longer lonely, but now belonged.

The issue of moving to violence is not so well understood. That often seems to be happenstance and often precipitated by the death of a friend, the loss of a loved one, the blowing up of a family home. And the issue of radicalization, though, this is a systematic process and quite alarming and a major counterterrorism challenge.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Jessica Stern, what do you see in your research that turns -- that causes these young men to turn the corner to something violent?

JESSICA STERN, Harvard University: Well, I think it's often about confused identity.

And some young people seem to have a lot of trouble withstanding that confused identity. And they find a way to identify with people who feel oppressed. That narrative of oppression is often appealing to young people for whom something, as Dr. Post said, has gone wrong.

With Faisal Shahzad, he started having tax problems. He became more religious. He started going to Pakistan. But he until that change was described as a fairly nice person. This is -- it's not a unique thing. We have seen this before.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And just to be clear, you're referring to one of the terrorists who tried to ...

JESSICA STERN: The Times Square bomber. I'm sorry.

JUDY WOODRUFF: That's right. I just wanted to be clear.

JESSICA STERN: Yes.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Dr. Post, you talked about feeling isolated, not feeling as if they belong. But they had to have read or seen something before that fueled the change. Is that right?

JERROLD POST: Oh, absolutely.

And it's quite striking. Jessica and my colleague Gabi Weimann, who wrote a book, "Terror on the Internet," talks about, especially for the youthful generation, in fact they are often consolidating their identity online. And the -- I have analyzed the themes in these online sites.

And there are three, and this coincides with what Jessica said earlier. First, we are the victims. Secondly, they, the West, and especially United States and Great Britain, but also Israel, are the victimizers, and therefore defensive jihad is justified and required against those who are doing this to us.

And that's a powerful message. And you have people who have -- the brothers were characterized as losers by their uncle, who are not doing so well in their lives, and that he had given -- had lost his dream to be an Olympic boxer, that his parents had left and were back in Dagestan. All of these together may have helped move him into this sphere where -- from passivity and helplessness to activity to aggression.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And, of course, some of this has to be speculation at this point, because we don't have the whole story yet.

Jessica Stern, tell us about what kind of information is available online. We have heard about this one website, Inspire. But as you said -- both of you have said, there are thousands more. What do they say? And are they all in English?

JESSICA STERN: Yes, there are a lot that are available in English. And, in fact, there are a number of scholars who communicate directly with jihadis online.

It's quite remarkable, what's going on now, the kind of back-and-forth. But it's not just jihadi ideology and how-to manuals that are available online. There are also "The Anarchist Cookbook." Paladin Press had a book called "Hit Man" that resulted in a lawsuit because someone followed the directions and actually committed murder.

It's available online. I was curious, and I looked last night. It's right there.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And what about the -- staying with you, Jessica Stern, just a moment, what about the ideological or the religious, Islamist strain of this? I mean, for example, are there passages from the Koran? Or is it extreme language that veers off in another direction?

JESSICA STERN: Well, what we have found is that it's often people who are most ignorant about Islam who can pick and choose passages, actually, from any religion that would seem to support a holy war.

And right now there's a canned ideology, a jihadi ideology that seems to be very appealing to the kind of alienated and lonely and lost young men that Jerry Post is talking about, that canned jihadi ideology right there. Some of them are converts.

JUDY WOODRUFF: I'm sorry. What did you say there at the end?

JESSICA STERN: I said of the -- about 35 percent of those who actually have tried to carry out jihadi attacks, most of them failing, of course, have been converts to Islam.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Dr. Post, is enough beginning to be known about this process that more could be done by authorities, by experts like you, like Ms. Stern to identify people who are -- may be susceptible to doing something?

JERROLD POST: Well, this is a real dilemma.

And what we mustn't do is undermine the very foundations of our liberal democracy in coping with this problem, because we have individuals. We can't be monitoring everyone's e-mail. The way Major Hasan, my psychiatric colleague at Fort Hood, was found was by monitoring the e-mails of al-Awlaki.

But it's a very difficult process. And if someone is himself exploring, feeling a sense of fervor, meaning, of aggression, it's quite a daunting challenge. But we mustn't give up our civil liberties in pursuing that challenge.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And, just quickly, final question to you, Jessica Stern.

It seems to me just a few years ago, we were hearing that there was more homegrown radicalization going on in Europe, in Great Britain, because perhaps young people were not feeling as assimilated there as they were here in the United States. That's changed?

JESSICA STERN: Well, it does seem to be changed.

For the most part, Muslims in the United States are much better integrated. They're better educated than the average American. They're more likely to vote than the average American. But the New York City Police Department predicted after the 2004 murder of Theo van Gogh, that that kind of radicalization would come to the states in about five years, and I think they were right.

JUDY WOODRUFF: On that note, we will live it there.

Jessica Stern, Dr. Jerrold Post, we thank you both.

JERROLD POST: Thank you.

Book Examines the Blurring Line Between Soldiers and Spies Since 9/11 Attacks

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 18:41:00 EDT

GWEN IFILL: Finally tonight, a new book about a major change in the way America fights.

The attacks of September 11^th sparked a revolution of sorts at the Central Intelligence Agency, transforming it from an operation focused on stealing secrets to something closer to a paramilitary organization focused on hunting down and killing terrorists.

The Department of Defense has evolved as well, beefing up its global intelligence gathering capabilities, and at times conducting missions that were previously done by the spies of the CIA.

New York Times national security correspondent Mark Mazzetti tracks all this in "The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth."

Margaret Warner sat down with him recently, and began by asking when it first became apparent that the line between spies and soldiers had blurred.

MARK MAZZETTI, "The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth": I started covering the military just shortly before the September 11^th attacks.

And in the months and years afterwards, what -- a lot of what I was reporting on was these efforts by Donald Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, to basically get soldiers outside of the declared war zones, so basically send them around the world.

And that meant changing not only the authorities that the Pentagon had to do that, but to build the budgets and build the capabilities of special operations troops. And Rumsfeld really was furious at the Pentagon he inherited that it wasn't equipped to fight this kind of war.

And so he was trying to push them more and more into intelligence gathering, manhunting. And there are some now famous memos that Rumsfeld wrote that sort of expressed his concern about these things. And then what we saw with the CIA was weak after 9/11. The -- President Bush gave the CIA lethal authority to capture and kill al-Qaida leaders, which is something it hadn't had for decades.

And so they become much more into the killing business and the military business.

MARGARET WARNER: More operational.

Now when did the CIA -- they have started out capturing and interrogating terror suspects in these secret sites. When did they shift their focus and sort of embrace the policy of targeting and killing them instead?

MARK MAZZETTI: There's a critical moment that I write about in 2004 when the CIA inspector general, John Helgerson, writes a pretty devastating report about the abuses in the CIA prisons.

And really it had this effect not only within the agency, but in the Bush administration. And, ultimately Congress, and, as we all know, the American public started learning the details. The first drone strike in Pakistan took place a month after that report.

Now, I don't want to draw too direct a line and say one absolutely led to another, but there's no question that this report, this internal report, led to -- helped lead to a new direction for the CIA from capturing to killing.

MARGARET WARNER: Now, you write about this, but briefly describe, what sort of debate was there within either the agency or the administration about the morality and legality of using drones to essentially carry out remote-control assassinations?

MARK MAZZETTI: You had a whole generation of CIA officers who had come in to the agency after the 1970s Church Committee investigations, which many people will remember sort of aired all the dirty laundry about assassination attempts, coup attempts in the early days of the CIA.

So many thought the CIA shouldn't be doing this in terms of handling armed drones. Then, of course, 9/11 happens. President Bush gives the lethal authorities. And those concerns that played out before 9/11 were quickly swept aside.

And it -- but it did take some time for the CIA really to escalate its killing operations even after the 9/11 attacks. Some of it was because, as we said, there was this interrogation focus, but it was also, their intelligence wasn't particularly good in order to do these drone strikes. They had to broker secret deals with these countries in order to allow them to have the strikes.

And then finally the big moment was, at the end of the Bush administration, President Bush decides that he's going to authorize the CIA to do drone strikes in Pakistan unilaterally, without even telling the Pakistanis, because he had reached a point of frustration.

MARGARET WARNER: You write about a number of the downsides, and one of the most important ones you found was that it -- all this focus on targeting, finding specific terrorists took them away from the traditional work, in which they might come to, say, understand developments throughout the Muslim world, let's say the Arab spring, for example, which the intelligence agencies missed.

MARK MAZZETTI: When the Arab spring happened, after the initial spark that happened in Tunisia that set up the Tunisian revolt, you had these cascading revolutions in Egypt, in Libya.

And there was a lot of concern in the administration that the agency was a step behind all along the way. And one of the things I write about in the book is that when you're doing manhunting and you're doing counterterrorism, you're necessarily going to be being very close with foreign spy services. They're going to help you find terror leaders or militants.

So you’re close with the Libyans and you're close with the Egyptians. But those are the last people who are going to tell you that there's a revolution on its way in the country. Right? And so ...

MARGARET WARNER: Even if they know it. Sometimes, they miss it.

MARK MAZZETTI: Even if they know it, they might not tell the CIA.

So the question was how much the CIA or other intel agencies didn't have its ear to the ground to predict or at least to update these revolts as they were happening.

MARGARET WARNER: Now, the new director of the CIA, John Brennan, seemed to indicate at his hearing that he wanted to dial back on the drone -- having the agency in the drone attack business. Do you think there is going to be a shift, and, if so, why?

MARK MAZZETTI: Well, I think that the pressure is increasing on President Obama to bring more transparency to these operations.

They remain in secret. And it's amazing that even some members of the Intelligence Committees who have access to the highest-classification information in the U.S. government, they realized during the Brennan hearings that they didn't have everything, and that they were pushing for more information.

So there's pressure to at least bring more transparency. And Brennan has said that there is -- there are functions the CIA is currently doing that it probably shouldn't be doing. I think that this is going to be something that takes time, though, that not -- that the CIA wouldn't necessarily entirely get out of the targeted killing business.

It may give up aspects of it. And then the question is, well, how long does it really take the agency to be moving back in the other -- the other direction? It could take years. But there's no question that the secrecy of all this is something that I don't think President Obama and the Obama administration is going to be able to maintain for very long.

MARGARET WARNER: Mark Mazzetti, thank you for joining us. And I look forward to continuing our conversation about "The Way of the Knife" online.

MARK MAZZETTI: Thanks very much.

GWEN IFILL: As Margaret mentioned, there is more of their conversation online, and you can find that on The Rundown.

Bombing Suspect Alleges Attack Was Self-Motivated, Not Connected to Other Groups

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 18:05:00 EDT

JUDY WOODRUFF: This afternoon, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino announced that the biggest charitable fund for the bombing victims, The One Fund, is up to $20 million dollars so far. Corporate donors committed $15 million dollars. The rest came from some 50,000 individuals. Payments are expected to be distributed starting in July.

We have more now on some of the questions surrounding the investigation and what's been learned in the last 24 hours.

I spoke with Devlin Barrett of The Wall Street Journal a short time ago.

Devlin Barrett, welcome.

Let me ask you first about this younger brother, Dzhokhar. We know that he's in the hospital bed communicating. What do we know about his injuries and how he's talking to, communicating with investigators?

DEVLIN BARRETT, The Wall Street Journal: His medical condition was upgraded from serious to fair, which means that he is improving, but he still has some pretty major injuries which are affecting his ability to communicate.

Specifically, he's been shot in the head, some sort of head wound, also a pretty serious gunshot wound to the neck which is affecting his throat. And also he's got gunshot wounds to his legs and his hand. So our understanding is that he can basically communicate by writing a little and by nodding and a little bit of sort of grunting yes or no at times, but it's very limited, is what's been described to us.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And what have you learned about what they are -- what he's saying to them, what he's communicating?

DEVLIN BARRETT: What we're told is that he's telling his FBI questioners that he and his brother acted alone, that they did so out of a jihadist sentiment, an anti-American sentiment, but that they weren't directed by anyone, certainly not a terror group overseas.

And he's also told them that there aren't any other bombs and there aren't any other bombers out there that they have to worry about. Now, what I'm told is investigators aren't taking any of that at face value, but so far they have not found other evidence to prove those assertions wrong.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And what's your understanding of whether he has taken responsibility for what's happened?

DEVLIN BARRETT: As -- what we have been told is that he essentially acknowledges his role in this.

There are differing accounts of how much of the direction he cites to his brother. I think that's still to be determined, but he acknowledges that he essentially did this and was part of this.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And that's what I wanted to ask you about, because there have been reports that he is saying in so many words and communicating to investigators that this was mainly his brother's idea, that his older brother was the driving force here.

DEVLIN BARRETT: I have seen those reports. And I will be honest, that's not how it's been described to me. I think we also have to be careful in -- when you hear different things. That's going to be a big part of the legal fight over this guy's ultimate sentence.

He's facing the death penalty. One of the -- maybe the only mitigating factor for him in all this may be that if he's able to claim that he was essentially a pawn or a tool of his older brother. I think, frankly, whatever the truth is, it's going to take more than his word to determine it.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But, in so many words, again, he's saying that they were not in connection with outside groups, but that they were looking at jihadist websites?

DEVLIN BARRETT: Right.

This seems to be -- everything that he's telling them and everything that the FBI has found so far really suggests the sort of classic nightmare scenario for counterterrorism officials, which is self-motivated, self-indoctrinated and self-trained, essentially. That doesn't mean that they won't find something in the course of the investigation that points to some direction or training or ideological involvement by another party, but right now what they have is two young men who seem to have taken it upon themselves to conduct some pretty atrocious acts of violence.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Devlin, we -- it's been reported that investigators also are talking to the widow of the older brother, Tamerlan. What's known about what she's saying?

DEVLIN BARRETT: Well, that's a very interesting piece to this case, because one of the things investigators are trying to determine is, did anyone either wittingly or unwittingly help them accomplish this?

And the widow has been an interesting focus for the bureau for a number of days, because she immediately got a lawyer. And the lawyer has been negotiating terms for her to come in and talk. And I believe that conversation began today. And I think that's someone that the FBI has been very interested in talking to, and really wants to understand better what that relationship was, what she saw or didn't see, and what she thought or didn't think once the attacks happened.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And we know that her attorney is saying that she didn't know anything about it.

Do you know who else they are talking to?

DEVLIN BARRETT: Well, they're talking to basically every single person who ever had contact with them.

I know another piece of this that they're looking at is, the older brother -- there are records showing that the older brother purchased some fairly large pieces of fireworks in New Hampshire. We have been told by experts that, in theory, you could take out the black powder from those fireworks, and if you had a whole bunch of them, certainly more than there are records for the brother purchasing, but if you had a bunch of other purchases, you could amass enough black powder, technically, to build these types of bombs.

It's just an avenue the FBI is pursuing at this point. They think it's possible that that's where the black powder for these bombs came from, but they also haven't ruled out other potential sources for the black powder, such as gunpowder or other things.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Devlin Barrett with The Wall Street Journal, we thank you.

DEVLIN BARRETT: Thank you.

Suspect Admits Role in Boston Attacks; Medical Condition Upgraded to Fair

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 18:02:00 EDT

JUDY WOODRUFF: New details emerged today in the investigation of two Chechen-American brothers in the Boston bombings. And as authorities worked to build their case, two more victims of the city's week of terror were laid to rest.

Family and friends paid final respects today at funerals for MIT police officer Sean Collier and eight-year-old Martin Richard. At the same time, the medical condition of the surviving suspect, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was upgraded to fair from serious. He's now facing federal charges that he and his older brother, Tamerlan, planted pressure cooker bombs near the finish line for the Boston Marathon. Tamerlan later died after a shoot-out with police.

In Providence, R.I., lawyers for Tamerlan Tsarnaev's wife, Katherine, said she had been unaware of the bombing plot.

MIRIAM WEIZENBAUM, Attorney for Katherine Tsarnaev: The reports of involvement by her husband and brother-in-law came as an absolute shock to them all.

As a mother, a sister, a daughter, a wife, Katie deeply mourns the pain and loss to innocent victims, students, law enforcement officers, families, and our community. In the aftermath of this tragedy, she, her daughter and her family are trying to come to terms with this event.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Meanwhile, both The Washington Post and The New York Times have reported that the younger Tsarnaev admitted his role in the attack. The Post also reported he told investigators that U.S. involvement in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were motivating factors. Other accounts said there appeared to be no links to larger terrorist groups.

In Russia today, their mother said FBI agents talked to her about Tamerlan Tsarnaev's trip back home last year, but she told them he was no radical.

ZUBEIDAT TSARNAEVA, Mother of Suspects: What happened is a terrible thing, but I know that my kids had nothing to do with it. I know it. I'm a mother. I have -- you know, I know my kids. I know my kids. I -- really, my kids would never get involved into anything like that.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Back in Boston, there were mixed feelings today among people returning to homes and businesses along reopened sections of Boylston Street, the site of the bombings.

MAN: I don't want to get in anyone's way, you know? It's pretty weird being back here. I don't really know what to do.

MAN: It's fantastic, yes. It feels like home. So, we're ready for it to be busy again.

FEMALE: Get back to normal?

MAN: Exactly.

JUDY WOODRUFF: At the same time, the Boston Public Health Commission upped the number of people injured in the marathon bombing from 180 to 264. The new total takes into account individuals who delayed treatment for minor injuries; 51 of the victims remain hospitalized.

'The Way of the Knife' Examines Conflict Between CIA, Pentagon

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 17:11:00 EDT

[ DUE TO RIGHTS RESTRICTIONS, VIDEO IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE ]

PBS NewsHour senior correspondent Margaret Warner talks to Pulitzer Prize winning author Mark Mazzetti on his new book "The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth." Mazzetti talks about the competition between the CIA and the Pentagon in the years following 9/11 as the global manhunt for terrorists intensified.

Boston 10th in Funds Received for 'High Threat' Urban Areas

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 12:19:00 EDT

Terrorism has been in the headlines in Boston before. Ten al-Qaida hijackers departed from Boston's Logan airport on Sept. 11, 2001. And in 2012, Tarek Mehanna of Sudbury, Mass., a Boston suburb, was convicted of conspiracy to provide material support to al-Qaida.

But when the Department of Homeland Security originally assessed the threat of terror to 65 American metropolitan areas in 2003, Boston barely made the top 10. As a result, the city did not initially receive a security seed grant for $100,000,000, designed to help metropolitan areas acquire personnel, equipment and training to prevent and recover from acts of terrorism. Then Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and the state legislature lobbied DHS to include the city in the program. On April 11, 2003, the Boston Herald reported:

All 12 Massachusetts lawmakers sent a letter yesterday to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge requesting information about why Boston was not one of the cities that received $100 million as part of the Urban Area Security Initiative.

In 2009, Boston was re-classified as one of ten "tier 1" cities, making it eligible for more funds than metropolitan areas that face a lesser risk of terror. From 2003 to 2012, Boston received a total of $173,318,428 from the Urban Area Security Initiative program, or UASI, according to data compiled by Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn.

According to 2010 U.S. Census data, Boston's metro area comes in 10th, with a population of 4,552,402. By comparison, the No. 1 region New York has a population of 18,897,109.

The UASI is currently the largest DHS grant program. Congress authorized $500.4 million for UASI allocations in the 2013 fiscal year.

In 2011, the DHS cut 31 cities from the UASI program in an effort to control costs.

Correction: The chart above misidentified Seattle, Washington as Seattle, Oregon.

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The Latest Hunger Strike at Guantanamo

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 18:28:00 EDT

Watch Video PBS NewsHour senior correspondent Ray Suarez talks to the Miami Herald's Carol Rosenberg on the 9/11 Guantanamo hearing delays, the uncertain status of 86 detainees at the detention center and the men leading the latest hunger strike.

News Wrap: Terror Plot to Attack Canada-U.S. Rail Line Thwarted

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 18:13:00 EDT

KWAME HOLMAN: Police in Canada say they have broken up a plot to derail a passenger train. They announced today two men have been arrested and charged with planning a terror attack. The suspects live in Toronto and Montreal, but are not Canadian citizens. They allegedly had direction and guidance from al-Qaida, but the plot still was in the planning phase.

JAMES MALIZIA, Assistant Royal Canadian Mounted Police Commissioner: While the RCMP believed the accused had the capacity and intent to carry out these criminal acts, there was no imminent threat to the general public, rail employees, train passengers, or infrastructure.

KWAME HOLMAN: Authorities said the plot had no connection to the Boston bombings.

So far, there's no sign of the poison ricin at the home of a Mississippi man accused of sending tainted letters to President Obama and a U.S. senator. Paul Kevin Curtis has denied involvement with the suspicious mailings. At a hearing today, an FBI agent testified a search found no ricin or materials used to make it. A defense lawyer suggested Curtis might have been framed.

The death toll from six days of heavy fighting in and around Damascus, Syria has grown to at least 100. And anti-government activists warned today the number could be closer to 500. Meanwhile, dark plumes of smoke rose over the capital city as government troops pressed an offensive. They're trying to push back rebel forces.

There was word today fierce fighting in northeastern Nigeria killed at least 185 people over the weekend. The Red Cross reported the death toll, based on local accounts. Nigerian authorities said the number was terribly inflated. The fighting erupted Friday between government soldiers and Islamist extremists known as Boko Haram. In Afghanistan, the Taliban took at least 11 civilians hostage after a transport helicopter was forced to make an emergency landing. Officials said eight Turks and a Russian were among the captives. The civilian helicopter landed in strong winds and heavy rain in Logar province. The Taliban largely control that region.

Flight delays hit airports up and down the East Coast today as 1,500 air traffic controllers were required to take unpaid leave. Airports in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington had delays of 15 minutes to two hours.

In Washington, transportation Secretary Ray LaHood blamed federal budget cuts from the ongoing sequestration.

SECRETARY OF TRANSPORTATION RAY LAHOOD, United States: Safety is not compromised. Planes are going to be guided in and out of airports safely. We will never compromise safety. This is a people-centric system. Planes are guided by people. Planes are guided by pilots. And when you furlough some people, there will have to be slowdowns. And that's what we warned about several months ago.

KWAME HOLMAN: The Federal Aviation Administration has ordered furloughs for all 47,000 agency employees. Each employee loses one day of work every other week.

Flooding in the Midwest eased slightly today, but prospects of more rain and snowmelt raised concerns for the days ahead. The heavy rain of last week already has caused a number of swollen rivers to burst their banks. Two levees failed early today along the Wabash River in southwest Indiana. Crews also worked to recover more than 100 barges that broke free in the Mississippi River. The flooding is blamed for at least three deaths.

President Obama will attend a memorial service Thursday for the 14 people killed in the Texas fertilizer plant explosion. White House officials said today the president already planned to be in Texas to help dedicate the George W. Bush Presidential Library. Most of the victims in the explosion in West, Texas, were firefighters and medical technicians.

A U.S. Army sergeant pleaded guilty today to killing five other Americans in Iraq in 2009. Sgt. John Russell admitted he gunned down four U.S. soldiers and a Navy officer at a mental health clinic near Baghdad. At the time, Russell was nearing the end of his third tour in Iraq. The guilty plea means he will avoid a death sentence.

Folk singer and guitarist Richie Havens has died. His family said he suffered a heart attack today. Havens came from the New York folk scene in 1960s. And in 1969, he performed at the original Woodstock festival, welcoming thousands of people to the event. Richie Havens was 72 years old.

Wall Street managed to rally a bit today, after big losses last week. The Dow Jones industrial average gained 19 points to close at 14,567. The Nasdaq rose 27 points to close at 3,233.

Those are some of the day's major stories -- now back to Gwen.

Early Stages of Boston Investigation Yields Family Stories, Bomb Fragments

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 18:07:00 EDT

JEFFREY BROWN: And we're joined now by a reporter who has been following developments closely.

Dina Temple Raston is NPR's anti-terrorism correspondent.

Dina, welcome to you.

Do we know how much or what investigators are learning from Tsarnaev in the hospital so far?

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON, National Public Radio: Well, there's been very little that they have learned because he can't -- we understand that he can't speak, that he has actually a tube in his throat. And he has some sort of a wound on his neck and his hand and apparently to his jaw. There's some question as to whether or not it was a self-inflicted wound.

So as a result, apparently, they're writing notes back and forth. And it's unclear if those notes are rapport-building, so that he learns to trust these people who are trying to question him or whether they're getting substantive information from him.

JEFFREY BROWN: So, what can you tell us about the focus of the investigation right now? What do investigators see as the most important leads?

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: Well, one of the things is they can't really question the younger suspect, suspect number two, the one who had that white basketball cap on, until he is really lucid.

And because of that, they have sort of concentrated their efforts on what his older brother was up to over the past sort of couple of years. You mentioned in your piece that there was a 2011 interview that the FBI had with the older brother at the request of the Russian government. They basically said they thought he had links to radical Islamists in Russia and wanted the FBI to sort of investigate that.

The FBI couldn't find anything that he had done illegal. So they allowed him to leave. And then we subsequently learned that he went to Russia last year. And he was there for six months. What they're looking for now is, what was he doing while he was in Russia? Was he training, for example? Was he meeting with radical Islamists who might have help radicalize him?

Those are the sort of threads that they're pulling now to try to put something some sort of motif about what happened leading up to these bombings.

JEFFREY BROWN: And in response to the questions that have come about whether the FBI did enough to check out -- to check him out at the request of the Russians, what's the response so far?

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: Well, you know, if he wasn't doing something illegal, there's only so much that the FBI can do in terms of an investigation.

They went to his house. They asked questions. Apparently, they had tea with his family. But if he wasn't doing anything illegal, they're not allowed to follow him. And this has been the back-and-forth that has been going on now, as there's been finger-pointing because this happened. They're asking why the FBI didn't follow up.

Well, if he's not doing something illegal, they're not allowed to follow him.

JEFFREY BROWN: So, they're looking over there. They're also looking of course in Boston into the lives of these two.

And one of the questions is about the turn to religion, if you will, by Tamerlan and the possible turn to radicalization by both of them. How much is known?

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: Well, what we understand -- and there was a great article in The Wall Street Journal this morning that really pieced a lot of this together by a huge team at The Wall Street Journal -- basically, what we understand is that his mother became more devout.

And then the older brother, Tamerlan, sort of followed in her model and became more devout as well and became quite radical in his beliefs. We know that he was visiting jihadi websites. We know that he actually posted some things, it seems, some pro-al-Qaida or at least pro-radical Islam.

What it seems to be -- and again this is very early days in the investigation, and so, you know, they keep saying that in the early days of the investigation, you're almost always wrong when you jump to conclusions. But in these early days of the investigation, it appears that the older brother had a tremendous amount -- or held great sway over the younger brother, and that the younger brother didn't seem to have any outward signs of this sort of radical Islam -- Islamic belief, but followed in the footsteps of his older brother.

So that's what investigators are going to try to find out when they finally get to talk to him in the hospital. And, as you mentioned in your piece, they did end up Mirandizing him, reading him his rights. And there was some question as to whether or not they would use something called the public safety exception, which basically says you don't have to read someone their Miranda rights if you believe that the public safety is in danger.

So, in other words, you know, if you thought that if you read him his rights, he might remain silent about co-conspirators or bombs that might be elsewhere in Boston or in the surrounding area -- and I guess they made the determination that that wasn't necessary, and so they read him his rights right away.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, a couple other areas of the investigation that continues. One, of course, they're still looking at the bombs, right, bomb fragments that they pick up from the site. Another one is that apparently federal investigators are trying to interview the older Tamerlan Tsarnaev's wife at this point, and I gather get have been in touch with his -- with her attorney.

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: That's right. Yes.

And in addition to that, I mean, they have more than just bomb fragments. What they found in the apartment and in the back of a car that they carjacked on Thursday night was something that looked -- bombs that looked very much like the fragments that they had found at the sites -- at the two bombing sites at the Boston Marathon. And these were bombs that had a low-grade explosive.

And we know this from the criminal complaint that was released today. The bombs were a low-grade explosive that were inside these rice cookers or pressure cookers. And, in fact, at one point during this car chase on Thursday night, they actually lit one of these kinds of bombs and threw it at police. And it became -- you know, and it was partially exploded, so it became more evidence in the case.

JEFFREY BROWN: And, Dina, let me just ask you finally, briefly, one of the strange aspects to this, of course, is that in the days after the bombing, it looks as though the two brothers went back to life, went back to business as usual?

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: That's right.

Well, we know and we have been reporting for a while that the younger brother was tweeting. And one of the last things, he tweeted a Jay-Z lyric on Wednesday and then actually tweeted, "I'm a no sweat kind of guy" or something to that effect, or "I'm a no-stress guy" is what he said on Wednesday. He went to a party. He was hanging out with his friends.

So clearly they were trying to act as if nothing had happened. And clearly they didn't understand just how much surveillance there was around the finish line at the Boston Marathon. What we found out is they have surveillance video that is very clear and seems to completely have the younger Tsarnaev dead to rights on being there at the second bombing site dropping his backpack, and having the bomb blast just minutes -- just actually seconds later.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, NPR's Dina Temple-Raston, thanks so much.

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: You're welcome. Thank you.

Boston Bombing Suspect Arraigned on Federal Charges While Hospitalized

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 18:02:00 EDT

JEFFREY BROWN: The Chechen-American teenager accused in the Boston Marathon bombings now faces a possible death sentence. The filing of charges today officially moved the case into the federal courts, even as the city began returning to normal.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was arraigned this morning at Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital, where he remained in serious condition. A short time later came word of the complaint filed by the U.S. Justice Department. It formally charged the 19-year-old with conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction, potentially a capital crime punishable by the death penalty, and of destruction of property by explosive device causing death.

Tsarnaev had been able, sporadically, to answer questions in writing, but a gunshot wound to the neck left him unable to speak. It was unclear if he was read his Miranda rights.

But, in Washington, White House spokesman Jay Carney said he's a naturalized U.S. citizen, so will not face a military tribunal.

JAY CARNEY, White House Spokesman: He will not be treated as an enemy combatant. We will prosecute this terrorist through our civilian system of justice. Under U.S. law, U.S. citizen cannot be trialed -- tried, rather, in military commissions. And it's important to remember that since 9/11 we have used the federal court system to convict and incarcerate hundreds of terrorists.

JEFFREY BROWN: Tsarnaev was also likely to face state charges in the shooting death of a police officer at MIT.

It all followed his dramatic capture Friday evening, when he was found hiding and wounded in a boat behind a home in the Boston suburb of Watertown. His older brother Tamerlan died hours earlier in a shoot-out with police that triggered the all-day manhunt and shut down the city.

Yesterday, on CBS, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick stood by the unprecedented measures.

GOV. DEVAL PATRICK, D-Mass.: I think people understood that we were making decisions in the face of a rapidly developing investigation and that we were making them in the best interests of people's public safety, or the public's safety. I think there won't be political backlash. And, frankly, I'm not thinking about that anyhow.

JEFFREY BROWN: In Boston today, it was a time of remembrance and reflection. Bells tolled as people observed a moment of silence at 2:50 p.m., the time one week ago that twin bombs exploded at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.

Elsewhere, friends and family gathered at St. Joseph's Catholic Church for the funeral service of 29-year-old Krystle Campbell, one of three people killed in the bombings. A memorial service for another victim, Chinese graduate student Lu Lingzi, was set this evening.

Back in Washington, President Obama also observed a moment of silence at the White House, as did the U.S. Senate. But tempers flared at a Senate hearing. Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley was one of several Republicans who've said the bombings, allegedly by two Chechen immigrants, raised questions about immigration reform.

SEN. CHARLES GRASSLEY, R-Iowa: I think we're taking advantage of an opportunity when once in 25 years we deal with immigration to make sure that every base is covered.

JEFFREY BROWN: That sparked a heated exchange between Grassley and New York Democrat Chuck Schumer.

SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER, D-N.Y.: I say that particularly those who are pointing to what happened, the terrible tragedy in Boston, as a, I would say, excuse for not doing a bill or delaying it many months and years.

CHARLES GRASSLEY: I never said that.

CHARLES SCHUMER: I didn't say you did sir.

CHARLES GRASSLEY: I never said that.

CHARLES SCHUMER: I didn't say you did, sir.

CHARLES GRASSLEY: I didn't say anything about ...

CHARLES SCHUMER: I don't mean you, Mr. Grassley.

MAN: Mr. Chairman ...

CHARLES SCHUMER: Those remarks were not aimed at anyone on this committee or the three witnesses. There are people out there -- you have read it in the newspapers -- who have said it.

JEFFREY BROWN: There were also questions about the FBI's investigation last year of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, after he spent six months in Russia. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairing the Intelligence Committee, said senior FBI may testify tomorrow about why they didn't pursue the matter further.

And I misspoke in that setup piece. Tsarnaev was read his Miranda rights in his hospital room today.

Second Boston Marathon Bombing Suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in Custody

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 22:07:00 EDT

PBS NewsHour will livestream updates, including news briefings, from Boston as they happen in the player above.

"We've closed an important chapter in this tragedy."-President Obama to.pbs.org/ZxeNm9
— NewsHour (@NewsHour) April 20, 2013

Updated 10:07 p.m. ET: President Obama speaks on tonight's arrest: "Tonight our nation is in debt to the people of Boston and the people of Massachusetts."

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Updated 10:00 p.m. ET: In a press conference, Massachusetts State Police Colonel Timothy P. Alben says "We're exhausted ... but we have a victory."

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Updated 9:10 p.m. ET: Confirmation of capture was followed by applause in the neighborhood of Watertown and a tweet sent out from the Boston Police Department: "In our time of rejoicing, let us not forget the families of Martin Richard, Lingzi Lu, Krystle Campbell and Officer Sean Collier." Richard, Lu and Campbell were the three killed in the marathon bombings and Collier was the MIT officer shot late Thursday.

Updated 8:50 p.m. ET: From Mayor Thomas Menino.

"We got him" #oneboston twitter.com/mayortommenino...
— Mayor Tom Menino (@mayortommenino) April 20, 2013

Updated 8:45 p.m. ET: Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in custody.

NewsHour will air a live updated report at 9 p.m. ET.

Suspect in custody. Officers sweeping the area. Stand by for further info.
— Boston Police Dept. (@Boston_Police) April 20, 2013

Updated 8:39 p.m. ET: From The Boston Globe

PHOTO: A police SWAT team member readies his weapon as he stands in the middle of a #Watertown street. #manhunt twitter.com/BostonGlobe/st...
— The Boston Globe (@BostonGlobe) April 20, 2013

Updated 8:35 p.m. ET: Suspect covered in blood, but source tells Associated Press it's unclear whether Tsarnaev is dead or alive. Updated 8:13 p.m. ET: Bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is in a boat stored in the Watertown, Mass., neighborhood. Updated 7:39 p.m. ET: Massachusetts state police say, "Renewed activity in Watertown related to today's events."

Updated 7:11 p.m. ET: Gunshots heard in Watertown, Mass as emergency and military vehicles drive through town, according to the Associated Press. Updated 7:05 p.m. ET: Latest from the Boston Police

Police operations in the Franklin Street Watertown area. Residents shelter in place.
— Boston Police Dept. (@Boston_Police) April 19, 2013

Updated 6:20 p.m. ET: State police say they believe the second bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is on foot and still in Massachusetts because of his ties. Updated 6:10 p.m. ET: At an evening briefing, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick says the stay-indoors-request has been lifted and that the state's metro service will resume immediately.

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Updated 5:40 p.m. ET: Outside of Watertown, Massachusetts State Police recovered "homemade explosives, including pipe bombs and another pressure cooker, as well as more than 200 spent rounds," reports WBUR -- Boston's NPR station. Police also say Norfolk Street in Cambridge has been cleared out and that the planned controlled explosion did not happen. Updated 4:37 p.m. ET: Earlier this afternoon, we spoke to Bob Russo, Portland Boxing Club owner, who coached Tamerlan at the Golden Gloves amateur nationals in 2009. Russo said he didn't know the young boxer very well, but said he was very quite and "a very good athlete."

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Updated 4:25 p.m. ET: While police initially said the brothers robbed a 7-Eleven convenience store in Cambridge near the MIT campus Thursday night, they say now the robbery there was committed by someone else, according to the latest AP report. A surveillance photo they released came from a gas station where the suspects stopped. Updated 4:10 p.m. ET: "Convince me," implored Maret Tsarnaeva, aunt of the Boston bombing suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, in a press conference shot by ABC.

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"Why doesn't the FBI give me more?" she asked, saying she doesn't have enough information to convince her that her nephews are responsible for Monday's attack that killed three and wounded 170.

Tsarnaeva, who lives in Toronto, called the FBI's tip line, saying she believes her nephews are innocent. "They are just normal young men ... athletic and smart."

Updated 3:45 p.m. ET:With Beantown in effect paralyzed as authorities continue their search for a suspect, the Boston Red Sox and Bruins postpone their games Friday night.

Updated 3:35 p.m. ET: Tsarnaev, the deceased suspect pictured below, had studied accounting as a part-time student at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston for three semesters from 2006 to 2008, the school told the AP.

Photo of deceased suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev accepting trophy for winning the 2010 New England Golden Gloves ow.ly/i/1VIvR
— NewsHour (@NewsHour) April 19, 2013

Updated 3:21 p.m. ET: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was registered as a student at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and lived in a dormitory there, according to the AP. Students at UMass Dartmouth said he was on campus this week after the bombings. The university closed down earlier today along with other Boston colleges as the search unfolded. Updated 3:15 p.m. ET: Police say they had conflicting reports on whether the brothers robbed a 7-Eleven in Cambridge, near the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on Thursday night, according to the Associated Press. Updated 2:43 p.m. ET: Compiled from NPR, what it looked like from inside the lockdown in Boston.

Updated 2:31 p.m. ET: State police now saying they have that car.

Media reporting we are looking for a Honda Civic reg 116GC7, please note that we have that car. We are not looking for it. BOLO recalled
— MASS STATE POLICE (@MassStatePolice) April 19, 2013

Updated 2:30 p.m. ET: @j_tsar appears to be the Twitter account of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, according to reports from The Boston Globe, NPR and The Washington Post.

Ain't no love in the heart of the city, stay safe people
— Jahar (@J_tsar) April 16, 2013

Updated 2:20 p.m. ET: President Barack Obama meets with members of his national security team to discuss developments in the Boston bombings investigation. (Photo by Pete Souza/White House)

Updated 2:14 p.m. ET: Officials in Boston are looking for a 1999 green Honda Civic

Bombing suspect may be driving 4-door, '99, green Honda Civic w/ Mass. plates reading: 116GC7. #FBI #BostonMarathon 1.usa.gov/11oEKTB
— FBI Boston (@FBIBoston) April 19, 2013

Updated 1:03 p.m. ET: Government officials say Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died in a police shootout overnight, traveled to Russia last year and returned to the U.S. six months later, according to the Associated Press. Updated 12:56 p.m. ET: At a press briefing in Watertown, Mass., State Police spokesperson Timothy Alban cautioned residents that police were staging a "controlled explosion" in Cambridge this afternoon as they continue their search for the 19-year-old suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings.

Alban also said police are continuing to search Watertown for the suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

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Updated 12:38 p.m. ET: Teen Suspect in Boston Bombings a 'Regular American Kid'

Updated, 12:06 p.m. ET: The uncle of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bombing suspect still at large, has urged his nephew to turn himself in. Ruslan Tsarni of Montgomery Village, Md., spoke to reporters from his driveway Friday.

"Dzhokhar, if you are alive, turn yourself in and ask for forgiveness," Tsarni said.

Tsarni said that Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed overnight, were born in Kyrgyzstan. NPR's Pam Fessler reported that the two suspects are ethnic Chechens from Kyrgyzstan, and the suspect's aunt told @nprnews that their family was deported to Kyrgyzstan in the early 1990s from Chechnya.

Tsarni said he hasn't seen them since December 2005 and did not know of any possible involvement in terrorist groups or whether either had any paramilitary training. He added that his family is ashamed and that he loves and respects the United States.

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Updated 11:43 a.m. ET: The name and a photo of the MIT police officer killed Thursday night have been released. Authorities say 26-year-old Sean Collier was shot and killed by the Boston Marathon bombing suspects. MIT says Collier was a Wilmington native and Somerville resident who had worked at MIT since January 2012. Before that, he was a civilian employee of the Somerville Police Department. Collier was found shot several times in his vehicle at about 10:30 p.m. Thursday.

MIT officer Sean Collier, 26, of Somerville, was identified as the victim in last night's shooting. twitter.com/cambridgechron...
— Cambridge Chronicle (@cambridgechron) April 19, 2013

Updated 11:02 a.m. ET: Connecticut State Police say a vehicle believed to be linked to Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been recovered in Boston, the Associated Press reports. Elsewhere, the University Of Massachusetts Dartmouth has closed its campus and ordered an evacuation after confirming that Tsarnaev is registered there. The school says it closed the campus "out of an abundance of caution" as the search continues.

SWAT teams enter suburban neighborhood to search for remaining suspect. Live updates: reut.rs/Watertown twitter.com/AntDeRosa/stat...
— Anthony De Rosa (@AntDeRosa) April 19, 2013

PHOTO: Law enforcement and lockdown in Watertown, from Instagram user @jjesiolowski twitter.com/USATODAY/statu...
— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) April 19, 2013

Updated 10:40 a.m. ET: Here's a detailed timeline of events over the last 17 hours, via the Associated Press, based on reports from the Middlesex County district attorney, Massachusetts State Police and Boston police:

At 5:10 p.m. Thursday, investigators of the bombings release photographs and video of two suspects. They ask for the public's help in identifying the men. Around 10:20 p.m., robbery takes place at a 7/11 convenience store in Cambridge, near the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, just outside Boston. Shots are fired on the campus. At 10:30 p.m., an MIT campus police officer who was responding to a disturbance is found shot multiple times in his vehicle, apparently in a confrontation with the Boston Marathon bombing suspects. He is later pronounced dead. Shortly afterward, two armed men reportedly carjack a Mercedes SUV in Cambridge. A man who was in the vehicle is held for about a half hour and then released unharmed at a gas station on Memorial Drive in Cambridge. Police soon pursue the carjacked vehicle in Watertown, just west of Cambridge. Some kind of explosive devices are thrown from the vehicle in an apparent attempt to stop police. The carjackers and police exchange gunfire. A transit police officer is seriously injured. One suspect, later identified as Suspect No. 1 in the marathon bombings, is critically injured and later pronounced dead. Authorities launch a manhunt for the other suspect. Around 1 a.m. Friday, gunshots and explosions are heard in Watertown. Dozens of police officers and FBI agents converge on a Watertown neighborhood. A helicopter circles overhead. Around 4:30 a.m., Massachusetts state and Boston police hold a short outdoor news briefing. They tell people living in that section of eastern Watertown to stay in their homes. They identify the carjackers as the same men suspected in the marathon bombings. Overnight, police also release a photograph of a man believed to be Suspect No. 2, apparently taken from store video earlier in the evening at a 7-Eleven convenience store in Cambridge. He is wearing a gray hoodie-style sweatshirt. Around 5:50 a.m. authorities urge residents in Watertown, Newton, Waltham, Belmont, Cambridge, Arlington and the Allston-Brighton neighborhoods of Boston to stay indoors. All mass transit is shut down. Around 6:35 a.m., The Associated Press reports that the bomb suspects are from a Russian region near Chechnya and lived in the United States for at least a year. Around 6:45 a.m., The Associated Press identifies the surviving Boston bomb suspect as Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, who has been living in Cambridge. Around 8 a.m. Boston's police commissioner says all of Boston must stay in their homes as the search for the surviving suspect in the bombings continues. Around 8:40 a.m., a U.S. law enforcement official and the uncle of the suspects confirm that the name of the slain suspect is Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's older brother.

#WANTED: Updated photo of 19 year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev released. Suspect considered armed & dangerous. twitter.com/Boston_Police/...
— Boston Police Dept. (@Boston_Police) April 19, 2013

Updated 10 a.m. ET: The greater Boston area remained on lockdown Friday morning as police hunted for a second suspect connected to the dual bombings at the Boston Marathon on Monday.

Late Thursday night, the suspects led Boston police on a wild car chase through suburban neighborhoods before one of them, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, died in a shootout. The other suspect, identified as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, of Cambridge, according to the Associated Press, remained at large and was considered "extremely dangerous."

The men's uncle, Ruslan Tsarni of Montgomery Village, Md., told the AP that they are from a Russian region near Chechnya and that they lived together near Boston and had been in the United States for about 10 years.

Authorities have asked residents of Newtown, Watertown, Waltham and Cambridge to remain at home, stay inside and report any suspicious activities.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, left, remains at large. FBI photo.

#WANTED: Suspect identified as 19 year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev of Cambridge. Suspect considered armed & dangerous. twitter.com/Boston_Police/...
— Boston Police Dept. (@Boston_Police) April 19, 2013

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Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis urged all residents to stay at home as the police conduct a door-to-door search for the remaining suspect and any other possible accomplices. Colonel of the Massachusetts State Police Timothy Alben said Watertown was the priority neighborhood for the search.

The suspected bombers robbed a 7-11 store in Cambridge Thursday evening. Shortly afterward, they shot and killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology security officer, before carjacking a Mercedes SUV and then leading police on a chase through Boston suburbs.

Incredible photo of swat teams, taken by the Globe's Aram Boghosian. twitter.com/billy_baker/st...
— Billy Baker (@billy_baker) April 19, 2013

Were Boston Suspects 'Lone Wolves' or Part of a Larger, Radical Confederacy?

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 18:19:00 EDT

JEFFREY BROWN:And now to some of the leads being pursued in this investigation.

Authorities said a short time ago they believe Dzhokhar Tsarnaev remains in the Boston area and is the only person they're looking for at the moment. Investigators said -- quote -- "His ties seem to be here."

For more, I'm joined now by New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt, Mark Hosenball of Reuters, and Bruce Hoffman, director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University.

Michael Schmidt, you have been watching what the FBI is up to. We heard a bit about the two brothers. What are investigators most focused on now to fill in the picture?

MICHAEL SCHMIDT, The New York Times: They're really just, you know, in a basic game just trying to find this guy and trying to exploit all the different tools and techniques that they have, through the interviews that they have been conducting today, and particularly through the information provided by the man who was in that car that was hijacked.

He's the only person that we know of that's had direct contact with the suspect in recent days that's talked to the authorities. And they're trying to exploit all that information for whatever clues may be there, in the hopes of trying to find out where the suspect may be.

JEFFREY BROWN: So are there any particular leads at this point that you're aware of that they're following or of particular interest to them?

MICHAEL SCHMIDT: No.

There were different things about whether the suspect may have been heading towards New York or the suspect may have been heading towards Connecticut or -- he was in a car. But we -- they haven't taken those any further. And they're just still looking for leads and trying to scour Eastern Massachusetts as much as possible, in the hopes of finding something. But I think they're pretty stumped right now.

JEFFREY BROWN: Mark Hosenball, what would you add? What do you think the leads or clues might be out there that investigators are looking at, here or abroad?

MARK HOSENBALL, Reuters: Well, what I have been looking at is, who are these guys? What are their connections? Why did they do it?

From the sounds of things, you know, everybody wants to know what the motivation is. The authorities do seem to think that they are some kind of Islamic militants. But then the question is, do they have confederates or accomplices either in the United States or abroad? If they have confederates in the United States, that raises the question of who are these confederates? Have they gone underground? Could they commit further attacks from hidden lair?

As I understand it at the moment, investigators believe that, in fact, this is not an al-Qaida operation. It's not clear how these guys became radicalized, but they don't seem to think that they have any significant overseas connections, and they don't seem to think, as I think you quoted somebody there earlier, that they have any accomplices in the United States.

So, from the sounds of things, they're a couple of what they call in the counterterrorism trade lone wolves who dreamt this all up on their own, who probably radicalized themselves perhaps over the Internet, who may have even gotten the designs of their bombs over the Internet.

And such people, because they don't do the kinds of things that would attract the attention of intelligence agencies, they're very hard to spot in advance.

JEFFREY BROWN: And, Bruce Hoffman, what do you think should they be looking at now? What do you think is the interesting part here?

BRUCE HOFFMAN, Georgetown University: First and foremost, I think the authorities are going to be combing through the computers that they seized to find out precisely if they were in contact with anyone either in the United States or overseas, if they were downloading, for instance, the sermons of Anwar al-Awlaki, who's the deceased lead -- one of the deceased leaders of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, who has had a role in the radicalization of many Westerners, and also looking for any foreign travel.

JEFFREY BROWN: With great caution here, because there's so much we don't know, but the two brothers are ethnic Chechens.

Now, that's an area, Bruce Hoffman, that has been rife with a lot of turmoil, but we don't have any particular evidence that links them to that, right?

BRUCE HOFFMAN: No, not necessarily, we don't.

There's been, I think, two interesting data points, and that's all they are, perhaps coincidental, perhaps not. But over the past eight months, there's been arrests in late February in France of three Chechens who were charged with plotting terrorist attacks in Spain, and then last August, a Dagestani, a Chechen and a Turk similarly plotting attacks in Spain against both British and American targets.

There may be a link. It may be coincidence, but it could be that. Movements are turning more to non-Arab Muslims to carry -- to recruit and carry out terrorist operations.

JEFFREY BROWN: Michael Schmidt, have you heard anything that connects anything on the Chechen angle? Is that something that's being actively pursued at all?

MICHAEL SCHMIDT: Yes, it's something that they have been actively pursuing and it's something they are very focused on. They're very focused on whether there's a nexus abroad, whether it's coming from there or elsewhere, whether there were militants in Pakistan or elsewhere in the Middle East that may have helped spur these individuals to do what they did.

But at this point, I -- similarly to how they're having trouble finding the suspect, I think they're also having trouble figuring out what sort of caused them do this. But at the same time, we have to realize that this incident happened on Monday, and we are just a few days after it. And it may be weeks if not months until we find out exactly what led them to do this.

So I think there's a bit of patience that we all have to have, as much as we all are anxiously trying to get to the bottom of it.

JEFFREY BROWN: Mark Hosenball, what would you add to that, about specifically where they're looking at?

MARK HOSENBALL: Well, again, as they say, they're looking at all these places.

One of the other things that they're actually looking at as well is whether the U.S. government -- what the U.S. government knew about these guys, if anything, before this event happened. In the past, for example, the case of the guy who tried to attack the American-bound jet on Christmas Day in 2009 with the bomb in his underwear, it turned out that that guy's father a month earlier had been to the U.S. Embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, and warned them that his son was hanging around with very bad people.

The U.S. Embassy sent a cable to the State Department. The CIA guys there sent a cable to the CIA, saying, this is a very weird story about this guy, but nobody seems to have paid much attention to it. So, even though they had some evidence that perhaps could have kept that guy, the -- Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the underwear bomber, off a plane, they never put it into operation. They never used it.

Now they're going back here with these guys to see what they might have known or not known about these guys. Again, it's not clear what they did or they didn't know. They clearly had immigration files on them because they came into the United States. But did they have other information that they -- that were clues that were overlooked? That's one of the things we're looking at. We don't know what they got, if anything.

JEFFREY BROWN: And, Bruce Hoffman, how -- who were they talking to? How does one pursue all these leads and what kind of resources does the American government have to marshal to pursue them?

BRUCE HOFFMAN: Well, again, certainly, any communications on the computer is going to be enormously important, and then in the attempt of Tamerlan, who is believed to have had traveled abroad, where he may have gone and who he may have met with.

But I think it's all going to boil down to the question of, where and how were these two individuals radicalized and were there any connections with anyone else? Thus far today, we haven't heard very much of the third suspect who was taken into custody this morning. That may be an enormous link to this as well.

JEFFREY BROWN: Or not.

BRUCE HOFFMAN: Or not, or not, precisely.

JEFFREY BROWN: Yes.

The lone wolf type that I think we heard referred to earlier, that clearly has to be -- that's part of the pursuit as well to see how they -- who they are and how they might have gotten radicalized.

BRUCE HOFFMAN: Yes, absolutely.

At least the pattern of this type of terrorism in the past few years has gone one way or the other. Either it has turned out to be general lone wolves, autodidacts, for instance, in bomb-making and weaponry, self-radicalized.

But at the same time, all of this sounds remarkably like the situation and the scenario after the July 7^th, 2005, bombings. Their relatives spoke of the bombers the exact same way we have heard earlier. The reporters described their process of radicalization as being something that was much more isolated than it turned out to be.

So, I think, as Mike Schmidt cautioned, it really is just too soon to know.

JEFFREY BROWN: Bruce Hoffman, Mark Hosenball and Michael Schmidt, thank you all very much.

Suspect's Reputation as Normal Kid Is Striking Contrast to Deadly Crime Spree

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 18:08:00 EDT

RAY SUAREZ: For more from Boston about the latest and what we're learning about the suspects' lives there, we turn to two journalists who have been out and about in the Boston metro region today, Farah Stockman of The Boston Globe and once again David Boeri of WBUR Public Radio.

Farah, just a short time ago, the shelter-in-place order was lifted and mass transit is going to start moving again. But you had to move across Boston to get to this camera to talk to us. What was it like in the city?

FARAH STOCKMAN, The Boston Globe: People were starting to move around a bit. There were a few cars on the road. But the streets are very empty.

I happen to live a block away from the suspects. And so I was woken up this morning with people calling me, saying, hey, there's something going on, on Norfolk Street. And as I walked down there, cops waved me down and said, you have to go back inside. And so it's been -- a lot of people have been staying at home.

RAY SUAREZ: David, it is one of the largest metropolitan areas in the country. It must have been odd to see it deserted on a weekday.

DAVID BOERI, WBUR Public Radio: More than odd.

I mean, what you're seeing here today, as harrowing as this situation is, the fact that there are people running around with bombs and shooting at police, 87 square miles of this metropolitan area were shut down, locked down today. I did the math, Boston and four towns. All mass transit was shut down. The colleges were shut down. Amtrak was shut down.

Even the train engineers were told to leave the buildings. It is -- what we're seeing is really an example, probably a prime example, of the post-9/11 security state. And when you see the vehicles downtown, armored cars, tanks, when I started in this business, when you had a bad situation, it involved state troopers with shotguns, tear gas and maybe shields.

This is vastly different. In fact, you even see an armored car out there today with a sign on it saying, "Cape Cod SWAT Team," all this equipment bought in the post-9/11 era.

RAY SUAREZ: David, has law enforcement at any level confirmed what it is they're looking for behind those barricades in Watertown? Can they talk at all about who it is, what it is they think they're going to find?

DAVID BOERI: Well, they started this morning thinking that they were going to find Dzhokhar.

Dzhokhar was in that area, they thought. They were sure that they had him in that area. And now they have been compressing in, and yet there's some doubt now that whether -- as to whether or not he's there.

RAY SUAREZ: Farah, you mentioned that you live right near where the suspects did. When you were poking around and reporting today talking to people in the area, what did they tell you about the brothers Tsarnaev?

FARAH STOCKMAN: Well, the family came in 2002. So, Dzhokhar was 9 years old. His older brother was 16 when they came.

The father used to make money selling cars, so he was often seen outside the house fixing up old cars and selling them. Some of the neighbors thought that the mother might work in the health care industry. But a lot of the crowd that was being evacuated, all the neighbors were being evacuated -- I think a woman with a baby was taken out of the apartment as well.

As people were milling around, I got to talk to the classmates of Dzhokhar. And everybody at that time talked about a normal kid, a kid who was popular, who went to -- he was a good wrestler. And it's just an amazing juxtaposition of this kid, and especially -- I spent the afternoon on his Twitter account. And it's like walking around in a suspect's brain.

And you get to read, OK, two weeks ago, he's talking about eating a cheeseburger at McDonald's. And you're like, this is the kid that -- this is the kid that shut down the city of Boston? It was -- it's really extraordinary. And to see the things that he was tweeting, especially on marathon day, it was just eerie.

RAY SUAREZ: Farah, in a lot of immigrant families, it's often the case that people who come when they're younger have an easier time assimilating to American life, and people who come when they're a little older sometimes a tougher time, both with the language and with fitting in. Was that the case in the Tsarnaev family?

FARAH STOCKMAN: I definitely got the clear picture that the brother was the instigator. This is going to be my hunch.

The brother was 16 when he came. And shortly after he came, he was interviewed because he won a boxing championship. And at that time, he said, I love America -- or maybe he said, I like America because there are jobs here, and there were no jobs in Russia.

And -- but over time, clearly, he developed an anti-American attitude, and you can sort of see some of that rubbing off on his brother in some of the comments that he made on his Twitter feed page. But I bet we're going to see a story of a radicalized brother that basically dragged his kid brother down.

You think of how people hold their older brother up as a hero and follow them, follow in their footsteps. I really bet that's what we're going to find in this case.

RAY SUAREZ: David, a lot of attention has been paid to that quote from Tamerlan about not having any American friends. But I think in the process of glomming onto that, people glossed over some of the other signs of a guy who liked being here, was sharply dressed and talking on a cell phone in a photo essay that was published online and in a local college magazine, of having a girlfriend who was converting to Islam for him, which he thought was great, of smiling and accepting a very prestigious boxing trophy.

This wasn't a nobody.

DAVID BOERI: Ray, if you go onto the website of teenagers, you will see kids with thousands of friends and you will hear that complaint, I don't have any friends.

So, that's -- that's common. In fact, they were well-dressed. They seemed to be prospering in some ways. The family is described -- the parents are described as observant Muslims, traditional. The women in that household wore the hijab. And Tamerlan himself had a traditional full-length beard, until he cut it several months ago.

But there was this certain exuberance, and it was especially seen in Dzhokhar. One of his teachers said this kid had a heart of gold. And if you look at his yearbook picture, you see this -- you see this smiling face that could be a poster -- a poster kid of the American immigrant success story, which makes it all the more shocking to his teacher, Larry Aaronson, with whom I was speaking today, that, as Larry is thinking, geez, the IEDs are coming home, the war is coming to us, suddenly, he has this sickening realization that it's this kid that he admires so much that might be at the center of it.

RAY SUAREZ: Are we clear on whether he was actively enrolled and in classes at this branch of the University of Massachusetts, David?

DAVID BOERI: We're told that he was, in fact, a student at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, which is on the South Shore here. And people have gone out there and talked to students who knew him there. He was seen, though, and he seemed to be living there, but as late as Wednesday, one of the neighbors told me he was still in Cambridge on Norfolk Street.

And another one who has an auto body shop said that, in fact, Dzhokhar had come to him with a car, his girlfriend's Mercedes, several weeks ago and wanted it repaired. And he came on Tuesday, and he wanted it back. And the auto body mechanic said, it's not ready. And the auto body mechanic said that Dzhokhar was nervous and insisted on having the car.

But to think that he was there as late as Wednesday night is an interesting investigative picture as well.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, I'm sure we will continue to fill in the picture of these two young men's lives.

David Boeri of WBUR, Farah Stockman of The Boston Globe, thank you both.

DAVID BOERI: You're welcome.

FARAH STOCKMAN: Thank you.

Boston Stayed On Edge and Inside After Police Ordered City Lockdown

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 18:05:00 EDT

JEFFREY BROWN:So how did we get to this dramatic point? Kwame Holman has our recap of the major events of this day.

KWAME HOLMAN: Nineteen-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev escaped the early morning gun battle in suburban Boston that killed his 26-year-old brother, Tamerlan.

That set into motion an unprecedented manhunt, as a small army of local, state and federal officers fanned out through Boston and its suburbs. The city was brought to a near standstill. More than one million people were urged to shelter in their homes. Schools and mass transit were closed. Amtrak service was shut down into the city.

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick spoke at 8:00 a.m.

GOV. DEVAL PATRICK, D-Mass.: There is a massive manhunt under way, a lot of law enforcement involved in that. To assist that, we have suspended all service on the MBTA, our public transit service. And that will continue until we think it's safe to open all or some of that.

We're asking people to shelter in place, in other words, to stay indoors, with their doors locked, and not to open the door for anyone other than a properly identified law enforcement officer. And that applies here in Watertown, where we are right now, also Cambridge, Waltham, Newton, Belmont, and at this point all of Boston, all of Boston.

This is a -- this is a serious situation. We're taking it seriously. We're asking the public to take it seriously as well and to assist law enforcement by following those simple instructions. We have got every asset that we can possibly muster on the ground right now. They are doing a terrific job and working in concert with each other, but we are going to need the public to help us help them stay safe.

KWAME HOLMAN: In Washington, the president convened a briefing in the White House Situation Room with almost a dozen top aides.

The search focused on Watertown, Mass., just west of downtown Boston. The string of events began yesterday afternoon when FBI agents showed images of two then unnamed suspects pictured at Monday's bombing and called them armed and dangerous.

A harrowing night then began a short distance from the site of Monday's bombings. Around 10:30, gunfire was reported on the campus of MIT in Cambridge. Authorities say a campus police officer, 26-year-old Sean Collier, was shot and killed by the suspects.

The Tsarnaevs then carjacked a Mercedes SUV elsewhere in Cambridge, police say. The two men took the driver to three ATMs, where they got cash, before releasing him. Police pursued the SUV into Watertown. That's where heavy gunfire and explosions were heard, captured on smartphone video.

IMRAN SAIS, Taxi Driver: We heard a loud boom, and then a rapid succession of pop, pop, pop. It sounded like automatic weapons. And then I heard the second explosion. And then there was the smell of something burning in the air. We were still going toward it, and then residents from the windows, they shouted, hey, it's gunfire. Don't go that way.

KWAME HOLMAN: Superintendent Timothy Alben of the Massachusetts State Police:

COL. TIMOTHY ALBEN, Massachusetts State Police Superintendent: The pursuit went into a residential neighbor -- neighborhood not far from here, where there was an exchange of gunfire between Watertown police, MBTA police officer, and suspects in this SUV.

During the course of that pursuit, several explosive devices were discharged from that car at the police officers. In the exchange of the gunfire, we believe that one of the suspects was struck and ultimately taken into custody. A second suspect was able to flee from that car, and there is an active search going on at this point in time.

KWAME HOLMAN: Police shot Tamerlan Tsarnaev. He was pronounced dead a short time later at an area hospital.

DR. RICHARD WOLFE, Chief of Emergency Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center: This was a trauma arrest, multiple injuries, probably, we believe a combination of blasts, potentially gunshot wounds.

QUESTION: How many gunshot wounds?

RICHARD WOLFE: Unable to count.

QUESTION: Multiple gunshots?

RICHARD WOLFE: Yes.

QUESTION: I'm sorry. I didn't hear the rest of that.

RICHARD WOLFE: And probably a blast injury also.

QUESTION: Blast meaning what?

RICHARD WOLFE: An explosive device, possibly shrapnel, thermal injury.

QUESTION: Can you describe where it was?

RICHARD WOLFE: It was pretty much throughout the trunk. It was multiple wounds.

QUESTION: Would it be -- would it be consistent with perhaps a bomb strapped to the chest? Would it be consistent with that?

RICHARD WOLFE: Unclear. I think the medical examiner will be able to kind of conclusively say that, but there were signs of more than just gunshot wounds.

KWAME HOLMAN: The brothers were of Chechen heritage and came to the U.S. about 10 years ago. A circuitous path took them through Dagestan, a volatile region in Southern Russia.

Twenty-six-year-old Tamerlan reportedly was a hip-hop fan and a Gold Gloves boxer. In an online spread of photos that showed him boxing, he was quoted saying: "I don't have a single American friend, I don't understand them."

Nevertheless, he was said to have hopes of securing a U.S. Olympic team berth. The younger Dzhokhar graduated from the prestigious Cambridge Rindge and Latin School two years ago and was enrolled at University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. He became a naturalized American citizen last year on September 11^th, according to several news organizations.

A high school acquaintance spoke to reporters.

WOMAN: I'm not -- not so sure what set him off like this. So -- but I don't know. I mean, I have never -- I didn't meet his brother. So, I don't know who his brother is. I don't know any of that sort. So, I'm not sure. I am just really caught off-guard with all of this.

KWAME HOLMAN: Another high school friend talked to ABC News.

WOMAN: My school is very diverse, very open and accepting. We just kind of -- he never -- he didn't really talk with an accent at all. He was pretty, I mean, American, I guess. He had a lot of friends. He was a relatively well-liked guy, well-known.

KWAME HOLMAN: On a Russian social networking site Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's world view was listed as Islam, and he'd apparently linked to Islamic and other websites calling for Chechen independence.

Late this morning, an uncle of the brothers spoke to reporters from his home outside Washington. Ruslan Tsarni said he had not seen either man in years.

RUSLAN TSARNI, Uncle of Suspects: I have just been following it from day one, but never, ever would imagine that somehow the children of my brother would be associated with that. So it is atrocity. We're devastated. We're shocked. And, again, I don't know, this family doesn't know how to share that grief with the real victims.

KWAME HOLMAN: Tsarni said the family was Muslim and were ethnic Chechens. He was unaware what, if any, military training the men had or what led them to allegedly commit the crimes.

RUSLAN TSARNI: If that happened, most likely, somebody radicalized them. But it's not my brother, who just moved back to Russia, who spent his life bringing bread to their table, fixing cars, fixing cars. I say Dzhokhar, if you are alive, turn yourself in and ask for forgiveness from the victims, from the injured, and from those who left. Ask forgiveness from these people.

We're not requiring forgiveness in this family. He put a shame -- he put a shame on the Tsarnaev -- on our family, Tsarnaev family. He put a shame on the entire Chechen ethnicity, because everyone now names -- they play with the word Chechen. So they put that shame on the entire ethnicity.

So that's what I would say. Turn yourself in. And whatever -- whatever one -- I mean, put yourself at the discretion of those who are here.

KWAME HOLMAN: The men's aunt, Maret Tsarnaeva, had a different take. She spoke to reporters in Toronto.

MARET TSARNAEVA, Aunt of Suspects: My first call to FBI, they couldn't have done this. Where are the evidence? All you're showing is the footage. Two guys are walking. And I found it strange. Tamerlan is walking in the front. Dzhokhar is in the back. Why wouldn't they come together, just, you know, together, as brothers, as I used to know them?

KWAME HOLMAN: The men's father, who lives in Russia, told the Associated Press that his son Dzhokhar was "a true angel. He is such an intelligent boy. We expected him to come on holidays here."

Manhunt for Boston Bombing Suspect Ends After Daylong City Shutdown

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 18:02:00 EDT

Ongoing Coverage: Hunt for the Boston Marathon Bombing Suspects

Boxing Coach Calls Bombing Suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev 'Very Good Athlete'

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 16:08:00 EDT

Watch Video Bob Russo coached Tamerlan Tsarnaev when he was a competitor at the Golden Gloves amateur nationals in 2009. Tsarnaev, one of the suspects of the Boston Marathon bombings, was killed Friday while in pursuit from police. Photo by Julia Malakie, Lowell Sun

As the manhunt continues for 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing, stories begin to unfold about his older brother and suspected accomplice in Monday's attack that killed three and wounded 170.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed early Friday morning in an encounter with police. According to the Associated Press, the brothers are ethnic Chechen who had lived in Dagestan, which neighbors Chechnya in southern Russia. They had been in the U.S. for about a decade, an uncle said, and were believed to be living in Cambridge, Mass.

Tamerlan studied accounting as a part-time student at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston. He was also an aspiring boxer. According to the Lowell Sun, Tamerlan was a Lowell Golden Gloves boxer who told the paper in 2004 "I like the U.S.A." after winning his first fight in the north Massachusetts town.

PBS NewsHour spoke to Bob Russo, Portland Boxing Club owner, who coached Tamerlan at the Golden Gloves amateur nationals in 2009.

Russo said he didn't know the young boxer very well, but said he was very quite and "a very good athlete."

Streets of Boston Eerily Quiet as Residents Take Shelter

Teen Suspect in Boston Bombings a 'Regular American Kid'

Boston Bombing Suspects' Uncle: 'Turn Yourself In'

Bombing Suspects' Aunt: 'They are Just Normal Young Men'

Ongoing Coverage: Hunt for the Boston Marathon Bombing Suspects

Boston Bombing Suspects' Uncle: 'Turn Yourself In'

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 14:58:00 EDT

Watch Video

Ruslan Tsarni, uncle of the two Boston Marathon bombings suspects, attributes their alleged actions to "being losers." He pleaded with the younger suspect, who is still at large, to turn himself in and ask for forgiveness.

The uncle of the two men suspected in Monday's Boston Marathon bombings appeared overwhelmed with anger and emotion in front his home in Montgomery Village, Md., Friday. Ruslan Tsarni said he has not been in touch with his nephews in a number of years and that he hasn't seen the boys since 2005.

Late Thursday night, the two suspects led Boston police on a wild car chase through suburban neighborhoods before one of them, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, died in a shootout. The other suspect, identified as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, remains at large and was considered "extremely dangerous."

Tsarni has urged the younger Tsarnaev to turn himself in.

"Dzhokhar, if you are alive, turn yourself in and ask for forgiveness," Tsarni said to reporters from his driveway Friday.

"Of course we're ashamed. Yes we're ashamed. They're children of my brother," he said.

Streets of Boston Eerily Quiet as Residents Take Shelter

Teen Suspect in Boston Bombings a 'Regular American Kid'

Boxing Coach Calls Bombing Suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev 'Very Good Athlete'

Bombing Suspects' Aunt: 'They are Just Normal Young Men'