In an otherwise interesting story about the medical response in Boston, the Times reports:
Cellphone service in Boston had been limited to prevent terrorists from using cellphones to detonate any more bombs, so doctors, nurses and other medical professionals were contacted with text messages.
This is a zombie non-fact, arising from the AP’s mistaken report that cell service had been shut down in the wake of the bombing. What really happened is that cell networks were overwhelmed, and only text messages were getting through because, to oversimplify, if your phone can communicate with with the cell network, it can send a text message even if there’s not enough bandwith to make a call.
This might not seem like a big deal, but it does show the power of the first report. Even in a time of tight budgets, a front-page Times story is heavily edited, and every editor who touched that story missed a pretty obvious falsehood. One of the strange things about human memory is that stress or trauma fixes memories into our brains. In Down Around Midnight, Robert Sabbag’s story of surviving a plane crash and dealing with his traumatic memories, he mentions a tribe that would tell its most important stories to kids and then throw them in the river, because the trauma and fear of near-drowning would cause them to remember the story for life. Perhaps that’s why the Times’ editors remember the initial AP story, which came at the height of the chaos around the bombing, but not the correction. If you don’t like my “This American Life”-style explanation, you can chalk it up to sloppiness caused by technical ignorance. Either way, this won’t be the first time that the “scoop” obsession of the media covering this and other stories has caused a rumor from a single source to be treated as fact long after being debunked.
Being first is not a real scoop, but the mania to be first pushes a bunch of crap into our already shit-burdened media pipeline. This zombie cell phone story is just one example.
Also, too: the government can shut down the cell phone system. It’s been done during protests against BART.
Walker
This article clearly needs a link to the Onion’s reaction to the NY Post’s coverage
Comrade Jake
Yup. I heard this non-fact repeated twice on sports radio yesterday (Mike and Mike in the morning, then an afternoon show).
These things can be difficult to correct once they get started. Also, too, Al Gore invented the internets.
NonyNony
Yes. And the fact that text messages could get through when calls could not should have been an indication that this playground rumor about why the cell network was down was wrong. It really can’t be any harder to detonate a bomb with a text message than with a call from a cell phone.
(But using cell phones to blow up bombs is one of those things that I can’t believe that real bombers do all that often. I’d like to see statistics because this sounds more like a flashy thing that you see on TV or in the movies because it looks cool.)
raven
My old man was pinned down on the beach at Corregidor by japanese machine gun fire. He was in a fairly safe position and hung tight until fire support zeroed in and made it safe for him to haul ass. When we were kids we used to go up into the Puente Hills above Whittier College. There were a couple of boulders with corrugated roofing metal across them. He got us down in there and started bombing us with big rocks and telling us if we stayed put we’d be safe. Took me a long time to put the two situations together but it was a learning experience I never forgot.
Dave
To go slightly OT here, how come no one has mentioned the guy who tried to bomb the Spokane MLK parade in 2011? With a homemade bomb packed with shrapnel in a backpack.
Susan Collins goes on and on about Islamic terrorists. But here’s a white supremacist who tried to attack a similar “soft target” with a similar bomb.
MikeJ
@NonyNony:
Why not? It’s cheaper and far more reliable than building some other sort of remote detonation device. You can pick one up for $10 and it will almost certainly work almost anywhere. Snip the leads to the speaker and , wire it into your circuit, and you’ve got a control signal that works when it rings, or even when it gets a text. Very, very easy to use.
Face
As was all those undetonated non-bombs, the non-bomb in the Kennedy library, and all those Saudi suspects being interrogated. There’s about 5-6 huge “facts” they got wrong, and yet they’re still part of the lore of the event. Thanks, CNN.
marshall
I regard the story about the shut-down of the cell phone system as currently unproven. (Yes, I read the article in Motherboard, which talks about “Gut instinct” but had no actual facts, except that the guy was able to send text messages from near the bomb site.) They could have tried to shut it down, they could have tried to jam it, they could have turned off power to local cell towers, they could have even asked Verizon and Sprint to keep quiet about what they were doing, the system could have simply collapsed. I am sure it will all come out in the long run, but, at present, I don’t see how we (the public) can know for sure.
Suffern ACE
@Dave: the Times Square bomb attempt also used a similar device against a soft target, unless tourists mulling about before going to see a musical is something else.
I don’t think that bringing up the Islamic potential is as much of a problem as her idea that it is somehow wrong to arrest foreign terrorists and try them in court. The “scary terrorist need to go to military court the way you’d send a bad boy to military school” is actually more offensive.
Comrade Jake
@Dave:
It’s domestic. You know how I know: a foreign group would have claimed responsibility already. You’d think this would occur to the right-wing numbnuts, but as it turns out, they’re numbnuts.
Raven
@Face: Come on, that will always happen with shit like this.
Cassidy
@NonyNony: It was a common initiating device in Iraq.
Omnes Omnibus
@Cassidy: So now you are saying this was an Iraqi attack? Let’s invade those fuckers!
/wingnut
Dave
@Suffern ACE: The Times Sq. attempt was a car bomb, IIRC. Here, you can kind of draw a line from this bomb to the Spokane attempt and back to Rudolph’s Centennial Park bomb (pipe bomb laced with nails). Just seems to me like the odds of it being a domestic terrorist are way higher than it being an evil furriner
Comrade Jake
I’d missed this gem from Steve Doocy the other day, regarding the Saudi national who was questioned after the bombings:
Jesus.
Cassidy
@Omnes Omnibus: Heh. I am saying that not only was it a common initiating device, but Soldiers are taught rudimentary skills in making IED’s to help us better identify them.
Omnes Omnibus
@Dave: The confluence of the tax filing deadline and MA’s Patriot Day holiday points toward domestic to me. OTOH once we find out who it actually is, all sorts of facts will become significant in retrospect. Right now, we are basically reading chicken entrails for signs.
Dave
@Omnes Omnibus: Very true.
Cassidy
@Omnes Omnibus: I’ll go with tea leaves.
Omnes Omnibus
@Cassidy: Sadly, making a simple bomb is not very complicated.
@Cassidy: You could have the chicken for dinner.
Suffern ACE
@Dave: the explosive device was a pressure cooker bomb. Why is it sooooo important that it be a domestic terrorist? What happens if it turns out to be an African American convert to Buddhism and a libertarian pot legalization activist who was in Iraq and had PTSD? There might be something in his bio for everyone to latch on.
Anya
@Comrade Jake: Doucy is so dumb, I don’t know how he manages to tie his own shoes?
JGabriel
mistermix @ top:
I seem to remember we learned, during the Times fact-check review of Judy Miller’s reporting, that the Times doesn’t edit its reporters very heavily, and, in particular, relies on reporters to do their own fact-checking.
That’s in contrast to the New Yorker, which is legendary for its fact-checking desk.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suffern ACE: A
I know that guy. Fucker owes me money.
Cassidy
@Suffern ACE: Why we got to bring PTSD into this? You know, some of us have PTSD and are normal, functioning members of society.
schrodinger's cat
I think there may be some sort of a running connection, the Boston Marathon is the holy grail for long distance runners. You have to qualify to run the marathon.
I doubt that it is that big of deal to people outside that community and people from Boston.
The aim was not to kill but maim, the lower extremities. Anger against people who can run. Something the perpetrator probably liked to do but can’t do now.
Suffern ACE
@Cassidy: ok. Apologies. He has a child with autism and targeted boston because it has a high concentration of pharmaceutical researchers.
Paul in KY
@raven: He was getting you ready for Nam, it appears.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
Never trust initial reports.
That’s what Lt. Col. Robert Bateman means when he says to his scout troopers, “you motherfuckers lie to me all the time.”
Paul in KY
@MikeJ: Sounds like you’ve been thinking long & hard about how to do that, ‘Mike’.
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodinger’s cat: You know, with all the political terrorism speculation going on, something like this is also a real possibility. Its motivation could be more akin to Aurora and Newtown than Atlanta or OKC.
Cassidy
@Suffern ACE: Fuckin’ with ya. I always laugh when one of us says something that can generally be true and then everyone jumps up “well, in my case…”.
The other day I said that zombie apocalypse speculations tends to be a largely male activity, just in my experience and I got several “I’m a women…” or “I know a women..”. So anyway.
In all seriousness, the PTSD would have to be really severe and at that point would be so debilitating that I don’t think they could function enough to plan anything. OTOH, some very bitter, anti-gov’t types of various political stripes have come out of the wars.
Paul in KY
@Comrade Jake: The right wing POSes never claim responsibility, cause they are chickenshit scum who are trying to get away with this & feel a claim of responsibility wouldn’t help them stay one step ahead of the law.
The Al Qaeda types are usually in a cave 10,000 miles away.
raven
@Paul in KY: Watching this week’s Mad Men was interesting. The entire episode was about people fucking each others wives and shit and in the background was new reports about the Pueblo and Tet. Whiny ass right wingers are always bitching about how bad the troops were treated by hippies but this was closer to my experience. Basically no one gave a fuck.
raven
“Kim Williams, wife of jailed ex-Kaufman County JP Eric Williams, arrested on capital murder charge”
MikeJ
@Paul in KY: Except that it’s so trivial that there’s no need to think long and hard about it. It’s not the least bit “flashy” as nony claimed.
aimai
There are a lot of angry people in this country. A LOT. And they are angry at people who are happy–happier than they. The place where this crosses over into libertarian/galtian/rightist violence land is that such people are so highly individualistic, angry and bitter that they don’t work well with others. I expect this is going to turn out to be another “lone wolf” because its not necessary to work with a group to do violence to your enemies in this country. Its easy to get the motive, means, and opportunity. The only thing that makes this at all different from the usual rash of young white male violence is that it wasn’t targeted at women or at students. I expect, in the end, its going to turn out to be an older white male, angry at runners because he didn’t qualify for the Marthon and perhaps generically angry at liberal boston and even (especially) at the international aspects of the Marathon and even of the city itself.
schrodinger's cat
@Omnes Omnibus: Both NY and DC have their own high profile marathons, which would have made a bigger political point. To me this seems more like a personal vendetta. I guess we have to wait and see.
handsmile
@JGabriel:
Reporters and editors of the NYT are very busy and very important people. They just won four Pulitzer Prizes, I’ll have you know.
You can’t expect them to be “truth vigilantes” as well!
http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/12/should-the-times-be-a-truth-vigilante/
beltane
@Omnes Omnibus: If the person who did it was so severely mentally ill you’d think they would have tried to bask in the glory of their work by seeking attention after the fact. Whoever did it was sane enough to avoid getting caught.
Omnes Omnibus
@beltane: Unibomber. Not caught for years, crazy as a rat in a tin can.
beltane
@Omnes Omnibus: The Unibomber wasn’t roaming around in a big city filled with law enforcement, and he chose his targets very, very carefully. One also has to consider that the elite runners had already passed the finish line quite a while before, so in terms of affecting the athletes themselves the attack was a failure. Whoever did it clearly wanted to cause mayhem among the spectators more than anything else.
Also, unless we are talking about a Love Bomb designed to spread peace and joy, most bombs are generally intended to maim and kill.
MobiusKlein
It wouldn’t surprise me if it was some lone psycho, not motivated by politics, but by voices in his head.
But could have been a right wing associated crazy.
Or lefty crazy.
Or foreign terror.
I would be surprised if it was a mob hit, however. I think we can safely rule that out.
aimai
@beltane:
We don’t know where this guy is roaming or holed up. We also (seem) think this is his first try. If he doesn’t do it again–what are the odds that he gets caught?
Villago Delenda Est
@Walker:
Let’s not bicker and argue about who killed who! This is supposed to be a happy occasion!
Villago Delenda Est
@schrodinger’s cat:
This made me think of serious Likudnik shill Krauthammer.
beltane
@aimai: If he doesn’t do it again, it will all have been for naught as marathons will continue to be run and all the dead were spectators, not runners.
gbear
@NonyNony:
Roger McGuinn was writing songs about bombings triggered by phone 22 years ago when they were called ‘car phones’.
priscianus jr
@Comrade Jake: It’s domestic. You know how I know: a foreign group would have claimed responsibility already.
I had been thinking the lack of responsibility claim was very significant, but I couldn’t pinpoint what the significance was. I think you’ve nailed it. McVeigh/OK City kept silent as well.
Davis X. Machina
@Dave:
Because you don’t want to be vice-president.
aimai
@beltane:
I know–the fact that it was all spectators makes me think this was very much a private passion play the meaning of which will be, in the end, nonsensical or basically the classical meaning of “idiocy.” There are/were any number of places where he could have mown down specifically runners. And he has to have known when he dropped off his bombs that the spectator’s bodies would actually constitute a shield of sorts, a buffer.
I agree with the FBI: someone knows this person and long suspected he could/would do violence to someone. Someone knows this person’s history and suspects he did it.
MomSense
It is just a waste of time to speculate as to who did this or what the motives were. There is just not enough information.
lol
@beltane:
I don’t think that’s much to go on. Boston’s marathon times are quite a bit faster than other cities. If this had happened in almost any other city, it would’ve killed more runners.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@beltane: Love bombing is usually a very bad thing.
Villago Delenda Est
@MomSense:
It won’t stop the BJ commentariat, who have a limited audience, and it certainly won’t stop the MSM, who have Buicks to sell.
I might add that the BJ commentariat does this more as a mental exercise, with an unspoken caveat that it’s speculation and subject to massive revision as solid facts come to light. The MSM, however, makes no apologies for its banquet of bullshit. They’ve got fucking Buicks to sell!
Cassidy
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: My first thought was the “banned skittles commercial”. lol
Debbie(aussie)
@Anya:
He probably wears slip-ons, otherwise he would slip-up.
beltane
@aimai: It could also be an ex-spouse/lover looking to take domestic violence to a whole new level. This is sometimes the motivation for workplace shootings so anything is possible.
beltane
Maybe it was someone pissed that the NY Marathon was cancelled due to Hurricane Sandy. Or Oscar Pistorious.
Suffern ACE
@beltane:
Well, there was that one guy who was placing his bombs in mailboxes to form a happy face. But even those bombs maimed people.
Aimai
@MomSense: what makes you think it’s a este of time to speculate? I agree that if you aren’t local the issue is moot but I am local–people in my neighborhood were maimed. My children and I are in the city almost every day. It does make a difference to me whether I think it was a single asshole or the front edge of a rightist anti tax group, or something else. It’s as much speculating to decide one way as the other. But in any event, if you are local, you can’t help it. I don’t watch or read any national coverage because its just violence porn for news junkies. But it’s too real here to be put behind us yet.
beltane
It is being reported that the pressure cookers involved were of European manufacture and hard to obtain in the US. Does anyone know of Megan McArdle’s whereabouts at the time of the bombing?
Suffern ACE
@beltane: Raven admitted her pressure cooker was French. I’m not sure how much trouble she went through to get it.
Mine is good ol USA branded made whoknows where.
mistermix
@JGabriel: My understanding is that the bylined big-namers, like Judy Miller, aren’t edited much, but the top story on a current news event is assembled by editors from many different reporters’ work.
Davis X. Machina
@beltane: “Hard to obtain” in this foodie-filled age, is a very relative term. “Can’t be bought at WalMart or Target” isn’t ‘hard-to-obtain’, not in a Williams-Sonoma world.
I got moose in my back yard, can hear loons at night most of the summer, and if I drive 20 minutes, I can buy a complete sous-vide kit. Not that sous-vide helps moose much.
schrodinger's cat
@Davis X. Machina: You can get fancy kitchen stuff from Amazon.com.
Paul in KY
@raven: I was a kid back then & when we would watch the news, generally there would be a line like ‘In Vietnam today U.S. Command reported 587 Viet Cong killed and 5 U.S. combat deaths’.
I would be thinking ‘Surely they must run out of Viet Cong at some point.’ In my immediate family, we had only 1 close friend who was killed during the war.
So, there was alot of out-of-sight, out-of-mind.
Will say that the was coverage back then was alot more in-your-face & explicit than in Gulf/Iraq.
Paul in KY
@MikeJ: Just messing with you a bit. Understand your comment was germane.
beltane
@Davis X. Machina: And probably very little in the way of cookware is hard to obtain in the Boston area.
Paul in KY
@aimai: Would be surprised if it was someone who an aspect of their doing this was they they were pissed at not qualifying. I think it was probably more about them there young fancy lberals with their tight running shorts & it being in Taxachusetts, grumble, grumble…
Paul in KY
@gbear: Saw Mr. McGuinn in concert a few years ago. Very interesting fellow. Didn’t get to ask him about kicking Gene Clark out of band for being afraid to fly.
Eric U.
@schrodinger’s cat: The only person I suspect is the guy that got caught cheating at marathons, including Boston. Wonder if they know where he was the other day? Slippery character.
MomSense
@Aimai:
I’m local too. Even though I live in Maine now I used to live in Boston–cheered friends and family members at the finish. Worked very close to that spot. Attended church nearby.
I am in no way saying that we shouldn’t grieve or care for our friends, family, and community–I just don’t see how speculating is helpful.
We don’t have enough information to determine who is responsible. I don’t appreciate it when people speculate that it is “Islamic Jihadists”. It can cause harm. What is the point of speculating anyway? It doesn’t bring us any closer to knowing the truth. It doesn’t make us feel better. All it does is display our biases.
MomSense
@Aimai:
Also, not speculating on who did this is not in any way “putting this behind us”. I am not saying that at all. I think there is a lot to do right now and for a long time to come to care for people who are hurting.
Bobby Thomson
@Eric U.: Doesn’t fit his profile. When caught, he never responded angrily. Just accepted it and moved on. Plus he hasn’t entered anything in years.
Xenos
I just got a European pressure cooker… they are damn expensive over here. If using the pressure cooker is a local terrorist’s idea of misdirection then he is paying a serious premium to do so.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Davis X. Machina: But it could mean “hard to obtain without leaving records”. Probably cuts down on the likelihood that they were bought at a thrift store or garage sale.
Xenos
@Eric U.: Rosie Ruiz does not seem to be the violent type, either.
My guess is that the bomber was sending a message. The message, basically, was “I hate you fuckers and I am going to bomb you.” If the message was “Enjoy your roosting-chicken sandwich, Fucking Yankees! LOVE AQ/FARQ/Red Brigades/whatever” then some way of saying that would have been sent by supplemental communication already.
So if the first message is being sent, who hates international crowds dedicated to peace and fair competition, in the center of liberal America in the home of the revolution that birthed the US Government? And what sector of society has generated terrorists going after parades and international events dedicated to peaceful competition in the past?
gbear
@Paul in KY:
The rest of the Byrds were giving Gene Clark shit because he was making so much more money from songwriting royalties. The songs were just pouring out of him while the others struggled with writing. The Byrds started cutting his good songs from the records so that lesser songs by the others could be included. It wasn’t just fear of flying that got him tossed from the band.
Another question for McGuinn is why he shortchanged Clark so badly on the first Byrds box set.
Mnemosyne
@MomSense:
I think one of the reasons people are speculating out loud is that the media — both MSM and right-wing — is also speculating out loud, and we don’t want their speculations to have the force of “truth” because they were the only ones heard. There are already so many myths about the event (there were 5 bombs! the cell phones were shut down!) that shooting down the ones the right wing is coming up with is well worth it.
Remember, there are people who were so convinced that Saddam Hussein was behind the Oklahoma City bombing that they managed to convinced powerful Republicans that their conspiracy theory was right. I would really, really like to try and not have that happen again.
MomSense
@Mnemosyne:
Obviously everyone can do what they want to do. For me, it doesn’t make sense to speculate. I can understand why people would want to counter the misinformation provided by our media. I’m not sure that speculating based on hunches is the best way to do that. But it isn’t for me to decide what to do for others.
I choose not to speculate.
Interrobang
@beltane: Funny, it was all over the news in my area this morning that the pressure cookers were made by a Canadian company. (Being Canadian, and all, my news would care about that sort of thing.) Were they wrong? The news people said you could get them for about a hundred and forty bucks, which seems like an awful lot to pay for a pressure cooker, and an awful lot to spend on an improvised pipe bomb, but what do I know. Maybe the bomber just rolls with quality, man…
Another Halocene Human
This is a zombie non-fact, arising from the AP’s mistaken report that cell service had been shut down in the wake of the bombing. What really happened is that cell networks were overwhelmed
Toldjaso, toldjaso, toldjaso, toldjaso.
Another Halocene Human
@Interrobang: I hate these preliminary reports. I didn’t know what a box cutter was till I saw a photo–ohhhhh, a utility knife!
The radio yesterday was saying a pressure cooker was like a rice cooker. Well, a rice cooker has a little pressure, but a good pressure cooker (not a rice cooker) has a lot of steel in the construction which increases the price.
But I don’t frequent white supremacist sites (I’ll leave that to the heroes at SPLC) so I don’t really know what kind of cooker they mean.
JGabriel
@mistermix: Yes, that could be. You’re right, that process would make more sense for a breaking story.
Cheryl from Maryland
More Zaum from David Brooks. Just ignore.
Another Halocene Human
@Cassidy: PTSD can make you lash out in fear at your loved ones or total strangers, but it doesn’t make you sit up late at night for weeks plotting to bomb a crowd of people.
Honestly, it probably makes you more likely to be unable to plan anything, between the depression, bad sleep, memory problems, and anxiety.
Another Halocene Human
@Suffern ACE: So why didn’t “he” blow up the BU Photonics Lab several blocks away, instead? Why didn’t he find out where Gorski (don’t think he’s in Boston, but the antivaxxers on SafeMinds hate him) and Steve Novella (who is in Boston) work and firebomb their cars?
People who set off bombs to kill random strangers don’t hate a specific item, program, or person. They hate the world.
Another Halocene Human
@Omnes Omnibus: Agreed. Although I think the timing shows what websites this fucker’s been on, so more of a Breivik, maybe.
Mnemosyne
@MomSense:
No, I get it. I’m in California, so there aren’t too many options open to me other than speculation, but I can understand why people in the affected area find it maddening.
Another Halocene Human
@beltane: It is being reported that the pressure cookers involved were of European manufacture and hard to obtain in the US.
Really? Have they checked eBay?
I buy shit from Hong Kong all the time so I question this.
Also, why the f*ck would the cops let it drop that the manufacture is unusual?! That’s how they find people. This is nonsense.
Another Halocene Human
@Paul in KY: It’s someone who feels excluded, hence the happy families congratulating their marathon-finishing loved ones sets off the rage… or just the fact that the entire town is on holiday, having a good time, loving on each other … and that sets off the rage.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Another Halocene Human: There’s a paper trail with eBay.
I don’t think the cops let it slip so much as let a photo out without thinking. What I’ve seen is all centered on a 6L notation on the remains of the pot in the photo.
Cassidy
@Another Halocene Human: You didn’t see my follow up comment. I was just giving some friendly antagonism.
MattR
FWIW, cnn.com has an article on 5 viral stories about the Boston attacks that are not true. Included on the list is the “authorities shut down cell phone service” claim.
Paul in KY
@gbear: Gene Clark was the only reason they were stars (IMO).
You can see the jealousy that erupts when the money isn’t distributed evenly. The Doors had every somg written by ‘The Doors’, even though Jim wrote about all of them except ‘Light My Fire’.
Thanks for the info.
Paul in KY
@Another Halocene Human: Certainly could be that.