5 ms·

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev charged with using ‘weapon of mass destruction’

22 points by a_p 13y ago

This is the most bizarre and dangerous definition of 'WMD' that I've ever seen.

gknoy 13y ago
When did "WMD" go from describing something intended to kill thousands or millions of people to an IED? Both are bad, but it seems like a dilution to make "WMD" effectively synonymous with "bomb".
- josh2600 13y ago
  I find it disturbing that under this definition of WMD, what the US does with Drones almost each day is certainly also massive. Is a gun a weapon of mass destruction? Why not?
  - bryne 13y ago
    Because the NRA.
  - noonespecial 13y ago
    Its probably more about the anonymous killing of multiple random people vs the actual number of people killed. A gun may kill many, but the shooter must do some selection of each one.
    - josh2600 13y ago
      This isn't true with a high-powered rifle being shot into a crowd... I think an assault rifle would've done a lot more damage than the pressure cooker.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
  He allegedly made a bomb, or bombs, and maybe shot a policeman. The bombs killed a few people, including a child. He apparently had intent to set off another bomb or two. There's enough to put him away for the rest of his (useful to him) life. No need to make him any more important than he is, and no need to cheapen the acts of real honest-to-goodness war criminals.
  - manicdee 13y ago
    You forget that use of WMD means you can be subjected to "enhanced interrogation" (aka torture) to extract "actionable intelligence" (aka "whatever nonsense we make them say, such as 'Obama is not American'"). Therefore adding charges of WMD opens up new doors for prosecution and sentencing.
- sehugg 13y ago
  There's a Schneier post about this from 2009: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/04/definition_of_w.html http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/04/definition_of_... Here's the legal code which describes a "destructive device" (passed in 1968 and amended several times): http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/921 http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/921 Note that it is so broadly written that it has to specifically exclude antique muzzle-loading rifles.
  - abecedarius 13y ago
    Ha: "the Reagan administration's long-misnamed WMD-for-Hostages deal with Iran."
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  The law defining 'weapons of mass destruction' was written in 1994, but does in fact reference pretty much any 'destructive device.' That latter term was first defined in 1968, and includes things like hand grenades or things with as little as a quarter-ounce of explosive material. The 'mass' part reflects the principle of damage radiating outward from the origin and affecting whoever/whatever happens to be in proximity, as opposed to the more targeted destruction caused by a bullet or handheld weapon. Of course you could kill multiple people with a handheld weapon or (rarely) hit several people with a single bullet, but in general such attacks involve one-on-one interactions even if there is a series of them in rapid order, as with automatic gunfire. hitting multiple individuals from a single shot or manual attack is considered a fluke. See notes on http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2332a http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2332a and http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/921 http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/921 Note that the law is not necessarily drafted to reflect the actual probability of injury, but to dissuade any use of the method; explosive, chemical, biological and radioactive attacks are by nature indiscriminate. That's considered much worse than an attack on a particular individual (you could launch an indiscriminate attack by, say, firing a gun into a crowd. But that lack of care about who you hit would itself attract a higher sentence). Furthermore, it radiates temporally; if you plant a device and then drop dead of a heart attack, the device remains dangerous even though you are no longer capable of forming criminal intent. It presents risk from when it's emplaced to when it has finished releasing, a period which could last years. In similar fashion, using a bomb or poison to kill someone automatically makes the offense into Murder in the First Degree, negating defenses like 'crime of passion' or 'heat of the moment'.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
awnird 13y ago
If those pressure cooker bombs were WMDs, then I guess the Iraq invasion was justified after all.
- gyom 13y ago
  Exactly my reasoning.
mpyne 13y ago
I like how the comments here are recycling Reddit from yesterday, almost word for word. The term "WMD" being used here has a specific legal meaning which is far different from the more well-known military meaning, and is valid for the charges in question. If it makes you feel better, imagine they charged him with "homocidial douchebaggery"...
- DanielBMarkham 13y ago
  I don't read reddit, so apologies. I really enjoy a good bit of legal context. No doubt that trained prosecutors do things for legitimate and rational reasons. However, there is also a role for the "peanut gallery" of uninformed speculation here. In fact, I'd argue the public perception of this stuff is 1000 times more important than the legalese. You want a crime that's got "mass destruction" in the title, you need to demonstrate to the common man that this involves mass destruction. I don't believe that's too much to ask from the system.
  - mpyne 13y ago
    > You want a crime that's got "mass destruction" in the title, you need to demonstrate to the common man that this involves mass destruction. I don't believe that's too much to ask from the system. Since when did blowing up two bombs that cause 3 fatalities and 150+ persons to sustain often-horrific injuries not count as as mass event? It is not the prosecutor's fault that American servicemembers have caused the medical field to innovate for the past ten years on how to save lives in response to these attacks.
    - DanielBMarkham 13y ago
      You want to define "mass destruction" as some number dead and injured? I'm fine with that. You want to define it as the intent to kill and/or maim a certain number of people? I'm fine with that too. But that's not the way the law is worded. Right now, a high-school student playing around with blackpowder in an effort to blow up his neighbor's mailbox is flirting around with getting a WMD charge. Do you want that in the same category as this? I don't.
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
So there is no difference between killing 3 or 4 and maiming a hundred, and killing 4 or 5 thousand and maiming ten times that many? I must have missed where the "mass destruction" part was defined. Don't get me wrong, if he's guilty, I'm about as hardcore as a person could be about what to do with him. I'm just trying to figure out what the hell the government has done to our criminal justice system in the name of the war on terror. EDIT: From a friend on FB, the definition of Mass Destruction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapon_of_mass_destruction#Criminal_.28Civilian.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapon_of_mass_destruction#Crim... "other device with a charge of more than four ounces" So a few shotgun shells in a mailbox, which is a mean, vile, lethal weapon and might easily deserve the death penalty, but now it's also a WMD? I hate to put this so bluntly, but the only thing that this tells me is that idiots are defining legal terms. Are there any grownups in charge of making these laws?
- podperson 13y ago
  Perhaps it's an attempt to retro-actively redefine WMD so that Bush/Cheney can claim that Saddam did so have WMDs. It ties in nicely with defining environmental activists who had never killed anybody (and who had taken pains to avoid doing so) as terrorists after 9/11.
  - mpyne 13y ago
    You mean time travel? This definition has been on the books since before 9/11...
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  It's a charge of 1/4 ounce; four ounces refers to the minimum standard for projectile charge in a missile. It's not a good idea to rely on Wikipedia and Facebook for your legal insights. Yes, there are grownups in charge of making such laws, and perhaps you might benefit from contemplating the principles behind such laws before projecting your understanding of a term onto the legislative language. 'Weapon of mass destruction' is a categorical definition, not a quantitative one. The quantitative aspect of the case will be reflected in the number of murder/battery charges.
- 13y ago
ry0ohki 13y ago
I don't understand what people think is wrong with the usual criminal justice system. If we can't convict someone of 3 murders, 140 attempted murders, destruction of property, using an explosive, etc... without resorting to wacky terrorism laws, then we have bigger problems.
- svachalek 13y ago
  All (reportedly) caught on video too. Should be a slam dunk for any legal intern worth their salt.
- gwright 13y ago
  The argument isn't that the criminal justice system (in this particular case) is inadequate for conviction but that actionable intelligence might be gleaned by following the rules regarding interrogation designed for warfare that wouldn't otherwise be accessible via regular criminal justice procedures.
  - ry0ohki 13y ago
    Couldn't that apply in many criminal cases? If we didn't have to read a drug dealer his rights, and could use torture we might be able to get actionable intelligence on their cartel, or a child molestors network, etc...
    - gwright 13y ago
      Yes. This is a policy decision and one that is pretty murky with lots of differing opinions. The 'war on terror' and the 'war on drugs' are two areas where these policy decisions seem to come up quite a bit. Or maybe a better way of characterizing the problem area is that it is deeply related to how we want to respond to patterns of violence caused by foreign, non-state actors: terrorist groups, drug cartels, organized crime, private militias, etc. (including US citizens that are involved with those foreign non-state actors).
  - mpyne 13y ago
    What are you referring to? The Miranda thing or what Senators Graham and McCain are going on about? The Miranda exception is not at all designed for warfare, and as far as I know there is no one within the current Administration even suggesting they might accede to what Graham/McCain suggest doing with regard to treating Tsarnaev as an enemy combatant.
brianchu 13y ago
Everyone here talking about how this definition is stupid is seriously missing the point. Just because the legal use of a term doesn't fit in with your conception of what a WMD is doesn't make it a stupid definition. I think it's clear that the federal government just wanted a separate criminal category for explosives and other extremely hazardous materials (chemical and biological). Seriously, this should not be the first time that some of you guys have encountered a legal term that doesn't match up with the colloquial sense of the term. And we shouldn't be predicating crimes on the competence of their perpetrators - their pressure cooker bombs did injure more than a hundred people. Had they engineered it optimally, they likely could have killed tens of more people.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
mtgx 13y ago
Since Carmen Ortiz will be his prosecutor, I'm not surprised by this. She seems to identify someone's crime, then look for an order of magnitude worse charge, and go with that. It seems to be her style of prosecution.
- mpyne 13y ago
  Someday you'll actually read the law in question and realize how incredibly insensitive this comment must make you seem.
mindslight 13y ago
And what happens if a court actually correctly decides that such charges violate the second amendment? I'm sure Bostonians everywhere will be thrilled.
- kvb 13y ago
  What does the 2nd amendment have to do with anything?
zeteo 13y ago
The events in Boston are tragic, but this stoking of mass hysteria around them is not that great either. I find it hard to believe that someone like John McCain, who had no problem with dropping bombs from his plane onto Vietnamese civilians [1], is so terrified by three civilian deaths at the hands of low-tech [2], deluded criminals. The big question, of course - possibly bigger than the terrorist act itself - is who benefits from this absurd inflation of the threat's magnitude. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Rolling_Thunder#Conclusions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Rolling_Thunder#Concl... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_(projectile)#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_(projectile)#History
illuminate 13y ago
I don't understand what is particularly special about this case of domestic terrorism where persons are now wanting to treat the attackers somehow differently than the Turner Diaries brand of American bomber (aside from that the brothers were lawful residents, not citizens, of course.)

22 points by a_p 13y ago

This is the most bizarre and dangerous definition of 'WMD' that I've ever seen.

gknoy 13y ago

When did "WMD" go from describing something intended to kill thousands or millions of people to an IED? Both are bad, but it seems like a dilution to make "WMD" effectively synonymous with "bomb".

josh2600 13y ago
I find it disturbing that under this definition of WMD, what the US does with Drones almost each day is certainly also massive. Is a gun a weapon of mass destruction? Why not?
- bryne 13y ago
  Because the NRA.
- noonespecial 13y ago
  Its probably more about the anonymous killing of multiple random people vs the actual number of people killed. A gun may kill many, but the shooter must do some selection of each one.
  - josh2600 13y ago
    This isn't true with a high-powered rifle being shot into a crowd... I think an assault rifle would've done a lot more damage than the pressure cooker.
fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
He allegedly made a bomb, or bombs, and maybe shot a policeman. The bombs killed a few people, including a child. He apparently had intent to set off another bomb or two. There's enough to put him away for the rest of his (useful to him) life. No need to make him any more important than he is, and no need to cheapen the acts of real honest-to-goodness war criminals.
- manicdee 13y ago
  You forget that use of WMD means you can be subjected to "enhanced interrogation" (aka torture) to extract "actionable intelligence" (aka "whatever nonsense we make them say, such as 'Obama is not American'"). Therefore adding charges of WMD opens up new doors for prosecution and sentencing.
sehugg 13y ago
There's a Schneier post about this from 2009: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/04/definition_of_w.html http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/04/definition_of_... Here's the legal code which describes a "destructive device" (passed in 1968 and amended several times): http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/921 http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/921 Note that it is so broadly written that it has to specifically exclude antique muzzle-loading rifles.
- abecedarius 13y ago
  Ha: "the Reagan administration's long-misnamed WMD-for-Hostages deal with Iran."
anigbrowl 13y ago
The law defining 'weapons of mass destruction' was written in 1994, but does in fact reference pretty much any 'destructive device.' That latter term was first defined in 1968, and includes things like hand grenades or things with as little as a quarter-ounce of explosive material. The 'mass' part reflects the principle of damage radiating outward from the origin and affecting whoever/whatever happens to be in proximity, as opposed to the more targeted destruction caused by a bullet or handheld weapon. Of course you could kill multiple people with a handheld weapon or (rarely) hit several people with a single bullet, but in general such attacks involve one-on-one interactions even if there is a series of them in rapid order, as with automatic gunfire. hitting multiple individuals from a single shot or manual attack is considered a fluke. See notes on http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2332a http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2332a and http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/921 http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/921 Note that the law is not necessarily drafted to reflect the actual probability of injury, but to dissuade any use of the method; explosive, chemical, biological and radioactive attacks are by nature indiscriminate. That's considered much worse than an attack on a particular individual (you could launch an indiscriminate attack by, say, firing a gun into a crowd. But that lack of care about who you hit would itself attract a higher sentence). Furthermore, it radiates temporally; if you plant a device and then drop dead of a heart attack, the device remains dangerous even though you are no longer capable of forming criminal intent. It presents risk from when it's emplaced to when it has finished releasing, a period which could last years. In similar fashion, using a bomb or poison to kill someone automatically makes the offense into Murder in the First Degree, negating defenses like 'crime of passion' or 'heat of the moment'.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

awnird 13y ago

If those pressure cooker bombs were WMDs, then I guess the Iraq invasion was justified after all.

gyom 13y ago
Exactly my reasoning.

mpyne 13y ago

I like how the comments here are recycling Reddit from yesterday, almost word for word. The term "WMD" being used here has a specific legal meaning which is far different from the more well-known military meaning, and is valid for the charges in question. If it makes you feel better, imagine they charged him with "homocidial douchebaggery"...

DanielBMarkham 13y ago
I don't read reddit, so apologies. I really enjoy a good bit of legal context. No doubt that trained prosecutors do things for legitimate and rational reasons. However, there is also a role for the "peanut gallery" of uninformed speculation here. In fact, I'd argue the public perception of this stuff is 1000 times more important than the legalese. You want a crime that's got "mass destruction" in the title, you need to demonstrate to the common man that this involves mass destruction. I don't believe that's too much to ask from the system.
- mpyne 13y ago
  > You want a crime that's got "mass destruction" in the title, you need to demonstrate to the common man that this involves mass destruction. I don't believe that's too much to ask from the system. Since when did blowing up two bombs that cause 3 fatalities and 150+ persons to sustain often-horrific injuries not count as as mass event? It is not the prosecutor's fault that American servicemembers have caused the medical field to innovate for the past ten years on how to save lives in response to these attacks.
  - DanielBMarkham 13y ago
    You want to define "mass destruction" as some number dead and injured? I'm fine with that. You want to define it as the intent to kill and/or maim a certain number of people? I'm fine with that too. But that's not the way the law is worded. Right now, a high-school student playing around with blackpowder in an effort to blow up his neighbor's mailbox is flirting around with getting a WMD charge. Do you want that in the same category as this? I don't.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

So there is no difference between killing 3 or 4 and maiming a hundred, and killing 4 or 5 thousand and maiming ten times that many? I must have missed where the "mass destruction" part was defined. Don't get me wrong, if he's guilty, I'm about as hardcore as a person could be about what to do with him. I'm just trying to figure out what the hell the government has done to our criminal justice system in the name of the war on terror. EDIT: From a friend on FB, the definition of Mass Destruction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapon_of_mass_destruction#Criminal_.28Civilian.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapon_of_mass_destruction#Crim... "other device with a charge of more than four ounces" So a few shotgun shells in a mailbox, which is a mean, vile, lethal weapon and might easily deserve the death penalty, but now it's also a WMD? I hate to put this so bluntly, but the only thing that this tells me is that idiots are defining legal terms. Are there any grownups in charge of making these laws?

podperson 13y ago
Perhaps it's an attempt to retro-actively redefine WMD so that Bush/Cheney can claim that Saddam did so have WMDs. It ties in nicely with defining environmental activists who had never killed anybody (and who had taken pains to avoid doing so) as terrorists after 9/11.
- mpyne 13y ago
  You mean time travel? This definition has been on the books since before 9/11...
anigbrowl 13y ago
It's a charge of 1/4 ounce; four ounces refers to the minimum standard for projectile charge in a missile. It's not a good idea to rely on Wikipedia and Facebook for your legal insights. Yes, there are grownups in charge of making such laws, and perhaps you might benefit from contemplating the principles behind such laws before projecting your understanding of a term onto the legislative language. 'Weapon of mass destruction' is a categorical definition, not a quantitative one. The quantitative aspect of the case will be reflected in the number of murder/battery charges.
13y ago

ry0ohki 13y ago

I don't understand what people think is wrong with the usual criminal justice system. If we can't convict someone of 3 murders, 140 attempted murders, destruction of property, using an explosive, etc... without resorting to wacky terrorism laws, then we have bigger problems.

svachalek 13y ago
All (reportedly) caught on video too. Should be a slam dunk for any legal intern worth their salt.
gwright 13y ago
The argument isn't that the criminal justice system (in this particular case) is inadequate for conviction but that actionable intelligence might be gleaned by following the rules regarding interrogation designed for warfare that wouldn't otherwise be accessible via regular criminal justice procedures.
- ry0ohki 13y ago
  Couldn't that apply in many criminal cases? If we didn't have to read a drug dealer his rights, and could use torture we might be able to get actionable intelligence on their cartel, or a child molestors network, etc...
  - gwright 13y ago
    Yes. This is a policy decision and one that is pretty murky with lots of differing opinions. The 'war on terror' and the 'war on drugs' are two areas where these policy decisions seem to come up quite a bit. Or maybe a better way of characterizing the problem area is that it is deeply related to how we want to respond to patterns of violence caused by foreign, non-state actors: terrorist groups, drug cartels, organized crime, private militias, etc. (including US citizens that are involved with those foreign non-state actors).
- mpyne 13y ago
  What are you referring to? The Miranda thing or what Senators Graham and McCain are going on about? The Miranda exception is not at all designed for warfare, and as far as I know there is no one within the current Administration even suggesting they might accede to what Graham/McCain suggest doing with regard to treating Tsarnaev as an enemy combatant.

brianchu 13y ago

Everyone here talking about how this definition is stupid is seriously missing the point. Just because the legal use of a term doesn't fit in with your conception of what a WMD is doesn't make it a stupid definition. I think it's clear that the federal government just wanted a separate criminal category for explosives and other extremely hazardous materials (chemical and biological). Seriously, this should not be the first time that some of you guys have encountered a legal term that doesn't match up with the colloquial sense of the term. And we shouldn't be predicating crimes on the competence of their perpetrators - their pressure cooker bombs did injure more than a hundred people. Had they engineered it optimally, they likely could have killed tens of more people.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

mtgx 13y ago

Since Carmen Ortiz will be his prosecutor, I'm not surprised by this. She seems to identify someone's crime, then look for an order of magnitude worse charge, and go with that. It seems to be her style of prosecution.

mpyne 13y ago
Someday you'll actually read the law in question and realize how incredibly insensitive this comment must make you seem.

mindslight 13y ago

And what happens if a court actually correctly decides that such charges violate the second amendment? I'm sure Bostonians everywhere will be thrilled.

kvb 13y ago
What does the 2nd amendment have to do with anything?

zeteo 13y ago

The events in Boston are tragic, but this stoking of mass hysteria around them is not that great either. I find it hard to believe that someone like John McCain, who had no problem with dropping bombs from his plane onto Vietnamese civilians [1], is so terrified by three civilian deaths at the hands of low-tech [2], deluded criminals. The big question, of course - possibly bigger than the terrorist act itself - is who benefits from this absurd inflation of the threat's magnitude. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Rolling_Thunder#Conclusions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Rolling_Thunder#Concl... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_(projectile)#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_(projectile)#History

illuminate 13y ago

I don't understand what is particularly special about this case of domestic terrorism where persons are now wanting to treat the attackers somehow differently than the Turner Diaries brand of American bomber (aside from that the brothers were lawful residents, not citizens, of course.)