

 Dzhokhar Tsarnaev charged with using ‘weapon of mass destruction’ - a_p
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/alleged-bombers-aunt-tamerlan-tsarnaev-was-religious-but-not-radical/2013/04/22/ca8f3214-ab5c-11e2-a198-99893f10d6dd_story.html
This is the most bizarre and dangerous definition of 'WMD' that I've ever seen.
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brianchu
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.

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gknoy
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".

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josh2600
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?

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noonespecial
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.

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josh2600
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.

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zeteo
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#Concl...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Rolling_Thunder#Conclusions)

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_(projectile)#History>

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ry0ohki
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.

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gwright
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.

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ry0ohki
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...

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gwright
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).

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mpyne
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"...

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DanielBMarkham
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.

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mpyne
> 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
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.

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kvb
Did you miss the "resulting in death" part of the charges?

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

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gyom
Exactly my reasoning.

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DanielBMarkham
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#Crim...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapon_of_mass_destruction#Criminal_.28Civilian.29)

"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?

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igravious
If that is the legal definition of WMD then in this case the law is an ass.
When was this legal definition created? Pre or post 9/11? I'm betting post. Do
please correct me if I'm wrong. If I am though how come nobody at the time of
the Iraq invasion^H liberation sought to point this out? I missed that memo.

And so further down the Orwellian tunnel of language distortion we go: if we
(the good guys of course) do it then it's _collateral damage_ and _enhanced
interrogation_ ; if they (those evil scum) do it then it's _weapons of mass
destruction_.

I think when people hear WMD they take it to mean _nuclear_ _chemical_ and
_biological_ weapons capable of killing _thousands_ in an instant or very
short space of time. There is no way anyone seriously considers an IED of any
crappy variety to be a WMD no matter how it is deployed or what the intent
behind the murders is.

But yeah, let's keep on barreling down that road, let's see where it'll take
us.

EDIT: as anigbrowl points out the answer is pre:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5591399> Also interestingly mass in this
sense means indiscriminate as opposed to targeted. I don't know is it just me
or were others under the impression that mass meant _on a massive scale_. It
certainly seems to have been used in that sense in the run-up to Iraq 2003 at
which time it entered the public lexicon. And as I say I don't remember any
legal-heads piping up to correct the misconception.

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kvb
It was created in 1994, as anigbrowl mentions in another comment, also going
into detail on why the categorical definition makes sense.

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igravious
Thanks for that kvb, I've edited my previous post

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

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

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illuminate
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.)

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mtgx
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.

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

