A week later here on this way-early Monday — the trauma of the last few days still pretty intense even if the bloodied dust has settled. Now the bullshit begins.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev is dead, his brother, Dzhokhar, in custody and reportedly responding to written questions. The big question, however, is what to do next — do the right thing, or listen to the same horrible tripe from the Bush Co. terror-mongers.
Endless war for more than a decade has made crime a toss-up justice form. The nefarious-sounding ‘homeland’ is a nirvana never to be touched. Murder is murder is murder.

(Illustration found here).

Even as former deputy director of the CIA Phillip Mudd explains the difference:

“The only fingerprint I’ve seen might have possible have been ideology, but not operations,” Mudd explained.
“But every step of the way here was pretty rudimentary.
For example, if you look at some of those initial photos, you’ve got a kid with a hoodie and a cap.
If he wants to obscure himself, the hoodie goes on, the cap forward.”
“If he had operational training, I want to know who did it because they were amateurs.”
Mudd added that he feared that people were being too quick to categorize the crime as terrorism.
“This looks more to me like Columbine than it does al Qaeda,” the counter terrorism expert observed.
“Two kids who radicalized between themselves in a closed circle go out and commit murder.
I would charge these guys as murders, not terrorists.”

Exactly, but…
Notorious asshole Lindsey Graham blubbered “…a citizen can be an enemy combatant,” while his bunk-mate, John McCain also added his illustrious name to a statement that young Dzhokhar is “…clearly is a good candidate for enemy combatant status.”
Bring out the waterboard, too — New York state GOP Senator Greg Ball wants to channel George Jr.: “So, scum bag #2 in custody,” he wrote on Twitter Friday night. “Who wouldn’t use torture on this punk to save more lives?”
The law of the US doesn’t mean anything to these assholes as they press for the way of the worst decade in this country’s history.

Trial in open court is way-needed in this particular case. The biggest, most-awesome question now awaiting the kid to answer — why?
And the 19-yearold Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is apparently one nice work of pathological art. There were reports he partied during the time between the bombing and the vicious manhunt, and now classmates at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth paint the boy as someone way-weird, creepy.
Via the Chicago Tribune:

Tsarnaev was working out in the gym from 8 to 10 p.m. on Tuesday, listening to music on his iPod, when he struck up a conversation with fellow sophomore Zach Bettencourt.
“It’s crazy this is happening now,” Bettencourt recalled Tsarnaev telling him when the bombings came up.
“This (these bombings) is so easy to do.
These tragedies happen all the time in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
…
“The word that I’ve heard everybody use is ‘surreal’,” said a college official helping students settle back onto the leafy campus of 9,400 students.
“It’s one of those things where you see people committing an alleged crime on stage with cameras from around the world focused on them and a lot of the students just can’t believe their eyes,” the official said.
Students were stunned to learn that the teen they knew as a friendly, pot-smoking transfer student from the UMass Boston, who took easy courses and got middling grades, eluded an army of law enforcement officers to become the most hunted man in the country.
…
Bettencourt said he had found disturbing the casual way Tsarnaev chatted about the bombings during his gym workout.
“I don’t know how he talked about it.
I don’t know what was going on in his head,” Bettencourt said.
“I was driving here and thinking ‘Wow, he actually did it.'”

How long will this country continue in this scared-shitless mode about terrorism — gun violence kill way more US peoples than any terrorist — and start depending on a justice system that most of the time responds fairly well.
It will be a disaster if he’s made out a terrorist with a political agenda and not a heartless killer.