Are the Boston Marathon bombings triggering a sense of deja vu? In a general sense, clearly yes. This isn’t the first terrorist attack of its kind in the world. But in a specific sense it is, too – at least with a retired FBI agent who has felt a sense of disquiet and deja vu because it reminds him of the 2004 Madrid train bombings — which killed 191 people, injured 1800 and was the handiwork of a terrorist cell inspired by Al Qaeda. The Daily Beast:
Watching the images of Monday’s Boston Marathon bombing on CNN International and the BBC, former FBI counterterrorism investigator Mark Rossini thought he noticed a disquieting connection.
“This has the hallmarks of a Madrid-style event in many respects,” Rossini told The Daily Beast from Paris, where he was visiting on business for his private security consulting firm. “We don’t know who the bombers are, but I assume it was more than one. It’s just my gut that there might have been two people involved. And allegedly, a third device has been found.”
…Rossini at one point had been the FBI’s liaison to the Spanish police. And as one of the FBI’s team leaders on the scene in Nairobi, Kenya, investigating the 1998 al Qaeda bombing of the U.S. Embassy there, Rossini brings special insight to the Boston attack. He was also the FBI’s representative at “Alec Station,” the CIA’s out-of-the-way, tiny operation to track a little-known Saudi fanatic named Osama bin Laden years before 9/11.
Some of what he knows about the Boston bombings he saw in 2004 in Madrid:
“I’m not sure if it’s domestic, or if there was shrapnel or ball bearings in the bombs,” Rossini said, “but when I saw a still photo of the explosion, there was what looked like a fireball from an accelerant like a propane tank or gasoline”—yet another similarity to the carnage in Spain. “Of course, a pipe bomb could have that effect as well,” he added.
Rossini speculated that the Boston explosives were not planted long in advance of the marathon but probably carried into the finish-line area as the race was getting under way, inside harmless-looking backpacks..
AND:
Rossini continued: “Right now what the CIA is doing, along with the NSA [National Security Agency], is scrubbing any and all communications from cellphone tower traffic and text messages that were leading up to the bombing one or two hours before and also afterward. The CIA and NSA are also monitoring international traffic to see if anybody is talking about it. And at the counterterrorism center they’re burning the midnight oil, going through the database, tracking search terms, longitude and latitude points, scrubbing everything they have. They are also monitoring a multitude of people that have FISA warrants on them”—a reference to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that gives a secret court the power to activate secret warrants.
……Rossini, however, cautioned against jumping to conclusions that the Boston bombing was the result of Middle East-inspired terrorism. “It could be a white supremacist group. We just don’t know.”
Could it be the same kind of group?
No one knows for sure at this writing.
But evil doesn’t only come in different forms.
Often it copies and clones itself.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.