Sunday shows dissect the Boston attacks

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 17:27:00 +0000

Today’s Sunday shows, like everyone else, tried to pick apart the details of how and why the terrorist attacks occurred in Boston this week. On CBS’s “Face the Nation” Bob Schieffer interviewed Rep. Mike McCaul (R.-Texas), Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.

“My theory is [Tamerlan Tsarnaev] was radicalized by 2009, 2010,” McCaul said. “Reports show the Russian Intelligence Service reach out to our law enforcement to interview this individual, which they did. He was on the radar, then he got off the radar. Then he travels overseas. I would assume the Russians would have some intelligence on this individual.”

Although he lacks direct evidence McCaul appeared to suggest that Tamerlan, who reportedly had a bomb strapped to his chest when he was shot, had ties to international terrorist networks. “I think another important point [is] the tools of trade craft used here,” McCaul said. “This pressure cooker device is very similar to what the Taliban in Pakistan use. The idea that they could make pipe bombs and then there are reports they had suicide vests, all point to the fact that this was…”

The Cuban Missile Crisis: An all-too-real October surprise

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 19:43:00 +0000

It seemed at first more a testimony to his own advanced age that 75-year-old Bob Schieffer invoked the Cuban Missile Crisis before the final presidential debate got underway in Boca Raton, Fla., Monday night. Yet, as a pair of PBS documentaries tonight reminds us, nothing could be more central to a contemporary foreign policy discussion than the frightening brink of total nuclear annihilation reached during that tense October, 50 years ago this week.

Just about the whole vocabulary of current international dealings were used in that conflict half a century ago. Blockades, showing strength, drawing a red line — all part of Monday’s debate — were at the center of the Cuban Missile Crisis. And the war porn that got us all into it – annotated aerial spy plane photos of construction sites and alleged warmaking plans — along with show-and-tell demonstrations at the U.N., were part of the process of invading Iraq a decade ago.

Salon.com > Bob Schieffer

Sunday shows dissect the Boston attacks

The Cuban Missile Crisis: An all-too-real October surprise