Why Place Two Bombs in the Chelsea Neighborhood?
jimgeraghty
It is extremely unlikely that two separate perpetrators, acting independently, would place two explosive devices four blocks apart from one another on the same night. New York City is facing an individual or group who set two explosive devices intending to harm people. (If we were collectively less lucky, the bombs could have killed someone last night.) Whether or not Mayor Bill de Blasio chooses to call it ”terrorism” or says there is any connection to terrorism, the perpetrator’s intent was to terrorize.
A bomber’s choice of location for his bomb says a great deal about him. In the immediate days after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, some speculated whether it could be the work of militias, because the date (April 15) was close to tax day and the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing (April 19). But militias are primarily angry at the federal government; blowing up a marathon doesn’t make a lot of sense as a target. The Boston Marathon made more sense if you were targeting America or Americans as a whole, and it made more sense if the bomber was local. The Boston Marathon is a huge event in that city and region, but less so on the national stage (most years). As it turned out, the perpetrators were indeed locals who embraced jihadist ideology; they had previously contemplated suicide attacks on the crowds for the Boston Pops fireworks display on the Fourth of July.
The Chelsea bomber presumably could have left his pressure-cooker bombs closer other sites that would be more symbolic – Times Square, the Empire State Building, the Ground Zero memorial. However, all of those sites would have more visible police presence and, perhaps in the bomber’s mind, a more likely chance of being caught before detonation. Some have speculated that because Chelsea has a reputation as a neighborhood with a lot of gays and lesbians, the attacker may have wanted to target them. But the perpetrator also could have easily put his bombs closer to a gay club or other target more closely associated with this group.
It is entirely possible that the perpetrator’s thinking has no coherence, and the selection of targets only make sense to him. Or the randomness may be the point; he wants to send the signal that no place is safe.
The perpetrator may know the Chelsea neighborhood well, well enough to be confident that he could place these bombs in these locations without arousing suspicion and/or that they would be unlikely to be discovered before detonation.
The security camera footage and eyewitness accounts from last night describe “white smoke.” Recall the white smoke of the Boston Marathon bombing:
 
The bombs in the Boston Marathon attack used black powder from fireworks and nitrate and perchlorate-based oxidizers. The FBI and ATF almost certainly know by now whether the bomb components and types of chemicals used in Manhattan match those used in Boston.
The Tsarnaevs said they learned how to build a pressure-cooker bomb from Al Qaeda’s magazine, Inspire.
It’s worth noting that investigators never determined where the Tsarnaevs built the bomb, and in court filings, suggested that the brothers may have had help building the bomb: “Yet searches of the Tsarnaevs’ residences, three vehicles, and other locations associated with them yielded virtually no traces of black powder, again strongly suggesting that others had built, or at least helped the Tsarnaevs build, the bombs and thus might have built more.”
After his capture, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told agents he and his brother acted alone and there were no more bombs.
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