about the tactics that were used, is it safe to say that these two were planning for something perhaps even greater than the initial attack? craig, it was the beginning of a bombing campaign. the evidence is the pressure cooker bomb that was thrown at the watertown police and the eight improvised hand grenades. they were going to do at least another attack by using that pressure cooker bomb and then probably make some more. i don t think they were going to do another suicide bomb right away, i think they were going on some placement devices. we ll know. it may be on their computer. james cavanaugh, thank you for your expertise. folks, when we come back we ll go back to the white house for some more reaction to the suspect s capture. also we ll take a look at the international scope of this investigation as well. this is msnbc. mine was earned in djibouti, africa, 2004.
charge and msnbc analyst james kav nauf. you know, it s hard to remember anyone without a digital photograph, certainly not a 19- or 26-year-old. what are you looking for. we re looking for a fingerprint, chris, that s going to last longer than your real fingerprint. you re going to be the main manufacturer of it. you re going to put it on youtube, on your eye phone, on your computer. you know, that s all great when you are living your live but when you start hurting people, we re going to be able to latch onto that somehow. we re going to get a search warrant and do it in legal ways but we re going to get it. you re going to convict yourself. short of saying here s the plan, this is what i m going do, what do they look for? well, they look for the stuff in the cloud, first of all. they re going to be looking for the hard drives where you ve developed the plans and communicated with conspirators and associates. you basically give us a map and
we stumbled across and interrupted a bombing campaign. more than stumbled across, they brought it to us. and i agree with you that this was the first of a new era. crowd-sourced social media use in a manhunt. and in this case the good guys won in the end. mr. cavanaugh, thank you very much for being with us tonight from nashville, tennessee. thank you, brian. we ll take another break. we ll check in with kate snow after this. we have been relying heavily on the coverage of one of our sister networks new england cable news during this entire crisis in the boston area, and tonight one of their reporters, scott yount, got closer than the others and heard a lot as this unfolded. scott, where were you, and you could actually hear the s.w.a.t. teams at least trying to talk to the suspect, correct? yeah, brian. we were behind the the house where they had converged initially. and we saw the firefight. there were a number of shots fired. they were firing at the suspect. apparently, he
are you heros? no. no. you know like some people have asked said what we did was heroic. and the way i look at it is we were in the wrong place at the wrong time but we did the right thing. our thanks, in more ways than one, to the staff of forum restaurant, a good place to stop in if you find yourself on boylston in boston. and about what we ve just been through now that the smoke has quite literally cleared, we are joined tonight by james cavanaugh, former special agent of atf. he s with us from nashville. and mr. cavanaugh, i m curious about now looking at this in our rearview mirror, what worried you most about the lessons we ve just learned about these two guys, what they were able to do, and what has cheered you most about the way it was resolved? well, brian, i think the thing that worried me most after it broke, and tuesday, was that this is the beginning of a bombing campaign. and i think it really was. and that s evidenced by the
apartment as well. i want to bring james cavanaugh back into the conversation, msnbc analyst, retired atf special agent in charge. he s also a former hostage negotiator as well. james, i want to pick up sort of where we left off last hour. do the devices and the tactics that these two deployed, do those things indicate specialized training or outside assistance? well, that s a great question, craig. i feel like there s more contact than just the self-radicalization by themselves and the internet. now, we don t know. we really don t have those facts. but you know i ve been listening to your guests, mr. ervin and professor pape, and these are top people in the field. i have read professor pape s stuff. as a bomb investigator, there s the bomb and there s the bombers. and, you know, they have done a great job at the chicago project, i hope your viewers value the unbelievable deep information that he can provide