Since the city-wide manhunt and apprehension of Boston Marathon bombing suspect 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, government officials and the media have exhibited a troubling tendency to cast Tsarnaev's alleged crimes in military terms.

Commentators have called the bomb Tasrnaev is accused of planting an IED.

A handful of Senators wanted Tsarnaev declared an "enemy combatant" and tried by military commission. Obama deserves credit for not caving and for charging Tsarnaev in civilian federal court, but loses credit for invoking a distorted version of the "public safety exception" in questioning Tsarnaev without reading him his Miranda rights.

Then, the Justice Department charged Tsarnaev with using a "Weapon of Mass Destruction," a crime with a legal defintion so broad that almost any bomb, grenade, mine, or explosive would count. The term "Weapon of Mass Destruction" is ill-defined, inflammatory and prejudicial (See the Iraq War). The FBI's Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate, established in 2006, is focused not on bombs but on "nuclear, radiological, biological, or chemical weapons." The definition of "Weapon of Mass Destruction" has caused so much debate that, in 2012, the National Defense University published an entire study on the meaning of the term.

Almost every media outlet and the government immediately called the Boston bombing suspects terrorists, despite the fact that we still know next to nothing about what motivated their actions, the key element in the legal definition of terrorism. Glenn Greenwald hits the nail on the head:

It's certainly possible that it will turn out that, if they are guilty, their prime motive was political or religious. But it's also certainly possible that it wasn't: that it was some combination of mental illness, societal alienation, or other form of internal instability and rage that is apolitical in nature.

He said that he knew of no other plots and that he and his brother had acted alone, and he said he knew of no more bombs that had not been detonated.

It seems that we have been itching to make Tsarnaev the part of some international, terrorist conspiracy - the best we could come up with is that he immigrated to the U.S. as a child. However, despite the frantic attempts to shoehorn Tsarnaev into some terrorist paradigm (almost every media report mentions that he is Muslim and was "radicalized"), the facts fail to support that narrative. Here's what has been attributed to Tsarnaev: