Five Things to Remember as Boston Crisis Unfolds

April 19 (Bloomberg) -- The Boston Marathon bombing is aquick-moving story (a frenetic one, if you’re following onTwitter). And the facts, as CNN has learned, shift with seemingabandon. But certain patterns and questions are makingthemselves fairly obvious. So here goes:

1. The events of this week don’t represent a revolutionarydevelopment in the long battle against terrorism. Keep in mind,there have been a fairly significant number of aborted anddisrupted attempts by jihadis (both organized and lone-wolfstyle) to kill civilians on American soil since the Sept. 11attacks. If the Times Square bomb built by Faisal Shahzad in2010 had exploded, we would have been looking, quite possibly,at far more deaths than those caused in Boston. (And it is notyet clear, despite preliminary indications, that these men were,in fact, motivated by radical Islam.)