Lots of familiar boxes being checked now. Terrorists accepting welfare while they’re busy plotting murder? Yep. Mosque they attended has links to “extremists”? Yep yep. Apologists grasping for theories to explain how “society” is really responsible for their degeneracy? A few, yeah, but that won’t hit full flush until the trial, when poor Dzhokhar describes his American nightmare of smoking weed, collecting scholarship money, and attending state-funded universities. Give it time.

The USA Today piece about the mosque is worthy of the Times or the Post. No excerpt will do it justice; take a minute to read it all, noting the rogues’ gallery of terror suspects and other assorted militants who’ve passed through it. The basics:

Several people who attended the Islamic Society of Boston mosque in Cambridge, Mass., have been investigated for Islamic terrorism, including a conviction of the mosque’s first president, Abdulrahman Alamoudi, in connection with an assassination plot against a Saudi prince.

Its sister mosque in Boston, known as the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, has invited guests who have defended terrorism suspects. A former trustee appears in a series of videos in which he advocates treating gays as criminals, says husbands should sometimes beat their wives and calls on Allah (God) to kill Zionists and Jews, according to Americans for Peace and Tolerance, an interfaith group that has investigated the mosques…

“In 2011, the two brothers were right under the nose of the FBI and they didn’t find anything,” Eid said, who never met the Tsarnaevs. “How do you want me as an imam to know enough to tell them they are not welcome here? How can I figure out those people have that kind of criminal intent?”…

Jacobs and others say it is not only renters who express sympathetic views for terrorists. Leaders of the Boston and Cambridge mosques, and invited guests, have advocated on behalf of convicted terrorists, urging followers to seek their release or lenient sentences.

Is that where Tamerlan met the mysterious “Misha” whom his uncle and former brother-in-law believe corrupted him?

The mosques are affiliated with the Muslim American Society, which was founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood but now insists that it’s independent of the MB — although, per USA Today, American prosecutors have accused it of being an arm of the group. Reason enough to believe that the Tsarnaevs were radicalized there? Well, according to this LA Times piece a few days ago, it was an imam at the Islamic Society of Boston mosque who angered Tamerlan by praising Martin Luther King and saying it’s okay to celebrate America’s national holidays. It might also be the Islamic Society of Boston that refused the Tsarnaev family’s request to give Tamerlan an Islamic funeral; all NBC knows for sure is that some mosque in the Boston area refused, and the Tsarnaevs were known to attend the ISB. One other thing: Given the number of high-profile jihadi types who’ve passed through the ISB in the past, it’s highly likely that the feds had this mosque under surveillance, no? Despite Eric Holder’s occasional indignation at local police forces for spying on Muslims, his own guys have been doing it for years, sometimes as an adjunct of “mosque outreach” programs. As such, the imam quoted in the excerpt makes a fair point. If the feds were watching, why they didn’t spot Tamerlan as a budding jihadi either?