Were bomb-sniffing dogs on the scene BEFORE the explosions?

Many thanks to a reader named XI, who directs our attention to this little-known aspect of the Boston Maratthon bombing.

University of Mobile’s Cross Country Coach, who was near the finish line of the Boston Marathon when a series of explosions went off, said he thought it was odd there were bomb sniffing dogs at the start and finish lines.

"They kept making announcements to the participants do not worry, it's just a training exercise," Coach Ali Stevenson told Local 15.

Stevenson said he saw law enforcement spotters on the roofs at the start of the race. He's been in plenty of marathons in Chicago, D.C., Chicago, London and other major metropolitan areas but has never seen that level of security before.

"Evidently, I don't believe they were just having a training exercise," Stevenson said. "I think they must have had some sort of threat or suspicion called in."

CNN reports a state government official said there were no credible threats before the race.

Perhaps we should cast a suspicious eye on that wording: "No credible threats." Although it would take me a while to find the link, I saw a story which quoted an administration official as saying there was no "specific" information indicating a possible terrorist attack. The careful phrasing makes me go hmmm. Perhaps some folks in officialdom did get wind of a plot in the works, even if they did not have much definite information.

Update: Okay, here's the link to the story I read.

But Boston police commissioner Ed Davis, along with Representative Peter King in the House, said there was "no specific intelligence that anything was going to happen" at the race...

This just in: The Guardian confirms the story...

Davis says this year's race had a stronger security presence than usual:

We review each one of these events. At the end of our review last year, we determined that the crowds were larger than usual. And so we put additional officers at the end of the race," the police commissioner says.

There was no specific threat about this event ... this was a standard threat picture.

Davis says undercover officers were "fully deployed" among the crowd as were bomb-sniffing dogs.

Surprisingly few blogs have deigned to note Coach Stevenson's report of an early appearance by the dogs. Here's one site which mentions the story. And here's another.

Stevenson's report may turn out to be highly significant, or it may be a distraction. He was on the scene, and he seems like a man of reasonable judgment. If he got the impression that a known threat or an advance warning must have prompted such a heavy presence by police dogs, I would not be too quick to dismiss his assessment.

About that Saudi: The right-wing blogs have revealed his name to be Abdulrahman Ali Alharbi. He was indeed the inhabitant of that apartment in Revere searched by the feds (an incident we mentioned in our previous post). The good news: He has been ruled out as a suspect in the bombings.

His roommate told reporters that Alharbi is "quiet and clean." Needless to say, some Pam Gellerites do not want to accept this exoneration. One reader of that site offered this classic response:

"qutie and clean?" then how come he comitted this jihad attack in Boston.

You gotta love that kind of logic. Can I play the same game? Okay, here's my offering:

Pam Geller says she has no connection to mass killer Anders Brevik. Oh yeah? Then how come she helped him kill all those kids on that island?

Same fallacy. Better punctuation. (For those of you who like to keep track of these things, the logical flaw being demonstrated here is called petitio principii.)

(Note: I've slightly rewritten this post to include information taken from a just-released Guardian story.)