Online magazine Inspire gains readers in radical circles THE online magazine that informed the Boston Marathon bombers on how to build two bombs has become increasingly popular in radical circles. The aptly-titled Inspire magazine, co-founded and once edited by a former Charlotte, North Carolina, man, has reportedly been used or cited by multiple terrorism suspects in recent years as inspiration for their attempts to carry out attacks in the United States. Investigators say suspects have been particularly attracted to one article titled "Make a bomb in the kitchen of your Mom." The founders, editor Samir Khan - a US citizen who once penned, "I am proud to be a traitor to America" - and radical American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, have become cause celebs in the extremist world for their propaganda work, including creating the flashy magazine that delivers incendiary messages with, as one expert said, the "spark and crackle of Vanity Fair." Khan, a Charlotte resident before moving to Yemen in 2009, and al-Awlaki were killed on Sept. 30, 2011, when an unmanned US drone fired missiles at their vehicle as it drove through the desert. Al-Awlaki was the target. The online magazine continues to be produced, but it's unclear by whom. Lying in a Boston hospital bed, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, has passed notes to investigators stating that he and his older brother, Tamerlan, killed in a police shootout, learned how to make the shrapnel-jammed, pressure-cooker bombs from the online magazine, according to a federal law enforcement official familiar with the matter who insisted upon anonymity because the investigation is ongoing. The two explosions killed three people and injured more than 260 others. Inspire magazine, launched in 2010, gave al-Qaeda and proliferating affiliated groups "a foot in the door" in their attempts to foment violence and convert people like the Tsarnaevs to terrorism, said Bruce Hoffman, director of Georgetown University's Security Studies Program. "They just plant the seed, and they hope someone will be fertilized somewhere," said Hoffman, whose comments about Inspire have been quoted by the authors of the magazine. You can ponder how to be a terrorist, but if you have no means to actually get off the dime and become one, you may not go anywhere. That's why I think things like Inspire and 'How to make a bomb in your mom's kitchen' are so important. They give people the confidence, or you might say the hubris, to make that next step. One issue went so far as to describe how to build an "ember bomb" to start forest fires when droughts strike Montana and other Western states. It's unclear how successful the magazine has been in recruiting US terrorists, but the dilemma for governments around the world is how to stop it. The Internet transcends international borders and is hard to police, and while Inspire's quarterly issues are routinely taken down by host servers, they reappear elsewhere. Inspire magazine's influence has been documented in several US terrorism cases, some in which suspects tried to use its bomb-making instructions to carry out attacks. Law enforcement officials reportedly found a copy of the same Inspire article in the hotel room of Army Private First Class Naser Jason Abdo, who was accused in 2011 of plotting a deadly copycat attack on soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, just two years after the 2009 shooting rampage by Major Nidal Hasan. Jose Pimentel was arrested in November 2011 by New York law enforcement after allegedly turning to Inspire magazine for bomb-building instructions in a foiled plot to blow up police and post offices in New York City. And Abdel Daoud wrote in a jihad-related Internet forum before he was arrested last year in a foiled Chicago bomb plot that Inspire was "the best magazine I have read."