Ex-Obama NSC spokesman the latest to criticize Rolling Stone bomber cover

President Obama’s former National Security Council spokesman is the latest to question Rolling Stone‘s cover of the Boston Marathon suspect.

Tommy Vietor, the former spokesman, said he thought the Rolling Stone magazine cover glamorized Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who is suspected of plotting and carrying out the bombing earlier this year that killed three people.

Im concerned about Rolling Stone’s cover w/ Tsarnaev. A rockstar style photo – John Lennon with contacts? – on the cover glamorizes his acts

— Tommy Vietor (@TVietor08) July 17, 2013

The cover photo shows an image of an angelic looking Tsarnaev, who is starting straight ahead. 

“How a popular, promising student was failed by his family, fell into radical Islam and became a monster,” the cover reads.

The cover has touched off a firestorm of criticism on Twitter, with people alternatively criticizing Rolling Stone and defending the magazine.

The cover of the August issue of Rolling Stone pic.twitter.com/1JFw5hTgLY

— Andrew Kaczynski (@BuzzFeedAndrew) July 17, 2013

Tsarnaev is charged in the attacks at the Boston Marathon earlier this year that killed three and wounded more than 200 others. His older brother was killed after a gunfight with police and an exhaustive manhunt on the Boston area.

Boston Mayor Thomas Menino lashed out in a personal letter to Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner on Wednesday, saying the cover “rewards a terrorist with celebrity treatment.”

{mosads}“To respond to you in anger is to feed into your obvious marketing strategy,” Menino wrote. “So I write to you instead to put the focus where you could have: on the brave and strong survivors and on the thousands of people – their families and friends, volunteers and first responders, doctors, nurses and donors – who have come to their side.”

“The survivors of the Boston attacks deserve Rolling Stone cover stories, though I no longer feel that Rolling Stone deserves them,” he concluded.

This story was updated at 3:49 p.m.