Mario Del Pero - 06/05/2013

The pundits have long been warning that terrorism on US soil might come from a domestic matrix. Obama’s vigorous war on terrorism, resorting to drones and a coolly calculated assassination campaign, has decimated the Al Qaeda leadership and its many offshoots, curbing their capacity for action. Tight controls on temporary visas have made it hard to get into the USA the way the 11th September terrorists managed. So the risk has shifted: that those measures, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, might radicalize minority sects belonging to the many Muslim communities living in the USA; or else that an upsurge of the extreme right following Obama’s election, and a proliferation of white supremacy organizations, might work up to Nineties-style dynamics of the kind that culminated in the dramatic Oklahoma City attack in 1995.

The discovery that behind the Boston bombs were two young Chechnyan immigrants, one of them naturalized, thus came as a surprise and something of a shock to America. The Tsarnaev brothers arrived in the States ten years ago and seemed the perfect example of integration in US society. The elder one, 26 year-old Tamerlan (who was gunned down by the police in the shoot-out) was an excellent amateur boxer of national calibre with an eye on the Olympic Games once he achieved citizenship. The younger, 19 year-old Dzhokhar, had already obtained citizenship, attended an illustrious Boston high school (the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School which spawned Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) and had won a grant from Cambridge City to attend another leading institute of learning, the Dartmouth University of Massachusetts. Integrated even more than his elder brother, Dzhokhar might have been a symbol of the young immigrant who rapidly Americanizes.

We now know it was not so. Sporting and family problems had nudged Tamerlan more and more into a state of alienation and the arms of a radical religious movement. Dzhokhar idolized his brother and was easily led astray. So the Tsarnaev family was a prey to demons that would one day bring about the Boston bomb attack, the origin of which looks so different from how it was first envisaged.

There would seem to be two lessons to draw from this episode and two political consequences. The first lesson is that the bid for total security as pursued by the Bush and the Obama administrations at the cost of considerable restriction on freedom is ultimately unachievable; a permeable society like the United States can but accept a degree of danger and insecurity. The second lesson is that the legacy of 9/11 is still riding high. It may fuel irrational behaviour, if not outright hysteria. In the 24 hours following the attack and the killing of Tamerlan Tsarnaev Boston was paralyzed (at a cost of about $300 million), while the media conjured up apocalyptic scenarios and grotesque ideas as to the possible assailants.

As for the political implications, the first ties up with one of the most important reforms being debated in Congress at present: immigration. It is broadly supported, but might receive a setback after what happened in Boston. Immediately following Dzhokhar’s arrest, the influential Iowa senator Chuck Grassley linked the Boston marathon bombs to the immigration issue and argued outspokenly against the reform bill, claiming that the terrorist threat justifies strict control measures and expulsion of illegal immigrants. It is highly unlikely that the bipartisan bill currently going through the Senate will not gain approval; but it may take longer to do so, or the contents of it may come in for further change.

The second consequence regards the style of anti-terrorist campaign being waged in the USA. Various influential republican senators demanded that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev be treated as an "enemy combatant", a status reserved for Al Qaeda terrorists whereby they forfeit their rights under the Geneva convention. In the end, the administration decided not to go down that road. But the case has shown once again just how difficult it is to defend and safeguard civil and political rights when a security emergency appears to justify further restriction of them.

Mario Del Pero
(University of Bologna)