Year: 2013

Dark Side Watch

Malkin Award Nominee

“I’ve been talking about radicalization of the Muslim community, and I think this is an example of it. … Police have to be in the community, they have to build up as many sources as they can, and they have to realize that the threat is coming from the Muslim community and increase surveillance there,” – Congressman Peter King, true to form.

Remembering The Fourth Victim

Students have set up a tumblr for memories of Sean Collier:

He knew I was watching the marathon on Monday and was one of the first people to text me to make sure I was okay. Last night, he texted me at 10:30 to see if I’d be bartending at the Thirsty Ear that night — he was thinking about stopping by after his shift ended and hanging out with the students at our weekly karaoke night. He never responded to my text back hoping that he was safe.

Keep the MIT police in your thoughts. They are a kind, dedicated, hardworking part of our community. The extent to which they care about the well-being of the students and every faculty and staff member is inspiring and stems from a deep and genuine love of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Meanwhile, a quick update at the other major disaster this week:

On Friday, a spokesman for the [Texas] State Department of Public Safety estimated that of the 12 confirmed dead so far, 11 of them were first responders. That’s roughly half of West’s volunteer firefighter force—all of whom were well known in town.

(Hat tip: Summer Anne Burton)

How The Suspects Became Citizens

It’s hard to see how tighter immigration laws could have stopped the Tsarnaevs from entering the country:

At the time that the Tsarnaevs applied for asylum, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar were very young. There was almost certainly nothing in their background that would have raised any red flags; apparently, there was nothing in the father’s either. Here, [David Leopold of Leopold and Associates, an immigration attorney who’s been practicing law in Cleveland since the early 1990s,] made a key point: “You can’t predict future behavior.” For any democratic country that wants to participate in international society, Leopold pointed out, you have to assume some level of risk. Despite that, “the systems they have in place,” meaning those security screenings, are “doing the job.”

Terror In America

Manhunt Underway For Marathon Bombing Suspect

Rick Perlstein’s take:

As ghastly, evil, overwhelming, tragic, as the events this week in Boston, Texas, the Capitol mail rooms, have been, it’s easy to forget, in our oh-so-American narcissism, enveloped in the wall-to-wall coverage that makes our present catastrophe feel like the most important events in the universe, how safe and secure Americans truly are by any rational standard. Terror shatters us here precisely because ours is not a terrifying place compared to so much of the rest of the world. And also not really an objectively terrifying time, compared other periods in the American past: for instance, Christmastime, 1975, when an explosion equivalent to twenty-five sticks of dynamite exploded in a baggage claim area, leaving severed heads and other body parts scattered among some two dozen corpses; no one ever claimed responsibility; no one ever was caught; but pretty much, the event was forgotten, life went on, and no one anywhere said “everything changed.”

A less narcissistic time, perhaps. Not now. Now, we let trauma consume us. Now, our desperate longing to know—to find easy, immediate answers—confines us, makes us frantic, reduces us to our basest cognitive instincts.

On an average day in America, 85 people are shot dead. There are now five dead in Boston, including one of the suspected bombers – over the course of five days. I’d say our reaction is less about narcissism than a collective form of PTSD stemming from 9/11.

Nonetheless, we don’t yet know whether others could be involved, or the scale of this terror plot. And authorities have to weigh excruciating risks – between over-reaction and under-reaction – in a fog of fact and fiction. They deserve a break. What we do know is that the bombers had another pressure-cooker bomb with them as they sped toward Watertown. They could have terrorized again.

(Photo: SWAT teams moved into position at the intersection of Nichols Avenue and Melendy Avenue in Watertown while searching for one of the two marathon bombing suspects. By Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Looking The Killer In The Eyes

Dramatic details are still emerging from Monday’s bombing:

Just before 3 p.m. on April 15, Bauman was waiting among the crowd for his girlfriend to cross the finish line at the Boston Marathon. A man wearing a cap, sunglasses and a black jacket over a hooded sweatshirt looked at Jeff, 27, and dropped a bag at his feet, his brother, Chris Bauman, said in an interview. Two and a half minutes later, the bag exploded, tearing Jeff’s legs apart. A picture of him in a wheelchair, bloodied and ashen, was broadcast around the world as he was rushed to Boston Medical Center. He lost both legs below the knee. “He woke up under so much drugs, asked for a paper and pen and wrote, ‘bag, saw the guy, looked right at me,’” Chris Bauman said yesterday in an interview.