I wonder how many people can look me in the face today and tell me they’re totally comfortable with the “resolution” of the Boston Marathon bombing case last week, or in fact any terrorism-related case solved by the United States.
Do you, dear reader, believe that the two suspects – one killed and one captured by American law enforcement officers last Thursday and Friday – are the correct culprits beyond reasonable doubt?
I want to believe in a system that is technologically advanced and stands head and shoulders above any other country when it comes to thorough investigation, speedy gathering of data, interviewing savvy, and good old-fashioned investigative work; but to do so without a tinge of doubt would make me either a devout believer in United States’ domestic and foreign policy or simply naïve.
I am neither, and I believe that a country which has made itself the police force of the world’s seven-billion-strong population must expect about half of them to accept with a grain of salt its resolution of terrorism-related crimes.
And this doubt goes beyond the Boston bombing last week or even Timothy MacVeigh’s Oklahoma bombing of 1995.
The USA started a decade of war over another bombing, that of the Twin Towers in September 2001, which much of the world is still uncertain about in relation to the circumstances and the identity of the slain culprit.
As a result of 9/11, we in the western world were introduced to Afghanistan and Al Qaeda, and that chapter closed with the killing and mysterious burial at sea of Osama bin Laden in May 2011.
But what compounded international doubt about the USA’s handling of terrorism was that the country also went to war in March 2003 over the mere suspicion of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
How can one forget that, despite the USA’s inability to get a United Nations resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq, then President George W. Bush insisted that peaceful measures could not disarm Iraq of the weapons he alleged it to have. He therefore launched the second Gulf War, amid raging international and domestic dissent.
Many lost their lives – justifiably or otherwise – on Middle Eastern soil. As a result the western world somehow takes comfort in this and believes the world to be a safer place and, almost without thinking, reserves tears only for those who suffer tragedies on the American mainland where, in most instances, the death toll is never as high as Middle Eastern targets.
Therefore, how can any right-thinking person in the 21st century be absolutely trusting of proclaimed efforts by the USA to make the world a more secure place?
And how can Americans sleep more comfortably at night as they fail to come up with a motive regarding these two Boston-based brothers of Chechen origin who have been described by neighbours and friends as “normal” and “outgoing”, and whose demeanour never hinted at extremism?
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 19-year-old suspect nabbed last Friday, was born in Kyrgyzstan, became a naturalized American citizen late last year and wanted to be a medical doctor, while Tamerlan, 26, killed the night before after a reported crime spree, wanted to be a boxer. Why should one suspect their ambitions and not those of the law enforcement officials?
For all I know, these men may be criminals and their friends and families akin to ostriches, but I have doubts about what really happened in Boston and wonder whether, some day, some Caribbean country that happens to oppose some American issue – whether it involves Cuba, Venezuela or even gays – will incur the wrath of the global “protector”.
Will we, even then, feel that everything America says and does is right?
• Ricky Jordan is an Associate Editor of THE NATION.
