Capturing Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and the rituals of mourning mass-casualty events

Charlie Pierce reports on Friday events in Boston, Guns Along The River: A Late Night In Watertown Esquire Politics Blog 04/20/2013.

The one thing we should all remember about this is that it was always a police action. There was no need for Patriot Acts, or for warrantless wiretapping, or for "enhanced interrogation techniques," or for anything else out that bag of horrors the previous administration filled so fatly after the attacks of 9/11. The waterboard was left in the closet. This was cops being cops, albeit with some fairly impressive modern-day technology. (I didn't know police helicopters had thermal-imaging capabilities. I will now respect more those signs in New Hampshire that say, "Speed Monitored by Aircraft.") There has been grinding forensic work ever since the bombs went off. There was all that basic shoe-leather detective work yesterday, house after house, block after block. And that's not even to get into the horrific events of Thursday night, which nonetheless did not require a military response. Just cops being cops.

And now there should be a trial. And not just a trial, but the greatest, fairest trial in the history of trials. The defendant should get the best possible legal assistance money can buy. The "public safety exception" to Miranda should be allowed to expire. He should get the best jury we can empanel and, if we have to move the trial to Guam on account of pre-trial publicity, then godspeed. And then he should be tried and, if convicted, in the greatest, fairest trial in history, he should get shipped off forever to federal prison, never to be heard from again. We should ignore all the predictable howling from John McCain, and from his maiden aunt, Lindsey Graham. This guy is accused of being a multiple murderer. He committed his crimes against the people of Suffolk and Middlesex Counties in Massachusetts. These were not acts of war. They were crimes, more garish than most. This was a day for cops, not for grandstanding celebrity politicians who were not here this week. [my emphasis]

The "public safety exception" to Miranda is something that is a real concern to anyone who actually cares about the rights of people who are accused of crime. Marcy Wheeler discusses it in Dzhokhar Tsaraev: The Big Issue Is Not Miranda, It's Presentment Emptywheel 04/20/2013. She also links to Emily Bazelon's Why Should I Care That No One’s Reading Dzhokhar Tsarnaev His Miranda Rights? Slate 04/19/2013 and Josh Gerstein's Next for Boston suspect: Five legal questions Politico 04/19/2003. Gerstein writes:

The Center for Constitutional Rights condemned the decision in a statement: "The Miranda warnings were put in place because police officers were beating and torturing "confessions" out of people who hadn't even been formally accused of a crime. We cannot afford to repeat our mistakes. If officials require suspects to incriminate themselves, they are making fair trials and due process merely option and not a requirement. To venture down that road again will make law enforcement accountable to no one."

The Center's press release is CCR Condemns Miranda Exception in Boston Marathon Suspect Case 04/20/2013, which also says:

Like Obama's expanded killing program and his perpetuation of indefinite detention without trial at Guantanamo, this is yet another erosion of the Constitution to lay directly at the President's feet. Obama's Justice Department unilaterally expanded the "public safety exception" to Miranda in 2010 beyond anything the Supreme Court ever authorized. Each time the administration use this exception, it stretches wider and longer. However horrific the crime, continuing to erode constitutional rights invites continued abuse by law enforcement, and walks us down a dangerous path that becomes nearly impossible to reverse.

Pierce has obviously also been reflecting on the public rituals that have grown up around the periodic, recurring mass-casualty events that are part of American life now:

The gun battle into which John Donohue wandered exploded the comfortable narrative of these things. We had the event. Then we had the mourning. Then we had "Indomitability Day." Then we had the healing of the interfaith service at which the president gave a fine speech, and the demonstrations of solidarity at the Bruins game. That is the pattern of these things in our public lives, until the next one of these things happens, and then we do it all over again. We did it for Tucson after Columbine. We did it for Aurora after Tucson. We did it for Sandy Hook after Aurora. And, this week, we did it for Boston after Sandy Hook. It's the modern Stations of the Cross, with theme music, and logos, and Wolf Blitzer. We were done. We were healed. And then the Tsarnaev brothers came home. And one of them got away.

Suddenly, healing was very much beside the point. Suddenly, indomitability meant more than shouting brave imprecations on Facebook, or singing the Anthem loudly at a hockey game. Suddenly, indomitability meant staying inside your house, all day, while the men with the body armor and long guns walked your streets, because you might come out of your house and get yourself shot. Our autonomic emotional reflexes were all shorting out. This was an event that happened too soon after the previous event, even though, in most violent places in the world, that's the way these things happen. These are the places without the perennial media Via Dolorosa that we all walk every time another one of these things happen. Our steps were less steady. Our sense of direction was jumbled. We were on a familiar path for a while, and then some son of a bitch moved Golgotha on us, and we didn't know where to go next on our journey to redemption.

Rosa Brooks is one who thinks there's something dysfuntional about this media-driven ritual, as she explains in Keep Calm and Shut the Bleep Up Foreign Policy 04/18/2013:

At the end of the day, there just isn't much most ordinary people should do in immediate response to events such as the Boston bombings. We can take common sense security measures, but we can't eliminate all terrorism any more than we can eliminate all crime or prevent all accidental deaths. We live in an imperfect world. The best we can do is cultivate resilience and learn how to intelligently manage risk.

Second best: Let's quit whining and quit yapping. A small number of Americans have something terrible to grieve about as a result of Monday's bombing. The rest of us should show our respect by not trying to horn in on their grief -- and by shutting up until we actually have some information worth sharing.

And she refers us to an opinion piece of hers from six years ago, We're not all victims Los Angeles Times 04/20/2007, that one on the Virginia Tech Massacre. "Convincing ourselves that we've been vicariously traumatized by the pain of strangers has become a cherished national pastime," she wrote there. She added, "Our collective insistence that we all share in the Virginia Tech trauma is a form of anti-politics, one that blinds us to the distinctions between different kinds and degrees of suffering."

The Virginia Tech massacre was catastrophic for the victims and their loved ones, but, unlike war, it was not catastrophic for the nation. Yet President Bush — who refuses to attend the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq because that might "politicize" the war his administration started — ordered all federal flags at half-staff and rushed to Blacksburg to bemoan the "day of sadness for the entire nation." It's a good strategy. People busy holding candlelight vigils for the deaths in Blacksburg don't have much time left over to protest the war in Iraq.

The insistence on collective mourning even operates to depoliticize the Virginia Tech tragedy. Those who made the mistake of suggesting that the massacre might lead us to consider tighter gun regulation were quickly told to shut up because this is "a moment for grief," not politics.

But we live in a political world. Searching for policies that can reduce the violence that plagues our world, at home and abroad, is the best way to honor the dead.

I'll give some credit to President Obama so far for not trying to turn this into some war fever.

But Brooks' 2007 column gets at what bothered me so much about Obama's treating the Gaby Giffords assassination attempt as an opportunity for a pious speech about the need for "civility." Up until the Sandy Hook school shooting, he repeated the de-politicizing ritual that Brooks' describes Bush employing in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings. We need less maudlin and irresponsible media spectacles around these events - and given the level of gun proliferation we have to assume they will continue - and more realistic looks at what is happening and what public policy should be in response. While the mainstream media and the Democratic Party treat these events as "a moment for grief," the NRA and their loyal Republican Party use these events to promote the sale of more guns and ammo by means of fear-mongering paranoid conspiracy theories that serves to dial up the potential for mass-casualty violence.

Tags: boston marathon bombing

Political violence and the Boston Marathon bombing (Updated)

Sadly, David Sirota is pointing to a grim reality here, Bombings like the Boston Marathon tragedy have become the 'new normal' 04/15/2013:

(Update: Digby complains about what I take to be a different twist on the "new normal" in connection with yesterday's bombing in Oh, I guess it's time to start mawkishly proclaiming a "new normal" Hullabaloo 04/16/2013. I think the phrase "new normal" is getting kind of hackneyed. But what I think Sirota gets right is that mass-casualty attacks have become accepted in some way as more routine over the last few years, in large part thanks to the gun lobby. In cold business calculations - "cold, dead hands" calculations, we might say - these mass casualty events are good for the firearms business. And the NRA uses them successfully to market around. General sensitivities have not yet been corrupted to the point that the NRA could explicitly say that recurrent mass-casualty attacks should be viewed as acceptable. But that's what their argument comes down to: their version of the Second Amendment accepts these events as the price of the "freedom" of gun proliferation for which they fight.)

Charlie Pierce, who has been reporting from Boston, has some useful reflections on political violence, without jumping to any conclusions about who may have been behind the Boston Marathon bombing. In The Morning After Esquire Politics Blog 04/16/2013 he writes:

It is in no way "politicizing" the events by mentioning that history teaches us that, on events like this, the universe of suspects is wider than many people would like to believe. All indications are that, one way or another, the bombing was a political act. It may have been the political act of madmen, but it was a political act, and it does us no good to pretend — as Chris Matthews attempted to do last night — that it was not. Somehow, somewhere, this act came from a dark vein of violence in somebody's politics. Those politics may be fashioned from mania, or even sociopathy, but they are fashioned out of politics nonetheless, and of the collapse of the faith that we can govern ourselves as we govern our passions, and that collapse is not the province of the mad or the angry. That collapse is caused by something deeply endemic in our systems and in ourselves. We have tolerated unreasoning hatred for far too long. We have abandoned the rational for the comfortable, and we have abandoned the empirical for the comfortably insane. We have given too much oxygen to the flame. ...

By six last night, you could tell the Feds were taking over the operation in and around Copley Square. The uniformed Boston cops were back out in the street, and a lot of people in windbreakers and earpieces popped up from around every corner, and the silly argument about whether the president should have said "terrorism" or not seemed particularly moot. Terrorism is in the mind of the terrorized, and there was nobody idly walking through Copley Square as Monday evening became Monday night. The sun came up this morning on a garrisoned city. Some people think one thing about that, and some people think another. But too many people think something completely insane, and that scares the hell out of me. In our politics, we must we must look the real monster in the eye, and not create phantoms because they are more easily killed. We have lost faith in that in which we cannot lose faith and survive. As investigators crawl over Copley Square, they might as well be looking for the democratic soul of a nation gone a bit mad.

Those comments are important, because in the post-9/11 era, the default responses to acts of terrorism from the media and authorities have tended to fall into two categories: anti-Muslim religious stereotyping and reductionist psychologizing.

Real acts and plots of terrorism involving Muslims are often reported with no real analysis or even basic factual reporting about the politics involved in them. Pierce is taking a speculative step in saying, "Somehow, somewhere, this act came from a dark vein of violence in somebody's politics." But his immediately following reminder is very important, "Those politics may be fashioned from mania, or even sociopathy, but they are fashioned out of politics nonetheless."

He's apparently drawing a conclusion from the nature of the attack, which was obviously designed not just to kill a lot of people but to spread confusion and terror.

When non-Muslims are involved, the reporting tends to be on the personal psychology of the perpetrator. We've had a string of terrorist and/or mass-casualty incidents over the past several years that have involved people with, yes, affinities for radical right politics. And the mainstream media is just plain scared to go there. So we have a string of incidents from assorted "lone nuts", which without any coherent and reality-based explanations of what the connections might be only serves to mystify the events and make them more terrifying.

Too many people are more than happy to use incidents like this to reinforce their preferred narrative of reality, even when it may be effectively irrelevant. (Over to you, Westboro Baptist!) But it's a problem that too much of the reporting and commentary doesn't provide the meaningful context to help us all interpret what is happening with such a series of events.

It's idiotic and bad religion, too, for fundamentalist Christians to say that God did this bombing, or used this bombing or whatever mealy-mouth qualifications someone might want to put on it, to punish the country for allowing gays and lesbians to live without being imprisoned.

But if it were to turn out to be some group behind this bombing that is particularly fixated with hating on gays, that would be relevant to understand how that train of influence worked to produced random killings and maiming in the Boston Marathon. And self-righteous patriotic moralism and hate-filled jingoism also shouldn't stop us from looking at the political motives of even foreign terrorist groups. As I've said here numerous times over the years, the idea that you shouldn't try to understand the ideas of The Enemy is a ridiculous and impractical concept. But it is useful if you want to paint them as Evil And Nothing But Evil.

Stephen Walt writes in On the Boston Marathon attacks Foreign Policy 04/16/2013:

There are now over 7 billion human beings on this planet, and roughly 313 million citizens here in America. It is inevitable that a tiny handful of these individuals will be driven ... to commit deliberate acts of violence against innocent people. And there is no reasonable way to prevent a few of those individuals from getting their hands on the materials needed to make a bomb. It has happened in Northern Ireland, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Istanbul, in Bali, at abortion clinics here in the United States. It has happened in the Moscow subway, in Madrid, and in Oklahoma City. Sometimes a political group is responsible; sometimes it is just an angry and warped individual. It happened yesterday, as well as throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

We should by all means adopt prudent security procedures -- as Massachusetts officials did before yesterday's race -- and revise and update those procedures in light of experience. And when we do know what motivated this particular attack, we should consider if there was anything that we might have done to prevent the perpetrators from embarking on their evil course. We should be brave and honest enough to ask if this was some sort of warped response to something we had done and consider whether what we had done was appropriate or not. To ask that question in no way justifies the slaughter of innocents, but understanding a criminal's motivations might be part of making such events less likely in the future.

But we are never going to return to some sort of peaceful Arcadia where America -- or the rest of the world -- is totally immune from senseless acts of violence like this one. There is no perfect defense and there never will be. And so our larger task is to build a resilient society that comes together when these tragedies occur, understands that the ultimate danger is limited, and that refuses to bend in the face of a sudden, shocking, and cowardly attack.

Tags: boston marathon bombing

Assimilating mass violence

One of my friends just posted on Facebook that whoever is behind the Boston bombing today, she hope we, mean

I replied, I don't know, maybe the rhetoric needs to be dialed up in some ways. The first reports on these things are always wrong in some significant ways, so I'm not making any assumptions. Obviously, multiple bombs planned to go off at the same time wasn't just "boys will be boys" or whatever. I still think it was a big mistake for Obama to respond to the attempted assassination of Gaby Giffords with a vague call for "civility."

And "we're" - especially the pundits who are convinced they speak for the regular Real American - developing a jaded attitude toward mass murder attempts. If it's some rightwinger trying to stop the Agenda 21 Conspiracy, our star pundits will say it's another "lone nut." If its someone Muslim behind it, we'll probably bomb another village in Pakistan or Somalia and say we killed some important Terrorist (Al Qaeda's Number Two! again) with some unfortunate collateral women and children collateral damage. (Any grown men we automatically count as Terrorists.) Maybe we can have another round of "Why Do They Hate Us?"

And, whoever did it, the NRA will use it for a new round of the-scary-Negro-President-is-coming-to-confiscate-your-huntin'-rifles, and gun and ammo sales will spike up again. It's become standard firearms industry marketing.

The Obama-is-behind-it and they're-coming-for-your-guns crowd are already at it hard. Conspiracy-theory guru mongerer Alex Jones already has one like that going. There's a significant portion of the public to whom actual facts are irrelevant. The only certainty about it right now is that the NRA will use it for marketing even more guns and ammo.

And, of course, some neocon is undoubtedly trying to scare up an Iranian connection.

Mass killings have become a routine fact of American life. And we are developing standard rituals for responding to them. That's not a bad thing in itself, they've become a frequently recurring event in the US, and you have to find some way to adjust to something that has become to an amazing degree accepted as normal in our culture.

We'll soon see which type predominate after this one.

Tags: boston marathon bombing