It would be nice if Benjamin Franklin’s famous
aphorism were as widely believed as it is quoted. I doubt that Sen. Lindsey
Graham and his ilk would express disagreement, but one cannot really embrace
Franklin’s wisdom while also claiming that “the homeland is the battlefield.”
(The very word homeland should make Americans queasy.)
If we were to take Graham literally, all of America
would look as the Boston suburbs looked last recently — but even worse, because
the government would be monitoring everyone’s reading and web browsing lest it
miss someone becoming “radicalized” in the privacy of his own home.
Who would want that? Is it a coincidence that
virtually every dystopian novel prominently features a police force
indistinguishable from an army in combat and 24-hour surveillance by the state?
The Boston Marathon bombing obscures the fact that
terrorism is actually less common in the United States now than in the past,
and that the odds of an American being killed in a terrorist incident are
rather small. (For some perspective, see Brian Doherty’s article, “3 Reasons
the Boston Bombing Case Should Not Change Our Attitudes About Privacy” and Gene
Healy’s “Boston Bombing Suspects Are Losers, Not Enemy Combatants.”)
An open and (semi-) free society cannot realistically
expect to eliminate the risk of indiscriminate violence. The cost in liberty
and dignity would be way too high — and the attempt would fail. Moreover, the
risk of violence perpetrated by our guardians would not be eliminated but
augmented.
It’s worth emphasizing that we don’t yet know if the
actions allegedly taken by Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev qualify as terrorism.
(Glenn Greenwald points out that even Alan Dershowitz and Jeffrey Goldberg are
not convinced the bombings do qualify.) As commonly used, the word terrorism
does not mean merely any violent act that scares people. The Boston Strangler
(Albert DeSalvo) terrorized women in the early 1960s, yet we don’t think of
that as terrorism. (Greenwald discusses other cases.) Why don’t we regard all
mass or serial killers as terrorists? Because in common usage terrorism has a
political component. This is also the case for official definitions.
For example, see title 22, chapter 38 of the United
States Code:
The term
“terrorism” means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated
against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.
And title 18:
The term
“international terrorism” means activities that … involve violent acts or acts
dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United
States or of any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed
within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State; [and] appear to
be intended … to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; … to influence the
policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or … to affect the conduct
of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and [which]
occur primarily outside the territorial jurisdiction of the United States, or
transcend national boundaries in terms of the means by which they are
accomplished, the persons they appear intended to intimidate or coerce, or the
locale in which their perpetrators operate or seek asylum.
And the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations:
The
unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or
coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in
furtherance of political or social objectives. [Emphasis added.]
And, finally, the USA PATRIOT Act:
Activities
that (A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the
criminal laws of the U.S. or of any state, that (B) appear to be intended (i)
to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, (ii) to influence the policy of
a government by intimidation or coercion, or (iii) to affect the conduct of a
government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping, and (C) occur
primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S. [Emphasis added.]
For the record, the Oxford English Dictionary
defines terrorist as a “person who uses violent and intimidating methods in the
pursuit of political aims; esp. a member of a clandestine or expatriate
organization aiming to coerce an established government by acts of violence
against it or its subjects.” (Hat tip: Gary Chartier.)
You get the idea. These are reasonable, common-sense
definitions consistent with common usage. (Note that they exclude the shootings
at Fort Hood, since Nidal Malik Hasan’s targets were not noncombatants.)
Politically motivated violence against noncombatants needs a term, after all.
What’s unreasonable is that the term is not applied to the conduct of the U.S.
government or its allies when they target noncombatants for political purposes.
Large-scale indiscriminate violence against
noncombatants that is not politically motivated, then, is not terrorism.
Someone frustrated by a dead-end life who lashed out violently at a crowd of
people would not be counted as a terrorist, according to this usage. Thus
DeSalvo, Charles Whitman, and George Hennard, monstrous as they were, were not
terrorists.
Perhaps the Brothers Tsarnaev were not terrorists
either. We don’t know yet. True, leaks from the interrogation of the heavily
medicated Dzhokhar Tsarnaev indicate that the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
figured in their “radicalization” and bombing plot. He also reportedly said
“religious fervor” and a desire to defend Islam were behind their actions.
Maybe that is true. But maybe these are rationalizations of their personal
failures and envy. (And how reliable are those leaks?) We need to know more —
and maybe we’ll never know enough. People and their situations are complex.
What we do know is that we must not let the
Tsarnaevs’ crimes snuff out whatever civil liberties are left after the USA
PATRIOT Act, the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, and the other
abuses ushered in during the fevered aftermath of 9/11. We must ever be
vigilant against the predictable efforts of politicians to exploit the bombings
to aggrandize their power.
Whether U.S. foreign policy really had anything to
do with the Boston Marathon bombings, there are reasons enough to scrap it and
to follow strict noninterventionism, since that would cease the daily brutality
against Muslims (and others) committed in the name of the American people. One
bonus from ending U.S.-sponsored murder and mayhem in the Muslim world is that
it would remove a potential reason for violence against Americans.
About the author: Sheldon Richman is vice president
and editor at The Future of Freedom Foundation in Fairfax, Va., and author of
Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State. Visit his blog “Free
Association” at http://www.sheldonrichman.com. Send him email.
This article was published by the Future of Freedom Foundation.
No comments:
Post a Comment