The Brothers

What led a pair of brothers to bomb the Boston Marathon in 2013? The author did exhaustive on the ground research in Chechnya, Dagestan, Stalin's Gulag, and the Boston area in writing a forensic account of the family's background. The book is well edited and presented but reads like a detective's field notes giving us the facts of the case with no sense of empathy for the objects of her investigation. One senses that the many people who were interviewed must have been left with a sense of having being used.

This was a family who fled Russia because they were victimized there due to their ethnicity, religion, and culture only to arrive in America at a time when the War on Terror made all things Muslim suspect. When we grant refugees asylum they are often confronted with a language in which they cannot communicate, a bureaucracy they don't know how to navigate, customs and morays foreign to them, and a system seemingly designed to act as a barrier to their success. All too often the American Dream becomes a nightmare and children of such immigrants fail to flourish in an environment that seems fashioned to put them down and keep them there.

The story has played out in the lives of Vietnamese refugees supported with limited success by religious groups in the US and Canada. In the life of Omar Kadhr. Having extended the hand of friendship we feel betrayed. Stories such as this present the details of frustrated hopes and dreams and hint at the temptation to exact revenge and descend into lives of crime and drugs. What they fail to suggest is the motivation that led to such bad decisions or the changes that should be made to make the asylum process more humane and workable for those forced to go through it. Explaining what led to the crime in no way exonerates the perpetrators nor does it lead to solutions for preventing its recurrence.

Individual rights to freedom, security and privacy seem to be the first victims of the War on Terror. The fact that the acts of two individuals could lead to an entire city being under lock-down speaks for itself. Could it be that the reactions of security forces are far worse than those of the terrorists who provoked them. Is this akin to burning a house down because there is a mosquito inside. If you provoke your suspects into a shoot-out they spare you the bother of proving them guilty in court and the protracted appeal process that follows a capital sentence.

After reading this book the only thing I'm certain about is that bombs went off in Boston. The recipe for the creation of a pressure cooker bomb was available by direct link in a magazine posted in Wikipedia. That's hardly a spoiler. I'm not so certain as to who set them or why. I do know that police tactics and the court of public opinion probably played a big role in motivating whoever did. Executing a young man over a decade from now may create a martyr but will do nothing to make things better and may even worsen them.