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.
