A great recipe for political success: Frighten the population into a hysterical frenzy - send in the troops - catch a suspect - reap applause:
The reports from Boston,
after the Chechen suspect was arrested were full of “we are a resilient city”
and “we are proud to be Bostonians”, whilst hordes in the city of Harvard and
MIT shouted “USA USA” reminding one of recent classy Republican Party conventions.
As terror attacks go, this
one was fairly minor. And yet, public transport was shut down, airspace was restricted
and more than a million Bostonians were put under curfew. Then, many thousands
of policemen, national guardsmen, FBI agents and who knows what other agencies
they have, were sent out to locate one man whose identity was known to the
authorities.
Is that their level of
sophistication in the land of high-tech or is it just that the word terrorist
gets everybody’s knickers in a twist? They don’t, after all, close down
American cities every time a murderer is on the run. Perhaps they should?
Such heavy-handed mode of operation could perhaps have been avoided, had more
sophisticated and intelligent FBI work been able to prevent the
Marathon bombing: having been tipped off by the Russian (?) secret service, the FBI that interrogated
the elder (now killed) Tsarnaev brother a couple of years ago, failed to recognize his radicalization.
