Posted by Lecturer Nicholas Grossman
Shortly after the explosions at the Boston Marathon, the
question arose whether the bombings constituted terrorism. This is not semantic. To prevent something, it is essential to
understand it, and accurately distinguishing terrorism from other types of
violence aides the development of counter-strategies. Additionally, defining a violent action as
terrorism carries legal implications—the charges and associated penalties are
harsher, the rules on interrogation looser—and leads to greater involvement
from national agencies, such as the FBI and NSA.
Terrorism is political violence against non-combatants by
relatively weak actors. Government
oppression and military action can be terrifying, and often kill far more
people than any terrorist attack, but require more resources than any terrorist
could hope to control. Violence against
active soldiers, such as an improvised explosive device targeting an American
patrol in Afghanistan, is an act of war, and has a different effect on the
public consciousness. It's more
expected, more “normal,” so it's less frightening to outside observers. Criminal violence, such as a robbery or
murder, is undertaken for personal reasons, including enrichment or
revenge. Gangsters consider themselves
businessmen, but terrorists see themselves as “freedom fighters,” struggling
against the odds on behalf of a noble cause, and they design their attacks to
have an impact beyond the suffering of the immediate victims.
Even before the suspects were identified, the Boston bombing
appeared political because of the choice to attack such a public target. Police perform security sweeps before the
start of public races, and maintain a large presence throughout, which means it
would be easier to attack “softer” targets, such as train stations, shopping
malls, or schools. But that would garner
less attention, provide fewer lasting images.
The Boston Marathon is one of the biggest in the world, and few places
have more cameras trained on them than the finish line of a major global
race. The bombers surely knew that the
world would be watching.
That also proved their undoing.
The area around the finish line was covered
in cameras.
Media photographers, official
race cameras, spectators' cell phones, and store security cameras provided
hundreds of hours of videos to FBI and police investigators, who spotted two
men that entered the area with large backpacks and left without them.
After accumulating more video evidence, the
FBI released photographs of the two suspects, later identified as Tamerlan and
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, around 6:00PM on April 18
th, three days after the
attack.
This seems to have sent them
into a panic.
In the next eight hours,
the two suspects killed an MIT campus officer,
carjacked an SUV, and engaged police in a firefight that killed 26-year old
Tamerlan.
Around 8:45PM the next day,
acting on a tip from a homeowner who noticed blood on his boat, police arrested
19-year old Dzhokar.
(
See
a timeline of events here).
This apparent lack of preparation for the possibility that
law enforcement would identify them is not the only indication that the
Tsarnaev brothers were amateurs.
No
group claimed responsibility for the marathon bombing, and the Pakistani
Taliban even issued a statement denying involvement.
Since terrorist groups believe their actions
are justified, they often publicly admit responsibility for an attack, and use
the ensuing attention to explain their grievances.
Osama bin Laden gave multiple speeches
defending al Qaeda's attacks against the United States as self-defense
responses to America's “injustices” in the Middle East and central Asia, asking
in 2004 for the world to consider “
why we
didn't attack Sweden.”
The lack of any public claim of responsibility suggested
that the Boston bombers were self-starters.
Rather than belonging to a terrorist group, which usually have media
arms and public relations strategies, the Tsarnaevs sympathized with a cause,
but took the initiative themselves.
In
2011,
Russian
intelligence warned the FBI that Tamerlan “was a follower of radical Islam
and a strong believer, and that he had changed drastically since 2010.”
The FBI, however, investigated the elder
Tsarnaev, interviewed him and his family, and determined that he was not a
member of a terrorist group and had not engaged in any terrorist activity.
More information may come to light revealing
that Tamerlan was in contact with an extremist group, perhaps in Chechnya or
Dagestan, but the currently available evidence strongly indicates that he and
his brother did not act at the direction of others.
This puts the Tsarnaevs in a category with Faisal Shahzad,
who unsuccessfully attempted to set off a car bomb in Times Square in 2010,
and Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 in the Fort Hood shooting in 2009. These individuals belong to the small minority
of the world's billion-plus Muslims who believe Islam is under attack by the
West, and that violence against the United States and its allies is the proper
response. They often communicate online,
discussing politics and religion, and sharing tactics. For example, the pressure cooker bombs used
by the Tsarnaevs followed a simple, commonly used design, which was featured in
al Qaeda's Inspire magazine.
Terrorist groups recruit, fund-raise, and spread propaganda
semi-publicly, which helps intelligence agencies track their activity. However, non-members who sympathize with
their political positions are harder to monitor. Most never commit violence, and the few who
do are difficult to anticipate.
Unfortunately, it is likely that some self-starters will
surprise us with attacks of similar scale in the future.
(We'll discuss self-starters and other issues pertaining to
21
st century terrorism in
The
Politics of Terrorism class that I'll be teaching this fall).
