You’re right. Another gambit is what is or what flirts with what’s called entrapment. The police cook up spurious terrorist schemes to test a suspect if not, indeed, simply to “go fishing” and see if they get any “bites”. That’s (so far, at least technically) illegal in parts of Europe but in the U.S. it’s considered a fair cop to lure someone into a cooked-up plot. There’s a bald assumption in doing that: namely that

“the guy (or woman) would have eventually gotten around to doing something of the sort ‘on his own’ even if we hadn’t lured him.”

Such simple (-minded faith) in another’s evil intents leaves me shaking my head about the stuff that Americans can convince themselves of.

I congratulate your ability to see and resist this kind of foolishness. But unfortunately, you’re part of a relatively small (and, I think, dwindling) minority.

The Bill of Rights has already been shredded for most practical intents and purposes. There, as here, in Europe, we live “at sufferance” of the authorities. Wherever and whenever their inclinations to sufffer our liberties lapses, those liberties easily go by the boards.

To that extent, the “terrorists” have not only scored something by their calculus, they’ve exposed, revealed, about us (that is, “Westerners”) , some of the very things which certain of their views, stated or unstated, seem to assume to be true about us.

Indeed, just my point. “We”ll” (i.e. the police authorities will) catch “at least some bad guys.” But not all.

The point was and remains that, short of truly large numbers of completely innocent people enduring a hellish challenge to prove their innocence while the authorities detain and distrust them–short of such Draconian practices, there are obviously going to continue to be instances of just what has happened : the police (at some level) had intelligence concerning the possibility of “X’s” potential as a “terrorist” threat, they investigated, and, in the end, they decided to shelve the matter without arrest and indefinite detention.

That’s a “shame” only from the perspective that, in order to keep even some of our liberties, we have to run certain risks. The risk here is that occasionally, the police, even when they do their jobs well and effectively, will still miss an actual threat.

I don’t claim that the people involved in the Boston marathon attack were motivated by a desire for revenge for what has been done to people in Chechnya. But, if they had been so motivated, I wouldn’t find it the least bit surprising. Given a person such as V. Putin and, given that Obama, as it suits his own quite cynical needs and interests, is or isn’t bosom-buddies with Putin, I’d imagine that the Boston attacks inspired some of Putin’s still-surviving victims in Chechnya to say, even if only to themselves, “Yeah! And, why not?!”

If Americans suffered death and injury at the rates suffered by people throughout the “underdevelopped” world and suffered that for causes which are due more or less directly to the persuit of and protection some one or more foreign governments calculating their own selfish interests–against all ordinary notions of justice, by the way— then there’d ensue a regular blood-letting which would place the events of the Boston marathon in stark contrast. But, instead of this, it’s not especially in America that this blood-letting goes on (though Americans do a quite respectable job of killing each other in the course of an ordinary day). It’s elsewhere in the world, in Chechnya, for example, or in Africa, where Western oil companies do deals with despots who grant drilling contracts and, reaping for themselves obscene gains, keep the public under oppression; wherever the White House deems “the vital interests of America”, to require it, justice is delayed so that our material needs and our competitive advantages are better ensured though for others, this entails a daily blood-letting at their expense, not ours.

Here’s another thought: if the two brothers–presuming as seems likely true–were indeed responsible for the Boston marathon attacks, it seems that under present circumstances, if instead of having been killed or captured in the U.S., one or both had escaped and fled the country, then that one or both, would be instantly very high on Obama’s personally-reviewed and approved list of people designated to be eliminated by assassination at the first opportunity, instead of receiving what used to be known as “due process” under law, with such extravagances as the right to the presumption of innocence (though most Americans do not really know in any practical sense what that means or why that measure is important); the right to a trial; the right to be apprised of the charges against one; the right to examine witnesses; and on and on.

With a stroke of his pen, U.S. citizen or not, Obama–like Bush before him–can and does dispense with all such troublesome details and in such cases, orders a drone-strike or another sort of assassination by remote control to be done.

We’re against the slaughter in Syria–only just not too much against it. One reason of course is that Putin is arming Assad and if we pressed the issue too much, we’d be at serious odds with Putin. So, a certain number of innocent Syrians, who aren’t well enough armed to defend themselves, are Assad’s victims, and our American interests are placed in jeopardy. Of course, the full picture is a little more complicated but even if it were quite simple, the White House would easily calculate its interests and those innocent Syrian’s lives would still be forfeit.

That’s just one example among others that go on and on.

I chose my words carefully here. In the recent past, I’ve explicitly called for people to not succumb to the whole police state thing, and I tend to get a lot of crap for saying that from people who get mad at me because they want the police state, or at least, they want the police to be uncriticized by the citizenry. That’s the whole post 9/11 attitude, and it is very self destructive. If we can’t critique the police, then we might as well shred the Bill of Rights.

Here’s how I look at it:

not much remains of U.S. civil liberties but this case presents at least some anecdotal evidence that there remains at least a little something of the idea that a person under suspicion by the authorities might, despite that, be grante the benefit of the doubt about the reality of those suspicions’ good grounds.

In other words, there is only one way in which society could rest assured that no so-called terrorist shall ever escape timely detection and be prevented from carrying out some act of violence: remove every suspect, without exception, no matter how flimsy the evidence may be or how little confidence the authorities have in the belief that the suspect is in fact designing some terrorist project.

Or, in still other words–and these are needed because there is such mass stupidity and foolishness surrounding the issue: only by wrongly arresting and detaining people could the police ever hope to achieve complete “success” in finding and stopping each and every “bad guy” out there in the wild.

Do you really want to live in such a society? It would mean a consistent and long-term practice of wrongful arrest, under mistaken suspicions, of many, many really innocent people.

But, clearly, after all we’ve seen, U.S. society is fully capable of such a wildly stupid and destructive course–just to gain a fuller sense of false security.

That’s why organized terrorist groups generally claim responsibility for terrorist acts, and why even many “lone wolf” types (e.g., Ted Kaczynski or Chris Dorner) leave manifestoes lying around. Most normal people may think your thought processes have gone badly astray, but there is, generally, a thought process involved.

On the plus side, at least it can’t be used as an excuse to start another war.

No, but it’s almost a guarantee that the right will only focus on the ISLAM CONNECTION WARBLEGARBLE!!!11!! and sweep anything unrelated under the rug.

It’s even scarier when someone you have met actually does become a multiple murderer. I met a mild-mannered axe murderer once (before he committed the murders, of course). So I can envision the shock that Dzhokhar’s friends and acquaintances felt upon hearing that he was a suspect in the case. It must have been even worse for Tamerlan’s wife, who apparently found out from TV news that her husband was a suspect.