The Brothers Tsarnaev

Dear Mr. President,

The media is having a field day with the Tsarnaev brothers, poring over their online activity, their Facebook and Twitter posts sifted for significant dots to connect, their travel records scanned, the history of Chechnyan violence reviewed. Speculation about their self-taught radicalization is at a fever pitch, how it led to the Boston Marathon bombing. Sen. Marco Rubio, after a briefing by the FBI and intelligence officials said, “This is a new element of terrorism that we have to face in our country. We need to be prepared for Boston-type attacks, not just 9/11-type attacks.” But the most interesting and revealing hearing on Capitol Hill yesterday was one by the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights. Today’s NYT captures it in an article on p. A9, titled “Drone Strikes Turn Allies Into Enemies, Yemeni Says.” Farea al-Muslimi, who attended high school in the U.S., said “his friends and neighbors used to know of the United States primarily through ‘my stories of the wonderful experiences I had’ here. ‘Now, however, when they think of America, they think of the fear they feel at the drones over their heads. What the violent militants had failed to achieve, one drone strike accomplished in an instant.’” He also asserted that the man killed in the strike could easily have been arrested. And there’s the key to the question no one wants to ask—What drove the brothers Tsarnaev to do this? The same question no one asked about the 19 hijackers who flew airliners into the Pentagon and World Trade Center on 9/11. As long as we don’t ask that question—and understand the answer—we will continue our blind misguided war of terror that begets only more militants and more violence. Until we end our own terrorist acts against others we will never end others’ against us and Sen. Rubio will be right—we must prepare for more Bostons. Every drone strike, every night raid, every act of brutality creates new militants and makes the world less safe. You could change that, Mr. President, but it’s unlikely. You’ve already chosen a path of violence rather than a path of peace and so, we’'ll continue to stumble blindly into a dystopian future because it’s easier to kill than understand, easier to be part of the the power structure rather than resist it, easier to be violent than merciful, easier to be the War President than the Nobel Peace Prize winner. And so, we’ll expect more Bostons and more violence in the future.