One of the more depressing and dispiriting things about these terrorist attacks is the battle people have over proper usage and nomenclature in their aftermath. When can we call something terrorism? What constitutes cowardice?
As a general matter, these debates don’t interest me and I wish we didn’t have them. I thought Bill Maher was correct when he said that it took some courage to pilot a plane into a skyscraper knowing that you would die in a fireball. Those men didn’t strike me as cowards because they did something that I wouldn’t do not only because it was evil but because I would be too scared to do it.
But the person or people who detonated the bombs in Boston do strike me as cowards. They didn’t die or risk dying. They didn’t give their victims a chance to fight back as the passengers of Flight 93 successfully did on September 11th. What they did was deliver a sucker punch. They waited until people were not looking and they blew their legs off. I suppose the only courage in that is the courage to risk being arrested.
We don’t know who did this, but we do know that they are attempting to get away with it. If I sucker punch you, I know that you might press charges. Even a sucker puncher has more balls than this psychopath.
So, even though I don’t think it matters or that debating it is a useful endeavor, I think it is entirely appropriate to refer to the perpetrator as a coward (or cowards).
I love John Green:
Yep
And the bombing happened in that communist stronghold of MA/NE
On tax day.
On Patriots Day
And at the the liberal Mecca JFK library
Jus’ saying’
We will see.
There was a fire at JFK Library yesterday, but local authorities have been saying it’s unrelated to the Copley Square stuff. Are you mixing up Kennedy with Boston Public, which is in Copley Square?
Eric Rudolph took years on the lamb in the Smokies and being incarcerated before he took responsibility for the Centennial Park and clinic bombings.
McVeih probably never would have said a word if he wasn’t caught. In fact he wasn’t arrested for the bombing and had no plans for giving it up until he thought they knew what he did.
OT, but whatever else you do today, make sure to DVR the PBS Documentary by Ken Burn’s “The Central Park Five”. It should be must see tv for anyone who claims to care about why African Americans and other minority or so distrusting of the legal system in America, even after slavery and Jim Crow
Also, this doc just proves that Donald Trump has always been a bigotted douchebag.
Central Park Five
Another horrible blight on white America — those young men were convicted in the court of public opinion that once again got it wrong.
Yes, of course you are right. I’m really concerned about our language. People don’t even know what basic words mean any more. I guess they think “coward” is a bad name you call somebody you don’t like, rather than that it has any specific meaning.
Yes. It doesn’t compute for those that engage in the aggressive use of force that kills and maims innocent people that they are cowards. Most Americans equate our government’s ability to blow up lands, structures, and people with bravery. Would laugh if others in the world called us cowards for our acts. Yet, quickly label those that dare perpetrate violence not sanctioned by us as cowards. Those in this country and the world that advocate for peace and non-violence are also labeled cowards.
Right on the money, Marie.
Right there!!!
AG
Booman writes:
So do I.
But what do you call an executive officer who OKs massive numbers of drone strikes while knowing full well that many civilians will be killed, including little children?
Pragmatic?
PLEASE!!!
I mean, you are fully aware of the inefficiency of long-distance drone strikes in terms of “collateral damage” and you also consider Obama to be an highly intelligent man…as do I…so I am sure that you understand the fact that he understands this too.
Your positions are indefensible in terms of basic logic, Booman. The opposition is “cowardly” for taking lives at no risk to their own while your own employers…and if you call yourself a “political consultant” or some such term then you are most certainly in some way in the employ of the Democratic Party as headed by Preznit O’Bomb’em…while your own employers brazenly drone village after village in search of whatever it is that they think they are doing.
I’m sorry, Booman. Either stay out of the blame game or include all who take part in the murder-without-risk thing in your indictment.
WTFU.
As Osama bin Laden…Allah bless and forgive him if he really existed as he was sold to us American clomp-clomp-clompers by the corporate-owned media…quite clearly stated many years ago:
WTFU.
AG
Yes, sadly. Moreover ‘intelligence’ is maybe the most overrated characteristic of people.
AG, I agree with you 100% about drone strikes. They are a blight on the US. If Pakistan ordered drone strikes on Pakistani dissidents who live in Passaic, NJ, what would our reaction be?
your reaction or the government’s?
Our first drone strike in Pakistan was at the government’s request and it targeted a man who was fighting the Pakistani government, not us. Our drone bases there were overseen by the Pakistani military and each drone strike was approved by the Pakistani military.
Same thing is true in Yemen.
No, what’s shocking is that I agree with AG.
One small step for mankind.
I tol’ ya!!!
Check it out.
AG
I don’t follow this.
The person who did this obviously knows if they’re caught they’ll have charges filed against them (or I guess be torn apart by a mob). How is that different than what a sucker puncher faces? It’s entirely possible to be sucker punched and not know who punched you.
Yes, it was cowardly to plant and detonate those bombs in Boston, as it is also cowardly to sit in a cubicle somewhere in the American southwest and blow people thousands of miles away into smithereens by remote control.
The lack of personal risk to the drone operators is controversial, quite aside from the controversy over the effectiveness and morality of the program.
So, that’s one part of it.
Beyond that, we either accept that the targets of these drone strikes are deserving of death or we do not. If we accept that they are, then the next question is whether the drone strikes limit or exacerbate the number of civilians and soldiers that are killed. Obviously, they limit the risk to soldiers. Do they limit the risk to civilians? I think they obviously do that, too.
So, it really comes down to two things. Are these people legitimate targets in the first place? And, does the blowback from this tactic outweigh the effectiveness of the strikes?
The fact that you and Marie2 and Arthur Gilroy are all equating the bombings in Boston with the drone strikes shows me that you all doubt that the targets of drone strikes are legitimate targets in the first place. If that’s the case, the method of killing them doesn’t seem to matter. It would be wrong no matter why they were being targeted.
This is my problem with a lot of the angst I read about drones. People rarely spell out exactly what it is that they are objecting to. But the lack of risk taken by the “pilots” is one major reason why people have an uneasy feeling about drones. Another is the lying involved where foreign governments pretend to be outraged when they’ve approved every strike.
This is my problem with a lot of the angst I read about drones. People rarely spell out exactly what it is that they are objecting to.
“I think it’s wrong to use force against al Qaeda” is such an obvious loser of a position that the people who want to argue it need a poster child to change the subject, and UAVs are scary and cool.
How are drones any different than shooting missiles from a ship in the gulf in this respect? I just don’t get that argument.
What would you have written if the perpetrators of this tragedy had…instead of using IEDs…stepped up to the finish line, automatic weapons a’blazing like some scene from a Hollywood movie gone dangerously amok?
How does one differentiate between the guilty and the innocent in such situations, whether it be a drone stroke on a rural village, a Rambo-style strike on the same village, an IED strike on part of a system that has been economically imperializing 3/4s of the globe for 100+ years or a group of suicidal terrorists bent on taking on the entire Boston police force and the local National Guard in a firefight?
Where…and with whom…does the “guilt” truly reside?
Where is the cowardice?
Where is the heroism?
It is all fucked up, Booman.
All of it.
Until we step away from the whole scene, the U. S. is as culpable (if not more so, seeing as how we are most definitely the instigators in this ongoing blood for oil war )as is any media-branded “terrorist.”
Bet on it.
AG
Talking about a drone strike on a village makes no sense. It’s like saying you threw a snowball a neighborhood.
The armaments that drones can carry aren’t even enough to level a house.
I’m not sure about that. They carry some 500 lb. bombs. That will level a house. That will level a small neighborhood. They also carry other munitions more suitable for hitting moving cars or stationary groupings of people. But they have the capability to be more lethal than that.
I’ve been calling for us to leave Afghanistan for, I don’t know, five or six years, at least. Maybe more.
But I understand why we went over there. I understand that we have certain obligations once we become an occupier. I understand that there are people killing our troops. I understand that Pakistan would rather we use drones than drive tanks into the Hindu Kush, as if that were really even possible.
You and I agree about a lot, maybe even more than you realize, when it comes to our foreign policy, but there is a difference between targeting someone because you believe that they are trying to kill our soldiers or because they are terrorizing the local population or because they are part of an organization pledged to kill American civilians, and just blowing up innocent civilians on purpose. I mean, even on 9/11, they chose targets that were symbolic of their perceived enemies. Wall Street, the Pentagon, the government in Washington. You could at least see what they were trying to do there. But marathon runners and spectators? We don’t have the faintest clue why this happened. Could have been someone who wasn’t allowed to run in the race or someone who was fired from the committee that organizes the race or someone who just wants to kill people because they’re insane, or some MIT grad student who wanted to see if he could blow people’s legs off without killing anyone. We just have no idea.
It wasn’t a mistake. It wasn’t so-called collateral damage. It was just evil. And cowardly.
You do?
Tell me more.
And I answer…stop being an occupier.
And I understand why they are “killing our troops.” Just as we would be killing an occupying country’s troops if it was say Detroit instead of Kabul, the midwest instead of the Afghani mountains.
And I understand that much of “Pakistan”…its rulers, not its people…is our enemy. An enemy that is united with other Islamic fundamentalist groups in an effort to get our fucking economic imperialst boots off of the whole region. Are they “right?” On some levels yes, on others no. But take our interference with their own region out of the mix and the real assholes in the game there would lose power relatively quickly. They are using “us” as an excuse to gain and hold power. Very successfully, I might add.
“Targeting” them because they are trying to kill our soldiers as part of an occupying force? I can relate. Can’t you? Take those soldiers away from danger and no one…except of course the thousands of Americans who have been driven stark staring mad by the almost unlimited contradictions between what they have been told is “The American Way” and what is really going down here…will be “trying to kill” them.
“Targeting” them because they are terrorizing the local population? Doctor, heal thyself. We have enough problems domestically. Let us fix our own system before we go out and try to save the systems of others.
I agree.
But the scale, Booman.
The scale!!!
The carpet bombing of S.E. Asia.
The still ongoing “secret wars” in Central and South America that have killed tens of thousands.
The blood for oil wars in the Middle East.
They weren’t mistakes, either. They were quite purposefully done, and their damage…collateral and otherwise…has been unimaginable. They are evil on a scale well past anything that one can rationally forgive. Cowardly? We need another word to describe those actions…actions which in one form or another continue to this day, actions that have of course resulted in both the immense wealth of the United States and also its ongoing (and rapidly accelerating) breakdown.
You wrote a couple of days ago in your post Crazy Nation:
And I am telling you what is wrong. People are indeed going insane. They are being driven insane by the vast contradictions under which they live their lives in this so-called free society.
Make peace/Make war.
Question authority/Obey.
Speak freely/Do not disagree upon penalty of whatever we wish to do to those who bother us.
The Burroughsian Walk/Don’t Walk conundrum. Stop/Go.
Go here for more on the subject from Wiliiam Burroughs’ book “The Job.” Heavy duty. Read it and understand more.
Or…go on wif your bad self and work for the Obama man.
Your choice.
I’ve made mine.
Or maybe more accuratey I have had my choice made for me by the actions of our nation over the past 50+ years.
It ain’t right, Booman.
What the U.S. has been doing just ain’t right.
Bet on it.
And it ain’t working, either.
Look around.
You see it. It is perfectly obvious that you see it in your post Crazy Nation.
Check it out.
An old vaudeville routine.
The doc’s not so crazy, is he?
It’s not working?
Don’t do dat!!!
Later…
AG
Bqhatevwr.
Marathon bombing cuz Contras.
Tighten up your argument.
Insufficient reply.
Try again.
Let’s take it from the top.
You said that you “…understand why we went over there.” To Afghanistan.
Ok.
Enlighten me, please.
And while you are at it, enlighten me about why we committed all of the other war crime-level acts of invasion and covert interference in the hundreds of of the other places on the globe that are now our implacable enemies.
Please.
I thank you beforehand. I really do need to understand whatever it is that you and millions of others appear to “understand” regarding these acts.
I am mystified.
AG
Obama was right not to jump the gun.
It might not be terrorism but just another mass murder.
Somebody decided to use home made bombs featuring ball bearings in pressure cookers instead of an assault rifle to make a big splash of blood.
And he might do it again.
And he might get better at bomb placement and kill a whole lot more people in his next try.
And what is this irrelevant babbling about bravery vs cowardice?
There is no evidence, even if the guy was actually a terrorist, supporting any guesses about how brave or how fearful a man he might be.
Nor much reason to care, unless you’re doing some kind of imaginary guest shot on Criminal Minds and trying to profile the guy.
And so far this just doesn’t look all that much like terrorism, to me.
Neither foreign nor domestic.
No political statement, after all.
Neither explicit nor anything to be inferred.
Wait and see.
Depends how one defines a terrorist. It clearly meant to spread fear, that is sufficient for me to call it an act of terror. It’s not in a warzone, nor inside military barracks, the bombs targeted civilians in a normal activity: a sports event.
Could be a loner with no earlier background of violence but garnering a hatred for being left-out of society. Right-wingers would target a government building, feds, ATF or police. April is known to be a month for those kind of attacks.
If the culprit isn’t caught, he/she most likely will strike again.
It’s good that you go back to the root meaning of the word terrorism. The original meaning was acts intended to terrorize a population in order to create a climate where your group is more likely to get what it wants. It wasn’t meant to describe every act of mass murder, but instead to describe a particular strategy behind some of those acts of mass murder.
When a lunatic shoots up a school or a movie theater it’s not terrorism – it’s a crime but the intent is not to terrorize but to meet some personal insane desire. Yes, the effect is to terrorize the population, but that’s not the intent.
When people in an occupied country use timed explosives on the local military its not terrorism, but when they use timed explosives against the private citizens of that military’s home country it is terrorism. The former is not intended to terrorize the population – its intended to make the costs of the occupation too high to bear. The latter is indeed intended to get the population to want to stop the occupation.
When a wingnut goes into a Unitarian church and shoots as many people as he can that’s not terrorism – that’s his own little contribution to killing off the liberals – he’s hoping others will follow in his stead. Similar for the wingnut in Norway. Yes, the effect can be to terrorize the population, but that’s not what they are trying to achieve.
The FBI report on the Columbine shootings determined that they were an act of domestic terrorism, but they had those two kids on tape talking about setting off a revolution.
I don’t recall this about Columbine. What sort of revolution? In their minds, who were the bad guys and who the good?
Sometimes the line gets blurred between the doings of a whackjob and the doings of a “real” political terrorist, particularly given that being a whackjob is almost a requirement for being a terrorist – the more so, I think, in the case of the self-motivated and isolated “lone wolf” type.
Have we had any cases, yet, where the terrorist was pissed at the gummint for hiding aliens at Area 51?
There’s always tomorrow.
Never say never.
I’m not sure they had the whole thing worked out very rationally, but they seem to have taken their “us against the jocks and Christians” experiences and written them large into American politics.
Two days after the event and no clearcut claims of responsibility.
During a day of personal freedom and liberty, runners from around the world come together on the streets to celebrate individual achievement and bring hope to varied and important causes, two bombs go off maiming and cutting the legs off of participants.
The sheer narcissistic message where this narcissistic coward acted may be his/their message of ‘I did it because I could’ which is always the worst reason of all.
Interesting that a number of the usual suspects, including someone claiming to represent Al Qaeda in Pakistan, have explicitly DENIED being behind this.
Reminds me that on 9/11 a bunch of groups reflexively claimed responsibility in the first hours only to quickly retract the claims once they realized the consequences.
What this suggests is that those foreign groups who might consider using terrorism on the US population recognize that its not going to be an effective strategy – so the terrorist threat in the US will only come from small groups of isolated incompetents like the shoe bomber or the underpants bomber. In order for it to be an effective terror strategy for foreign groups it would have to be something they could sustain over time and yet at the same time remain anonymous to protect themselves from retaliation – a combination that is virtually impossible. So instead they focus on making the occupations more difficult.
Yes and I was thinking back to the anthrax letters where the sender never went the public bragging route and the FBI’s two suspects never definitively panned out. That there’s been no declaration by a group or individual that barks their success at the Marathon gives me the chills.
Boston Globe and CNN report, press conference at 17:00 hrs.
http://bostonglobe.com/2013/04/17/boston-medical-center-reports-five-year-old-boy-critical-condition
-victims-treated-from-boston-marathon-bombings/UiktKly60y4m8UVHeNu8NP/story.html