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No, Congress Doesn't Oversee Drones |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6030"><span class="small">Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic</span></a>
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Wednesday, 01 May 2013 13:11 |
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Friedersdorf writes: "The veracity of what Feinstein says cannot be trusted. The Senate Intelligence Committee is not kept 'fully informed' of counterterrorism operations."
Democratic Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein. (photo: J Scott Applewhite/AP)
No, Congress Doesn't Oversee Drones
By Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic
01 May 13
 ritics of Team Obama's targeted killing program frequently complain that it is not subject to sufficient Congressional oversight, which is another way of saying that the core mechanism the Framers gave us to prevent catastrophic policies from arising and persisting is not being exercised. Professor Amitai Etzioni says that the critics are wrong. "Actually Congress is regularly briefed about this campaign," he wrote Tuesday here at The Atlantic. "As Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, a strong liberal herself, recently stated: 'Senate Intelligence Committee is kept fully informed of counterterrorism operations and keeps close watch to make sure they are effective, responsible and in keeping with U.S. and international law.'"
Etzioni's argument is weak.
This is why:
- The veracity of what Feinstein says cannot be trusted. The Senate Intelligence Committee is not kept "fully informed" of counterterrorism operations. Notice Feinstein's claim that they're kept fully informed is dated March 7, 2012. Yet here is what happened almost a year later: "Sen. Dianne Feinstein's office revealed Wednesday that the Obama administration has yet to show members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence seven additional opinions laying out the legal basis for targeted killing." The same month, February 2013, Feinstein was quoted in The Hill saying, "Right now it is very hard [to oversee] because it is regarded as a covert activity, so when you see something that is wrong and you ask to be able to address it, you are told no." Feinstein is also either ignorant of the number of innocent civilians the United States has killed, or else lying about the number. She claims civilian casualties in a given year "are typically in the single digits," an estimate with which no credible source agrees. (If you want to go deeper into the weeds on Feinstein's unreliability, make your way through this Empty Wheel post.)
- Senator Ron Wyden, another member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has waged a years-long effort to get the information on the drone program that he needs to fulfill his oversight responsibilities. Even after he was able to look at some of the drone memos during the John Brennan confirmation process, he said that the Obama Administration had a long way to go before it met the threshold of providing him with all the information that he ought to have. It makes no sense to claim that members of a Senate committee are fully briefed when at least one of them has been fighting tooth and nail for months and months to get basic information.
- Even if the Senate Intelligence Committee had been given all the information it needs to meaningfully perform oversight on the drone program, which it hasn't, that would still fall short of what's needed. Here is a lengthy statement by Rep. John Conyers explaining why the House Judiciary Committee has direct jurisdiction over various aspects of the targeted killing program, and stating that as yet the Obama Administration had not provided the information needed to fulfill its oversight role. And if the House Judiciary Committee gets all the information it needs? That would still be insufficient. The Congress as a whole need not be told every operational detail about the drone program, but there is no legitimate reason to hide from Congress major aspects of it, like the names of all the countries in which we are taking lethal action, the number of civilian casualties, and the legal theories that ostensibly justify the program. None of that information would endanger national security. And all of it would presumably prove extremely important as Congress weighed whether current policy is in the national interest.
There is a reason that the Obama Administration has hidden so much of what it's done from Congress and the American people: Officials know they cannot defend the policy they are pursuing if they forthrightly lay it out in all its indefensible details. Feinstein has repeatedly abetted their efforts to obscure reality, whether deliberately or because she is being manipulated. Certainly she has passed along factually inaccurate and misleading information to the public. The claim that Congress performs meaningful and sufficient oversight of the drone program is flat out incorrect, and citing Feinstein as if her words demonstrate the contrary reveals a willingness to trust elected officials even when the facts demand skepticism.
It is vital for Americans to understand that the Obama Administration has hidden much of what its done from their representatives in the legislature, and that many of their representatives are derelict in their duty to zealously guard their oversight power, as James Madison assumed they would.
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FOCUS | Rise of the (Armed) Conservative Revolutionaries |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=14516"><span class="small">David Sirota, Salon</span></a>
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Wednesday, 01 May 2013 11:15 |
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Sirota writes: "Almost half (44 percent) of all self-described Republican voters say they believe 'an armed revolution might be necessary to protect our liberties.'"
Tea Party supporter William Temple of Brunswick, Ga. (photo: AP/David Goldman)
Rise of the (Armed) Conservative Revolutionaries
By David Sirota, Salon
01 May 13
Almost half of Republicans think an armed revolution may be needed soon. What does it mean for guns and democracy?
 here's plenty of proof of an authoritarian streak and animus toward democratic ideals in today's conservative movement. There was the movement's use of its judicial power to halt a vote recount and instead install a president who had lost the popular vote. There is the ongoing GOP effort to make it more difficult for people to cast a vote in an election. There is the GOP's record use of the Senate filibuster to kill legislation that the vast majority of the country supports. There is a GOP leader's declaration that what the American people want from their government simply "doesn't matter."
Up until today, you might have been able to write all that anti-democratic pathology off as a pathology infecting only the Republican Party's politicians and institutional leadership, but not its rank-and-file voters. But then this poll from Fairleigh-Dickinson University was released showing that authoritarianism runs throughout the the entire party.
Take a look at the cross-tabs on page 3 of the national survey - that's right, you are reading it correctly: almost half (44 percent) of all self-described Republican voters say they believe "an armed revolution might be necessary to protect our liberties." Just as bad, more Republicans believe an armed revolution might be necessary than believe one isn't necessary.
This poll raises two obvious questions, each of them more disturbing than the next.
The first question is about gun control and gun ownership - and more specifically, what the latter is all about.
Typically, GOP leaders typically say that their opposition to minimal gun regulations has nothing to do with helping arm those who want to commit acts of violence, and everything to do with wanting to make sure people can defend themselves. Based on the poll, of course, it is certainly likely that many are buying such weapons in an effort to defend themselves, both for day-to-day life and in the event of a sudden armed revolution. But here's the scary part: how many are buying weapons to arm themselves in order to foment an armed revolution? Maybe none, but maybe a lot. I don't have an answer - but this poll suggests the question should at least be aired.
The other question is about republican democracy: can it survive in an age when almost one half of one of the major parties seems to support the concept of violently thwarting it?
"Politics is war by other means" - that aphorism sums up the democratic theory undergirding the American idea for two centuries. Though we haven't always lived up to that ideal, it is a pretty simple one: a civilized society should solve disputes through a democratic process and democratic institutions, rather than through the barrel of a gun. And while our democracy has been corrupted by Big Money, it still functions better than autocracy. In that sense, Churchill had it right when he said "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."
Incredibly, though, almost half of Republicans don't seem to necessarily see it that way. According to the Farleigh Dickinson poll, 44 percent of rank-and-file Republicans seem to believe that because they aren't getting their way through the ballot box, bloodshed may be justified to impose their will on everyone else. Think of it as sore loser-ism juiced by violence.
Of course, GOP apologists will say that the poll just asked specifically about armed revolution "to protect liberties" - the idea being that almost half of Republican voters don't support using violence to advance their own political agenda, they only support it in the face of a future dystopian nightmare whereby the population is terrorized by police-administered drone bombings and Waco-esque invasions of private homes.
But that's the thing: we can't be so sure that's really true when conservative media voices and politicians are using the broad and incendiary language they now regularly employ. Today, those voices often claim that almost everything in the Democratic/liberal agenda - from Obamacare to taxes to environmental regulations to contraception policy - is an assault on "liberty."
That means the poll might indicate something much more significant than understandable opposition to Big Brother turning our country into Oceania. It might show us that all the vitriolic language employed by the right is undermining the most basic non-violent democratic ideals that are supposed to define America.
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The Crucifixion of Richard Falk |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Tuesday, 30 April 2013 14:30 |
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Boardman writes: "It's not as though we lack a recent example of a president in panic launching stupid, destructive wars that piled up dead and debt that will haunt the country for a generation. It's a fair question - with no certain answer - to ask, if the United States had not engaged in mass killing in Afghanistan and Iraq, would we have ever heard of the Tsarnaev brothers?"
Richard Falk, UN special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories. (photo: Wayne Schoenfeld/Reuters)
The Crucifixion of Richard Falk
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
30 April 13
Who Is Richard Falk and Why Do Some People Hate Him for Stating the Obvious?
 n a personal blog post titled "A Commentary on the Marathon Murders," Richard Falk begins by describing Boston's "dominant reactions" to the Patriots' Day bombing as being full of compassion for the victims, resolve to catch the perpetrators, and an urge to restore normalcy as swiftly as possible:
In this spirit, it is best to avoid dwelling on the gory details by darkly glamorizing the scene of mayhem with flowers and homage. It is better to move forward with calm resolve and a re-commitment to the revolutionary ideals that midwifed the birth of the American nation.
Such responses are generally benevolent, especially when compared to the holy war fevers espoused by national leaders, the media, and a vengeful public after the 9/11 attacks that also embraced Islamophobic falsehoods. Maybe America has become more poised in relation to such extremist incidents, but maybe not …
Writing on April 19, four days after the event, Falk was aware that one suspect was dead and the other still at large. His concern was that the president - and the country - not over-react to what, although he doesn't put it this way, would be a slow day in Baghdad.
What's to hate here? Falk, who taught international law at Princeton for forty years, is calling for a rational rather than a rash response.
Why Would Anyone Think a President Might Stampede the Country Into War?
It's not as though we lack a recent example of a president in panic launching stupid, destructive wars that piled up dead and debt that will haunt the country for a generation. It's a fair question - with no certain answer - to ask, if the United States had not engaged in mass killing in Afghanistan and Iraq, would we have ever heard of the Tsarnaev brothers?
But Falk's call for reasoned restraint, largely ignored in most media, evoked a storm on the right. A week later, on April 26, DemocracyNOW reported the reaction this way, under the headline "U.N. Official Condemned for Highlighting Role of U.S. Policy in Boston Attacks."
A United Nations official is facing calls for his ouster following his comments about the role of U.S. policy in the Boston Marathon bombings. Richard Falk [is] U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories….
Officials in Canada and Britain as well as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice have called for Falk to be fired.
A Call to Reason Strikes Some As Anti-Semitic - Really!
Falk's blog post, over 1,500 words, covered a lot of ground and challenged much conventional wisdom, past and present. His concern was how the past might affect the present, and how the present might differ from the past:
Obama came to Washington as outspoken opponent of torture and of the Iraq War. He also arrived after the failed wars of Afghanistan and Iraq, which had devastated two countries, seemingly beyond foreseeable recovery, while adding nothing to American security, however measured. These unlawful wars wasted trillions expended over the several years during which many Americans were enduring the hardships and pain of the deepest economic recession since the 1930s.
In other words, temporarily at least, the Beltway think tanks and the government are doing their best to manage global crises without embarking on further wars in a spirit of geopolitical intoxication….
Accusing the reformed alcoholic President Bush of another kind of drunkenness might have elicited some rejoinder from the right. But it didn't. The kernel of Falk's offense was here:
At least it seems that for the present irresponsible and unlawful warfare are no longer the centerpiece of America's foreign policy as had become the case in the first decade of the 21st century, although this is far from a certainty.
The war drums are beating at this moment in relation to both North Korea and Iran, and as long as Tel Aviv has the compliant ear of the American political establishment, those who wish for peace and justice in the world should not rest easy.
Who Wants America's Next War? Where? And How Soon?
Falk was not attacked for omitting the loudest war drums of all - beating for Syria. Falk's offense was disparaging Tel Aviv, despite the obvious reality in recent years that Israel has been nudging the U.S. toward war against Iran and/or Syria.
But he wasn't finished. Falk then noted what he called the "taboo" against "any type of self-scrutiny by either the political leadership or the mainstream media" -- just the sort of scrutiny he was attempting. And Falk cited hopefully several callers to public radio who expressed similar concerns about the relationship of civilian-killing drone strikes or years of torturing prisoners to the "retribution" (as one of the callers characterized it) of the Boston bombing.
Falk asked: "Should we not all be meditating on W.H. Auden's haunting line: 'Those to whom evil is done/do evil in return'?"
Falk's attackers made little attempt to engage his argument on its merits. Instead they accused him of some version of "blaming the Boston Marathon bombings on the U.S. and Israel" (i.e., Heritage Foundation, Breitbart.com, Haaretz, Jewish Chronicle, Wall Street Journal, FoxNews, et alia, apparently led by UN Watch, an Israeli-leaning group which has been attacking Falk for years for his defense of Palestinians). The most-quoted line from Falk's blog in support of the charge against him was this:
The American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world. In some respects the United States has been fortunate not to experience worse blowbacks, and these may yet happen, especially if there is no disposition to rethink US relations to others in the world, starting with the Middle East.
Who Decided That Truth Was Offensive? And Should Be Suppressed?
And how is this, or any part of it, not a truism? Is there not an ongoing American project of global domination? Is it not even welcomed and encouraged by quite a few other countries? Has the United States not been fortunate to suffer little compared to the suffering it has imposed? Does anyone really think it's not a good idea to rethink US relations to the rest of the world?
Falk's critics generally don't acknowledge these questions; much less do they attempt to provide cogent answers. Their game is demonization, as writers in both Counterpunch (Jeremy Hammond, who published Falk's blog in his Foreign Policy Journal) and the American Conservative (Scott McConnell, founding editor) have detailed.
The people demonizing Falk have been at it for years, and the reason is simple: he has been critical of Israel.
Since Obama's 2009 speech in Cairo, as Falk sees it, Israel has been pushing back against any fundamental change and Obama has been in the midst of "an accelerating back peddling in relation to opening political space in the Middle East. Now at the start of his second presidential term, it seems that Obama has given up altogether, succumbing to the Beltway ethos of Israel First…. Such obsequious diplomacy was a disappointment even to those of us with low expectations in what the White House is willing [to do] to overcome the prolonged ordeal of the Palestinian people."
Are America's "Revolutionary Ideals" Even Relevant Anymore?
Falk concludes essentially as he began, with his concern for the nation to somehow re-commit itself to the revolutionary ideals that made the United States possible in the first place:
Aside from the tensions of the moment, self-scrutiny and mid-course reflections on America's global role is long overdue. Such a process is crucial both for the sake of the country's own future security and also in consideration of the wellbeing of others.
Such adjustments will eventually come about either as a result of a voluntary process of self-reflection or through the force of unpleasant events. How and when this process of reassessment occurs remains a mystery. Until it does, America's military prowess and the abiding confidence of its leaders in hard power diplomacy makes the United States a menace to the world and to itself.
… bipartisan support for maintaining the globe-girdling geopolitics runs deep in the body politic, and is accompanied by the refusal to admit the evidence of national decline. The signature irony is that the more American decline is met by a politics of denial, the more rapid and steep will be the decline….
We should be asking ourselves at this moment, "how many canaries will have to die before we awaken from our geopolitical fantasy of global domination?"
For his efforts, Falk has been variously called "grotesque," "anti-American," "anti-Semitic" and "a self-hating Jew."
Most Countries Maintained a Diplomatic Silence on the Falk Matter
Among some diplomats, however, their reactions gave little indication that officials had read the original text.
U.S. Ambassador to the UN (and would-be Secretary of State) Susan Rice apparently tweeted on April 23, in response to an appeal from UN Watch, which has been campaigning against Falk since he was first appointed to his UN position in May 2008: "Outraged by Richard Falk's highly offensive Boston comments. Someone who spews such vitriol has no place at the UN. Past time for him to go."
Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird issued a statement on April 24 calling for Falk's removal from his UN post and saying in part:
Once again, United Nations official Richard Falk has spewed more mean-spirited, anti-Semitic rhetoric, this time blaming the attacks in Boston on President [Barack] Obama and the State of Israel.
There is a dangerous pattern to Mr. Falk's anti-Western and anti-Semitic comments. The United Nations should be ashamed to even be associated with such an individual.
The British Mission to the UN issued an April 24 press release:
The UK objects strongly to recent remarks made by UN Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian Territories, Richard Falk, linking the Boston bombings to "American global domination" and "Tel Aviv". This is the third time we have had cause to express our concerns about Mr Falk's antisemitic remarks….
Higher levels of these governments have remained silent.
And Falk appears secure in his role as U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories through the end of his mandate in mid-2014. As FoxNews somewhat bitterly reported: "The United Nations official who angered critics by blaming the Boston Marathon bombing on 'American global domination' will keep his post, because not enough other countries took offense at his comments."
And What If Falk Had Said Anything Like What They Said He Said?
The distortions and lies of those attacking Falk were detailed at significant length (28 pages) on a web site called Mondoweiss on April 25. The site is run by Phan Ngyuen, self-described as "a Palestine solidarity activist based in New York." He notes that after Falk responded to a direct inquiry from the Jewish Chronicle in London, the Jewish Chronicle revised its initially harsh headline on the story. Answering the question whether he had suggested that Israel was responsible for the Boston bombing, Falk wrote:
I never suggested such a connection. My reflections were only a commentary on focusing all attention on the wrongdoing of the perpetrators, and avoiding self-scrutiny as to why the United States, more than elsewhere, was the target of such extremist behavior.
This has been a national characteristic ever since the atomic bombs were dropped at the end of World War II, and before as well. It does not lead to any kind of learning experience that might make the world a less menacing place to inhabit.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Adam Lanza vs. The Knock-off Jihadis |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=23847"><span class="small">Joan Walsh, Salon</span></a>
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Monday, 29 April 2013 14:24 |
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Walsh writes: "Tsarnaevs seem more like mixed-up killers than big terrorists. So why is far more known about them than Adam Lanza?"
Adam Lanza (left) and Dzohkhar Tsarnaev. (photo: unknown)
Adam Lanza vs. The Knock-off Jihadis
By Joan Walsh, Salon
29 April 13
Tsarnaevs seem more like mixed-up killers than big terrorists. So why is far more known about them than Adam Lanza?
 eave it to Joe Biden - or his speechwriters - to come up with the best description yet of Tamarlan and Dzohkhar Tsarnaev: "knockoff jihadis." Knockoffs are, of course, cheap imitations, not the real thing, but the word also gets in a sly allusion to "whack-off" and "jerk-off," or maybe that's just me. It's intentionally belittling. Biden thumbed his nose at those who would put the Tsarnaevs in a class with Mohammed Atta or Anwar al-Awlaki, let alone Osama bin Laden, and his words set up predictable braying on the right. (I learned about the controversy when I defended Biden's comments on Joy Behar's "Say Anything" while talking about my book, and inspired more invective on the right.)
While Republicans try to hype the security breach the Boston bombing represents, to make the case that President Obama is either soft on Islamic extremism or downright friendly to it - a low charge even from a craven opportunist like Rudy Giuliani - the Tsarnaev brothers still look more like mixed-up lumpen-American killers than hardened terrorists, even though they succeeded in terrorizing and appear to have been driven partly by perverted Islamic fervor. The unbearable Charles Krauthammer even used the bombing to argue that George W. Bush kept us safe, while Obama exposed us to harm, ignoring the fact that 9/11 occurred on Bush's watch, and so far no one has tied the Tsarnaevs to an international terror plot.
The Sunday shows also featured Republican politicians, most notably House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers, insisting the elder brother had been radicalized by a trip to Dagestan, Russia, in 2012, while his Cambridge landlady of a decade told the New York Times, "He certainly wasn't radicalized in Dagestan."
Two weeks into the Boston bombing investigation, we are still far from understanding the domestic and international forces behind the attack. Yet I'm struck by how much more we know about the Tsarnaev family than about America's last notorious crime family, the Lanzas, almost five months since the awful Newtown shootings. The two sets of killings were roughly parallel in terms of media obsession, though the Boston story had an edge, thanks to the fact that it disrupted a national media event, involved a charge of terror, and injured so many more people.
The Tsarnaevs' chosen weapon, the pressure cooker bomb, only killed three people, but wounded almost 300; Adam Lanza's choice of weapon, a Bushmaster automatic rifle, killed every single one of his 26 targets, minus one lucky child who escaped. The New Yorker's John Cassidy already wrote a great meditation on what might have happened if the Tsarnaevs used automatic weapons, not crude bombs. (Certainly they wouldn't have been charged with possessing "weapons of mass destruction.")
The New York Times and Washington Post both published absorbing and textured narratives about the Tsarnaev family on Sunday. From the Times we learned that Tamarlan's boxing career wasn't necessarily cut short by his Islamic radicalization; his giving up boxing also coincided with Golden Gloves leadership deciding he couldn't compete for the national championship because he wasn't a U.S. citizen. He was the New England regional heavyweight champion for a second straight year - he'd competed for the national championship in 2009 - when the Golden Gloves association changed the rule to exclude non-citizens in 2010. That's when he gave up boxing, friends say, and turned more fervently to Islam. It's too big a jump to blame his radicalization on the Golden Gloves disappointment, but it's an interesting piece of information about a complicated, hard to fathom man.
From the Washington Post we learn that Anzor Tsarnaev, the brothers' father, followed his now famous brother Ruslan to the U.S. in 2002, fleeing ethnic and political strife and chasing the American dream. While the family first seemed to thrive, Anzor with an auto-mechanic business and wife Zubaidah giving facials in their Cambridge apartment, things later fell apart. One daughter was busted for dealing marijuana (friends claim Dzohkhar was a dealer, too), Zubaidah was arrested for shoplifting, neighbors complained about Anzor hogging scarce street parking for his car business and stealing from a local auto-parts supplier.
As the family unraveled, Zubaidah became ever more observant, taking to wearing the hijab, while son Tamarlan went from flashy "Eurotrash" night-clubber with a possible boxing career to obnoxious observant Muslim, picking fights over whether Muslims should celebrate American holidays. He was charged with domestic violence in 2009 but never prosecuted; the next year he married the WASPy Katherine Russell, who dropped out of college, converted to Islam, and apparently supported her husband and daughter with a punishing schedule as a home health aide.
In short, the Tsarnaevs sound like they'd make a great American reality TV series, except for the horrific ending.
With all the rich detail about the Tsarnaevs, I'm struck by how little we know, by comparison, about Newtown killer Adam Lanza's family. There's no media conspiracy at work; I'm just wondering about the contrast. Certainly two weeks in, we had nothing like the detail about the Lanza family that we already have about the Tsarnaevs. Clearly one reason (suggested by a reader) is that Adam Lanza left no digital footprints - he even destroyed his computer's hard drive - while the Tsarnaevs were all over social media, from Russian social networks to YouTube to Twitter.
Another reason is the Lanzas' wealth, which made it possible for their dysfunction to fester in private. Nancy Lanza took her son out of school and home-schooled him in her suburban mansion when she became unhappy with his treatment in both public and Catholic schools. The Tsarnaevs lived in a dense, middle- to working-class Cambridge neighborhood, which meant their neighbors knew their business. Lanza apparently seceded from any public institutions that might have helped her; the Tsarnaevs were known to welfare officials and law enforcement (even before the FBI interviewed them). Early reports that she was a "doomsday prepper" haven't been confirmed, but Lanza's own gun enthusiasm seems at least partly responsible for the killings - safe in suburbia, she collected guns, and took her disturbed son to shooting ranges.
It's hard not to wonder whether we pursue reasons for the Boston bombing more aggressively than for mass shootings because one is designated "terrorism," and the other is just a fact of American life - not accepted, of course, but not treated as a horrific aberration that requires both explanation and measures to prevent it from happening again. There have been attempts at overviews of the Lanzas' troubles by various news outlets - this one by the Courant and PBS's Frontline is about the best - and the local papers cover new revelations regularly. But we still don't have anything like the rich, textured narrative we already have about the Tsarnaevs.
It's also clear that we don't generalize from the actions of white killers to reach conclusions about their "group"; the Tsarnaevs' Muslim religion also makes them "other," and more subject to scrutiny. No one has suggested that we study the Lanzas' fractured suburban family life for clues to why their son became a killer. We know far more about Anzor Tsarnaev than Peter Lanza. However, anyone involved in the debate over whether the brothers are white surely enjoyed the Boston Globe's revelation that Tamarlan taunted the Chinese immigrant he carjacked by suggesting that the young man wouldn't remember what he looked like, because "maybe you think all white guys look the same." Whatever others may think, Tamarlan considered himself "white" in America's ethnic mix.
Investigators may still find a foreign influence behind Tamerlan's radicalization. This weekend we also learned that the Russian government asked the FBI and then the CIA to keep tabs on the Tsarnaevs because a wiretap found Tamerlan and his mother, as well as his mother and a Russian friend, "vaguely discussing jihad," according to AP.
But there's an element of frenzy in our determination to figure out the Tsarnaevs that wasn't apparent in the media approach to the Lanzas. So far, though, what we've uncovered is that the Tsarnaevs were as American as many first-generation immigrants, trying to grab their piece of the American dream, but failing. Anzor returned to his home country; Zubaidah became more religiously observant; their children flailed, and two turned to violence. Republicans are determined to make this a story of global Islamic violence resurgent, but so far, the story is resisting.
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lease spare Lawrence Lessig, the 
