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Authoritarianism Has Enveloped Every Part of American Life |
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Sunday, 28 April 2013 13:07 |
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Knefel writes: "Privacy, not surveillance, is what must be justified now. We must make sure not to draw the wrong lessons from Boston."
Surveillance cameras are only one part of the growing collection of surveillance technology being implemented in the US. (photo: Kodda/Shutterstock.com)
Authoritarianism Has Enveloped Every Part of American Life
By John Knefel, AlterNet
28 April 13
Privacy, not surveillance, is what must be justified now. We must make sure not to draw the wrong lessons from Boston.
 bserving the media frenzy that surrounded last week's Boston marathon bombing and the eventual capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one thing became immediately clear: the attack gave media elites an opportunity to fully embrace their generally latent authoritarianism. Finally, they could openly and unapologetically align themselves with law enforcement officials, sham "counter-terrorism experts," and whoever else bravely suggested that total surveillance is good and inevitable. (See Tom Brokaw telling viewers that they must now submit to increasingly invasive searches, or Andrea Mitchell uncritically amplifying Tom Ridge's policies when he was head of the Department of Homeland Security as but two of the countless examples.) They could once again act as spokespeople for the government, uniting the country under the banner of American Exceptionalism.
The country's foremost jingoist, Thomas Friedman – the NYT columnist who once indelicately suggested that the Muslim world suck the United States' collective phallus – wrote in his column on April 17th that "cave dwelling is for terrorists." Americans, he countered, live in freedom. The "cave" line's Islamophobia is as obvious as it is repugnant, and should be a reminder that not-so-subtle bigotry towards Muslims is acceptable and rewarded in polite society in this country. His larger point, that the United States will respond to this apparent terrorist attack by remaining a fully open society is either willfully delusional or a product of his privilege; he won't be profiled because of his name or religion.
Privacy, not surveillance, is what must be justified now, though that was true before Boston. The elites either don't see it or simply pretend not to, but the authoritarianism unleashed by 9/11 has become institutionalized, normalized, and ubiquitous. The surveillance state didn't need Boston to implement its policies, though the bombing will certainly be used to accelerate them and further marginalize dissent.
That domestic surveillance will continue to increase – especially with the arrival of drones – was true before Boston. Miranda rights had already been significantly weakened by the Obama DOJ in 2010. US officials already had the ability to wiretap certain Americans without a warrant. Prior to the Boston bombing, US attorneys were fully capable of over-charging activists in computer-based cases as full-on enemies of the state. The FBI and DHS didn't need the Boston bombing to treat Occupy like a terrorist organization.
Police departments throughout the country had already been hyper-militarized, thanks to DHS funding in the name of counter-terrorism. And of course Mayors throughout the country didn't need Boston to criminalize peaceably assembling in parks to protest the unconscionable wealth gap in this country, or to deploy their hyper-militarized forces to dislodge those encampments. Anyone who wanted to see what police look like now needed only to watch as tanks rolled through Boston.
The list could go on.
No, the bombing in Boston didn't change the powers the state claims regarding so-called national security measures, because it could already claim virtually any power it wanted. But there's another thing the bombing didn't change: the critiques of those very powers.
Trevor Aaronson's in-depth investigation into the FBI's "manufactured war on terrorism" remains as valuable as ever. The actions of the alleged Boston bombers don't change the fact that nearly every "terrorist" the FBI has captured in a sting operation is an economically precarious, mentally vulnerable outcast with no ability to enact a terrorist plot on his own. Nor does the attack in Boston justify the NYPD's investigation of Ahmed Ferhani, a manufactured terrorism case so flimsy even the FBI wanted nothing to do with it.
And the bombing doesn't negate or excuse the disastrous effects that surveilling Muslim communities has on innocent members of those communities. Surveilling innocent Muslims remains as odious and morally repugnant – not to mention counter-productive to the stated aims of identifying dangerous people – as it was on April 14th. That scores of pundits last week implored people not to engage in profiling – without acknowledging that Muslims are constantly profiled by the FBI, NYPD, and others – only underscores how invisible the criminalization of Muslims is.
Republican Rep. Peter King's recent call for law enforcement to "realize that the threat is coming from the Muslim community and increase surveillance there" was the most explicit endorsement of a largely-in-place policy that many Americans would prefer to ignore.
Guantanamo Bay should still be closed down, and the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights' claim that the prison is "in clear breach of international law" still should matter. The hunger strike there, now officially at 84 detainees, remains a problem that the Obama administration must examine and determine how to solve. And though the suggestion by Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain that Tsarnaev be held in military custody was widely and correctly mocked, the Obama administration has overseen the institutionalization of military commissions at Guantanamo. That alternate legal universe that could very easily be employed by a president in the future, especially in the event of a terrorist attack that more closely resembles 9/11.
The secret law that determines how the executive branch kills US citizens, suspected al Qaeda operatives, and individuals whose identities aren't even known in signature strikes should still be made public to the greatest extentpossible. The inappropriately-named targeted killing program should be made more transparent, and should have clear checks and balances put in place. The secrecy under which the Obama administration operates is still contra to democracy, and their war on whistleblowers is as grave a threat as ever.
Those arrested on US soil still should be read Miranda rights immediately, and if the "public safety exception" must be invoked it should be for minutes, not hours or days.
People in the United States should still be guaranteed 4th amendment protection against illegal searches, including from the domestic drone expansion that is very likely on the near horizon. As Glenn Greenwald has previously articulated, surveillance changes the kind of thoughts you can have. It limits not only what you're willing to say or do, but actually how you think. People under surveillance – or even the presumption of surveillance – self-sensor, and are much more likely to conform to accepted orthodoxies.
In a world of assumed total surveillance – a panopticon – dissent is impossible, and therefore renders elected officials even less responsive to those they claim to represent. When –not if – the next Occupy-style social unrest happens, tools that have been sharpened and tested on so-called national security matters will be used against activists, and the crackdown will be spectacular. That phenomenon is already occurring, but will only grow unless there is a massive and concerted push-back.
Most importantly, terrorism is – and should be treated as – a crime, not an act of war. The horrific bombing in Boston ended the lives of three people, physically harmed more than 170 others, and permanently altered the lives of everyone who witnessed the event or knows someone who was hurt. We should do everything to make their recovery as full and immediate as possible. What we should not do is continue to pursue policies that make us all less free, and disproportionately impact Muslims and Arabs.
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Whither Moral Courage? |
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Sunday, 28 April 2013 13:03 |
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Rushdie writes: "We find it easier, in these confused times, to admire physical bravery than moral courage - the courage of the life of the mind, or of public figures."
Novelist and essayist Salman Rushdie. (photo: Random House)
Whither Moral Courage?
By Salman Rushdie, The New York Times
28 April 13
 e find it easier, in these confused times, to admire physical bravery than moral courage - the courage of the life of the mind, or of public figures. A man in a cowboy hat vaults a fence to help Boston bomb victims while others flee the scene: we salute his bravery, as we do that of servicemen returning from the battlefront, or men and women struggling to overcome debilitating illnesses or injuries.
It's harder for us to see politicians, with the exception of Nelson Mandela and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, as courageous these days. Perhaps we have seen too much, grown too cynical about the inevitable compromises of power. There are no Gandhis, no Lincolns anymore. One man's hero (Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro) is another's villain. We no longer easily agree on what it means to be good, or principled, or brave. When political leaders do take courageous steps - as France's Nicolas Sarkozy, then president, did in Libya by intervening militarily to support the uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi - there are as many who doubt as approve. Political courage, nowadays, is almost always ambiguous.
Even more strangely, we have become suspicious of those who take a stand against the abuses of power or dogma.
It was not always so. The writers and intellectuals who opposed Communism, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and the rest, were widely esteemed for their stand. The poet Osip Mandelstam was much admired for his "Stalin Epigram" of 1933, in which he described the fearsome leader in fearless terms - "the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip" - not least because the poem led to his arrest and eventual death in a Soviet labor camp.
As recently as 1989, the image of a man carrying two shopping bags and defying the tanks of Tiananmen Square became, almost at once, a global symbol of courage.
Then, it seems, things changed. The "Tank Man" has been largely forgotten in China, while the pro-democracy protesters, including those who died in the massacre of June 3 and 4, have been successfully redescribed by the Chinese authorities as counterrevolutionaries. The battle for redescription continues, obscuring or at least confusing our understanding of how "courageous" people should be judged. This is how the Chinese authorities are treating their best known critics: the use of "subversion" charges against Liu Xiaobo, and of alleged tax crimes against Ai Weiwei, is a deliberate attempt to blind people to their courage, and paint them, instead, as criminals.
Such is the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church that the jailed members of the Pussy Riot collective are widely perceived, inside Russia, as immoral troublemakers because they staged their famous protest on church property. Their point - that the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church is too close to President Vladimir V. Putin for comfort - has been lost on their many detractors, and their act is not seen as brave, but improper.
Two years ago in Pakistan, the former governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, defended a Christian woman, Asia Bibi, wrongly sentenced to death under the country's draconian blasphemy law; for this he was murdered by one of his own security guards. The guard, Mumtaz Qadri, was widely praised and showered with rose petals when he appeared in court. The dead Mr. Taseer was widely criticized, and public opinion turned against him. His courage was obliterated by religious passions. The murderer was called a hero.
In February 2012, a Saudi poet and journalist, Hamza Kashgari, published three tweets about the Prophet Muhammad:
"On your birthday, I will say that I have loved the rebel in you, that you've always been a source of inspiration to me, and that I do not like the halos of divinity around you. I shall not pray for you." "On your birthday, I find you wherever I turn. I will say that I have loved aspects of you, hated others, and could not understand many more." "On your birthday, I shall not bow to you. I shall not kiss your hand. Rather, I shall shake it as equals do, and smile at you as you smile at me. I shall speak to you as a friend, no more."
He claimed afterward that he was "demanding his right" to freedom of expression and thought. He found little public support, was condemned as an apostate, and there were many calls for his execution. He remains in jail.
The writers and intellectuals of the French Enlightenment also challenged the religious orthodoxy of their time, and so created the modern concept of free thought. We think of Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau and the rest as intellectual heroes. Sadly, very few people in the Muslim world would say the same of Hamza Kashgari.
This new idea - that writers, scholars and artists who stand against orthodoxy or bigotry are to blame for upsetting people - is spreading fast, even to countries like India that once prided themselves on their freedoms.
In recent years, the grand old man of Indian painting, Maqbool Fida Husain, was hounded into exile in Dubai and London, where he died, because he painted the Hindu goddess Saraswati in the nude (even though the most cursory examination of ancient Hindu sculptures of Saraswati shows that while she is often adorned with jewels and ornaments, she is equally often undressed).
Rohinton Mistry's celebrated novel "Such a Long Journey" was pulled off the syllabus of Mumbai University because local extremists objected to its content. The scholar Ashis Nandy was attacked for expressing unorthodox views on lower-caste corruption. And in all these cases the official view - with which many commentators and a substantial slice of public opinion seemed to agree - was, essentially, that the artists and scholars had brought the trouble on themselves. Those who might, in other eras, have been celebrated for their originality and independence of mind, are increasingly being told, "Sit down, you're rocking the boat."
America isn't immune from this trend. The young activists of the Occupy movement have been much maligned (though, after their highly effective relief work in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, those criticisms have become a little muted). Out-of-step intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and the deceased Edward Said have often been dismissed as crazy extremists, "anti-American," and in Mr. Said's case even, absurdly, as apologists for Palestinian "terrorism." (One may disagree with Mr. Chomsky's critiques of America but it ought still to be possible to recognize the courage it takes to stand up and bellow them into the face of American power. One may not be pro-Palestinian, but one should be able to see that Mr. Said stood up against Yasir Arafat as eloquently as he criticized the United States.)
It's a vexing time for those of us who believe in the right of artists, intellectuals and ordinary, affronted citizens to push boundaries and take risks and so, at times, to change the way we see the world. There's nothing to be done but to go on restating the importance of this kind of courage, and to try to make sure that these oppressed individuals - Ai Weiwei, the members of Pussy Riot, Hamza Kashgari - are seen for what they are: men and women standing on the front line of liberty. How to do this? Sign the petitions against their treatment, join the protests. Speak up. Every little bit counts.
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FOCUS | Debunking the Bush Revisionism |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=22082"><span class="small">Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon</span></a>
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Sunday, 28 April 2013 11:25 |
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Seitz-Wald writes: "Every dog goes to heaven and every former president should get a shot at repairing his legacy, especially when it's as tattered as George W. Bush's."
Former President George W. Bush speaks at the Summit to Save Lives in Washington, DC, 09/13/11. (photo: Getty Images)
Debunking the Bush Revisionism
By Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon
28 April 13
 very dog goes to heaven and every former president should get a shot at repairing his legacy, especially when it's as tattered as George W. Bush's. With the opening of his presidential library and museum this week, observers from former Bush officials to mainstream outlets were taking a fresh, rosy look at the Bush legacy. Some offered dopey and facially ridiculous cheerleading, while others offered more compelling suggestions to return to the Bush era with an open mind. After all, other presidents left office in a cloud only to be redeemed by history years later.
So, is this week making you feel a bit nostalgic for the Bush era? Don't. It's been almost half a decade since the 43rd president left office, and he's looking as bad as ever. Of course, that won't stop a small circle of admirers (many of whom used to be on his payroll) from trying, so here's your guide to taking on the five biggest specious pro-Bush talking points put forward this week:
1) Bush kept us safe: The biggest myth of the Bush presidency, by far, is that the president kept the country safe. As Charles Krauthammer wrote this week in the Washington Post in a typical example: "It's important to note that he did not just keep us safe. He created the entire anti-terror infrastructure that continues to keep us safe ... Which is why there was not one successful terror bombing on U.S. soil from 9/11 until last week."
Just no. First of all, why does 9/11 not count? It's not like the U.S. government was completely unaware of the threat from al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden until 9/11. After all, bin Laden had already helped orchestrate the U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania that killed hundreds in 1998, and Bill Clinton launched cruise missiles into Sudan and Afghanistan to try to kill bin Laden three years before 9/11. And then there's that CIA briefing that warned Bush: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." - 36 days before Sept. 11. Bush's response to the briefer giving him the news? To say, "All right. You've covered your ass, now." Then he went fishing. Literally.
As for the claim that there were no terror attacks on U.S. soil after 9/11 under Bush - also bogus. Conor Friedersdorf writes:
"Bush's tenure included anthrax attacks that killed five people (more than died in the Boston marathon bombing) and that injured between 22 and 68 people. Bush was president when Hesham Mohamed Hadayet killed two and wounded four at an LAX ticket counter; when the Beltway snipers killed 10 people; when Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar injured six driving his SUV into a crowd; and when Naveed Afzal Haq killed one woman and shot five others in Seattle."
Also, there was the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, just before the 2000 election, which should have brought an extra warning about the al-Qaida threat, and later on, bombings in London, Madrid, and Jordan. Meanwhile, thanks to the wars there, much of the attention from international terror went to Iraq and Afghanistan, where al-Qaida and sympathetic groups found it easier to kill American soldiers than to attack Americans on U.S. soil.
2) Bush was fiscally responsible: Here's Republican strategist Ed Gillespie, writing in the National Review this week, "Over Mr. Bush's tenure, our national debt averaged 38 percent of GDP, a result of holding average annual deficits to 2 percent of GDP, and federal spending remained below 20 percent of GDP in six of his eight years in office. (Only one other president in the past 40 years was able to reach such a low level, and for fewer years)." Jennifer Rubin added in the Washington Post: "He is responsible for one of the most popular and fiscally sober entitlement plans, Medicare Part D."
Former Bush White House Chief of Staff Andy Card even had the chutzpah to claim that President Bush "probably has the best track record of any modern president in terms of fiscal discipline."
The only way to make that claim is to be willfully dishonest, as the numbers are cut and dried. Notice that Gillespie cites the average debt over the course of the eight years, instead of the progression. Here's another way of looking at Bush's fiscal legacy: When he entered office, the U.S. government was running a surplus (and was projected to do so for the next several decades) and when Bush left office, the government was running its biggest deficit since World War II.
Part of this can be attributed to the collapse in tax revenue during the Great Recession, and even if we don't blame Bush for letting Wall Street collapse the economy, you can certainly blame him for ruining the fiscal bulwark built up under the Clinton years with massive tax cuts that mostly benefited the rich and two hugely expensive wars. Here's a chart from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities about what's driving the debt:
As for Medicare Part D, which helps seniors pay for prescription drugs, while the cost of the program is less than was originally projected, it's still higher than it should be. The savings came from lower drug spending overall, but while overall spending is 35 percent lower than expected, Medicare Part D spending was only 22 percent below expectations. And drug costs are still higher under Medicare Part D than they should be.
And during most of this time, there was no reason for the debt to explode; the economy was doing pretty well (unless you were poor). Much of the debt raised under Bush was purely elective. Even Republicans say this all the time. "Many of us, myself included, got into politics because we were appalled at the Bush record on spending," South Carolina Rep. Mick Mulvaney told the Hill.
3) Iraq wasn't so bad: While even the people who were responsible for executing it admit there were problems with the Iraq War, they always blame it on faulty intelligence. And who could have predicted the uprising following the invasion? Meanwhile, Afghanistan wasn't so bad, they say.
Here's Krauthammer: "Bush's achievement was not just infrastructure. It was war." He goes on to note that Democrats voted for the Iraq War, and that while there were no nuclear weapons, the war did prevent Saddam Hussein from regaining his "full economic and regional power." Karl Rove added, "I do believe that the Iraq War was the right thing to do and the world is a safer place for having Saddam Hussein gone."
More whitewashing. Bush officials threw the CIA under the bus for allegedly misleading them on weapons of mass destruction, but what seems more likely is that the White House and other key officials "cherry-picked" key pieces of intelligence to bolster their claim and discarded the rest. Intelligence is messy and produces lots of divergent and sometimes conflicting information from sources of varying reliability, but the White House pushed the boundaries of intellectual honesty in building the case for the war. While many argue it's a bridge too far to say he lied and knew there were no nuclear weapons, it's clear that officials chose an outcome they wanted and then found the evidence to get them there, and then misled the American people and world by not honestly representing the doubts in the intelligence.
As for the aftermath, as James Fallows wrote in his seminal 2004 account, "The U.S. occupation of Iraq is a debacle not because the government did no planning but because a vast amount of expert planning was willfully ignored by the people in charge."
Is Iraq better off without Saddam Hussein? One could make the argument, but the country is hardly the model of peace and democracy. The war tipped off a brutal civil war that left an estimated 125,000 dead and millions displaced. Bombings and attacks continue to this day and the country seems to be heading back toward widespread violence. Meanwhile, the government the U.S. installed is trending toward autocracy.
And while Iraq may no longer be the regional powerhouse it once was, the war served to empower Iran, its longtime rival, by eliminating the main check on Tehran's power. Now it's Tehran's nuclear program that we're worrying about.
The fact that Democrats also supported the war does not make it right; it means that they were wrong too.
4) Bush is Back - and popular now! At the beginning of the Week of Bush Revisionism, the Washington Post and ABC News released a poll showing that Bush's poll numbers have recovered since leaving office. As Dan Balz wrote, "Days before his second term ended in 2009, Bush's approval rating among all adults was 33 percent positive and 66 percent negative. The new poll found 47 percent saying they approve and 50 percent saying they disapprove."
This has been a jumping-off point for every Bush revisionist article and argument of the past five day and presented as proof positive that Americans are finally realizing that Bush was OK. As Rubin wrote, "It took less than 4 1/2 years of the Obama presidency for President George W. Bush to mount his comeback." Her phrasing suggests this is an unusually short amount of time for a former president to stage a comeback, as if presidents inevitably leave office in disgrace, as hundreds of thousands of people sing "Kiss Him Goodbye."
But this simply isn't the case. Americans are a pretty forgiving people and generally like their presidents, so if it takes almost five years for fewer than half of Americans to like you, the problem isn't the public - it's you. When Bill Clinton left office, he had a 65 percent approval rating (reminder: This is the guy who was impeached). Today, according to a Fox News poll from last week, 71 percent of Americans view Clinton favorably and just 25 hold an unfavorable view of the former president.
And the poll is just a single data point, hardly enough to say definitively that Bush has bounced back. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll from earlier in April found that only 35 percent of Americans view Bush in a positive light, while 44 percent viewed him negatively.
Even the relatively positive Washington Post poll found that Bush's approval rating on key decisions is still deep underwater. And as recently as November, most Americans still blamed Bush for recession, almost four years after he left office.
5) Bush was a historically great president: Karl Rove went for the big picture, saying at the dedication of the Bush Center in Dallas, "I'd put [Bush] up there" with "George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, FDR."
Hmm. Is that really where Bush ranks in the history of American presidents? If you ask historians, it's somewhere near the very bottom. A Siena College survey of 238 presidential scholars in 2010 put Bush at 39th out of 43 presidents. A 2009 C-SPAN ranking put him at 36th.
If you ask the American people, they say something similar. In 2012, Gallup asked Americans how former presidents will go down in history. Nearly half - 47 percent - said Bush will be remembered poorly or below average. Just 25 said above average or "outstanding." By contrast, just 12 percent said Clinton would go down as below average or poor.
If you ask the data, they paint an ugly picture. Unemployment, federal debt, consumer debt and poverty all went up, while income equality, GDP, wages, tax revenues all went down. Here's what Neil Irwin wrote in 2010:
For most of the past 70 years, the U.S. economy has grown at a steady clip, generating perpetually higher incomes and wealth for American households. But since 2000, the story is starkly different. The past decade was the worst for the U.S. economy in modern times, a sharp reversal from a long period of prosperity that is leading economists and policymakers to fundamentally rethink the underpinnings of the nation's growth.
Add to that the bungled wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the preventable failure to catch Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora, the absolutely horrendous handling of Hurricane Katrina, the outing of a covert CIA officer in a political vendetta, the illegal wiretapping of Americans' phones, the improper firing of U.S. attorneys for political reasons, the use of taxpayer dollars to pay columnists, and "misrepresenting and suppressing scientific knowledge for political purposes," to name a few - and, well, then you know why Dana Perino, Bush's former press secretary, was forced to lead her ode to the ex-president by recounting that he "shar[ed] his peanut butter and honey sandwiches with me."
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What If the Tsarnaevs Had Been the 'Boston Shooters'? |
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Sunday, 28 April 2013 08:16 |
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Cassidy writes: "Most Americans associate bomb attacks with terrorists. When they hear of mass shootings, they tend to think of sociopaths and unbalanced post-adolescents."
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, left, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. (photo: AP)
What If the Tsarnaevs Had Been the 'Boston Shooters'?
By John Cassidy, The New Yorker
28 April 13
 ere's a little mental experiment. Imagine, for a moment, that the Tsarnaev brothers, instead of packing a couple of pressure cookers loaded with nails and explosives into their backpacks a week ago Monday, had stuffed inside their coats two assault rifles - Bushmaster AR-15s, say, of the type that Adam Lanza used in Newtown. What would have been different?
Well, for one thing, the brothers would probably have killed a lot more than three people at the marathon. AR-15s can fire up to forty-five rounds a minute, and at close range they can tear apart a human body. If the Tsarnaevs had started firing near the finish line, they might easily have killed dozens of spectators and runners before fleeing or being shot by the police.
The second thing that would have been different is the initial public reaction. Most Americans associate bomb attacks with terrorists. When they hear of mass shootings, they tend to think of sociopaths and unbalanced post-adolescents. If the Tsarnaevs had managed to carry out a gun massacre unharmed and escaped, their identities unknown, would the first presumption have been that the shooters were Islamic extremists? Or would people have looked in another direction?
Third, had the attack been carried out with assault rifles rather than explosives and nails, the gun-control bills that perished on Capitol Hill just two days after the Boston bombings may have met a different fate. After yet another gun massacre, this one on the streets of Boston, it's hard to imagine the White House wouldn't have been able to summon up sixty votes in the Senate for expanded background checks. The proposed ban on assault weapons would surely have gotten the support of more than forty senators, too, and the proposal to ban multi-round magazines would also have gained more support - that's if the gun lobby hadn't managed to postpone the votes until emotions had cooled, which it would certainly have tried to do.
Finally, there's the question of what would have happened to the Tsarnaevs after they had been caught - that's assuming one or both of them had survived the attack. Just for the sake of argument, let's say things had developed pretty much as they did, with Tamerlan, the elder brother, being killed, and Dzhokhar, the younger brother, being wounded and captured. Would the government have charged him with conspiring to use "weapons of mass destruction," a count that could lead to the death penalty? And if they had done this, what would it have meant for the future of assault weapons? Once they'd been classified as W.M.D.s, would that have not made a difference to the public debate about how freely available they should be?
Yes, this is only a counterfactual exercise, which, like all such riffs, shouldn't be taken too literally. But it's hard to think about it for long without coming to the conclusion that there's something askew with the way we think about and react to various types of extreme violence, and the weapons used in such episodes. In a country where each life (and death) is supposed to count equally, surely the victims of gun violence should be accorded the same weight as the victims of bomb violence. And the perpetrators should get equal treatment, too. But, of course, that's not how things work.
Let me make clear that I am not trying to equate, in any moral or legal sense, mass shootings that result from personal vendettas or psychological pathologies with acts of terrorism carried out for political purposes. Nor am I suggesting that the Tsarnaevs can't be classed as terrorists. From what has appeared in the media, it appears that Tamerlan had been frequenting radical Islamist Web sites, which promote conspiracy theories about 9/11 and violence against the West. (The motivations of Dzhokhar, whose main passion at UMass appears to have been pot, remain murkier.)
My point is about perceptions and reality, and how the former can shape the latter. The Tsarnaevs did have at least one gun - evidently a pistol, rather than the mini-arsenal originally reported - which they apparently used to kill an M.I.T. police officer, but that wasn't what kept an entire city locked indoors: it was the fact that there were "terrorists," who had carried out a bombing, on the loose. As I pointed out the other day, numerically speaking, terrorism, especially homegrown terrorism, is a minor threat to public safety and public health. It pales in comparison to gun violence.
Set off in a public space a couple of crude, homemade bombs that you appear to have made using a recipe on the Web, and the state will make you Public Enemy Number One. To insure that you are caught and punished, there are virtually no lengths to which the authorities won't go. They'll assemble a multi-agency task force overnight, calling on some of the enormous investments in hardware, intelligence, and manpower that have been made since 9/11. They'll haul in anybody who might be remotely connected to the crime scene, and, if necessary, shut down an entire city. Once you're caught, they'll interview you in your hospital bed without reading you your legal rights and then charge you with using W.M.D.s. If you weren't born in this country, there will even be talk about changing the immigration laws.
If you systematically shoot a classroom full of defenseless six-year-olds and blow off your own head, things proceed rather differently. To be sure, you, or your memory, will be hated and vilified. But the political system, in hock to the N.R.A., will classify you as a nut whose deadly actions have few or no policy implications. (With the demise of the gun-control legislation, that's what it did with Adam Lanza.) Life and politics will go on as normal. The President will probably visit the scene of your outrage and say consoling things to the families of your victims. He'll mean what he says, but he won't be able to do much about it, and nobody will ask why the F.B.I. or the C.I.A. didn't realize you were such a menace to society and lock you up preemptively. Crazed shooters, after all, are something we've grown used to.
Because we have become inured to deaths from shootings, and because of the association of guns and liberty in the minds of many Americans - an association assiduously promoted by the gun lobby - the political system no longer responds to gun deaths. Terrorist acts, on the other hand, even ones masterminded by Mutt and Jeff from Cambridge rather than Osama and K.S.M. from Tora Bora, still have the power to spook the nation and swing the entire U.S. government into action.
Which is what got me thinking in the first place about what would have happened if the Tsarnaevs had been shooters rather than bombers. Maybe I am wrong about how things would have played out. But the country, or large parts of it, would finally have been forced to confront its cognitive dissonance about gun violence and terrorism, which, at the very least, would have been educational.
As it is now, the law-enforcement agencies are patting themselves on the back; Tsarnaev is headed for court; and in Washington the policy debates look set to continue along their well-established and ossified tracks. Meanwhile, the rest of the world looks on in astonishment at a country that so vigorously confronts one source of death and destruction while turning its back on another.
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he controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) now appears to be 
