The biggest tragedy of terroristic attacks and war massacres is that the indignation and the shock they raise very seldom becomes a lesson.
Once gruesome pictures and videos are replaced by some other fresh priority in the news,
we remove the fact and wait for the following shock.
But mistakes and attitudes that are the causes of those facts remain as a natural and deterministic framework, uninteresting and unable to make the same impression.
Here it comes a perfect (and recent) example :
The Saudi Marathon Man,
Posted by Amy Davidson
(from The New Yorker)
A twenty-year-old man who had been watching the Boston Marathon had his
body torn into by the force of a bomb. He wasn’t alone; a hundred and
seventy-six people were injured and three were killed. But he was the
only one who, while in the hospital being treated for his wounds, had
his apartment searched in “a startling show of force,” as his
fellow-tenants described it to the Boston Herald,
with a “phalanx” of officers and agents and two K9 units. He was the
one whose belongings were carried out in paper bags as his neighbors
watched; whose roommate, also a student, was questioned for five hours
(“I was scared”)
before coming out to say that he didn’t think his friend was someone
who’d plant a bomb—that he was a nice guy who liked sports. “Let me go
to school, dude,” the roommate said later in the day, covering his face
with his hands and almost crying, as a Fox News producer followed him
and asked him, again and again, if he was sure he hadn’t been living
with a killer.
Why the search, the interrogation, the dogs, the bomb squad, and the
injured man’s name tweeted out, attached to the word “suspect”? After
the bombs went off, people were running in every direction—so was the
young man. Many, like him, were hurt badly; many of them were saved by
the unflinching kindness of strangers, who carried them or stopped the
bleeding with their own hands and improvised tourniquets. “Exhausted
runners who kept running to the nearest hospital to give blood,”
President Obama said. “They helped one another, consoled one another,”
Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, said. In the midst of
that, according to a CBS News report,
a bystander saw the young man running, badly hurt, rushed to him, and
then “tackled” him, bringing him down. People thought he looked
suspicious.
What made them suspect him? He was running—so was everyone. The police
reportedly thought he smelled like explosives; his wounds might have
suggested why. He said something about thinking there would be a second
bomb—as there was, and often is, to target responders. If that was the
reason he gave for running, it was a sensible one. He asked if anyone
was dead—a question people were screaming. And he was from Saudi Arabia,
which is around where the logic stops. Was it just the way he looked,
or did he, in the chaos, maybe call for God with a name that someone
found strange?
What happened next didn’t take long. “Investigators have a suspect—a
Saudi Arabian national—in the horrific Boston Marathon bombings, The Post has learned.” That’s the New York Post, which went on to cite Fox News.
The “Saudi suspect”—still faceless—suddenly gave anxieties a form. He
was said to be in custody; or maybe his hospital bed was being guarded.
The Boston police, who weren’t saying much of anything, disputed the
report—sort of. “Honestly, I don’t know where they’re getting their
information from, but it didn’t come from us,” a police spokesman told TPM. But were they talking to someone? Maybe. “Person of interest” became a phrase of both avoidance and insinuation. On the Atlas Shrugs
Web site, there was a note that his name in Arabic meant “sword.” At an
evening press conference, Ed Davis, the police commissioner, said that
no suspect was in custody. But that was about when the dogs were in the
apartment building in Revere—an inquiry that was seized on by some as,
if not an indictment, at least a vindication of their suspicions.
“There must be enough evidence to keep him there,” Andrew Napolitano
said on “Fox and Friends”—“there” being the hospital. “They must be
learning information which is of a suspicious nature,” Steve Doocy
interjected. “If he was clearly innocent, would they have been able to
search his house?” Napolitano thought that a judge would take any reason
at a moment like this, but there had to be “something”—maybe he
appeared “deceitful.” As Mediaite pointed out,
Megyn Kelly put a slight break on it (as she has been known to do) by
asking if there might have been some “racial profiling,” but then, after
a round of speculation about his visa (Napolitano: “Was he a real
student, or was that a front?”), she asked, “What’s the story on his
ability to lawyer up?”
By Tuesday afternoon, the fever had broken. Report after report said
that he was a witness, not a suspect. “He was just at the wrong place at
the wrong time,” a “U.S. official” told CNN.
(So were a lot of people at the marathon.) Even Fox News reported that
he’d been “ruled out.” At a press conference, Governor Deval Patrick
spoke, not so obliquely, about being careful not to treat “categories of
people in uncharitable ways.”
We don’t know yet who did this. “The range of suspects and motives
remains wide open,” Richard Deslauriers of the F.B.I. said early Tuesday
evening. In a minute, with a claim of responsibility, our expectations
could be scrambled. The bombing could, for all we know, be the work of a
Saudi man—or an American or an Icelandic or a person from any nation
you can think of. It still won’t mean that this Saudi man can be treated
the way he was, or that people who love him might have had to find out
that a bomb had hit him when his name popped up on the Web as a suspect
in custody. It is at these moments that we need to be most careful, not
least.
It might be comforting to think of this as a blip, an aberration,
something that will be forgotten tomorrow—if not by this young man.
There are people at Guanátanmo who have also been cleared by our own
government, and are still there. A new report
on the legacy of torture after 9/11, released Tuesday, is a well-timed
admonition. The F.B.I. said that they would “go to the ends of the
earth” to get the Boston perpetrators. One wants them to be able to go
with their heads held high.
“If you want to know who we are, what America is, how we respond to
evil—that’s it. Selflessly. Compassionately. Unafraid,” President Obama
said. That was mostly true on Monday; a terrible day, when an
eight-year-old boy was killed, his sister maimed, two others dead, and
many more in critical condition. And yet, when there was so much to fear
that we were so brave about, there was panic about a wounded man barely
out of his teens who needed help. We get so close to all that Obama
described. What’s missing? Is it humility?
