When bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon last week, it ended the comfort zone we have been living in, somehow believing that what happened on 9/11 would not really happen again.
This time it may not have been done by international terrorists. We still are not sure about the motivations for the attack. But it happened in America, at the Boston Marathon. Three people died, and more than 170 people were injured. We were lucky that additional bombs, intended to reap more destruction, did not explode.
Questions continue to be raised about the alleged perpetrators, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. What could lead a person to carry out such an awful attack?
According to media reports, Tamerlan, the older brother who was killed in a shootout with police, returned to America from a six-month overseas stay in Chechnya. He came back to the U.S. from a violent, jihadist region in Russia. Was he trained somewhere in Chechnya as a terrorist, or taught how to make those bombs? Even more important for us to know is why the FBI did not look more closely, and question both where he spent his time while in Chechnya, and what his beliefs were, before they let him back on American soil.
The Israelis have perfected the art of asking tough questions of people entering or leaving their country. They don’t make you dump your bottle of water, or limit your cosmetics to a quart-sized bag. Instead, they ask where you have visited, what you have done there, and other questions, to see if your answers are consistent and sensible. We need to train our people in better interrogation techniques.
We have had others try to make terrorist attacks in recent years. There was the “shoe bomber,” who was overpowered on the plane before his bomb was ignited. Another terrorist, with explosives in his underpants, was also overcome before he could light them. Another thwarted terrorist put explosives in the car he parked in Times Square in New York City, but luckily, the explosives did not detonate. All of those people are now in jail.
Today, terrorists can be quickly identified because stationary cameras and cellphones with camera applications are ubiquitous. Photos of the bombers allegedly dropping the bombs were found. Once their pictures were circulated, it was just a question of time until law enforcement could apprehend them.
These homemade bombs were dropped in a public place. If someone had reported the packages right away, we might have had fewer injuries. We need to all learn how to be vigilant in the face of extremism.
We also need to improve our ability to intercept potentially dangerous messages, and to have more public cameras available to protect against future attacks. Unfortunately, the cost of more security is a loss of the privacy so many of us value.
Both our federal and local law enforcement personnel were well-coordinated, and appeared to have a great deal of cooperation in doing their job against the Boston Marathon bombers. Most of us feel good about the outstanding job these agencies did. The key to better safety is for police and the federal government to do more sharing of cyber security knowledge to mitigate future security risks by knowing what terrorists are planning in advance.
Cooperation by citizens is necessary. We all need to report odd or suspicious behaviors to local police or federal agencies. At the same time, we don’t want to be afraid to attend public events. After all, the aim of many terrorists is to create fear and hysteria. We don’t want to give them victories.
It was reassuring to see how Bostonians, and many people who came for the race, rushed into the street after the bombs went off, to help the injured. We can be very proud of the people who did that.
There will be more terrorists and more threats. We need to stand up to them. But we also need to train personnel in the latest, cutting-edge technologies, and teach them how to question and interpret what people say to them.
We will not be able to prevent every terrorist act, but we need to make it a lot harder for people to use our democracy against us.
— Bernard Featherman is a business columnist for the Journal Tribune and former president of the Biddeford-Saco Chamber of Commerce.
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