Paris and Boston: That Other, Missing, Comparison
January 8, 2015 by Russ Baker
Video frame grab of attack on Paris magazine Charlie Hebdo.
By now, many of us have seen the chilling
video in which a gunman executes a wounded French police officer lying
on the sidewalk, his arms raised in helpless surrender.
The Tsarnaev brothers stand accused of
doing essentially the same, sneaking up and shooting a helpless MIT
police officer named Sean Collier as he sat in his idling cruiser on the
Cambridge campus as the manhunt for the Tsarnaevs gathered pace. The
killers wanted Collier’s gun but were too stupid to figure out how to
unbuckle his holster.
He’s right about the parallel, but not necessarily about the lessons
to be drawn. While there’s little doubt that the French suspects
committed the multiple murders in Paris, the same cannot be said
at this time about the Tsarnaevs and the killing of Sean Collier. There
are real questions about both the identity of the MIT executioners and
the purpose of their act. Among the
questions: why would the Tsarnaevs have been on that empty campus and
have known that a police car was parked between buildings off the
street? We’ve examined those issues at great length here.**
The Globe columnist is perhaps also wrong in his conclusions. Referring to the publication, Charlie Hebdo, whose ranks were decimated in the Paris attack, he writes:
Nous sommes tous Charlie [We are all
Charlie]. That is a major, major problem for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. And
there is no change of venue for that.
The really striking similarity, beyond the theme of radical Islam, is
this: in both cases, the security state knew the perpetrators well. In
Boston, the FBI was in direct contact with and monitoring alleged senior perpetrator Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
Chérif Kouachi
From the New York Times:
The massacre, which singled out
cartoonists and other staff members at a newspaper that frequently
mocked Islam, Christianity and all forms of religious and secular
authority, left France stunned. It also raised questions about how
Chérif Kouachi, so well known to the police for so many years, and his
brother had managed to conceal their intentions.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev apparently underwent a conversion to radicalism.
Chérif Kouachi was consistently an open advocate of radical violence and
jihad, and served jail time for recruiting young French Muslims to fight in Iraq.***
In both cases, the understandable reaction is fury and a desire for retribution and closure. The result in both cases will almost certainly be a decision to grant further authority to the security state in both countries to do “whatever is necessary” to protect us.
But as we know, the security state, in both the United States and France, already has enormous power. It monitors the general population, in myriad ways, both electronic and otherwise.
As noted, it often already knows those very few who do commit these acts. And sometimes even recruits them as informants, with occasionally disastrous results.
Something to think about.
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