I'm Here To End The Show

Today’s article posted by JudicialWatch.org about the Boston Bombers sent pretty serious chills down my spine. I am not, and don’t pretend to be, any authority on international terrorism.  I am not an avid student of geopolitical strife and its implication on the United States, but in light of the terrorist attacks at the Boston Marathon this week I feel it’s everyone’s responsibility to become more informed and engaged with such topics.  I live in the heart of Manhattan and was reminded (as we all were) this week that you never know where terror will strike and what face it will wear.  This is precisely why I decided to share with you today my ‘holy crap, this shit’s crazy’ moments after reading this article.

Titled Boston Bomber Could Have Been Deported After 2009 Conviction the article obviously focuses on immigration and while perhaps timely, buries the more important (and damn scary) points near the end.  First, terrorism is developed and ingrained over several decades if not a generation and we shouldn’t lose site of this reality.  I belong to a generation that demands fast change, fast action, and immediate information. Well fellow millennials, according to intelligence documents sited by JudicialWatch.org al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden ordered the creation of a terrorist training camp in Chechnya as far back at 1995 to train “international terrorists” to carry out plots against Americans and westerners… 1995.  I was 9.  Let’s take a moment to think about the fact that the seeds for Boston were sown almost 20 years ago.

I consider myself fairly well educated and knowledgeable however human nature subconsciously applied the “law of least effort” to the cognitive resources I devoted to terrorism.  The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action.  As an American my goal in this case was a tepid understanding of terrorism and its effects in relation to my life (deployed friends, safety in Manhattan, cost of war, etc…).  The least  demanding course was to frame terrorism the way the media frames it, as an issue isolated to a specific part of the world (Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan) with specific actors (al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden). Then I read this, “The goal, according to the once-classified documents obtained by JW in 2011, was to “establish a worldwide Islamic state capable of directly challenging the U.S., China, Russia, and what it views as Judeo-Christian and Confucian domination.”” Wait, so you’re telling me terrorism isn’t limited to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan where we’ve been fighting the past 10+ years!?  The bombers were white, young, successful, and by all respects completely normal “Americans” who immigrated from a part of the world I never considered.  Holy crap is right!  This made me realize how perilous and impossibly complex the situation really is.

The Judicial Watch article says it best: “There’s no telling how many of these Chechen terrorists have infiltrated the United States… Osama bin Laden specifically chose Chechnya as a terrorist training camp because it’s an “area unreachable by strikes from the west,” according to the intelligence report obtained by JW years ago.”  So you’re telling me Osama bin Laden understood the American military apparatus so well he had the foresight to develop a terrorist training camp strategy 20 years ago that effectively (even more so today) can counter our anti-terrorism efforts even in 2013?!   Where would you build a terrorist training camp today?  Probably somewhere beyond the reach of unmanned drones…  Well, Osama did this 20 years ago.  Is America’s unmanned drone strategy just another technology fueled extension of outdated search and destroy counter-terrorist tactics, or are terrorists too agile of an enemy to effectively defeat from afar?  Should the US Government bring back a ‘boots on the ground’ strategy and invest in long term covert anti-terrorism operations on foreign soil?

Again I’m no expert on these matters; I’m just a concerned citizen with internet access.  If you’re reading this, congrats, you too have internet access.  You should read up on the story of how America’s anti-terrorism policy first came into being under Nixon, its transformation to today’s modus operandi via Reagan and his creation of the ‘Antiterrorism Assistance Program’.

In the meantime though, you now understand why the JudicialWatch.org article got me going.  Hope it got you going too or at least thinking a little.