Terror, Made in America

One alleged terrorist is dead, the other caught, but the horror remains. Unlike the 9/11 terrorists, the Boston bombings suspects had long been living in the U.S. Now America must uncover the cause of the act of terror: Boston remains a mystery.

It was the “hundred hours’ terror.” For exactly 102 hours, Boston lived in fear. For four days and six hours the whole of America sat in front of televisions and feverishly followed events on computers and smart phones. The nation experienced a period of agonizing uncertainty, a marathon of terror. Yet what began on Monday with an attack ended on Friday night in a triumph for the police. One bomber was dead, the other seriously injured and under arrest. The proud city of Boston celebrated its victory over fear; America had, once again, won against terror.

But the horror is not over: Boston remains a mystery. Just one hour after the drama ended, Barack Obama had already asked all the right questions. The president wanted to know from his investigators how this act was possible; whether, given that the FBI had its eye on one of the two marathon bombers after Russian warnings in 2011, mistakes had been made; whether the brothers belonged to any terror network or obeyed foreign masterminds, of which there has so far been no indication. But there was one particular question which the president asked himself and his people: Why did young men who grew up here resort to such violence?

Homemade Terrorists

This is a new question for the United States. Since the horror of Sept. 11, 2011 terror has always come from abroad. The perpetrators of 9/11 were Arabs who entered the country, remotely controlled by al-Qaida. And behind the assassins who murdered 13 soldiers on an army base in Texas or attempted to detonate a car bomb in Times Square in New York, there were also overseas masterminds. This time, however, it seems to be terror well and truly “made in America.” Both immigrant children had been living in Boston for over 10 years. Yes, the older brother traveled around the Caucasus for months, and Islamist videos, accessed via the Internet, made up part of the borderless world of both perpetrators. They may have remained foreigners but were, in the language of experts, “homegrown terrorists.”

All the more surprising is the quarrel that some prominent Republicans are now instigating. Led by Senator John McCain, conservative senators are demanding that the surviving perpetrator be treated as an “enemy combatant” and should be tried in a military commission. As if America’s criminologists had not just prevailed against violence and terror! There is a glimmer of “American exceptionalism” in all of this, which has recently all too often shaped the conservative world view: America is good by definition and evil is per se un-American.

Barack Obama has also said again that America is “the greatest nation” in the world. But he did not mean this as just an empty statement. The president meant it as a patriotic mission to continually improve the country and as a demand to uncover the causes of the hundred hours of terror abroad as well as at home — and just in time.