America this morning owes a huge debt of gratitude to its law-enforcement agents. Just over 100 hours after the Boston Marathon bombings, one suspect is dead and a second was captured last night. The threat they posed, for now at least, appears to be over.
Whew. These have been scary days. Indeed, the sight yesterday of the whole city of Boston on lockdown, with streets deserted and silent, couldn’t have been more eerie.
It was also chilling to see how successful the suspects, Chechen Muslim immigrants, were — not just in allegedly killing people, but in instilling widespread fear, especially in the Northeast. The week served as a painful reminder that this nation remains in an ongoing fight against terror — and that the homeland is still vulnerable.
On Thursday, cops first identified the two brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, as the key suspects and confronted them in a wild and bloody battle that left Tamerlan dead. With Dzhokhar still on the run through the day, officials ordered folks to stay inside. They said the pair had killed an MIT police officer, wounded a transit cop, carjacked a vehicle and sped off with its owner, hurled explosive devices and engaged cops in a shootout.
It will take time for their motives to be properly understood, but the pair appears to have left tantalizing clues: Both became devout Muslims and used social media to link to pro-jihadist videos. Tamerlan, a champion boxer, wrote that he would not fight on his native Chechnya’s team until it won its independence from Russia. He also wrote about his alienation, claiming, “I don’t have a single American friend.”
Classmates and associates painted a different portrait of the two — one of a total assimilation into US culture with no signs of religious or terrorist obsession.
All the possible motives, of course, need to be explored fully — and with no punches pulled for political correctness. More details may come in the days ahead. But whatever the bombers’ motives, this much is clear: The war on terror isn’t over. Alas, far from it.