Bostonians are stunned by the marathon “pressure cooker bombings” that killed three people, including an eight-year-old boy, and injured hundreds of others — spectators and participants — with the kinds of battlefield injuries we’ve only read about until now in reports about Afghanistan and Iraq — shrapnel injuries, amputations, burns and disfigurements that one NPR report says witnesses describe as “surreal.”
But what’s most interesting on the second day after the attack is the race by the U.S. government to control the investigation into the attack and to contain media coverage and speculation.
Just this morning (4/16), in fact, NPR’s Dina Temple Raston threw out a bombshell question of her own: why is the U.S. media so far behind the curve covering this story?
Raston told her radio audience that like many reporters, she heard authorities had taken the Saudi national linked to the incident to Brigham Young Hospital the day before, where he was being questioned. But instead of hospital spokespeople issuing a timely statement — or a speedy report from police or the FBI — reporters waited roughly five hours before anyone appeared to brief them.
“Why the lag?” Raston asks, when countries like Israel, for example, where bombings occur on a regular basis, are so forthcoming with news and details?
Ah, there’s the question, Dina. And well-asked.
Here’s a detail that news commentators, even the ones who claim law degrees, have not been exploring.
The Saudi national with a student visa, currently being described by authorities as “a witness,” was served with search warrants yesterday — a warrant validated by a sworn affidavit signed by a judge and based on the determination by U.S. law enforcement authorities that the young Saudi national in question must be, according to the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, a suspect: in order to obtain a search warrant, evidence must be presented to a judge that there is solid evidence that connects this person to the crime (the bomb blast), and there is probable cause to believe that there is further evidence of his involvement in the location authorities intend to search.
The Warrant Requirement
In order to avoid illegally searching or seizing the property of a suspect, law enforcement personnel typically obtain search warrants. To obtain a search warrant, law enforcement must show probable cause, must support the showing by oath or affirmation, and must describe in particularity the place they will search and the items they will seize. A judge can find probable cause only be examining the totality of the circumstances.
And what constitutes “probable cause”?
The amount and quality of information police must have before they can search or arrest without a warrant. Most of the time, police must present their probable cause to a judge or magistrate whom they ask for a search or arrest warrant. Information is reliable if it shows that it’s more likely than not that a crime has occurred and the evidence sought exists at the place named in the search warrant, or that the suspect named in the arrest warrant has committed a crime.
Definition provided by Nolo’s Plain-English Law Dictionary.
In other words, the fact that authorities were able to obtain search warrants to investigate the rooms, the vehicle, etc., belonging to the unnamed Saudi “witness” to the bombing incident means that, contrary to statements issued by the government, the FBI and the other enforcement officials involved in the investigation, that this individual has been legally defined as a “suspect” in the case.
And why would U.S. officials delve into the wobbly world of semantics instead of telling the media, and the public, that when a judge issues a real, live search warrant, it’s because the FBI, the Boston police, the other task force investigators on the scene, have sworn to him that there is probable cause to regard our Saudi student covered with gun powder and a few burns as a criminal actor in this debacle.
Because pulling the Saudis, the second largest providers of oil to the U.S. and eager purchasers of U.S.-manufactured weaponry, is a political nightmare for the administration, and the implications, to which I alluded in my last two blogs, is that the extremist jihadists that, for better or worse, the Saudis and their Wahhabi partners made, are indeed, “off the reservation.”
And they are bringing the fight to U.S. Right here. And right now.
In my last blog, I questioned Eliot Cohen’s argument in a recent WSJ oped that suggests America’s disengagement, regarding modern militarization (while Russia and China continue to beef up their arsenals) from longstanding obligations to defend our allies in Europe, Asia and Israel, is unacceptable. Yes, in a world where, believe it or not, might still makes right: The guy with the biggest guns generally comes out on top. You don’t have to use them — just have them. We may not need 900 nuclear warheads, but they do make an impression, and in this case, keeping up means keeping on.
But defense policy that doesn’t take terrorism into account as a number one threat is useless, and regardless of the push by the Bush administration and the Clinton team at “inclusionary negotiations” with the Muslim world, the fact is that a revolution is taking place within that community — an attempt to hijack Islamic movements which are national, fairly secular, and supportive of democracy, and to replace those efforts with jihadism.
Just last week, NPR reported that Jabhat al-Nusra, one of the most extreme and fiercest Islamic fighting units in Syria, had formally and openly aligned itself with al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), a group whose goal, according to Elizabeth O’Bagy, a scholar at The Institute for the Study of War is “the establishment of an Islamic caliphate through violence.”
If you are an American, you are a target.
A former intelligence operative, who speaks far more frankly than I am, tells me that the U.S. media is “behind the information curve” for one reason: That if the U.S. government, the administration, discovers the Boston Marathon bombers were Islamic extremists, particularly of Saudi origin, they’re between an economic rock and a political hard place. Not the first time. Consider Mexico, where cartel violence and its frequent intrusion onto U.S. soil is rarely reported. Fact: the Mexican cartels have a formal agreement with the government of Mexico to stay away from tourist locations (increasingly difficult, considering the discovery of mass graves roughly five miles outside of Acapulco and the attack on European tourists a few months ago).
But trade is trade. Let’s not forget that the U.K. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin discouraged anti-Hitler “raves” as late as 1936 for fear of discouraging German purchases of U.K.-manufacture aircraft engines.
When Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941, Americans knew what it meant. Not so, apparently, on 9/11, or on April 15, 2013 in Boston.
But the difference is that we were listening on Dec. 7, 1941. Today, there’s not too much to hear.
