The Boston Bombs Roused a Monster

It was depressing to see heavily armed Swat teams with assault rifles and body armour debouching from armoured vehicles in Boston as they used to do in Belfast. Curfews, which people in Baghdad and Fallujah have become inured to, suddenly become acceptable in Massachusetts. In contrast to Northern Ireland and Iraq, this is done to the applause of local inhabitants. The reason for Swat teams and curfews is understandable, but measures like these get people cumulatively accustomed to accepting without protest an authoritarian government.

Much of the initial impact of the Boston bombing and the pursuit of Tamerlan and Dzhokar Tsarnaev, will dissipate. Unfolding stories like this swiftly shift from being over-covered to under-covered. Journalists know the feeling of relief and frustration when editors back home decide that the story to which they have been giving wall-to-wall coverage, is old news.

Unfortunately, this often happens at the very moment when the long-term significance of what has happened is becoming clearer. Pundits who have been making embarrassingly premature comments based on too limited evidence might at last have something revealing to say. Instead, they find that the media caravan has moved on and is no longer interested in their views.

An outcome of the bombings will be an enhanced sense of public insecurity, and support for those who claim to be doing something about it. Before the Boston attack there were signs of restiveness in the US at the excessive size of the post-9/11 security bureaucracy at a time of budget cuts. The FBI, put in charge of investigating domestic terrorism by President Bush, has 103 joint terrorism task forces, supposedly linking local and state police to federal terrorism investigators. As a result of 9/11, the US has the services of the National Counterterrorism Centre, which analyses and collates intelligence information for the Office of the Director National Intelligence. This, in turn, is supposed to coordinate and oversee the work of America’s 17 intelligence agencies. Then there is the sterling work of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) which unites the 22 federal departments and agencies that employ 240,000 people.

The creation of a bureaucratic Leviathan like this is more likely to impede than assist the gathering and analysis of intelligence. Too many people do not know what they are doing and there are too many layers of responsibility. Such vast organisations are on an endless quest to justify and expand their own influence and protect themselves from rivals. Power delegated to them because of a single crime is seldom reclaimed.

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