By David Weigel
When President Obama wrapped up his remarks on the Boston Marathon,
reporters--in the room and on Twitter--quickly checked the language. No, the
president had not referred to "terrorism." What does that mean?
It means a number of things, and
it depends on who's saying it. If/when a subject (or subjects) gets charged for
the bombings, yeah, it matters whether they're prosecuted for "terrorism" or not, and whether
anyone else is prosecuted for conspiracy to commit terrorism. But we're not
there yet--the discussion is whether politicians mean anything when they say
"terrorism" happened in Boston. Right now, they don't. No international
terrorist organization has even taken credit. Like Bruce Schneider says, there's
no good reason for people to panic about the T-word. Look at
four possible outcomes if the act was, indeed, terrorism.
Islamic
terrorism. If that's what happened, it's the first successful attack in
the United States since the 2009 killings at Fort Hood; if that's too
controversial, it's the first successful attack here since 2001. The people with
the most to say and gain, politically, are the people who accused the Obama
administration (and even the Bush administration) of being too PC to draw links
between extremist branches of Islam and terror, or even too PC to racially profile. Likely legislation? Well,
in Britain, fear of Islamic terrorism led to a debate about criminalizing
"terror glorification," something that would be tough to do here within in
bounds of the First Amendment (and good for us). The response would depend
entirely on the investigation--the ranks of "unindicted co-conspirators" tend to
mushroom after these situations.
Right-wing terrorism. The I-told-you so crowd is entirely
different: It consists of people who tried to say, in 2009, that DHS should fret
about "patriot" movements and people with military training returning from war
to make war on the government. Likely legislation? More like a
free hand for the president to criticize "anti-government" extremism. In a
situation like this, the Info wars-esque conspiracy theorists do major damage to
their own side, making government critics look ever less
reasonable.
Left-wing terrorism. Same as above, but the culprits can be
identified as believers in some left-wing cause--most of this, recently, has
been some kind of Eco-terrorism. Likely legislation? See above,
but replace "the president" with "Republicans."
Unclassifiable kook terrorism. In this case we merely get
the legislative push common to every scenario--greater pressure for homeland
security funding, and for more surveillance in cities.
Read more on Slate about
the Boston Marathon bombing.