Let’s Let The Authorities Do Their Jobs

The second suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing has just been caught, and already the full-scale second-guessing has begun.

I’m amazed at the criticism, from right and from left, that is being directed at the authorities.  Shouldn’t Dzhokhar Tsarnaev be read his Miranda rights immediately?  Shouldn’t he be treated, instead, as an enemy combatant and tried in a military court?  Why didn’t the FBI do more to identify latent terrorist tendencies when it received inquiries about Tamerlan Tsarnaev from a foreign nation?  Why didn’t the police put together Tamerlan’s lack of American friends, his prior bout with domestic violence, and his YouTube viewings of radical Islamic videos and identify him as a likely terrorist?

This kind of Monday-morning quarterbacking is absurd.  By any measure, law enforcement agencies have done a pretty good job in dealing with a very difficult terrorist situation in one of our largest cities.  They found and  apprehended the apparent perpetrators only a few days after they anonymously committed their horrible crimes.  Now the lone survivor, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, will be questioned in an effort to elicit more information about how this ncident occurred and whether there are other terrorists lurking, and then the justice system will take over.  All of this seems to be proceeding as it should be.

Can’t we all reserve judgment and back off a bit for the moment?  I suspect that we are going to be hearing a lot more about the Tsarnaev brothers and their activities over the coming weeks, and I would not be surprised if some of the information we obtain contradicts the conventional wisdom as it now stands.  It’s time to celebrate the fact that the culprits of the Boston Marathon bombing are off the streets and let the authorities do their jobs — without the backbiting.

How The Mighty Have Fallen

Muammar Gaddafi lived by the sword, and now he has died by the sword.

Gaddafi was an unbalanced individual who somehow ended up running an oil-rich country that produced enough money to allow him to regularly engage in international intrigue and terrorist schemes, including blowing up airplanes filled with innocent people.  He kept the people of Libya terrorized and subdued for decades.  He used the UN as a platform to broadcast his curious ideas and bloodthirsty revolutionary philosophies.  He supported terrorists and thugs, because he was one himself.

When the people of Libya finally had enough and rose up against their tyrannical dictator, Gaddafi tried to crush the dissent with violent repression.  When that didn’t work, he issued warnings and vowed to fight to the death.  According to today’s news report, however, he was found huddled in a sewer, and when he was dragged from his hiding place he pleaded for his life.  His captors ignored the pleas, executed him summarily, and paraded his dead body through the street.