Boston Suspect's Writing on the Wall

Your words were a real stretch as to how the well-heeled Abdulmutallab, without apparent prior terrorist affiliations, was suddenly transformed into an international terrorist ready to die while killing innocents.

Perhaps no one told you that the young Nigerian had particular trouble with Israel's wanton slaughter of more than a thousand civilians in Gaza the year before, a brutal campaign defended by Washington as justifiable self-defense. You ought to take the time to learn about these things.

Till next time, Ray.

How to Spin This One

An important element in intelligence analysis is to understand the why -- what's the motive? That doesn't mean you sympathize with what someone did. It does mean that you understand that knowing why is an important starting point for future prevention of similar acts.

Yet, virtually no one in the U.S. political/media hierarchy has dared to discuss, in a candid way, the issue of motivation. All the American people normally get is boilerplate about how al-Qaeda evildoers are perverting a religion and exploiting impressionable young men.

There is almost no discussion about why so many people in the Muslim world object to U.S. policies so strongly that they are inclined to resist violently and even resort to suicide attacks. So how will the media spin Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's handwritten note?

Well, we've already watched CBS's Norah O'Donnell come up with the familiar "self-radicalization" shibboleth. She tied the concept to a lack of ties with a larger group, but "self-radicalization" is normally employed to create the impression that hard-wired "violent Muslim extremists" simply look in the mirror one day and say to themselves, My, this looks like a good day to self-radicalize.

Also regularly trotted out is the "homegrown-violent-extremists" moniker employed as recently as Thursday by FBI Director Robert Mueller III in Senate testimony.

Other "mainstream media" and government officials will keep blaming terrorism on Islam, as the Wall Street Journal does Friday in repeating the claim that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told the FBI earlier that he and his dead brother "were acting as jihadists motivated by Muslim religious anger at the U.S." (In other words, pay no heed to what he scribbled on the side of the boat as he thought he was dying.)

Rarely has there been any official or quasi-official acknowledgement of the main problem. But there was a major exception in the fall of 2004 in an unclassified study published by the Pentagon-appointed U.S. Defense Science Board. Directly contradicting what President George W. Bush was saying at the time, the board stated:

"Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf States."

That's not spin. That's the assessment of professionals who were reading the handwriting on the wall.