The Great Debate

In the end, it was a high-tech gadget that allowed the FBI to identify the first Boston bomber in the video, the man agents called “Black Hat.”

This gadget — and the story of how the name of one bomber ended up in an FBI database — has revealed a great deal about the inner workings of the bureau, as well as its relations with an extensive network of countries in the pursuit of terrorism suspects. A wide variety of information is now exchanged internationally.

The gadget was used about 1 a.m. on Friday (April 19), eight hours after the FBI released photos and video of the bombing suspects – images of two men with backpacks strolling through the crowd at the Boston Marathon. One was wearing a black hat; the other a white hat turned backward.

It was three days after the two explosions at the finish line of the Boston Marathon — and the FBI still did not know the identities of the two suspects.

Then, in the Boston suburb of Watertown, a furious firefight broke out between police and the two men. About 200 rounds of ammunition were exchanged, and explosive devices were thrown at the police by the suspects. Black Hat was felled by the bullets and rushed to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The second man escaped in the Mercedes SUV the two had carjacked earlier.

So another day with another infamous history:  April 15, 2013. That date has now been internalized in our collective guts. This is, alas, an easy one to remember. Tax Day. The Boston Marathon — a race that will never again be run without a shiver of fear, a dark cloud.

Something so darkly grim about runners losing their limbs. One wonders if he or they who planned this thing thought of that — if that gave them their own perverse extra shiver. Hard to know.

It took us a long time from Sept 11, 2001, to calm down, but finally we did. Finally we started to relax, grumbling more about taking our shoes off in the endless airport security lines. The irritations of navigating around started to trump the fear, even though, deep down, none of us really thought 9/11 was a one-off. We were lucky; that’s how it felt. That’s over.

-John Bew is Lecturer in Modern British History at Peterhouse, Cambridge University. Martyn Frampton is a Research Fellow, also at Peterhouse. Their book, co-written with Iñigo Gurruchaga, is called "Talking to Terrorists: Making Peace in Northern Ireland and the Basque Country" and they blog at Talking to Terrorists. The opinions expressed are their own.-

One of the current fashions in British and American diplomatic circles is the idea that it is necessary to engage with our enemies, no matter how extreme they might seem. In response to the recent Iranian election results, for example, Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation – a think tank with strong links to the Obama administration – suggested that "nothing at all has changed in the equation that Obama set out during the campaign: we have to deal with out enemies – we must engage".

Equally, many observers now suggest that the same logic should be applied to non-state actors including Hamas, Hezbollah and even "moderate" Taliban in Afghanistan. Earlier this year, the British Foreign Office reanimated contacts with Hezbollah and several senior British MPs invited Hamas to participate in a video-link discussion in Westminster.