Vol. 77/No. 18      May 13, 2013

“Our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change,” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg told a press conference April 22. “We’re going to have more cameras and that kind of stuff.”

The 1,000-member-strong New York Police Department’s intelligence squad — and its spy and frame-up operations — is being held up as an example nationwide. Judith Miller wrote glowingly in the Wall Street Journal about the cops “aggressively monitoring groups and individuals suspected of radicalization” and their “network of tipsters and undercover operatives” targeting neighborhoods where large numbers of Muslims live.

Miller boosted the NYPD’s “Ring of Steel,” a network of “sophisticated security cameras that feed information into a central monitoring system to detect questionable or unlawful activity.”

“Drones are a great idea,” Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis told the press April 24. He said drones should be used for aerial surveillance at next year’s marathon and other events.

Officials in Boston announced May 1 that three additional people — including two identified as fellow students of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who has been charged in the bombing — have been arrested for allegedly helping him afterwards.

The rulers’ campaign, along with revulsion at the carnage in Boston, has provoked discussion among working people.

“I really don’t like the way the government used the events in Boston to lock down the city and clamp down on political rights,” Dan Ventor, who works cleaning up toxic sites, told supporters of the Socialist Workers Party campaign in Seattle. “I have an ongoing discussion with some of my friends who think it’s OK to sacrifice democratic rights in the name of ‘security.’”

According to a poll taken a week after the bombing by the New York Times and CBS News, one-fifth of those questioned said they think “the government had gone too far in restricting civil liberties in the fight against terrorism, while 26 percent said it had not gone far enough and 49 percent said the balance was about right.”

News reports indicate growing evidence tying Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother Tamerlan, killed in a shoot-out with police, with Salafist Islamist forces. Dzhokhar “told interrogators in handwritten answers that the brothers acted as jihadists and out of Muslim religious anger at the U.S.,” the Wall Street Journal reported April 24.

The capitalist press increasingly refers to the Tsarnaev brothers as “radicals” and “militants,” suggesting an amalgam with workers battling boss attacks or opponents of Washington’s wars. But their jihadist views and actions have nothing in common with battles by working people against capitalist exploitation or national oppression in the U.S., Chechnya or elsewhere. These reactionary, anti-working-class forces carry out acts of terror, whether in Boston or the Middle East, against workers and others they oppose.

On April 16, Josefina Vidal, director of Cuba’s Foreign Ministry North American Affairs Division, delivered a note from the country’s revolutionary government to the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, saying Cuba “rejects and condemns unequivocally all acts of terrorism, in any place, under any circumstance, and with whatever motivation.”

The Cuban statement offered “the most heartfelt condolences of the people and government of Cuba to the people and government of the United States, particularly those directly affected by this tragedy and especially to the relatives of the victims.”
 
 
Related article:
Canadian gov’t presses new attacks on workers rights with ‘terrorism’ law
 
 
 
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