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" As we prepare to decide through a jury of his (and our) peers whether or not we will kill Dzhokhar Tsarnaev or not, Masha Gessen in The New York Times reminds us that, even if we put Tsarnaev down, we still will not know as much as we should about the events in Boston nearly two nears ago now -- and (implicitly) that, if we kill him, we may never know it.  Even worse, two critical questions have not been answered. Where were the bombs built? Investigators have testified that they were not built at the older brother&amp;#039;s apartment or in the younger brother&amp;#039;s dorm room. Were they built in someone else&amp;#039;s apartment, house or garage? If so, who, and was he a knowing accomplice? Did he help in any other way? The other big question is: Why did the F.B.I. fail to identify Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older brother, who had been fingered as a potential terrorist risk two years before the bombing and interviewed by field agents? Within 24 hours of the bombing, on April 15, 2013, investigators focused on images of the brothers in surveillance tapes recovered from the scene. Yet they had no names \u2014 and more than two days later they released the photos to the public, asking for help with identifying the suspects. How is it possible that someone who had been interviewed by a member of the local Joint Terrorism Task Force could not be identified from the pictures?  There is danger in closing cases in which questions like these are not answered. There is probably at least one killer of children who got away in Atlanta because the authorities there de facto pinned all the murders on Wayne Williams. If neither Tsarnaev brothers built the bombs, or even if someone else merely helped, then there&amp;#039;s a bomb maker possibly plying his trade somewhere. This strikes me as important information. Of course, we won&amp;#039;t ever know that if we silence the only surviving witness that we know of, thereby having our government provide a hit on behalf of a terrorist cell. (And this is not even to mention the completely bizarre death of Ibragim Todashev, who was shot and killed while being interrogated by the FBI with regards to Tamerlan Tsarnaev&amp;#039;s crimes.) Beyond some staggering bureaucratic ass-covering, however, Gessen makes an even more salient point about why some people may not want all the information to come out about who may or may not be involved in the crime.  The problem with these narratives is the very premise of radicalization \u2014 the idea that people become terrorists as a result of being indoctrinated by an organization or, as the newly coined term &amp;quot;self-radicalization&amp;quot; would suggest, indoctrinating themselves. This idea has little basis in fact or scholarship. A close examination would shed light on the lure of terrorism, which gives the disenfranchised a chance to become part of something greater. An even closer examination would show that the &amp;quot;war on terror&amp;quot; has contributed to the mythology of international Islamic terrorism as a mighty and glorious entity.  Exactly that. There are a lot of important people in this country who are heavily invested for their own purposes in wedging the &amp;quot;war on terror&amp;quot; into a simple binary Cold War paradigm. People who are into melding ISIS, Bashar al-Assad, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the people fighting against al-Assad in Syria, al Qaeda in wherever, and Boko Haram into one mighty force called Islamic Terrorism. (Call it what it is, Mr. President!) To intimate that, as is the case in all human endeavors, these various groups might be at odds with each other, and that they may be riven with internal factions guaranteed one day to immolate themselves, is to intimate that we are not engaged in a grand war of civilizations but, rather, in an anomalous conflict that requires nuanced analysis and precise information. If Dzhokhar Tsarnaev bought into the war of civilizations too, maybe it wasn&amp;#039;t his brother doing all the selling, after all. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a34265/unanswered-questions/>