Mirandize What?

I'm having a difficult time with law enforcement's decision not to give miranda warnings to Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, the suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing.  First and foremost, it is my contention that rights for Americans are the same as the rights that all humans should enjoy.  Secondly, this young man is not a foreign national or a known enemy combatant.  He is known to be an American Citizen and as such is constitutionally protected as being innocent until proved guilty.  If we don't provide him with all the rights of citizenship, what happens when you or I are accused of illegal acts?

Beyond the philosophy and legality of our treatment of suspected terrorists is the question of why someone finds it necessary to bomb innocent athletes and spectators?  Is terrorism a pathology that needs to be cured?  I think that is sometimes true as in the case of the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski or the many recent young men with assault rifles.  If so perhaps miranda warnings are beside the point.  These folks need treatment rather than punishment and if we catch them before they offend might even return to society better or at least safer than before.  We, meaning the medical profession, must find ways to identify and treat dangerous pathologies just as they would for infectious diseases.

More difficult, I think, is the political and cultural terrorism displayed by the Brothers Tsarnaev and members of various organized terror groups such as the Aryan Brotherhood or al-Qaeda.  They are crying out against real or perceived evils in their culture or the world at large.  It's hard not to sympathize with their plight if not with their solutions.  If you or I lived in the culture of poverty and want, we also might resort to extreme means to expose our plight - or fall victim to the "out to get us" attitudes of many stressed cultures.  In many ways there is little difference between the aims of Osama Ben-Laden and Mahatma Ghandi.  Using your body as a barricade is different only in degree from using your body as a bomb.  Yes I know, blood should not be spilled but the sweat of the poor might as well be blood for all it costs them.

So, where does that leave us?  How about redirecting the majority of our war spending to human needs, starting with places like Chechnya and Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq, or you pick one.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost $1,444,990,000 plus over 1,000,000 deaths.  What good could we do with a trillion and one half dollars?  Even if we wasted half of it, that would leave close to $400 each for the whole world population or considerably more if we properly target the least fortunate.  You say people don't appreciate a hand out?  Probably true, but people respond well to help if allowed to direct it and participate personally.  One thing is for sure, most folks don't send the suicide bombers after the people helping them out of poverty.