The Enemy At Home (31 page)

The obvious reason for Clinton’s failure is that his administration simply did not make the bin Laden mission a top priority. After all, there were other objectives to focus on. Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton were promoting a petition drive organized by the Feminist Majority Foundation to pressure the Taliban to liberalize its position on women’s rights. For others in the administration, the prize target wasn’t bin Laden, it was special prosecutor Kenneth Starr. Starr was the political foe the Clinton team really wanted to “get,” and they largely succeeded in discrediting him. Bin Laden was left to concoct other schemes. The conclusion seems unavoidable. The radical Muslims made the decision to attack America on 9/11 because they decided that America was weak. They came to this conclusion as a result of the actions—and inaction—of the Clinton administration and its allies on the left.

SINCE SEPTEMBER
11, 2001, there has been a strange and almost fanciful debate about measures taken by the Bush administration to prevent another such attack. The 9/11 attacks confirmed America’s extreme vulnerability. From the moment they occurred, it has been evident that such an attack could happen again, with even worse consequences. America is a big, open, and porous society. Every year some 60 million people enter the country on flights, and more than 100 million people come by land or sea. America offers a virtually limitless supply of potential targets: population centers, sports arenas, theme parks, power plants, water supply systems, electricity grids, tunnels, bridges, and computer networks. Virtually any group of determined people possessing weapons and skills, and willing to give their lives, could wreak havoc. One might expect all Americans to rally behind a concentrated effort to protect the homeland by locating the bad guys, arresting them, holding them, and extracting information from them. One might expect this, but one would be wrong.

From the outset, the left has led a campaign to oppose the administration’s most important measures to avoid another terrorist attack. The left’s campaign has been spearheaded by radical groups like the National Lawyers Guild and the Center for Constitutional Rights. Listening to the left, one almost gets the impression that September 11 never happened. Indeed many on the left portray the United States government, not Al Qaeda, as the gravest threat to American citizens. In this view, bin Laden might detonate an occasional explosion, but Bush is plotting to deprive all Americans of their basic liberties. Author Gore Vidal even suggests that the Bush administration has largely concocted its terror warnings as part of a scheme to establish martial control over America. The same note is struck by Joe Conason, who claims that America is now operating under “a nascent military regime.” Writing in
Harper’s,
Lewis Lapham detects nothing less than “the hallmarks of fascist sentiment in the character of the American government.”
¹⁷

So powerful is the left’s solicitude for civil liberties that Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean even suggested that the United States should not presume bin Laden’s guilt until he had been given the opportunity to have a fair trial. Radical lawyer Ramsey Clark agreed to defend Saddam Hussein in court on the grounds that the U.S. government had “demonized” him before giving him an impartial hearing. Activist lawyer Lynne Stewart, a veteran of militant causes in America, chose to represent the blind sheikh Omar Abd al-Rahman. Although Stewart portrayed Rahman as a noble soul exercising his free speech rights and the U.S. government as a malevolent institution motivated by anti-Muslim prejudice, Rahman was found guilty of plotting several terrorist bombings in America. Stewart herself was arrested and convicted of conspiracy when she was caught transmitting clandestine messages from the blind sheikh to his radical acolytes. Apparently moved by her plight, philanthropist George Soros contributed $20,000 to Stewart’s defense.
¹⁸

The Stewart case illustrates the symbiotic relationship between liberals and the far left. Leftists like Stewart stake out the extreme position and their allies like Soros provide political cover. This is not to say that liberal concerns about civil liberties are insincere. They are not, and in some cases they may be valid. Many libertarians and some conservatives have raised similar concerns. The critics stress that Bush should go after the bad guys only in a way that protects their constitutional rights. If not, the rights of all Americans are jeopardized. We have here an echo of the ACLU’s credo that rights are best protected at their extreme. If the Bush administration is forced to release a man accused of building a “dirty bomb” on the grounds that he was denied access to a lawyer, then the rest of us are more secure in our liberties. Whether this is true or not, it is based on the assumption that the freed suspect would not proceed to build and then detonate such a bomb. In that case many thousands of Americans would be manifestly less secure in life and liberty.

The issue here is an old one, and it was raised during the Civil War when President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and took other measures that his critics said violated constitutional rights. Lincoln—like Bush today—denied that he violated those rights. But Lincoln went on to argue that even if he had violated the rights, he would be justified in doing so. Lincoln’s argument was that the integrity of the government was fundamental to upholding the Constitution and protecting all rights. Lincoln contended that it makes no sense to endanger the ship of state in the name of protecting this right or that right, because if the ship sinks then no rights can be protected. The point applies to 9/11 in this way. If there are further terrorist attacks, the sense of public danger would be so great that many of the liberties we take for granted today would be curtailed. America would become like Israel, a state under martial supervision. To avoid this, it is better to relinquish conveniences and even some liberties in order to permit reasonable measures to protect both security and liberty.

Let us examine some of the left’s criticisms of the Bush administration to see if the government has been acting reasonably. One of the earliest concerns raised by the left concerned racial profiling. From this point of view, the government should not pursue terrorism by singling out any particular group. Recently Al Gore went to Saudi Arabia to apologize for the U.S. government’s “terrible abuses” inflicted against Muslims who were “indiscriminately rounded up” after 9/11. Human Rights Watch and the ACLU jointly issued a report warning that “Muslim men were arrested for little more than attending the same mosque as a September 11 hijacker or owning a box cutter.”
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It is hard to disagree with the report’s conclusion that the experience for innocent Muslim detainees was Kafkaesque. But then the country had just been through a Kafkaesque experience. Neither Gore nor the human rights report acknowledged that the detainees were released as soon as it became clear that they had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.

The irony of the racial profiling debate was that the 9/11 terrorists seemed right out of central casting—they fit every stereotype of the fanatical Muslim terrorist, right down to their nose hairs. Given the fact that the terrorists were Muslims who claimed to be acting in the name of Islam, it would seem rational for the government to focus its surveillance on mosques rather than, say, yoga conventions, blues bars, or Knights of Columbus meetings. It is true that not all Muslims are Islamic terrorists, but it is equally true that all Islamic terrorists are Muslims. To forgo racial profiling is to expose the entire population to the scrutiny that would otherwise be focused on high-risk groups. Even Gore found himself being searched, as if the country needed to be secured against the threat of one of its leading presidential candidates carrying out terrorist attacks on his own country! As a consequence of liberal pressure, terrorism screening has become an equal-opportunity business.

Strangely, though, the government’s effort at comprehensive scrutiny has encountered the same left-wing resistance as racial profiling. The provisions of the Patriot Act are not limited to any particular group but cover all Americans. The act includes a provision that permits government surveillance of terrorist suspects’ bank records, hotel bills, phone records, computer databases, and library borrowings. The inclusion of libraries infuriates Senator Russell Feingold, who thinks it is outrageous that the government can intrude on privacy in this way. Feingold raises the prospect of Americans “afraid to read books, terrified into silence.” But imagine a group of FBI agents who are tracking an Al Qaeda cell member who is plotting an attack. He goes to a public library and checks out a book on electronic circuitry. Shouldn’t law enforcement be able to examine what he is reading? Liberal fears about innocent Americans having their literary pursuits placed under government scrutiny would be justified if there were cases in which the Patriot Act had been abused in this way. But there has been no such case.

Soros warns that the Bush administration’s entire security apparatus—the Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security—is frightening Americans and silencing their criticism of the government’s policies. “When I heard President Bush say either you are with us or you are with the terrorists, I hear alarm bells. This is not the America I chose as my home…where disagreement is not tolerated.”
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But when President Bush made that statement in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 he was insisting that other countries needed to make a decision either to stand with America or to stand with the terrorists. The context of Bush’s remarks makes it clear that he was not speaking about American citizens. Soros’s claim that the Bush administration won’t tolerate disagreement is bizarre in view of the fact that he has been an outspoken critic—to the point of investing millions of dollars in a publicly announced campaign to defeat Bush—and he has suffered no government sanction or retaliation of any kind.

Groups on the left have expressed outrage over the fact that the U.S. government holds foreign insurgents captive at Guantánamo Bay and other facilities without charging them or granting them access to lawyers. Legal scholar Laurence Tribe fulminates that thousands of captives are denied constitutional protections “simply because they are not U.S. citizens.” Columnist Bob Herbert argues that “the fundamental right in the case of the Guantánamo detainees is the right not to be deprived of liberty without due process of law.”
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It has long been understood, however, that the rights in the U.S. Constitution only apply to U.S. citizens. In a moral sense, all human beings have natural rights, but there is an important distinction between natural rights and civil rights. The constitution is a social compact between citizens. Through mutual consent, citizens give to their government the power to protect certain rights. These rights do not extend to those who stand outside the social contract. Americans have no obligation to extend them to aliens, and they are most certainly inapplicable to those who are apprehended in foreign jihads against America.

The ACLU and other groups have demanded that U.S. courts supervise the detention of foreign combatants both at home and abroad. In one of its reports Human Rights Watch faulted the U.S. government for holding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief architect of 9/11, in an undisclosed foreign location.
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The left’s contention that such men are entitled to court supervision to ensure protection of their civil rights is quite remarkable. Courts have never previously interfered in this way in the treatment of foreign captives. Left-wing groups routinely file lawsuits to force the government either to charge its foreign prisoners or to free them. Although the Bush administration’s determination to hold such captives without trial is presented as outrageous, it is hardly bizarre for countries at war to detain the enemy. It is not customary for nations to provide enemy captives with lawyers, except when they are tried for war crimes. It is normal practice to keep enemy fighters in detention until the war is over or the government determines that they are no longer a threat.

Obviously the government has to be much more careful when it is dealing with American citizens who are suspected of collaborating with Al Qaeda or conspiring to commit terrorism. American citizens do have constitutional rights and they should not be violated. It is no violation of constitutional rights, however, for the government to hold without trial a citizen who has enlisted in a foreign military struggle against the United States. While affirming that even accused terrorists who are American citizens must be granted due process, the Supreme Court has said, both in the
Hamdi
and
Padilla
cases, that those rights can be met by military tribunals.

In December 2005, the
New York Times
disclosed that the Bush administration had been secretly listening to the phone conversations of Americans who were calling abroad to speak to figures connected with Al Qaeda. Bush’s authorization of this surveillance brought a storm of criticism from the left and even from some civil libertarians on the right. John Dean of Watergate fame was on hand to make the obvious Nixon comparison. Congressmen John Conyers and John Lewis said they would support a bill of impeachment against President Bush. Critics said that Bush had violated a law requiring the federal government to get a court warrant before subjecting American citizens to surveillance. These allegations have emboldened lawyers in some of the nation’s biggest terrorism cases to file claims to get their clients released. The
Times
reports that defense lawyers for Lyman Faris, who admitted plotting to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge, and Mohammed Junaid Babar, convicted of involvement in a plot to set off fertilizer bombs, are seeking to establish that their clients’ phone conversations were illegally taped and therefore their convictions are invalid.
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If the left is worried that dangerous men may be set free to devise further schemes to harm Americans, it never publicly expresses such concerns.

Is there any merit to the charge of illegal wiretapping? Actually, there is, but the issue is not clear-cut. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed in 1978 when an enemy like Al Qaeda was not even contemplated. Moreover, Congress had authorized Bush to use all necessary force to respond to the 9/11 attacks, and the Bush administration argued that this authority extends to its measures to trace Al Qaeda’s American connections. I am skeptical of the Bush administration’s logic here. I think it would have been better for Bush to have sought a change in the old law, or to have secured specific congressional authority to act. But the administration did notify leading members of Congress, both Republican and Democrat, of its surveillance practices, so the legislative branch was at least aware of the executive’s actions. While this legal debate is important, it camouflages the simple reality that the U.S. government should be listening to conversations involving terrorist suspects, just as it should be monitoring their financial transactions. Two of the 9/11 hijackers made overseas calls to Al Qaeda operatives; if those conversations had been intercepted, 9/11 may have been prevented. When situations like this arise, it may not always be possible to secure court approval for surveillance in advance. If the law says otherwise, the solution is not to impeach the president but to change the law.