The Enemy At Home

by Dinesh D'Souza

  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.”19 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.”20 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.”21 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.22 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.23 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.

  Another statute frequently invoked on the left is the Geneva Convention. Critics have bitterly protested the Bush administration’s view that the Geneva Convention does not apply to Al Qaeda captives. Yet the terms of the convention apply only to signatories or parties observing the rules. The Al Qaeda fighters do not represent a state. They are not soldiers in the conventional sense that they wear uniforms and operate in accordance with the laws of war. They ignore the distinction between military and civilian targets. They extend to their captives no protections whatsoever. Consequently they have placed themselves outside the orbit of the Geneva Convention rules.

  The most serious charge leveled against the Bush administration in this context is the charge of torturing foreign prisoners to obtain information. Reports of torture have brought forth a torrent of liberal indignation. Columnists like Anthony Lewis and Jonathan Schell are apoplectic on the subject. The New York Times gravely warns that torture clearly “doesn’t work” because “centuries of experience show that people will tell their tormentors what they want to hear.”24 This may be generally true, but (with due respect to the Times’s extensive experience on this subject) is it always true? The Israeli government seems to have used torture quite effectively to locate Palestinian hideouts where hostages have been held. Is it not at least possible that torturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed could provide useful information about future attacks? It seems dangerously smug to make lofty pronouncements about torture when many lives could be at stake.

  Undoubtedly torture can be misused, but then the criticism should focus on those misuses. Moreover, there are some forms of torture that no decent community can sanction, no matter what its effectiveness. But this is an issue not of whether torture should be allowed but of what kind of torture should be allowed. Perusing through reports from Human Rights Watch, I list what the group considers to be America’s most egregious forms of torture: sleep deprivation, force-feeding of detainees who refuse to eat, incessant hard rock and rap music, long periods of darkness and isolation, “stress positions” such as being forced to stand with arms outstretched, exposure to very warm and very cold temperatures, and (most controversially) immersion into water to create a sensation of drowning. While I support the idea of congressional oversight of these measures, I don’t find myself shuddering over them. Most are scarcely rougher than what millions of American soldiers suffer in boot camp. Given the forms of coercion that have been used historically, and that are still used throughout the world, the interrogation techniques used by America’s military agencies seem warranted under the circumstances.

  It is possible to have a reasonable debate over what powers the government should possess to effectively fight the war and at the same time minimize the threat to civil liberties. What is striking about the left’s position is how obstructionist it is. Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch argues that the U.S. government should “formally abandon all forms of coercive interrogation.”25 This is another way of saying that it should content itself with information that captured terrorists and insurgents choose to share. Clearly if the Bush administration were to adopt the left’s agenda, it would find itself incapacitated in fighting the war. This does not seem to be a prospect that frightens or deters the left. At every stage the left seems to support the policy that most endangers American security. Considering that America is at war, the restrictions on liberty to date have been minimal. Apply the left’s arguments to World War II and their ridiculousness becomes apparent. “Nazi Captives Being Held in Detention Centers Without Trial.” “German Prisoners Refused Fifth Amendment Protections.” “Government Found Taping Phone Conversations Between U.S. Citizens and Hitler Staff.” I am quite sure there were no such front-page headlines in the New York Times.

  Why then does the left hamper America’s homeland security in this way? In the following chapter, I will offer a theory to explain the strange behavior of the left. Here I simply note that what liberals consider fine points of principle, the enemy interprets as weakness. The 9/11 attacks were the direct result of bin Laden viewing the United States as a feeble giant, all tied up in knots and waiting to be struck. Whatever its motivations, the left through its actions is increasing America’s vulnerability. Having emboldened the enemy to attack us once, the actions of the left are now emboldening the enemy to attack us once again.

  NINE

  The War Against the War

  Decoding bin Laden’s Message to America

  IN 2004, A LEADING CRITIC of the Bush administration published a stinging critique of the U.S. government’s war on terror. He found Bush’s conduct objectionable from the very time the president was informed about the 9/11 attacks. He charged that notwithstanding the gravity of the occasion, Bush continued reading to children “a little girl’s story about a goat and its butting.” The critic proceeded to fault Bush’s motives for the war on terror. Bush made the decision to invade Iraq, he said, because of “oil and more business for his private companies.” Bush knew that Iraq posed no security threat but “the black gold blinded him and he put his own private interests ahead of the American public interest.” As a consequence, the critic charged, “Bush’s hands are covered with blood” and Iraq has become a “quagmire.” Yet the president refuses to change course because, after all, “the Bush administration has profited” from the destruction of Iraq, as shown by “the enormity of the contracts won by large corporations like Halliburton.” While Bush pretends to promote liberty abroad, “he has brought tyranny and the suppression of liberties to his own country” through “the Patriot Act, implemented under the pretext of fighting terrorism.”

  Michael Moore? Al Franken? Nancy Pelosi? Actually, the speaker is Osama bin Laden, in an address to the American people on the eve of the 2004 election. Not only do bin Laden’s more recent statements seem plagiarized from Moore’s Web site and Pelosi’s speeches, but in addition bin Laden seems to have adopted the practice of explicitly citing and commending the works of the left. In his 2004 missive, bin Laden said his message could be better understood if Americans read the works of Robert Fisk, “who is a fel
low Westerner…but one whom I consider unbiased.” Bin Laden called on people to pay more attention to Fisk “so that he could explain to the American people everything he has learned from us.”1 In his January 2006 videotape bin Laden informed Americans that “if Bush carries on with his lies and oppression, then it would be useful to read the book Rogue State.” Bin Laden went on to cite a passage by the author, William Blum, who calls on America to withdraw from the Middle East and “give an apology to all of the widows and orphans and those who were tortured” by American troops. Bin Laden proposed such steps as part of a “truce” between Al Qaeda and the United States.

  Who are these people singled out for praise by bin Laden? A British leftist who covers the Middle East for London’s Independent newspaper, Fisk is the author of several books that blame America for inflicting conquest and unending war on the Middle East. Fisk’s books receive enthusiastic reviews in America’s left-leaning magazines like The Nation. Blum is a former Vietnam War protester who posts his articles on leftist Web sites and writes for magazines like the Progressive. Noam Chomsky has praised his work, and in 2002 Blum joined Jane Fonda, Barbara Ehrenreich, and a host of other prominent liberals in denouncing Bush’s preparation for the invasion of Iraq. Blum describes his life’s mission as “slowing down the American empire—injuring the beast.”2 One can see how bin Laden might see his own mission in those same terms.

  Blum’s reaction to bin Laden’s endorsement? “I’m not repulsed and I’m not going to pretend that I am,” he told the Washington Post. Blum compared bin Laden’s blurb to being listed on Oprah’s Book Club. While Blum admitted he would not like to live in bin Laden’s model society, he said he agreed with bin Laden about America’s role in the Middle East. “If he shares with me a deep dislike for certain aspects of U.S. foreign policy…I think it’s good that he shares those views.”3