Already the effort to repress conversation on Muslim terrorism is resulting in a deadly form of debate breaking out. In whispered, conspiratorial tones Americans are joining the rest of the world in asking why, if Islam is a peaceful religion, is there a pattern of attacks on Christians in countries with Muslim majorities? Why do Muslims tear down historic Buddhist monuments? Why can you regularly read of Muslims burning schools for girls? Why do imams indoctrinate so many terrorists? Why was Daniel Pearl, an American Jewish journalist, beheaded in the name of Islam? Why is an American political cartoonist, Molly Norris, in hiding because of death threats by Muslims upset at her suggestion of a “Draw Mohammed Day”? Why was the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York compelled to take down all artwork depicting the Prophet Muhammad from its Islamic exhibition? Why was Theo van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker, killed by Muslims for making a film about Muslim abuse of women?
Pretending that this pattern of Muslim violence does not exist makes no sense. Moreover, it is dangerous, because it suppresses the necessary public vent of honest conversation, open dialogue, and debate. It exacerbates tension as pent-up fear, worries, and anger emerge. And it is likely to become ugly when acted on by frustrated people tired of being called bigots for seeing what is plain as day but not being able to speak about it. In September 2010, the month before I was fired for talking about my fear of Muslim terrorism, the AP reported that the Justice Department reported that it was investigating several anti-Muslim incidents in four states. In one case a brick was thrown at a window of the Madera Islamic Center in California. Signs left behind read: “NO TEMPLE FOR THE GOD OF TERRORISM” and “WAKE UP AMERICA—THE ENEMY IS HERE!” Justice was also responding to an attack against a Muslim New York City cab driver who had his throat slashed by a man raging against Muslims. The FBI is dealing with growing vandalism at mosques. And famously, there is an uproar with a strong anti-Muslim flavor over a perfectly legal plan to build a mosque several blocks away from Ground Zero, the site of the 9/11 attacks that brought the World Trade Center crashing down. In Oklahoma, a state with a tiny Muslim population, the state legislature passed an anti-Sharia law at the prompting of politicians looking for an issue to drive up their poll numbers. And the pastor of a very small Christian church in Gainesville, Florida, became the center of international attention for announcing plans to burn the Koran on the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
These are examples of the growing tensions erupting among Americans as they are told to muffle and muzzle their fears of Muslim terrorism. Political, media, and religious leadership rightly protect the First Amendment rights of Muslims to practice their religion. But they fail to acknowledge and denounce radical Islamist elements preaching world domination through violence that are associated with terrorist groups in the Middle East, such as Hamas and Hezbollah. Such (well-intentioned) censors seem to me to be also opening the door to more Muslim terrorism in U.S. schools, in the military, and in jails by deriding those asking questions about radical Islamists as anti-Muslim bigots. If you admit you are suspicious of elements of Islam, you are called a bigot. So lots of people keep their suspicions to themselves. When law enforcement agencies capture Muslims engaged in planning terror plots, as they have in New York, New Jersey, Miami, Dallas, and Washington, DC, in the last year, the politically correct crowd reflexively ratchets up the message that not all Muslims are terrorists and calls for restraint in discussing the blatant links between extreme Muslims, Islamists, and terrorism. I call it censorship. This is a corrupt, self-defeating cycle. It limits the reasoned, rational assessments of genuine terror threats—an essential element of effective response.
The uncensored reality is that there are 1.5 billion Muslims in the world and Islam is the world’s fastest-growing religion. The most pressing threat to our nation comes from this religion’s determined extremist faction, the Islamists who see jihad as a holy mission to establish a one-world government, a caliphate, under Muslim law. Of course, the overwhelming majority of Muslims are peaceful people who are respectful of others, mean no harm, and are just trying to hold a job, pay the rent, and raise their children. However, if only one-tenth of 1 percent of Muslims are radicalized and intent on harming the United States and its allies in the name of Islam, that makes 1.5 million seeking to bring down democratic governments, ban religious diversity, and overturn Western civilization. That is an astoundingly large number, and by all indications the growth of Islam in the United States and the worldwide reach of the Internet are leading to increasing conflict between those bent on committing acts of terror and the rest of the world. To point this threat out is not bigotry. It is an act of self-preservation.
But the insidious hand of political correctness extends its corrupt fingers to shush people who are trying to introduce some straight talk into discussion of the Muslim terror threat. For example, when President Obama told Bob Woodward, my former Washington Post colleague, that the United States could absorb another terrorist attack, conservatives who normally rail against left-wing political correctness played their own game of avoiding hard truths. They hammered President Obama as a weak commander in chief who was effectively inviting another terrorist attack. But the president had done no such thing. He had simply told the truth: that he was doing everything he could to prevent another 9/11 but that even after 9/11 “the biggest attack ever … we absorbed it and we are stronger.” The president spoke the truth. He was not giving in on the fight against terrorists. He was expressing almost hubristic, pro-American sentiment in noting the strength and resilience of our people and our country. Hard-line conservatives, sensing political vulnerability, turned it into a statement of surrender by a weak-kneed liberal Democrat. To them, the Democrats have long been suspect on national security. But they turned the president’s words against him in an unfair way. We do a service when we shed light on a statement that exposes a hidden truth. But deliberately misconstruing comments and turning them into something else is a lie—it’s a form of censorship, whether it’s done by the Left or the Right.
This is the other side of the political pressures limiting rational assessment of terrorists’ power. They undercut honest dialogue about the Muslim terror threat. The not-so-hidden factor at play here is that Republicans are setting the stage to blame President Obama should any terrorist act take place. It has the effect of forcing the president into a defensive posture, hindering decisions about the practical limits of what we can do to prevent terrorism. This is a tit-for-tat game because Republicans are still trying to justify every over-the-top, costly step taken by the Bush administration, including getting into questionable wars. The politically correct thinking suggests that the Bush team was right to keep its deliberations secret to ensure quick response to any terror event. It also reveals how scared the Bush White House was of another terrorist attack. Their thinking was to control the response to any threat and keep Congress and the public out, assuming that they, not Congress, would be blamed if anything happened. As a result, they wanted to make all the decisions. Even after the overwhelming passage of the Patriot Act, which gave the government unprecedented powers to conduct surveillance of any suspected terrorist, President Bush, without consulting Congress, secretly authorized domestic wiretaps, monitoring the e-mail of Americans. Three years later, when the New York Times learned what had happened, it wrote that allowing such violations of the privacy rights of Americans “crossed constitutional limits on legal searches.” It also created a lack of accountability. It opened American intelligence agencies to charges of fixing their reports to please the White House. It called into question American credibility with other governments. The Department of Defense was similarly tarnished after Congress granted approval in 2002 for a program called the Information Awareness Office. The plan allowed for collecting and analyzing phone calls, e-mails, and personal information. But under the Bush administration the program was discovered to have become a digital “drift net” to grab any and all communications, or what an expert Internet technici
an later called “vacuum-cleaner surveillance of all the data crossing the Internet.” That criticism grew so intense that Congress pulled funds for the program in 2003.
The real question, then and now, which no one is directly addressing, is how far we are willing to go to keep ourselves safe from terrorism. Most Americans, according to polls, are willing to sacrifice some rights in order to allow the government to keep the nation safe. Those polls show more Americans are willing to entrust government with expanded reach into their lives. But Americans don’t want to create a big-brother state. Nonetheless, some conservatives, notably former vice president Cheney, want to silence anyone concerned about essential questions regarding constitutional protections—the heart of the American experiment. So, using another brand of political correctness, they demonize those who insist on public debate and demand accountability for American political leaders who go beyond constitutional limits.
The irony in this situation is that it is usually conservatives who are sensitive to any intrusion by big government, whether it comes in the form of a pat-down by airport security or a government health-care plan. The consensus in the intelligence community is that the country is safer today from terrorism than it has ever been. In their language, targets—U.S. airports, buildings, and monuments—have been hardened, and Congress and the Bush and Obama administrations have all greatly increased surveillance under the law. Nonetheless, the unspoken truth that the political alarmists deliberately ignore or sweep under the rug is that America can never be completely safe as long as we live in a free and open society. Nothing is absolute.
That includes the notion of absolute security. Endless redundancies in intelligence and crime-fighting networks dedicated to heading off the slightest terror threats, whatever the cost, are being justified by politicians who fear being blamed by the public and the other party for the next terrorist incident. Yet absolute security from any and every terrorist act is an illusion. And when leaders voice such expectations, they are inviting disappointment. While security is an all-important responsibility of the government, it is not the government’s only responsibility. The president and members of Congress swear an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States—not the security of the United States. The Constitution declares our rights and liberties and defines us as a nation. Nothing in it offers a guarantee of safety from crazed, jihad-inspired terrorists.
We seem to be caught between the ideas of Benjamin Franklin and those of Abe Lincoln. Franklin once wrote that those who would give up liberty for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both. On the other hand, President Lincoln once said, in justifying his Civil War–era suspension of habeas corpus (the right of any suspect to appear in court and be told the charges against him), that, in essence, extreme times call for extreme measures. The political pressure discouraging mature conversations about the tension between liberty and national security has caused a terrible loss of American unity. Free people have to agree on the limits of defense against terrorism if they don’t want to sacrifice the very rights that guarantee our freedom and form of government. At every step of the way, from how we define terrorists to how we detain and treat them when captured to how we treat our own citizens during this time of emergency, there is a need for unhindered conversation about these serious topics. We don’t need or benefit from censorship. The central question is how to protect the Constitution and the values that underlie America while effectively fighting the enemy. There are no easy answers. But the politically correct mudslinging on both sides makes it nearly impossible to cut through the finger-pointing and get to that all-important debate.
That conversation starts with the question of whether we have the necessary laws to stop the terrorist once we know who he or she is. And that is just the start of the debate. Americans also have to contend with how to treat an enemy who is not covered under the Geneva Conventions, which deal with soldiers representing another country during a time of war. Is it okay to torture a terrorist? Is it okay to hold a suspected terrorist without trial? Does that trial have to take place in U.S. civilian courts? Or does it better serve the nation to try terrorists in military courts?
Unfortunately, open discussion of these questions got treated as out of bounds after the 9/11 attacks. Congress issued a resolution authorizing the president to use whatever force he felt necessary to combat the terrorist groups behind the 9/11 attacks. The president did not have to make his case to Congress or the American people. Public support for the president in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks was at a record level, more than 90 percent. That level of trust across political, class, racial, and religious lines gave the president the latitude to speak and act for all Americans. The normal appetite for discussion of policy was quieted by a desire for fast action and effective response to prevent further terrorism. Vice President Cheney, speaking on Meet the Press after 9/11, said the Bush administration had license to work secretly, outside the normal congressional, judicial, and public oversight and debate. In other words, beyond the constitutional checks on power in America. “We’ve got to spend time in the shadows of the intelligence world,” he said. “A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion.”
The congressional resolution allowed the president to secretly give the CIA authorization to kill al Qaeda operatives, to open secret prisons overseas, and to torture people. In one memo that set off huge controversy when it was later made public, a lawyer for the Bush administration, John Yoo, advised the president that without any public debate or congressional authorization he could start a war anywhere in the world in pursuit of terrorists. In 2002 President Bush issued an executive order denying Geneva Convention protections—specifically safeguards against torture—to terrorist detainees. Attorney General John Ashcroft decided—without public debate—that waterboarding, a technique in which the victim feels as if he can’t breathe and is drowning, is not torture and is legal. One Bush administration legal memo concluded that anything can be done to terror suspects as long as it does not lead to organ failure, impair bodily functions, or result in death.
To me, the most distressing aspect of not allowing the American people in on the debate about how to handle terrorism was the president’s lack of trust in the Constitution and the law. Decisions on U.S. law that impacted our constitutional rights suddenly fell into the hands of a few obscure political appointees working on secret memos at the Justice Department and the White House. They competed to please the administration by giving the president unprecedented, unquestioned levels of power. American values, democratic principles, and confidence in the maturity of the American people and their representatives in Congress to work through a threat to our nation got left behind in the name of ending the terrorist threat through expansive presidential powers. Anyone asking questions was dismissed as naive, unpatriotic, or sympathetic to terrorists. In my experience, as word of these decisions leaked into the news, rather than comfort Americans, it led to uneasiness over what we believe our nation’s values are with regard to using torture, championing human rights, and protecting civil liberties. The president’s political rivals began to voice concern that there was no process at work, no legal framework for such vast exercise of power by the president. Talk of naked power grabs and dictator-like mandates had to be quieted by the Bush administration with claims that such extralegal steps resulted in forcing more information from suspects and informants and stopping more terrorist plots. As much as the public wanted to believe in the administration, there was no way to be certain, and earlier events, such as the government’s justification for attacking Iraq, had weakened public faith in the administration’s words. Americans had been told the United States had to go to war in Iraq because Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. No such weapons were found. Allegations of a link between Iraq and the terror attacks of 9/11 had also proved unsupportable; the president had openly claimed that Iraq was training al Qaeda terrorists. It was
never proven. The crisis of confidence was heightened by dwindling international support for the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan and the handling of terrorists.
The situation became glaringly difficult to reconcile with American ideals. News stories revealed terrorists being stripped naked and dying at a CIA prison in Afghanistan, sensory deprivation of detainees, attacks on the religious beliefs of detainees. Then came stories of prisoners shackled to the floors of airplanes for twenty hours with black goggles covering their eyes and ears. We discovered that in 2003, U.S. interrogators used the waterboarding technique on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a top al Qaeda leader, 183 times in one month. The Red Cross issued reports on the deteriorating psychological health of detainees at Guantánamo Bay. And in 2004 Americans saw pictures of male Iraqi prisoners being stripped, paraded in front of American female soldiers, and threatened by dogs at Abu Ghraib—Saddam Hussein’s most notorious prison—in Iraq. The news that the United States engaged in such abuse undermined claims that Saddam Hussein’s tyranny had been replaced with the promise of American liberty. “I’m gravely concerned that many Americans will have the same impulse as I did when I saw this picture, and that’s to turn away from them,” said a pained Senator John McCain, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam. “And we risk losing public support for this conflict.” McCain called for full disclosure of what procedures had been authorized for handling prisoners in American custody. In 2004 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that detainees at Guantánamo Bay had the right to challenge their detention.
The enduring controversy over waterboarding of Muslim terrorists inspired several journalists, from Fox News Channel reporters to tough-guy radio talk-show hosts to magazine writers, to undergo the procedure themselves and report on whether they considered it torture. Christopher Hitchens, writing for Vanity Fair magazine, had it done to him and not only declared it torture but added that once he understood the full barbarity of the act, he realized that the U.S. government had lied when it said it was not torture. “One used to be told,” Hitchens wrote, “… that the lethal fanatics of al-Qaeda were schooled to lie, and instructed to claim that they had been tortured.… Did we notice what a frontier we had crossed when we admitted and even proclaimed that their stories might in fact be true? I had only a very slight encounter on that frontier, but I still wish that my experience were the only way in which the words ‘waterboard’ and ‘American’ could be mentioned in the same (gasping and sobbing) breath.”
Juan Williams Page 10
