Unfortunately, I wouldn’t know about the goddamned big waves on the North Shore. I went to cover the final Association of Surfing Professionals surf contest of the year at Pipeline, and six out of seven days I was there the sea was flat, flat, flat — apart from a few puppy-ripples you might find on a 50-foot potato chip. The Pacific Ocean doesn’t love you. The ocean doesn’t care that today is the Superbowl of surfing and it is the field; it says “ha ha ha ha” and rolls away to attack Venezuela where they don’t want anything to do with it.

The small North Shore community has the feel of a condominium poolside singles scene. The people listen to a lot of “Jawaiian” music, which is a kind of audio drip torture created by extracting all the soul from reggae standards and adding ukuleles. There is such a “laid-back” island attitude that many of the inhabitants treat the sandy island like a big hotel ashtray and, in a carefree fashion, leave big viscous globs of filthy surf wax under the restaurant tables, that you might rub up against them unawares and ruin your pants.

The North Shore also has whores. We saw one right off, a hip-weaving brunette cat-walking the side of the main road along the beach with a hard expression of crystallized pornography, wearing nothing but a turquoise string bikini, black eyeliner and a pair of red 6-inch fuck-me platforms. A truck stopped for her and she got in.

The surfing world is not really covered by any major press, save surf magazines. Even in the Honolulu paper, the front page headline one contest day was “Christmas Trees Selling”; the surf results were buried around Page B6. Famous surfers are famous almost exclusively to other surfers, surf-mag readers, sponsors and interested locals, so they hang around in the restaurants of the small North Shore town of Haliewa fairly unguarded, close enough to breathe on; no entourage armies or swarms of pie-eyed little girls.

Even the wildly photogenic six-time world champ, water-djinn and Pam Anderson Lee-ex, Kelly Slater, rates fairly low in the mainstream public consciousness compared with other sorcerers of sport. Slater is surfing’s Michael Jordan, its most transcendental practitioner ever, but the ASP and/or surfing’s annual world championship tour has virtually no corporate infrastructure comparable to the NBA’s. So to the average tourist, the Holy Slater is just a freakishly good-looking young guy with a cell phone.

The first legend I spotted in Haliewa was big-wave stud Brock Little, who looked like a piece of animated driftwood. He’d been absolutely chiseled by the teeth of the ocean, physically and spiritually — he had the look of somebody who’s died six or seven times already and is now a project of voodoo scientists, running on some whole other ghost chemical. All the blood in his body has been removed and replaced with concentrated adrenaline and a clear, high-octane bionic fluid made from denatured testosterone and the distilled essences of his dead friends, which makes him beautiful and creepy to look upon.

When it isn’t completely flat and eventless, Pipeline is the mother of all dangerous surf zones. The area boasts a huge tubing wave, which when it’s doing what it’s supposed to do, stands up a couple of stories high, throws its white lip over itself and makes a perfect “Hawaii Five-O” circle that accelerates into a howling Niagara then crushes down into hard, chunky spray — like an imploding concrete building — as it nears the shore. The reef underneath it is hard and nasty and lethal, covered with weirdly shaped rocks and deadly little caves an unfortunate surfer can get sucked into.

The day before we arrived there was a flurry of casualties: Cory Lopez, the sullen son of Florida and one of my personal favorites, broke his nose when his board snapped up and bashed him in the face and out of the contest. Taj Burrow, another top contender, slammed his ass very badly on the reef. Derek Ho, a native local hero who has won the Pipe Masters competition enough times in the past to feel real comfortable, almost drowned when he bounced off the reef and his foot leash got caught on a rock. He went to the hospital with a head injury and lungs full of ocean.

On the last day of our stay, the ocean graciously kicked in again and we were able to see 32 of the ASP top 44 whittled down in eight hours of heats to 16.

The state of surfing that day seemed to be a general contentedness under the reign of Occy — aka Mark Occhilupo — the lovable Australian “Sesame Street” monster, who had just been crowned 1999′s World Champion. Basically, every surfer in the ASP, even the most gargantuanly bitter, entitlement-barking horror egos like Sunny Garcia, are pretty happy about this.

Occy made a positively stellar surf comeback after being a fat, depressed guy on a couch for several years, and is now a sunshiny example of plucky human triumph; everything is fair and right within a world in which Occy earned his champhood at 33. Kelly Slater didn’t do the ASP tour in 1999 or try for the title, and this prompts the terrible question: Is anyone really world champ in any way other than ceremonially if Slater didn’t surf? Slater reserved himself for choice surf events in ’99, in which he competed as a “wild card.” Naturally, he was there at Pipeline, lending star aura, being the big dog in the park.

There is a dumb but enjoyable surf movie called “North Shore,” where a dopily sincere blond boy from an Arizona wave pool comes to the North Shore as a hick-weed nobody and soul-surfs his way to Pipeline domination. This was very nearly the case with cuddly Aussie newcomer Zane Harrison, a DiCaprio-cute, blond beach-bunny boy — a total unknown until he conquered the Sunset Beach Jewel of the Triple Crown and the Pipeline trials.

Overnight, he became a surf-porn centerfold, competing against the biggest faces of the spitterati (“spit” is the name given to the white stuff a tube hurls at you after you ride through it) and giving bashful autographs to big gushing blond surf-groupie, free-love hippie chicks with hardly any clothes on.

There were several thousand people on the beach, listening to a Brazilian announcer provide a weird, non sequitur rambling narration for each surf heat, particularly when fellow Brazilian Victor Ribas pulled into a tube and didn’t come out: “Look at heem stand up. Proud he is. Victor, he jut do the job. He jut pull it in and die inside. Also, you must remember to buy Vans fine footwear, appropriate for all situation and occasion, Vans, yes, they keep you looking great.”

There was some early drama when Trevor Knox popped an eardrum, and Brock Little towed him into shore on a Jet Ski. He stumbled onto the beach holding his head with two people supporting him under the arms; later, everyone learned he hadn’t lost his equilibrium.

Andy Irons, a Hawaiian-born bruiser who underperformed at the beginning of the year because he was totally drunk, had the perfect-10 scoring wave of the day. He’s better now, his blood has been laundered, he’s clean, bathed, focused and no longer sporting those tragic 3 a.m. self-haircuts that made him look like he’d been taken to the vet for stitches.

He began on a big second-reef wave, way offshore, looking like a tiny speck, then zigzagged up and down the wave and got closer and closer to the beach. Finally the wave obliged him and made a little, wobbly barrel-tube (crucial for point accumulation), and he slid inside and vanished and everyone on the beach thought it would close out and eat him — we were all beginning to feel disappointed.

Suddenly, Andy shot happily out the other side with his arms up and it was wholly magical. Everyone started screaming. It was as if he’d just turned the island upside down like a snow globe and shook the ocean until it did what he needed it to do.

Old surf hero Gerry Lopez, the Godfather of Pipeline and the man for whom Mountain Dew named the Pipe Masters contest, was casually slouching and shuffling around like beloved beach royalty; egoless, beatnik-suave, in faded surf shorts and an old T-shirt. He was lovingly flanked by wrinkled, long-in-the-tooth white hula ladies in bright bikinis and hand-clasped by starry-eyed young men, and he made funny, humble comments over the loudspeaker. He might as well have been in a bathrobe in his living room, he was so ultracasual, despite the fact that the surf cognoscenti were weepy and trembling in his presence.

Watching Kelly Slater in the water was kind of ridiculous — he does things that look physically wrong. Nature has a crush on him and is obeying him. Waves that don’t come for anybody else come for Slater, and he bats them around gleefully, with a scalpel-clean precision that nobody else has.

Later, I had the extreme pleasure of meeting and eating with the Surfers, a musical trio composed of Kelly Slater, perennial ASP top 16er Rob Machado and big-mouth, fun-boy surf monkey Peter King. In Japan, the Surfers are huge. In the States, their label fucked them over and nothing happened, just like any other band, the usual dismal reaming by the iron-fanged dildo of the music industry.

Kelly Slater was nothing like I thought he’d be. Much as I loathe blowing gold up anyone’s ass and digressing into hapless fan-girl twaddle, I have to say Kelly Slater is superhumanly cool. My previous impression of him, from magazines and videos, was that he was incredibly distracted by his Otherworldly Communication with the Ocean, which I figured took up at least 75 percent of his total brainpower, and made him kind of a weird, shapeless personality, glazy-eyed and only about 12 percent present.

Socially, I had expected him to be a thick, simple genius type: I sit here with a placid smile beautified and incoherent behind my sapphire wall of athletic godhood, thinking things only dolphins would comprehend, and am therefore totally boring.

I theorized that Pamela Anderson Lee, his last girlfriend, dumped him because he was this sanctified type of boring. This is not the case; he’s fascinating, funny as hell, scarily bright, totally there, ready with the relaxed one-liners and spot-on impersonations.

He and Gerry Lopez both reminded me of the Zen idea that Zen masters are like great stand-up comics — they are so preternaturally relaxed and flowingly in tune with the cosmos, they always have an ironic, sublime zinger in their pocket ready to ignite the dinner table. Some surfers have it too; I reckon a constant awareness of death will make you a funny guy.

Since comparatively few people know what a Thing it is to be alive in the time of Kelly Slater (Babe Ruth, Muhammad Ali, etc., the Great Sports Personality, the Realized Man), he has no toxic star aura; you can sit at a dinner table with him and feel at ease and interrupt him and you never feel like you couldn’t steal a parking place from him, or sock him in the thigh as punctuation.

I was appalled to find that there are really no grubby, humanizing aspects of Kelly Slater. I always look for the flaw in the Wall of Wonder, the dirty little thing that makes the star more like me. OK, Pamela Anderson Lee ditched him to get pimp-slapped by Tommy some more. OK, he’s got a goofy, irony-free music project, and he played himself on TV on “Baywatch” for a while, ha ha ha, snicker snicker. But Slater is so open about all this stuff that there is no use trying to tie it on him as some kind of bib of shame. It’s just more evidence of his superior well-roundedness, his not taking himself too seriously.

Even Kelly Slater’s glaring deficiencies are fucking cool, revoltingly enough. It is wholly disconcerting to see that much unflawedness coagulated in one human being. Disgusting, really.

I found myself easily divulging embarrassing personal information to Slater in the course of conversation, just because an intimate chat with him naturally swerves toward death and mortality and religion; it’s everyday stuff for him in his workaday world, like a jammed Xerox machine for the rest of us.

“What’s the longest you’ve ever been held under, Kelly?” I asked.

“Not very long. Around 15 seconds, I guess. It’s never the big waves you think are going to hold you under that hold you under, it’s the little, innocuous-looking ones.” (Ah, yes. Applicable to art and life. He’s always inadvertently spouting off these multileveled walnuts of experiential folk wisdom and esoteric universal law.)

“Kelly Slater is the horniest guy in surfing,” Peter King whispered to me, across the table.

I got some gossip out of the group. Apparently, California hard-ass surfers Christian Fletcher and Flea Virotsko hate each other so much that they have decided to do a no-holds-barred fight wherein they get locked into a cage and thrash the living shit out of each other until one of them isn’t moving anymore. The winner will get $10,000; the loser will get $5000. (Gentle Readers, your author hopes to cover this event for you.)

All the big boys at Surfer magazine are running far away from the magazine, quitting en masse, chucking 40 years of tradition (now kneecapped by corporate disease) in favor of a new online surf mag slated to come out in the spring called Swell, and held aloft by Japanese money. Only the Japanese care about keeping our better, more isolated American art forms alive; rare jazz, surfing, rockabilly hairdos. America places no value on its own genuine blasts of culture, and therefore will eventually have none.

Big blond Chris Malloy, the earnest John Boy Walton of the ASP, said he was using the bathroom and he heard someone say, “I just saw a table full of all the guys from Surfer magazine, and Kelly Slater was over there totally kissing their asses!”

“Man, I’m just trying to get a quarter-page picture! That’s all!” squealed Kelly. Everybody laughed, kissing Kelly’s ass, knowing he’s the axis upon which their whole commercial world spun for the last few years. There is, in the surfing world, a love/hate relationship with what little press there is; it is both too much and not enough. There is barely a surf industry to speak of, but those surfers who actively court photo opportunities are regarded as the worst, most laughable kinds of whores.

I got to talking to Slater about Trevor Sifton, one of the most (or least, depending how you look at it) legendary surfers on the North Shore, and maybe the only surfer Slater suspects is cooler than himself. Sifton is an “international male model” of absurd beauty and a hallowed big-wave masochist who has never, ever let himself be shot for surf magazines. He continually haunts the most obscure, lethal and remote areas to surf all alone, and is self-professedly “anti-ego” to the point of total obscurity, except to the surfers who are in awe of him, who’ve paddled out to the heaviest, most fearful, hidden outside waves found in nature and discovered Trevor sitting there already, camped out like a hermit on the wet mountaintop, executing drops that others would need a crowd on the beach and board shorts electro-charged with unclean Fame Nerves to pull off. Trevor’s always been doing it, and still does; no leash, no cameras, no endorsements, and nobody watching. Just him and the ocean — looking better than God, if you paddle out far enough to see him.

“I don’t think he’s ever had his picture in a magazine,” mused Slater admiringly, mindful of his own glossy uber-presence.

The day I left the North Shore, they ran the finals. Kelly Slater loop-de-looped to victory, capping off a perfect-10 ride with an aerial 360 against poor Occy, who had surfed his ass off to no avail. (It was Slater’s record-making fifth Pipe Masters title.) Sweet, all-too-human Occy was so saddened and demoralized he left the beach without a word, knowing all too well that he was world champ only because Slater had flung the title away like a chew toy that had lost its squeak.

Kelly was onto other things, fighting crime, banishing demons, reinventing golf, somersaulting in the air over fields of poppies. Whatever a perfect fucker like Kelly does. “Stay hidden. Be Trevorina Sifton,” was one of the last things Slater said to me.

Oh, yeah. We should all be so cool.

So it was a bit of surprise when the Home Affairs Committee of the British House of Commons invited King to testify in its “Roots of violent radicalisation” inquiry. Inevitably, King’s I.R.A.-supporting past came up.

It was the longtime Labour MP David Winnick, who was first elected to the House of Commons in 1966, who confronted King.

“There’s been some surprise in the United States but also in Britain that you have a job looking into and investigating into terrorism,” said Winnick. King, the MP added, “seems to be an apologist for terrorism.”

Winnick cited a King quote from 1982:

We must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry.

And another from 1985:

If civilians are killed in an attack on a military installation, it is certainly regrettable, but I will not morally blame the I.R.A. for it.

“Do you stand by that?” Winnick asked King.

“I stand by it in the context of when it was said,” King responded, without hesitation.

He later added that those quotes were designed to “put [the conflict] in a perspective” for an American audience that was too often exposed to anti-I.R.A. points of view.

He then offered this lengthy defense of the role he played during the conflict in Ireland. Conspicuously missing from it is any denunciation of, or expression of regret for, I.R.A. terrorism.

I stand by it in the context of when it was said. … I can cite you Tony Blair, as recently as March of this year, put out a long statement defending my record both in the 1980s and throughout the Irish peace process. I was just out in the hallway and Baroness Kennedy came up to me to thank me for the work I did in the Irish peace process. Paul Murphy came by last evening.

What I was saying — and I stand by it — is that the situation in northern Ireland — there were loyalist paramilitaries and obviously Republican paramilitaries — and I believe that, I had gotten to know Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. And I was very confident that if the Republican movement could get to the table, you would see a peace process. And I believe the United States had a very significant role to play as an honest mediator, as an honest broker. And I worked very closely with Bill Clinton, I was very much involved in the Good Friday agreements, I was very involved in getting Gerry Adams’ visa, but also involved in getting loyalists into the United States. I felt that when it was on the table, that Adams and McGuinness would be able to, if you will, control the republican movement. And it’s worked. Tony Blair said I made invaluable contribution to peace, Bill Clinton has cited me in his memoirs as a person who was very much involved.

It was never my position as an Irish-American, whether or not Ireland was united, to me there were injustices in the north. There were good people on both sides. I spent a lot of time meeting with the loyalist community, the unionist community, at the same time, and I came away from that convinced that there was a role for the U.S. to play. What I was saying with those quotes, I was also trying to put in perspective. All of the quotes were anti-I.R.A. in the United States, no mention [ever] made of the UVF or the UDA or the Red Hand Commandos or whatever. I was trying to put it in a perspective to show that there were people — that this is not just the terrorist mayhem it was made out to be — that there were significant leaders on the Republican side.

It’s also worth noting here that this year King defended his support for the I.R.A. to the New York Times by claiming that the group had “never attacked the United States. And my loyalty is to the United States.” He did not repeat that explanation to the parliamentary committee.

Winnick followed up on the exchange by asking about British use of torture against the I.R.A. being used as a recruiting tool, and whether there is a parallel to post-9/11 U.S. torture policies. King said he did not believe there was.

Watch the exchange, beginning at the 10:18:50 mark.

Blaming Political Correctness for Terrorism

King’s hearings underscored the urgency with which a growing cast of influential characters seeks to open yet wider the door to the sort of anti-democratic (and anti-constitutional) actions that have been woven into counterterrorism policy since September 11, 2001. As chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, King made it his job to acknowledge the obstacle that — as he might put it — excessive tolerance for minorities, foreigners, or other religions and cultures can pose. “To back down [from these hearings],” he insisted when criticized, “would be a craven surrender to political correctness and an abdication of what I believe to be the main responsibility of this committee — to protect America from a terrorist attack.”

It was hardly the first time in the Obama era that political correctness has been identified as a major cause of terrorism, or at least as a major roadblock to confronting terrorism. One need only think back to the November 2009 killing spree in which Major Nidal Hasan, a Muslim Army psychiatrist, fatally gunned down 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas. In an op-ed penned several days after the attack, Republican Congressman John Carter, who represents the district where Fort Hood is located, pointedly connected political correctness to the dangers posed to the country by terrorism, warning, “Political correctness is killing Americans and undermining the national security of the United States.”

Key political figures continue to use the Hasan case to harp upon the imagined horrors of being politically correct. For instance, in February, a Senate Homeland Security Committee report was still fretting that military “worries” about “political correctness inhibited Hasan’s superiors and colleagues who were deeply troubled by his behavior from taking the actions against him that could have prevented the attack at Fort Hood.” Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn, commenting on the report, insisted that “we must never allow the safety of those who defend our freedom to play second fiddle to political correctness.”

Dorothy Rabinowitz, a conservative columnist in the Wall Street Journal, echoed Cornyn, arguing in a much-cited op-ed that military psychiatrists failed to see Hasan’s rampage coming because they inhabited “the world of the politically correct.”

The message that political correctness is allowing al-Qaeda-ish wolves in sheep’s clothing to penetrate the country’s defenses has been spreading, based in part on claims about unlearned lessons from past incidents of terrorism. Last month, at New York Law School’s City Law Breakfast Series, for example, Michael Mukasey, George W. Bush’s last attorney general and the former chief judge of the Southern District of New York, informed an audience of judges, lawyers, reporters, and law students that political correctness had actually been responsible for the FBI’s failure to stop the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.

“When a group of FBI agents approached what they thought was a bunch of folks who were taking rather aggressive target practice,” he told his audience, “and thought that they would give them a toss…and get their identification and so on…these folks put them off and challenged them and said [the FBI agents] were engaged in what is now known as profiling and [the agents] being polite, politically correct, backed off.” These “folks,” Mukasey added, included the ones who later hatched the plot on the World Trade Center.

On the specific crimes of political correctness, Mukasey was blunt: it gives a free pass to Islam which he suggests is a dangerous religion. “We live in a culture…in which we hesitate to ask questions about other people’s religion, but when that religion is something they use as a justification for imposing a system on us, we are very well entitled to ask questions about it and to draw appropriate conclusions.” These “appropriate conclusions,” his audience was left to conclude, seemed to include the notion that Islam “causes” terrorism.

According to Mukasey, guilt over earlier eras of American history is now working to derail commonsense measures for safeguarding the country. “We were very much on guard… and still are against a repetition of our treatment of the Japanese during World War II and of fomenting religious and ethnic tension in this country. We are also a society that is reluctant to examine other folks’ religions. For those two reasons, we shun the notion of a war on any movement that is or claims to be inspired by a religion.” According to Mukasey, even President Bush was swayed by an irresponsible emphasis on tolerance into “going so far as to tell us that… ‘Islam is a religion of peace.’”

Revenge Enters the Torture Debate

The conviction that political correctness has been crippling America’s struggle with violent jihadists inevitably leads Mukasey and others like him into treacherous waters that tend to sweep away ever more civil liberties, as has been true for Washington policymakers since George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror began. For them, the urge to chip away at a traditional American commitment to religious toleration reflects a deeper imperative to jettison a wide range of traditional legal protections.

In Mukasey’s rendering of recent history, the failure of al-Qaeda to mount another major set of attacks in the United States can be explained by the Bush-Cheney administration’s willingness to stiff-arm politically correct civil libertarians and human rights advocates. As the former attorney general put it at that breakfast meeting, “A great deal of this success, I believe, was due to the CIA interrogation program, which involved…questioning [detainees] vigorously at times.”

He’s talking about torture, of course, a word he couldn’t quite bring himself to utter, even though the euphemisms of others on the subject offend him. Here’s what he said about the phrase “enhanced interrogation techniques” which often replaced “torture” in Bush administration and media accounts of what CIA interrogators and others were doing: “[It was] probably one of the worst PR campaigns since New Coke… It sounds like a wash product, doesn’t it? Enhanced — get the whitest wash on the block. I think ‘harsh techniques,’ ‘coercive techniques’ would have been a whole lot more accurate and in the end a whole lot less harmful, because when you use the euphemism like ‘enhanced’ it sounds as if you are trying to hide something that you believe to be horrible and that you’re ashamed of… and that was a disastrous choice.”

Only the politically correct, it seems, would imagine that there was anything shameful or dishonorable about torturing a naked prisoner, tied helplessly to a chair or bolted to the floor.

And talking about the temper of the times, recently yet another judge from the Southern District of New York introduced a new rationale for torture, one that, even in the darkest days of the Bush administration, had not been publicly spoken, much less authoritatively explained from the federal bench. At the sentencing of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the sole Guantanamo detainee to be tried in a federal court (for his role in the bloody 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania), the judge, Lewis Kaplan, made it his business to opine about torture. During the trial, he had refused to let the government’s star witness testify. His grounds: only through Ghailani’s torture had investigators been able to identify that witness who was thus “fruit of the poisoned tree” and constitutionally prohibited from taking the stand. For this, he was embraced as a hero by civil libertarians, myself included, and reviled by conservatives and war-on-terror hawks.

Convicted on one of 284 counts, Ghailani was sentenced to life without parole. During his sentencing, Judge Kaplan suddenly took off the gloves, to use a phrase much loved by those in favor of “enhanced interrogation techniques” in the Bush years. Specifically, he went out of his way to undercut any moral (as opposed to strictly legal) objections to the torture of detainees in American custody. He said:

I have not previously expressed any opinion as to whether Mr. Ghailani’s treatment by the United States was illegal and I do not do so now. That question is not before me. What I will say is this: Whatever Mr. Ghailani suffered at the hands of the CIA and others in our government, and however unpleasant the conditions of his confinement, the impact on him pales in comparison to the suffering and the horror that he and his confederates caused. For every hour of pain and discomfort that he suffered, he caused a thousand-fold more pain and suffering to entirely innocent people.

From a well-respected member of the federal bench, that statement represented an under-reported benchmark in American legal history. In a few carefully chosen words, Kaplan moved the arguments in favor of torture out of the context of gaining actionable intelligence (however mythical that might be in torture cases) and into the context of revenge. In so doing, he displayed a startling willingness to throw away enduring normative restraints on the exercise of power over those incapable of resisting, restraints that had previously seemed inseparable from American culture and the American legal system.

No longer on the bench, Mukasey had explicitly justified the torture of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on the grounds that the pain his interrogators inflicted disgorged invaluable information for stopping future attacks on Americans. Judge Kaplan took Mukasey several steps further, by implying from the bench that no one could morally object to American interrogators torturing a terror suspect, not because he offered actionable intelligence, but simply because of the terrible crimes he was, at the time, alleged to have committed.

Enemy Creep

It has been a persistent worry of civil libertarians that violations of the rights of non-citizens would eventually contaminate the ways citizens are treated, too; that a process of “enemy creep” would, in the end, result in the Guantanamo-ization of American terrorism suspects.

When rights were first denied to captives at Guantanamo Bay, the Bush administration argued that a prison in Cuba should not be considered subject to the constitutional principles that apply to Americans everywhere or to anyone within the territorial boundaries of the U.S. It is, however, quite another matter, as in the King hearings, to single out Muslims or others in our midst as potential terrorists and then to argue that when arrested — even if they are U.S. citizens or captured or tried on U.S. soil — they should be denied the protections of U.S. law.

At the moment, the most alarming example of “enemy creep” can be found in the case of Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private who allegedly downloaded hundreds of thousands of classified documents from Army computer systems and turned them over to WikiLeaks. He is now being held on 24 charges in 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement in a brig at Quantico Marine Base in Virginia, while awaiting a court martial slated to begin later this spring.

There, among other punitive forms of treatment, he has reportedly been denied his clothes at night (though he is now apparently allowed to sleep in a coarse, tear-proof gown), supposedly as a form of self-protection. In captivity, nakedness, as the infamous abuses at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison demonstrated, is above all a form of humiliation, and often the first step towards physical and sexual abuse, including torture. Manning, neither Muslim nor accused of terrorism, is nonetheless clearly considered by his captors an enemy of the nation, a traitor. As a result, he is being kept under conditions which should make Americans take note of the blurring of, and crossing of, previously sacrosanct lines and the dismantling of long-established rights when it comes to defining and punishing “the enemy.” Though no jihadi terrorist, Manning, too, is being punished before being tried for the crime of threatening national security.

In a recent press conference, President Obama professed to find nothing legally or morally objectionable about such punishment without trial. The Pentagon, he said, had assured him that “the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards,” adding that “[s]ome of this has to do with Private Manning’s safety.” (State Department spokesperson P.J. Crowley, who had publicly criticized the Pentagon’s handling of Manning, which led to that question about him at the press conference, was soon after forced out of his job.) Perhaps we are to believe that, according to the standard put forward by Judge Kaplan, however abusive the conditions of Manning’s confinement, the impact on him pales in comparison to the suffering and the horror he is alleged to have caused.

Thanks to Mukasey, Kaplan, King, those overseeing the treatment of Manning, and others, the embrace of cruel standards when it comes to alleged enemies of the state is gaining traction. These officials and former officials seem to be part of a process, remarkably uncommented upon, that is turning previously unthinkable rhetoric into normal discourse and intolerance into a rationale for challenging the rights of anyone accused of violating the country’s security.

Perhaps we should consider the King hearings and the ever more extreme statements of a growing cadre of well-respected figures as an omen. At an increasingly rapid pace, the boundaries of acceptable civil discourse are being crossed and rights in America are being tossed away — at least when it comes to national security issues. Today, even with a constitutional lawyer as president, fear continues to cow those who have the power to make a difference.

There is a dual lesson in recalling what Madison and Jefferson did in embracing freedom of religion while sending warships to silence pirates and bullies on the shores of Tripoli. Their prescience may surprise you.

Echoes of “what the founders believed” reverberate all the time, especially coming from the lips of those with axes to grind who are seeking scriptural support from the Constitution. Take the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Long Island congressman Peter King, who opened his remarks last week on the threat posed by radical Islam by charging “special interest groups” with having caused “hysteria” in anticipation of the extended hearings he is now orchestrating. Actually, he has it backward. Hysteria is what he is feeding.

Congressman King overlooks what is the very essence of James Madison’s thinking: religious discrimination as the most dangerous threat to liberty. “Whilst we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess, and to observe a religion which we believe to be of divine origin,” he wrote in his bold “Memorial and Remonstrance” of 1784, “we cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us.” Madison and Jefferson first met in the fall of 1776, three months after the Declaration of Independence, as fellow members of the Committee on Religion in the Virginia State Assembly. Freedom of conscience, then under consideration in Williamsburg, was the subject on which they first saw eye to eye; the two young legislators were impelled toward collaboration in order to change the laws and disestablish the Anglican Church. Their liberal advocacy opened the way for Baptists, Methodists, Quakers and others to extend their reach.

In his 1785 Notes on Virginia, Jefferson wrote: “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” For making this dangerous statement, he was painted in broad strokes by self-righteous conservatives in 1800, as the confirmed atheist who, if elected president, would burn all Bibles. Their idea was: You’re not “one of us” if you question the right of Christian ministers to enforce a moral consensus — that which sustains the illusion that the community can be kept safe by espousing the same or similar views. Fearful people look for comfort in the predictable, in simple formulations. That’s where enemies come in handy.

The same impulse led to the Japanese internment and drove Cold Warriors to see corrosive communism in families and in schools and in Hollywood. In some circles today, the term “social justice” has acquired a bad name, as an unsafe redistribution of wealth that could trickle down to foreign illegals. If it is possible to conceive that “social justice” is a threat, then American Muslims are easy pickings — just look for the prayer rugs.

To Madison, attacking a person’s religion was the first step in disempowering and demonizing a minority. This slow dehumanization was an effective political tool for enhancing the political clout of the loudest faction in society. We can see shades of the same phenomenon in the crass calls of birthers and their Republican enablers who refuse to dismiss the nonsense about our illegitimate “Muslim” president.

Find an enemy, preying and bestial, to hate. An enemy, readily identifiable, will help alleviate our national anxieties. Only it won’t. Peter King justifies the ongoing hearings by saying that “to back down would be a surrender to political correctness.” No sane person would dispute the need for our government agencies to continue to exercise extreme vigilance and aggressively act to stop all security threats. But like those who saw religious pluralism as a threat to security in 1800, King is mixing a distaste for what strikes him as un-American with old-fashioned fear-mongering.

Minnesota Democrat Keith Ellison, a member of the committee and a Catholic who converted to Islam at age 19, takes issue with the Republican congressman. “You investigate the Mafia,” he struck back, employing an easy analogy, “not Italians.” He was speaking on “Real Time With Bill Maher” after the first day of the hearings, contradicting Rep. King by suggesting that all of the committee’s stagecraft might actually “cause the thing it’s trying to prevent” — more radicalism.

Madison knew something about Islam. As Jefferson’s secretary of state, he oversaw the Tripolitan War from 1801 to 1805. (Yes, our republic’s first significant foreign war took its name from the very city where Col. Moammar Gadhafi presently tests the world’s patience.) For years, the Barbary States of North Africa — Algiers, Tunis, Morocco and Tripoli — had been attacking vessels in the Mediterranean, capturing crews and holding them hostage until a ransom was paid. When the U.S. balked at paying tribute, the pasha (chief) of Tripoli declared war. Neither Madison nor Jefferson shied from using force to teach the tyrants a lesson, illustrating the young nation’s pride.

Just as significantly, though, the Jefferson administration was careful not to turn the conflict into a holy war. Madison instructed the U.S. consul in Algiers to exhibit “universal toleration in matters of religion.” When Pope Pius VI learned of America’s naval triumph on the shores of Tripoli, he praised the administration for its defense of Christianity. Madison and Jefferson flatly rejected the pope’s perspective, even though the literature on Islamic culture published in the U.S. in the first few years of the 19th century insisted that the religion of the Barbary States made its people “superstitious and cruel.” Madison and Jefferson appreciated that their war was about the use of power in the national interest, and nothing else. They were pragmatic politicians, not zealots.

Madison had witnessed the persecution of religious minorities in Virginia, where the Anglican Church used tax dollars and corporate land grants to extend its power and silence dissenters by holding over their heads the threat of prosecution for heresy. And so he committed himself to the protection of minorities. In the famous Federalist No. 10, drafted in support of the Constitution, he contended that the most dangerous political factions were those inspired by religious and political fanaticism and aggravated by demagogic orators. In recent performances, the pugnacious Peter King seems the perfect embodiment of Madison’s worst-case scenario.

Rep. King led the charge against the so-called ground zero mosque, a proposed community center with a prayer room (not quite a mosque). Invoking the concern that any Islamic site would tarnish the memory of those who died on 9/11 worked on the patriotic imagination and effectively captivated the media for weeks. More recently, King stated in a Fox News interview (with no facts to back up his fear-mongering) that 85 percent of Muslim religious leaders in the United States were influenced by radical Islamic and terrorist beliefs.

He is not moved by the fact that at least 29 Muslims died at ground zero, a fact Rep. Ellison made clear as a member of the Homeland Security Committee. His account of Mohammed Salman Hamdani, a Muslim American casualty on 9/11, showed how the culture of fear led some to “smear” his name. The real Hamdani was an “all-American kid,” a member of his high school football team, a police cadet and paramedic. His identity was erased as rumors were spread, and a heroic young man was transformed into a terrorist simply to support a convenient narrative in which an adherent of a religion is automatically defined as violent.

During the War of 1812, when the enemy ultimately set fire to the Capitol, the president’s house and other government buildings, Madison would not sacrifice his principles. Though Secretary of State James Monroe urged him to curb freedom of speech and enforce sedition prosecutions (there was considerable pro-British sentiment), he would not do so. Also, as president, he refused to charter an Episcopal church in Alexandria, Va., because, he said, the national government should take no “cognizance” of religion. In a Madisonian world, any memorial at ground zero should take no cognizance of religion — by the same token, you do not mask religious discrimination behind the rhetoric that a Muslim center in the same neighborhood would insult the dead.

Granted, it is not always easy to maintain Madisonian principles. Political animals are not known for abiding by rational solutions. But if we apply a Madisonian perspective to the hearings, we can see clearly that they are skewed to underscore King’s most prominent fears. He has intentionally excluded many of the security experts in this country from testifying, when they might put a damper on the singular focus on American Muslims.

Here is another little-known fact about James Madison: He made sure that the Constitution forbade all religious tests for holding office. “Merit alone,” he said, was to be the basis for officeholding — not one’s religious background. It was, you might say, an article of faith for him. Although his was a time of remarkable prejudices as much as it was a period of growing national pride, when the enslavement of Africans could still be rationalized by his friends and neighbors, Madison would exclude no religious group — not even Muslims — from a place in government.

Bottom line: The oft-quoted “Father of the Constitution” was fully convinced that religious hatred excites the worst, most irrational passions; and when majorities target minorities for abuse, they behave as a soulless mob. Madison argued, time and again, that “enflamed” majorities caused decent individuals to go against their own consciences, disregarding their best principles while sheepishly following the crowd.

Haven’t we figured it out yet? It is not religion that makes a terrorist; it is belief in a radical ideology condoning violence, a perverted ideology promoting the killing of civilians, and even blowing up oneself, in the name of a cause. We will be safer when, as a people, we tackle each form of terrorism as the sociopathic problem it is.

Demagogic displays, the exploitation of the vulnerabilities of minorities, gives only a false sense of security. Madison made this clear to his fellow Americans in 1784, when he declared that any official of the government who made himself a judge, or interpreter, of another’s religious life not only revealed “an arrogant pretension,” but was at the same time contradicting the teachings of Christianity, which “disavows a dependence on the powers of this world.” And as much as Madison insisted that government had no business making laws to constrain religious practice, he was just as insistent that religion’s intrusion into government affairs invited greater tyranny. What had religious establishment contributed to civilization? he posed. “Superstition, bigotry, and persecution.”

To celebrate his birthday properly, James Madison’s cogent observations ought to remind us to uphold our founding ideals even when indiscreet politicians and pundits with microphones are leading us astray.

Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg are professors of history at Louisiana State University, and co-authors of “Madison and Jefferson.”

King’s not the only American politician to have publicly supported a terrorist group. An Iranian militant group known as the Mujahadin-e Khalq, or MEK, has also enjoyed the support of several prominent U.S. political figures despite the group’s designation as a terrorist organization. According to the State Department, the group’s killed several U.S. military personnel and civilians during the 1970s, had ties to Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, and uses “propaganda and terrorism” to wage a worldwide campaign against the Iranian government, even while in exile. The group claims to have renounced terrorism in 2003.

MEK’s prominent U.S. supporters – mostly Republicans, but some Democrats too – have attended pro-MEK events and personally voiced support for the removal of MEK from the U.S. terror list.

They include: former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, former New York mayor Rudolph Guiliani, former homeland security secretary Tom Ridge, former White House Homeland Security advisor Frances Townsend, former attorney general Michael Mukasey, former CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden, former Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo, former Indiana Congressman Lee Hamilton, and many others. They’ve made the enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend argument, noting that MEK is an organized resistance group opposing a terrorist state.

“The United States should not just be on your side,” Guiliani said at a pro-MEK event in December, the Washington Post reported. “It should be enthusiastically on your side. You want the same things we want.”

As Time magazine noted, however, the group isn’t popular back in Iran – especially not with Iran’s pro-democracy movement, which challenged the regime following the country’s contested 2009 presidential election and whose members have also led some of the recent protests in Iran.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said this week that the State Department is reviewing MEK’s designation as a terrorist group.

1:50 The hearing ends with a brief statement from Rep. Thomas Marino (R-PA) defending the hearing itself (he also invokes the inevitable “I have many friends who are Muslims” line). Indeed, much of the hearing was taken up arguing about the propriety of the hearing. Marino also assures a Democratic colleague that he would be on board with a similar hearing about the KKK and Christian terrorism in the future.

King closed the session by thanking witnesses and noting that it went more smoothly than might have been expected, given the controversy. It’s not clear what’s specifically is going to happen net — but King has suggested that there are more hearings to come on Muslim “radicalization.” In terms of how today’s session will play in the media, Adam Serwer seems correct that the Dems will promote Rep. Keith Ellison’s emotional testimony, while Republicans will emphasize the story of Melvin Bledson, whose son became an Islamic extremist and allegedly killed a solider in Arkansas.

The other big story here is how King significantly amped down his own rhetoric in the face of persistent criticism over the past few months. This is a man who in recent years has repeatedly claimed that 80 percent of mosques are controlled by extremists and was in the forefront of the fight against the so-called “ground zero mosque.” Today, finding himself in an intense media spotlight, King came off as relatively sober — if sticking to his guns on some controversial claims. (His full opening remarks are here.)

1:28 Chris Moody at the Daily Caller gets the video of Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) railing against King and the framing of the hearing for “demonizing … a whole broad base of human beings.” She added: “There are no redeeming factual information that we will receive today that can add to the abhorrence that all of us have on terrorism in the United States of America.”

Watch:

12:57 And the fight over CAIR reaches as a fever pitch as freshman Rep. Chip Cravaak (R-MN) calls the group “a terrorist organization,” citing the case I described below. Cravaak was challenging Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, who has emerged as the star witness for the Democrats, as to why Baca works with the “terrorist” CAIR. (He had said earlier that his deputies had good relations with the southern California chapter of the group.)

Responded Baca: “If the FBI has something to charge CAIR with, bring those charges.”

12:34 Several Republicans — including King and now Rep. Paul Broun, a man who once was part of a comic effort to hunt out Muslim interns from Capitol Hill — have taken shots at the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which is one of the most prominent Muslim groups in the country.

There’s a complicated backstory here, but the most common attack on CAIR involves citing the fact that the group was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation Hamas funding case in the late 2000s. The Texas-based Holy Land Foundation was convicted of sending $12 million to Hamas, which is illegal because Hamas is designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist group. But the list of co-conspirators contained more than 300 groups — including some of the biggest American Muslim organizations — and has been disputed by CAIR and civil liberties groups as unfair.

Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that CAIR has denounced terrorism, as the group explains in a prominent section of its website:

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has consistently and persistently condemned terrorism and the killing of innocent civilians.  CAIR has also organized fatwas, petition drives, placed advertisements in national and local newspapers, ran public service announcements on television and radio stations, helped local Mosques across the United States in holding open houses, published Op-Eds in local and national newspapers, conducted inter-faith meetings and worked with scholars to disseminate the peaceful teachings of Islam.

11:45 We’ve just heard several exchanges that require some context. Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), the ranking member of the committee, has been asking witnesses whether they agree with a statement made by an unspecified Republican that there are “too many mosques” in America. Dr. Jasser, the leader of the right-wing Muslim group, replied that he did not agree.

What Thompson didn’t mention is that the statement was made by Peter King, the chair of the committee, in a now-notorious interview with Politico in 2007. In response to Thompson just now, King said, “I never said there’s too many mosques in America.” In fact, he did say that. Here is the video of the 2007 interview:

King has consistently maintained that he was really saying that there are too many mosques who do not cooperate with police in the country.

11:25 And here is the video of that emotional moment from Keith Ellison I mentioned earlier:

11:18 The committee just heard from the father of the man who in 2009 allegedly opened fire at a Little Rock military recruiting center, killing one soldier and wounding another. The father, Melvin Bledsoe, said his son converted to Islam and then became an extremist after traveling to Yemen. “Something is wrong with the Muslim leadership in Nashville,” he added.

There is some good commentary and analysis out there on the hearing — and, perhaps more importantly, the Obama administration’s own policies in countering “radicalization.” Adam Serwer at the American Prospect points out that, while the administration has been playing “good cop” and criticizing King’s fiery rhetoric, it is in fact “already singling out American Muslims for close scrutiny.” He writes about the infiltration of mosques:

The Obama administration kept the Bush-era FBI investigative guidelines, which are more lax on matters of racial and ethnic profiling. The rules allow FBI agents to initiate surveillance without suspicion of criminality, allow domestic intelligence gathering in religious spaces, and even allow agents to gather information on “concentrated ethnic communities.”

Meanwhile, ThinkProgress points to a report from the Muslim Public Affairs Council concluding that non-Muslim Americans have been involved in plenty of terrorist attacks and plots in the last several years. Think, for example, of the anti-tax activist who flew his plane into an IRS building in Texas last year. Or the attempted bombing of a Martin Luther King Day parade in Spokane, Washington, in January.

10:30 Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, an Arizona man who founded the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, used his time to speak out  against some of the larger national Muslim advocacy groups. “Too many so‐called Muslim leadership groups in America, like the Council on American‐Islamic Relations (CAIR) or Muslim Advocates, have specifically told Muslims across the nation, for example, not to speak to the FBI or law enforcement unless they are accompanied by an attorney,” he said. “Rather than thanking the FBI for ferreting out radicals within our community, they have criticized sting operations as being ‘entrapment.’”

The backstory here is that CAIR’s California chapter was criticized for putting up posters that read, “Build a wall of resistance. Don’t talk to the FBI.” CAIR has said it is merely trying to inform people of their constitutional rights.

Jasser himself came to prominence with a key role in a lurid documentary called the Third Jihad, which was produced by the Clarion Fund. As I’ve reported, the Clarion Fund has close ties to the Israeli right, and appears to be funded by a wealthy Chicago businessman.

10:15 Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), the first Muslim elected to Congress (and one of two current Muslim members), is a witness at the hearing and he gave an emotional statement this morning in which he told the story of Mohammed Salman Hamdani, a paramedic who was killed on 9/11:

Let me close with a story, but remember that it’s only one of many American stories that could be told.  Mohammed Salman Hamdani was a 23-year-old paramedic, a New York City police cadet and a Muslim American.  He was one of those brave first responders who tragically lost their lives in the 9/11 terrorist attacks almost a decade ago.  As The New York Times eulogized, “He wanted to be seen as an all-American kid. He wore No. 79 on the high school football team in Bayside, Queens, where he lived, and he was called Sal by his friends… He became a research assistant at Rockefeller University and drove an ambulance part-time. One Christmas, he sang in Handel’s Messiah in Queens. He saw all the Star Wars movies, and it was well known that his new Honda was the one with “Yung Jedi” license plates.

Mr. Hamdani bravely sacrificed his life to try and help others on 9/11.  After the tragedy some people tried to smear his character solely because of his Islamic faith.  Some people spread false rumors and speculated that he was in league with the attackers only because he was Muslim. It was only when his remains were identified that these lies were fully exposed.

Mohammed Salman Hamdani was a fellow American who gave his life for other Americans.  His life should not be defined as a member of an ethnic group or a member of a religion, but as an American who gave everything for his fellow citizens.

Ellison’s full remarks are here.