When Sami Al-Arian, a computer science professor at the University of South Florida and a Muslim community leader in this Tampa suburb, agreed to go on Fox News’ popular “O’Reilly Factor” Sept. 28, he thought he’d be discussing American Muslims’ reaction to Sept. 11. Instead he found himself denounced by host Bill O’Reilly as a patron of terrorists for his work on behalf of Palestinian statehood, with O’Reilly demanding an explanation for incendiary anti-Israel remarks Al-Arian made 15 years ago.
And that was only the beginning of what has become the most intense debate anywhere in the nation about academic freedom in the wake of Sept. 11. Al-Arian’s “O’Reilly” appearance triggered hundreds of phone calls and e-mails (as well as death threats) from critics outraged that USF would employ the supposed “terrorist.” Three days after his Fox appearance, university president Judy Genshaft suspended the Palestinian-born Al-Arian with pay, ostensibly for his safety and that of the university community; just before Christmas, she fired him.
Genshaft made no pretext that Al-Arian’s academic performance was at issue; he is both tenured and popular with his students. Al-Arian was terminated, she said, for failing to make clear he was speaking for himself and not the university when he appeared on Fox, thus making USF the vortex of right-wing fury about his views. “We are experiencing a level of disruption that no university anywhere is set up to deal with on an ongoing basis.”
The question raised by Al-Arian’s firing — Can a university punish controversial speech by one of its professors? — is not only polarizing Tampa Bay, it is sounding alarm bells throughout academe; and the story of how this local spat caught fire like autumn leaves suggests how fragile the national psyche remains four months after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. The firestorm has pulled in Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who personally appoints USF’s trustees and has praised Genshaft’s move, and Fox attack-dog Bill O’Reilly himself, who has defended the Palestinian academic’s right to his views and denounced the university president for firing him.
The firing has been criticized by the American Association of University Professors and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. On Thursday, Al-Arian will get a chance to defend himself to the university’s administration in an appeal required under his union contract.
The Al-Arian story, like so much about Sept. 11, did not begin with the hijacking of those four airplanes. Instead, it goes back nearly a decade. In the early 1990s, Al-Arian, along with other Palestinian exiles in the Tampa area, founded an Islamic studies center at USF, inviting speakers ranging from mainstream to radical. “What we were trying to do,” Al-Arian recalls, “was foster dialogue” across the broad range of Islamic political opinion. Al-Arian himself — who taught in the university’s engineering school since 1986, and also serves as the imam of the Islamic Community of Tampa, where he founded a well-regarded parochial school attended by over 200 children — emerged as a passionate defender of the Palestinian intifada, occasionally given to the kind of hotheaded rhetoric familiar from liberation movements the world over. And he helped establish a charity to raise money for the families of Palestinians killed in the uprising.
USF first caught heat for its professor’s political commitments in 1994. That year, terrorism maven Steve Emerson produced a controversial PBS documentary called “Jihad in America.” It interspersed video footage of one of Al-Arian’s anti-Israel speeches with images of Sheik Abdul Rahman, the blind cleric convicted in the first World Trade Center bombing, who had once appeared at one of the USF center’s conferences. Emerson, citing anonymous sources, labeled Al-Arian’s center “the primary support group in the United States” for Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Emerson, it should be noted, is no neutral observer of the Islamic scene; a New York Times review of his 1991 book “Terrorist” found it “marred by factual errors and by a pervasive anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian bias.” He lost much of his credibility as a journalist when he rushed to proclaim Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing the work of Muslim terrorists, but his stock recently rose again thanks to the insatiable hunger for “terrorism experts” post-Sept. 11, and he regularly appears on cable news shows. Al-Arian considers his 1994 documentary “a classic example of guilt by association,” and traces his present plight to Emerson’s never-proven allegations.
Controversy returned a year later when the former co-editor of the USF center’s journal, who had disappeared after just six months’ work, turned up in Syria as general secretary of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The FBI, apparently convinced the center was a front for terrorism, seized its computers, videotapes and files and froze its accounts; USF, painted by the media as “Jihad U,” suspended Al-Arian with pay and hired a prominent Tampa lawyer to conduct its own independent investigation. After 15 months the FBI and the university both cleared the center of any connection to terrorism or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. A federal judge later affirmed their findings, calling Al-Arian’s enterprise — which by then had folded its tent — “a reputable and scholarly research center.”
But that wasn’t the end of the saga. Apparently still hoping for pay dirt, Tampa FBI officials decided to arrest Sami Al-Arian’s brother-in-law, a soft-spoken scholar named Mazen Al-Najjar, for unspecified terrorist associations. Al-Najjar — the brother of Al-Arian’s wife, Nahla — had arrived at Tampa in 1981 and earned a doctorate at USF. Al-Najjar was arrested under then new antiterrorism laws allowing suspects to be held on the basis of secret evidence, without the precise charge being revealed in court. For the next three and a half years, Al-Najjar would remain in Bradenton prison without anyone — not his lawyers, not even the judge — ever seeing the purported evidence against him.
The secret-evidence arrest of his brother-in-law galvanized Al-Arian and his family. While continuing to teach at USF, Al-Arian threw himself into building a national effort to challenge such cases. “The whole idea of secret evidence,” he recalls, “was so repugnant, such a repudiation of everything we thought the American system stood for.” The radical campus speaker evolved into a canny coalition-builder, winning friends in Congress ranging from the liberal David Bonior to conservatives like Henry Hyde and Bob Barr and rallying Tampa religious leaders to the case. Indeed, prior to September 11 Congress was close to passing a bill sharply restricting secret-evidence trials.
In May of 2000, a no-nonsense federal judge declared Al-Arian’s brother-in-law’s detention unconstitutional, an immigration judge declared the terrorism charge unfounded and a year ago December Mazen Al-Najjar at last went home to spend Ramadan with his family.
Then came Sept. 11, 2001. The terror attacks on New York and Washington left Al-Arian and his family both sickened and fearful. “This is un-Islamic by every definition, to have innocent people being killed. I don’t see anyone who can claim religion here. This is an evil act,” he told local papers. Members of the mosque donated blood, and Al-Arian helped organize an interfaith service. Muslim schools in the area immediately received threatening calls. “This is worse than any nightmare could be,” brother-in-law Mazen Al-Najjar told a reporter. “I am sad for every reason, for what happened to the victims, for what happened to the world.”
It was, Al-Arian thought, to talk about the Islamic community’s response to the attacks that he agreed on Sept. 28 to appear on “The O’Reilly Factor,” a show he had never seen. Instead, host Bill O’Reilly peppered him with the very charges from 1996 that had long ago been discarded by the FBI and discredited by a federal judge. The transcript is almost comic in its crude tabloid-like melodrama: USF “may be a hotbed for Islamic militants,” O’Reilly warned his audience. He quoted a speech Al-Arian gave 15 years ago: “You did a little speaking engagement in Cleveland, and you were quoted as saying Jihad is our path. Victory to Islam. Death to Israel. Did you say that?” Al-Arian tried gamely to defend himself, saying that “death to Israel” meant “death to occupation, death to apartheid.” He also tried to point out how similarly incendiary President Bush’s talk of a “crusade” seemed to much of the Muslim world.
O’Reilly wasn’t having any of it. “I appreciate your coming on the program, but if I was the CIA I’d follow you wherever you went. I’m saying I’d be your shadow, doctor.”
In a sense, that was exactly what happened. O’Reilly’s interview, and several Fox rebroadcasts, inspired hundreds of e-mails and calls to USF, and numerous death threats. That barrage of mail landed on the desk of USF’s president, Judy Genshaft, who had taken the job just 18 months earlier. And Genshaft was faced with a dilemma: How to balance those threats with the tradition of academic freedom?
Genshaft’s initial response, three days after the O’Reilly show, was to suspend Al-Arian with pay. It was, she declared, a step designed to protect both professor and campus. “I will protect this university as a safe and secure learning environment,” she said, and pointing out that Al-Arian was not under any investigation by the FBI or police.
In retrospect, it seemed a move designed to buy time. And it didn’t work. After O’Reilly, the Tampa Tribune — the more tabloid of the area’s two major newspapers — decided to make a crusade of its own, ressurecting the years-old charges in its editorial pages and news columns, branding Al-Arian a “hate-monger” in its headlines. (By contrast, the more sedate St. Petersburg Times, while criticizing his old speeches, declared that Genshaft’s “first responsibility” was to protect an academic’s right to speak.) Soon the university changed its tune from protecting Al-Arian and the campus to protecting the campus from Al-Arian, warning him in an October letter that he risked disciplinary action should he even set foot on campus after hours.
Still, controversy did not abate: “The death threats are not subsiding,” Genshaft sighed in early October. And as the controversy rose, so did the political stakes: Genshaft’s boss, after all, is Gov. Jeb Bush, the president’s brother. Over the summer, Bush had stopped by the USF campus and delivered a speech on academic freedom, but that was then and this was now.
Finally, on Dec. 19, the school let drop the other shoe: Al-Arian was fired, effective immediately. The professor, Genshaft said, had not made it clear on Fox that he was speaking for himself and not the university.
It was a peculiar accusation: Professors who appear on TV programs are hardly expected to issue such boilerplate disavowals. But Genshaft won immediate support from her boss. “Professors have the right to say things that are unpopular,” Bush said. “But they do not have the right to disrupt the life of a university.” Al-Arian, he declared, “continues to make very provocative statements” — as if provocative statements are grounds for firing a scholar. None of the Florida press corps, apparently, thought to point out that it was threatening callers, not Al-Arian, who were doing the disrupting — or that Al-Arian’s offending rhetoric had been uttered when today’s USF students were still in elementary school.
While Genshaft may have pleased Bush, her decision to fire Al-Arian elevated the case into a high-profile academic freedom controversy. And in a bizarre irony, one of the first to leap to the professor’s defense was … Bill O’Reilly. “You don’t sack a tenured professor for saying stuff you don’t like,” he growled on his program. “This president of the University of South Florida should resign. She’s a coward.”
For Al-Arian’s family, the firing comes at a particularly painful time. In late November the INS rearrested his brother-in-law Mazen Al-Najjar. No secret charges of terrorism this time: Instead, the INS is moving to deport him for overstaying a long-expired student visa. But as a stateless Palestinian he has nowhere to go, and supporters say the Justice Department is using his case to create a precedent for unlimited detention of Palestinian deportees.
In some ways, as a civil liberties issue, Al-Arian’s firing pales beside his brother-in-law’s second detention. After his earlier three-and-a-half-year stint in prison, with secret charges against him, again Al-Najjar is accused of no crime. But he is now being held in solitary confinement, in a maximum-security federal prison, strip-searched twice daily and forbidden contact visits with his family.
Yet the firing of a university professor for his views, past or present, has its own profound and disturbing echoes of witch hunts past. The plight of the Al-Arian family — one member jailed awaiting deportation, the other fired from his teaching post — recalls the precise conditions that inspired the creation of the American Civil Liberties Union during World War I: on the one hand, roundups of immigrant radicals, and on the other hand, the firing of antiwar academics like James McKeen Cattell, the founder of Columbia’s psychology department, and political scientist Scott Nearing, who after being fired from the Wharton School of Business, achieved cult status for books on “Living the Good Life” in rural Vermont and Maine.
The very institution of academic tenure was created to ensure that scholars feel free to speak out on public controversies, whether in or outside their official academic portfolio. What’s more, in a world haunted by terrorism, the stakes in the Sami Al-Arian case go beyond civil libertarian abstraction. If anything helps fuel terrorism, it is a sense that politics cannot work. Sami Al-Arian may be a militant Palestinian nationalist — but he is a militant who proved to himself, and to his communities both in the US and abroad, that politics and democratic institutions like courts can work, by clearing his name and freeing his brother-in-law. Firing Al-Arian because of public hysteria over spurious charges turns the hiring and firing at USF over to a gang of hecklers and telephone thugs. And like the rearrest of his brother-in-law, it sends a disquieting worldwide message that democracy will betray those most clamoring for it.
It’s time for some blunt language: The Bush administration has launched a jihad against the Bill of Rights. The warning signs have been evident for weeks: first, the expansive new surveillance-and-detention powers unleashed by the USA-PATRIOT Act; then Attorney General John Ashcroft’s hobbling of the Freedom of Information Act, the democratic statute that allows the press to shine a light on the dark corners of government. But with President Bush’s executive order establishing military tribunals for noncitizen terrorist suspects, the administration has crossed the Rubicon — quite literally discarding the Constitution in the name of justice.
Bush’s order authorizes military trials, imprisonment and death sentences not only for present or former members of al-Qaida, but for any noncitizen accused of aiding or abetting acts aimed “to cause injury to or adverse effects on the United States, its citizens, national security, foreign policy or economy.” Such trials could take place not only on the Afghanistan battlefield but in the United States. The order is being sold as an expedient means of settling the nettlesome question of what to do with Osama bin Laden, but Bush’s order explicitly applies as well to those already detained at home in the post-Sept. 11 dragnet.
As early as last Thursday, senior administration officials were telling reporters that immigrants currently held in connection with the Sept. 11 investigation might well face charges in the new drumhead courts — courts closed to the public, with a lower standard of evidence and few rights for the accused.
The official justification for avoiding conventional trials of al-Qaida suspects is the difficulty of public trial based on classified information, and the danger of terrorist reprisal against witnesses or jurors. But neither explanation holds water. As recently as June, a New York federal jury convicted al-Qaida-linked suspects in the U.S. Embassy bombings. Just weeks ago, U.S. District Judge Leonard Sand sent them to prison for life. Those convicted of the first World Trade Center bombing went to prison, too.
In fact, the tribunals have little to do with public security and everything to do with a power grab by the Bush administration in the weeks since Sept. 11 — systematically undercutting powers normally held by courts and Congress, protecting the administration’s actions from even routine scrutiny by the press. To understand the dangers posed by Bush’s tribunal order it must be considered alongside the other powers granted the administration by Congress or seized by presidential fiat in recent weeks — most often at the expense of courts or the press, the usual avenues for scrutiny.
The USA-PATRIOT Act (“Uniting and Strengthening America Act by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism”) removed layers of judicial review from wiretaps, expanded the authority of government agents for black bag jobs, and gave federal prosecutors unprecedented access to previously secret grand jury investigations. Then there is USA-PATRIOT’S broad definition of terrorism, a definition echoed in the military-tribunal directive. As Nadine Strossen of the ACLU points out, it’s sweeping enough to permit the Department of Justice to go after activists and dissenting editorialists on subjects as diverse as the World Trade Organization and Puerto Rico’s Vieques bombing range. The public should also not forget those 1,000 or so foreign nationals detained since Sept. 11, their names and any possible charges still unaccounted for. Add to the mix Ashcroft’s fettering of the Freedom of Information Act, telling government agencies they can “be assured” that the Department of Justice will defend their decisions to deny FOIA requests. That has roused opposition from numerous mainstream journalism organizations like the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Finally, there was the Bush decision to delay the release of former President Reagan’s papers into the public domain. The picture that emerges from all this is of an administration using Sept. 11 as an excuse for a massive rollback in civil liberties, the kind of crackdown sought by the law-and-order right ever since the 1960s.
The tribunal order is an end run around Congress, too. By Friday morning, voices as diverse as Georgia’s conservative Rep. Bob Barr and Vermont’s staunchly liberal Sen. Patrick Leahy were all expressing deep alarm not only about the tribunal order itself but about the deep erosion in Congress’ authority. The military-tribunal order not only reflects this administration’s alarming disregard for civil liberties and its equal impatience with Congress, but its disdain for the mechanisms of international justice. The tribunal scheme offers a convenient evasion of any prospect for a credible and open international trial, should al-Qaida leaders fall into allied hands — and, not so coincidentally, an equally convenient evasion of our European allies’ opposition to capital punishment, an opposition reflected in the absence of a death penalty in the tribunals for the Balkans and Rwanda.
To understand where all this is going, think back a few years to Jim Sheriden’s Academy Award-winning film “In the Name of the Father.” That movie told the true story of Gerry Conlon, accused of being an IRA terrorist, tried and convicted with secret evidence under Britain’s Prevention of Terrorism Act. Conlon was a “foreigner” in London — a Northern Irish Catholic, detained in precisely the manner now landing Mideast immigrants in jail. It took years for Conlon to be freed. But Conlon’s trial — at a time of widespread public fear and emotion in Britain not so different from the post-Sept. 11 climate here — was a model of openness and due process compared with the proposed military tribunals, where a guilty verdict and possible death sentence can be based on hearsay evidence and the majority vote of a handpicked military commission, and where the only appeal is directly to the president.
On Thursday, Vice President Dick Cheney was blunt in defense of his boss’s tribunal order. “This is the way we dealt with the people who assassinated Abraham Lincoln and tried to assassinate part of the Cabinet back in 1865.” He also pointed out that Franklin Roosevelt implemented a similar process during World War II which led to those plotting against the United States being “executed in relatively rapid order.” Noncitizen terrorist suspects, he said, “don’t deserve the same guarantees and safeguards” embedded in the law. So al-Qaida suspects, guilty or innocent, don’t deserve the Bill of Rights. But the question is: Do we?
On Thursday, one month after four hijacked airplanes turned the world upside down, a unanimous Senate passed a $2 billion airline-security program that would federalize passenger screening and place armed marshals on hundreds of flights.
Good news for passengers and the public, right? Not according to House Republicans. While Congress has demonstrated remarkable unity in voting for the bombing of Afghanistan and for Attorney General John Ashcroft’s wiretap wish list, an overhaul of the nation’s notoriously lax and haphazard airline security system — the single intervention most likely to impede future hijackings — still seems a long way off. That’s because Republicans in the House have their own, radically different idea: Let the private contractors who have delivered us the current system keep the job.
Republican Whip Tom DeLay has vowed to block any airline security bill that puts federal officers instead of private contractors at the departure gate. And on Friday afternoon, he and other GOP leaders in the House went so far as to urge President Bush to short-circuit the unamimous vote of the Senate with an executive order keeping airport security in private hands. The request came even as Ashcroft announced the criminal indictment of one leading airport passenger-screening contractor, Securicor, for hiring security guards with extensive criminal records in defiance of a previous federal order.
Just hours after the Senate vote in favor of airline security, the only voices a squabbling Congress seemed to be hearing on the subject appeared to be their own — and those of influential lobbyists hired by the contractors in a desperate bid to keep their franchise.
Here is another voice Congress ought to be listening to. Call him Jaime. He is not the kind of person who usually gets invited to testify on Capitol Hill. But when it comes to airline security, Jaime is an expert.
“When I worked at Logan Airport, I always said something terrible was going to happen,” Jaime says, and then repeats himself several times for emphasis. “Security was so lax. So lax.”
Jaime cannot reveal his real name because he holds the kind of job where a reputation as a whistleblower could make him unemployable. He was hired as an airport security guard at Boston’s Logan Airport in 1995. His employer was the giant corporation Servicemaster, whose aviation division holds contracts with more than 30 major airports for custodial service and security. Jaime left Servicemaster and Logan several years ago, when he was offered a better paying and less monotonous job. But the attacks of Sept. 11 brought the experience of his former employment rushing back.
Then, as now, at Logan — and other airports — security was provided through a hodgepodge of private contractors hired by airlines, and overseen by a political appointee of the Massachusetts governor. Some contracts go to uniformed security companies — Burns International Services holds one for Logan, as does Securicor — and some are held by general maintainence companies like Servicemaster, whose employees sometimes alternate between monitoring the departure-gate metal detectors and picking up garbage.
When Servicemaster hired Jaime to screen passengers at Logan, he had no background in law enforcement or security. The pay was $5 per hour. Training? “Ten minutes — they checked us out on the X-ray.” Background check? ” We were asked if we had any current warrants or charges pending.” (If the Justice Department’s indictment of Securicor is any indication, such scant scrunity is typical of airline security conractors.) Jamie’s job? Watching X-ray machines, collecting impermissible weaponry and patting down passengers.
It was a deadening shift in the company of other minimum-wage guards. “You would go to work already in uniform — there were not even lockers for the workers. You would go to your station and just stand there.” He would “stand there” for eight hours with a half-hour break for lunch and two 10-minute coffee breaks, squinting at X-ray machines and an endless parade of passengers. “By the end of the day, it was inevitable that you would miss things,” Jaime says.
Indeed, on several occasions during Jaime’s shifts, FAA inspectors ran dummies with hidden weapons through the metal detectors, and sent through undercover inspectors with contraband. “They got right through,” says Jaime. His memory jibes with FAA reports, cited in the Boston Globe, that security screeners at Logan have over the last several years routinely missed pipe bombs, guns and other test items carried by FAA inspectors.
The job had its entertaining moments. There was a bantering conversation with Jerry Garcia, a sighting of Dustin Hoffman. There was the time Jaime got to pat down Lee Iacocca. But in retrospect — and particularly in light of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks — what still shocks Jaime is the broad airport access given him and other untrained, minimum-wage guards.
“My first day on the job, they gave me a ramp pass. You know what that means? I could go anywhere in the airport. The tarmac. The conning tower. The baggage areas. The VIP lounges.”
This was a privilege of Jaime’s fellow guards, who he describes as a decidedly mixed lot. One, he says, was an apparent drug addict. “He’d show up to work shaking from booze and drugs, and sometimes disappear for 10 or 20 minutes at a time to get well.” This particular employee’s specialty, says Jaime, was shaking down Caribbean immigrants who would come through with suitcases of Rolex knock-offs and other items to sell back home. He’d threaten to turn them into Customs until they handed over some goods, says Jaime. If passengers complained, he adds, “one of us would pretend to be his supervisor. ‘Don’t worry, ma’am,’ we’d say. ‘We’ve had our eyes on him for a long time. This is probably his last day.’ Yeah, right.”
The picture Jaime paints would be laughable if it were not, in the wake of Sept. 11 and in the midst of war, so terrifying. Why would House Republicans — with the tacit approval of the Bush White House — want to keep airport security in the same hands?
Start with campaign contributions — the conventional currency of Washington supposedly set aside in a national crisis — and consider, for starters, Jaime’s old employer at Logan, Servicemaster, based in Downers Grove, Ill. According to federal campaign finance records, in the 2000 election alone, Servicemaster’s corporate PAC gave more than $30,000 to Republican congressional candidates and committees — and just $5,000 to Democrats. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, Tom DeLay and other top Republicans are among the beneficiaries, each having received the maximum contribution allowable under law.
The new Airline Security Association — formed to lobby for keeping airport screening in private hands — is similarly well-connected. Its lobbyists include Kenneth Quinn, the top FAA lawyer in the previous Bush administration.
Compared with that kind of clout, a security guard like Jaime doesn’t count for much. Neither, apparently, does a Justice Department indictment. And if the scant federal oversight given airport security over many years is any indication, neither do passengers.
You’d think public safety would trump politics as usual after Sept. 11. But you’d be wrong.
When President Bush walked out of the Capitol after his speech Thursday night, he left behind him bipartisan huzzahs, a new terrorism czar and a list of demands for the Taliban. Yet paradoxically, he also left behind a war on terrorism even more murky than it was when he entered the building an hour earlier.
From his first shaken television appearance hours after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks a week ago, Bush has seemed to promise a swift and definitive and violent reply. Standing atop the rubble in New York, he shouted into a bullhorn that the perpetrators of the attack would feel America’s sting; earlier this week he declared presumed mastermind Osama Bin-Laden “wanted dead or alive”; in Congress he offered a high-oratorical version of the same John Wayne promise: either “we bring our enemies to justice, or we will bring justice to our enemies.”
But the remarkable reality of Bush’s speech Thursday night was just how far he backpedaled from that promise of easy vindication of the dead. He devoted much of the speech to explaining what his new world policy is not: “not one battle but a lengthy campaign,” not a war for territory like Iraq, not a sanitized air war like Kosovo, not even a war with a pre-defined enemy but against any mafia or state “sponsoring, sheltering or supplying terrorists.”
Bush stated his goals so broadly because, despite his rhetoric of the last days, he faces a crisis that defies military solution. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld admitted as much at a press conference Wednesday in which he described the difficulty of finding suitable targets for air strikes in already-devastated Afghanistan, or waging a ground war in a rural mountain land that in a century’s time defeated the best efforts of the British Empire and the Soviet Union. Instead, Bush defined the crisis so broadly Thursday night as to defy effective measurement even of success or failure.
Indeed, while he made reference to the great ideological conflicts of recent decades — calling the bombers “the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century” — the past century, the new strategy described by Bush is really more heir to the war on drugs than to World War II or the Cold War. Like the war on drugs, Bush’s new campaign means taking on conspiratorial actors rooted in some of the world’s most impoverished economies. Like the drug war, it means parsing out — or more likely looking away from — the morphing, corrupt relationship between transnational criminals and governments, some of which happen to be key American allies. For the drug war’s Colombia, substitute Taliban-friendly Pakistan, or perhaps Saudi Arabia, deeply implicated in the funding of militant Islamic networks worldwide.
And like the War on Drugs, Bush’s new campaign carries a domestic “homeland security” component which many Americans may find far from congenial. As recently as the early 1980s, the label “terrorism” was applied with a broad brush to justify FBI spying on a broad range of American dissidents. Attorney General Ashcroft’s demand for sweeping new power to detain immigrant “terrorist suspects” without charge and virtually without appeal has already been compared with the Palmer Raids of 1919, when hundreds of immigrant radicals were arrested and deported. But it is also frighteningly reminiscent of the draconian anti-terrorist laws passed by Great Britain during the Irish Republican Army campaign of the 1970s — where secret courts and arrests without evidence led to numerous cases of wrongful imprisonment, including the Guilford Four whose story was told in brutal detail in the film “In the Name of the Father.”
If Bush left his goals vague it is also because his administration and advisors are still warring internally. On one side are those who, like former Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger and Paul Wolfowitz, call for putting an assortment of nations out of business no matter what it takes: essentially, sending America to war with Iran, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan all at once. Secretary of State Colin Powell — until last week the most marginalized member of the Cabinet — clearly favors more limited and precise action aimed specifically at bin Laden’s mafia.
And alongside that debate is an even bigger question, left completely unanswered in Bush’s speech and yet arguably key to the whole enterprise: whether he is willing to abandon the blunt policy of American unilateralism which has so far guided the Bush administration every step of the way. Bush showered praise on Great Britain’s Tony Blair and applauded the sympathy displayed for America in Seoul and Cairo. At the same time, this president who spurned the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, who has fought establishment of an International Criminal Court, who angered even close allies with his missile defense plan, made no mention in his speech Thursday of the United Nations.
It was an omission all the more notable because recent years have brought a steady stream of transnational cooperation in the prosecutions of mass murderers. “Modern democracies have perfectly adequate justice systems for dealing with terrorists,” says William Schabas, a leading international law scholar and director of the Irish Center for Human Rights in Galway. “We track them down, catch them, bring them to trial and impose fit punishment. That is what the United States and the United Kingdom did with those responsible for the Lockerbie crash, and for the embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. It is what the U.N. is doing for those accused of genocide and crimes against humanity in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.” Indeed, says Schabas, “How much more healthy it is for democracy that Milosevic be judged by an international court rather than murdered by a cruise missile aimed at his home.”
The possibility of such cooperation seemed far from the president’s mind Thursday night. The president’s speech was clearly designed to mark for Americans a new era of global struggle — but to the rest of the world, it also says that even after the World Trade Center and the Pentagon this is a president who goes it alone.
“How much anger can prompt a group of people to do this?” asked my friend David Handschuh, a New York Daily News photographer, after firefighters pulled him, legs shattered, from the rubble at the World Trade Center.
With President Bush talking of war and “a monumental struggle between good and evil,” motivation may seem beside the point. But David’s anguished query is the right one, and one we ignore at our peril: What do we make of a rage so deep that it could prompt a few individuals to convert box-cutters, pilots’ licenses and airline schedules into weapons of mass destruction?
For now, with the attackers still officially unidentified, the only thing that can be responsibly said is that terrorist killers are made, not born. Call it blowback, call it payback — but whichever part of the world these sadistic attacks emanated from, it is someplace where people have long acquaintance with body counts and death raining down from the sky.
Handschuch’s question is even more relevant because, as the bodies and survivors are finally recovered, the mute bewilderment and confusion will turn into anger of our own. That is natural. But what contours will that rage take as it emerges in Washington and around the country?
President Bush read the words “a quiet, unyielding anger” from his teleprompter Tuesday night. But hours earlier, even as Air Force One scrambled the unseen president’s entourage from airbase to airbase to bunker, something different was already evident.
Already, certain Washington hands and select media mouthpieces were playing an alarming blame game, seeking to channel public anger into their long-favored favored projects. On ABC, former Secretary of State James Baker blamed the whole thing on the Church Committee — the U.S. Senate inquiry that 20 years ago exposed the long history of CIA manipulation of foreign governments and subsidizing of torture. “In terms of intelligence, we unilaterally disarmed,” Baker insisted, declaring it time return for a return to the days of unaccountable “dirty business.”
He seems to have forgotten just how deeply American embroilment in dirty business — coups, assassinations, military regimes — contributed to hatred of the U.S. (Today’s CIA, let it be noted, profoundly objects to this yearning by nostalgic old Cold War hands: Earlier this year I attended a conference on terrorism at which Bill Harlow, the CIA’s director of public affairs, bluntly said that the intelligence community manages to recruit any sources it desires under current rules.) A few hours later, former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger called on the U.S. to flatten Kabul: “We’ve got to be somewhat irrational in our response. Blow their capital from under them.”
Just how effective would the Baker-Eagleburger strike-hard policy be in quelling the terrorist threat? Look at the West Bank, where the cycle of vengeance and victimization gets further cemented into the foundation of daily life with each new home demolition and cafe bombing.
This is no time for lectures; in these first hours and days all of us are thinking about the people who escaped, or who didn’t. But with the clamor for aggressive and massive military action already beginning, it’s essential to point out just how many of the world’s more baleful terrorists and mass murderers were born precisely from the kind of operations now advocated by the bomb-and-assassinate crowd.
Pol Pot? Rode to power after formerly neutral and stable Cambodia was flattened by American bombs. The Taliban? Detritus of the anti-Soviet Afghan guerrilla movement financed and trained by the U.S. Chechnya guerrillas? Russia’s own private blowback.
None of this diminishes the responsibility of the perpetrators of this week’s attack, or diminishes the need to bring the full force of domestic and international law to bear. But it should serve as a warning to our leaders that assuaging the public’s grief with B-52 strikes will reap its own unforeseeable whirlwind. “Blow Kabul from under them?” You might as well hand out box-cutters and directions to Kennedy Airport to every kid in Afghanistan unto the third generation.
And on the domestic front, while comparisons to Pearl Harbor are inevitable, the comments of some politicians Tuesday were a chilly reminder of the worst panic-driven excess of the Second World War: the internment of Japanese-Americans in prison camps. No one was going quite that far. But Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., called for closing the nation’s borders. Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., and Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., propose greatly expanding the FBI’s surveillance powers — powers that already are the broadest in American history. Not that there is a shred of evidence that the cold, disciplined commandos who so carefully perpetrated these ghastly attacks chatted about their plans over cellphones, or that dozens of terrorist teams are creeping in from Vancouver.
What is striking, in fact, is the raging irrelevance of the extreme measures both military and legal authorities proposed in the last 24 hours. “The responses for which support is being mobilized are not going to address the true character of this challenge,” says professor Richard Falk of Princeton, a foreign policy scholar who has thought long and hard about the reconfigured world order. “This is the first war for which there is no military solution. And without a military solution our leaders lack the imagination to understand what is happening and what to do.”
One former high-ranking federal emergency official and terrorism response expert described to me a recent simulated terrorism exercise that featured role-playing by such Washington luminaries as Sam Nunn and David Gergen. The participants were given an imaginary scenario involving the deliberate release of smallpox. This observer was struck how in the “outbreak’s” early phases, when small measures could have made the simulated events more manageable, the players could not settle on a course of action. Later — when in a real epidemic it would have been far too late — they resorted to draconian measures. In the all-too-real scenario now playing out in Washington, draconian measures — political, legal and military — seem to have similar appeal.
The war has indeed come home. But I don’t mean the war on terrorism, a phrase repeated endlessly and meaninglessly on television Tuesday night. Nor do I mean, in any narrow sense, the fanatic war of whoever it was who attacked lower Manhattan. What has come home, on an unimaginable scale and with inconceivable speed, is a vicious cycle of victimhood and revenge — a bitter, confusing jumble of shock, grief, fear.
“How much anger can prompt a group of people to do this?” That is the question to ask — of ourselves as well as of our attackers.
President Bush landed in Spain Tuesday on the heels of a death penalty whirlwind. Not just because of the Monday execution of Timothy McVeigh. Nor just because of the recent, highly publicized exoneration of Florida death row inmate Joaquin Martinez, a Spanish citizen who returned home to a warm welcome 48 hours before Air Force One touched down in Madrid.
Sure, those events were both controversial enough in the European Union, which prohibits membership to countries with the death penalty. But then Bush appeared to get into an argument with himself about one of the most controversial aspects of capital punishment: execution of the retarded.
“We should never execute anyone who is mentally retarded,” the president told a group of European reporters who had asked him about growing concern from prominent American diplomats that execution of the retarded was impeding U.S. relations abroad. “And our court system protects people who don’t understand the nature of the crime they’ve committed nor the punishment they are about to receive.”
What made Bush’s comments particularly remarkable: As governor of Texas, Bush himself presided over several executions of mentally retarded inmates.
Indeed, his governorship was literally ushered in with one such killing: the execution of inmate Mario Marquez on the day of Bush’s 1995 inauguration. Bush did not, strictly speaking, sign off on Marquez’s execution. But he did approve two other executions that drew worldwide condemnation: Terry Washington in 1997 and Oliver Cruz in 2000. Marquez, Washington and Cruz each “definitely had an I.Q. below 70,” says Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington. An I.Q. of 70 is the universally recognized minimum for normal mental development.
As governor, Bush also authorized the execution of Johnny Paul Penry, who had an I.Q. in the 50s and a mental age of 6. Penry came within four hours of execution in 2000 when the U.S. Supreme Court stayed his execution; and last week, the court overturned his death sentence, saying the Texas legal system did not give jurors the proper opportunity for “morally reasoned” consideration of his retardation.
Bush’s remarks — coming just a day before his brother Gov. Jeb Bush signed a ban on executions of the retarded in Florida — left White House staffers in damage-control mode, denying any shift in position.
The president “has always believed we shouldn’t put people to death who are incompetent to understand the charges against them or the difference between right and wrong,” senior White House communications advisor Dan Bartlett told Salon. But, he added, “there is some confusion” because in cases like Cruz’s and Washington’s, Bush believes that I.Q. is not the only measure of retardation. Bush, Bartlett said, believes that someone can learn to understand the difference between right and wrong regardless of I.Q.
The president, Bartlett added, continues to think that a ban on executing the retarded — like the one signed by his brother and like a similar measure passed by the Texas Legislature that awaits action by Gov. Rick Perry — is unnecessary. “The president believes juries are the appropriate body” to weigh a defendant’s mental status, Bartlett said.
But while Bush defends putting on death row some defendants with I.Q.s in the 50s because they may not be retarded, there is growing alarm even among capital-punishment supporters that such cases profoundly undermine public confidence in the death penalty — as well as place the U.S. at odds with every international standard of criminal justice.
Mental retardation and the special suggestibility of the mentally impaired are responsible for a large number of mistaken death sentences, which have received enormous publicity. The most recent case is that of Ronnie Burrell, who was exonerated and released after 14 years and one near-execution on Louisiana death row in January.
Even some of the cases of retarded defendants who actually are guilty can be hair-raising. Texas’ Johnny Paul Penry, for example — who has had his death sentence overturned by the Supreme Court twice in 12 years — still believes in Santa Claus. Also in Texas, Cruz, convicted in 1988 of participating with an accomplice in the rape and murder of a young woman named Kelly Donovan, received his death sentence thanks to the plea-bargain testimony of his decidedly unimpaired accomplice. Cruz, with an I.Q. of 64 and a family history of schizophrenia, “waived” his Miranda rights and confessed — a confession accepted by the courts even though the police officer who took it admitted on the stand that Cruz had no capacity to understand the words in his Miranda warning or what waiving rights might mean.
And then, when Cruz faced the sentencing jury, the prosecutor turned his mental impairment into the reason for his execution: “It makes him, in fact, more dangerous. It’s part of the outlook of Oliver Cruz that makes him what he is,” the jury was told. Cruz was executed in Texas in August.
This year, Human Rights Watch issued a report detailing false death row convictions in which retardation played a key role, such as the case of Earl Washington of Virginia, who has an I.Q. of 57. After a long police interrogation in 1983, Washington confessed to a whole series of crimes he never committed: a burglary, a rape and a fatal stabbing, the last of which landed him on death row. It took until 2000 before DNA tests fully exonerated him.
On Monday, a group of nine prominent retired U.S. diplomats filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court, which is considering retardation in death penalty cases, arguing that such executions so strongly violate world norms that they interfere with American foreign policy. Among the signers of the brief was Thomas Pickering, who represented the Reagan administration and the first Bush administration in El Salvador during the most contentious years of that country’s civil war.
Proponents of capital punishment like Gov. Jeb Bush realize that when it comes to mental retardation, they have a problem. Even in Texas, recent polls show that the public overwhelmingly opposes the execution of retarded inmates like Johnny Paul Penry or Oliver Cruz.
And in Europe this week, Bush can expect to hear more about executions of the retarded and the death penalty in general. Twenty years after France abolished the guillotine, the European Union this year made abolition of the death penalty its top human rights priority worldwide. France now refuses to extradite any American criminal suspect who might face capital charges — a refusal that reached crisis proportions for the Ashcroft Justice Department in the case of James Kopp, the accused shooter of Buffalo, N.Y., obstetrician Bernard Slepian, who is still being held in a Brittany jail. Germany is suing the U.S. over the execution of a German national never advised of his consular rights. And in the Republic of Ireland last week, voters overwhelmingly approved a referendum abolishing capital punishment from the constitution.
When a reporter asked Bush about capital punishment as he landed in Spain, the president said, “I refuse to let any issue isolate America from Europe.” But the evidence suggests that the death penalty is already isolating the U.S. in Europe as it increasingly divides Americans at home.
