On 23 Dec 2005 10:45:52 -0800, "G.W." wrote:

John R. Carroll wrote:

G.W.,
You can't legistlate morality.
Be a better parent. What better opportunity is there to teach proper moral
behavior is there?
I do realize that many parents are simply to lazy or irresponsible to be of
much use as parents but that's the only real answer and it's also the whole
problem.
The same is true for abortion and other like issues. Making this illegal
won't appreciably reduce demand. If you want to reduce demand bring kids up
not to "demand" the things in the first place. As long as that demand exists
a supply will be at hand. That may outrage some but the facts remain outrage
or no...


Ok, I can go along with that up to a point. Raising moral children is a
good solution. On the other hand, you still don't want to live in a
society that has absolutely no limits. I don't think we need a whore
house on every corner under some bogus idea of "free speech". Sensible
limits should be set by our elected representatives not by some judge
who misinterprets the Constitution.
That's only my opinion.

Why the FBI Didn't Stop 9/11
Heather Mac Donald
EMAIL
RESPOND
PRINT

The greatest obstacle to domestic security in the war on terror is the
worldview of the liberal elites. No sooner had the Twin Towers fallen
than the press and an army of advocacy groups were on the hunt for
victims—not of Muslim fanaticism but of American bigotry. The liberal
commentariat has denounced every commonsensical measure to protect the
country the Bush administration has proposed as an eruption of racism
or tyranny.

But the elite ideology began its corrosive work long before 9/11. For
three decades, the liberal establishment, fixated on preventing a
highly unlikely repeat of Watergate-era abuses, has encumbered
America’s intelligence and national security capacities with
increasingly crippling procedural inhibitions, culminating in domestic
intelligence restrictions promulgated by the Clinton administration in
1995. As long as the elites continue to act as if America’s biggest
enemy is not al-Qaida but the country’s own allegedly repressive and
bigoted instincts, the nation’s defense against terror at home will
proceed at half throttle.

In August 2001, mere weeks before the greatest mass murder of
civilians in U.S. history, the Justice Department squelched two
prescient efforts to avert the attacks. In Minneapolis, FBI agents
frantically sought permission to search the possessions of one
Zacarias Moussaoui, a bumbling, suspicious flight student and a
colleague of Islamic fundamentalists. In New York, another FBI agent
no less frantically sought clearance to throw his squad into an
11th-hour search for Khalid Almihdar, an al-Qaida operative at large
in the country.

Justice Department bureaucrats refused both requests on absurd
grounds. In the case of the New York agent, for example, they argued
that because he was a criminal investigator, not an intelligence
investigator, his participation in the manhunt for Almihdar could
violate Almihdar’s rights: the al-Qaida agent was wanted not as an
ordinary felon but as a terrorist.

The refusals may have had enormous consequences. Had the Minneapolis
agents searched Moussaoui’s effects, they would have found leads to
two of the 9/11 terrorists and to the Hamburg al-Qaida cell that
planned the attack. Had the FBI been able to find Almihdar, it would
have apprehended the pilot who crashed American Airlines Flight 77
into the Pentagon. Instead, the plot hurtled on undisturbed to its
gruesome climax.

The media have portrayed both episodes as “intelligence failures,”
“communication failures,” or the failings of individual managers to
“connect the dots.” They were not. Each of these lost opportunities
was the foreseeable outcome of senseless terror-fighting restrictions
put into place by Attorney General Janet Reno in 1995. Good luck
finding any hint of the decisive role of the Clinton Justice
Department in press accounts of the Moussaoui and Almihdar affairs,
however.

The 1995 Reno guidelines, though the craziest development in
intelligence law to date, are not unprecedented. They are the
culmination of three decades of liberal grandstanding around
intelligence-gathering and use.

For most of the twentieth century, Congress, courts, and legal
scholars agreed that the president had plenary authority to
investigate and disarm threats to the national security. If the FBI
suspected a Russian attach&#eacute; in Washington of passing nuclear
secrets to the Soviet Union, for example, the Bureau could tap his
phone without needing permission from a judge. Judges were not
competent to make national security decisions, as an unusually
self-effacing court explained in 1980, because they lacked “mastery of
diplomacy and military affairs.” The Fourth Amendment’s warrant
requirement, legal opinion held, was intended to protect citizens
against unreasonable government intrusion in domestic crime
investigations, not where the survival of the nation itself was at
stake.

In the 1970s, however, the courts and Congress changed their minds,
signaling a new adversarial attitude toward executive power, born of
1960s anti-war protests and the Watergate revelations. Congressional
hearings on a rash of excessively zealous FBI and CIA domestic
investigations sent a clear message: the American government, not its
enemies, was the real threat to the American people.

In response, Congress saddled the investigation of foreign threats
with complex procedural and judicial restraints for the first time in
history. Under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA),
the president (acting through the FBI) would need a judicial warrant
to surveil foreign spies and terrorists and their American
collaborators on American soil. The new law defined who could be
surveilled and under what circumstances, and it created two new
Justice Department bodies to monitor that surveillance: the FISA
court, composed of sitting federal judges, which issues surveillance
warrants (needing renewal every 90 days); and the gatekeeper Office of
Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR), which screens surveillance
requests from FBI field offices and then argues them before the court.

Problems surfaced immediately. FBI agents complained that FISA created
a Catch-22 situation: in order to meet the statutory requirements for
obtaining a surveillance order, you needed to show that your target
was a probable spy with anti-American designs—part of the information
that the wiretap was intended to obtain. In 1982, a Senate Select
Committee reported that FISA had “enmeshed intelligence in procedures
wholly inappropriate to it.”

They hadn’t seen nuthin’ yet. Per the infallible rule of bureaucratic
accumulation, FISA would trigger an explosion of obtuse procedural
distinctions that would harm America’s ability to obtain, and act
swiftly upon, intelligence information.

One of the most vexing consequences of FISA was the requirement,
imposed over time by federal courts and Justice Department officials
themselves, that FBI agents continuously evaluate what their “purpose”
was in conducting foreign intelligence surveillance. As long as their
purpose remained gathering information on suspected spies and
terrorists for its own sake—to learn about the extent of a terror
cell, say, or to use in covert operations like infiltration—the FISA
wiretap could continue. But if the agents concluded that the suspects
had committed a crime that the government should prosecute, they had
to shut down the FISA wiretap, often prematurely.

In the late 1980s, for example, agents working for Oliver Revell, the
FBI’s Associate Deputy Director of Investigations, were monitoring
followers of Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal. A microphone installed
in the home of a cell member in St. Louis recorded the parents’ murder
of their daughter for becoming too Americanized. In order to prosecute
the murder case, the Bureau had to close down the FISA surveillance,
before agents had figured out the extent of the Abu Nidal cell.

Civil libertarian zealots sparked this nonsensical practice. They
argued that because the probable-cause standards for a FISA wiretap
were in some cases lower than the requirements for an ordinary
criminal wiretap, power-mad prosecutors would gin up specious FISA
requests in order to obtain criminal evidence in violation of
constitutional standards. Therefore, they said, the Justice Department
must draw a bright line between the gathering of foreign intelligence
information for intelligence purposes, on the one hand, and for
criminal investigation and prosecutorial purposes, on the other.

These arguments don’t withstand scrutiny. A FISA wiretap order is
essentially a judicial warrant within the meaning of the Fourth
Amendment. As Kenneth Bass III, the first director of the OIPR, argued
recently before the Senate Judiciary Committee, if the FISA court has
issued the surveillance order properly—to obtain information about the
agents of a foreign power—the fruits of that order should be available
for any national security use, including prosecution. Since acts of
terrorism and conspiracy to commit terrorism are themselves crimes,
the distinction between a “pure” foreign intelligence wiretap and a
“criminal” wiretap, where terrorism is concerned, is nonsensical.

Moreover, contrary to civil libertarian hyperventilating, FISA’s
probable-cause standards for surveilling U.S. citizens and permanent
resident aliens are almost indistinguishable from traditional criminal
wiretap standards. To get a FISA order for a citizen or resident alien
suspected of terrorism, the government must establish that he is an
agent of a foreign power and is knowingly engaged in international
terrorism or spying—in other words, committing a felony, just as for
an ordinary criminal wiretap.

But absurdity is no bar to realization in the airless world of civil
libertarian absolutism. To prevent the wholly fantastical abuse of
FISA power by criminal investigators and prosecutors, a set of
inhibitions gradually developed to regulate contacts among FBI agents
who were gathering intelligence under a FISA order, FBI agents who may
be investigating an already committed terrorist crime, and federal
prosecutors.

Those inhibitions reached their peak destructiveness with Attorney
General Reno’s “Procedures for Contacts Between the FBI and the
Criminal Division Concerning Foreign Intelligence and Foreign
Counterintelligence Investigations,” issued in July 1995. Immediately
dubbed “the Wall,” the 1995 guidelines erected a mind-boggling and
ultimately lethal set of impediments to cooperation among all relevant
anti-terrorist personnel.

Let’s say—and this is a purely hypothetical example—that David Dell,
an agent in the New York FBI office, has a FISA wiretap on Abdul
Muhammad, an Islamic fundamentalist Yemeni affiliated with a suspected
al-Qaida support cell in Brooklyn. Muhammad is not yet tied to any
crime or criminal conspiracy; Dell is surveilling him to determine the
extent of al-Qaida strength in New York. In a phone conversation with
a fellow Yemeni in Pakistan, Muhammad mentions a dying swan and
several Muslim names that Dell does not recognize. Several desks away
in the FBI’s downtown office, Sam Simpson is investigating the
al-Qaida bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. Simpson also worked
on the al-Qaida bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998,
for which he traveled to Yemen and Kenya to execute warrants.

In a sane system, Dell and Simpson would be able to talk to each other
about their cases, for although Dell doesn’t recognize the names and
swan references in Abdul’s recent conversation, Simpson came across
some of the named men while he was in Kenya and recognizes the code
that Abdul is using. The content of the Abdul intercept would help
Simpson’s criminal case, and Simpson’s knowledge of the code and
identities of the men would help Dell map out the extent and possible
goals of the Brooklyn cell. And if Dell interviews Muhammad, in a sane
world Simpson would be in on the interview, since he might recognize
the significance of some of Muhammad’s replies in a way that Dell
could not, and he would then be able to press Muhammad immediately for
further information. Simpson might even suggest to Dell that he expand
his surveillance to a grocer in Brooklyn, suspected of running an
informal credit scheme, or hawallah, that may have sent money to the
USS Cole conspirators.

That reasonable (and, to repeat, entirely hypothetical) scenario is
not the world of the Wall. Under the Wall, Dell and Simpson may not
talk to each other, because Dell is receiving FISA information, and
Simpson is working on a criminal case against terrorists. If Dell
wants to pass any information to Simpson “over the Wall,” he first has
to get permission from FBI headquarters in Washington, which then
notifies the OIPR. If permission is granted, which is by no means
certain, someone from the OIPR has either to come from Washington to
New York or monitor all further communications between Dell and
Simpson over the phone. This bureaucratic Rube Goldberg machine
radically chills communication, of course; but the deeper problem is
that without Simpson’s expertise, Dell may not even recognize the
significance of the information he is receiving, and so it may not
even occur to him to request a Wall bypass. And as far as Simpson’s
offering suggestions to Dell about other targets that would strengthen
both their investigations, forget about it.

The insanities of the Wall don’t end here. Even if Dell and Simpson
are working on the same case, they cannot review raw intelligence
intercepts—recorded phone conversations among terrorists, for
example—in their entirety, lest Simpson start suggesting better
avenues of investigation. Instead, a high-ranking FBI official reviews
the intercept and segregates the bits that are appropriate for each to
see. But no third-party bureaucrat can possibly have the ground-level
knowledge necessary to understand the potential significance to each
investigator of the various bits. Nevertheless, in a climax of
perverse logic, the more important the terror case, the more
stringently policed is the segregation of intelligence intercepts.

Analogous to the Wall between FBI agents working in intelligence and
those working on criminal cases was another wall, between the FBI and
prosecutors, who also are barred from bringing their accumulated
knowledge to bear on all intelligence information. According to
Kenneth Bass, who helped draft FISA for the Carter administration,
none of these Reno-mandated restrictions reflects the law’s original
intent. “The Wall is absolutely ludicrous,” he says. “It is not in the
national interest.”

No sooner had the ink dried on the Wall guidelines than America’s
anti-terror operations suffered a nervous breakdown. Collaboration
broke down almost completely. Says Mary Jo White, former New York U.S.
attorney and the most seasoned al-Qaida prosecutor before 9/11: “The
walls are the single greatest danger we have blocking our ability to
obtain and act on [terrorist] information.”

Although the Wall only governs information-sharing, every other
FISA-regulated procedure became entangled in red tape after the Reno
edict. In 2000, the National Commission on Terrorism reported that the
OIPR was imposing impossibly high and statutorily unjustified
probable-cause standards. For example, to surveil someone who is
neither a citizen nor a permanent resident alien, FISA requires
showing that he is a member of a foreign terrorist organization. This
is tough enough. But the OIPR started requiring evidence of a crime or
specific knowledge of a group’s homicidal intentions before taking the
request to the FISA court, and ignored the target’s past activities in
determining probable cause. A worried Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence reported in 2000 that the OIPR was taking months
scrutinizing FISA applications from the field, even though the
nation’s safety depended on swift action against terrorist threats.

The practical effect? “We absolutely were unable to check people out,”
reports James Kallstrom, former head of the FBI’s New York office, in
anger. “How can you have a proactive agency that protects citizens,
if, in order to even start an investigation, you have to show that
someone is a member of a known terrorist organization, with the
wherewithal to carry out an attack and the intention to do so?”

Intelligence agents thought that things could not get much worse. They
were wrong. In November 2000, the chief judge of the FISA court, Royce
Lamberth, blasted the Bureau and one of its most respected agents for
trivial violations of the Wall. The Reno Justice Department, it had
turned out, was unable to abide by the Reno Wall. In September 2000,
the Clinton administration had notified the FISA court that there had
been over 75 breaches of the Wall since its inception. These included
such violations as: disseminations of FISA intelligence to terrorist
criminal squads in the FBI’s New York field office and to the U.S.
attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York without court
permission; a claim in a wiretap application that the target was not
under criminal investigation for terrorism when in fact he was; and
misstatements about the existence of a Wall in one particular FBI
office between intelligence and criminal squads, when actually all the
agents were on the same squad, and a supervisor overseeing both
investigations screened the raw intelligence intercepts.

The reasonable response to such revelations is: Big deal. None of
these Wall breaches violated anyone’s rights; they represent the most
technical of infractions. But the FISA court went berserk at these
supposed insults to its authority. It excoriated the FBI’s lead Hamas
investigator, Michael Resnick, for innocuous omissions in his FISA
requests and forbade him from ever appearing before it again. It ruled
that from then on, every last communication between intelligence
agents and law-enforcement officials required its approval.

In recoil, the FBI and Justice Department hunkered down completely.
FBI headquarters and the OIPR, already a crippling drag on terrorist
investigations, became paralyzing weights. Recalls Mary Jo White: “The
walls went higher. Nothing could have been worse.” It was as if the
Wall had become covered with concertina wire and broken glass, says
Kallstrom. Morale plummeted. Agents in the New York bureau put signs
on their desks saying: “You may not talk to me.”

Fast-forward to August 2001. Coleen Rowley and other FBI agents in her
Minneapolis office were furiously banging their fists against the
Wall. A Minneapolis agent had flagged Zacarias Moussaoui as a possible
terrorist threat, after a local flight school disclosed that Moussaoui
had been acting strangely and had paid cash (nearly $7,000) for
simulator training. The Minneapolis office learned from the French
Intelligence Service that Moussaoui, now in custody on an INS
violation, had connections to radical Islamic groups. Desperate to
search Moussaoui’s computer and possessions, the agents sought
permission from FBI central headquarters to ask the OIPR to seek a
warrant, as per Wall procedures.

They met only resistance. Finally, on August 28, 2001, the FBI’s
National Security Law Unit (NSLU)—incredibly, yet another bureaucratic
gatekeeper that stymies counterintelligence operations—pronounced that
there was insufficient evidence of Moussaoui’s connection specifically
to al-Qaida to justify a FISA search. FISA required no such showing:
the French Intelligence Services’ linking of Moussaoui to Islamic
radical groups in general was sufficient. The NSLU had imported a new,
non-mandated roadblock into the act in the mania of risk-aversion that
had gripped the agency after the Lamberth outburst. The investigation
was over—until September 11, when FBI headquarters decided that maybe
it ought to look into that computer after all.

Astoundingly, on August 29, 2001, the day after the National Security
Law Unit killed the Moussaoui investigation that would have led to two
9/11 hijackers and to the Hamburg cell that planned the attack, it
cited the Wall to rebuff as well a New York agent’s urgent pleas to
let him and his subordinates help track down al-Qaida member Khalid
Almihdar. According to the Bureau’s paranoid Wall interpretation,
because the New York agent was working criminal cases against
terrorists, and Almihdar had not been indicted for a crime, the agent
and his men could not cooperate with the intell agents searching for
Almihdar.

Immediately after the NSLU’s prohibition, the agent sent an angry
e-mail to FBI headquarters: “Someday someone will die—and wall or
not—the public will not understand why we were not . . . throwing
every resource” at terrorists.

On September 11, when his office received the passenger manifests of
the four hijacked flights, the agent shouted: “This is the same
Almihdar we’ve been talking about for three months.” In a parody of
bureaucratic buck-passing, his supervisor responded: “We did
everything by the book.”

One cannot understand America’s failure to prevent 9/11 without
understanding the history of the Wall. But rather than exposing the
truth, America’s opinion elites have failed even to grasp it. In place
of relentless investigation and tough-minded analysis, they have
adopted a series of mutually contradictory attitudes about
intelligence law determined by one goal only: discrediting the current
Republican administration.

In May 2002, Minneapolis agent Coleen Rowley released a memo she had
written to FBI director Robert Mueller, complaining of the Wall and
its role in blocking her office’s attempts to search Zacarias
Moussaoui’s computer and possessions. Had a search request been
granted, Rowley speculated, some part of the 9/11 plot might have been
foiled.

The media and anti-law-enforcement lobby could not have leaped quicker
to turn Rowley into a feminist heroine who had the guts to expose the
Bush administration’s failures. “Courageous whistleblower” was
the—quite accurate—epithet of choice. But against whom did Rowley blow
her whistle? Columnist Maureen Dowd, the New York Times’s most
knee-jerk feminist and reliable Republican baiter, didn’t need to do
any hard reporting to know. Calling Rowley a “woman of ingenuity and
integrity in [a] macho organization,” Dowd contrasts her to the lazy
and dull-witted FBI men, who were too “inept, obstructionist,
arrogant, antiquated, bloated and turf-conscious—and timid about
racial profiling” (no, that last phrase is not a typo) to prevent the
9/11 attacks.

None of these newly minted aggressive law-enforcement types bothered
to explicate the all-controlling role of the Clinton Wall in producing
the Bureau’s ingrained risk-aversion. Too onerous, no doubt, to read
through the mountains of reports necessary to uncover its existence
and trace its tragic legacy. Instead, the suddenly gung ho press
portrayed the Moussaoui struggle in an ahistorical vacuum, as the
product of incomprehensible Republican foot-dragging on national
security.

But look what happens next. In August 2002, the news breaks that
Attorney General John Ashcroft has submitted a request to the FISA
court to rescind the 1995 Wall guidelines. Having just lionized Rowley
for her assault on the Wall, the media turn around and demonize
Ashcroft for his assault on the Wall. This latest gyration—impelled by
a mixture of ignorance and hypocrisy—proceeded as follows:

Last March, the Justice Department asked the FISA court to approve new
FISA guidelines that would tear down the Wall, allowing full
cooperation between criminal investigators, prosecutors, and
intelligence agents in international terrorism cases. The department
forcefully argued that such cooperation was mandated by the USA
Patriot Act, which Congress passed in the wake of 9/11 to improve the
nation’s intelligence capacity. That meant, if the department was
right, that both the executive and the legislative branches demanded
the rescinding of guidelines promulgated by Janet Reno’s edict.

In May, the FISA court starchily rejected the Justice Department’s
proposed new guidelines. This result is not surprising: a leading
Clinton administration architect of the Wall, Allen Kornblum, now
advises the court on legal matters, and the new guidelines would strip
the court of its fearsome power.

Ordinarily, all FISA proceedings are secret. The court broke with
tradition, however, and grandiosely released its May 2002 opinion in
August. The anti-Ashcroft media machine ramped into high gear.
According to opinion makers, the country had just narrowly avoided
becoming a police state, deterring at the last minute the
megalomaniacal efforts of Attorney General Ashcroft to crush American
freedom under his jackboots. Coleen Rowley was out of sight and out of
mind. The media howled over the 75 Wall violations, criticized in the
Court’s opinion, while only sporadically pointing out, and then only
sotto voce, that those violations had all occurred on Clinton’s watch.

In a typical display of liberal self-righteousness, Jeffrey Rosen,
legal-affairs editor of The New Republic and professor at George
Washington Law School, warned in the Washington Post that the proposed
new FISA guidelines would “resurrect the specter of domestic
surveillance by the FBI that Congress specifically ruled out in the
1970s.” This is nonsense. FISA’s strict probable-cause standards for
U.S. citizens and the act’s exacting procedural requirements for
obtaining a surveillance order are, for better or worse, light years
from the pre-FISA era, when the executive could conduct warrantless
national security surveillance.

As in the Rowley affair, none of the reinvigorated defenders of
American liberty bothered actually to explain the Wall and its fatal
consequences. This silence guaranteed that the public could have
absolutely no understanding of what was at stake in Ashcroft’s
proposal, leaving the commentariat free to mischaracterize it at will.
But criticizing the Wall revisions without disclosing the specific
problems that those revisions aimed to correct is like criticizing
America’s recent war on the Taliban without mentioning 9/11.

If 1960s-vintage paranoia about the imminent American police state
created the intelligence paralysis leading up to 9/11, another key
component of the elite worldview has dragged down every commonsensical
effort to improve national security since the attacks. That is the
belief that America stands ever ready to oppress people of color.
Scarcely a homeland security proposal has emerged from the Bush
administration that the opinion elites have not portrayed as an
eruption of bigotry or tyranny.

After 9/11, the FBI investigated hundreds of thousands of terrorist
tips and ultimately picked up a mere 1,200 men, mostly illegal
immigrants, for questioning. The government detained some for weeks or
sometimes months, checking out their backgrounds, before deporting or
releasing them.

The vast majority of the men were Muslim. And any investigation of
Islamic terror cells worth its salt will turn up . . . Muslims! But so
charged and distorted has the debate about policing and race become
over the last decade that it is now professional suicide to say that,
in hunting Islamic terrorists, one is going to look for and find
Muslims.

It is a misnomer to call such an inevitable practice “racial
profiling,” as the term is commonly used. “Racial profiling,” as the
elites imagine it, takes place when police play the odds about crimes
that all groups commit, but at different rates. Looking for Muslims
for participation in Muslim jihad is not playing the odds; it is
following an ironclad tautology—Usama bin Ladin’s very definition of
what it means to be a warrior for jihad. Nevertheless, anti-police and
Arab advocates have co-opted the poisonous discourse about racial
profiling to tar all rational law-enforcement efforts against Islamic
terrorism as an outgrowth of blind prejudice.

Thus, the New York Times reported ominously that the post-9/11
detentions showed signs of “profiling.” According to this stupendous
illogic, a non-biased investigation of Islamic terrorism would detain
proportionate samples of Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Hindus.

If the FBI and police have to defend themselves against charges of
bigotry whenever they investigate or arrest Muslims on suspicion of
Islamic terrorism, it’s going to be quite difficult, to say the least,
to fight Islamic terrorism. But that is precisely what investigators
are up against. When three of the 1,200 detainees were indicted in
Detroit this August for operating a terrorist support cell that was
infiltrating the Detroit International Airport, local Muslim leaders
denounced the indictments as just another instance of racist
stereotyping. “There is a feeling in our community of being a victim,
which is a painful experience after September 11,” complained Mohamad
Elahi, imam of the Dearborn Heights mosque.

Complaints of bias also greeted the arrest of members of another
alleged terrorist cell in upstate New York, indicted this September.
“This is a crime of terror by the FBI on the people of Lackawanna,”
explained a protester outside the courthouse where the six men were
being charged.

Cracking down on the crimes that make terrorism possible, above all
identity fraud, also risks charges of discrimination. This August, the
government charged 14 Detroit-area men, including six physicians, with
providing phony documents to immigrants. “Is the government only
targeting Arab-American doctors?” asked Imad Hamad of the
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. “We truly wonder about
the timing of it.” In the strange logic of these advocates, the
defendants, arrested and indicted for serious crimes, were more sinned
against than sinning.

This inflamed sense of grievance now leads Muslim spokesmen to equate
minor inconveniences—such as being questioned at an airport—with major
rights abuses. Sayed Moustafa al-Qazwini, imam of the Irvine,
California, chapter of the Islamic Educational Center of Orange
County, exemplifies the disjuncture between the actual Muslim
experience in America after 9/11 and the rhetoric used to describe it.
A courteous, round-faced man, with a short dark beard and rimless
glasses, who casually drops the names of Condoleezza Rice and George
W. Bush, al-Qazwini has flown 20 times since September 2001, both
domestically and abroad, and he has been searched only once. Yet of
that one time, he asks heatedly: “Why did they turn me into an animal
and deal with me in a disgraceful manner, just because my passport was
Iraqi?” The “disgrace” consisted in being interrogated for half an
hour about his mosque and whether the congregation was Sunni or Shia.

Al-Qazwini is not willing to cut security personnel any slack. “They
should have common sense that not all Iraqis are terrorists,” he
asserts. But in 95 percent of his flights, they assumed just that. To
expect to fly search-free 100 percent of the time is ludicrous, given
the enemy status of Iraq. Nor were the questions asked of him
inappropriate, given the role of imams in breeding jihad.

If occasional interrogation before flying is now the equivalent of
being “turned into an animal,” it’s hard to see how America can go
forward with any rational security measures. But such hyperbole is now
standard. A cartoon in Islamic Discourse magazine, a publication of
the Islamic Educational Center of Orange County, shows two doors at an
airline gate. The word “White” has been crossed out and “American”
written in its stead on one; the word “Colored” has been replaced with
“Arab-American” on the other. By no stretch of the imagination are
post-9/11 security measures remotely close to Jim Crow laws, but Arab
advocacy groups have masterfully usurped the mantle of black
victimhood to put anti-terror efforts on the constant defensive.

It would be refreshing (if unprecedented in contemporary American
culture) if Arab-Americans and other Muslims stepped outside their
sense of grievance to grasp the larger interests of the country. But
al-Qazwini, for one, continues to see the security issue only in
personal terms: it’s okay if other people get searched for no reason
at all, but he or his family shouldn’t be. He was happy that a blond
woman was searched on his last flight. “I now know that the security
agents are open-minded,” he says. But he is incensed that his own
parents were searched before a flight to London. “This has nothing to
do with security,” he fumes, “but it’s because some Mexican guy has
been brainwashed by the media telling him: ‘When you find these
people, search them, regardless of age or stature.’ Let’s have some
standards!” Most Americans would agree.

One can’t blame al-Qazwini for his views. When our national leaders
are unwilling even to name the enemy correctly, it’s no wonder that
the advocates and the media have stepped into the breach with
victimology. In speech after speech, President Bush refuses to
identify our nemesis as “Islamic terrorism,” preferring instead the
vaguer “terrorism,” a generality that won’t offend any religious or
ethnic group.

Not giving offense now seems equal in importance to protecting the
nation. Following the president’s lead, Transportation Secretary
Norman Mineta, in his now-infamous 60 Minutes interview, said he would
“hope” that a 70-year-old white woman from Vero Beach, Florida, and a
young Muslim male from Jersey City would receive the same level of
scrutiny when boarding an airplane. And, alas, they do.

Such security procedures have a strong symbolic purpose: to show that
our hearts are pure and that we have never ever drawn any inferences
from the fact that every anti-American terrorist since 1987—with the
exception of Timothy McVeigh—has been Islamic.

President Bush could have put an end to such charades had he explained
to the nation that, because Usama bin Ladin has called on all Muslims,
not all Protestants or Jews, to kill Americans wherever they find
them, we would have to give a little more scrutiny to people from
certain parts of the world who seek to enter the country or assume
high-security positions. These are minor inconveniences compared with
the catastrophe that we are trying to avert, he could have said, and
we ask for the patience and understanding of people subjected to
greater inquiries about their purposes. Of course such measures do not
imply that we think that all Middle Easterners, North Africans, or
Muslims are terrorists, but until someone comes up with a method of
identifying to a man each individual terrorist, a method that is
neither over- nor under-inclusive, we will have to use cruder
screening mechanisms.

In the absence of such a public explanation, the elites and the
advocates continue to turn every reasonable security measure into
another cause for grievance. Last fall, the Justice Department sought
to interview about 5,000 young men from Middle Eastern and other
terror-breeding countries who had entered the U.S. on short-term visas
over the last two years, as had all the 9/11 hijackers. The interviews
were voluntary, innocuous, and could be refused without consequence.
Every civil liberties and Arab advocacy group rose up against the
plan, portraying it, in the words of Islamic Discourse magazine, as
“another wave of threats to our civil liberties.” The message: Every
Muslim in America should feel offended. Why not an alternative
message: This is not a problem. If you can help out the government in
any way to prevent further attacks, please do so.

The fear of giving offense also hampers needed changes in immigration
policy. American and foreign intelligence still cannot identify
Islamic terrorists very well, or understand fully how they communicate
with one another, activate sleeper cells, or channel funding for
operations. If we were serious about preventing more terrorists coming
to our soil, we would impose a moratorium on immigration and visitor
visas from the countries most likely to export terrorism, until our
intelligence services were capable of detecting our enemies. We would
suspend the student-visa program until we had a foolproof system in
place for tracking foreign students.

Instead, we have taken half-measures that do not provide any assurance
of safety. But those half-measures have generated just as much outcry
as real measures would have. Both the New York Times and the
Washington Post have bemoaned the fact that the State Department is
taking longer than usual to process student visas from Middle Eastern
and other terror-sponsoring countries. The resulting delays, warns the
Times, are “generating widespread hostility” among Muslim men. Perhaps
the Times has forgotten a far more lethal “hostility” among Muslim men
that killed 3,000 people on 9/11.

The Justice Department has proposed putting the names of visa
violators who have absconded following a deportation order into
national criminal databases, so that if a police officer comes across
an absconder in the course of a routine stop, he can arrest him. Yet
even this baby step toward border enforcement—in a reasonable world,
all visa violators, not just deportation evaders, would be listed—has
produced the usual denunciations. National Public Radio even broadcast
a comparison of the absconder program to the detention of
Japanese-Americans during World War II.

But what do you know—the opinion elites are just as hypocritically
opportunistic when it comes to charges of profiling as they are
regarding intelligence issues. Having worked themselves into a lather
after 9/11 over the possibility that the Justice Department might use
Middle Eastern or Muslim heritage as a factor in anti-terrorism
investigations, they turned on a dime when doing so offered them a
chance to beat up on the Bush Justice Department.

In May 2001, Phoenix FBI agent Kenneth Williams wrote his supervisors
that al-Qaida members might be training in U.S. flight schools. He had
been observing several Islamists enrolled in an Arizona aviation
academy, one of whom had told him that he considered the U.S.
government and military legitimate targets of Islam. Another man who
attracted Williams’s suspicion, it was later discovered, had
associated with 9/11 hijacker Hani Hanjour and may have screened other
al-Qaida pilots. In his memo, Agent Williams requested that the Bureau
check out other Middle Eastern flight students for al-Qaida ties.

It is not hard to guess why the FBI ignored Williams’s request. Had
word leaked out that the Bureau was investigating Muslim aviation
trainees, the nation’s newspapers, networks, and advocates would have
burst forth in one mighty roar of “Racism!” For the previous five
years, the only law-enforcement topic that had consistently interested
the press was the charge that the police were bigots.

So when the Williams memo surfaced in May 2002, the media, the
victims’ lobby, and the legal professoriat berated Williams for his
prejudices, right? Wrong: they lionized him for his prescience. Nadine
Strossen, president of the ACLU, the organization that has done more
than any other to make “racial profiling” the equivalent of
“genocide,” wins the prize for the most blatant hypocrisy. “It
surprises me that the FBI was worried about racial profiling
criticism,” she cooed on National Public Radio. “The Phoenix
flight-school memo was good policing.” The ACLU should have fired her
on the spot for betraying everything it has argued for the last five
years.

The New York Times nearly equals Strossen in shameless
self-contradiction. It editorialized that the FBI’s “fumbling” of the
Arizona terrorist warning constituted an “egregious failure.” Never
mind that before May 2001, and continuing to this day, the Times has
been the nation’s most powerful voice berating the police for what it
charged was their use of race and ethnicity in investigatory stops.

Such little moments of clarity, even if motivated by bad faith, have
been rare since 9/11. The time is past for preening fantasies aimed at
boosting the elites’ self-image as a bulwark against imagined American
injustice. Yet the guardians of politically correct opinion have held
on to their fondest fictions, despite their destructive effects on
national security.

The power of the elites’ nonsensical ideology should never be
underestimated. In the field of counterterrorism, the elites crippled
intelligence-gathering not only by the legal restrictions that they
sponsored. They accomplished something subtler but equally dangerous:
they broke the agencies’ zeal to protect the country. The fuel for
people who work in national security is not money but morale, observes
James Kallstrom, former head of the FBI’s New York office. “When you
destroy that, people give up,” he says. “The notion that people who
come to work every day to protect the country are raked over the coals
because they shared terrorist information with criminal investigators
is mind-boggling,” Kallstrom observes wearily. “We’ve been frozen in
our tracks for decades by extremely vocal people who represent less
than 0.01 percent of the country, but who have created totally
risk-averse bureaucracies in the FBI, CIA, and the military.”

Here’s a modest proposal that would improve our domestic security by
100 percent: if the elite war on the war on terror continues, we
should all just stop listening.
"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire.
Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us)
off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give
them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the **** out of you
for torturing the cat." Gunner