London and Guantanamo
The 7/7 attacks show the importance of keeping terrorists out of circulation.
Saturday, July 16, 2005 12:01 a.m.
Some of our readers took offense that we mentioned the debate over Guantanamo in reaction to last week's London bombings. So we thought we'd elaborate on why the political campaign against both Gitmo and the Patriot Act illustrate how far some of our elites have traveled since 9/11.
Start with Guantanamo, and the growing chorus to shut it down. In Congress, this includes most Democrats. A few Republicans have piled on too, such as Mel Martinez, a Florida Senator and former Bush Cabinet officer, who said last month that the detention center had "become an icon for bad stories" and was hurting the war effort.
The argument seems to be that closing Gitmo will make the Arab world think better of us, thereby causing Islamic terrorists to stop killing Americans. This overlooks the small detail that they were willing to kill us, even on American soil, long before Guantanamo was up and running. What critics also don't mention is the dozen detainees released from Gitmo who have already rejoined the fight against the U.S. The Pentagon says that several Gitmo veterans have been killed in combat with U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. Imagine the uproar if it had been the other way around.
Nor has anyone come up with a better idea about what to do with enemy combatants who, under international law, can be held until the cessation of hostilities. At best, there's a certain cognitive dissonance at work here. On the one hand, civil libertarians have sued to get detainees returned to their countries of origin. On the other hand, they've sued to prevent them from being sent home if that home is located in a place like Turkey or Pakistan, where they might be treated less gently than at Guantanamo. A spokesman tells us there are 15 detainees whom Defense has deemed no longer threats but can't be released until their cases are reviewed in federal court. Call it the ACLU detention policy.
Then there are those who want detainees charged and tried in U.S. criminal courts as if they were run-of-the mill felons instead of fighters. They presumably haven't studied the al Qaeda training manual captured in Manchester, England, which explains how operatives are trained to manipulate the West's system of criminal justice. Lesson 18 is titled: "If an indictment is issued and the trial begins, the brother has to pay attention to the following." Item one is: Tell the judge you're being tortured. Item two is: Complain of mistreatment in jail. Sound familiar?
The debate over the Patriot Act hasn't been any more clarifying. Last month the House voted to exclude libraries and bookstores from a provision of the law (Section 215) that lets law enforcement officers obtain warrants from a special federal intelligence court to search business records. The Justice Department says that, as of the end of March, Section 215 had been used 35 times--though not once to search library records. Two of the terrorists used public libraries to check their flight reservations for 9/11, a little-known fact that militates against carving out what would become a safe haven for libraries.
The Patriot Act was rushed through Congress in the emotional days after 9/11, and making some of its provisions automatically expire at the end of 2005 was a prudent idea. Four years later, however, despite the doom-and-glooming of the ACLU and friends, there is no evidence that the Patriot Act has been abused in any way or that it jeopardizes basic civil rights. Not one concrete example.
None of this is to say that the U.S. hasn't made mistakes in fighting terrorism. The broadly based post-9/11 roundup of illegal immigrants went too far, as an Inspector General report noted and the Administration has admitted. The refusal to endorse racial profiling in airport security checks is another--reducing the government's credibility among ordinary Americans who understand that it defies common sense. But the federal courts have mostly upheld the government's anti-terror policies and where they haven't--as in the question of regular reviews of detainees' status--Washington has been quick to adjust.
In the wake of the London attacks, a common line was surprise that something similar hasn't yet happened in the U.S. No one knows why we've been spared, but one reasonable guess is that the forceful anti-terror response of the U.S. government has made it more difficult.
The specifics of Guantanamo and the Patriot Act aside, the campaigns against them show that we've been creeping back toward the law-enforcement mindset about terrorism that prevailed before September 11 and which contributed so much to letting that day's attacks succeed. London is a reminder of how clear and present the danger still is. |
