The Other War
The ACLU thinks cops are a bigger threat than terrorists.
BY DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
- Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.
"Blood must flow. There must be widows, there must be orphans."--jihadist Fayiz Azzam addressing a gathering in Atlanta, 1990
"We conquer the land of the infidels, and we spread Islam by calling the infidels to Allah."--from a speech by Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, outlining the plan for Islamic world rule, at an event sponsored by the Islamic Charity Project International, Detroit, 1991
"He is now extremely anxious when he sees police officers in the subway system."--from a description, by the New York Civil Liberties Union, of one of the complainants who joined its lawsuit against the New York City Police Department, August 2005
A solemn handful of plaintiffs surrounded New York Civil Liberties Union head Donna Lieberman last week as she announced the agency's latest lawsuit--this one targeted at new procedures allowing for the random inspection of bags carried onto the subways. This will not come as a surprise--the agency has had an exceptionally busy few years, since 9/11, campaigning against expanding police powers, increased surveillance and other antiterror measures, all of which, the NYCLU and likeminded watchdogs regularly inform us, pose a greater danger than any that might come from the terrorists themselves. How Americans of normal intelligence respond to this reasoning should make entertaining reading someday.
Most of those entering the subways these days are, it seems, unperturbed by the prospect of a bag check, and not a few have made clear their approval of such precautions. Indeed, in its latest war on the security search, the NYCLU has entered on decidedly iffy terrain: one close to home, psychologically, for masses of Americans (and not just those who take city trains and buses), all in a good position to weigh the sort of argument which holds that government security methods are a greater threat to them than terrorism.
It was a war undertaken even as the pictures of the London bombings remain fresh in memory--along, of course, with those of the devoted jihadists, shown (via surveillance cameras) sprinting through that city's transportation system after their attempt at a second strike. Who can forget the faces of this crew, as it rushed furtively about through empty corridors and train cars--a sight that lent a special touch of nightmare immediacy to the picture unfolding in Britain these last weeks. The pictures revealed, as none had before, the scope of the Islamic terrorist apparatus and support groups operating from within--a threat not limited to Britain.
Which is one reason why, in the matter of the subway searches and the lawsuit against New York City and its police commissioner, all the sides to the conflict and what they stand for are perfectly clear to most people. Matters must have seemed even clearer to those who followed the news of the NYCLU's press conference a few days ago, at which the agency announced the legal action and introduced five plaintiffs who had signed on. Among them was a lawyer, quoted above, a traveler so apprehensive about being searched that he took alternative routes: even so he remained, according to the claim, extremely anxious at the sight of police in the subways. A sad case, doubtless. One also wildly at odds with the reactions of most subway travelers, who tend to feel good at the sight of police officers in the subways--the more of them the better, preferably in close proximity.
Good feelings come, to be sure, in all forms. Another of the NYCLU plaintiffs told how, when a member of the police force asked if he could look in his bag, he declared, "Absolutely not"--and walked away. With the other plaintiffs, he declared himself affronted by the police request, the invasion of his privacy, by the threat to personal freedom, not to forget the Constitution. Not everyone gets to go on trips like this with a MetroCard.
Taking affront at government security measures in wartime is, of course, a choice available only to a free people, as is the right to cavil ceaselessly about the alleged erosion of our liberties, the dark night of oppression settling on us daily, as the NYCLU has so conspicuously done these last years--though not without echoing choruses from its parent organization, the ACLU, and various crank outposts of the libertarian movement.
Lurking at the center of the current struggle, ostensibly about snooping in bags, violation of constitutional rights and such, is the question of racial profiling--an incendiary issue that has set off a rhetorical war to match. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has declared an ironclad ban on anything smacking of profiling with an eye to any particular ethnicity or race. If we have learned anything, the mayor recently declared, "it's that you can't predict what a terrorist looks like."
To which Howard Safir, former police commissioner in the Giuliani administration, retorted on a "Hardball" interview, "We know what the 19 hijackers looked like on 9/11"--and also, he went on to note, what the London train bombers looked like, what those who bombed the Cole looked like, and more. The current mayor's posture on profiling was, he declared, an exercise in public relations that could never work.
Who, listening to this, would not know at once which of these responses better represented common sense and honesty?
The head of the NYCLU, in turn, charged not only that the random bag searches didn't work but that they were also likely to lead to racial profiling. She explained how this would happen in a statement that would require, of those who read it, the deciphering talents of the Enigma codebreakers: "Although the NYPD claims that they are conducting searches that are purely random, the large number of people entering the transit system and the lack of control over that traffic result in people being selected for search in a discretionary and arbitrary manner, which creates the potential for impermissible racial profiling."
Among other lessons of 9/11, we have learned the cost of squeamishness that prevented closer scrutiny of young Arab men entering the country even when their behavior raised suspicions. In an exceptionally powerful series airing on the National Geographic Channel on Aug. 21 and 22, titled "Inside 9/11," an airline ticket-taker recalls being stunned by the strange look on the face of customer Mohamed Atta--particularly the unsettling fury the man exuded. Still, he could not bring himself to raise any alarm: indeed, when he heard later that the plane Atta was on had been one of those that crashed in the terror attacks, the agent felt terrible. Terrible because he had been suspicious of the passenger and thought he could be a terrorist and now the poor man was dead. It was a while before the ticket agent grasped that the man he suspected was, in fact, hijacker-in-chief and pilot of the plane.
As the admirable Tony Blair is now discovering after announcing his determination that "multiculturalist concerns" will not be allowed to impede the struggle to rid his nation of terrorists, a thorny road lies ahead. Islamic civil rights organizations and others immediately warned that the only result of his efforts would be to "alienate" young Muslims. Translation: cause them to become terrorists. In short, the prime minister must accede to blackmail in his dealing with Muslim communities.
Ethnic/racial profiling may not, in fact, work very well as a security strategy--but the frenzy of the attacks it has excited tells more than we may want to know about our post-9/11 condition. Large numbers of citizens of every religion and ethnicity lost their lives in the terrorist attacks. Today, a strategy designed to help ensure that such a calamity will not again occur has been converted to a bizarre race-discrimination issue, subordinated to the concerns and ambitions of politicians. This won't, in the end, do much for the office-seekers and -holders now competing for the honor of delivering the most hysterical denunciations of ethnic and racial profiling. What, after all, can citizens (black and brown among them) think of leaders still prepared to argue that young Arab males receive no more scrutiny than the famous 80-year-old little grandmother--and that the people's security lies in measures clearly the least suited to assuring their safety? |
