Last week U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour sentenced a defendant to prison for plotting to bomb the Los Angeles airport. In the course of the sentencing, the judge criticized the Bush administration's post-Sept. 11 policies, such as the use of military tribunals and the detention of enemy combatants. He said that "the message to the world from today's sentencing is that our courts have not abandoned our commitment to the ideals that set our nation apart." Some people, the judge said, believe that the terrorist threat "renders our Constitution obsolete. . . . If that view is allowed to prevail, the terrorists will have won."
That's a little hard to follow. That courts can handle terrorists who are caught with explosives in their possession doesn't mean they are capable of handling the terrorists who manage to evade detection until the moment they immolate themselves with their victims. But worse than the judge's logic is the underlying sentiment that yesterday's law enforcement procedures are adequate for today's security threats -- and that any deviation from them is a betrayal of the Constitution.
It recalls the now notorious statement by Lord Hoffman, a British law lord who said, "The real threat to the life of the nation . . . comes not from terrorism but from laws," such as a statute authorizing detention of foreign-born suspected terrorists, which the law lords invalidated under the European human rights charter in December 2004. It also echoes Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's quotation, in the case of Yaser Esam Hamdi, of a precedent stating that it "would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of one of those liberties . . . which makes the defense of the Nation worthwhile."
All of these have become judicial cliches to be invoked in arguments about how the global struggle against terrorism is to be prosecuted. Many cliches are, of course, true, but these are absurdities.
For example, consider the statement that the terrorists will "win" if legal rules and policies are changed in ways that restrict the package of civil liberties in place before the terrorist threat emerged. Whether such restrictions count as a victory for terrorists depends on what terrorists are trying to achieve. Although al Qaeda's ultimate goals are to drive American troops from the Middle East and, more broadly, to establish a Muslim caliphate in the region, its proximate goal is to kill ordinary people to bring pressure to bear on democratic governments. A change in policy that reduces the chance that more people will be killed does not hand the terrorists a victory; it frustrates their plans. A failure to alter any policies in response to a successful terrorist attack is, by contrast, a sign of weakness and paralysis; that would be a victory for the terrorists. Osama bin Laden was right to say that people will back the strong horse. But he was wrong about which horse will prove stronger.
Some theorize that terrorists hope to provoke the target government into cracking down on civil liberties, in the further hope that the crackdown will, in the long run, increase disaffection among the population from which terrorists recruit. This is a remote and uncertain effect that has to be balanced against the immediate security benefits of adjusting civil liberties. A policy of static defense might increase terrorist recruitment as well, by suggesting that the target government lacks the will or capacity to take the fight to the enemy. The best course is to ignore such speculative long-term considerations in favor of choosing policies that make sense in the short run.
A second cliche is this: that a nation that permits incremental reductions in its civil liberties in response to threats to its citizens is not worth defending. The truth is that few people have accepted Patrick Henry's call to "give me liberty or give me death" -- this was a rallying cry, not a policy paper -- and in any event nations are rarely faced with such a stark choice. An incremental reduction in civil liberties is not equivalent to their elimination.
British and American traditions are two-sided: They acknowledge that governments have an obligation to protect people's lives as well as their liberties. No nation preserves liberty atop a stack of its own citizens' corpses, but if one did, it would not be worth defending.
The spurious assumption behind both cliches is that whatever package of civil liberties happens to exist at the time a terrorist threat arises must be maintained at all costs; adjustments that reduce liberty are bad even if they produce greater gains in security, potentially saving people's lives. This is a virulent form of the fallacy of the status quo -- that whatever exists must be good. In fact, the balance between security and liberty is constantly readjusted as circumstances change. A well-functioning government will contract civil liberties as threats increase. A government that refuses to adjust its policies has simply frozen in the face of the threat. It is pathologically rigid, not enlightened.
The two cliches about terrorism are familiar from debates among commentators and politicians. What is new and surprising is their citation by judges as self-evident truths. Judges do badly when they appeal to speculative causal theories about terrorism or to the romantic ideals of civil libertarianism. Both are incompatible with the kind of balancing that is so much a part of the judicial function. That ideals have a tendency to explode on the rock of fact was spectacularly demonstrated in Britain, where terrorist carnage occurred just a few months after the detainees in Lord Hoffman's case were released under legal compulsion. It is too soon to tell whether there was a causal connection between the two events, but Lord Hoffman's casual dismissal of the threat to citizens' lives now appears grotesque.
The day before Coughenour's soliloquy, Prime Minister Tony Blair said that he doubted whether statements such as Lord Hoffman's "would be uttered now." Perhaps that's true in England, but it seems that American judges have yet to learn the lesson.
Posted by: Mrs. Davis ||
08/08/2005 13:32 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[0 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
Having suffered through many of these little judicial speeches, Methinks our esteemed judges and justices would do well to just stick the doing the damn job without indulging the urge to editorialize in a general and generally inarticulate manner about matters of which they are not fully informed.
August 8, 2005: A rather strange, to Western sensibilities, war is being fought in the Islamic media. The battle is being fought with ideas, myths and spin by terrorists, Islamic monarchs and dictators, and opportunists of all kinds. Playing defense are the United States counter-terrorism forces. Playing both sides is most of the Western media. Before the Internet, and web sites for the Islamic media came along over the last decade, most Westerners were pretty oblivious of what was being said, discussed and debated in the Islamic media. Perhaps thatâs just as well, because in the Islamic world, some pretty strange ideas (to Westerners) are constantly in play.
First, let us consider the Israel issue. There has been an Israel issue in the Islamic media since World War II, and before. But the unique Islamic view of Israel became a major issue once Israel declared itâs independence in 1948. From the beginning, the Israelis were seen as a plot by the Europeans to steal Arab land, and to take control of the holy places (mostly Christian and Jewish, but including some important Moslem ones as well.) This attitude came from several centuries of Arabs being on the losing side of history. Moslems, especially Arabs, felt persecuted and put upon. While Islam had started, with much promise, in the 7th century, after about five hundred years, things began to go downhill. There were military defeats at the hands of the Christians, and the pagan Mongols. Then the Turks moved in, and displaced the Arabs as the leaders of the Moslem world. After a few centuries of being a major world power (and the head of the Islamic world as the âCaliphâ), the Turks began to decline as well.
Itâs well to remember that memories are long in the Middle East, and Arab hatred of Europeans predates the founding of Islam in the 7th century. A thousand years before that, Greeks, and then Romans, came a-conquering. Every time the Arabs turned around, there seemed to be another bunch of bad-ass Europeans telling them what to do. The Turks werenât really appreciated either, even though the Turks were Moslems. The Turks were another bunch of aliens. And when the Turks left after World War I, they did so because they wanted to become more European, because they were on the losing side of the war, and because the Arabs really wanted them to go. After World War II, the Europeans finally departed, but left many, many bitter memories behind. OK, you can see why the Arabs, in particular, and Moslems in general, donât like Europeans. But it's worse than that.
Left to their own devices, and in possession of vast (and newly discovered) oil wealth, the Arabs had some reason for optimism after World War II. But it was not to be. The hated Israelis, despite being outnumbered over a hundred to one by their Arab neighbors, fought the Arab armies to a standstill and created this new country. At the urging of other Arab nations, about 600,000 Arabs (later called Palestinians) fled the newly established Israel. In retaliation, an equal number of Jews were expelled from Arab nations. Most of these Jews, many of whom had lived among Arabs for thousands of years, went to Israel and became Israelis. But the Arabs expelled from Israel were not allowed to settle in any of the Arab nations they ended up in as refugees. No, the Arab countries insisted that Israel would be crushed by the vastly more numerous Arab armies soon. The Arab refugees would remain refugees, not because of Israel, but because their Arab neighbors insisted.
Over half a century later, and many lost wars later, the Arabs have still not destroyed Israel. And they wonât quit trying. Despite the fact that during that time over a hundred million other refugees were resettled, many national boundaries were redrawn, and numerous wars were ended and left in the past. But the Arabs fixated on Israel. Almost, it would appear, to the exclusion of everything else. While most of the world made substantial economic and social progress in the last half century, the Arab world slid to the back of the list. Most other nations educated more of their people, provided more medical care and achieved more economically and in terms of new technology. But not the Arabs. To make matters worse, the Arab media, when it noticed these shortcomings, blamed it on Israel, and, of course, the West. It had to be someone elseâs fault. It always had to be someone elseâs fault that the Arab world was run by a motley collection of monarchs and dictators. While the rest of the world prospered because of the rule of law, democracy and clean government, the Arab world wallowed in corruption and tyranny. It was all Israelâs fault. Go ahead, visit Arab media web sites. There are many of them in English. The only difference between those sites, and the ones in Arabic, is that they tone down the anti-Semitism and some of the more extreme conspiracy theories for the English speaking audience. The English speaking Arabs who maintain the English language sites are, so to speak, âbi-cultural.â They know that there is a different cultural sensibility in the English speaking world, and realize that some of the stuff that flies in the Arab media, would leave Westerners (and English speakers from other parts of the world, like India and East Asia) perplexed.
Al Qaeda, and other Islamic conservatives, not only believe a lot of the conspiracy theories, but try to manipulate them to their advantage. This creates, to Western eyes, some strange changes in attitude. For example, right after September 11, 2001, the Arab media denied any Arab involvement in the attacks. It was widely claimed that the attacks were carried out by the Israelis. This is still widely believed in the Moslem world, even though al Qaeda as since taken credit for the attacks. Thus Arab media will simultaneously repeat the âIsraelis did itâ story, while also discussing how al Qaeda is going to carry out, âanother 911â any day now.
So how do you fight an information war in an environment like this? Not using the normal rules of logic, thatâs for sure. The United States has provided support for the growing number of Moslem journalists that report reality as it is, not how traditional Moslem journalists would like it to be. This can be dangerous. One reason that the fantastical and illogical stories keep running is the most Arab media operate in police states. Say they wrong thing and you can die. But transnational, satellite based, media has made it easier to get an untraditional (and often unpopular) message to Arabs without threatening the lives of the reporters.
The truth is getting through. More and more Arabs are becoming aware of what is happening in Iraq, and what happened in Israel over the last half century. Long held beliefs will not be abandoned quickly. But attitudes are changing. But to understand that, you have to know where the strange ideas came from in the first place.
Posted by: Steve ||
08/08/2005 09:52 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[0 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
It is overly optimistic: it doesn't account for two factors.
First: satellites and other technologies work both ways. Arab countries hold a high number of satellite channels (surprising, reative to their GDP) in order to send the "message" to their communities in Western countries. This is an important factor of non-assimilation contrarily to previous generations of immigrants they are not cut-off of their countries of origin. And most of these channels are sources of islamism/pan-arabism (two faces of the same coin)
Second: The betrayal by the MSM is a heavy burden in a war where the battle of ideas is crucial. Whenever an Islamo-nut goes on TV with rants about Iraki or Afghan deaths we should have the reporter ask him "Did you care about Saddam's massacres", "Did you care about the children blown by Al Quaida in Irak" or "I don't remember hearing you when the Taliban masscred the Hazaras at Herat" instead what we have is multiculti dhimmitude.
We should be churning revised versions of the Cold War movies where our valiant heroes (eventually assisted by a ring of non-islamo-nut pakistanis or afghans) unravel the sinister plot of some mad mullah, we should have discussions on TV about how Islam empoverished nations and about its blood-thirstiness. We should be doing our best for Muislims rejecting fundamentalism (and in a second phase Islam itself). Instead we get that modern version of the Protocols of th Sages of Sion called Fahrenheit 911 or abject material for high schoolers telling kids "Show how Jihad was a reaction to the Crusades". In opther words we are producing material aimed at making them hate us.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
