A Simple Government (19 page)

Once on the street, mission completed, most men would have called it a day. But Rick Rescorla was not like most men. He couldn’t abide the possibility that someone—one of his flock—was overlooked and still inside. After seeing that his charges on the street stayed together and moved safely away from the tower, he headed back in to climb the stairs and check for stragglers. He was never again seen alive.

I told this story because it had moved me when I first heard it; it moves me to this day. It moved the crowd in Little Rock. But I could see on their faces a shift from a mood of mourning to something more. I said that the flames of the World Trade Center—the very flames that killed Rick Rescorla and so many others—achieved more than the terrorists could ever have anticipated. Those very flames, I went on, caused our great American melting pot to boil over. Whenever those waters have boiled over, throughout our history, they have snuffed out the flames of tyranny, hatred, and evil, even when they seemed to burn unchecked. At this point in my talk, I could see in the faces before me an obvious strength and resolve that reminded me that it is not in the DNA of Americans to live our lives as victims. We never have, and I pray that we never will. In fact, at the time I was addressing those folks in 2002, our nation was already mobilizing, ready to take the fight to the terrorists where they live.

Right now, I don’t feel as hopeful as I did that day. I have to ask myself this question: If Rick Rescorla were here today, how could I explain to him how and why we’ve dropped the ball in the global war on terror? How would I explain to this hero—a man who not only saw imminent danger on the horizon but also devised and executed a simple yet effective survival strategy—that afterward, even with all the resources our nation can bring to bear, we have not followed suit?

Are we even marginally still engaged in a war on terror? In many ways, it ended when President Obama took office. Was there some final victory that I somehow didn’t hear about? No, he just changed the name of our efforts to “overseas contingency operations,” which doesn’t make sense as English, let alone as military strategy. If the man had been in the White House on June 6, 1944, we might now know D-Day as “A Day at the Beach.”

So this is the politically correct order of the day. We’re not supposed to talk about “terror,” for one thing, and we should especially refrain from mentioning that it is radical Islamists who are coming after us. On November 10, 2009, the president spoke at the Fort Hood memorial service to honor the thirteen soldiers (and the unborn child of one of them) who had been murdered by Major Nidal Hasan as an act of jihad. Astonishingly, as if completely ignoring the motivation behind this tragedy, he never used such words as
Islam
or
Islamist
or
Muslim
. Does ignoring the gorilla in the room mean that he’s really not there?

A few months later, in May 2010, Texas congressman Lamar Smith tried to get Attorney General Eric Holder to admit that a belief in radical Islam was behind Hasan’s attack, as well as Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s failed attempt to explode a bomb in his “Under-roos” on a plane to Detroit the Christmas before and Faisal Shahzad’s fizzled bomb during rush hour in Times Square earlier that month. Here is an excerpt from the congressional hearing:

This was not just a disagreement about semantics. The guys they’re talking about weren’t trying to blow things up (themselves included) because they were pyromaniacs; they were engaged in their own personal acts of jihad. We can only thank the Lord that they were so inept, because we were failed by the system we trusted to catch them before they could act on their hatred. If they’d had the skills to match that hatred, we would have suffered scores of casualties.

The current bizarre taboo against identifying our enemy by name reminds me of our deference to the Islamic prohibition against depicting Mohammad. We’re so afraid of offending the people who are hellbent on wiping us out that we are now playing by their rules. The naming taboo also goes to the heart of our ability to prosecute this war, a war that Osama bin Laden declared on us in 1996 and 1998, before his attacks (or overseas contingency operations) on our embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998, on the USS
Cole
in 2000, and on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001.

As the frustrated and incredulous Congressman Smith remarked to Attorney General Holder, “I don’t know why the administration has such difficulty acknowledging the obvious. . . . If you can’t name the enemy, then you’re going to have a hard time trying to respond to them.” Exactly! This example of PC (like so many) isn’t just silly; it’s downright dangerous, and also reminiscent of our failure to recognize the seriousness of the Islamic terror threat after the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. Rick Rescorla, though he was nowhere near the halls of national power or the inner sanctum of the intelligence community, clearly saw the writing on the wall. He correctly inferred that this failed attack was in fact a first strike in a larger offensive. How could so many others not see that?

Perhaps President Obama and his administration are so wary of naming the enemy because they are fundamentally unable to distinguish between the ancient religion of Islam and the radical Islam of our day—a totalitarian ideology like its predecessors in the twentieth century, communism and fascism. While traditional Islam is not my particular cup of religious tea, I can accept it generally as a historical set of beliefs that brings purpose and unity to millions of peaceful worshipers around the globe. It is clear that most followers of Islam are as revolted by terror as we are (and, in some cases, as likely to be attacked and killed).

But radical Islam is an altogether different thing: It isn’t as much a religion as it is a psychosis. Don’t get me wrong: All religions must be vigilant against radical perversion, as Christians learned, for instance, from the medieval and Spanish inquisitions or the Salem witch trials. But to confuse the radical with the righteous in any religion, or to lump them together, is a tragic mistake. In the Obama administration’s fear of naming the obvious, it is a tactical error.

To fight them, you have to know precisely how they think. The terrorists who scheme against us follow the ideology of the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, the Karl Marx of Islamic extremism. His writings, which are the intellectual foundation of the movement, include the following tenet: “A Muslim has no nationality except his belief.” If that’s the case, the radical Islamist can have no loyalty to the United States or any other country. He is loyal only to the jihad that plots to establish an Islamist theocracy, or religion-run government, that will eventually rule a worldwide caliphate. This is a breathtaking ambition, but Qutb and his followers mean it. Political divisions are irrelevant, because lines on a map can be wiped forever away with a blood-soaked rag. This is the root explanation of why the war on terror is infinitely more complex than any prior war, in which opposing nations typically fought each other on battlefields. Terror, by contrast, happens at home. In almost any nation. Anywhere.

Although Qutb was executed by President Nasser in 1966, he and his ideas have remained alive to haunt us through his followers. He has inspired terrorists from bin Laden to the radical American-born imam Anwar al-Awlaki, now in hiding in Yemen. Al-Awlaki, in turn, inspired Hasan, Abdulmutallab, and Shahzad. He has argued that “jihad against America is binding upon myself, just as it is binding on every other able Muslim.” That’s a pretty clear renunciation of any claim to his citizenship, I’d think. Yet when he was added to the CIA’s list of terrorists being targeted by our drones, the
New York Times
denounced this move as a planned execution by the United States of “one of its own citizens far from a combat zone.” I guess they just don’t get it: Yemen is a combat zone. It is, in fact, the headquarters of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). During the Civil War Abraham Lincoln asked, “Must I shoot a simple-minded deserter, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert?” In any event, the CIA has reason to believe that al-Awlaki has gone well beyond being a wily agitator who preaches that attacking America is a “religious duty.” Evidently, he is now actively engaged in plotting with AQAP.

Sadly, while we’ve become used to packing our Ziploc bags with miniature bottles of shampoo and taking off our shoes at airport security gates, some of us still have not intellectually grasped whom and what we are fighting. Unfortunately, President George W. Bush was only half right when he said that we have to fight them there so that we won’t have to fight them here. In a war without borders, the truth is that we have to fight them here, there, and everywhere, even if walking sock-footed through airports and having our belongings rustled about by TSA workers does less to deter terrorism than to inconvenience travelers.

It has not helped the war that, after 9/11, too many senators and congressmen shamefully saw homeland-security funds as a great source of local pork rather than as limited, precious resources to be allocated based purely on risk. It also hasn’t helped that too many in the administration are like the sputtering attorney general or Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, who has referred to the war on terror as a series of “man-made disasters.”

Politicians and pundits alike are fond of repeating that 9/11 “changed everything.” It has certainly changed some things, but it hasn’t changed enough of them so that we can effectively fight our enemies.

For one thing, we have continued to try to fit the round peg of Islamic terrorism into the square hole of our traditional criminal justice system. Remember, we didn’t choose this particular enemy or this new mode of warfare, but we must adjust our response to the circumstances. Nothing in the Constitution prevents us from defending ourselves and our country. Or, as Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson once put it, “If the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”

That’s close to what Attorney General Holder is doing by pursuing a way to expand the public-safety exception under the
Miranda
decision, which requires that criminal suspects be read their rights. He is not only wasting his time but also jeopardizing our safety. We don’t need an improved public-safety exception because, in the war against terrorists, we don’t need
Miranda
at all. He also wants to delay the initial hearing for a captured terrorist suspect.

These ideas are completely wrongheaded. The criminal justice system that the Obama administration is tinkering with was designed to keep the peace, not prosecute a war. It’s like zoo officials planning an extreme home makeover on the aviary to make room for the new elephant. We can’t successfully wage this war if we use the wrong paradigm.
Miranda
was intended to yield admissible evidence that would be upheld in order to gain convictions. What’s the connection here? What we need is usable intelligence that will keep us safe from these whack-jobs who leap up from their prayer rugs with a renewed zeal to sever our heads.

If someone steals a watch from a store in Times Square, he’s a criminal who is entitled by law to
Miranda
warnings whether he’s a Christian, a Muslim, or an atheist. But when a radical Islamist tries to detonate a bomb in Times Square, he’s an unlawful enemy combatant.
Miranda
is irrelevant because he’s attacking the country as part of a war, not because he’s a Muslim. When our soldiers pulled Saddam Hussein out of the hidey-hole he’d fashioned near Tikrit in 2003, the message they delivered was not “You have the right to remain silent.” Be it in Tikrit or Topeka, a terrorist is not a criminal; he is an enemy. We should be consistent in treating him as such.

Holder’s efforts are only part of the ongoing legal confusion. There is conflict among lawyers at the State Department, Justice Department, and Pentagon over the limits of executive counterterrorism powers. The administration wants to rely more heavily on the Geneva Conventions, but those agreements never envisioned this type of warfare. Another dangerously wrong paradigm! The war on terror is challenging enough without our tying one hand (or both) behind our backs.

Yet another ill-advised paradigm is the use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to control how we monitor terrorist communications. FISA was passed in 1978 in response to possibly questionable government surveillance of members of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. But the pendulum swings. Today, New York City police commissioner Ray Kelly has properly called FISA “an unnecessarily protracted, risk-averse process.” That means we are erring on the side of overprotecting e-mails and cell-phone calls while putting our lives in danger. Either FISA must be rewritten to address the current situation or a separate set of rules should govern our conduct of the war on terror.

Even though Major Hasan’s damning e-mail correspondence with jihadist Anwar al-Awlaki was in hand, for some reason the Joint Terrorism Task Force and the army decided to not even bother to investigate him. Their negligence let him go on to murder thirteen and wound thirty-one of his fellow soldiers, including an innocent unborn child. What were our officials thinking?