By Lee Smith
Of the many uncomfortable truths emerging
from last week’s bombing and subsequent manhunt—including the fact that
American cities are still vulnerable to Islamic terrorism—one of the
most troubling but least talked-about is the fact that martial law may
now become part of the municipal playbook.
It was not two immigrant brothers—“losers,” their uncle called
them—who closed down Boston, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, put military vehicles in its streets, and sent men in helmets and flak jackets into peoples’ homes.
It was our elected leaders: our local, state, and federal political
officials and law-enforcement authorities. If any Bostonians objected to
having their civil liberties trampled on, they were drowned out by
their cheering neighbors who massed in the streets to celebrate the
authorities who had turned their city into something resembling Fallujah
under American military occupation.
And we may as well get used to it, because in the event of future
terror attacks this reality is likely coming to your city, too. As
Charles Ramsey, Philadelphia’s chief of police, said on Fox News Sunday of closing down a major American city, “Certainly I think it was genius.”
The consensus of smart commentators is that Ramsey is right: It’s the
way we live now, and we better get used to the facts of modern life.
Terror, Islamic rage, and the hysterical Twitter-fed public response to
shootings, bombings, and threats, have made the ever more disruptive and
repressive responses unavoidable. “What happened the other day in
Boston unfortunately is not the exception,” says Richard Haass, the head
of the Council on Foreign Relations. “This is not a one-off. This is a
glimpse of the future. This is granular terrorism that 1, 2, 3 people
can carry out. We live in a world where power is diffused. Where
individuals are in turn empowered.”
In what Atlantic magazine correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg
calls “the era of the suspicious package,” everything is indeed
different now. As Tom Brokaw says, “You can’t get intel on the lone
operator.” Terrorists “only have to be right once,” California Rep. Jane
Harman intoned on the Sunday talk show circuit, also noting the importance of “bomb-sniffing dogs.” “Obviously,” she said, “next time, we will have more bomb-sniffing dogs.”
We might as well accept the truth here: If the safety, stability, and
economic welfare of our cities depend on the thin, furry line of
bomb-sniffing dogs, we’re in trouble. Similarly, much has been made of
the fact that the FBI was warned by Russian intelligence that Tamerlan
Tsarnaev was a potentially dangerous character. But if we have to depend
on the ability and willingness of foreign-security services to tell us
about the activities, beliefs, and capabilities of people who live and
work in major American cities, we’re in trouble.
Or rather, everyone is who doesn’t live in New York. Since 9/11,
officials in New York have chosen to play offense rather than defense,
by actively collecting intelligence about individuals and groups that
might target their city. The NYPD has offices and liaison officers
worldwide, including Paris, London, Amman, and Tel Aviv, but its most
important collection work takes place in the five boroughs of New York,
especially in those places most likely to know about or, worse, incubate
potential Islamic terrorists: the city’s Muslim communities.
Obviously this is not going to stop every terrorist act, just like a
cop walking his local beat is not going to stop every liquor-store
hold-up in his precinct. But the Boston area’s local, state, and federal
authorities surely would have profited from contacts with members of
the Boston mosque where Tamerlan Tsarnaev raged against the imam for
putting forth a non-Muslim—Martin Luther King, Jr.—as a positive role
model. Had the authorities been alerted by those best placed to
understand Tsarnaev’s actions as volatile and extreme—namely, Muslim
community leaders—this intelligence might have prevented a murderous
career.
We’re not talking about water-boarding American Muslims here, or
shipping them off to Guantanamo. It’s collecting intelligence about
potential problems in a community that is as keen as any other to be
done with Islamic terrorism. Now, to be frank, the unhappy reality is
that in some instances, conducting surveillance in Muslim communities
may indeed be a violation of the civil liberties of some citizens (and
indeed, the NYPD has taken a fair amount of criticism for its efforts
because of this). But sending armed vehicles into the streets and
putting entire cities under lockdown is also a violation of civil
liberties. The fact that there will be more people like the Tsarnaev
brothers means that we have hard choices ahead of us. The people who are
forcing these choices on us are not liberals or conservatives, but
terrorists.
The question then is, should a few suffer temporarily? Or should all
Americans bear the burden permanently? Like all of democratic politics,
it’s a trade-off and one that like gun control, gay marriage, and
immigration merits a broad debate among Americans. The problem however
is that virtually everywhere else except New York City, political
leaders, local, state, and federal law authorities, as well as
intellectuals and media figures have already made an unspoken trade-off:
Rather than encroach in a limited fashion on the rights of Muslim
Americans, all Americans must forfeit some of their liberties. Lock down
Boston. Send SWAT teams into the streets. Use bomb-sniffing dogs. Spend
tens of billions of dollars taking naked pictures of air travelers and
searching grandmothers at airports. But whatever you do, don’t gather
intelligence on the guy who trolls jihadist websites and then takes a
six-month-long vacation in Dagestan.
It’s just more confused rhetoric from a
political class, right and left, that lacks all clarity and discretion.
Intelligence gathering in Muslim communities is a no-no, but it’s OK to
use a drone to kill an American citizen in Yemen without judicial review
or oversight.
This makes no sense. It would help if America’s political establishment
were able to tell the difference between politically incorrect
violations of individual rights in the service of information-gathering
to prevent attacks, and gross violations of the core rights to due
process of law that they are sworn to protect.
***
It would also help if they could tell the difference between
civilians and terrorists. Amazingly, Secretary of State John Kerry can’t
tell the difference between the armed Turkish terrorists who were
killed when they tried to break Israel’s maritime blockade of Gaza in
May 2010 and the four innocent people murdered in his hometown by the
Tsarnaevs last Monday. At a press conference in Istanbul, Kerry said
of the deaths aboard the Turkish-sponsored ship that ran the blockade,
which was intended to keep arms from reaching Hamas: “I particularly say
to the families of people who were lost in the incident: We understand
these tragedies completely and we sympathize with them. … I have just
been through the week of Boston and I have deep feelings for what
happens when you have violence and something happens and you lose people
that are near and dear to you.”
So, let’s get this straight: If you sail to break a blockade designed
to keep missiles and guns out of the hands of Hamas, who are a group of
murderous anti-Western religious fanatics who kill civilians in terror
bombings, then you are the moral equivalent of the innocent people in
Boston who lost their lives in a terror bombing, perpetrated by
murderous fanatics who believe the very same things that Hamas believes.
How would Kerry feel if after last week’s events the Turkish government
sailed a flotilla of aid ships into Boston Harbor in support of the
surviving Tsarnaev brother—and any associates who might still be at
large? John Kerry needs to get it through his well-coiffed skull that it
is the Boston Marathon bombers and Hamas who are the same people—and
the civilians that they maim and kill are the victims.
And sadly, Kerry is not alone in his confusion. America has become a
nation in political, moral, and now actual lockdown. And it needn’t be:
Islamic terror is not a fact of life, nor is it an existential threat to
the United States. It’s a vicious ideology that should be equally
offensive to men, women, Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and to
politicians and commentators on the right and the left—and kudos to
those like Andrew Sullivan who state it clearly.
The violence and terror it gives rise to is a limited problem that can
be further contained by politicians and law authorities who devote their
budgets to intelligence collection rather than putting armored vehicles
in American streets.
The true existential threat to America comes not from Islamic terror
but from our own inability to think and speak clearly about the threats
that we face. By abridging the rights of all Americans in order to avoid
politically unpleasant images we are inflicting greater damage on our
society than any group of Islamist terrorists could ever dream of doing
on their own.
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