THE PROBLEM OF THE LAW-ABIDING TERRORIST There were two civil-liberties sob stories in the news last week. The better known is the case of the “dirty bomber” and U.S. citizen Abdullah al Muhajir (ne Jose Padilla), an al Qaeda associate who was snatched up entering the country on May 8 and turned over to the military last week to be held and questioned. The second is that of Nabil Almarabh, who is maddeningly and typically referred to as a “former Boston cab driver,” though he is credibly suspected of having been a consequential figure in al Qaeda’s North American operations before September 11. He has been detained since last September as a material witness to the attacks, and after spending eight months in solitary confinement without legal representation, was charged in late May with relatively trivial violations of immigration law. What both these cases raise is what The Scrapbook hereby dubs the problem of the law-abiding terrorist. If the well-founded suspicions about them are true, these are extremely dangerous men. But it is not conceptually helpful to think of them as criminals; rather, they are enemies. And we can’t wait for them to become criminals before we round them up. Obviously, the reason Almarabh has been confined is not that the FBI is too busy admiring its jackboots to know what to do with him. It’s pretty clear that they know exactly what they’re doing, and it has nothing to do with immigration-law violations. One, by detaining him in solitary confinement for as long as possible, they hope to break the guy’s will and get him talking; two, they’re afraid simply to deport him. He might take part in an al Qaeda plot against America or one of our allies. Obviously, there are differences between how we will want to treat enemy-citizens like al Muhajir and enemy-aliens like Almarabh. But the Bush administration is clearly on the right track in making the interrogation and detention of such men a priority. Indeed, the defense-lawyer bellyaching about such cases has the effect of reassuring one that the right eggs are being broken in the making of the homeland-security omelette. The administration may not yet have done an optimal job of articulating this distinction between criminals and enemies. But it’s clearly keeping them up late, as can be seen in this overlooked Donald Rumsfeld interview with editors and reporters of the Washington Post on June 3. (The full text is available at www.dod.gov/news/Jun2002/t06042002_t0603edb.html.) “RUMSFELD: We are constantly putting pressure on [al Qaeda] every time we arrest somebody in some country around the world and start asking questions and learn a little bit more. Then that whole network knows that [inaudible] was arrested and he’s being asked those questions and he may or may not be providing information. “The problem we’ve got is the one you’re seeing manifested in the press [and] to a certain extent in our society. That is the tension between treating something as a law enforcement problem and treating it as an intelligence-gathering problem, and that is not an easy thing to deal with for a country that has historically [not had] a domestic intelligence-gathering entity. Most countries do. Anything that comes up in the United States tends to be looked at as a law enforcement matter. Gee, we just found this person doing something they shouldn’t have, let’s go punish them. Give them their rights, stick them in a jail, hire a lawyer at government expense and decide whether or not he’s guilty or innocent and give him due process. “Of course if you’re worried . . . that you’ve got the risk of terrorists getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction or killing thousands or tens of thousands of people, you’re not terribly interested in whether or not the person is potentially a subject for law enforcement. Your interest is what in the world do you do to find out what that person knows so that you can prevent an attack with thousands more Americans being killed, and that is a mindset that does not even exist domestically in our country. It doesn’t exist in the population, it does not exist in the press, it does not exist in how our government is organized and arranged. . . . “But here, once somebody is in the Justice Department they are looked at as a law enforcement problem as opposed to an intelligence-gathering problem. Therefore the question is how do you deal with that? It is not an easy question for us and we’ve got a lot of good, fine people who are worrying that through and wondering what that all means in our society.” WACKY JOURNALISTS The Scrapbook is a little late on this one; all the people involved have probably already been hired to write editorials for the New York Times. Just the same, let’s hie on over to www.journalism.berkeley.edu/alumni/enews 0202.html and get a behind-the-scenes look at Professional Journalism, elite graduate school division. The link is to the University of California, Berkeley School of Journalism’s electronic alumni newsletter for February 2002. One is instantly struck by the newsletter’s very first item, written in the J-School’s institutional voice, which describes how “Former President Bill Clinton addressed an adoring full house at Zellerbach Hall on the UC Berkeley campus on Tuesday in an event sponsored by the Journalism School.” Granted, The Scrapbook never went to journalism school, so maybe we’re just naive. But still, isn’t it . . . um, unusual for journalists to serve as–much less announce themselves to be–a politician’s “adoring” audience? Anyway, the real eye-opener in Berkeley Journalism’s alumni newsletter is the dispatch it publishes, in the form of a letter to Professor David Littlejohn, from one Malcolm Garcia, Class of ’97. Note please: Mr. Garcia has already graduated. He already has a big-league job, covering a major foreign war for a major American newspaper chain, the Knight Ridder Newspapers. What’s that like, you wonder? “Dear David,” Garcia begins. “Arrived about 4-5 weeks ago in Kabul and have been working ever since.” Turns out they shoot off actual weapons in a major foreign war and there are “shell casings all over the place,” which is “kind of a trip.” Garcia finds that “when I am ensconced on the thrown [sic] with my jeans around my ankles and shivering and hear gunfire at night, I feel a certain kind of vulnerability that goes behind [sic] wondering if we’re out of toilet paper.” But mostly, Malcolm Garcia is having a ball! “Saw Rumsfeld today at the airbase. . . . At one point the PIO cut off my probing questions about policy (do you think marijuana should be legalized, things like that that had nothing to do with the price of butter but I felt like twisting the minds of 21 year olds) and said, ‘They are trained to fight, not think.’ Ahh, the world we live in. I hang out with a wacky freelance guy out of Bangkok. He walked up to the Secret Service guys who had leather pistol grips inside their thighs and said, ‘So tell me about this bondage thing you’re into.’ Then, to some of the soldiers, ‘So if you unlock your safety’s [sic], you could just blow Rummy away, right?’ He’s a perfect match for me and behind the insanity a very good reporter.” Great business we’re in, huh? CHINA STALL Why is the Bush administration sitting on a long-completed report on China’s military power? By law, the Pentagon is required to produce an annual report on Beijing’s military strategies and capabilities. And it’s an open secret in Washington that the report has been done for some time now. Senior officials on the National Security Council staff and at the State and Defense departments, however, continue to block its release, apparently afraid that its frank assessment of where the Chinese military build-up is headed will complicate relations with Beijing. The irony of course is that the previous version of the report dates from the Clinton administration and was widely respected for its blunt but careful analysis of China’s military plans. You would think an administration whose president has said he would do whatever it takes to defend Taiwan would want to make public what in fact it would take.
