Ashcroft Vindicated Again The campaign to “free Mike Hawash” sputtered to a halt last week. Hawash is a former Intel engineer who has been widely portrayed as the victim of a Bush administration anti-Muslim witch hunt ever since the FBI picked him up in a parking lot outside his Oregon workplace last March. Hawash was held as a material witness to an al Qaeda conspiracy for five weeks before being charged as a member of that conspiracy. Shortly after he was detained, his former Intel boss Steve McGeady launched a publicity offensive on behalf of his friend, whom McGeady described as a prisoner in “John Ashcroft’s war on our Constitution.”
In most respects, this campaign was a huge success. The media were quite receptive to the idea that Hawash was being held because he conformed to a “stereotype set up by the Justice Department to vilify Mike and other Arab-Americans,” as McGeady put it. You can get a sense of just how receptive reporters were by perusing the vast array of clips at freemikehawash.org/coverage/index.htm.
But a funny thing happened on the way to Hawash’s martyrdom: He pled guilty to one of the conspiracy counts against him. Last week, as part of his plea agreement, Hawash admitted that he set out for China in October 2001 in an unsuccessful attempt to enter Afghanistan with a group of men known as the “Portland Six.” They were, he testified, “prepared to take up arms and die as martyrs” fighting for the Taliban against the United States. Moreover, Hawash said he “knew what he agreed to do was a violation of the law.”
The group, financed in part by Hawash, were hardly unsuspecting dupes. To get into the fight, they flew first to Hong Kong and then to Urumqi in western China, where they caught a train to Kashgar, hoping to cross into Pakistan and then Afghanistan. Failing in that, they took a train to Beijing, where they applied for visas from the Pakistani embassy, which turned them down. At that point Hawash returned to his wife and kids in Oregon. As a result of his plea, he will serve up to 10 years in prison and will assist the government in its prosecution of the men who traveled with him.
In May, McGeady wrote to the Oregonian, “If Mike Hawash is ultimately convicted of a crime, he should be held to account like anyone, but I would rather sacrifice my own credibility in his support and look a fool if he is guilty” than have him “emerge months from now, exonerated but friendless.” Too bad for McGeady that his friend wasn’t worthy of such loyalty.
The Arianna Agenda
Millionaire populist and author Arianna Huffington, whose dinner parties enlivened Gingrich-era Washington, jumped into the race for governor of California last week. She contributed a memorable piece to these pages in the fall of 1995, urging Newt, who was then her political lodestar, to consummate his revolution by running for president. But he didn’t take the advice, and she didn’t stay in his camp. By the late ’90s, she had moved so far left that Warren Beatty had become her ideal candidate. Now she has finally decided to cut out the political middlemen and run her own campaign.
On Wednesday morning, Arianna told Californians that “American politics is broken–controlled by a powerful elite using its financial clout to set the political agenda. Our representative republic has been replaced by the dictatorship of the dollar.” In the free-for-all that the Gray Davis recall has become, and as the only red-haired, Cambridge-trained celebrity debater in the race, she commanded the headlines for several hours. Then Arnold Schwarzenegger jumped in, trumping her celebrity factor by an order of magnitude.
Happily for Arianna, the race should still prove a terrific opportunity to test-drive the themes of her upcoming book, “Fanatics and Fools.” The fanatics, by the way, are Republicans; the fools are Democrats. Nobody, on the other hand, has ever accused Arianna of being a fool. In late May, Variety reported that she was paid in the low seven figures for the book by Miramax, with whom she is also working “to develop a television show.” No doubt the publicity value of a pseudo-campaign for governor will prove to be considerable.
Fake Tocqueville: It’s Back
Nearly eight years ago, in the early days of this magazine, Claremont McKenna professor John J. Pitney Jr. first called attention to the most overused bogus quote in American politics: the platitude, falsely attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville, that “America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.”
Devotees of THE SCRAPBOOK will recall that for years this page has waged a valiant–if unsuccessful–war to purge “fake Tocqueville” from our national discourse. The list of politicos who have deployed the quote is long and bipartisan, but the abuse of Fake Tocqueville reached its peak during the administration of Bill Clinton, whose use of it was, like so much else in his life, promiscuous. Since Clinton left office, uses of the quote (probably the concoction of a 20th-century ghostwriter) have mostly been confined to obscure op-eds and over-earnest letters to the editor.
But it’s campaign time again, and Fake Tocqueville has made its first official appearance of the 2004 presidential race. The summer 2003 issue of the communitarian journal Responsive Community reprints a May 19 campaign speech by Sen. John Kerry titled “Reviving the Ideal of Citizenship,” which Kerry kicked off this way: “Visiting this nation more than 150 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that America is great because Americans are good.” Kerry isn’t just using the ersatz quote, he’s misquoting it. Not only does Fake Tocqueville refuse to die; it mutates!
CIA MIA
When Congress released the unclassified version of its report on the terrorist attacks of September 11, the headline stories were all about “missed opportunities” and Saudi complicity. The only hero in the story, it seemed, was George Tenet, the CIA director, who, as early as 1998, had “declared war” on al Qaeda but whose efforts were frustrated by an administration and bureaucracy that didn’t take the threat posed by bin Laden seriously. Or so we’re told. Yet buried in the 858-page report are two notable findings that call into question just how serious Tenet himself was about waging that war.
On page 59 of the report, for example, the congressional investigators conclude that intelligence analysts assigned to work on the issue were “inexperienced, unqualified, under-trained, and without access to critical information.” And then, on page 388, the report notes that CIA’s counterterrorism officers told the Joint Inquiry that “before September 11 the CIA had no penetrations of al Qaeda’s leadership, and the Agency never got actionable intelligence.”
So, let’s see–the analysts were second rate and our spymasters had not recruited a single important source within the ranks of the terrorists. What war was Tenet waging, anyway? Given those facts, it’s easy to understand why the Pentagon wanted to set up an office to review and query what the CIA was feeding it.
League of Hypocrisy
The Arab League pitched a fit last week over the new Iraqi governing council. As the Washington Post noted in an editorial aptly headlined “Comic Relief in Cairo,” the 22 members of the league “declined to recognize the new council, on grounds that its members were . . . not elected by the Iraqi people themselves. . . . As the league’s Secretary General Amr Moussa put it in Cairo, ‘The council is a start, but it should pave the way for a legitimate government that can be recognized.'”
“By this standard,” the Post pointedly observed, “the league would have 22 empty chairs. Not a single country in the entire Arab world has a government that enjoys the sort of democratic legitimacy the league now demands of the Iraqi council.”
