“I was recently told by a media person that if something happens in this city, I’m toast.” So said Tom Potter, mayor of Portland, Oregon, on April 28, 2005 as he and the city council voted to bar Portland police from participating in one of the federal government’s key anti-terrorism initiatives, the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. In Portland’s deep-blue precincts, there was intense opposition to the Bush administration’s conduct of the war on terror; residents worried the task force might violate state anti-discrimination laws by targeting Muslims for their religious and political views. So city leaders forbade police from taking part in it.
They made brave statements. “Here in Portland, we are not willing to give up individual liberties in order to have a perception of safety,” city commissioner Randy Leonard told reporters a few days before the vote. Yet there was still a little note of concern in Mayor Potter’s words: What if there were a terrorist attack after we refused to work with the FBI to prevent it?
Last Friday, that nearly happened. FBI undercover agents arrested would-be jihadi Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a 19-year old Somali-born naturalized U.S. citizen, in connection with a plot to set off an enormous car bomb at a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square. Mohamud told the agents he wanted to stage a “spectacular show” in which hundreds, perhaps thousands of Portlanders would die. He also said he wasn’t worried about getting caught because the authorities in Portland “don’t see it as a place where anything will happen.”
Mohamud’s plot — uncovered by the very FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force that city leaders rejected — has rekindled the security debate in Portland. Tom Potter is no longer mayor, but his successor, Sam Adams, says it is time to “re-think” the city’s rejection of the FBI task force. Council members who weren’t in office in 2005 say the same thing.
Looking back at the ’05 debate, it’s striking how deeply concerned city officials were with the well-being of possible terrorist suspects, and how relatively less concerned they were with the threat of actual terrorist violence. The debate focused on whether, if Portland allowed its cops to take part in the task force, the FBI would abide by an Oregon law strictly barring police from collecting “information about the political, religious or social views, associations or activities” of anyone unless that information directly related to a criminal investigation and there were reasonable grounds to suspect that person was involved in criminal conduct.
The mayor demanded the FBI give him top secret security clearance so he could keep an eye on any investigation his police were involved in, just to make sure the anti-discrimination law was being observed. The FBI said no. When the city council acted, the people who advocated breaking with the FBI framed the issue as one of secrecy and transparency. “Portland has stricken a blow against government secrecy by deciding to pull out of the Joint Terrorism Task Force,” said ACLU associate legal director Ann Beeson.
Opponents of the FBI often cited the bureau’s mistaken arrest of Brandon Mayfield, a Portland lawyer and convert to Islam, for the 2004 train bombings in Madrid, Spain. But there’s little doubt that Portland officials were angry over the war on terror well before the Mayfield incident, slamming the Bush administration over the Patriot Act and efforts to question Muslims in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Portland wanted to strike a symbolic blow against Bush, and it did.
There was one dissenting voice on the council. Before the vote, Commissioner Dan Saltzman warned that the action was “a step backwards” and that “the threat of terrorism is…real.” Now, after the Mohamud incident, Saltzman is again calling for Portland to change its mind. “The events of this holiday weekend have made it clear that we need to have seamless communication with our regional and federal law enforcement partners,” he said in a statement Monday. “We need to rejoin the Joint Terrorism Task Force.”
The bottom line of all this is that the FBI saved Portland from a potentially horrendous attack. But city leaders weren’t involved in saving themselves because they were more concerned about the possibility of discrimination than the reality of terrorism. Even as he cast his vote, Mayor Potter worried that something might happen. And now that Portland almost experienced his worst fears, shouldn’t someone be toast?
Byron York, The Examiner’s chief political correspondent, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears on Tuesday and Friday, and his stories and blogposts appear on ExaminerPolitics.com.
