Ramblings

Allan C. Brownfeld

      Allan C. Brownfeld is our correspondent covering Washington D.C.

President Bush's "Comprehensive National Strategy" Against Terrorism Has Yet to Make Us Secure at Home

      After the terrorist attacks of September 11, President Bush pledged a "comprehensive national strategy" against terrorism. The congress passed anti-terrorism legislation. A number of new, sometimes controversial steps, were taken. One new regulation permits wiretapping conversations between suspects and their lawyers. More than 1,000 people have been arrested or detained since September 11 and the Justice Department has compiled a list of 5,000 men-mostly from the Middle East-to be interviewed for information connected to terrorist activity.
      Civil libertarians on both the left and right have expressed concern about some of these steps, pointing out that in times of war government power always tends to increase, often in ways that have little real connection to the war effort itself. Those who are traditionally concerned about the growth of government power often look the other way when such growth is done in the name of "national security." This, however, is a mistake. It is possible to conduct a successful war effort and maintain our respect for Constitutional rights and the separation of powers at the same time.
      Beyond all of this, however, is the fact that the "comprehensive national strategy" against terrorism remains far from being established. The U.S., as 2002 begins, remains highly vulnerable to terrorism.
      There are serious problems with coordination between local, state and federal government law enforcement authorities. State and local officials bear most of the burden in responding to terrorism-in part because of the numbers. There are approximately 650,000 local policemen but only 11,400 FBI agents. Yet, cooperation between the different levels of government is rarely smooth.
      In December, New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik accused the FBI of slowing New York's anthrax response by withholding for a week key information on the deadly virus. Kerik, in testimony before Congress, blasted the FBI's decision earlier this fall to sit on the information that NBC anchor Tom Brokaw had gotten an anthrax-laced letter. "We could have had a handle on it much earlier," said Kerik. "That letter was held for some time . . . even more than a week. The FBI didn't let us know."
      Kerik complained that the FBI's mind-set is not to share information with local police departments-delaying their ability to respond in a crisis.

Continuing to maintain walls between federal and state authorities with respect to the sharing of real-time information represents the worst kind of dysfunctional thinking in government and must be addressed as quickly as possible.

      Another official who testified before Congress was Martin O'Malley, the mayor of Baltimore, who recalled how a tip was recently phoned to a local utility concerned about a suspicious truck parked outside one of its facilities. The city's police department, which could have been there within minutes, never received the tip, he said. The police commissioner found out about the incident only long afterward, when a utility executive passed it along at a social event. "We assume that the FBI checked into the truck," O'Malley said, "but we're not sure."
      In addition, said O'Malley, one of the hijackers who crashed a jetliner on the Pentagon on September 11 had been stopped days earlier by a Maryland state trooper who had no way of knowing that the man was "an international terrorist." He declared:

The CIA had him on a watch list, the FBI didn't, and no information was shared with state or local law enforcement. The state trooper who pulled the driver over would have known he was wanted if he had an outstanding speeding ticket in the state of Maryland. He would have known if his insurance was expired. But he had no way of knowing that he had just pulled over a international terrorist.

      The men identified as the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77 stayed in Laurel, Maryland, motels in the months leading up to the hijacking. The hijacker-who O'Malley did not identify by name-was stopped by a state trooper for speeding in the Laurel area on September 9.
      O'Malley and Kerick appeared before the senate committee to speak on behalf of legislation known as the U.S.A. Patriot Act. The bill would allow federal authorities to provide state and local law enforcement agencies with information about grand jury proceedings, confidential banking and educational records, wiretaps and foreign intelligence operations.
      Mayor O'Malley also said the FBI has not sought the help of local law enforcement agencies in questioning 5,000 foreign students who have visa violations. "Our police commissioner has heard nothing," O'Malley said. "his 3,200 police officers are not yet helping."
      The National Governors Association estimates that homeland security will cost the states $4 billion extra in the first year. Yet, with the economy in recession, the states are facing large budget shortfalls. They are asking for federal help, but little seems to be forthcoming. Mayor Marc Morial of New Orleans complains that of the $10 billion to be spent on homeland defense this year, states and cities will get just five percent.
      At the same time, despite much discussion of lax airport security, American airports remain less than prepared for the current threat. While passengers are waiting in longer lines and National Guardsmen are patrolling airports with automatic weapons, "nothing has changed" in the quality of airport security, said Issac Yeffet, the former head of security for Israel's El Al airline, which is widely considered the world's most secure carrier.
      Yeffet said the steps the government has hurried to implement, such as increasing the use of bomb-detection technology and tightening the process at passenger screening checkpoints, are half-measures. He compared them with the problem of trying to warm up with a blanket that is too short:

You don't know what to cover first, head or legs. Whatever you do, in the morning you're sick.

      At Baltimore-Washington International airport (BWI), for example, the Federal Aeronautics Authority (FAA) supplied van-sized bomb detection machines. The scanners-Examiner 3DX6000 models-were to be run continuously, scanning as many bags as possible. Yet, the Washington Post reported late in December,

One day last week, two of BWI's machines were switched off. The two that were running seemed to be operating at vastly different rates.

Anything less than constant use of those machines, Yeffet said is nearly meaningless: "We cannot rely on God to reveal which bags to scan out of thousands that flow through the airport every day."

      On November 27, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta admitted that a sixty-day deadline in new aviation security legislation for screening all checked bags for bombs was unrealistic. The deadline is January 18 and airlines have been seeking at least a thirty-day delay.
      Congress, while arguing in support of airline security, seems unwilling to foot the bill. While Congress has mandated the screening of one hundred percent of checked bags, and while it will cost at least $4 billion to buy and install the equipment, Congress is budgeting less than $300 million this fiscal year. At that rate it would take Congress thirteen years to make good on its commitment. The law says air marshals may be deployed on every flight, and congressional sponsors said this would be an antidote to terrorism. In fact, however, marshals will be on less than twenty percent of flights and while the House voted to spend $233 million more, the Senate approved nothing for this purpose. In the case of cockpit reinforcements, the law requires that cockpits be made impregnable to hijackers, but the Senate cut the president's $300 million dollar request to $251 million and the House slashed it to $50 million.
      Editorially, USA Today declared that this

. . . behavior is typical of the way airline security has been mishandled for years: bold public pronouncements after a tragedy, then a failure to follow through when the public isn't watching. After the 1998 bombing of Pan Am 103, Congress ordered regulators to move speedily to screen checked baggage; but it wasn't until the mid-1990s that Congress provided real money to do the job. That's one major reason only a small percentage of checked baggage is now screened. . . . Congress argued that it had ushered in a new era of air security. That can't happen if lawmakers stick to their bad habit of making promises they have no intention of keeping.

      There are serious vulnerabilities in other areas as well. The American public health system is in need of serious repair. Modern communications systems are absent from many local health departments. In any incidents involving life-threatening pathogens, it is essential to both identify the organisms and also disseminate the information widely and rapidly. Yet funding constraints have prevented some city, county and state health departments from buying basic equipment, such as computers and fax machines. Nearly one-third of local departments have no Internet access, ten percent have no e-mail, and fewer than half can broadcast faxes to send out disaster alerts to hospitals and doctors. Integrated data systems that would allow quick electronic information-sharing within state health agencies, between states, with laboratories, and with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention do not exist in public health.
      In congressional hearings in October, Patrick Quinlisk, Iowa's state epedemiologist, and Rex Archer, director of the Kansas City, Missouri Health Department, testified that most health offices are severely understaffed even for routine health services, much less for acts of bio-terrorism. Only twenty-five states have CDC-trained Epidemic Intelligence Service officers, or "disease detectives."
      The limits of public-health preparedness became clear to those who participated in Operation TopOff in May 2000, a four-day, $3 million drill and simulation of a bio-terrorist attack in Denver. Denver was selected because it was one of the cities that has received preparedness training and equipment. TopOff (so named because top officials of the U.S. government participated) simulated the release of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes pneumatic plague, in the Denver Performing Arts Center. The illness is passed from person to person through droplets in the air, but to catch it one must be within six feet of an infected person. Simple facemasks can prevent the spread of the plague. Nevertheless, in the drill the disease spread beyond Denver and then beyond the U.S. Drug supplies became depleted. TopOff participants also discovered that public health's decision-making style didn't work.
      This lack of preparedness was evident during the anthrax scare beginning in October. In Florida, New York, and Washington, D.C., telephones were not answered at health departments or in federal offices. Federal health officials often contradicted one another-as well as their own previous statements.
      Concern is growing in Washington not only about the prospect of future bio-terrorist attacks, but also of the vulnerability of U.S. nuclear plants and computer networks, as well as a continually lax immigration policy and porous borders. Only 334 border patrolmen cover all 3,500 miles of the U.S.-Canadian border. There are only 20,000 prison beds nationwide for detaining illegal aliens. Almost all are filled by illegal aliens awaiting deportation after serving felony sentences in the U.S. That leaves no space for illegal aliens who have not yet been convicted of a felony.
      We have heard the appropriate rhetoric of concern and alarm about our vulnerability to terrorism. That vulnerability, however, remains very much a reality. President Bush's "strategy" remains a work in progress-limited progress in too many areas.

After September 11: A Crisis of Identity for Muslim-Americans

      Immediately after the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, President Bush and other U.S. leaders called for ethnic and religious tolerance and urged Americans not to single out Muslim-Americans as in any way involved with those who were responsible for the assault.
      Ziad Asali, president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the largest Arab-American group in the country, said: "The tone of the country's leaders-all officials, at all levels, is exactly the right one, and it is carrying clout with the public."
      Nabell Abraham, an anthropologist who is co-author of Arab Detroit, said that since the gulf war, during a decade of accelerated immigration from the Middle East and Asia, he had observed a "phenomenal" improvement in attitudes toward Arab-Americans in the news media and among elected officials. "It is like night and day," he said.

In the 1980s, when the Reagan administration said it was waging war on terrorists like Libya's Qaddafi, almost all of the government and officialdom was indifferent to Arab-Americans in this county. Now Bush is going to a mosque. The tone is being set on top, and it is making a difference.

      When President Bush addressed a joint session of Congress shortly after the terrorist attack, he declared:

The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying, in effect, to hijack Islam itself. The terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics, a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teaching of Islam. . . . they follow in the paths of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism.

      While the terrorist attacks may have put America's Muslims on the defensive, they also sense an opportunity to bolster their political clout. At the American Muslim Alliance's national convention in October in California, activists from around the country distilled this message: Muslims must show the rest of America that they are part of the mainstream, but they must also use their visibility to forge political influence just as minority groups before them have.
      "This is not the time to hide but to come out and let people know who we are," declared Omar Ahmad, chairman of the Council of American-Islamic Relations. "it is our opportunity to raise the level of understanding and be a part of the solution."
      Whatever differences may divide America's approximately six million Muslims (a number which is itself a subject of dispute with a recent study commissioned by the American Jewish committee concluding that the number is much lower, no more than 3.4 million and perhaps fewer than 1.5 million), they seem united in their devastation by the terrorist attacks. Islamic legal scholars issued a religious ruling that Muslims serving in the U.S. military have a duty to fight for their country even if it means bearing arms against other Muslims.
      Professor Agha Saeed of California State University-Hayward told the American Islamic Relations meeting that

We support Bush in going after terrorists and bringing them to justice. But if there is to be peace, we have to respect American ideals; due process, the dignity of the individual. We're not asking for favors, we're asking for equity.

      James Zogby, a lobbyist for the Arab-American community and a Christian, as are the majority of Arab-Americans, is a strong advocate of American democracy and its inclusion of immigrants from the Middle East. He notes that,

In the Middle West, there are Muslim community associations where the boys are all football players, and you couldn't tell their group photographs from an outing of Baptists or Methodists. But they still fast during Ramadan.

      Nearly eight in ten U.S. Muslims were born abroad, and no imams at mosques are American-born, according to an American Muslim Council (AMC) survey in 2000. A recent finding that just two million Muslims affiliate with a mosque suggests high rates of secularization.
      While on the surface, the president praises Islam and Muslim-Americans (the U.S. Postal service recently issued the Eid Stamp commemorating two Muslim holidays), and Muslim leaders embrace the American war on terror, the fact is that there is much turmoil within the Muslim-American community and, many fear, a stronger association with Islamic fundamentalism and anti-Western thinking than is immediately apparent.
      In an article entitled "The Danger Within: Militant Islam in America" (Commentary, Nov., 2001), Daniel Pipes, director of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum, argues that,

The Muslim population in this country is not like any other group, for it includes within it a substantial body of people-many times more numerous than the agents of Osama bin Laden-who share with the suicide hijackers a hatred of the United States and a desire, ultimately, to transform it into a nation living under the strictures of militant Islam. Although not responsible for the atrocities in September, they harbor designs for this country that warrant urgent and serious attention.

      While Mr. Pipes' fears may be overheated, and the likelihood of any serious effort to create an Islamic America is fanciful, the fact remains that Islamic fundamentalism with its anti-American and anti-Western views has indeed found a place for itself within Muslim America.
      One imam, Fawaz Damra of the Cleveland Islamic Center, was videotaped speaking in 1991 to an Islamic Jihad fund-raiser in Chicago. He urged the audience to direct

. . . a rifle at the first and last enemy of the Islamic nation, and that is the sons of monkeys and pigs, the Jews.

After a local T.V. station recently aired the videotape, he apologized for making "deplorable remarks in the past."
      Or consider Sheik Muhammad Al-Gamei'a, the former imam of the Islamic Cultural Center in New York, the biggest mosque in Manhattan, who has moved to Egypt. In comments posted on an unofficial website of Egypt's Al-Azhar University, he said:

Muslims just aren't smart enough to carry something like (the September 11 attacks) off, only the Jews are capable of planning such an incident.

He also accused Jewish doctors in the U.S. of killing Muslim children:

Muslims do not feel safe even going to the hospitals, because some Jewish doctors in one of the hospitals poisoned sick Muslim children, who then died.

None of this has been reported, he said, because "the Zionists control everything and they also control political decision-making, the big media organizations and the financial and economic institutions."
      In November, a Washington-based Islamic cleric accused Israel of carrying out the September 11 attacks. Imam Mohammed Asi of the Islamic Center of Washington said Israeli officials decided to launch the attacks after the U.S. refused their request to put down the Palestinian infitada. "If we're not going to be secure, neither are you," was the Israelis' thinking following the U.S. response, according to Imam Asi. He also repeated the widely circulated canard that 4,000 Jews did not go to work at their World Trade Center offices on September 11 because they had been warned in advance of the attack.
      A sectarian divide in U.S. Islam is gaining more attention. Wahhabism, a strict form of Muslim Orthodoxy backed by Saudi Arabia's wealth and its members' missionary zeal, may have overshadowed alternative strands of Islam in the U.S., some observers charge. Others say Wahhabism, which is more likely to claim it is "true Islam" and expect other Muslims to conform, is merely part of the faith's diversity.
      Azizah al-Hibri, a law professor at the University of Richmond, says: "The problem is that some ideas have more funding than others," responding to the question of Saudi funding of Wahhabi schools, literature and religious teachers. "It has a strong presence, and that makes it an issue for people who are not Wahhabi. But it's not a split in Islam. It is part of the marketplace of ideas."
      One Sufi leader, Sheik Hisham Kabbani, who founded the Islamic Supreme Council of America as an alternative to Wahhabi influence, stirred a debate on the issue in 1999. In a State Department hearing, he said that eighty percent of America's mosques had been taken over by imams with Wahhabi-like loyalties. Estimates of the number of mosques in the U.S. range from 1,200 to 3,000.
      For his testimony, Mr. Kabbani was denounced by a coalition of established Muslim political groups. Professor al-Hibri rejects the sheik's charge that policy groups such as the American Muslim Council (AMC) harbor Wahhabism. "The AMC is not Wahhabi," she said.
      As September 11 recedes, some Muslim groups in the U.S. are returning to the positions they have long held: that military aid to Israel and sanctions against Iraq create the ideal atmosphere for recruiting terrorists. "We kept quiet on that in the initial stages, not wanting to be seen as insensitive or political opportunists," said Aslam Abdullah, editor of The Minaret, North America's top-selling Muslim magazine. The magazine's October issue condemned the September 11 attacks and mourned its victims. The November issue argues that anti-American sentiment, born of the U.S. support for undemocratic governments in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, is partly to blame for the attacks. "People are asking why this is happening," Mr. Abdullah said. "We are telling them."
      The shift in pronouncements is opening rifts in a community struggling to present a united front-and, above all, a benevolent face-to the American public. Angered by the suggestion that American policies could provoke terrorist attacks, some Muslim and Arab-American groups are condemning what they call the misguided and irresponsible positions of their peers.
      "The terrorism was the result of a suicide death cult that was hell-bent on killing a lot of people, said James J. Zogby, president of the Arab-American Institute. "It simply wasn't edifying in the face of the horror and shock to discuss any of these grievances. There's not a connection."

      Other groups point out that the Bush administration has already expressed support for an independent Palestinian state, making criticism of its policies inappropriate, if not inflammatory.
      "This is a defining moment for the community," said Aly R. Abuzaakouk, director of the American Muslim Council.

There are issues of concern for our community and we will get to them. But, for now the country is in crisis and we need to show our loyalty by standing by the administration. We need to build bridges, not break them.

      Despite a small number of anti-Muslim hate crimes, many Muslim and Arab-American groups say they have been most deeply moved by the outpouring of tolerance and openness most Americans have shown. In November, President Bush held the first Ramadan dinner at the White House, "a way for the administration to publicly make the case that it is sensitive to Muslims."
      Some critics, however, are less than pleased with the response of Muslim theologians and clergy in the U.S. Columnist Charles Krauthammer, for example, writes that

After September 11, where were the Muslim theologians and clergy, the imams and mullahs, rising around the world to declare that September was a crime against Islam? Where was the fatwa against Osama bin Laden? The voices of high religious authorities have been scandalously still. And what of Muslim religious leaders in America? At the solemn National Cathederal ceremony just three days after September 11, the spokesman for the American Muslim community made no statement declaring the attacks contrary to Islam. There was no casting out of those who committed the crime. There was no fatwa against suicide murder. Dr. Muzammil Siddiqi, spiritual leader of the Islamic Society of North America, offered that "to those that lay the plots of evil, for them is a terrible penalty." Who are those plotters of evil receiving retribution? Did he mean the terrorists? Or did he mean that America had it coming? He never said.

      Many Muslim messages are being heard in the U.S. "When you're dealing with Islam, it's like dealing with Judaism," said John Esposito, director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. "You ask a religious question and the answer is, Who's your rabbi? Who's your imam?"
      Most Moslems in the U.S. appear to be loyal Americans who are not being properly represented by the militant clerics in their midst. A more typical Arab-American view is that expressed by Professor Muqtedar Khan of Adrian College in Michigan:

American Muslims are in a unique position today. They know and understand the Muslim world and they know and understand the U.S. as well. They can serve as a bridge of understanding, dialogue and peace between America and the Muslim world. . . . American Muslims must avoid the impulse to blame the U.S. (or Jews or Hindus) for Muslim miseries. We must develop a balanced attitude towards the U.S. We must be critical, but also self-critical.

      In the end, Muslim-Americans will have to decide where their loyalties lie, as have all other religious and ethnic groups in the American society. Most of them, it appears, have decided that America is their future and are adapting accordingly.