Read Fighting Terrorism Online
Authors: Benjamin Netanyahu
Fighting Terrorism (4 page)
While the United States and Canada have been hesitant to follow the lead of the European states and Japan in moving against their terrorist enemies at home, this is not to say the great democracies on the western side of
the Atlantic have had no experience with a more aggressive anti-terror policy. In 1970 Canada was faced with a spate of domestic terror at the hands of the Quebecois Liberation Front (FLQ), a tiny separatist group which got as far as blowing up a plane. The Canadians responded by invoking the War Measures Act of 1942, granting extensive emergency powers to the security services, which in short order reduced the FLQ to a memory. Looking back, we can see that it was this quick and draconian action which stamped out domestic terrorism in Canada for decades to come.
the Atlantic have had no experience with a more aggressive anti-terror policy. In 1970 Canada was faced with a spate of domestic terror at the hands of the Quebecois Liberation Front (FLQ), a tiny separatist group which got as far as blowing up a plane. The Canadians responded by invoking the War Measures Act of 1942, granting extensive emergency powers to the security services, which in short order reduced the FLQ to a memory. Looking back, we can see that it was this quick and draconian action which stamped out domestic terrorism in Canada for decades to come.
Perhaps the most striking example in which the United States was forced to momentarily curtail civil liberties in the face of potential terrorist activity occurred during the Gulf War. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990, Iraq was by no means a world military power, and Saddam's chances of winning a conventional war were slim. But Saddam had several cards up his sleeve that he believed might be able to make the Americans think twice. One was his arsenal of Scud missiles and chemical-weapons stockpiles, which he claimed to be willing to use to “incinerate half of Israel,” thereby hoping to shift the focus of the war to an Arab-Israeli confrontation and splitting the Arab partners in the international coalition arrayed against him; the other was terror, which he threatened to loose against the United States and its allies in the event of a counteroffensive in Kuwait. Indeed, there was every reason to think that Saddam would be able to make good on his threats. Iraq had long been one of the foremost sponsors
of international terrorism, hosting in Baghdad such terrorist groups as the Abu Nidal organization, Abul Abbas's Palestine Liberation Front (PLF), and the organization of the notorious bomb maker Abu Ibrahim. Yasir Arafat's PLO, which had an extensive network of operatives among Palestinian Arabs residing in Kuwait, provided Saddam with valuable intelligence which he used in planning the invasion, and there was a danger that the PLO would join in conjuring up an unprecedented wave of anti-Western mayhem at Saddam's behest. Other pro-terror states, such as Sudan and Yemen, supported Saddam as well. Indeed, of all the central sponsors of international terrorism then active, only Syria refrained from supporting Iraq's promised “mother of all wars”âout of a neighborly interest in seeing Saddam toppled, and in exchange for billions of dollars in Saudi money brokered by the American government.
of international terrorism, hosting in Baghdad such terrorist groups as the Abu Nidal organization, Abul Abbas's Palestine Liberation Front (PLF), and the organization of the notorious bomb maker Abu Ibrahim. Yasir Arafat's PLO, which had an extensive network of operatives among Palestinian Arabs residing in Kuwait, provided Saddam with valuable intelligence which he used in planning the invasion, and there was a danger that the PLO would join in conjuring up an unprecedented wave of anti-Western mayhem at Saddam's behest. Other pro-terror states, such as Sudan and Yemen, supported Saddam as well. Indeed, of all the central sponsors of international terrorism then active, only Syria refrained from supporting Iraq's promised “mother of all wars”âout of a neighborly interest in seeing Saddam toppled, and in exchange for billions of dollars in Saudi money brokered by the American government.
While most people are aware of the results of Saddam's missile attacks against Israelâthirty-nine barrages against Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities resulted in only a single death from the actual bombardmentâless is remembered about the terrorist front of the war against Saddam. Even before the war, the American intelligence community recognized that with the majority of the world's terrorist networks poised to assault Western targets, the Allied invasion of Kuwait could easily end up being a costly affair even if the Allied troops won the land and air battles handily. There was no viable option of passive defense against the terrorists, and the Bush administration concluded that there was no choice but to
follow the Europeans' lead and adopt a more activist policy. It ordered “a crackdown on all potential sources of threat,” which included surveillance, searches, interrogations, and expulsions en masse of Iraqi diplomats, PLO operatives, and other potential agents of Iraqi terror. For possibly the first time in decades, a concerted anti-terror effort was conducted simultaneously by the governments of virtually every democratic nation. And the result was an unambiguous victory for the Western security services. Of 173 terrorist attacks during the weeks of the Gulf War, 143 took place in Third World and Arab countries; the terrorists were able to pull off a total of only thirty attacks against the principal enemy, the Western countries, and these were for the most part unsuccessful, inflicting no more than ten deaths among them. In this way, the promised threat of fearful terror directed against the United States and its allies was quietly reduced to irrelevance.
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follow the Europeans' lead and adopt a more activist policy. It ordered “a crackdown on all potential sources of threat,” which included surveillance, searches, interrogations, and expulsions en masse of Iraqi diplomats, PLO operatives, and other potential agents of Iraqi terror. For possibly the first time in decades, a concerted anti-terror effort was conducted simultaneously by the governments of virtually every democratic nation. And the result was an unambiguous victory for the Western security services. Of 173 terrorist attacks during the weeks of the Gulf War, 143 took place in Third World and Arab countries; the terrorists were able to pull off a total of only thirty attacks against the principal enemy, the Western countries, and these were for the most part unsuccessful, inflicting no more than ten deaths among them. In this way, the promised threat of fearful terror directed against the United States and its allies was quietly reduced to irrelevance.
3
A grisly postscript to this story took place in Greece, where students expelled from the country on suspicion of being a security threat were allowed to return the month after the end of the warâonly to blow themselves up in a post office in the college town of Patras, while trying to mail a package bomb to the British legation. Seven people were killed in the blast. The “students” were members of the Islamic Jihad Brigades, one of the six known factions of the Islamic Jihad; this one an organ of the “Western Sector” terror apparatus in Yasir Arafat's Fatah.
What these examples show is that domestic terrorismâand,
as we have just seen, under certain conditions international terrorism as wellâcan be controlled, reversed, or defeated outright by the democratic nations. There is no question that the United States has the political culture and operational capacity to eviscerate domestic terror. The question is whether it has yet reached that same moment of truth which brought the major Western European countries to allow their security services to take the vigorous action needed to uproot the terror in the midst of their societies.
as we have just seen, under certain conditions international terrorism as wellâcan be controlled, reversed, or defeated outright by the democratic nations. There is no question that the United States has the political culture and operational capacity to eviscerate domestic terror. The question is whether it has yet reached that same moment of truth which brought the major Western European countries to allow their security services to take the vigorous action needed to uproot the terror in the midst of their societies.
The basic barrier to such action in the United States is essentially one of political philosophy and jurisprudence. Some Americans fear that an active anti-terror strategy would compromise the free, democratic nature of American society. Yet in none of the democracies has the adoption of firm anti-terror measures led to a significant or lasting curtailment of individual freedoms. It did require, however, the explicit revision of the widespread conviction that a democratic society can guarantee the freedoms of speech, assembly, religion, the bearing of arms, diplomatic immunity, and political asylumâas if they were practically absolutes. They are not and cannot be absolutes, as the record of terrorist abuse of these democratic freedoms demonstrates again and again. The fact is that both the primary co-conspirators in the World Trade Center bombing entered the United States as political refugeesâone from Iraq and the other claiming he had been oppressed in Israel (both would have most likely received political asylum had they not spoiled their chances by blowing up a building). More bizarre is the
fact that a
fatwah
(Islamic legal ruling) ordering the death of Salman Rushdie for having written
The Satanic Verses
isâincrediblyâbeing preached in the United States as “protected” speech, shielded by an absurdly generous interpretation of “freedom of speech and religion.” Still more disturbing is the utterly excessive American generosity in interpreting the “right” to bear arms as including freedom from practically any kind of licensing and government supervision, a freedom well abused by David Koresh's militaristic messianic Branch Davidian cult in its incendiary confrontation with federal agents in Waco, Texas, in 1993, leaving scores dead. In the absence of countervailing legislation, other ultra-nationalist “militia” and neo-Nazis continue to conduct battalion-level exercises in barely veiled preparation for coming military action against the American government, of the sort which produced the Oklahoma City bombing, and yet their activities, too, are considered constitutionally “protected.”
fact that a
fatwah
(Islamic legal ruling) ordering the death of Salman Rushdie for having written
The Satanic Verses
isâincrediblyâbeing preached in the United States as “protected” speech, shielded by an absurdly generous interpretation of “freedom of speech and religion.” Still more disturbing is the utterly excessive American generosity in interpreting the “right” to bear arms as including freedom from practically any kind of licensing and government supervision, a freedom well abused by David Koresh's militaristic messianic Branch Davidian cult in its incendiary confrontation with federal agents in Waco, Texas, in 1993, leaving scores dead. In the absence of countervailing legislation, other ultra-nationalist “militia” and neo-Nazis continue to conduct battalion-level exercises in barely veiled preparation for coming military action against the American government, of the sort which produced the Oklahoma City bombing, and yet their activities, too, are considered constitutionally “protected.”
A good example of the absurdity of shielding terrorist incitement is provided by the case of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric whose Gamaa Islamiya terror network has been charged with the World Trade Center bombing and with planning attacks on targets such as the Lincoln Tunnel. Rahman was allowed into the United States in 1990 from Sudan, after a history of perfidy in his native land, which included serving time for recruiting members for the Islamic terrorist faction that had assassinated President Anwar Sadat. His
fatwahs
in Egypt and the United States are among the
bloodiest ever issued, calling for the death of Sadat's successor, Hosni Mubarak, and the overthrow of the Egyptian regime, and ruling in favor of the murder of foreign tourists traveling in Egypt. Yet none of this was sufficient to justify the scrutiny of the American authorities, because Rahman's freedom of action in the United States was protected by the right to immigrate into the country and, once there, the right to practice his brand of freedom of speech and religion, which called for outright murder. It was only
after
Rahman's minions had already killed five and had injured hundreds in the Twin Towers in Manhattan that some of those rights were curbed. It is clear that a fresh look is needed at the way the United States presently chooses which liberties are worthy of protection.
fatwahs
in Egypt and the United States are among the
bloodiest ever issued, calling for the death of Sadat's successor, Hosni Mubarak, and the overthrow of the Egyptian regime, and ruling in favor of the murder of foreign tourists traveling in Egypt. Yet none of this was sufficient to justify the scrutiny of the American authorities, because Rahman's freedom of action in the United States was protected by the right to immigrate into the country and, once there, the right to practice his brand of freedom of speech and religion, which called for outright murder. It was only
after
Rahman's minions had already killed five and had injured hundreds in the Twin Towers in Manhattan that some of those rights were curbed. It is clear that a fresh look is needed at the way the United States presently chooses which liberties are worthy of protection.
The ideal of an absolute civil libertyâwhether a “leftist” liberty such as absolute free speech or a “rightist” liberty such as the absolute right to bear armsâshould be tempered by political realities, and the attempt to apply it in its pristine form has grave consequences. When a society tries to grant such pockets of unlimited freedom, it provides the proverbial 99 percent of normal citizens with supposed “rights” that they neither want nor needâthe “right” to call for the murder of what they deem an obnoxious author, or the “right” to own a grenade launcher. But there are always those in the other 1 percent who, if granted such freedoms,
are
capable of coming up with ways to abuse them. In fact, it is just such supposed rights that are needed to transform a handful of odious but essentially impotent lunatics at the
edges of society into a seething menace capable of turning that society into a shambles. Advocates of absolute civil liberties forget that legally protected freedoms are not
ends
in and of themselves; they are
means
to ensuring the health and well-being of the citizens. The United States Constitution, said Justice Robert Jackson, is not a suicide pact. And when a protected “right” in practice results in the encouragement and breeding of terrorist monstrosities ready to devour other members of society, then it is clear that such a right has ceased to serve its true end and must be either revised or reduced.
are
capable of coming up with ways to abuse them. In fact, it is just such supposed rights that are needed to transform a handful of odious but essentially impotent lunatics at the
edges of society into a seething menace capable of turning that society into a shambles. Advocates of absolute civil liberties forget that legally protected freedoms are not
ends
in and of themselves; they are
means
to ensuring the health and well-being of the citizens. The United States Constitution, said Justice Robert Jackson, is not a suicide pact. And when a protected “right” in practice results in the encouragement and breeding of terrorist monstrosities ready to devour other members of society, then it is clear that such a right has ceased to serve its true end and must be either revised or reduced.
At the Jonathan Institute's 1979 conference, Professor Joseph W. Bishop of Yale University inquired into the question of whether the United States Constitution could be made to square with firm anti-terror measures such as had been adopted in Britain, Germany, and other European democracies. After all, the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution appears to prohibit convictions on the basis of self-incriminating testimonyâwhich is just the kind that security services are practiced in obtaining in interrogation; it similarly prohibits depriving a citizen of his liberties without “due process of law”âwhich is exactly what an arrest without a warrant is; the Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to a trial by juryâand yet the British found trials by a lone judge to be a crucial step in obtaining convictions, because the Ulster citizenry had become so intimidated by terrorists.
Yet Bishop's conclusion was that even under the rigid civil liberties orientation of the American Bill of Rights, the courts had consistently upheld the authority of the
executive branch to curtail civil freedoms where there was compelling evidence of a threat to the security of the United States if these unlimited liberties remained in force. Thus Bishop notes that the Supreme Court, which is responsible for ensuring that the government of the United States conforms to the standards set out in the Constitution, stood aloof as Abraham Lincoln dramatically curtailed civil liberties during the Civil War. Lincoln suspended the writ of
habeas corpus,
had civilians in the South tried by military tribunals without the use of either a jury or the normal rules of evidence, and made use of wholesale internment of individuals suspected of supporting the Confederacyâand yet the Supreme Court was silent. The Court also refrained from commenting on the so-called Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which gave the President virtually unlimited power to suppress the activities of the Klan “by using the militia or the armed forces, or both,
or by
any
other means
, to take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress ⦠any insurrection, domestic violence ⦠or conspiracy” whichâlike terrorismâprevents citizens from enjoying their legal rights. During World War II, the Supreme Court upheld the military trial of American civilians suspected of engaging in activities on behalf of the Nazis and even the dreadful mass internment of Japanese-Americans for the duration of the war.
4
executive branch to curtail civil freedoms where there was compelling evidence of a threat to the security of the United States if these unlimited liberties remained in force. Thus Bishop notes that the Supreme Court, which is responsible for ensuring that the government of the United States conforms to the standards set out in the Constitution, stood aloof as Abraham Lincoln dramatically curtailed civil liberties during the Civil War. Lincoln suspended the writ of
habeas corpus,
had civilians in the South tried by military tribunals without the use of either a jury or the normal rules of evidence, and made use of wholesale internment of individuals suspected of supporting the Confederacyâand yet the Supreme Court was silent. The Court also refrained from commenting on the so-called Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which gave the President virtually unlimited power to suppress the activities of the Klan “by using the militia or the armed forces, or both,
or by
any
other means
, to take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress ⦠any insurrection, domestic violence ⦠or conspiracy” whichâlike terrorismâprevents citizens from enjoying their legal rights. During World War II, the Supreme Court upheld the military trial of American civilians suspected of engaging in activities on behalf of the Nazis and even the dreadful mass internment of Japanese-Americans for the duration of the war.
4
As these examples strongly suggest, the American judicial system is ready and able to distinguish normal, peaceful circumstances from those in which the security of American citizens is being threatened by organized
violence from without or within. This willingness to take responsibility and make hard decisions in the service of democracy is the hallmark of a mature political culture, such as the American Founding Fathers hoped would evolve in the United States. As James Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson with regard to the balance between the powers of the state and the rights of the citizen: “It is a melancholy reflection that liberty should be equally exposed to danger whether the government have too much or too little power.”
5
However, when it came to matters that endangered the security of the nation, Madison and Alexander Hamilton were unequivocal that the authority of the executive to ensure the security of the nation must take precedence over
all
other concerns. As they wrote in
The Federalist:
violence from without or within. This willingness to take responsibility and make hard decisions in the service of democracy is the hallmark of a mature political culture, such as the American Founding Fathers hoped would evolve in the United States. As James Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson with regard to the balance between the powers of the state and the rights of the citizen: “It is a melancholy reflection that liberty should be equally exposed to danger whether the government have too much or too little power.”
5
However, when it came to matters that endangered the security of the nation, Madison and Alexander Hamilton were unequivocal that the authority of the executive to ensure the security of the nation must take precedence over
all
other concerns. As they wrote in
The Federalist:
[The powers to ensure security] ought to exist without limitation, because it is impossible to foresee or to define the extent and variety of national exigencies, and the correspondent extent and variety of the means which may be necessary to satisty them. The circumstances that endanger the safety of nations are infinite, and for this reason no constitutional shackles can be wisely imposed on the power to which the care of it is committed.
⦠As I know nothing to exempt this portion of the globe from the common calamities that have befallen other parts of it,
I
acknowledge my aversion to every project that is calculated to disarm the government of a single weapon, which in any possible contingency
might be usefully employed for the general defense and security
[emphasis mine].
I
acknowledge my aversion to every project that is calculated to disarm the government of a single weapon, which in any possible contingency
might be usefully employed for the general defense and security
[emphasis mine].
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