One "Allegedly" Too Many - In her raw and disastrous way, Janet Napolitano is revealing.
Leroy N. Soetoro
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Shocking though it was, the Christmas Day terror attempt by a
23-year-old Nigerian has only hardened Americans' awareness that they
confront an implacable enemy in a war whose end is nowhere in sight. It
is a hard-won new sense of reality and an invaluable one, achieved event
by embittering event. The holy warrior assigned to blow up that
passenger plane and who almost succeeded has, we learn, been granted the
chance to strike a deal. His attack effort had come on the heels of the
all-too-successful terror assault by that other Soldier of Islam, Maj.
Nidal Hasan who murdered 13 fellow members of the American military.
This, even as it was becoming clear that the number of our homegrown
jihadis involved in terror plots, or who had enlisted in training toward
that goal, had increased markedly.
It wasn't always easy to preserve a healthy sense of reality about
terrorism in the years since 9/11, as the comments of ethical
counselors, privacy advocates and civil liberties sentinels aghast at
the possibility of government snooping have reminded us in the last
week. They were around in force for media interviews, equipped as ever
with a variety of arguments for the sanctity of privacy rights, warnings
against surveillance that threatened the rights of citizens in a
democracy. Day after day came the same breezy assurances�we had only to
balance our security needs with privacy rights. As though, in this
deadly war or any other, sane people could consider the values
equivalent. The latest threat to privacy rights, advocates charged, was
the use of full body scanners: the technology that would have
immeasurably decreased the chances someone like Umar Abdulmutallab would
have been able to get past security wearing his terror panties�intimate
underwear, that is, in which 80 grams of PETN had been concealed.
It was that prospect of images revealing intimate areas of the body that
apparently disturbed Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Utah Republican and sponsor of
a House measure banning the use of full body scanners other than as a
"secondary device"�i.e. to be used on select subjects. He didn't think,
he told a New York Times reporter, "anybody needs to see my 8 year old
naked in order to secure that airplane." A useful bit of reassurance,
that, for the plotters of terror assaults who have in the past shown no
compunction about the use of children as suicide bombers.
Another argument we heard frequently held that no matter what technology
was put in place, our dauntless enemies would find ways to get around
it. The picture was clear. With an unbeatable, ever resourceful enemy
working night and day devising ingenious strategies, what point could
there be in developing better detection capacities? Historians of the
future may one day well ponder the powerful streak of defeatism in the
U.S. in the era of its terrorist wars�and the superhuman characteristics
Americans ascribed to their enemies in that 21st century battle against
terrorism: a view in no small way nurtured in their media and political
culture.
No guardians of privacy rights had weighed in earlier against the body
imaging scanners than the American Civil Liberties Union. In October,
2007, the ACLU issued a statement decrying the use of this technology as
"an assault on the essential dignity of passengers." "We are," the
agency declared, "not convinced it is the right thing for America." This
reasoning is clear. The right thing is for America to reject the
scanners. Its citizens may then face increased risk of being blown up in
mid-air but their privacy would remain inviolate to the end. Who could
ask for anything more?
It took the president a second speech to weigh in on the issue of the
security, or lack thereof, that had nearly led to tragedy. The first
speech, two and a half days after the event, was in its own way
noteworthy. In it the president observed that a passenger on the plane
had "allegedly tried to ignite explosives. . . ." Mr. Obama's use of a
familiar legalistic evasion would, it was soon clear, raise
hackles�though the term is one routinely used in crime reporting. No
matter. It was one "allegedly" too many in the world, jarring coming
from the president in this circumstance.
Consider the justly famed speech an enraged American president delivered
the day after Pearl Harbor. Then try imagining that address by Franklin
Roosevelt�a leader to whom Mr. Obama has been compared�as it would sound
in Obama language.
"Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date that will live in infamy, the
United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval
and air forces allegedly from the Empire of Japan . . . Yesterday the
Japanese government allegedly launched an attack on Malaya. Last night
Japanese forces allegedly attacked Hong Kong. Last night Japanese forces
allegedly attacked Guam . . ."
Still it wasn't the president's comments but those of Janet Napolitano
that reverberated. It wasn't the first time the Homeland Security
chief's struggles to utter the kind of views she understood to be
fitting for an Obama administration official ended in trouble�this time
with interviews in which she made her now famous assertion that the
airport security system had worked. She followed up, the next day, with
retractions and clarifications that ended, as such things do, sounding
worse than the original.
Asked in an interview with the German magazine "Der Spiegel" last March
why she had avoided using the word "terrorism" in her testimony to
Congress, she explained that she had instead preferred to use another
term: "man-caused disasters." That choice of words demonstrated, she
said, that "we want to move away from the politics of fear." The idea
now, she added mysteriously, was to be prepared for all risks that could
occur. There was nothing mysterious about the intended point. In the new
forward looking administration she served�its leader had after all
travelled far tendering apologies for his country's past sins and
arrogance toward other nations�emphasis on terrorism was to be
dispatched, along with the words war on terror and terrorists. The use
of such references was to be equated with the low, the deceitful, the
politics of fear, with indeed, a false claim of danger.
Ms. Napolitano would go on in other ways to prove the potency of
man-made disasters�of which she was clearly proving one. In April, she
issued a report seeming to target military veterans as potentially
dangerous right-wing extremists. She soon apologized. In the same month
she managed to suggest that the 9/11 terrorists had entered the U.S.
through Canada, which appalled Canadian leaders. Apologies and
clarifications followed.
Mr. Obama can't be happy with his Homeland Security chief. It's fair to
say no president deserves an appointee so extravagantly unequipped for
her job. Still there is much in Ms. Napolitano's attitudes and
pronouncements, including talk of "the politics of fear," that reflect
with glaring accuracy the Obama team's values, ideology and prime
political targets. In her disastrous and raw way she is its voice
revealed.
Terrorism will continue to provide its hardening education, though not
entirely from terrorists themselves. We have before us now the spectacle
of Jihadi Abdulmutallab, lawyered up, with full rights as though a U.S.
criminal defendant. The impossibly expensive, dangerous, and unavoidably
chaotic trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and associates still lies ahead,
slated for a Manhattan courtroom. Even now a majority of Americans can't
fathom the reason for their government's insistence that the agents
chiefly responsible for the 9/11 attack be tried under the U.S. criminal
justice system with all due rights and constitutional privileges,
instead of in a military court. That insistence itself is answer
enough�an unforgettable testament to the ideological drives and related
evasions of reality that shape this administration's view of the world.
Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Journal's editorial board.
--
Nancy Pelosi, Democrat criminal, accessory before and after the fact, to
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles B. Rangel of New York's
million dollar tax evasion. Charles B. Rangel is still under
"investigation" by a "closed door" House Ethics Committee.
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Crossfire
her maximum level of incompetency in the Obama administration. This is
because Obama is as dumb as a Styrofoam cup and is incapable of hiring
anyone smarter than himself. He should resign and let someone qualified
be the President. Right now, there are no capable Democrats, so that
probably won't happen. Hopefully, theRepublicans can take back teh
country in 2010, and reverse some of the damage done by Democrats and
the socialist Muslim.