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| Imam Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen October 2008, taken by Muhammad ud-Deen. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
The
Generation Gasp
August
17, 2013
Time
to Walk Away from the War on Terror
By
Claire and Jim Castagnera
Jim:
Last Saturday, I did a seven-hour
continuing legal education workshop entitled “Counter Terrorism Issues.” The title was taken from my newest textbook
of the same name. 36 local lawyers
turned out for the program, which included a look at the case of Nidal Malik
Hasan, the Army major who killed 13 of his comrades at Fort Hood some four
years ago. Charged with 13 counts
of pre-mediated murder, Hasan’s court martial started on Tuesday, August 6th.
The lead story on August 6th
in this newspaper was not, however, the start of Hasan’s trial. The headline across the top of the
Times News read, “3 shot to death at Ross Twp. Municipal meeting.” The companion photo showed a
dilapidated shanty surrounded by junk.
The photo inset was of a man who looked like Santa Claus with
sunglasses. Apparently this guy
had a beef with the municipality, which led him to come into a township meeting
with his gun blazing. Not
satisfied with the damage done on his first attempt, he reportedly went back to
his car for another weapon. As is
often the case, these days, a local hero subdued him and shot him with the
killer’s own gun, before he could kill again.
These two events, occurring on the same
day, have kept me cogitating about stuff I --- we? --- would just as soon
ignore, if only we could.
At the CLE workshop last week, I raised
the question of what impact the War on Terror has had on our civil liberties,
since September 11, 2001. The
answer, I suggested, is that --- those annoying, delaying airport searches
aside --- most of us have not been impacted very much at all. That assertion even applies to “garden
variety” criminals. I noted, for
example, that in the past two years the U.S. Supreme Court has issued four new
opinions on our right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. Three of those four cases came down on
the side of us citizens and against the powers that be. Without a warrant, the police cannot
put a GPS on the outside of a suspect’s car… cannot take a blood sample during
a DUI arrest… and cannot send a sniffer mutt onto a suspected dealer’s front
porch in search of drugs.
This is all good news for most
Americans. However, let the FBI and
the U.S. Attorney’s office label you a “terrorist” or an “enemy combatant,” and
all bets are off. Consider for
instance, the so-called “Fort Dix Five.”
These are five young Muslim-Americans who, during a Pocono vacation,
videoed themselves firing automatic weapons and shouting, “Allahu Akbar.” After one of the brothers took the
video to a local store in Cherry Hill to have DVDs burned, and the clerk
alerted the FBI, the “gang” was infiltrated by an informant. When they tried to buy more weapons,
the FBI sting operation resulted in their arrests. At trial they were accused of plotting to attack South
Jersey’s Fort Dix. They are now
serving life sentences, some in solitary confinement, at the supermax facility
in Colorado.
I take no truck with terrorists, or any
other criminals for that matter.
But bear in mind that these five 20-something fellas never shot
anybody. They never even discussed
Fort Dix until the much-older informant (who has a police record and who once
tried to get a man murdered back home in Egypt) brought it up. The surveillance tapes revealed that he
asked these guys some 400 times when they were actually going to act on their
tough talk. To my way of
thinking, their treatment by the criminal justice system was a tad harsh.
A controversy is swirling on the
periphery of Major Hasan’s court martial.
Some of the survivors of his shooting spree have sued Uncle Sam. Their beef is that the Army has
classified the spree as workplace violence, rather than a terrorist
attack. This means that they are
only eligible for regular disability benefits, rather than Purple Hearts and
the apparently more substantial payments that come with being shot in combat.
I sympathize with their plight, and I
recognize that Hasan has become ever more militant in his public posturing ---
growing a beard, for instance --- during the past four years. He seems to be seeking martyrdom,
having admitted to owning the murder weapon… without ever having been asked. All the same, I believe that Hasan and
the Ross Township shooter should be treated the same: two cold-blooded
murderers, one apparently motivated by religious extremism, the other by a more
personal grievance (“They stole my land!”), but of the same ilk.
A dozen years after 9/11 America has not
fallen to bin Laden’s Jihad. The
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have wound down with Uncle Sam declaring victory
and heading home. Osama is dead
and Obama is under fire for NSA snooping and drone attacks on U.S.
citizens. The time is now to treat
“terrorists” the same as all other stone killers, no better and no worse. Our civil liberties --- and we
ourselves --- will be the beneficiaries.
Claire:
I can’t remember a time in my life when the word “terrorism”
wasn’t a buzzword used either to incite fear or fervor. My earliest memory of being aware of
terrorism as its own creature was on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers
fell and I was in my middle school art class. We made American flags out of construction paper and glue to
hang in the school windows, and then I went rollerblading.
In
short, I was too young to understand how the world changed that day. Things seemed the same, and by the time
they didn’t anymore, the transformation had happened so subtly over so many
years of my life, that I had barely noticed. To me, terrorism is the ghost of bin Laden and taking your
shoes off at the airport. It’s
scary if you think about it, but for the most part, I don’t even notice.
There
are things that scare me much more than the ghost of bin Laden, and they might
not be the things you’d expect.
I’m not afraid of those five young men who may or may not have been
plotting to shoot people down with automatic weapons. I’m not afraid of James Eagan Holmes or Adam Lanza. I’m afraid of a country that makes
buying guns so painfully easy that teenagers can order them online. I’m afraid of a country that values
money over mental health, rehabilitation, and a constructive prison
system. I’m afraid of a country
that considers an eye for an eye a fair price, and doles out the harshest
punishment for every crime, violent or not. Most of all, I’m afraid of the pervasive stupidity that
perpetuates these practices, year after year.
I’m
tired of being told whom I should be afraid of. Our problems are bigger than any individual.
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