Jose Padilla, a.k.a. Abdullah al Muhajir, once a mere Chicago
street thug, is now the third American to be detained in connection
with terrorist activities, and almost certainly he will not be the
last. The first was John Walker Lindh, the befuddled child of
middle-class, Marin County, California, privilege, who was seized
in Afghanistan with Taliban and al Qaeda killers, and now faces
trial in federal court in Virginia. The second, Yaser Esam Hamdi,
was also captured in Afghanistan, where he first was identified as
a Saudi. But then it was discovered he had been born in Louisiana.
His claim to citizenship may be perverse, but Hamdi is an American
nonetheless.
Unlike Lindh, however, Padilla and Hamdi are now in military
custody, and are classified as “enemy combatants.” Presumably they
can be detained for as long as the government sees fit, even though
some legal scholars and media commentators, of course, find this
alarming. As Harold Hongju Koh, a law professor at Yale, told
the New York Times, “If calling people enemy combatants is
another way of holding American citizens indefinitely, it’s
extremely troubling. If they can charge him with a crime, they
should try him.”
But as Ruth Wedgwood, another Yale law professor, also told
the Times, “If you go to war against your country, you do
not have rights to a jury trial. And the answer to the practical
question is that we are at war.”
Indeed we are at war, and a
Washington Post-ABC News poll taken over the weekend found that
seven in 10 Americans approve of the proposed Department of
Homeland Security, while more than six in 10 favor giving the FBI
expanded authority to monitor public places. According to the
Post, the poll “suggests the president retains the
confidence of a nation willing to accept a larger federal
bureaucracy and some loss of personal freedoms in exchange for
increased security from terrorism.”
The poll, in fact, also found that more than three in four
Americans — 77 percent — say they approve of the way George Bush
is handling the presidency.
Consider that as both good news and a sign of the
administration’s political adroitness. Congress may support the
establishment of a Department of Homeland Security, but it will be
swayed by its own political and turf interests in trying to enact
the necessary legislation — there are ample signs of this already
— and that means partisan bickering. But a popular president, one
with a 77 percent approval rating, say, has the clout to get
Congress to stop.
Meanwhile the political adroitness: Padilla, the Chicago street
thug with the alleged interest in a “dirty” bomb, was detained on
May 8. This was disclosed, however, only this week, by Attorney
General John Ashcroft in Moscow. The White House insists the timing
on this had nothing to do with politics, but some skepticism may be
in order. The disclosure about Padilla was a useful reminder to
Congress as it ponders anti-terrorism legislation and gets on with
its hearings: America is at war.
It was also useful, I think, in quite another way. It clarified
our view of the enemy.
In Our Brave New World: Essays on the Impact of September
11, recently published by the Hoover Institution Press,
journalist Anne Applebaum, in a characteristically intelligent
piece, notes that “capitalism, of which America has become the
symbol will also continue to produce enemies in the future, and
they will not necessarily live in distant parts.” She points out
that among the al Qaeda prisoners held captive at Guantanamo Bay
were men from Western Europe — three Britons and up to seven
Frenchmen.
“These ten European terrorists,” Applebaum writes, “were not
just similar to us: they were us. Just like the al Qaeda
activists who started dreaming of destroying the World Trade Center
from their universities in Hamburg, the ten Europeans in U.S.
custody chose to fight the West not because they were ignorant of
the West, but because they knew it all too well”
And besides them, of course, there is the young man from Marin
County, and now the street thug from Chicago. So yes, some of the
enemy really are us.
