It seems we weren't the only one to notice that the New York Times buried news
of a foiled terror plot against John F. Kennedy International Airport on page
37. A pair of Times readers submitted questions about this to Suzanne Daley,
the paper's national editor, who is doing a "Talk to the Newsroom"
question-and-answer series this week. Here is Daley's explanation:
Here's the basic thinking on the J.F.K. story: In the years
since 9/11, there have been quite a few interrupted terrorist
plots. It now seems possible to exercise some judgment about
their gravity. Not all plots are the same. In this case, law
enforcement officials said that J.F.K. was never in immediate
danger. The plotters had yet to lay out plans. They had no
financing. Nor did they have any explosives. It is with all
that in mind, that the editors in charge this weekend did not
put this story on the front page.
In truth, the decision was widely debated even within this
newsroom. At the front page meeting this morning, we took an
informal poll and a few editors thought the story should have
been more prominently played. Some argued it should have been
fronted, regardless of the lameness of the plot, simply because
it was what everyone was talking about.
Today, the Times has yet another editorial demanding that enemy combatants be
afforded full rights under the U.S. Constitution:
Congress should shut down Guantánamo Bay, as called for in
bills sponsored by two California Democrats, Representative
Jane Harman in the House and Senator Dianne Feinstein in the
Senate. Both lawmakers are intimately familiar with the camp
and have concluded it is beyond salvaging.
Their bill would close Gitmo in a year and the detainees
would be screened by real courts. Those who are truly illegal
combatants would be sent to military or civilian jails in the
United States, to be tried under time-tested American rules of
justice, or sent to an international tribunal. Some would be
returned to their native lands for trial, if warranted. The
rest would be set free, as they should have been long ago.
The Guantánamo camp was created on a myth--that the American
judicial system could not handle prisoners of "the war against
terror."
The attitudes expressed by Daley and the Times editorial board are quite
typical of elite liberal thought. They share a premise that the threat of
terrorism has been greatly exaggerated. But on closer analysis, there is a
contradiction, one that reveals why liberal thinking on terrorism is dangerous
not only to American national security but also, in the long run, to liberal
ideals.
Every time law-enforcement authorities announce that they have stopped a
terror plan, we hear Daley-like pooh-poohing from the left: The plot wasn't
really that serious, it was nowhere near being carried out, the suspects were
just a bunch of losers, that sort of thing. (The battier Bush-haters add that
the announcement is a publicity stunt to stoke public fear or serve some
political purpose.)
If this is true, then the Times's blithe assurance that the criminal-justice
system is sufficient for dealing with the terror threat is utterly fatuous, is
it not?
Of course, newspaper editorialists don't make policy, so their fatuity is
cost-free. But the Times's ideas are well within what passes for the
mainstream of the Democratic Party. The Times carries a news story today
titled "Democrats Hope to Expand Rights at Guantanamo." They are unlikely to
succeed as long as George W. Bush wields the veto pen, but if a Democrat is
elected president next year, all bets are off.
John Edwards has endorsed the view, which the Times expressed with those scare
quotes above, that the war on terror isn't real. Barack Obama, in a CNN forum
the other night, declared, "I believe Guantanamo, the decision to detain
people without charges, is unjust"--never mind that under international law,
even legitimate prisoners of war may be held without charge for the duration
of hostilities.
If the Democrats hold their congressional majorities and one of them becomes
president, then, it is quite possible that the Times's view will prevail.
What the Times is proposing is that all terrorists in U.S. custody be freed
unless prosecutors can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they have
committed a specific crime--and in making their case, prosecutors would be
bound by all the restrictions on admissibility of evidence that protect
ordinary criminal defendants in the civilian courts.
What if the U.S. adopts such an approach and it turns out to be inimical to
national security? What if, that is, President Clinton or President Obama or
President Edwards signs the Harmon-Feinstein legislation, Guantanamo is
emptied, and a few years later we see another 9/11 or worse?
Would the American people accept the idea that serial mass murder on our own
soil is just the price we have to pay to preserve some abstract concept of
liberty--that is, that the Constitution is a suicide pact after all? We doubt
it.
It is much more likely that the political system would find it impossible to
resist public demands for much harsher antiterror measures, probably involving
genuine curtailments of civil liberties. There is no reason to think that
liberal politicians would resist such demands. After all, Woodrow Wilson
restricted free speech during World War I, and Franklin D. Roosevelt interned
tens of thousands of American citizens during World War II, cheered on by
then-Gov. Earl Warren of California. In both cases the Supreme Court ratified
the president's excesses.
By overreacting to imagined civil liberties threats today, American liberals
may be setting the stage for future overreactions in the other direction.
Guantanamo helps keep America free as well as safe.
--
The trouble with American journalism, in short, isn't that it's too skeptical,
but that it's too willing to throw skepticism to the wind when it suits the
agenda of proclaiming every war a Vietnam and every Republican president a
Nixon.
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