Analysis & Commentary
Domestic Counterterrorism
Continental Divide
In the run-up to last month’s Dutch election, Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk, known locally as “Iron Rita,” declared her intention to pass a ban on religious garments that cover all of a woman’s face. According to one Dutch parliamentarian, full face covering is so rare that the ban would apply to less than one hundred of the Netherlands’ one million Muslims. Verdonk nevertheless insisted the ban was a needed from a “security standpoint.” Picking up on recent comments by British parliamentarian Jack Straw, Verdonk elaborated that “people should be able to communicate with one another.” Apparently, communication is impossible with a veiled woman.
Authored by: Aziz Huq
– 12/12/06
Five Squandered Years
The United States has two main resources to combat terrorism: The hard power of military might, and the soft power of diplomacy that comes from convincingly claiming the moral high ground. Five years after the 9/11 attacks, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the Bush Administration has gutted both.
Authored by: Aziz Huq
– 10/04/06
The Warrant’s Out on Judges
Within hours of her decision to hold the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program unconstitutional, Judge Anna Diggs Taylor was subjected to relentless personal criticism. Even in the mainstream press, she has been accused of “pos[ing] for the cameras” (the Wall Street Journal), charged with “blithely ignoring [her] own obligations” (The New York Times) and dismissed as having produced merely unscholarly “angry rhetoric” (The Washington Post). Such deeply personal invective directed at Judge Taylor drowned out commentary either applauding or disputing the merits of the decision.
Authored by: Aziz Huq and James Sample
– 08/30/06
Threat Assessment
Terrorism penetrates the psyche by being unpredictable. Terrorists rely not only on the element of surprise but also on a second-level uncertainty to strike so deep: The difficulty of knowing exactly who the terrorist might be. Background is no guide. Many of the 9-11 plotters had tertiary educations. Others, like the self-starting (and foiled) millennium bomber and former petty thief Ahmed Ressam, came from the social margins. Ethnic profiling, proposed again recently by New York Representative Peter King, hardly works. The July 2005 London attackers and the recent High Wycombe arrestees both defied racial stereotypes. Any halfway calculating terrorist group, moreover, will simply work around ethnic profiling.
Authored by: Aziz Huqhttp://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=threat_assessment
– 08/28/06
Flying While Muslim
The partisan posturing began within hours of reports the British had arrested 20-odd suspects in connection with an alleged terrorist conspiracy to blow up passenger airplanes. Arrests were made in the U.K, not the U.S. The plot was hatched in the U.K. and Pakistan.
Authored by: Aziz Huq
– 08/17/06
Wiretapping Unbound
Eighteen years ago , Justice Antonin Scalia assumed the prophet’s cloak and forecast threats to the Constitution’s core balance of powers. A threat, Justice Scalia explained, sometimes comes “in sheep’s clothing: the potential of the asserted principle to effect important change in the equilibrium of power is not immediately evident, and must be discerned by a careful and perceptive analysis. But this wolf comes as a wolf.” Today, another wolf scratches at the door: And it is a beast that has already inflicted heavy damage on the Constitution.
Authored by: Aziz Huq
– 07/24/06
Derelict on Domestic Spying
There is no “drift-net.” There is only a “very specific and very targeted” collection of data. So said General Michael V. Hayden, former chief of the National Security Agency on Feb. 5 this year about the NSA’s domestic activities. Without doubt, senators of both stripes stand ready to grill Gen. Hayden about these statements in light of USA Today’s startling revelation that the NSA has been assembling a mammoth database detailing the source, destination and timing information on almost every telephone call made in the United States.
Authored by: Aziz Huq
– 05/16/06
Distracted by Moussaoui
In an Alexandria, Virginia, courtroom, Zacarias Moussaoui and the federal government are acting out for the nation and the world a small drama about revenge. It is hardly clear who will savor revenge more: the defendant who seems likely to be strapped to the executioner’s gurney soon, or the state that injects the lethal combination of fluids.
Authored by: Aziz Huq
– 04/20/06
In the Dark on Wiretaps
Almost four months after The New York Times reported that the National Security Agency is spying on Americans in the United States without obtaining judicial warrants, we still are in the dark about what exactly the president ordered the NSA to do.
Authored by: Aziz Huq
– 04/04/06
At the NSA, the Enemy is Us
President Bush famously said that his administration took the battle overseas so that we would not need to fight the war at home. Revelations about the NSA’s warrantless domestic spying suggest that this formulation has the administration’s logic backward: The authority to conduct war elsewhere has been treated as permission to bring the tools of war back home.
Authored by: Aziz Huq
– 03/02/06