Scapegoats of September 11th: Hate Crimes & State Crimes in the War on Terror

Chapter 8: Claiming Effectiveness

CHAPTER EIGHT Claiming Effectiveness Our investigators, sent after dangerous terrorists, came back with a motley crew of hapless innocents and people who had said and done stupid things but were hardly a threat to the nation’s security. —New York Times, 2004 You hear that there’s more than 1,000 detainees, and if these cases are any example, you have to wonder if they’re just locking people up to make it look like they are getting somewhere on their investigation. —Attorney David Leopold, quoted in T. Lewin and A. L. Cowan, “Dozens of Israeli Jews are being kept in federal detention,” New York Times, 2001 A logical and reasonable method of assessing what works in counterterrorism is to examine recent outcomes of policies and practices, particularly in the realm of law enforcement and prosecution. In doing so, tangible evidence is uncovered, forming a basis for reality checks that assist in determining overall effectiveness (Welch 2004d). That approach to evaluation also invites close scrutiny 126 08-R3894 7/28/06 12:46 PM Page 126 into problems and errors, especially when the mistakes are so egregious that they erode public confidence in government and its capacity to protect citizens from threats of terrorism. Recent moves by some law enforcement officials have been nothing less than embarrassing, domestically and abroad. In the days following the March 11, 2004 train bombing in Madrid that killed 191 people and injured more than 2,000, Spanish authorities reached out to the FBI for assistance in identifying a set of fingerprints found on a plastic bag full of detonators. With near breakneck speed, the FBI claimed confidently that it had a match to the digital copy of the fingerprints, leading to the arrest and detention of a Portland-area immigration lawyer, Brandon Mayfield. Fourteen days later, Mayfield was freed. Even as Spanish authorities raised deep questions about the FBI’s fingerprint assessment, the Bureau had characterized the match as “100 percent.” Unsealed court records indicate that the FBI never bothered to examine the original print while in Madrid on April 21 and pushed forward with an aggressive investigation ofMayfield,a37-year-oldMuslimconvertwhohadpreviouslyrepresented a terrorism defendant in a custody case. Mayfield denies all FBI accusations that he had contact and associations with Islamic foundations that appear on a federal watch list. The government justified Mayfield’s arrest on his attendance at a mosque that had been under FBI surveillance, a claim that infuriated Muslims grown tired of terrorist profiling campaigns aimed against them. “I’d be surprised if there’s a mosque in the country that hasn’t come under scrutiny these days. It has become the whole Kevin Bacon game—no Muslim is more than six degrees away from terrorism,” said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Kershaw and Lichtblau 2004a, A20; New York Times 2004e). This chapter examines the war on terror as currently waged by the U.S. government. Unfortunately, there is a lot of bad news to report given the wealth of evidence pointing to seriously flawed operations along with poorly investigated cases. In contrast to the embarrassing no-fly incidents involving Mr. Islam (Cat Stevens) and Senator Kennedy, the consequences of many of the problems are not benign since those caught in the government’s machinery suffer months—sometimes years—of detention in harsh conditions of confinement where they have been subject to harassment and abuse (Lipton 2005b). Moreover, in so many cases thus far, the suspects ultimately have been cleared of serious terrorismrelated charges. The purpose of the chapter is to provide straightforward evidence that the war on terror as waged by the Bush administration is not as effective CLAIMING EFFECTIVENESS 127 08-R3894 7/28/06 12:46 PM Page 127 as it claims. The discussion canvases numerous bungled and relatively insigni ficant cases that clearly do not live up to their billing as major achievements in fighting terrorism at home. Certainly, constraints on page length keep us from addressing all the problems undermining the war on terror1 ; nevertheless, several key cases, incidents, and developments offer ample opportunity to evaluate the general effectiveness of law enforcement and prosecution. The chapter concludes with more than just a passing thought that the current counterterrorist strategy—particularly at the helm of the Justice Department—contains many features resembling the failed war on drugs, offering...