September, 2001

This morning's New York Times carries a lead article about Bush's appearance before a joint session of Congress and it's really given me the blues---just when I thought we might be on the right track for an internationally supported crackdown on terrorism.

In the aftermath of the WTC and Pentagon destruction, we Americans ask ourselves what kind of national governments and religions could possibly allow terrorists to exist within their protection. Why are such things allowed? Why don't the native populations rise up and demand an end to such inhumanities?

One needn't look much further for the answers than within our own supposedly tolerant society and ask why we tolerate reprisals against Americans with dark skin, a turban or a beard, a style of dress that is not like our own. Taking pride as a nation of immigrants, it's hard to escape the feeling that we mean European immigrants, white immigrants, immigrants like us. Our own black and Hispanic populations, generations old as American citizens are targets of racism and yes, let's call it what it is when a car is stopped and the occupants beaten, when gangs of whites beat, threaten or verbally attack people of color, when shopkeepers live in fear behind bullet-proof glass---terrorism.

The relatively rare occurrence of a black dragged to death or minority shopkeepers shot for their "difference from us" is not the point. The point is that we allow, freely allow as is our dedicated right to be free, the Nazi Party marches through predominantly Jewish towns, the militant hate groups that have taken over as their own certain parts of our country, the swaggering, black-booted skinheads roaming our cities in packs, a racist minority in our religions. Recent American history is rife with example; the founding example of slavery and the slaughter of our native population, as well as the recent history; Asians (any Asians) being attacked in Detroit in the days when Japanese cars were kicking our carmaking ass; blacks before, during and after the integration marches of the sixties; Japanese Americans interned during the Second World War, their properties confiscated and never returned; German Americans catching hell during the same times, many of them changing their names from native German spellings; the incredible sanctioning of destroyed lives (by innuendo) during the McCarthy years. Why did we as a nation never rise up against these anomalies?

And yet we wonder why these selfsame examples exist in other countries. And we demand extradition by reputation, without following the international laws of extradition, the proof of reasonable claim to criminal activity. That's what the Taliban requires, no more than what we or any nation of law would require. But we haven't the patience for it. Our blood is up. The requirements of international law don't count when our President's approval rating is at 82% and the need to keep it there is immediate. America's anger must be given an outlet before it directs itself against Washington for "not doing anything." A short term profit, a political expediency, a mugging of justice as we define justice.

I don't like the Taliban and most Afghanis don't either, but their country's been taken over by these Islamic fundamentalists and they're as powerless as Iraqi or Iranian citizens to do anything about it. I don't like skinheads, religious leaders who condone the killing of doctors in abortion clinics, Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan either and I wish we could rid our society of such groups. But I don't much like witch hunts either and when the world is momentarily on our team, I weep to see us go witch hunting.

We're unlikely to see another time when the entire world, including for the most part the Muslim world, is desperately seeking to find a method of cooperation in rooting out terrorism. But the methods that will work, the methods that join rather than separate, are not satisfying. In our agony over the New York and Washington disasters, we demand (and understandably demand) to see something go up in flames, to see the destruction of innocents as our civilian population suffered the destruction of innocents. It's an understandable demand, incredibly understandable but it's wrong-headed and if our President were a statesman instead of a politician, he would make us know that it's wrong-headed and squanders a never-to-be-repeated opportunity for a disastrous short-term satisfaction.

Our CIA has sponsored terrorism in foreign countries for decades and we've benignly accepted that as a necessary foreign policy. Salvador Allende, the first democratically elected president of Chile was overthrown and assassinated by a CIA assisted coup that set up Pinochet and his mass murders of Chilean citizens. Ask Henry Kissinger. When questioned before congress, he blandly stated that sometimes democratic elections bring the wrong man to power. If any of twenty or thirty of fifty foreign governments that have been destabilized, in many cases totally wrecked by these policies, demanded the immediate extradition of the Director of the CIA at the threat of armed attack, we'd laugh in their faces. What's different here is that no nation in today's world has the power to make such a demand and make it credibly. The world knows this and therefore how we handle this test of our country's patience and rule of law will forever define our glory. The very foundations of freedom and democracy will hold or crumble by our response.

Afghanistan demands proof and proof is not beyond our resources. But it will take the time and attention that would be immediately available to any grand jury within our country before criminal charges were brought and a suspect indicted. We owe it to ourselves to do this. We owe it to the future of a world of law to do this. Anything less is a no more than a lynch mob and we will pay an unknown but horrific price for that mistake.

Get out of the Archives and read what Jim's writing today