America's Growing Intolerance
How "Enemy Creep" Is Guantanamo-izing America
By Karen J. Greenberg
Just in case you thought that "political correctness" had been thoroughly discredited in the culture wars of the 1990s, it's back -- and this time it's being treated as a stalking horse for terrorism and getting pummeled all over again.
You only had to listen to the recent hearings convened by New York Republican Congressman Peter King on radicalization and the Muslim religion to know that, if the ascending right in Washington (and elsewhere) has its way, the age of tolerance in America is over. In the name of putting political correctness in its grave, a surprisingly sizeable contingent of politicians, judges, and other influential figures are now calling for transforming draconian behavior -- that once would have made Americans blanche -- into the order of the day.
Blaming Political Correctness for Terrorism
King's hearings underscored the urgency with which a growing cast of influential characters seeks to open yet wider the door to the sort of anti-democratic (and anti-constitutional) actions that have been woven into counterterrorism policy since September 11, 2001. As chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, King made it his job to acknowledge the obstacle that -- as he might put it -- excessive tolerance for minorities, foreigners, or other religions and cultures can pose. "To back down [from these hearings]," he insisted when criticized, "would be a craven surrender to political correctness and an abdication of what I believe to be the main responsibility of this committee -- to protect America from a terrorist attack."
It was hardly the first time in the Obama era that political correctness has been identified as a major cause of terrorism, or at least as a major roadblock to confronting terrorism. One need only think back to the November 2009 killing spree in which Major Nidal Hasan, a Muslim Army psychiatrist, fatally gunned down 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas. In an op-ed penned several days after the attack, Republican Congressman John Carter, who represents the district where Fort Hood is located, pointedly connected political correctness to the dangers posed to the country by terrorism, warning, "Political correctness is killing Americans and undermining the national security of the United States."
Key political figures continue to use the Hasan case to harp upon the imagined horrors of being politically correct. For instance, in February, a Senate Homeland Security Committee report was still fretting that military "worries" about "political correctness inhibited Hasan's superiors and colleagues who were deeply troubled by his behavior from taking the actions against him that could have prevented the attack at Fort Hood." Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn, commenting on the report, insisted that "we must never allow the safety of those who defend our freedom to play second fiddle to political correctness."
Dorothy Rabinowitz, a conservative columnist in the Wall Street Journal, echoed Cornyn, arguing in a much-cited op-ed that military psychiatrists failed to see Hasan's rampage coming because they inhabited "the world of the politically correct."
The message that political correctness is allowing al-Qaeda-ish wolves in sheep's clothing to penetrate the country's defenses has been spreading, based in part on claims about unlearned lessons from past incidents of terrorism. Last month, at New York Law School's City Law Breakfast Series, for example, Michael Mukasey, George W. Bush's last attorney general and the former chief judge of the Southern District of New York, informed an audience of judges, lawyers, reporters, and law students that political correctness had actually been responsible for the FBI's failure to stop the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.
"When a group of FBI agents approached what they thought was a bunch of folks who were taking rather aggressive target practice," he told his audience, "and thought that they would give them a toss" and get their identification and so on" these folks put them off and challenged them and said [the FBI agents] were engaged in what is now known as profiling and [the agents] being polite, politically correct, backed off." These "folks," Mukasey added, included the ones who later hatched the plot on the World Trade Center.
On the specific crimes of political correctness, Mukasey was blunt: it gives a free pass to Islam which he suggests is a dangerous religion. "We live in a culture" in which we hesitate to ask questions about other people's religion, but when that religion is something they use as a justification for imposing a system on us, we are very well entitled to ask questions about it and to draw appropriate conclusions." These "appropriate conclusions," his audience was left to conclude, seemed to include the notion that Islam "causes" terrorism.
According to Mukasey, guilt over earlier eras of American history is now working to derail commonsense measures for safeguarding the country. "We were very much on guard... and still are against a repetition of our treatment of the Japanese during World War II and of fomenting religious and ethnic tension in this country. We are also a society that is reluctant to examine other folks' religions. For those two reasons, we shun the notion of a war on any movement that is or claims to be inspired by a religion." According to Mukasey, even President Bush was swayed by an irresponsible emphasis on tolerance into "going so far as to tell us that... "Islam is a religion of peace.'"
Revenge Enters the Torture Debate
The conviction that political correctness has been crippling America's struggle with violent jihadists inevitably leads Mukasey and others like him into treacherous waters that tend to sweep away ever more civil liberties, as has been true for Washington policymakers since George W. Bush's Global War on Terror began. For them, the urge to chip away at a traditional American commitment to religious toleration reflects a deeper imperative to jettison a wide range of traditional legal protections.
In Mukasey's rendering of recent history, the failure of al-Qaeda to mount another major set of attacks in the United States can be explained by the Bush-Cheney administration's willingness to stiff-arm politically correct civil libertarians and human rights advocates. As the former attorney general put it at that breakfast meeting, "A great deal of this success, I believe, was due to the CIA interrogation program, which involved" questioning [detainees] vigorously at times."
He's talking about torture, of course, a word he couldn't quite bring himself to utter, even though the euphemisms of others on the subject offend him. Here's what he said about the phrase "enhanced interrogation techniques" which often replaced "torture" in Bush administration and media accounts of what CIA interrogators and others were doing: "[It was] probably one of the worst PR campaigns since New Coke... It sounds like a wash product, doesn't it? Enhanced -- get the whitest wash on the block. I think "harsh techniques,' "coercive techniques' would have been a whole lot more accurate and in the end a whole lot less harmful, because when you use the euphemism like "enhanced' it sounds as if you are trying to hide something that you believe to be horrible and that you're ashamed of... and that was a disastrous choice."
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