False Leads

There's a chapter in the book where you look at how many terrorist attacks there have been -- well, obviously none after 9/11 -- but also, all the people who supposedly were [involved], arrested and then convicted. Talk a little about that, because you were struck with an anomaly there, right?

That's right. It's an anomaly that's sharpened by the fact that, as everyone knows, the United States Government through the USA PATRIOT Act and other measures not even in the PATRIOT Act, such as wiretapping surveillance, has removed almost any barrier that ever stood between the United States Government and its ability to know anything it wants about anyone in the United States. Combine these abilities with the tens of thousands of people who've been detained and interrogated. Essentially any Middle Easterner whom the government had any interest in has been turned inside out with respect to possible links to terrorism. Huge amounts of money -- we're talking about billions and billions of dollars -- have been put into increasing investigative, surveillance, and enforcement, capacities that had been directed against organized crime and against drugs are now being dedicated to the War on Terror.

What has been the result? Repeatedly the government has announced the discovery of a spectacularly important, dangerous sleeper cell -- in Detroit, in Lackawanna, New York, even here in Lodi, California, and in Idaho, in Florida -- and they've trumpeted these successes because they have been struck on the inside by how few discoveries they have made. But when they bring them to trial they have been humiliated repeatedly to find [people like] Iman Faris from Ohio, who they said was working for al Qaeda to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge. He then turned out to be a mentally unstable guy who thought he could actually bring the Brooklyn Bridge down with a blow-torch.

The overwhelming number of people counted as successes turn out to have been Middle Easterners cheating on their language exam, truck drivers who had nothing to do with terrorism, people who extended their visas. You have in Detroit this sleeper cell, so-called; the cases were thrown out when it was shown that the prosecutor was cooking the evidence, and now the prosecutor's actually been convicted by the government of obstruction of justice and other charges.

In Lodi, California, where the government did finally, after a very long trial, get a conviction of one person, an obviously weak-willed, not very intelligent cherry picker who hardly speaks English, who speaks Pashtun, went to Pakistan to find a bride and ended up in the camp his grandfather runs that may have had al Qaeda people in it. The government interrogated him for months and even showed a videotape of him nodding in agreement to things that reporters in the courtroom said he barely understood, and he was convicted -- his father's case resulted in a hung jury, they couldn't convict him -- in a very conservative area. They convicted the son of material support for terrorism because he showed up at the camp in Pakistan.

When the arrest in Lodi was announced in February by Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence, in front of the entire panoply of the American intelligence and law enforcement leadership at Congress, he said this discovery of an important, large sleeper cell in this community [of Lodi] was terrifying--instructive evidence of the importance of the War on Terror and why it must be our highest priority. Well, it turns out that this conviction is all based on evidence provided by an informer who was paid $250,000 to find the sleeper cell. He couldn't find it, but he found that this one young guy had gone to a camp in Pakistan. This informer [also gave] incorrect information about having seen Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's right-hand man, in this mosque in Lodi, which everyone knows now is false.

So, again, it's one in a long list of embarrassing failures. The fact is, no matter how much money has been spent, we haven't found any planning of serious terrorism, with one exception. There was a couple in Texas who had all the material for cyanide bombs, except they were radical right-wing white Christians, not Muslims, and for that reason the government has not celebrated their arrest and conviction as a victory on the War on Terror.

You quote the Washington Post [which] did a study of some of the Ashcroft claims. He had said there are 375 indictments and 195 convictions, and the Washington Post points out that only 39 convictions were [for] terror -- so this is really, in a nutshell, an emperor-has-no-clothes story. Right?

Yes. Those statistics are even more dramatic now because the government has withdrawn some of those convictions, and a closed, confidential assessment by the FBI was that we have found no trace of any sleeper cell in the United States. That's also quoted in the book. But who's the emperor? In a way, it's not just the president, it's the whole political class.

You take the ports issue that just occurred -- you see, what I'm arguing as a social scientist is not just a plot by the Republicans, though the cabal that got us into Iraq started this off. They were the precipitating factor of this cyclone. But the cyclone has a life of its own, and it draws power from Democrats as well as Republicans. So, when there's a Dubai port deal, that Dubai's going to run our ports -- some of the Democrats, who know that the one issue the president's been able to live on has been the War on Terror, cannot resist the same logic that every interest group uses to advance its agenda, to say, "What idiocy! We Democrats could fight the War on Terror much better than that. Look at all the opportunities for the terrorists that are being opened here." Well, in that case, the president was actually telling the truth. He was trying to say, "Look, there is no security problem here." He had to retract it, just like Kerry during the campaign when he said, "Look, terrorism is mainly a nuisance, it's a law enforcement problem, we're always going to have a little of it, but we've got to get away from this War on Terror." He had to retract that because the War on Terror itself is now the enemy. It's what holds us in thrall. Yes, it started as a result of the actions of al Qaeda and of the cabal in Washington that wanted the war in Iraq, but it has a life of its own and it will be very difficult to stop it, though it can be done.

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