Sometimes, concerns about “civil liberties” are just an excuse.

Nov 29, 2010
WSJ

By JAMES TARANTO

The war on Christmas continues. Last year it was the “underpants bomber,” this year 19-year-old Mohamed Osman Mohamud, who allegedly planned to blow up a Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in Portland, Ore., but was foiled by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. The Washington Examiner’s Byron York has the details:

Mohamud, a Somali-born naturalized U.S. citizen who attended Oregon State University, told undercover FBI agents he dreamed of performing acts of jihad in which hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americans would die. “Do you remember when 9/11 happened when those people were jumping from skyscrapers?” Mohamud asked the agents, according to the affidavit. “I thought that was awesome.”

In months of preparation with men he thought were co-conspirators but were in fact undercover agents, Mohamud backed up his talk with action. After initially making email contact with Islamist radicals in Pakistan, he took part in constructing what he hoped would be an extraordinarily powerful bomb, scouted the best location for the attack, parked the van containing the bomb near the Christmas tree crowd, and, finally, dialed the cell phone number he believed would detonate the explosives. “I want whoever is attending that event to leave either dead or injured,” Mohamud said of the 25,000 people expected to take part in the event.

But here’s a curious twist: Although the Joint Terrorism Task Force is a partnership between the FBI and local law enforcement, the Oregonian reports that Portland’s Mayor Sam Adams, a Democrat, found out about the plot at the same time the public did: when the FBI announced Mohamud’s arrest on Friday.

That’s because in 2005, Portland became the only city in the country to withdraw from the JTTF. The reason, York explains, is that then-Mayor Tom Potter “said the FBI refused to give him a top-secret security clearance so he could make sure the officers weren’t violating state anti-discrimination laws that bar law enforcement from targeting suspects on the basis of their religious or political beliefs.”

Adams, then a city councilman, was part of the 4-1 majority that voted to withdraw from the JTTF. Now he’s having second thoughts, reports the Oregonian: “Adams . . . emphasized that he has much more faith in the White House and the leadership of the U.S. attorney’s office now than he did in 2005.”

The paper reports that the American Civil Liberties Union still opposes participation in the JTTF. Agree or disagree, the ACLU deserves credit for consistency. But Adams’s position is blatantly partisan. One can’t even attribute it to an epiphany brought on by the Mohamud arrest. According to the Oregonian, Adams and his police chief, Mike Reese, “have discussed for months” whether to rejoin the JTTF. What made the difference, it seems quite clear, is having a Democrat in the White House.

A similar mentality is on display in an op-ed piece in the Guardian, England’s leading left-wing daily. The author is Amanda Marcotte, a left-wing American blogress best known for being forced to resign from John Edwards’s presidential campaign over anti-Catholic posts on her own blog. Marcotte gropes for a position on the Transportation Security Administration’s new procedures but ultimately comes up empty-handed:

Left-leaning civil libertarians initially welcomed the sudden surge of news reports about anger and revolt over the Transportation Security Administration’s new procedures that involve rather intimate patdowns for people who won’t or can’t use the body-scanning machines at airport security lines. We’d been raising the alarm for years about the long lines and privacy invasions, all done in the name of security, with little to no evidence that any of it made us safer.

But it didn’t take long to realise that much, if not most, of the ire aimed at the TSA was coming from conservative corners, which made progressives hesitate. On the one hand, building political alliances is a time-honoured strategy to get things done. On the other, aligning yourself with the American right means bringing on quite a bit of baggage: bad faith arguments, outright lying, racism–and hidden agendas, usually serving predatory corporate interests.

Were rightwingers suddenly interested in civil liberties issues that usually hold little interest for them because the TSA had gone too far? Or was something else going on?

Marcotte acknowledges that “many Democratic-leaning journalists and pundits seem content to attack dishonest and shady rightwing TSA critics–without examining in detail why such security procedures are invasive and need to stop”–which actually describes her own op-ed quite well.

If a Republican were in the White House, it seems likely that the liberal left would be far more opposed to the TSA procedures than it is–just as Portland’s Democratic leadership viewed cooperation with the FBI as anathema until the Obama presidency.

To some extent, this is just a fact of life. Partisanship is an inevitable feature of politics, and it’s natural to trust the government more when one sympathizes with the men who run it. But to be so partisan on matters of national security and civil liberty seems extreme. It also makes you wonder how “progressives” can reconcile their general commitment to bigger government with their intense mistrust for government when it is led by the party they oppose.

Read more at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704584804575644710508483090.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion

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