Why terrorism works

Do you think that feeling has been endangered at all since Sept. 11?

I felt a danger to the feel of freedom when Ashcroft proposed Operation TIPS. The notion that every time an electrician or a postman comes to my house -- and I live a very open life -- that someone [might be] snooping for the government gave me a very eerie idea about the feel of freedom.

But there are certain liberties that we will have to part with in some way.

Anonymity is the big one. We can't walk around with a bag over our heads.

Then how did you react to when the U.S. rounded up the 1,000 Muslim men?

I was pleased that it happened immediately for several reasons. One: We didn't round up 110,000 Arab-Americans and put them in concentration camps like we did to the Japanese after Pearl Harbor. Two: It seemed to me that we needed to freeze the situation for a few days to find out what these people knew and who they were. Then I began to get distressed after a week or two or three. And now I'm outraged that it's lasted so long without judicial review.

I have no problem with short-term detention based on probable cause. The things that outrage me are the secrecy, the numbers and the length. It's a matter of degree. But as I say in the book, the idea that "better that 10 guilty go free than one innocent be wrongly confined" is appropriate in the criminal justice system. It may not be appropriate in preventing acts of terrorism. It may be that it's better for 10 innocent people to be confined than for one terrorist to blow up a city.

How will this transform ideas and policy about racial and ethnic profiling?

My friend Larry David, the comedian who writes "Curb Your Enthusiasm," said to me, "What if they prove that a bald, Jewish guy blew up the World Trade Center?" He's bald and Jewish. He said, "I'd be willing to show them anything! Anything!" A lot of people feel that if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't have anything to hide. I don't think that's right. Racial profiling is an evil in and of itself because it makes a general statement that all people who belong to a particular ethnic group are suspect.

But if you know that the only people who engage in suicide bombing are men, of a certain age and from a certain ethnic background, but you bother just for propriety's sake to also search the 80-year-old grandmother from Maine who's getting on the plane with her grandchildren, that's a waste. The one thing we know is that we don't have any experience of anybody blowing up an airplane with their grandchildren with them on the plane. Common sense can permit us not to have such a fetish, treating everybody exactly identically. It doesn't mean that everybody carrying a Quran should be subject to profiling.

One of the reasons that I think that a national ID card is better than ethnic profiling is because if you have a national ID card, you can avoid this stereotype. You have the card, you've gone through the process of getting it and you're not likely to be a hijacker if you have that card and it matches your retinal print.

And everyone, regardless of color and background, has one too.

And therefore everybody has a little bit of their anonymity diminished. I'd always rather have "we-we" compromises than "we-they" compromises. I worry about "we-they" compromises very much because there's no constituency to fight against it. This administration was willing to detain 1,000 people but they weren't willing to looking into their gun-purchase records for fear that the NRA would be upset. The administration sent a message that it's a greater violation of privacy to have your gun-purchase records looked into than to be detained in a prison. That's just crazy!

Is there anything else that particularly worries you about the Bush administration, things that have changed in the last year?

What worries me, of course, is the "wag the dog" scenario. As somebody said in Israel, Yasser Arafat has been Sharon's campaign manager. He never would have gotten elected without the terrorism. And the fear is that Osama bin Laden may become Bush's campaign manager for his reelection campaign because if not for Sept. 11 most political pollsters would tell you that his approval ratings, if the economy were as bad as it is, would be very low today. The fear is that Sept. 11 has become too important to the political fortunes of the current administration and there is a potential that they could abuse that. I haven't seen that happening yet, but the Iraqi scenario worries.

Just out of curiosity, you mention that you've defended terrorists. Who, and what was that like?

I defended the Jewish Defense League when they were a terrorist group in the 1970s. My first big case that I write about in "The Best Defense" was the defense of a man named Sheldon Seigel who was accused of making the bombs that were planted in Sol Hurok's office that ended up killing a young Jewish woman who worked there. I got to meet and see all the people in that terrorist organization and they're a bunch of zealots who believed their cause was above everything else. They did try to focus their terrorism on Soviet diplomats and people who traded with Soviet diplomats, but look, the only person they succeed in killing was a 20-something-year-old Jew, a woman who was just going to work. It instilled in me a tremendous hatred even when I was defending terrorists.

And then I was twice myself threatened by terrorists. Once when I was a professor, two North African students planned to assassinate me after I wrote an Op-Ed piece about Yasser Arafat. And then I was told I was on a list of prominent Jews who were targeted for assassination. After Sept. 11, we hired a security firm to check out everything around our house.

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