E-mail a friendJules Lobel
airdate November 13, 2007
University of Pittsburgh professor Jules Lobel lectures on constitutional, international, human rights and foreign relations law. An expert on emergency powers and the laws governing war, he's conducted human rights investigations in Gaza and Israel's West Bank and made presentations on human rights in the U.S. and abroad. He's written several books, including A Less Than Perfect Union, a collection of essays on the U.S. Constitution, and Less Safe, Less Free. Lobel received his J.D. from Rutgers.
Jules Lobel
Tavis: Jules Lobel is professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh and vice president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He is the co-author of the acclaimed new book "Less Safe, Less Free: Why America is Losing the War on Terror." Professor Lobel, nice to have you on the program.
Jules Lobel: Thanks for having me.
Tavis: That's a strong title, strong statement. "Less Safe, Less Free." True? I guess so, you wrote the book.
Lobel: Oh, it's definitely true, and the key part, I think, of it is the less safe part of it. That the administration claims that all these tactics they're using is preventing terrorism, but we think that it's actually creating more terrorism around the world and it's making us less safe.
Tavis: Tell me more, when you say it creates more terrorism around the world.
Lobel: Well, take a look at the Iraq war. How many terrorists has that created, both in Iraq and all around the world? People who fall prey to the propaganda. But we walked right into it, and the CIA told us, told the government that this was going to create tremendous recruiting for al Qaeda, and yet we did it anyway.
Tavis: If I were the president - obviously I'm not - and if I were defending president - obviously I don't - but if I were, I suspect my argument would be that you can't go after a terrorist organization without angering them, which in part is going to develop some sympathy for them. So there's no way you could fight any kind of war on terror and not empower, not agitate, some would-be supporters.
Lobel: Yeah, but they've relied on this idea of what John Ashcroft called the preventive paradigm, and where the rule of law requires that before you lock somebody up or you invade another country, you have to have objective evidence that they've done something wrong or doing something wrong or imminently about to do something wrong.
The preventive paradigm says we have to start wars, lock people up, use coercive tactics just because we have suspicion that they might do something wrong in the future. So after September 11th, we locked up over 5,000 Muslim aliens in this country, kept some of them for months, on the suspicion that they might be terrorists. And do you know how many now stand convicted of any terrorist crime?
Tavis: Of the - of the 5,000?
Lobel: Of the 5,000.
Tavis: You got me.
Lobel: Zero.
Tavis: Zero.
Lobel: Zero. Now, how is that helping fight the war on terror? If you're going after terrorists, that's one thing. But if you're going after people because you have suspicion - and one guy was locked up because he was speaking a foreign language which turned out to be French - if you go after people like this, you're going to ensnare thousands of innocent people, attack countries which aren't doing anything against you, and that is going to create more terrorists than you're capturing.
Tavis: I suspect the next argument President Bush might make if he were sitting across from you, Professor Lobel, is to say to you surely you're not arguing, Professor, that the world is safer, better off - not better off, rather, with Saddam Hussein gone? In fact, his father made that argument. I saw the other day his father, the first President Bush, being interviewed around the reopening of his presidential library and was asked that by a couple of journalists, and he made that point: Why are these people, like Professor Lobel, suggesting that the world is not better off with Saddam gone?
Lobel: Well, Saddam was an evil fellow, no doubt about that, and it's great that he's gone. But we took a country that was not a terrorist haven and we made it into one. We took a country which was not a terrorist threat and now have made it into one. We took a country which was relatively stable - it was stable. It was a dictatorship, but it was stable - and turned it into a country which is now in civil war, essentially, and which is rife for terrorists to move in.
That doesn't make us any safer, and we have spent $450 billion doing it which we could have put in better cargo screening, preventive measures, which really would help us make us safer.
Tavis: But there's a price to spreading democracy around the world.
Lobel: Yeah, there's a price, but number one, are we doing anything good here? Or are we just creating more anarchy and chaos? And number two, is the price worth it, if you say $450 billion and all the good that could be done in this country with that amount of money, and even the preventive measures that could be done.
Our general approach is we think preventive measures are good. We brush our teeth every day. Preventive medicine. You try to prevent tooth decay. What we are against is random root canals. If you just go and start root canalling every tooth you think might have a cavity, you wind up with no teeth.
Tavis: What do you make of the fact, then, to your brilliant last point, what do you make of the fact, then, that the Congress, even though now controlled by Democrats, has really not engaged in a debate about this so-called Bush doctrine? What do you make of the fact, again, that that Bush doctrine, even in this Congress, now controlled by Democrats, has not been fully debated for and with the involvement of the American people?
Lobel: Part of this book really was written toward the Democrats. We criticize Bush, but the Democrats haven't stood up strongly and we think it's partially because they feel cowed by the notion that they'll be painted as weak on terrorism. Really, if you look at all the facts and the figures and the statistics, this preventive doctrine, if you really see how it's made us less safe, you'd say we should be arguing not only that it's immoral, not only that it's illegal, but that it hurts us from a security perspective. And we think if the Democrats really bought into that, they would stand up stronger.
Tavis: What's the long-term damage, though, to this Bush doctrine becoming our modus operandi for engaging the world? It happens this time to be a Republican president, but next time it could be a Democratic president.
Lobel: That's right.
Tavis: So there's nothing to stop a president from hitting somebody if they think in this war on terror - and I can't imagine most presidents who are being told they have something, they're going to hit us, being unwilling to roll the dice. Nobody wants to get hit on their watch and then have it said later we told him or her and they didn't do anything about it. So this Bush doctrine could become the order of the day. What's the danger of that being the way we do business around the world?
Lobel: Well, first of all, we would be ensnared in wars all over. It could be Iran next, as you point out, and it could be a Democratic president. I think we have to not just say this war in Iraq is bungled, it's a mistake, but to say underlying this preventive war doctrine is a bad idea. It's going to get us involved in messes all around the world.
But I think the other thing is we will be isolated. We're getting more and more isolated all around the world, and it's in part because of this doctrine that they've developed. Throughout the Middle East, of course, when you take polls to people, they always say the United States is not doing good things. But even in Britain, our closest ally, last year they did a poll of the most dangerous political people in the world, political figures in the world, and the British people answered number one was Osama bin Laden and number two, ahead of the presidents of North Korea, the leaders of Iran, was George W. Bush.
And when you have the people in Britain feeling that the U.S. president is the second most dangerous person in the world, it shows how isolated we are. We cannot live, we cannot fight the war on terror, we cannot live in the world being that isolated.
Tavis: So we've excavated the less safe part, let's talk about the less free part. The underlying argument for our country now being less free, post 9/11, is what?
Lobel: Well, that they are invading people's privacy, they say they can engage in warrantless wiretapping, all on the notion of prevention. That they can now - an attorney general of the United States cannot tell the Congress that waterboarding is illegal. When that happens, you know that we're going down a line of really undermining our own liberties and undermining the rule of law, upon which our liberties are based.
Tavis: What do you make of the fact that this vote for Mr. Mukasey was so, relatively speaking, close?
Lobel: Yeah, and the fact that people could vote - senators can vote for somebody who can't tell that you that it's illegal to waterboard I think speaks volumes. But "The New York Times" wrote an editorial yesterday in which they said the Democrats should have filibustered this. And had they done that, he couldn't have gotten through.
Tavis: How do you encourage, how do you empower, how do you convince a U.S. senator to run on his or her conscience about this war on terror? To make the case that we are less safe, to make the case that we are less free, if you know that they don't want to be - nobody wants to be labeled soft on terror. Nobody wants to be labeled unpatriotic. And yet to do as you are suggesting will surely get them labeled by their opponent as unpatriotic and not serious about the war on terror.
Lobel: Yeah. What we think this book does is gives them the facts and the figures and the reality which would allow them to make that argument. If they were locking up people and it turns out that they were terrorists, then they might be able to paint you. But when they haven't got any convictions, when they've uncovered no real terrorist plots, when the amount of suicide bombing around the world has increased four times, the amount of terrorist attacks has increased four times, I think the Democrats should take the offensive on it, and I think that's the only way they're going to avoid being painted as weak on terrorism.
Tavis: So highly recommended for all cowardly Democrats, the book is called "Less Safe, Less Free," by David Cole and Jules Lobel. Professor Lobel, nice to have you on the program.
Lobel: Thank you very much.
Tavis: Good to see you.
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