John Avlon

I have never been so happy to hear that someone is dead.

It’s not bloodlust — it’s justice.

Ten years ago at this time, Osama bin Laden was in Afghanistan planning the terrorist attacks that killed more than 3,000 of our fellow Americans in cold blood.

Now he is dead and the families of his victims can have a measure of comfort. The healing can deepen. And if there’s a celebration in the streets outside the White House and ground zero — just as there was celebration after the death of Adolf Hitler was announced on May 1, 1945 — it is deserved. It is 10 years overdue.

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Terrorism is always one bad day away from being the most important issue in America. With election-eve cargo plane bombing plots disrupted by information from a repentant al Qaeda member who was also an ex-Guantanamo detainee, a timely new counter-terrorism report analyzes the most effective means for achieving the “reverse radicalization” of terrorists in prison. Among the countries whose efforts it examined was Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, where President Obama landed Tuesday morning on his Asian tour.

The report, “Risk Reduction for Countering Violent Extremism,” was unveiled at the Qatar International Academy of Security Studies on Monday—making it one of the first major counter-terrorism studies sponsored by an Arab nation. The president and secretary general of Interpol attended the briefings on site as well as senior representatives from the U.S. State Department, Department of Defense, FBI, NCIS and the U.S. Marshals Service. It was staffed by an international team of national security experts including Ali Soufan, the former FBI special agent in charge of the USS Cole bombing investigation who came to prominence thru a post-9/11 New Yorker profile and his subsequent criticism of the effectiveness of interrogation techniques such as water-boarding by the Bush administration. Read More…

First your cellphone doesn’t work. Then you notice that you can’t access the Internet. Down on the street, ATMs won’t dispense money. Traffic lights don’t function, and calls to 911 don’t get routed to emergency responders. Radios report that systems controlling dams, railroads and nuclear power plants have been remotely infiltrated and compromised. The air-traffic control system shuts down, leaving thousands of passengers stranded or rerouted and unable to communicate with loved ones. This is followed by a blackout that lasts not hours but days and even weeks. Our digital civilization shudders to a halt. When we emerge, millions of Americans’ data are missing, along with billions of dollars.

This scenario may sound like the latest doomsday blockbuster to come out of Hollywood. But each of the elements described above has occurred over the past decade as the result of a cyber attack. Cyber attacks are an accelerating threat, still without generally accepted terminology, effective deterrents or comprehensive legal remedies. They are weapons of mass disruption, used by adversaries cloaked in anonymity, that could prove at least temporarily crippling to the digital infrastructure of modern society. This kind of attack is attractive to America’s enemies, not only because it allows weaker entities to take on far stronger ones but because it turns our technological strength into a weakness. Read More…

The president-elect can rally support for public works, homeland security, and government transparency at the same time.

The neo-Keynesian fervor sweeping Washington is set to culminate in President-elect Barack Obama’s proposed $775 billion stimulus package. The Democratic congressional leadership has announced its desire to draft and pass the package of new spending, tax cuts, and infrastructure investment so rapidly that it may be ready for Obama’s signature immediately after his inauguration. But given the American people’s healthy skepticism of big-government action after the Great Society, the president-elect would be wise to reach out beyond traditional Democratic constituencies to make his case. A good place to start is the massive infrastructure-investment plan that is at the heart of the stimulus package. Here, in the largest public works project since the New Deal, Obama could find unexpected common ground with conservatives on homeland security and governmental transparency.

We know that terrorists eyed attacks on bridges and tunnels even before September 11; they have frequently struck train stations and other public transportation hubs abroad. Hardening these potential targets by strengthening their physical and security infrastructure reduces their vulnerability to devastating attack, and therefore reduces their attractiveness to terrorists. At the same time, strengthening infrastructure can help communities withstand natural disasters and build a more resilient society. So while Democrats rightly see the breach of the levees in New Orleans’s Ninth Ward as a symbol of the urgent need for infrastructure investment, it’s also a homeland-security priority, as Steve Flynn powerfully argued in his 2007 book The Edge of Disaster.

The simple truth is that America’s infrastructure is aging. Most of it was built between the 1930s and the 1960s. “We have an impending crisis with infrastructure, but it is easy to ignore until you have a catastrophe,” Robert Dunphy, a senior resident fellow at the Urban Land Institute, warned recently. But America can’t afford to wait for a catastrophe, and with a Democratic Washington, the price tag of infrastructure investment is no longer an impediment to action, as it was during the Bush years.

Still, the ever-present threats of waste, fraud, and abuse could render a multibillion-dollar infrastructure project ineffective unless Obama follows through on a campaign promise and insists on accountability and increased transparency. Adopting a concept championed by conservatives like Newt Gingrich, Obama frequently discussed using technology to improve transparency in Washington. As a first-term Illinois senator, he pointed to bipartisan legislation he had sponsored with Oklahoma conservative Tom Coburn as evidence of his commitment: the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act introduced in the Senate in 2006. The bill, sometimes referred to as “Google for Government,” was ultimately passed after being placed on “secret hold” by notorious pork-barrelers Robert Byrd and the now-convicted Ted Stevens. Today, interested citizens can track an estimated $1 trillion in federal grants, contracts, earmarks, and loans at www.USAspending.gov.

Subjecting the economic stimulus bill—and particularly its notoriously pork-prone infrastructure provisions—to the same heightened transparency would help address concerns that the stimulus bill will turn into just the latest big-government boondoggle. The Obama administration should take a lesson from the $700 billion TARP bailout package, which wasn’t subject to such transparency and has since become the target of a growing public backlash.

The Obama administration can build a more enduring base of support by funding projects that strengthen our homeland security and by imposing accountability through technological transparency. It’s one way Obama can set the promised post-partisan tone at the outset of his presidency. As then-senator Obama said at the launch of USAspending.gov, “We can’t reduce waste, fraud and abuse without knowing how, where, and why Federal money is flowing out the door.” His words are even more relevant now, with the spending floodgates wide open.

John P. Avlon is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics.

ON July 6, police say, a Pakistani named Chaudhry Rashid strangled his 25-year-old daughter San- deela Kanwal with a Bungee cord in her bedroom because she wanted to end her arranged marriage. This “honor killing” came not in Pakistan, but in Jonesboro, Ga. – a suburb 16 miles outside Atlanta.

At his arraignment, Rashid said through an Urdu interpreter that he was “not in the state of mind to talk because of the death of his daughter,” but stated “I have done nothing wrong.”

This is not the same as declaring innocence. His attorney, Tammy Long, explained, “My client is going through a difficult time. As you can imagine, he is distraught.” Apparently, it takes a stronger man to murder his daughter without sentiment.

The national media has paid little attention to the story of Kanwal’s murder, though most outlets found plenty of time to debate the cover of The New Yorker.

When a blonde girl goes missing, cable networks stop in their tracks – but when a Muslim woman is murdered by her father, there’s not a ripple of sustained interest. Where’s the outrage?

Maybe it’s muted because we’ve grown reluctant to pass judgment on other culture’s customs – but multiculturalism hits a crossroads when honor killings come to America.

The United Nations estimates that the world sees 5,000 honor killings a year – overwhelmingly in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa, but increasingly among Muslim immigrant communities in Europe.

The United States has avoided this bloodstained trend until recently. Some consider Kanwal’s death the first documented honor killing here. Others point to the murder of sisters Amina and Sarah Said in Irving, Texas, on New Years’ 2007. (Their MySpace page remains up. Featuring assimilated teen culture and American music, it is haunting.) Their father remains on the run from police.

Few doubt that other honor killings have occurred behind closed doors. In upstate Monroe County just a few days ago, a girl was stabbed by her brother for wearing immodest western clothing and wanting to move to New York City. According to court documents, Waheed Allah Mohammad explained the stabbing by saying his sister was a “bad Muslim girl.”

“Honor killing is a misnomer,” author and exile Ayaan Hirsi Ali told me. “The killing occurs because these girls have allegedly brought shame on their family. The paradox is that these are individuals who have emancipated themselves.

“These girls embody the American dream. They want to become self-reliant – deciding who they marry, when they marry and how many children they will have.”

On the surface, this sounds like a classic case for the left – outrages well worth protesting. Honor killings and other tribal customs like female genital mutilation represent a far greater threat to human rights than comparatively benign examples of Western sexism, like unrealistic measurements on a Barbie doll.

But this would require recognizing that the greatest danger to civil liberties in the world today comes not from the United States, but from a medieval tribalism that’s still murdering people around the world under the guise of enforcing piousness.

“America is an assimilating nation,” affirms Ayaan, “and so when immigrant Muslim men assimilate into American society they are applauded for it. But when some immigrant Muslim women assimilate into American society, they find themselves ostracized – beaten and even killed by their own families. And the American public ignores their plight to protect the immigrant Muslim community from stigma.”

There should be wall-to-wall coverage when Rashid’s pretrail hearings begin tomorrow in Atlanta. By any standards, this is a sensational crime.

Instead, the trial may well get dismissed as old news or swept under the rug as just another domestic-violence case. These rationalizations cover up a discomfort with wading into cultural judgment – and a desire to avoid the risk of violence that always comes with criticizing radical Islam.

There’s a cost to such squeamishness. In England, Lord Chief Justice Phillips, the country’s top judge, has said that sharia law should be incorporated into British law, while the Archbishop of Canterbury described such incorporation as “inevitable.”

This slippery slope threatens to undermine liberal democracy and even the concept of civilized norms. America must make a stand, because many Europeans either can’t or won’t.

As Ayaan says: “As an immigrant Muslim woman running for your life, from your own family, I think America is a better place for us, because we know that Americans are individualist enough that they will ultimately chose to protect us – while Europeans choose to stick their heads in the sand and pretend nothing is going on.”

Our ultimate victory in the War on Terror will be to encourage a Muslim reformation by offering examples of successful Muslim-American citizens – especially women – who thrive within the equal rights and open opportunities of American society. For Muslim women who want to live in freedom, America is the last best hope on earth – and we must remain nothing less.

John P. Avlon is the author of “Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics.”