That’s criminal law, not civil. The government can restrict your speech only in very, very limited circumstances (basically if it’s likely to bring about imminent lawless action).
I can imagine you might get sued in that situation, yes. I have no idea if you would lose. But anyway you’re talking about suing a magazine that isn’t based in the U.S. and may not have any legal assets anyway, and the people behind it are already on terrorist watch lists. So they’re not going to come to court and I don’t think anybody can enforce a judgment. I don’t see how this is supposed to work.
AQ is not interested in a jihad against the west, not even the twisted definition of jihad that they preach. They are interested in terrorism. Terrorism is an attitude-management technique designed to incite a people to discard or overhaul its government. The idea is to demonstrate to the target audience, “See how ineffective your leadership is at protecting you? Now that we have your attention, this is how you can keep yourself safe…[demands]”
So, how do you fight such an organization? Well first it would make sense to silence its spokespeople–either by killing them or refusing to publicly acknowledge them. Meanwhile, you quietly hunt down the leadership and dismantle the organization. Money is not the heart and soul of AQ, so it’s not what you need to go after.
Rant:In the wake of 9/11 we did neither and, instead, walked right into the terrorism trap. Our government demonstrated its own corruption (Gulf War II) and incompetence (the Afghanistan campaign), and the already tenuous unity of the American people was essentially obliterated. A dozen years later we still don’t trust each other enough for one party to give due credit to the other, and there doesn’t appear to be a leader coming forward who can convince us to set aside our differences in order to pursue some loftier future. As for domestic air travel and international relations…AQ kicked our asses. Yes, lots of Muslims have perished at our hands compared to the lives lost in North America, but overall we are much weaker. Stressed to begin with, but 9/11 was the cunt punt we needed to almost take us out of the game as a world power. And the Arab states? Still bickering amongst themselves and engaging in infighting, but they’ve overthrown our lapdog dictators and it doesn’t look like they’re leaning toward anything that looks like Western Democracy as a replacement. Something has inspired the Arab people to at least try to manage their own destiny, and I have to wonder if our ham-handed meddling in Iraq & Afghanistan/Pakistan played a significant role in that.
Speaking in general, The Great Sun Jester, whenever people disapprove of any anti-terrorism tactic they say “that’s what the terrorists want you to do!” It’s been said so often by so many people with such totally disparate views that it’s lost all meaning.
“that’s what the terrorists want you to do!” would apply to, “Decline public acknowlegment of their organization while quietly tearing it down”? I don’t think that’s what AQ wanted us to do at all (and it’s also what we didn’t do–except for the tearing it down part which was done quite messily).
Or does, “Get the sleeping giant to step on its own dick in response to our actions.” seem an implausible goal of AQ? Because that’s what we did in grand style.
Be patient with me. I don’t claim to be any sort of genius but the above seem like pretty reasonable conclusions to me
No, it would apply to the stuff you’re saying shouldn’t happen:
The Iraq war (among many other reactions to September 11th) was incredibly stupid, but that doesn’t mean it was what Al Qaeda wanted. Like I said, if you follow along over the years, whenever people were opposed to a particular idea, they’d say ‘you can’t do that, that’s what the terrorists want.’ That was applied to everything. The stupidest expression of the concept was “if we don’t do , the terrorists win,” but sometimes it was more subtle. So I’m always skeptical when people say “Al Qaeda wanted us to do that!!!” And to be fair I think Al Qaeda said they were attacking for different reasons at different times. At one point they did claim they were trying to bankrupt the U.S., but I don’t think they said that until after people started complaining about the costs of the wars. They’re propagandists and you have to be careful about taking their comments at face value. I don’t think they were trying to provoke the U.S. into invading Afghanistan. They had a pretty good thing going there and some of them never wanted to attack Western countries in the first place because they realized what would probably happen if they did: they became public enemy number one, lost their big safe haven, and it got a lot of them killed. They did their best to make hay out of the Iraq war but that didn’t go very well for them either, all things considered.
Anyway, the ‘refuse to acknowledge them’ thing is not possible. In an open society with a free press, you can’t just hush up terrorism. It’s not going to work, and if you think about it, it shouldn’t happen.
Charity Watch doesn’t publish its ratings. Charity Navigator does, and gives the SPLC 3/4. The Montgomery Advertiser story didn’t win anything (it was nominated for a Pulitzer), and Ken Silverstein is a crank.