Robert Mueller Quotes
I know that we will be judged in history by not only how we disrupt terrorism but how we protect the civil liberties and constitutional rights of all Americans, even Americans who don't wish us well. We must do all these things exceptionally well.
Mueller, Robert S. Hearing before the Committee on the Judiciary. United States Senate, U.S. Government Printing Office, 6 June 2002.
At that point they were imprisoned in Guantanemo, a military facility in Cuba.
In the aftermath of 9-11, there was a call for giving the law enforcement agencies more authority and the Patriot Act was passed in haste and fear. Some law enforcement personnel then went about picking up Arab Americans and in many cases holding them incommunicado without any charges. No terrorists were discovered by this process and yet good American citizens were abused, traumatized and insulted. In our zeal to protect American freedom, we actually began to resemble some of the capricious and abusive practices of our undemocratic enemies. There were other abuses allowed under the Patriot Act, but at the time of this writing the extent had not yet been revealed, but the refusal of the authorities to make public the national security benefits suggests that there was not much national security benefit and much abuse.
In the face of terror bombings, Britain passed some anti-terror laws which also somewhat infringed on civil rights, liberty and privacy.
One myth is that Islamic violence is caused by the dispute over Israel in the Middle East and American and Christian encroachments into Islam. Violence by Muslims against fellow Muslims is responsible for many more deaths than Muslims perpetrate against the West. In this example it shows that Muslim on Muslim violence in Egypt alone is far grater than the violence against the Israelis. In the Iraq war, Muslim insurgents killed many more fellow Muslims than they killed Americans. Many Muslims will kill and intimidate anyone of any religion who simply disagrees with them. Governments fighting the terrorists often, out of desperation, resort to Emergency Laws, suspensing rights or other extra judicial means. Democratic Israel, which has had to cope with terrorism for its entire existence still has a constitutional democracy and has not resorted to undemocratic extra judicial means of counter terrorism.
This is probably the first known use of the Bill of Rights phrase in the English language. For the earliest American use, see Edward Rutledge.
He was the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Islamic fundamentalist terrorists are repugnant to us because they have no respect for Civil and Human Rights and would deny us what we value so highly and for which so many Americans have sacrificed. We are little better off if we surrender our civil rights in order to cope with the problem of losing our civil rights to the likes of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
Robert Swan Mueller III is an American lawyer and government official who served as the sixth Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 2001 to 2013.
