My difference in opinion on how to view the case of Jamshid Muhtorov and the coverage by the Denver Post caused quite an outrageous slam on me by defense analyst Joshua Foust.
Perhaps his outburst isn't really caused by the issue at hand, but about his irritation with my persistent refusal to be bullied and silenced by him after he banned me from his group's site Registan; my principled and continued objection to all his bad-faith posts about Central Asia; my rejection of his realpolitik take on the massacre by the American soldier; or even my response to his calling a woman he's apparently dating "my girl" -- I said this was VERY VERY VERY VERY sexist -- like he once said to me about a far more apt epithet.
Several friends as well as strangers have approached me about this outrageous attack and said things like "This is awful, you shouldn't stoop to even answering it," or "what the hell is wrong with this guy," etc. Well, I believe in patiently answering Internet smears or else you are bullied into silence and the bullies win. Bullies who link to sites on bullying and claim you are a patholical paranoid liar are the kind of bullies you have to patiently polemicize against the most, in my experience.
And ultimately, this isn't about a blog war, but a serious case of a man's life and the potential loss of his freedom and what it means for our country and Uzbekistan, and I simply refuse to be shut up about those important matters.
In projecting a view of how he sees the world -- everybody lies, everybody is cynical, everybody bullies -- Foust imagines that the only reason I could possibly take up writing about this case is merely to pique Registan, which began writing about it. But Registan doesn't get to take up all the mindshare on this, and its awful positions on so many issues in this region simply cry out for debate and refutation. And I'm not going to be harassed into not doing that.
The refusal of the organized human rights movement and the "progressive" punditocracy and academic world to really grasp the threat of extremism and terrorism -- as above all threats to human rights and the liberal idea -- isn't something I think we can idly tolerate. Just because governments misuse the prosecution of terrorism to accomplish the suppression of civil society doesn't mean we don't get to critique the threat to civil society that extremist violent ideas bring us, too.
Thank God, in discussing the case of the imam shot in Sweden, uznews.net has not been deterred from covering the grave concerns that emigres have, not only about the Uzbek secret police and its likely involvement in this assault, but also the troublesome ideas of suppressing freedom of expression from the imam himself. Victim status doesn't entitle you to victimize others. This is something Registan almost never gets.
On the Muhtorov case, long before I ever wrote about this Uzbek emigre, or Registan did (they were first), the FBI was tracking his cell phone. That's what led to his arrest. Not a blog. Not an emigre website or comment. Cell phone conversations in which he said he was prepared to die for an extremist group's cause.
Why was he arrested? Not because he had a long beard or taught his children to recite the Koran. He was arrested because he was caught making contact with an extremist organization (one that Registan doesn't believe exists, but which he did indeed contact). He was caught offering allegiance to the group, and putting together money and equipment (cell phones, a GPS device). He took donations from another man, also arrested now. He was caught talking about "gifts" for "weddings" repeatedly in ways that suggested he was using the Al Qaeda code. He told his daughter he was not going to see her again until they met in heaven.
And in this newspaper article that Foust so agitates about, Muhtorov was caught with a cell phone with jihad videos on it, celebrating the terrorist destruction of the World Trade Center towers -- a fact Foust ellides from his post. He was deemed too violent to be released -- a fact that has set the Registani regulars to whine "who gets to decide?! the FBI?" or "this is America!".
Now, we all get it that violent thoughts and even intentions, as well as jihadi videos on Youtube are legal. People collect them out of spite or fury or because they think it's cool or whatever. People spout angry violent things because they are angry but not necessarily at the point of "imminent violent action."
But when you have those videos, and everything else mentioned here, and other things that the prosecution has said is part of secret information they are not revealing in the interests of national security, then it's a marker. And it's ok to be concerned about it.
Foust blusters and carries on so crazily in this post, especially with all his wacky stuff about me and false claims that "crazy Internet people are sending a man to prison" (!) that a commenter asks simply whether Foust thinks he is guilty or not. What's his gut on this? Yes, we get it that there are concerns about "thought crimes" -- but really? What do you think. "I won't tell anyone," this jokester quips on the, um, Internet.
And the answer is -- there isn't any answer from Foust. And if pressed, he would probably say, to cover his ample ass, that we have to wait until the case comes to trial and see whether the prosecutor can make his case. That's just in case the guy turns out to be guilty, like the Uzbek who threatened President Obama and had weapons -- whom Foust readily conceded was a terrorist who deserved to be arrested.
And if I am asked to say what *I* think, I answer in all sincerity, without any coyness, that I don't know, and that we have to wait until the case comes to trial and see whether the prosecutor can make his case.
Now, how do I differ from Foust?
I think it's more than fine for the FBI to make an arrest and investigate a case like this, and Foust doesn't. He thinks anything that might turn out to be "Interneting while Muslim" or a "thought crime" means no arrest is in order.
I agree with the prosecution that he sounds like a danger, and a risk of flight (he was, after all, caught at the airport, on his way to Turkey, with money, phones, etc. to meet up with a member of an extremist group). And I think if your claim that US authorities exploit the "war on terror" to violate human rights is to ever have any credibility, you have to concede that sometimes, they make the right judgement call.
Living in New York with a keen awareness of the effects of 9/11, I sure don't take for granted the NYPD's work in arresting in a timely fashion, with the help of citizens, the Times Square bomber, for example. I just don't find these arrests to constitute the "chill on speech" that I'm supposed to. So far, I only find Foust the chill on speech here.
Taking another look at the Denver Post articles, let me say a few thoughts on what we have so far from these reporters -- who seem perfectly competent and capable of reporting on a criminal case without having to be Central Asian experts:
1. We have a claim by the prosecutor that Muhtorov has admitted that he knew what the nature of the Islamic Jihad Union was, and knew that it fought NATO in Afghanistan. This claim has been reported from the courtroom because it is what the prosecutor said, and that's what reporters do, they report on what the prosecutor says at the trial. When they do that, they aren't required to comment "how Soviet" all this is (!) as Foust suggests -- they can, um, leave that to the angry comments on their forums page.
2. We do not have any counterclaim from Muhtorov himself. As he is in prison, it may not be possible for him to give comments to the press, he may be barred from interviews, but there it is -- he hasn't claimed otherwise.
3. We do not have any statement from his wife about this. And again, that may be due to the fact that her lawyer has told her to stay silent, and a wife can't be compelled to give testimony against her husband.
4. We do not have any statement from Muhtorov's lawyer claiming that the prosecutor misled the court or even outright lied. Foust makes a pretty serious claim: he says a prosecutor is lying in court and that a prosecutor is only quoting my blog in order to prosecute a man (!). But the lawyer, who is way more important to this case, doesn't claim that. Of course, he may be biding his time and getting ready a defense at trial or seeing what else comes out from the FBI (the jihad videos were only just added to the case). But there it is -- if there is some "big story" about the prosecutor reporting Muhtorov's admission, and not Muhtorov's admission itself as such, there is no counterfactuals to show in fact the prosecutor is wrong -- and not even anybody questioning the prosecutor the way the anonymous angry Post readers were doing, and Foust was doing.
So we have a whole lot of nothing on this now -- and if it turns out that Muhtorov in fact never really admitted this, that story will have its day in court. That will not mean it was wrong to arrest him, so far as I can tell.
This may be a distinction that flies over Foust's head, and certainly his enabler Sarah Kendzior's head, but I have no need for Muhtorov to be prosecuted and go to jail, or to be arrested "while Interneting as a Muslim." I have a different need: not to second-guess law-enforcers when they make an arrest of a terrorist, because terrorism is really, really a big threat to human rights.
Not only is terrorism a threat to human rights; when this terrorist is a former member of a human rights group, it's a HUGE threat to the human rights movement. It discredits it. It makes it seem as if hiding behind every innocent and sincere human rights activist is a potential terrorist who will turn to violence if somebody asks him to file his narrative and financials on a grant. Or asks him to leave a group that doesn't wish to state as its purpose the overthrow of the president.
It makes it seems as if hiding behind every refugee is a terrorist. Indeed, it is not discussing Muhtorov critically that runs those risks; its not defining, condemning and prosecuting terrorism that runs those risks. This is a major disagreement with how Registan sees the world, but I don't care -- I'm interested in preserving the crystal-clear distinction between non-violent human rights activism and terrorism by not speciously claiming special human rights privileges where they aren't warranted.
As we've seen with Sarah Kendzior in particular, she's not concerned about making these distinctions -- she rushed to ascribe to Muhtorov from the get-go the properties of a member of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, although as it turned out this was a man with jihad videos on his phone and hook-ups with the IJU. She believes in an "activism without activists" -- convenient, awfully, for Karimov, who would like no activists, and controllable activism, too.
Muhtorov's lawyer has chosen to highlight the fact that Muhtorov was at one time a human rights activist -- just as Registan has -- in order to try to get him off. His lawyer is doing his job, but his interests are narrow; Foust and Registan writers and commenters who share his views are only interested in enlarging their own arrogant sense of being above bumbling federal law-enforcers and misguided anti-terror warriors.
I have a different concern, which is I don't want people dragging in human rights groups and their legitimate activity to try to beat their own charges of terrorism. I don't want human rights groups to be a way station or parking lot for people who graduate to terrorist acts.
If I'm wrong about this and Muhtorov is let go and the prosecutor has egg on his face and the FBI is revealed as merely too vigilant against "Interneting while Muslim," the worst that happens is all of us look bad and an innocent devout beliefer goes free to go about his business, with Registan bolstered in its self-righteous mission to set the world straight on Central Asia. Far from having his life ruined, Muhtorov will be a human rights hero.
But irreparable harm will be done to the human rights movement, because people with violent and extremist views who appeared to warrant arrest for material support for terrorism but who were a few degrees away from that in fact will have been able to hide out in -- and dine out on -- the legitimate human rights struggle.
Thus, the non-prosecution of Muhtorov after these serious allegations does real damage to the human rights movement. Foust and bloggers like Gazistan think that for every single symptom of extremism and possible actual terrorism here -- calling shady IJU characters in Turkey, pledging allegiance to die for a cause, speaking repeatedly of gifts for weddings, telling your daughter you'll see her in heaven, jihad videos -- that's there's an innocent explanation. There might be. But there likely might not be, either, and that's ok to say.
Likely the Registanis will think that the prosecution of a one-time human rights activist -- who embarked on his career out of a sense of vengeance over what appearently was injustice in his sister's murder charges -- will harm the human rights movement. I don't -- just the opposite, the future of the human rights movement depends on making this distinction. As we know from Foust's vicious attacks on human rights advocates, and Kendzior's curious theories espousing Internet inactivism, they don't care about what it means for a terrorist to attempt exoneration by association with the human rights movement. I do.
