"Before we interviewed detained foreign national Al Qaeda subjects in East Africa in connection with the East African embassy bombings," former FBI Director Louis Freeh told congressional investigators last October, "FBI agents gave them their Miranda rights."
"IN ORDER TO GET BEYOND RACISM, we must first I take account of race." So wrote the late Justice Harry A. Blackmun in 1978, in one of the six opinions in the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Regents of University of California v. Bakke. By a 5-4 vote, the Court struck down a rigid racial quota in admissions at a University of California medical school. But one member of the majority, the late Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., suggested that he would uphold a more flexible plan using race as a modest plus factor, such as the one then used by Harvard.
Now we have been taking account of race for three decades in admissions to virtually every highly selective university in the nation, as well as in employment and government contracting. The Supreme Court is due to issue by early July its first major decision since Bakke on the constitutionality of racial preferences in state university admissions, in a case brought by disappointed white applicants to the University of Michigan’s undergraduate and law schools. It’s a logical time to take stock. Do the benefits of this type of affirmative action exceed the costs? What do the most relevant empirical data tell us about how it works? How much longer should it continue?
First, let’s be clear about what "taking account of race" actually means in deciding whom to admit. Lawsuits have uncovered a great deal of information that had previously been secret. The weight given to race at the University of Michigan appears to be fairly typical of top universities, but unusually easy to measure because Michigan uses a numerical "selection index" to rank applicants; it almost always admits those with the highest scores. Here is how the process would probably work for two hypothetical applicants from the same Michigan high school:
Imagine President Bush responding as follows to the latest rebuffs from France, Germany, South Korea, and others and to the stunning surge of anti-Americanism around the world:
Someday Americans may die because of Congress’s decision earlier this month to cripple a Defense Department program designed to catch future Mohamed Attas before they strike. That’s not a prediction. But it is a fear.
As tort reformers and trial lawyers resume their arcane battles, the costs of and damage done by our burgeoning lawsuit industry are mounting up, all around us. The total dollar amount awarded in the 100 largest jury verdicts in 2002 was more than three times the 2001 total, reports The National Law Journal. The direct costs to society from the tort liability system jumped by an inflation-adjusted 11 percent from 2000 to 2001, to $205 billion-"the equivalent of a 5 percent tax on wages"-according to a study released on February 11 by the actuarial firm Tillinghast-Towers Perrin (whose clients include most large insurers).
Lots of smart people think that invading Iraq over the objection of, say, France would be a huge mistake. I can’t be confident that they are wrong, because the most important question-whether we will be in greater danger if we invade than if we don’t-turns on inherently speculative and debatable calculations and prognostications.
During the Supreme Court’s private conference on the 1978 Bakke case, Justice John Paul Stevens said that preferences "might be acceptable as a temporary measure but not a permanent solution," according to John C. Jeffries’s 1994 biography of Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. "Powell agreed. The problem was one of transition to a color-blind society. Perhaps, Stevens added, blacks would not need these programs much longer, but at this point Justice [Thurgood] Marshall broke in to say that it would be another hundred years. This remark left Powell speechless…. He recoiled from the prospect of generation upon generation of racial quotas."
The vast majority of Americans of all races say they oppose racial preferences in college admissions. But most of us would also be highly distressed to see a drastic drop in the number of black and Hispanic students at our top universities. A Supreme Court decision banning racial preferences would produce just such a drop.
On judicial nominations, Democrats accuse President Bush of fomenting racial division. On tax cuts, Bush and other Republicans accuse Democrats of "class warfare."
Among the signals that should have alerted the FBI well before September 11, 2001, that Islamic terrorists might be thinking of crashing airplanes into American buildings was the 1996 confession of a captured Pakistani terrorist named Abdul Hakim Murad. He and others had planned to blow up 12 U.S.-owned airliners over the Pacific Ocean-and he had taken flying lessons in the U.S. to prepare to crash a plane into CIA headquarters. The planned suicide flight was not included in the criminal charges against Murad, apparently because it had not ripened into a provable conspiracy. But surely a crack counter-terrorism agency would have gone on the lookout for any signs of similar plots by other jihadists.
What did the FBI do? It "effectively forgot all about it," asserted Sen. Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, who was the Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s senior Republican for the past six years, in an impressive 84-page brief last month calling for "radical reform" of the intelligence community. "Convinced that the only information that really matters was information directly related to the criminal investigation at hand, the FBI thus ignored this early warning sign that terrorists had begun planning to crash aircraft into symbols of U.S. power. Thus, rather than being stored [and] assessed and re-assessed in light of a much broader universe of information about terrorist plans and intentions over time, the Murad data-point. … slipped out of the FBI’s usable institutional memory." So it was that in the summer of 2001, it never crossed anyone’s mind at the FBI to see the accumulating evidence of possible Qaeda plans to crash planes into buildings as part of a pattern dating back for years.
