Rachel Maddow: Right-Wing Terrorism Must Be Stopped

By Rachel Maddow, MSNBC. Posted June 8, 2009.

TURLEY:  There are, Rachel.  I mean, you have the FACE Act, which protects access to abortion clinics.  There have been prosecutions under that.  It was upheld by courts.  And you also have standard prosecutions for intimidation.  In fact, the FACE Act has intimidation as one of the elements.

So, there are ways to prosecute.  The FBI‘s done a very, very good job, you know, for many years now at focusing on these domestic organizations.  But as you‘ve already noticed or referenced, we have this difficult line to walk between free speech and preventive law enforcement.  And it all—that line is often found on violent speech.

And the Supreme Court said in the Brandenburg case that violent speech is protected.  In fact, I‘ve represented people accused of violent speech, including terroristic speech.  And that is a very difficult line, because it is, in fact, protected, to say all abortion doctors should be killed.  And what the Supreme Court said was that we have to look where that violent speech raises an imminent threat of violence, and then, you can prosecute that person.

But it‘s obviously a very difficult line to walk.

MADDOW:  And it‘s an intelligence matter, oddly, as well.  We think of intelligence in terms of where our—in terms of where the dividing lines are within our own government about the tools that are available to people who work for the U.S. government.  That‘s an important distinction between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, for example.

We collect intelligence on foreign bodies.  In terms of what we do domestically to disrupt homegrown terrorist plots, to disrupt criminal enterprises, to break up organized crime in these efforts, there‘s—I mean, there‘s civil liberties concerns, there‘s also strategic concerns about how these things can be done legally on American soil.

TURLEY:  Yes, but I would also caution though is that no matter what we do—we‘re probably never going to be able to stop the lone actor, the McVeigh, or the individual today, without becoming a totalitarian regime.  I mean, lone actors are dangerous because they don‘t come up on the radar screen.

What we‘ve learned—ever since cases like Brandenburg—is speech isn‘t the problem.  In fact, you want them to speak.  You want the speech to be protected so they come up on the radar screen and you can watch them.  And the FBI has a long history and a very effective history and a commendable history of following these dangerous groups.

But we can‘t do what we‘ve done in the past and say, “Because there was an attack, our system must not be working.”  I think we have to accept that, unfortunately, we‘re not going to be able to protect against all attacks.  And this guy represents the greatest vulnerability in the law and in terms of law enforcement.

The guy who‘s out there, you know, some dark corner, filled with hate, against the world, and he takes it upon himself to personify it into one person—we may not be able to stop that.  And efforts to try to stop that, I think, are going to likely be fruitless.

But the reason I appreciate what you‘re saying is that you‘re very mindful that we walk this careful line ...

MADDOW:  Yes.

TURLEY:  ... in protecting speech and looking for that speech that presents imminent threats.

MADDOW:  And looking for the—yes, exactly, protecting our constitutional values, protecting the reason that it matters that we have an America, as opposed to any other country, but also taking these threats to security seriously.  It‘s what we‘ve been talking about in all of these different contexts for eight years now.

Constitutional law professor, Jonathan Turley, thank you so much for your time tonight. It‘s really helpful.

TURLEY:  Thank you, Rachel.

MADDOW:  In the context of an extremist anti-abortion movement that has seen the murder of seven abortion providers and clinic workers in a five-year period during the course of the ‘90s, that saw another doctor shot by a sniper in his own home in the late ‘90s, a movement that publicly, openly celebrates the people who have killed these doctors as heroes—what should we make of it when figures in the media denounce other doctors already targeted by these groups as Nazis, as killers, as people with blood on their hands?

See more stories tagged with: religious right, progressive, fox news, msnbc, right-wing, liberal, rachel maddow, right-wing terrorism

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from Reproductive Justice and Gender! Sign up now »