Berkeley on the Potomac

Capitol Hill habitués here in Washington, D. C. got a chance to experience a bit of what life is like on a college campus today in a debate at the Heritage Foundation on Tuesday.

It wasn’t the debate on the stage between Bush Administration national security veteran John Yoo and ACLU mainstay Nadine Strossen that was reminiscent of give and take in academia today. Both debaters were affable and collegial, as was the moderator—the ever-amiable Ed Meese.

No, it was the protestor who got into the auditorium, tried to disrupt the discussion, and had to be physically restrained before making her exit. Indeed, what makes this incident remarkable is that she was not a faculty member.

In fact, a quartet of demonstrators held up placards in front of Heritage before the event began. “I would have advised the protestors that standing silently holding their placards would have been protected free speech as we defended it at NYU law on Friday,” Strossen said.

Strossen teaches at New York University’s law school. Meese, no stranger to protests from his days as Governor Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff during the Vietnam War to his service as the Gipper’s U. S. attorney general, took a wry view of the demonstration in front.

“When I told Ed there were protestors, he asked how many,” Yoo recalled. “When I told him, he said, “Four? That’s almost an insult.”

Not too surprisingly, Yoo and Strossen disagreed on Bush Administration policies that grew out of the war on terror. For example, Yoo defends the Bush Justice Department, where he was employed, in its effort to try terrorist suspects in military tribunals. Strossen, by and large, wants them tried in criminal courts.

Strossen argues that military tribunals have only convicted a couple of terrorists while criminal courts have convicted hundreds. Yoo argues that information from the former, along with other methods employed by the Bush Administration, and its successor, made at least one key victory in the War on Terror possible.

“The death of Osama bin Laden was President Obama’s greatest foreign policy achievement but 30 years ago, Jimmy Carter could not carry out even one operation like that,” Yoo said.  One point on which Yoo and Strossen reached a surprising level of agreement: the need for intelligence agencies to share information in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks upon the United States and their failure to do so beforehand.

            Yoo claimed that the so-called wall between the intelligence agencies grew out of Justice Department interpretations of The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. Strossen agreed that the agency was misreading the law.

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

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