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her what I just told you.
Religion has been a very positive thing in my life. Withoutit, I would never have been motivated to expose bad guys and celebrate heroism. Most media people are self-interested and cautious. But I see my job as much more than a big paycheck and a good table at the bistro du jour. I am on a mission.

FIVE

FROM 9/11 TO BENGHAZI
    What Have We Learned About the War on Terror? Anything?
    Our U.N. ambassador, Obama buddy Susan Rice, recently crowed that the United States has “decimated” al Qaeda worldwide. (Misusing the original meaning of the word—look it up!—she evidently meant something like “destroyed”.)
    Really, Madam Rice?
    It seems that many in government still are unable to read the handwriting on the wall. Like a virus, terrorist beliefs, goals, and actions have spread from the Middle East into other parts of the world. Attacks here at home—so far foiled—are no longer infrequent .
    Have we learned anything at all?
The secular-progressive movement opposes coerced interrogation—not torture, but harsh treatment—of captured terror suspects. They object to detention of them at U.S. military prisons like Guantánamo Bay. In addition, theACLU opposes military tribunals (rather than civilian trials) to determine the guilt or innocence of suspected terrorists, floating wiretaps (already in use in U.S. criminal investigations), telephone surveillance of overseas calls by U.S. spy agencies, airport profiling, the Patriot Act, the war in Iraq, and random bag searches on subway or mass-transit systems.
In short, the ACLU opposes making life more difficult for terrorists but proposes absolutely nothing to make Americans safer. Osama has got to love it.
    And for too many years, he did .
    But the debate about the usefulness of harsh interrogation techniques rages on. Have you seen Zero Dark Thirty ? Brilliant drama, but it is not going to change the minds of those on either side of the argument .

    A very peculiar response to the terrorism on 9/11 crossed into the field of religious controversy .
    If you haven’t heard about a certain required reading list at the University of North Carolina that erred in the interest of “diversity,” you’re going to be shocked, puzzled, or both .
I was distressed to hear that in the fall of 2002, the administration at UNC was going to require all incoming freshmen to read a book entitled Approaching the Koran: The Early Revelations . The book is a sanitized version of Koranicphilosophy, concentrating on lyrical stories and poetic lore. It’s a very interesting book, but there’s no way it should be mandatory reading in any public school.
Just imagine the outcry if any school demanded that students read Bible Highlights or Nice Stuff from the Torah . I mean, the ACLU would be setting itself on fire in protest—figuratively speaking, of course. But the ACLU was strangely mute when UNC issued its reading list.
So what was really going on here? Well, the backlash from 9/11 was hurting many law-abiding Islamic Americans, and the philosophy of “diversity” was taking some hits. So the University of North Carolina decided to set a proactive example and require students to read a book that is favorable to Islam. The intent was good, but it was a direct violation of the separation concept because it required students to learn about the positive aspects of a specific religion while ignoring the negative aspects. That’s religious advocacy, not intellectual discipline. And that’s not allowed in a publicly funded university in the USA.
The force behind the Islamic reading selection was UNC professor Dr. Robert Kirkpatrick. On July 10, 2002, he entered the No Spin Zone on The O’Reilly Factor . I’ve condensed some of our debate, but the main points are these:
            O ’ REILLY : The problem here is that this is indoctrination of religion.
            KIRKPATRICK : No, it has nothing to do with that. It’s a text that studies the poetic