The New York Post September 20, 2001 “The Fifth Column”

THE FBI is looking for hundreds of men inside the United States suspected of playing a role in Osama bin Laden’s terror network. The support network that made last week’s attacks possible is right here, burrowed inside Arab and Muslim communities in American neighborhoods.

For the first time in American history, we have irrefutable evidence that there is a dangerous and functional foreign-born “fifth column” at work on American soil.

The term “fifth column” has its origin in the ’30s Spanish Civil War, when the military decided to overthrow the Madrid government. With four columns of troops advancing on the capital, their general announced that “the fifth column is within the city” – meaning people secretly in league with the military who would perform acts of sabotage and terrorism from inside the government’s redoubt.

America is threatened as no other nation is by the strategy of planting a “fifth column” inside our society. Why? Because of our openness, our constitutional commitment to civil liberties and our social commitment to treating people as individuals and not members of a faceless group.

Thus, we’ve been having vicious quarrels for 50 years about the appropriateness of the U.S. government’s conduct in dealing with the ideological “fifth column” made up of native-born Americans who were spying for the Soviet Union.

https://nypost.com/2001/09/20/the-fifth-column/