[wordup] Stop frisking crippled nuns

[Adam Shand]

I was thinking about this and I'm of quite mixed minds.  One the one
hand I agree, it's stupid to avoid targeting the likely suspects, even
if it means profiling people (by race, religion or whatever).

One the other hand I'm not sure I'm comfortable giving the government
any addition power or slack to make judgment calls based on sweeping
generalizations.

I think the core of the problem is that no one trusts the government to
"do the right thing" anymore.  Whether we distrust certain people in
control, the ability of a bureaucracy to react efficiently and well or
just loath authority figures in general ... many of us, perhaps even a
majority of us, are just loath to give them the authority to do their
job.  Which of course goes against the common wisdom of "Don't buy a dog
and bark yourself".

Adam.

Via: Robert Tarrall <tarrall at xxxx.neighborhoodlink.com>

Hate to say it, but they do have a point.  The bit about the memos is
interesting too...

From: http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old&section=current&issue=2002-06-08&id=1915&searchText=Mark%20Steyn

Stop frisking crippled nuns
By
Mark Steyn says the FBI should wise up and tackle the most obvious
suspects — young Arab men New Hampshire

When political correctness got going in the Eighties, the laconic wing
of the conservative movement was inclined to be relaxed about it. To be
sure, the tendency of previously pithy identity labels to become ever
more polysyllabically ornate (‘person of colour’, ‘Native American’) was
time-consuming, but otherwise PC was surely harmless. Some distinguished
persons of non-colour, among them Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, even argued
that conservatives should support political correctness as merely the
contemporary version of old-fashioned courtliness and good manners.

Alas, after 11 September, this position seems no longer tenable.
Instead, we have to ask a more basic question: does political
correctness kill? 

Consider the extraordinary memo sent three weeks ago by FBI agent Coleen
Rowley to the agency’s director Robert Mueller, and now, despite his
best efforts, all over Time magazine. Ms Rowley works out of the
Minneapolis field office, whose agents, last 16 August, took action to
jail a French citizen of Middle Eastern origin. Zacarias Moussaoui had
shown up at a Minnesota flight school and shelled out 8,000 bucks in
cash in order to learn how to fly 747s, except for the landing and
take-off bit, which he said he’d rather skip. On investigation, he
proved to have overstayed his visa and so was held on an immigration
violation. Otherwise, he would have been the 20th hijacker, and, so far
as one can tell, on board United Flight 93, the fourth plane, the one
which crashed in a Pennsylvania field en route, as we now know, to the
White House. In Mr Moussaoui’s more skilled hands — Flight 93 wound up
with the runt of Osama’s litter — it might well have reached its target.

Ms Rowley and her colleagues established that Moussaoui was on a French
intelligence watch list, had ties to radical Islamist groups, was known
to have recruited young Muslims to fight in Chechnya, and had been in
Afghanistan and Pakistan immediately before arriving in the US. They
wanted to search his computer, but to do that they needed the OK from
HQ. Washington was not only unco-operative, but set about, in the words
of Ms Rowley’s memo, ‘thwarting the Minneapolis FBI agents’ efforts’,
responding to field-office requests with ever lamer brush-offs. How
could she be sure it was the same guy? There could be any number of
Frenchmen called ‘Zacarias Moussaoui’. She checked the Paris phone book,
which listed only one. After 11 September, when the Minneapolis agents
belatedly got access to Moussaoui’s computer, they found among other
things the phone number of Mohammed Atta’s room-mate.

What was the problem at HQ? According to the New York Times’s William
Safire, ‘Intimidated by the brouhaha about supposed ethnic profiling of
Wen Ho Lee, lawyers at John Ashcroft’s Justice Department wanted no part
of going after this Arab.’ Wen Ho Lee was a Taiwan-born scientist at Los
Alamos accused of leaking nuclear secrets to the Chinese and arrested in
1999. His lawyers mobilised the Asian-American lobby, his daughter
embarked on a coast-to-coast speaking tour, and pretty soon the case had
effectively collapsed, leaving the Feds with headlines like
‘Investigator Denies Lee Was Victim of Racial Bias’ (the San Francisco
Chronicle).

This was during an election campaign in which Al Gore was promising that
his first act as president would be to sign an executive order
forbidding police from pulling over African-Americans for ‘driving while
black’. Dr Lee had been arrested, wrote the columnist Lars-Erik Nelson,
for ‘working in a nuclear weapons laboratory while Chinese’. In August
2001, invited to connect the dots on the Moussaoui file, Washington
bureaucrats foresaw only scolding editorials about ‘flying while Arab’.

Example number two: another memo from last summer, this time the
so-called ‘Phoenix memo’ sent by Kenneth Williams. This is Kenneth
Williams the crack FBI Arizona agent, not Kenneth Williams of Carry On
Up the Khyber fame, though in the end it might just as well have been.
Agent Williams filed a report on an alarming trend he’d spotted and,
just to make sure you didn’t have to plough through a lot of stuff to
get to the meat, the Executive Summary at the top of the memo read,
‘Usama bin Laden and Al-Muhjiroun supporters attending civil aviation
universities/colleges in Arizona’.

Three weeks ago, FBI director Mueller was asked why the Bureau had
declined to act on the memo. He said, ‘There are more than 2,000
aviation academies in the United States. The latest figure I think I
heard is something like 20,000 students attending them. And it was
perceived that this would be a monumental undertaking without any
specificity as to particular persons.’

A ‘monumental undertaking’? OK, there are 20,000 students. Eliminate all
the women, discount Irv Goldbloom of Queens and Gord MacDonald of
Winnipeg and Stiffy Farquahar-ffarquahar of Little
Blandford-on-the-Smack and just concentrate on fellows with names like
...oh, I dunno, Mohammed, and Waleed, and Ahmed. How many would that be?
150? 200? Say it’s 500. Is Mueller really saying that the FBI with all
its resources cannot divert ten people to go through 2,000 names apiece
and pull out the ones worth running through the computer?

Well, yes, officially, he is. But what he really means is not that the
Bureau lacked ‘any specificity as to particular persons’, but that the
specificity itself was the problem. In August 2001, no FBI honcho was
prepared to fire off a memo saying ‘Check out the Arabs’.

On 15 September Robert Mueller said, ‘The fact that there were a number
of individuals that happened to have received training at flight schools
here is news, quite obviously. If we had understood that to be the case,
we would have — perhaps one could have averted this.’ Indeed. There
weren’t a lot of dots to connect. Last summer, within a few weeks of
each other, the Phoenix flight-school memo and Moussaoui warrant request
landed on the desk of Dave Frasca, head of the FBI’s
radical-fundamentalist unit. He buried the first, and refused the
second.

Example three: On 1 August, James Woods, the motion-picture actor, was
flying from Boston to Los Angeles. With him in the first-class cabin
were half-a-dozen guys, four of whom were young Middle Eastern men.
Woods, like all really good actors, is a keen observer of people, and
what he observed as they flew west persuaded him that they were
hijackers. The FBI has asked him not to reveal all the details, but he
says he asked the flight attendant if he could speak to the pilot. After
landing at LAX, the crew reported Woods’s observations to the Federal
Aviation Administration. The FAA did ...nothing. Two of the four were on
board the 11 September planes. There are conflicting rumours about the
other two. Woods turned out to be sitting in on a rehearsal for the big
day.

After 9/11, the standard line was that Osama bin Laden had pulled off an
ingenious plan. But he didn’t have to be ingenious, just lucky. And he
was luckiest of all in that the obviousness of what was happening
paradoxically made investigating it all the more problematic. His men
aren’t that smart — not in the sense of IRA smart, or Carlos the Jackal
smart. The details Woods is permitted to discuss are in themselves very
revealing: the four men boarded with no hand luggage. Not a thing.
That’s what he noticed first. Everyone going on a long flight across a
continent takes something: a briefcase, a laptop, a shopping bag with a
couple of airport novels, a Wall Street Journal or a Boston Globe.

But these boys had zip. They didn’t use their personal headsets, they
declined all food and drink, they did nothing but stare ahead to the
cockpit and engage in low murmurs in Arabic. They behaved like
conspirators. And Woods was struck by the way they treated the
stewardess: ‘They literally ignored her like she didn’t exist, which is
sort of a kind of Taleban, you know, idea of womanhood, as you know, not
even a human being.’

So they weren’t masters of disguise, adept at blending into any
situation. They weren’t like the Nazi spies in war movies, urbane and
charming in their unaccented English. It apparently never occurred to
them to act natural, read Newsweek, watch the movie, eat a salad, listen
to Lite Rock Favourites of the Seventies, treat the infidel-whore
stewardess the way a Westerner would. Everything they did stuck out. But
it didn’t matter. Because the more they stuck out, the more everyone who
mattered was trained not to notice them. The sort of fellows willing to
fly aeroplanes into buildings turn out, not surprisingly, to be fairly
stupid. But they benefited from an even more profound institutional
stupidity. In August 2001, no one at the FBI or FAA or anywhere else
wanted to be seen to be noticing funny behaviour by Arabs. In
mid-September, I wrote that what happened was a total systemic failure.
But, as the memos leak out, one reason for that failure looms ever
larger. Thousands of Americans died because of ethnic squeamishness by
federal agencies.

But that was before 11 September. Now we know better ...don’t we? The
federal government surely wouldn’t want to add to that grim body-count
...would they?

Well, here’s an easy experiment that any Spectator reader can perform
while waiting to board at Newark or LaGuardia. Fifteen of the 19
hijackers were young Saudi males, Osama himself is (was) a youngish
Saudi male, and some 80 per cent of all those folks captured in
Afghanistan and carted off to Guantanamo turn out to be young Saudi
males (though, out of the usual deference to our Saudi friends, the
administration is keeping studiously quiet on the last point). So you’re
at Newark standing in line behind a young Saudi male and an 87-year-old
arthritic nun from Des Moines. Who’ll be asked to remove his or her
shoes? Six out of ten times, it’ll be the nun. Three out of ten times,
you. One out of ten, Abdumb al-Dumber. Even if this is just for show,
what it’s showing is profound official faintheartedness.

Norm Mineta, the transportation secretary, is insistent that fairness
demands the burden of inconvenience be spread among all ethnic and
age-groups. ‘Any specificity as to particular persons’ is strictly
forbidden. Meanwhile, his colleagues have spent the last three weeks
assuring us that another catastrophe is now inevitable. ‘There will be
another terrorist attack,’ Robert Mueller told the National Association
of District Attorneys the other day: ‘We will not be able to stop it.’

We must, I suppose, take him and Cheney and Rummy and all the rest at
their word. They wouldn’t scare us if they hadn’t done all they believe
they can do. So, naturally, the mind turns to all the things they
haven’t done: as I write, young Saudi males are still arriving at US
airports on routinely issued student visas. If it lessened the
‘inevitability’ of that second attack just ever so slightly, wouldn’t it
be worth declaring a temporary moratorium on Saudi visitors, or at least
making their sojourns here extremely rare and highly discretionary? Oh,
no. Can’t be done.

Ask why the Saudis are allowed to kill thousands of Americans and still
get the kid-gloves treatment, and you’re told the magic word: oil.
Here’s my answer: blow it out your Medicine Hat. The largest source of
imported energy for the United States is the Province of Alberta.
Indeed, whenever I’m asked how America can lessen its dependence on
foreign oil, I say it’s simple: annex Alberta. The Albertans would be up
for it, and, to be honest, they’re the only assimilable Canadian
province, at least from a Republican standpoint. In 1972, the world’s
total proven oil reserves added up to 550 billion barrels; today, a
single deposit of Alberta’s tar shales contains more than that. Yet no
Albertan government minister or trade representative gets the access in
Washington that the Saudis do. No premier of Alberta gets invited to
Bush’s Crawford ranch. No Albertan bigshot, if you’ll forgive the
oxymoron, gets Colin Powell kissing up to him like ‘Crown’ ‘Prince’
Abdullah and ‘Prince’ Bandar do. In Washington, an Albertan can’t get
...well, I was going to say an Albertan can’t get arrested, but funnily
enough that’s the one thing he can get. While Bush was governor of
Texas, he even managed to execute an Albertan, which seems to be more
than the administration is likely to do to any Saudis.

So it’s not oil, but rather that even targeting so obvious an enemy as
the Saudis is simply not politically possible. Cries of ‘Islamophobia’
and ‘racism’ would rend the air. The Saudis discriminate against
Americans all the time: American Jews are not allowed to enter the
‘Kingdom’, nor are American Episcopalians who happen to have an Israeli
stamp in their passports. But America cannot be seen to take any similar
measures, though it has far more compelling reasons to.

James Woods puts it very well: ‘Nineteen of 19 killers on 11 September
were Arab Muslims — not a Swede among them.’ But au contraire, in a
world where the EU officially chides the BBC for describing Osama as an
‘Islamic fundamentalist’, we must pretend that al-Qa’eda contains
potentially vast numbers of Swedish agents, many female and elderly.
Even after 11 September, we can’t revoke the central fiction of
multiculturalism — that all cultures are equally nice and so we must be
equally nice to them, even if they slaughter large numbers of us and
announce repeatedly their intention to slaughter more. National Review’s
John Derbyshire calls this ‘the reductio ad absurdum of racial
sensitivity: better dead than rude’.

Last October, urging Congress to get tough on the obvious suspects, the
leggy blonde commentatrix Ann Coulter declared, ‘Americans aren’t going
to die for political correctness.’

They already have.