Imaginary dangers

Apparently another way in which conservatives in this country differ from the rest of us is in what they worry about. Here is Congressman John Shadegg, Republican of Arizona, (who had a few days earlier brought a staffer's 7 month old daughter on the House floor with him to use as a prop for a speech) reacting to New York Mayor Bloomberg:

I saw the Mayor of New York said today, "We're tough. We can do it." Well, Mayor, how are you going to feel when it's your daughter that's kidnapped at school by a terrorist? How are you going to feel when it's some clerk -- some innocent clerk of the court -- whose daughter or son is kidnapped? Or the jailer's little brother or little sister? This is political correctness run amok. Link

Terrorists kidnapping children as part of a raid to free jailed comrades? It sounds like a movie plot. When has Al Qaeda or any other real-life Muslim terrorist group operated like that? Al Qaeda targets are always ones that have resonance with the victims of American imperialism -- U.S. battleships and embassies, the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the White House or the Capitol. Although most Muslims around the world oppose acts of terrorist violence they do understand and have some sympathy with the message sent by attacking those targets. What message would be sent by targeting children and who would have sympathy with that message? Americans who worry that terrorist will target the Statue of Liberty, football stadiums or the children of mayors or prison wardens are reacting to terrorist they have dreamed up or seen in movies, not the real-life enemies we actually face.

The more clearly we see a potential danger the more effective we can be in preventing it. Worrying about imaginary dangers is total ineffective in keeping us safe, especially if it causes the warning signs of real dangers to be missed. (Remember President Bush blowing off warnings about Al Qaeda before 9/11 or Katrina before it hit.) I am glad we now have leaders on the national level who appear to be knowledgeable realists with their eyes squarely focused on the world as it exists.

Do Conservatives fear the attractiveness of fundamentalist Islam?

Some Conservatives are worried (see here and here) about the world getting a chance to hear what anti-American terrorists have to say. Here is CNN's Wolf Blitzer giving voice to some of those concerns:

One of the arguments against this decision is that it will give these five detainees, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and these four others, a platform, if you will. They will express their Jihadist views. In the process, they will be able to recruit more followers.

Why would Conservatives fear the world hearing what these terrorist defendants have to say? It is almost as if these Conservatives find fundamentalist Islam's ideas, commitment, moral certainty and absolutism more attractive in some respects than the traditional American ideals of democracy, freedom, diversity, choice and the rule of law. Why else would they so fear that when the world hears these ideas they will be seduced into anti-American terrorism? They must not believe that demonstrating our commitment to fair trials, rule of law and justice by publicly giving these criminals their day in court will be seen by the world as more attractive and admirable than terrorist rhetoric. I am starting to suspect that some Conservatives really don't like America very much.

Exercising Political Correctness

Yesterday on Fox Friends, Brian Kilmeade and Gretchen Carlson were wondering if it was time for the military to start treating Muslim-American soldiers as potential terrorists simply because they are Muslims.

Kilmeade:

Do you think it’s time for the military to have special debriefings of Muslim Army officers — anybody enlisted? Because if I'm going to be in a foxhole, if I'm gonna be stuck in an outpost, I've gotta know the guy next to me is not gonna wanna kill me.

Carlson:

I want to ask this question another way. Could it be that the military, because our society -- let's face it, our society has become very politically correct -- could it be that the military was also exercising political correctness, even though [Major Hasan] had a poor performance report, and even though he spoke openly about being a radical Muslim, and had those supposed postings online, could it be that the military was exercising political correctness in not approaching him as seriously as they would have had he not been a Muslim? link

Did the people at Fox News call for special debriefings of all Christian soldiers of European descent to prove they were not terrorists after Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City? Well not so much. Not only did they not think that terrorist acts by white Christians should prompt special suspicion of all white Christians as potential terrorists but when the Department of Homeland Security issued a report to law enforcement warning of the danger posed by right-wing extremist groups conservatives were outraged at the perceived insult to all people with right-wing views. Republican Newt Gingrich tweeted:

The person who drafted the outrageous homeland security memo smearing veterans and conservatives should be fired.

If Newt considered it an outrageous smear and insult to all veterans and conservatives to simply warn law enforcement that right-wing extremist groups might try to recruit returning veterans what would he think of the suggestion that all Christian veterans with right-wing views be debriefed to determine how much of a threat they might be? I suspect he would not label a failure to do that as an excess of political correctness.

One of the "worst of the worst"

(Photo by Nancy A. Youssef / MCT)

Check out this wonderful piece of journalism by Nancy A. Youssef of McClatchy. An Afghanistan tribal elder, Haji Sahib Rohullah Wakil, was detained by U.S. forces in August 2002 after attending a meeting with an American commander at U.S. military base near his home in Afghanistan. He was sent to Guantanamo and imprisoned there for 6 years, including the years 2007 and 2008 when government officials were assuring us that the remaining prisoners were the "worst of the worst." After he was released his name was included in a leaked list of 74 former Guantanamo prisoners "who've returned to or are suspected of returning to terrorism after their release" even though he leads a very public and open life as a respected tribal elder, has a reputation for being anti-Taliban and regularly meeting with Afghanistan government officials advocating for the needs of his home province.

Are Americans who attend church at greater risk?

A great deal has been written about the horrible and terrible murder of Dr. George Tiller in Kansas yesterday, but one aspect I have not seen discussed is whether Dr. Tiller put himself at risk by being a regular church-goer. In the interest of full disclosure I am particularly interested in this topic since I also attend church nearly every Sunday morning. More details have been released and it now appears that the murder happened in the vestibule of the church during the church service, where the murderer could have known Dr. Tiller would be because Dr. Tiller was listed as being one of the ushers in the church bulletin.

Dr. Tiller was known to sometimes wear a bullet-proof vest and have security at the clinic where he worked. Was his regular church attendance a fatal security lapse?

Terrorism committed by white people

A few days ago James Adkisson was sentenced to life in prison for killing two people during an armed assault at the Knoxville, TN Unitarian-Universalist church last July. Just after he was sentenced he released to the Knoxville News a four-page handwritten "manifesto" which was to be his suicide note if things had gone as he planned . The note can be viewed here. Some excerpts:

Know this if nothing else: This was a hate crime. I hate the damn left-wing liberals. There is a vast left-wing conspiracy in this country & these liberals are working together to attack every decent & honorable institution in the nation, trying to turn this country into a communist state. Shame on them....

This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book. I'd like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I know those people were inaccessible to me. I couldn't get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chickenshit liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same. It's the only way we can rid America of this cancerous pestilence."

I thought I'd do something good for this Country Kill Democrats til the cops kill me....Liberals are a pest like termites. Millions of them Each little bite contributes to the downfall of this great nation. The only way we can rid ourselves of this evil is to kill them in the streets. Kill them where they gather. I'd like to encourage other like minded people to do what I've done. If life aint worth living anymore don't just kill yourself. do something for your Country before you go. Go Kill Liberals.

It is clear that his act was a terrorist act with the same motives and purposes as other acts of terrorism, such as the 911 attacks or the embassy bombings -- to try to achieve political ends by killing innocent civilians. The only possible reason for not classifying his attack as an act of terrorism is if you define terrorism in a way that excludes the acts of white Christian Americans. Keep that in mind when you hear people claim that there have been no terrorists acts in this country since 911 or that terrorism is the exclusive province of Middle-Eastern people and/or Muslims.

William Kristol's answer to terrorism - patriotism

It is no surprise that William ”The Bloody” Kristol‘s column in today’s New York Times is wrong. Everything he said has turned out to be wrong. But this column’s wrong-headedness is immediately obvious. No need to wait for events to unfold to prove it false.

In India’s long and bloody battle with Muslim terrorism the one thing the non-Muslim majority of Indians has not lacked is patriotic and emotional fervor and intensity. The recent attacks by Muslim terrorists on hotels in Mumbai may have revealed possible deficiencies in police and military preparedness, communications, coordination, planning and leadership but they revealed no lack of patriotism among the common citizens.

So what is Kristol’s analysis of this situation?

In nations like India (and the United States), governments will have to call on the patriotism of citizens to fight the terrorists.

Think about that for a second. How would increased patriotic feelings among the ordinary citizens of Mumbai have prevented the recent attacks or decreased the number of Indians killed or brought the situation to a close sooner? What could ordinary citizens do in the face of AK-47s and grenades, no matter how patriotic they felt? The idea is absurd. It is so mind-numbingly false it boggles the mind how someone paid to provide expert commentary in a national forum could write such a thing.

'Palling around' with terrorists

Check out this memoir from a progressive public health professional about how he ended up "palling around" with Weather Underground terrorists in the late 1960s.

A lesson I learned from my Indian Guru

McCain and Palin have been saying that Barak Obama sees this country differently from you and me and pals around with terrorists. At least some of their supporters have made the inference from those statements that Obama himself is a terrorist. See here and here. The threats of violence against Barack Obama from riled-up crowds at McCain/Palin rallies have unnerved a lot of people including some Republicans. Here is an example from this morning's Quad City Times.

U.S. Rep. Ray LaHood has a message for his party's presidential ticket: Tone it down.

LaHood, a Republican from Peoria, Ill., who is retiring in January after seven terms, told a Chicago radio station Friday that some McCain-Palin rallies are unbecoming to Republicans.

In particular, he pointed to shouts of "terrorist" that have come from the audience when vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has talked about Democrat Barack Obama, the U.S. senator from Illinois.

"This doesn't befit the office that she's running for. And, frankly, people don't like it," LaHood told WBBM-AM.

Read the entire article.

In response to sentiments such as these from other Republicans and perhaps from his own sense of growing unease with what he has unleashed, yesterday John McCain started contradicting his own supporters who think Obama is a terrorist. See here. In response to a woman in the audience at his rally yesterday who said she feared an Obama presidency because Obama is an Arab, McCain said that Obama is a decent American and a family man and that no one should fear an Obama presidency.

This reminds me of the Indian guru I followed for a while in the 1970s. When he was hyping an upcoming meditation course, for which attendants would pay a sizeable fee, he would describe the importance of the course in cosmic terms – world peace and the very future of the universe depended on the number of people attending. Inevitable some followers dropped everything to attend, neglecting important family and business responsibilities. When reports of these unfortunate situations reached the guru he was perplexed. "Don't these people have any common sense?" he asked.

Republicans should learn from McCain the same lesson I learned from my Indian guru. Some people say things they don't believe themselves and if you believe them they will think you are a fool.

Fear of terrorism

I was once talking to a fellow who told me with supreme confidence that slaveholders always treated their slaves well, much better than employers treat their employees. A slave was a two thousand dollar investment. It would be foolish for the slave owner to damage their own property so, of course, they never did.

When logic is sound but leads to a false conclusion it must be based on false assumptions. Surely one of the false assumptions here, a common one that leads to many false conclusions, is that people always act logically and in their own best interests. But there is another false assumption here that I have recently come to understand from talking to my brother, who is researching American slavery and the Civil War for a book he is writing. That false assumption is that the goal of preserving and protecting their financial investment was never overruled by a higher priority. Slaveholders lived in constant fear of being murdered in their beds in a slave revolt. This fear led to them savagely beat, cripple and execute their slaves, hoping to instill enough fear into the slave population to prevent resistance. A fear of being killed caused people to willingly destroy their own valuable property.

After 9/11 many Americans, reacting to a fear of being killed by terrorists, advocated and supported policies and actions as inhumane and ultimately as harmful to their own best interests as a slaveholder beating his own slave to death.

I imagine that 30 or 40 years in the future there will be people who deny that the United States ever invaded and occupied a sovereign country that posed no danger to us. "They could not have done that," they will say. "That would have put them in greater danger of being attacked by terrorist. I refuse to believe that the people of the United States did such illogical, immoral things -- acts so at odds with all the nobel principles of democracy and self-determination that they have always stood for."

Military ordered to become terrorists?

An article in this morning's New York Times reveals that when the US military received orders from the civilian leadership in the Bush Administration in 2002 that everything had changed after 9/11 and that they should now use interrogation techniques which had previously been illegal on the prisoners they had captured in Afghanistan, and later Iraq, they knowingly adopted techniques used by the Chinese Communists against US soldiers captured during the Korean War.

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of "coercive management techniques" for possible use on prisoners, including "sleep deprivation," "prolonged constraint," and "exposure."

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

Holy Manchurian Candidate, Batman! The military leaders who sent those trainers to Guantánamo Bay knew that those were not techniques to obtain "actionable intelligence." The idea that the torture was justified because it would reveal information about future acts of terrorism, allowing those acts to be prevented and thus saving lives, has been proven by this article to have been a post hoc rationalization.

We don't know even the approximate wording of the order that came down from the Bush Administration to the military that rescinded the ban on torturing prisoners but we now know that when the military implemented that order they started using techniques that they knew produced false confessions. What does that tell you about what the thrust of that order was?

If the primary directive the military was following was to obtain information about future plans would they have adopted those techniques? We are left with two choices. Either that the order was to obtain accurate information "by any means necessary" and the military was incompetent, implementing that order using methods totally unsuited to that purpose. Or the military competently followed an order which placed little or no importance on obtaining accurate information. Perhaps the order said simply: "to combat terrorism we are going to become terrorists."

Who would benefit from a terrorist attack?

Ellen Beth has a disturbing report on how some Republican leaders seem to be calling for another terrorist attack on America.

'Suspicious activity' turns out to be a 'misunderstanding'

An article in today's Dispatch/Argus reveals that we now know the identity of the men who some thought were 'Middle Eastern' looking and 'acting suspiciously' last Sunday at mass at St. Pius X Catholic Church in Rock Island. One of the men recently moved to Rock Island and the others were friends of his visiting because his father had recently died. They are all Catholics and natives of India and had the same purposes and motives for attending church that day as all the other worshipers. Read the newspaper article.

How could the actions of these men be considered 'suspicious' when the men had the same purposes and reasons for being there as everyone else? Apparently there are a lot of people around here whose fear of terrorism is so much greater than the actual threat that they see terrorists where none exist.

Obviously there are downsides to the Bush Administration's encouragement to us to be alert and afraid. Is there any upside? Has a hyperalert citizen noticed something and thereby averted a terrorist attack?

No note taking or map reading in Chicago!

If you ever find yourself in Chicago, you'd better walk right, you better not stagger, you better not fight. You also better not take notes, use binoculars, cameras, video or maps. In their "Winter Holiday Public Awareness Bulletin" issued Nov. 8, 2007 the Chicago police request the public to immediately report any suspicious activity. Among the activities they specifically request the public to report are: taking notes, using binoculars, cameras and video and maps. See the bulletin here. If you need a map to find your way in Chicago you'd better be prepared to explain yourself to the police!