Posted on 05/31/2002 12:01:15 PM PDT by knighthawk
Here's a question: Does political correctness kill?
Consider the extraordinary memo written three weeks ago by Coleen Rowley, an FBI agent in Minneapolis. Last August 16th, having arrested Zacarias Moussaoui on an immigration violation and discovered his links to radical Islamist groups, the Minneapolis office wanted to search his computer. But to do that they needed the OK from HQ. Washington was not only uncooperative, 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. After September 11th, when the Minneapolis agents belatedly got access to the laptop, they found among other things the phone number of Mohammed Atta's roommate. Moussaoui was the so-called "20th hijacker."
What was the problem at HQ? According to The New York Times' 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 in 1999 of leaking nuclear secrets to the Chinese. His lawyers mobilized the Asian-American lobby, and pretty soon the case had effectively collapsed leaving the Feds with headlines like Investigator Denies Lee Was Victim of Racial Bias and accusations that Lee had been arrested 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 "Phoenix memo." Agent Kenneth 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 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 Jock MacNab of Aberdeen and Rene Purlaine of Lac St Jean 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 10 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 potentially career-detonating memo saying "Check out the Arabs."
Example Three: On August 1st, 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 they were hijackers. The FBI has requested that he not 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 the incident to the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA did ... nothing. Two of the four were on board the September 11th planes. 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 agents aren't that smart -- not IRA smart, or Carlos the Jackal smart. According to Woods, the four men boarded with no hand luggage. Not a thing. Not a briefcase, not a Boston Globe. They didn't use their personal headsets, they declined all hospitality, they did nothing but stare ahead to the cockpit and engage in low murmurs in Arabic.
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 never occurred to them to act natural, eat a salad, listen to Lite Rock Favorites of the Seventies, treat the infidel-whore stewardess like a human being. Everything they did stuck out. But it didn't matter. Because the more they stuck out, the more everyone who mattered was trained to look the other way. In August, 2001, no one at the FBI or FAA or anywhere else wanted to be seen to be noticing funny behaviour by Arabs. Thousands of Americans died, at least in part, because of ethnic squeamishness by federal agencies.
But that was before September 11th. Now we all know better ... don't we?
"There will be another terrorist attack," FBI Director Mueller told the National Association of District Attorneys the other day. "We will not be able to stop it." Presumably, the Administration wouldn't scare the American people if they hadn't done all they believe they can do. So, naturally, the mind turns to all the things they haven't done. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were young Saudi males, Osama himself is (was) a youngish Saudi male, and some 80% of all those folks captured in Afghanistan and carted off to Guantanamo turn out to be young Saudi males. Yet, as I write, young Saudi males are still arriving at U.S. airports on routinely issued student visas. If it lessened the "inevitability" just ever so slightly of that second attack, wouldn't it be worth declaring a temporary moratorium on Saudi visitors, or at least making their sojourns in the U.S. extremely rare and highly discretionary? Oh, no. Can't be done.
Ask why the Saudis are allowed to kill thousands and still get the kid-glove treatment, and you're told the magic word: oil. But the largest source of imported energy for the United States is the Province of Alberta. No Albertan representative gets the access in Washington the Saudis do. No bigshot Albertans get to kick loose at Bush's Crawford ranch. Ralph Klein doesn't get 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 they 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 with 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 even after September 11th the West can't revoke the fluffy myth 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.
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.
Did Bill Clinton get blow jobs in the Oval Office? "Political correctness" (along with our immigration policy, itself a direct product of "political correctness") is probably the leading factor leading to the massacres of 9/11. It'll lead to more massacres, too, as sure's you're born, because nine months after 9/11, we still have lots of Muslim militant illegals "in country," and those animals have plenty of enabling "politically correct" American traitors to help them.
I'm not sure I'm against rounding up all the middle eastern men, at least the ones that are not US citizens. Send them home or put them in internment camps?
Too bad they were tipped off too early to have gotten their awakening from this piece. Imagine their chagrin. ahaha
You might as well wish for the moon fairies to come down and kiss you on the cheek.
The PC crowd doesn’t read conservative papers like the NY Post or Washington Times, nor do they watch Fox.
The only time the loony left pays any attention to the conservative press is when one of the conservative press agencies publishes something un-PC. Then the PC press publishes a critisism of the un-PC article. This is when the PC crowd takes notice and then they start lobbing their “You’re so mean” and “You bunch of Nazis” comments at the offending party.
There are none so blind as those who are PC.
Well, some of the cr*p I've heard from the left over the years just kills me!
And they STILL won't. PC Uber Alles, even if it kills us.
Amazing; What the hell is the problem here.If the above is true, and I beleive it is, why is it they take a 3 inch plastic crochet hook, and a ball of wool away from my 81 year old sister who can hardly walk? A white Albertan old lady. In the meantime, middleast men are still coming into the country on phony visa's.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.