Letters to the Editor
cabdriver
Published Letters: 405 Editor's Choice: 8
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profiling
[Read the article: The FBI's plan to "profile" Muslims]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]On this issue, I'm not convinced that there's inherently a problem.
I can't stand the use of profiling in drug cases, because I'm opposed to the foundational principle of the Zero Tolerance criminalization-demonization laws. Once the premise that turns such a hugely popular unregulated commodity/contraband market into a mass criminal conspiracy gets accepted, anything goes, potentially. So many "suspect populations" are involved that the police get to pick and choose. A really unbiased drug offender profile would bear down on medical students, for instance- they're one of the sub-groups with the highest rate of illegal drugs use. But somehow the paddy wagons always seem to be full up with "other categories", before they ever make a swing by the medical schools...
Terrorism is different. That's a real crime, not merely a cultural offense invented by American prohibitionists in the 20th century and foisted on the world through the UN in 1961 by the "antidrug" fanatics of the USA.
And for real, serious crimes, profiling often works quite efficiently- since bottom line, not all that many people do real serious crimes.
In those cases, "profiling" is essential to detective work. It's a use of set theory, to help narrow a list of suspects. And to do that, I'm not convinced that any useful category should be out of bounds.
Ergo: in the case of terrorism and terror conspiracy offenses, there's abundant evidence pointing to the existence of terrorist groups who self-identify as exclusively Muslim, who include the USA on their seemingly endless enemies list of targets. For example, videos of the members boasting of their terrorist acts and supplying live footage proving that they aren't content with hollow threats. That's enough to convince me that Muslim terrorist conspiracies exist.
So I don't see how it's bigoted to include the category "Muslim" in a set of profile characteristics- as one out of many markers that might lead to more investigative attention in that regard.
To draw a hypothetical (but plausible) analogy from historical events that thankfully appear to no longer have any pressing relevance to the present day- if the Irish Republican Army were knocking off armored cars in the US to get money to fund the IRA Provos across the pond, would it be bigoted for the police to focus most of their investigative inquiries on Irish people and communities- and Catholic Irish, at that (because the IRA were known to have an animus against Irish Prots that puts them rather low on the roster of the set of all prospects for membership in that organization)? Would it make more sense to roust the Latinos, or the Italians?
Again, hypothetically (but plausibly)- if a serial killer's victims indicate someone with an advanced familiarity with anatomy and a high degree of skill in separating body tissues with a blade- is it bigoted to include "people with backgrounds in the medical or veterinary surgical field" as a category to be mindful to investigate?
It isn't the simple inclusion of a particular category in an investigative profile that's an injustice: it's what gets done with it. And that's why the general run of my comments on Salon are so adamant about not throwing out the Constitution in the morning trash, just because one time a handful of people were able to pull off a particularly spectacular violent terrorist act- apparently having been provided a decisive advantage by a shockingly high level of uncoordination, crossed wires, missed clues, elementary-level technophobia and similar incompetence in the Federal law enforcement & counterintelligence community that had not one whit to do with a pre-existing excess of Constitutional civil liberties protections, all the post-9/11 hype notwithstanding.
As long as historic individual protections like habeus corpus and search and surveillance only for probable cause are in place, profiling is just profiling. And if they aren't, simply having the category of "Muslim" stricken from the permissible list of police profiling characteristics is an illusory victory.
Parenthetically, as someone who has a record of intermittent and sporadic activism on a few controversial political questions- one which nonetheless exceeds probably 99.9% of the total citizenry of the United States of Apathy- I've assumed that there's an inherently high probability of increased law enforcement interest in me, due to my activities. But, to recall something Al Giordano once quoted Abbie Hoffman as saying, "In a way, it's good that they spy on us- that way, they know what we're NOT doing." I've always taken the possibility of intensified scrutiny of my actions with that baseline attitude- concomitant with a heightened sensitivity to the possibility of encountering provocateurs trying to lay traps. Because checking for a predisposition to serious criminal wrongdoing, and laying snares for the tempted, is part of the game. I don't like it- and I think I may have had people try it on me, more than once- but there it is. Part of the game, and a part that isn't going to go away. Innocence is always the best defense against entrapment- as long as the basic Constitutional protections of the rule of law in this country still apply, at any rate.
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the "center"?
[Read the article: Learning to live with the "new" Obama]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I get so tired of the abuse of the term "center."
It's even worse than the common abuse of the historic political meanings of the terms "left" and "right."
I'm not fond of the coinage "centrist", either.
Just once, it would be instructive to gather together every political journalist employing those terms so facilely, and have each of them supply their personal individual definitions of the terms, along with fielding a few cogent questions intended to obtain further clarification.