aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, April 24, 2005

Priorities

The photos of penguins put through airport screening at Denver International Airport are too good to resist, but I did the first time I saw them via Cory at Boing Boing. When I saw them the second time via Lindsay at Majikthise I decided I could use the occasion to again point to Dave Neiwert’s excellent post from March:

So far, most of the evidence that the Bush administration is mishandling the domestic side of the “war on terror” has been a matter of omission, that is, what isn’t being done: We haven’t caught the anthrax killer. The William Krar case was swept under the national carpet. Even the recent concerns raised by the Lefkow killings raised nary an eyebrow.

There have been clearer indications that this administration is playing politics with the “war on terror,” particularly in the skewing of priorities at the FBI, where investigators who specialize in right-wing extremists have been shunted to the back, and the FBI instead has announced “eco-terrorists” as the top domestic-terror threat.

Emphasis mine. The AP got to the story three weeks later:

The Homeland Security Department is focusing on possible terror threats from radical environmental and animal rights activists without also examining risks that might be posed by right-wing extremists, House Democrats said Tuesday.

A recent internal Homeland Security document lists the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front with a few Islamic groups that could potentially support al-Qaida as domestic terror threats.

The document does not address threats posed by white supremacists, violent militiamen, anti-abortion bombers and other extremists that Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, D-Miss., called “right-wing hate groups.”

As if, on cue:

Thompson said he reminded Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff of threats by right-wing groups in a letter sent to the department Tuesday—the 10th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. That attack, which killed 168 people, marks the worst act of domestic terrorism on U.S. soil.

ALF and ELF are accused by the FBI of committing hundreds of acts of arson or other attacks on property in the United States, causing millions of dollars in damages. None of their attacks, however, have caused human deaths.

John at AMERICAblog and Crooks and Liars posted about it. Salon reported it. But I’ve yet to see it on TV. Maybe I just missed it. Or maybe we’ve got to make still more noise about it. I do believe the terrorist threat is a real one, and this another example that our response is not just bureaucratically vapid but also influenced by politics and off the mark.

From uTopianTurtleTop on Wednesday, via Digby on Friday:

1,347: Number of days from the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, to VJ Day (Victory in Japan) on August 15, 1945.

1,317: Number of days from the airplane-bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, to today.

If Osama makes it to May 21, he will have survived the self-declared world’s only superpower in a presidentially-declared war longer than did Tojo, Hitler, and Mussolini working together.

Last night lying in bed on the way to sleep I had a flash of the fear I had in New York in those first nights after 9/11, when my apartment still smelled of the smoke from the towers. I was in Brooklyn when the planes hit, but I was downtown years before when the bomb went off in the garage; a fireman friend told me then that they came a whole lot closer to tumbling the towers then the world would ever know. He was back on 9/11 and became a hero that day.

Joe Gandleman at Dean’s World today urges all of us to read Annie Jacobsen’s account of Homeland Security investigating the strange case of Flight 327:

Here’s what I find fascinating: while one arm of the government (the Federal Air Marshal Service) has vehemently maintained all along that “nothing happened on flight 327,” the other, more muscular arm (the Department of Homeland Security) has been conducting a rather large investigation about it. Based on my 4 ½ hour meeting with the agents, I can tell you that not only have they been investigating what did happen during the flight, but they’ve also been investigating who botched the subsequent investigation as well as how it got botched. [...]

Since 9/11 the Justice Department has been widely criticized for one particular tactic it uses in fighting the War on Terror: it detains suspicious persons for long periods of time and puts them under heavy questioning before they are ever even charged with a crime. Flight 327 seems to have had an extreme case of just the opposite. There were 13 men on a domestic flight acting in such a way that many passengers felt their lives might be in danger. And yet not one of the individuals responsible for that threatening behavior was detained. Only two were put under light questioning, let alone medium or heavy questioning. Two individuals from a terrorist-sponsoring nation were allowed to speak on behalf of the other 11 men.

But we put penguins through metal detectors at airports.