veiled4allah: the questions one isn't supposed to ask

Jeanne d'Arc has an interesting and provocative post up at her blog called Fairy Tales:

Given the government's record in mistaking harmless cranks, and even some very good people for terrorists, I think it's safe to assume that most, if not all, the "suspicious people" the government harrasses over the next month will be perfectly innocent. I'd like to just express sympathy for those people and lament this administration's incompetence. Except that I'm still thinking about one of the best articles I read last week: Farhad Manjoo's piece in Salon on "Voter terrorism" -- how the Republican Party has spent the past twenty years refining the traditional American craft of keeping minority voters away from the polls. (To put the issue in historical context, read People for the American Way's recent report on voter intimidation, which traces the entire history back to the abandonment of Reconstruction.) Let's see. Immediately before an election, you start a campaign of keeping a close eye on "suspicious people," who, by sheer coincidence, happen to have once supported you but who have turned against you so precipitously that their lack of support could be a factor in some swing states. Read Manjoo's piece on the electoral benefits for Republicans of making people already wary of encounters with the government just a tad more nervous, and see if the attempt to thwart an imagined terrorist plot doesn't fit neatly into the history of vote suppression.

Stupid and evil.

Yes, the government is planning to increase surveillance, interviews and arrests on "suspicious people" just ahead of the election. You've got three guesses as to the most likely religion of these "suspicious people" and the first two guesses don't count. Jeanne goes one further in suggesting that it's a voter intimidation strategy.

But she doesn't stop there:

I have no career to protect (there are some benefits to an unproductive life) and yet even I experience a little twinge at saying that maybe, just maybe, if you have to go to all this effort to invent terrorist threats, the real thing doesn't exist at all. That's not an assertion, just an uncomfortable twinge. But I must say it bears a remarkable resemblance to the twinge I had more than a year ago, looking at all the trumped up evidence of WMDs in Iraq, and thinking, hmmm, if the weapons exist, why the need to make up so much? Some people were certain before the war that there were no WMDs. I think more people now claim to have been certain than really were. But I'll try to be honest and not claim any prescience I didn't really have. I had nagging doubts, but even though I thought the war was a horrible idea, my doubts never overcame my conviction that even the Bushies would not lie so boldly.

Luke Mitchell had an interesting essay in Harper's a few months ago on what it costs us when we make the likelihood and consequences of a terrorist attack something we are not even allowed to question. Is it really necessary to reorganize our entire way of life because of a threat that is remote at best, and perhaps far less likely or devistating than it is politically correct to posit?

I've rarely seen that question asked so directly, which is very odd, considering how fundamental it is.

I've thought for a long time that the same people who brought us the cooked-up "intelligence" on Iraq's WMDs are the ones who are bringing us all the intelligence on alleged terrorist threats. As Jeanne points out, however, there are some things one just isn't supposed to say.

Let's look at it from a different angle. Now that the U.S. went this far (in Iraq) on false information, we've done a lot to destroy our credibility when we make other claims. Like the boy who cried wolf, people may not listen the one time it's real. Does the Bush Administration realize this? Do they even care?