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Jens 'n' Frens
Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.
"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures."
-- Daniel Webster
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Thursday, April 15, 2004 :::
Regarding 9/11-commissioner John Lehman:Lehman's focus was the transition between the Clinton and Bush administrations. He told Rice that he was "struck by the continuity of the policies rather than the differences," and then he proceeded to ask Rice a series of blunt questions as to what she was told during the transition.
Among Lehman's questions was this: "Were you aware that it was the policy...to fine airlines if they have more than two young Arab males in secondary questioning because that's discriminatory?"
[...]
"We had testimony a couple of months ago from the past president of United, and current president of American Airlines that kind of shocked us all," Lehman told me. "They said under oath that indeed the Department of Transportation continued to fine any airline that was caught having more than two people of the same ethnic persuasion in a secondary line for line for questioning, including and especially, two Arabs."
Wait a minute. So if airline security had three suspicious Arab guys they had had to let one go because they'd reached a quota?
That was it, Lehman said, "because of this political correctness that became so entrenched in the 1990s, and continues in current administration. No one approves of racial profiling, that is not the issue. The fact is that Norwegian women are not, and 85-year-old women with aluminum walkers are not, the source of the terrorist threat. The fact is that our enemy is the violent Islamic extremism and the overwhelming number of people that one need to worry about are young Arab males, and to ask them a couple of extra questions seems to me to be common sense, yet if an airline does that in numbers that are more than proportionate to their number in particular line, then they get fined and that is why you see so many blue haired old ladies and people that are clearly not of Middle Eastern extraction being hauled out in such numbers because otherwise they get fined."
[...]
I'm starting to understand why John McCain was insistent that Secretary Lehman be put on the commission. Like McCain, Lehman isn't beholden to the partisan Democrats, or to the administration. This former Navy reserve officer who flew combat missions over Vietnam and was named Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Navy when he was just 38 years old, seems only to want the truth exposed, without regard for the blame game that has come to characterize the public proceedings of the 9/11 Commission. I only wish we had nine more like him, in which case I'd be much more confident that we're in the process of getting to the bottom of what went wrong and ensuring it doesn't happen again, instead of the high-stakes partisan skirmish that seems to have taken shape. Yeah, what he said.
::: posted by Steven at 6:10 PM
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