The Washington Post’s George Will wrote this about The Transportation Safety Authority’s adoption of scanners and groping to thwart terrorism: “What the TSA is doing is mostly security theater, a pageant to reassure passengers that flying is safe. Reassurance is necessary if commerce is going to flourish and if we are going to get to grandma’s house on Thursday to give thanks for the Pilgrims and for freedom. If grandma is coming to our house, she may be wanded while barefoot at the airport because democracy – or the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment; anyway, something – requires the amiable nonsense of pretending that no one has the foggiest idea what an actual potential terrorist might look like.”
The trouble is, we don’t have the foggiest idea of what a terrorist looks like. Before 9/11, our ideas of what Arab-Americans looked like were awash with turbans and long tunics. Many Americans were flabbergasted when images of the 9/11 hijackers – men of Arab descent wearing jeans, khakis, and button downs – were released. And grandma may very well have a bomb in her bag amid her peppermints and prescriptions. This would increasingly be the case if grandma was exempt from thorough security screenings at the airport. Wouldn’t a terrorist be more likely to plant an explosive in granny’s bag if he could bet with some certainty that granny’s screening would consist of no more than a polite smile and wave through by TSA personnel? We don’t know what a terrorist looks like. We didn’t know on 9/11 and we don’t know now.
What we do know is what many terrorists believe, the ideas that undergird their desires, and where they might travel to get the required training to plan their operation’s logistics. But in today’s internet age, we could be wrong about that too. A would be terrorist may need only travel so far as their laptop to get all the encouragement and technical expertise required to mount an attack. By all accounts, Timothy McVeigh wasn’t a state sponsored terrorist and the Fort Hood shooter was radicalized online. Welcome to Terrorism 2.0. It’s time that George Will & Co. upgrade from the Beta version.
Will’s cockeyed attempt to connect terror with identifiable physical features –as opposed to behaviors which can actually be instructive – extols a man with an agenda. Will is committed to creating a terror tapestry which reinforces the lie of the Bush administration; We fight them there so we won’t fight them here. Who? Arab Islamists. All this accounts for the flimsy argument which he painstakingly tacked together with duct tape and safety pins.
We’re at war with Arab countries, so the face of terrorism is an Arab face. This is intentional. If we were fighting in an African country instead of Iraq and Afghanistan, the face of terror would be that of the Nigerian underwear bomber Farouk Abdulmutallab or the Somali-American Mohamed Osman Mohamud, the latter of which allegedly plotted to bomb a crowded Christmas tree event in Oregon. Given, at first whiff the case against Mohamud seems to denote an over-zealous FBI that is all too willing to bend the rule of law a bit in order to build its reputation and evoke a collective shriek from the American public.
George Will was correct in his op-ed when he later asserted that “bureaucracies try to maximize their missions.” The FBI is no exception. In my mind, thwarting your own terror plot isn’t indicative of a genuine investigative effort. But genuine or not, Mohamud would be the face of the war on terror if it fit the agenda of those who support America’s adventures abroad,especially since Mohamud and Abdulmutallab are the most recent ones to be charged with plotting acts of terrorism against the American homeland.
In the case of terror spottings, the agenda is driving the data and not the other way around. The only thing we can be sure of is that the face of terror will never be that of a young white male. That’s just not in the playbook.
Yvette Carnell is a former Capitol Hill Staffer turned political blogger. She currently publishes two blogs, Spatterblog.com and GoGirlGuide.com.
