Some 80,000 Arab and Muslim immigrants have been subjected to fingerprinting and registration, another 8,000 have been called in for interviews with the FBI, and over 5,000 foreign nationals have been imprisoned in initiatives designed to prevent terrorism. This activity, notes the Georgetown University law professor David Cole, has not resulted in a single conviction for a terrorist crime. In fact, only a small number of people picked up on terrorism charges — always to great official fanfare — have been convicted at all, and almost all of these convictions have been for other infractions, particularly immigration violations.A blogger summarizes an article in Foreign Affairs that asks "Is there Still a Terrorist Threat?"
Or was there ever (in the US), in the sense we understand it from our increasingly unhinged brethren on cable news?
Well maybe, maybe not. My guess, at the moment, would be there has been or maybe is a threat, but it's been vastly (and unconscionably) over-hyped for political purposes, and whatever risk there is made greater, not less, as a result. My guess, further, is that in moving to create more secrecy and impose more surveillance in the US the government has moved in exactly the wrong direction; that terrorism is more easily accomplished in closed and secretive societies than in free and open ones.
Either that, or the much-feared terrorists are far, far more brilliant than even the wettest of right-wing wet dreams would suppose, and understand the American psyche so perfectly as to know we are far more debilitated by media terror than any real and immediate threat and are proceeding accordingly, the Fauxies and their ilk willing, even eager accomplices.
Time, perhaps, will tell.
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