The authors' attitude toward civil liberties in relation to the so-called Patriot Act can be accurately illustrated by quoting one sentence: "The privacy of the American home is millions of times more likely to be invaded by an e-mail spammer or a telemarketer than a federal agent." (p. 74) Anyone who needs to have it explained to them the difference between the latest hourly cyber-offer for low-priced Viagra and federal agents investigating them for possible terrorist connections is not going to be capable of even having a conversation about the subject. This is another sign of fanaticism, a worldview largely untroubled by normal reality-checking.
It won't surprise a reader of normal comprehension that the authors ridicule critics of the abortive TIPS program (that would have asked people to report vaguely-defined "suspicious" activities) without mentioning one of the most serious concerns about it: that it would generate a huge volume of more-or-less useless tips that would consume investigators' time in a highly inefficient manner.
Again, in dealing with fanaticism or abstract ideological/polemical formulations, what is not mentioned is often very telling. One should give the authors credit for a moment of lucidity in the same section of the book: they do recognize that racial profiling in airports would be a foolish, risky practice to adopt for the very sensible reason that not all high-risk terrorist suspects are "Middle Eastern"-looking.
I find myself asking, what is the right approach to understanding and countering this kind of argument? Although I'm very troubled by the far-reaching implications of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the ongoing loss of American and Iraqi lives in a war based on lies about non-existent "weapons of mass destruction," I'm not in a mood of despair. One of the greatest strenths of democracy is the fact that we have a citizen Army, and those leaders who prosecute even the most popular of wars must account to the voters for their conduct of foreign and military policy.
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