Spinspeak

Huh?

Faced with angry complaints, U.S. officials defended an anti-terrorism program yesterday that secretly tested radiation levels around the country -- including at more than 100 Muslim sites in the Washington area -- and insisted that no one was targeted because of his or her faith.

One official knowledgeable about the program explained that Muslim sites were included because al Qaeda terrorists were considered likely to gravitate to Muslim neighborhoods or mosques while in the United States.

"If you were looking [for] the needle in a haystack, that's the haystack you would look at," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the program is classified. "You'd look at the [likely] targets and the places the operators were."

So what, exactly, are the particular semantics of this defense? That Muslims weren’t targeted for their faith, but for their faith’s gravitational pull on terrorists?

Look, I get the point some make that random screening is pretty useless. That a former vice president was screened at an airport is patently absurd. But profiling isn’t the answer, either, and I don’t even need to mount a passionate defense of civil liberties to back up that statement; I can just give you two names: John Walker Lindh, a white American who fought with the Taliban, and wouldn’t have been pegged by racial profiling; and Muhammad Ali Hasan, a Muslim of Pakistani descent who is so enamored of the president and his policies that he started Muslims for Bush, and would have been pegged by either racial profiling or a program designed to monitor Muslims, even though he’s as big a Bush-fan as you’ll find (though he, not so coincidentally, I imagine, doesn’t support the Patriot Act).

Neither random searches nor highly targeted profiling work, ultimately for the same reason—because they are both as likely to exclude the people we want to know about and waste time and resources on people we don’t need to know about. That’s why smart and effective intelligence-gathering, and court ordered warrants secured on the basis of that information, are so critical.