Making us safer, part one

Proving once again, that given the right frame of mind, nothing is without its humorous side.

Washington, April 16 (New York Times) - The commission investigating the 9/11 attacks has concluded that immigration policies promoted as essential to keeping the country safe from future attacks have been largely ineffective, producing little, if any, information leading to the identification or apprehension of terrorists. ...

It returned a spotlight to programs that have been controversial from the start, aimed mostly at people ... from Muslim or Arab countries. Critics have said the government engaged in a wholesale roundup of these people, kept them in jail for months, in some cases without access to lawyers, and conducted closed-door legal hearings on their status.

Many of the libertarian and pro-immigration groups that have criticized the Bush administration ... hailed the findings. They said that as the first independent assessment of government actions after 9/11, it affirmed their misgivings.

The report also slammed programs to identify "special interest" immigrants, to require extra screening for visas from 26 predominantly Muslim nations, and to delay visa applications from the same countries. The first resulted in more than 700 people, mostly from the Middle East, being held for months before being cleared. None of them uncovered any terrorists or any information useful in antiterrorism efforts.

Here's where the humor comes in.

But a former Justice Department official involved in the development of the programs defended them as critical to counterterrorism efforts.

His name is Kris Kobach, former counsel to John Cinderfarm, and he claims the programs yielded great benefits and that the commission was looking at things too narrowly by

"looking for a terrorism label affixed to an individual. ... But it's failing to realize that just because the F.B.I. hasn't gotten to the point of applying the terrorism label, it doesn't mean the individual is not a terrorist. ...

"In many cases," he said, "we have kicked terrorists out of the country over garden-variety immigration laws."

British readers may know the name Mary Whitehouse. For 30 years she was president of the National Listeners' and Viewers' Association and a persistent campaigner for "decency" in radio and TV. She once complained that the UK's Obscene Publications Act was not strict enough because it requires proof of a "tendency to deprave and corrupt" before it can be enforced. "You've got to," she said, "get away from this silly business of having to prove things."

Kris Kobach clearly has.