Opinion
Mineta is Repeating the Internment Mistake
Searching for terrorists trying to board airplanes is like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Luckily, we know which hundredth of the haystack to look in. The Al Queda terrorist network that we are at war with is composed virtually entirely of young men of Arab, Persian, Pakistani or other Muslim descent. Through a combination of racial, national, ethnic, age and sex profiling, we can focus heightened security on the tiny subgroup of passengers that any terrorists are virtually certain to fall into. Knowing where to look greatly enhances our capacity to interdict terrorism, yet airport security personnel have been ordered not to focus their search where they know the terrorists are. Why? Because Department of Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta and his family were sent to an internment camp along with 110,000 others from the Japanese immigrant community during WWII. He thinks that gives him special insight into the issue today. In fact, he is repeating the mistake that was made in WWII.

The problem with the internment of the Japanese is that it was a blunt instrument that failed to minimize harms to the innocent. In particular, it failed to distinguish the guilty from the innocent. How can the guilty be distinguished from the innocent? Instead of assuming that all members of the implicated group pose a threat, we can investigate further, separating the guilty from the innocent by conducting searches and, if necessary, interrogations. Mr. Mineta's refusal to allow searches of the implicated group repeats our earlier failure to distinguish the guilty from the innocent. Mr. Mineta is rejecting the solution to his own family's mistreatment.

The analog to internment, in the instance of airline security, would be to not let the profiled group fly. Letting them fly, on condition that we search them, minimizes the harm. The profiled group isn't actually harmed at all. They don't even have to wait longer at the airport than anyone else. Everyone waits while they are searched. Indeed, the profiled group benefits along with everyone else. They get to keep their lives, when body searches of young Arab and other Muslim men stops would-be hijackers from bringing weapons onto planes. If only blue eyed people such as myself were terrorists, you can bet I would want every blue eyed passenger to be searched before I got on a plane.

Mr. Mineta acts as if being singled out is in itself a harm. Wrong. Harms are the impacts on one's liberty and security interests that follow as a consequence of being singled out. Being singled out for internment does a lot of harm. Being singled out for search does none. To not be able to distinguish between the two is a gross incompetence. Essentially, Mr. Mineta is treating civil rights as a superstition instead of as a product of reason, subject to the implications of reason. Punishing people for race, nationality, ethnicity, sex, age, or for anything that is not in itself wrong, does harm to innocents and should be avoided where possible. Rational steps to separate the guilty from the innocent minimize harms to the innocent and should be embraced.

If we have to make a mistake, Mr. Mineta is not even choosing the right one. An earlier generation believed that protection of the lives and liberty of the many required limited impositions on a few. Perhaps it did. We cannot know how many acts of sabotage were interdicted by internment, or how murderous, or how significant militarily, they would have been. In contrast, today's mistake trades huge risk to the many for the avoidance of any pain for anyone, until disaster strikes. It is the classic political failure, trading short run ease for long run tragedy. Luckily, we don't have to make either mistake. We don't have to treat everyone as guilty or everyone as innocent. We can investigate the implicated group further and distinguish the guilty from the innocent.

We know where to look for the terrorists. Are we really too morally incompetent to do it?

Alec Rawls' writings on most subjects can be found at www.rawls.org.

Page last modified on Thursday, 02-Mar-2006 00:14:26 MST.