Terrorists and Whales
Posted: August 30th, 2006 at 6:56 pm
For a while, after the death of J. Edgar Hoover, domestic spying for partisan political purposes was not considered defensible, at least in public. But under the current administration this attitude has changed. After Jimmy Carter made mention, at the funeral of Coretta Scott King last February, of the violation of her and her husband’s civil rights by “secret government wiretapping, other surveillance, and … harassment from the FBI,” supporters of the current president asserted publicly that Carter had been out of line. In the Bushites’ opinion, that Mrs. King’s obsequies were intended primarily to honor her courage in the furtherance of civil rights was no excuse for mentioning the government’s efforts to suppress them.
Although the president was present, at least physically, at Mrs. King’s funeral, it’s pretty clear that he did not attend the event because of a devotion to civil rights, for he had already secretly given his approval, in principle, of eavesdropping without a judicial warrant on any person or organization in the land of the free. Among the organizations considered suspect by his administration’s FBI have been the American Civil Liberties Union and United for Peace and Justice. This was to be expected. The administration understandably fears civil liberty and any opposition to the illegal invasion of other countries. But we’ve learned also that other groups it fears are People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the Quakers, and Greenpeace.
That the FBI has been especially interested in that third one is apparent from the difference between the 2,383 pages of data on it that the bureau admitted, last July, to having secretly collected, and the 1,173 pages it admitted to having so acquired on the ACLU.
Now, I can’t help but suspect that the FBI is especially suspicious of Greenpeace because many of its members risk their lives to prevent the slaughter of whales. It would be quite characteristic of the bureau to suspect that this organization was in league with whales who were terrorists, or could be trained to be. What other explanation could there be, the bureau might reason, for members of Greenpeace to risk their lives to protect these creatures? If our navy is trying to train sharks, why wouldn’t terrorists try to train whales? Besides, the bureau knows that a terrorist is whoever the administration says is one. Two years ago, the secretary of education called the country’s largest union of school teachers a “terrorist organization.”
In case it was because of such reasoning that the FBI secretly collected 2,383 pages of information on Greenpeace, I would like to spare the bureau a lot of future wasteful effort by pointing out that, although some whales might be Muslims, none of them, whether Shiite or Sunni, could meet the strict requirements of Islamic fanaticism. For one thing, whales cannot be induced to commit suicide. For another, they are incapable of practicing one of the indispensable Islamic rituals. Although whales have an excellent sense of direction, they can’t kneel and bow down toward Mecca. With those bodies they have, they just can’t do it.
—John DeForest
