U.S. Customs and Border Protection: Forcing You to Check Your Dignity at the Gate Since 2007

(This was supposed to be posted shortly after I arrived home from Turkey last week, but the vagaries of my college schedule conspired against me)

So it's about 2:15 p.m. in the afternoon the Saturday before last, and I've just landed at Logan International Airport (that's in Boston, for those of you from outside the New England area) after a seven-hour flight from Frankfurt. At this point I've been traveling for 18 hours, so I don't really feel like I'm in any condition to get riled up about anything. Once my family and I finally get off the plane (good lord, 747s take a LONG time to empty out), we head to Customs, where I am greeted by the sight of non-US citizens waiting in line not only to have their passports checked, but to be fingerprinted.

Yes, that's right. EVERY SINGLE NON-US CITIZEN had to get fingerprinted - all four fingers and the thumb on both hands, using some little gadget installed at the little Customs booth where the guy in the uniform sits. I nearly blew a gasket when I realized what was going on; it's probably a good thing that I didn't, because my doing so probably wouldn't have gone over too well with the Customs officers.

But this new "security measure" (read: procedure by which civil liberties get further curtailed) has continued to gall me ever since I saw it. First of all, is this really a good time to make America seem even more paranoid to all of the 5.5+ billion humans who don't happen to hold one of our passports? We're not going to negotiate with the U.N., we're not going to sign global warming treaties, and now we're going to fingerprint everyone who wants to come to our country? This is sure going to help our image in the Middle East, guys. Although, to be fair, at least we can't be accused of racial profiling if we subject everyone to this nonsense.

I expect that most rebuttals to my indignation would be something along the lines of, "Adam, you're being ridiculous - September 11 changed everything." Whether it did or not is neither here nor there (it didn't, by the way). Even if it did, what possible purpose does fingerprinting everyone who enters the country serve? Someone should inform the Bush administration that, much as it might surprise the denizens of the White House, terrorists aren't actually stupid. The vast majority of the plotters either have no criminal record or have taken the necessary precautions to make sure that they won't be caught on a cursory background check. And an even vaster majority of the actual bombers/hijackers/operatives who carry out the attacks are recruited from madrassas, slums, or rural villages - bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and unencumbered by any criminal history. So the likelihood that fingerprinting will actually catch any of the fish that the police are presumably looking for is, quite frankly, astronomically small.

What about the few terrorists (be they masterminds or operatives) who do have existing criminal records? Or what about the theory that we should get everyone's prints on file so that, while they may not be heading for a car-bomb appointment this time, they'll be caught when and if they attempt to do so in the future? To both of these questions, my response is simple: are our neighbors doing this, too? If a terrorist wants to set off a bomb in America, he's not going to mind flying to Guadalajara or Toronto or even Buenos Aires, hopping an appropriately stealthy means of ground transportation, and entering the country overland. Unless everyone starts checking all incoming passengers, all we've done is add a little detour to the travel plans of the terrorists from whom we are trying to protect ourselves.

Yet again, the American government has proven its ability to adopt comparatively ineffective defense mechanisms in the most egregiously offensive way possible. In the modern world, terrorist operatives are extremely hard to pick out of a crowd, and terrorist masterminds never need to leave the comfort of their home half a world away from their target(s). And while America is protected by two rather large oceans, it's not as if the only way to get to America is to fly into an American airport and pass through Customs. But despite these glaring flaws in their strategy, the Bush administration continues to beat on, a boat against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

If A Muezzin Shouts In A Forest, And Nobody Prays...

Dateline: Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, southwest of Reykjavik.

Currently sitting on the plane back from Istanbul, where I have spent the last eight days – apologies for the hiatus in posts, but sacrifices must be made at times.

Turkey is a very interesting country in many ways, quite a few of which will find their way into my writing in the coming days. But I want to begin with the most salient one to any visitor: the omnipresence of the muezzin, and its incongruity given the general balance Turkey has historically struck between religion and secularity.

The muezzin, in case you are unaware, is the guy who issues the call to prayer five times per day by bellowing…something…in Arabic from the minarets of the local mosque. There are approximately 2,000 mosques in Istanbul today, all of which resound with the more-or-less sweet strains (depending on the quality of each mosque’s loudspeaker system) of the muezzin at the five predetermined times: pre-dawn (approximately 5:40 am), noon, mid-afternoon, sunset, and “nightfall” (sometime around 8 pm).

As any visitor to Istanbul will readily attest, you can’t escape the muezzin when the time comes. The only time during the eight days I was in Istanbul when I was awake and didn’t hear him was while sitting on the tarmac at Ataturk Airport (more on him later) for my flight home.

Yet for all of their volume and effort, the muezzins had no visible influence on the Turks. I was in Istanbul for eight days, and I saw no one – I repeat, no one – stop to pray when the muezzin started up. Of course, sometimes this was because I was in my hotel room, or in a tourist-heavy locale where all of the people around me were either non-Muslims or had been trained to ignore the call to prayer for fear of scaring away the tourists and their wads of cash. But even when we were wandering around the residential sections of the city, where no one around us spoke anything other than Turkish, the muezzin’s call went seemingly unheeded.

So what does this say about Turkey? Perhaps it just means that the government's famous commitment to enforced secularity has won out over any Turk's instinct to publicly express his or her religious convictions? But the muezzins are Turkish government employees: the government owns every mosque in Turkey, and the calls to prayer are thus explicitly sanctioned by the government. The answer is clearly not that Turks are not religious people: there are 2,000 mosques in Istanbul alone, and over 80,000 in the country (according to our Turkish guide).

The most obvious answer would seem to be that prayer has simply been relegated to the private sphere: if you are in private when the muezzin starts up, you pray; if you are in public, you don't. But if prayer is a private endeavor, why is the call to prayer such an obtrusively public one? The Turks have a long and proud history of iconoclasm when it comes to their religious institutions, starting with Ataturk's abolition of the caliphate after a nearly 1300-year run. So while some countries might broadcast the calls just out of deference to tradition, Turkey would not seem to be one of them.

I am not in a particularly great position to posit explanations for the behavior of the 15,000,000+ residents of Istanbul, nor to generalize it to apply to the rest of Turkey. In the more conservative eastern and southern portions of Turkey, for example, I would bet a lot of money that when the muezzin shouts, many more people stop and pray. But the fact that I am not a Turk, nor was meant to be, does not make what I observed any less striking to me. If nothing else, the observations of foreigners may at least help to dispel stereotypes.

And the award for the most ridiculous excuse ever goes to...

...Ms. Geraldine Ferraro, for her response to the backlash about her comments that Barack Obama owes his success to his being black. Ms. Ferraro, who apparently has a history of saying stupid things about presidential candidates, said on "The Early Show" (CBS vintage) that "it wasn't a racist comment, it was a statement of fact."

If you read the article linked above, you will see that this woman has too much of a history of saying this sort of stuff for her response to have been anything other than dead serious. Leaving aside the logical Mobius strip that Ms. Ferraro must have been traveling down in order to believe that the statement-of-fact comment was a good thing to say, this sort of thing worries me. As I blogged about previously, it is a known psychological phenomenon that the mere mention of an idea, no matter how outlandish it is, will convince at least a few people that it is true. So while the vast majority of people have reacted to Ms. Ferraro's rantings with the contempt that she deserves, there will be at least a few voters who will believe her. And in a race as close as this one, that is a problem.

But what bothers me most about this whole thing is the lack of outrage from the Clinton campaign. The only thing that we've heard on the matter from a Clinton spokesman (one not named Mark Penn!) is that they "do not agree with" what Ferraro had to say. Notice that they didn't say anything about how disgustingly wrong-headed the comments were, or about how such words are a clear violation of the style of campaign that Hillary initially promised to run - that is, one free of attack ads and other staples of negative campaigning. They're desperate for anything they can get now, particularly after watching the minuscule gains they made on March 4th evaporate, and then some, with the results from Wyoming and Mississippi. But have they really fallen far enough that Ms. Ferraro is no longer worthy of their contempt?

Looking Gift Horses in the Mouths

For those unfortunate ones among you who aren't from Boston, the title refers to our often-trashy tabloid newspaper, the Boston Herald, which is good for Red Sox coverage, intolerance, and little else. Unfortunately, we appear to be dealing with the second category here - specifically, an article by the Herald's Michael Graham about Harvard's apparently reprehensible practice of clearing one of its gyms of men for some period of time six days per week to allow orthodox Muslim women to use the facility in accordance with a shari'a. The article goes on to detail other scandalous practices that Harvard engages in, such as accepting a $20m gift from a Saudi sheikh designated to fund the study of Islam - scandalous because the same sheikh also gave money to a fund to support the families of suicide bombers.

With all due respect to Mr. Graham, I am appalled. His views on the gym-use regulations are actually the least offensive of the positions he takes in the article: I don't have a problem with accommodating the Muslim women, but I think that one might perhaps be able to make a case that Harvard could have found a less intrusive way to do so.

But that's not what has me incensed. Graham's disgusting rants about Sheikh bin Talal are. Let's be clear about this. As far as we know (or at least as far as Graham knows), bin Talal did not finance suicide bombers. He did not train them, arm them, or aid them. What he did do is to aid the families of said bombers AFTER THE BOMBERS HAD KILLED THEMSELVES. Graham's argument is that the bombers, armed with the knowledge that "their kin will benefit financially" thanks to bin Talal's funding, are more likely to go ahead and blow themselves up, and therefore supporting bin Talal is akin to supporting suicide bombings.

Umm, WHAT?!?! Maybe it's just me, but I have a hunch that an Iranian feels grief just like an American does - while I have never experienced it personally (thank God), losing a child/brother/sister must be one of the most devastating things a person can be forced to endure. Simple human compassion and empathy would seem to dictate that we try to help people in such terrible positions. Furthermore, if we are trying to figure out ways to reduce the prevalence of suicide bombings, mightn't the parents and relatives of deceased bombers be persuasive and provocative spokespeople for our cause? The bombers themselves can't come back to talk about how much (or little) their act actually changed things, but their families can.

On a more basic level, though, Mr. Graham glosses over the actual purpose of Sheikh bin Talal's gift: ISLAMIC STUDIES. Whatever his previous associations may have been, bin Talal is quite clearly not intending to spread terrorist ideologies (or whatever other nefarious plots Mr. Graham may want to ascribe to him). On the contrary, he is actively trying to increase understanding of his religion, his homeland and his people, and he is doing so at one of the most respected institutions of the country to which radical Islam is supposed to be opposed! This is an olive branch if I ever saw one, a clear attempt to open a dialogue with rational Americans and increase awareness of a chronically misunderstood culture.

Sheikh bin Talal's gift is a welcome change from the usual anti-American rhetoric, and has the potential to redound to the benefit of all parties involved, American and otherwise. But it will apparently only do so if people like Mr. Graham are not on the receiving end.

Still waiting for the stump speech conducted entirely in charades from the campaign that says words don't matter.

During Hillary's speech in Ohio tonight, CNN cut to a shot of the crowd chanting something that sounded remarkably like "Yes we can."

Good job, Hillary. You've inspired chants you can Xerox.

A funny thing happened on the way through the blogosphere

So imagine my surprise and delight when I saw yesterday that Matt Yglesias had posted something about John Rawls on his blog. I think I largely agree with his criticism of A Theory of Justice (TOJ), but I wanted to put my two cents in on the issue.

First of all, for all of his strengths as a philosopher, Rawls was a mediocre writer at best, and a downright awful one at worst. This flaw is on full display in TOJ, in which Rawls is maddeningly prone to rambling, obfuscation, and general failure to do his ideas justice with his prose. And Yglesias is correct to point out that for all of Rawls's verbiage, he has remarkably little to say about what his ideas mean for the real world.

That being said, I think Rawls deserves more credit than Yglesias gives him. I have always been a big fan of the veil of ignorance as a theoretical construct - it is elegant, well-described, and potentially quite useful. Rawls's difference and maximin principles are similarly well-developed, and also have the advantage of being surprisingly concise, at least as political philosophy goes. The veil of ignorance is hugely impractical, of course, and can never be implemented in its purest form: we all have our biases, and all of our thinking is irreversibly influenced by our socioeconomic background. Nevertheless, it can often be a useful exercise to try to imagine how one might feel if one were in stuck on a significantly less desirable rung of the social ladder, and by doing so we can often get a good enough idea of what the less well-off experience to be able to more effectively combat it. [Editor's note: Now that was a sentence worthy of a philosophical treatise, lengthwise if not content-wise]

So while TOJ is not a silver-bullet solution to the problems of establishing justice, it certainly contains some interesting insights and a few cleverly-designed tools to use in evaluating individual circumstances. And given the general lack of silver-bullet solutions to philosophical quandaries, that's a pretty respectable accomplishment on Mr. Rawls's part.