Richard Meyers is the chairman of the Joint chiefs of Staff in the US. I heard him on the radio recently, presumably in connection with the recent increase in the US terrorist threat level and he had this to say:

“There is no doubt, from all the intelligence we pick up from al-Qaida, that they want to do away with our way of life. And if they could cause another catastrophic event, a tragedy like 9-11, if they could do that again, if they could get their hands on weapons of mass destruction and make it 10,000, not 3,000, they would do that, and not just in the United States, but in any of the free world or any peoples that treasure their freedom.”

I don’t really doubt that there are terrorists groups that would kill ten thousand Americans, or possibly even citizens of other western countries if they had the means. There is more than enough evidence in the world that extremist groups, certainly including but not limited to Islamic extremists groups, will do terrible deeds of violence when they have the opportunity. Two things bother me about this though.

First, he is focusing on the fair-enough probability that terrorists would kill tens thousand if they could, without anteing up any evidence that they can at the moment. He says they’ve got intelligence that they “want to”, not that they know how. But if you’re listening to the radio, what you are going to hear is that terrorists are threatening tens of thousands of lives. That’s fear-mongering.

Secondly, he’s almost certainly mingling facts with lies in a way that gives credibility to the lies. I’m not quite cynical enough to assume that the recent security alerts are purely made-up or blown entirely out of proportion. They very well might be, I don’t think I’d give the current US administration the full benefit of the doubt on that score, but it’s also possible that they really do have “credible intelligence” indicating imminent attacks. I highly doubt, however, that their intelligence really shows that the terrorists in question are out to attack “any peoples that treasure their freedom”. Attack the US maybe, or attack capitalist societies, or christian societies, or even just western societies generally. And certainly some of those groups include what could realistically be called free societies. But that’s not the same thing. Meyers would like his audience to think that freedom and westernism equate, and he would like his audience to think that terrorists hate “freedom”. But I figure terrorists probably like freedom just fine thank you, even if they have a different notion of it that Meyers or Ashcroft or you or me. I am confident that Al Qa’ida doesn’t order it’s foot soldiers to attack “any peoples that treasure their freedom”, so I am confident that the US didn’t obtain any such intelligence. That must be a lie. If it is, it’s a lie obscured by wrapping it up in a statement about intelligence reports, which is even worse. US officials shouldn’t allow value-laden rhetoric to contaminate security discussions. It seems that is you want to accept national security as a worthwhile goal, you have to buy into a lot of dangerous crap about terrorists being inexplicably evil.

Tangentially, one of the reasons it’s hard to oppose decreases in civil liberties is because of the ancient counter-argument that “you don’t have to be afraid of laws if you aren’t a bad person”. Well, of course you do, but if the media isn’t interested in cataloguing incidences of not-bad people suffering from theoretically-good laws, then any attempt to oppose those laws is forced onto shaky theoretical ground and dark mutterings about the unprovable ill-intent of Bush and Dick and so on. What I’d like to see is an attempt to round up the all of the times that the US and Canadian governments have used their anti-terrorism powers, so that we could see just exactly who is being targeted by those laws. Failing that, I’d like to see an attempt to just round up the news stories that have made it through the journalistic cracks. Here’s one anyway, I know there are others but I can’t point you to them because there isn’t such a database that I’m aware of.

Feds’ fumble costs family: Accusations of terrorism wreak havoc since March – Rocky Mountain News