Life during Wartime

Roundup!

YOU GOTTA GIVE California senator Dianne Feinstein credit. At least she didn't beat around the bush or coat her remarks with slippery pol-speak. No, Feinstein, just spit it right out.

To stop terrorists, the Democratic warhorse sternly told CNN June 2, "one isn't going to look for blond Norwegians." The "racial profiling debate," the California legislator continued, "has had a chilling impact" on the feds.

The dramatic makeover of racial profiling – from pariah policy to cornerstone of American security strategy – began, of course, on Sept. 12. But last week Feinstein took the don't-trust-those-swarthy-foreigners thing to the next level, what with her Scandinavian-pandering comments and her sponsorship of a new plan to track Middle Easterners entering the United States on work or school visas. Under the proposed rules, immigrants from countries such as Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, and Syria would periodically register with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and all people "who fall into categories of elevated national security concern" would be fingerprinted when they come into the country.

(Presumably, these additional layers of bureaucracy will make it easier for the INS to mail out green cards to dead terrorists.)

Intrigued by Feinstein's remarks, I gave a call to her Capitol Hill HQ. See, I was thinking about Timothy McVeigh, that long-forgotten melanin-lacking dude who committed the second-worst terrorist attack in American history. If we're going to assume that all Muslims are potential jihadists, shouldn't we also suspect that all Caucasian males are planning to blow up federal government buildings? I couldn't get Feinstein on the phone, so I made do with Scott Berger, her spokesperson. "I've got a question for the senator," I told him. "Does she think racial profiling could've stopped Timothy McVeigh?"

Silence.

"Uh ... uh ... I think the answer to your question is obvious," Berger said before pausing some more. "I mean ... uh ... clearly McVeigh is of a different ethnicity than the people who made the attacks on 9-11."

"Clearly," I replied. "So should we use racial profiling on white people?"

He ducked. "Uh ... the senator is concerned with all incidents of terrorism, regardless of who commits them."

I took that as an indication that Feinstein won't be calling for the feds to round up white guys anytime soon. But there are plenty of reasons to be suspicious of whites – exhibit A: Lucas John Helder, the college kid busted last month for a multistate bombing spree – and according to the FBI, honksters have perpetrated the "vast majority" of terrorist crimes in America during the past 30 years. The bureau's 1999 annual report on terrorism (the most recent I could find) is a veritable rogues' gallery of mad white people, mostly right-wing extremists and animal-rights militants.

You're right about one thing, Dianne: we don't need to worry about the Norwegians. (A.C. Thompson)

Chemical bothers

Since last autumn the federal government has quietly curtailed public access to environmental data – and more restrictions are in the works.

Here's the deal: In the wake of the 1984 poison gas catastrophe in Bhopal, India – death toll: 4,000 – the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency began collecting detailed reports from businesses that use toxic chemicals. Each sizable American industrial plant must reveal what hazardous substances it's using, what it's doing with the substances (i.e., is the company belching cancer-causing gases into the air?), and how many people those substances could kill in the event of an accident.

You see where this is going. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that nine days after Sept. 11, the EPA yanked the disaster scenarios off its Web site, citing concerns that terrorists could use them to target oil refineries and fertilizer factories. The "Risk Management Plans" are still available for public perusal in analog form at a handful of EPA reading rooms.

Now, according to Sean Moulton, a senior analyst with the Right-to-Know Network, a Washington, D.C.-based group that maintains its own Web site chock-full of EPA data, congressional leaders are pushing at least three bills that would further restrict citizen access. Moulton says heavy industry, which has bristled under the reporting regs since they were first introduced, is behind the looming rollbacks. "Industry is using concerns over terrorism to accomplish an agenda they've had for a long time," he told me. "I have a right to know if my kid is going to a school a half a mile away from a chemical powder keg."