Michelle Malkin wrote about the speech three times in her blog, accusing Gore of slandering America and suggesting that his underlying motives were financial. Scott Johnson of Power Line asked: “What is to be said of a man who stood a heartbeat away from the presidency of the United States and now feels free to defame his country as he has done?”

Gore’s remark was held up as an unfavorable contrast to Cheney’s hunting accident, which had occurred the day before. The American Thinker wrote:

It was also compared to a racist comment by Anne Coulter made around the same time. Tom Bevan of Real Clear Politics compares the two and finds Gore’s anti-racist comments more harmful. Elsewhere on the same site, Jack Kelly plays with absolute and relative numbers to point out that the percent of the total Arab population in the U.S. that was abused was actually very small.

Malkin, InstaPundit and many others also link to an amateur named Tigerhawk, a Princeton alumnus and high-level executive in the medical device industry. His chimerical nom-de-blog comes from being a big fan of college sports, particularly the Iowa Hawkeyes and the Princeton Tigers. Besides blogging, he also keeps horses and enjoys collecting rare coins, and he lists Lord of the Rings under both favorite movie and book, where it keeps proud company with Saving Private Ryan and Atlas Shrugged. He has been keeping his Eye of the Tiger on Gore, and here is what he has to say:

So it's silly, beneath refutation, but at the same time incredibly dangerous.

The Trekkie captain of Captain’s Quarters plays dumb: “We held mass roundups of Arabs? When? Where? What exactly were the ‘unforgivable’ conditions of which Gore speaks?” Fox TV’s Bill O’Reilly did a commentary and an interview segment on it. O’Reilly also adopts the strategy of playing it dumb, having his staff call Gore’s office to ask “where the unforgivable conditions are located” — a question made almost unanswerable by its contorted phrasing — and asking the same seemingly tough question of his own in-house Fox political analyst. She is conveniently unable to answer, though she does at least manage to mention Human Rights Watch, which O’Reilly then tries to brush off as a “far-left” organization.

The conservative points seem to run like this: Gore should not have gone to Saudi Arabia because it’s a foreign country, he should not accept speaking fees even though everyone does. Many of the attacks involve guilt by association: Jeddah, the business capital of the nation, is folksily described as bin-Laden’s hometown and is therefore contaminated ground, his family’s company is one of the dozens of sponsors of the conference, and most of the 9-11 hijackers were Saudis. Also, most importantly, Gore should not say anything critical about the policies of the current administration out loud in public, where our enemies might hear him and grow strong.

The first disgust me because they are so obviously hypocritical that I consider this incontrovertible proof that the conservatives are not operating in good faith. The last is simply a restatement of the principle that has plunged the country into a waking nightmare for the last five years, that criticizing George Bush is betraying America.

Here we see the Right using both the megaphone of cable monopoly and the echo chamber of interlinking blogs to create the effect of a chorus of furies.

I can’t tell you how depressed I get reading conservative rhetoric; it’s really almost like I’m taking my life into my own hands. The room goes dark, I see only swirling stupidity and its horrifying consequences, I struggle to count my many blessings and remember the joys of life. I even blame myself, as if I’m somehow seeking out the horror, as if the world is coming out from my eyes instead of the other way around.






There are two tragedies here. The first is that today even the barest mention of the Arab Round-Up of 2002-2003 will be shouted down in the strongest terms. It is less than a full chapter of our history on its own but certainly much more than a footnote to the era in which it occurred. It received almost no press in the first place and now the few pages which do tell of it are falling out of the public book of memory.

To be fair, there have been so many illegal detentions recently it’s getting pretty hard to keep track of them all. The UN recently issued a report calling for the closing of the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, where almost 500 inmates have been held for four years. Only this week did the U.S. finally release the names of those detained.

Amnesty International estimates that approximately 14,000 people are currently being held by U.S. forces in Iraq. 3,800 have been held for over a year, while 200 have been held for more than two years. And there is also the matter of the CIA’s “secret” prisons in Thailand, Afghanistan and unnamed Eastern European countries, of which the Post reports: “Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.”


Both secrecy and gradualness make it hard to tell the story of the round-up clearly. I find myself sadly unable to do it justice here. It is hard to know where one violation of civil liberties ends and another one begins. Here are two helpful timelines, from a Pakistani English-language newspaper and an Oakland, CA journal on race.

The two official sources of information about the detentions are the Human Rights Watch 99-page report which came out in August, 2002, and the 198-page report of the Department of Justice’s own investigation, released in June of 2003, which confirmed the findings almost ten months later. Here is a summary from the former:

Think Progress, a really excellent new clearing house of information for progressives which you should definitely check out, provides these numbers by way of contextualizing Gore's speech: 83,000 mostly Muslim foreigners required to re-register, 13,000 ordered into deportation hearings, more than 1,100 detained without charges, 0 charged with terrorism. It is the detention of the eleven or twelve hundred that Gore is referring to as an abuse.

To summarize, those arrested were not informed of the charges against them for some time, denied contact with family or access to lawyers, denied bail, and at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, NY (this would be the Where that the Captain and Mr. O’Reilly demanded someone provide them with but did not themselves seek), detainees were kept in solitary cells that were brightly lit around the clock so they couldn't sleep, locked down for 23 hours a day, and in some cases reportedly beaten by at least one of the guards.

On average, it took the FBI two or three months to clear detainees. That's a long time. After all, one does not have to prove conclusively that a detainee is not a terrorist, if such a thing is even possible. One only has to investigate the credibility of whatever lead prompted their arrest in the first place. If it is not credible, the presumption of innocence comes back into effect. If it still seems credible after investigation, then official charges should be brought so the accused may defend themselves. This is our system, the best one possible, and one I believe universal to the age of reason; there really is no other way to do it.

By all means, if you suspect someone of terrorist activity arrest them, but charge them and let them work with counsel on defending themselves in case it turns out you’re wrong, as the U.S. was practically every time here. The benefit of the doubt must always be for the individual, not the peristaltic torpor of the bureaucratic Leviathan.

The linguistic irony is that “detained” is a less serious word than “arrested”, but to be detained amounts to being arrested and held indefinitely without charge, which is of course much worse. Detention is a kind of limbo, and while technically accurate as a descriptive term, functions today as a euphemism for arrested without charge, a phrase whose sense is more plain. So if you enjoy paradoxes, here’s a good one for you: the problem is not that people are being arrested, but rather that they are not being arrested.

Special Registration, as the program was called, went into effect without proper public notice, only a posting in the Congressional Quarterly. It was already wrong from Day One, regardless of abuses that may have followed during incarceration, because it is based on racist assumptions, and because immigration laws were not intended to be used for an anti-terrorism dragnet. Applying immigration laws selectively to detain one group rather than another is discriminatory and illegal. Adding more second-class groups to try to make it look less racist only makes it worse.

The public tends to assume that if the government does something, it must be okay, since the government is who says what's okay and what isn't. This is a dangerous oversimplification that blurs the crucial distinction between the legislative and the executive branch, and that overlooks the reality that agencies can and do overstep their authority.

For a while there, it even seemed to some like the camps might be coming back. In August 2002, Anis Shivani sounded the alarm in CounterPunch, a little too stridently in hindsight: “Do we not know that capitalism, after a certain point, always ends in concentration camps?” In September 2002, the Voice’s Nat Hentoff denounced Ashcroft’s plans for concentration camps. A Jewish-American group also felt itself impelled to offer a careful but clear cautionary statement. I would argue that these were reasonable fears at the time if one extrapolated from the trend, or even if one merely took Ashcroft at his word.

Bruce Jackson, writing sometime later in The Buffalo Report chose a different historical analogy, Latin America rather than Germany, calling the detainees “The Desaparecidos of George W. Bush.”

Special registration of Muslims was discontinued on December 1st, 2003, a little over a year after it began. Homeland Security explained the decision on-line in the form of a catechism. Question: You haven’t caught any terrorists? Answer:

Answer does not compute. The second sentence makes no sense grammatically because some key preposition has been carelessly dropped – on? due to? – but the first one is also frighteningly obscure. What does it mean to catch a suspected terrorist? Is that the same as catching an actual terrorist, or does it simply mean that you have apprehended someone who you currently suspect, which is why you “caught” them in the first place?

The INS has been abolished, but it's nothing to celebrate, as its functions were transferred to Homeland Security; the enforcement branch is now called the ICE, as if to boast they have ice water in their veins. One question the ICE doesn't ask in its list, and which I do not know the answer to, is whether all the prior NSEERS detainees have been released yet.

Around this time it was revealed that the manager of a privately subcontracted West Coast INS data processing center had ordered her staff to shred about 90,000 vital documents on the night shift to reduce months of backlog, important documents like passports, birth certificates, visas and work permits, and that even after the backlog had been eliminated, new documents continued to be shredded in order to keep up with the incoming workload.

JHM Research and Development (JHM being the initials of the CEO, John H. Macklin) runs this center and others under a $325 million contract which they then in turn subcontract to two other companies; they were not reprimanded or fined as a result of these actions, since they never ordered the manager to perform them. But aren't they responsible for oversight, if not for assigning 90,000 more folders than could be processed without the hiring of additional workers? What kind of oversight can there be when even subcontractors have subcontractors?

Of those detained or deported, were any among those whose paperwork had been trashed without even being looked at? Can the power of life and death be put into the hands of such an incompetent and indifferent bureaucracy, the power to snatch people out of the world without a word of explanation and lock them away in a foul little closet, tying their fate to a few sheets of paper in an overworked clerk's in-box?






In the course of writing this post, I found an excellent blog entry by The Anonymous Liberal that travelled over much of the same ground, and did so in a much more timely manner. The author chose the same structure I did: start with the conservative furor, then come back and try to calmly establish the basic facts. The difference is, being a radical rather than a liberal, I believe the matter needs to be taken one step farther.

The second tragedy — remember, I did promise two — is that Gore did not actually mention the detentions in his speech, according to his own chat-room defenders. He was asked about them only afterwards in the Q&A period, and his hasty and evasive answer was that both Democrats and Republicans had opposed the program. “Terrible” is actually a weak, tsking word as he employs it here, a gentle head-shaking politeness before something too distasteful to discuss at length, a wishy-washy whitewash word like “unfortunate” or “regrettable”. Some right-wing sites accompanied the story with a photo of an angry, thundering Gore to suggest he was full of fire and brimstone as he said it, but the dark wood podium in the shot doesn't match the one he actually spoke at.

Though the speech was televised and undoubtedly exists on tape, no transcript has been made available by Gore or the conference organizers. However the Arab News gives a little bit more detail, which I consider illuminating.

Gore’s speech, as far as I can tell, was a mix of his usual bogus rhetoric about a bridge to the future, some beating of the tom-tom against Iran, and as a final delicacy a dash of identity politics produced for export, which is what got him into trouble. You would think that multiculturalism wouldn’t play as well overseas but many Saudis are U.S.-educated and the announced theme of the conference was “Seeding Potentials for Economic Growth: Honoring Identity and Celebrating Common Grounds.”

I doubt the rich Saudis at a global economic conference really care about their poor immigrant brethren in the U.S. I think their more pressing concern was with their own difficulties in getting visas for education, investment and recreation, which Gore also addressed. (The Times recently reported that King Abdullah II is planning to build his own Deerfield Academy in Jordan, even hiring away the Massachussetts boarding school's current headmaster.)

I certainly don’t remember Gore speaking out against the detentions at the time. Senator Obama, the son of a Kenyan immigrant, did mention it briefly in his speech at the Democratic Convention, bringing it back to self-interest in an effort to make it more palatable.

I never thought I'd live to see a day when due process was my rallying cry, but sadly that's what it has come to.

For the conservatives, the round-up never happened or wasn’t so bad, and the crime is that Gore’s vicious, pandering remarks are being underreported by the liberal press. The MSM, as both left and right scornfully call the mainstream media now that the Internet has given them some place to say it, did not by and large make much of the Gore story. Why not? Is it because they are more responsible, and it really isn't much of a story? Because they don’t want to offend the Saudis? Are the blogs a kind of minor league now where inflammatory opinion is tested out with scouts present to see if it has major league potential?

The anti-Gore reaction would have quickly become farcical if continued, once Bush risked expending a few more points of his dangerously low public credibility trying to defend the rights of an Arab company to buy U.S. ports. I doubt you'll hear many of the bloggers I quoted mentioning the hijackers in that context.

To recap, we’ve seen a big bag of tricks put to use, worth naming and reviewing for future reference. The Surge of Feigned Outrage, using words like defamation, slander, perfidy and treason. Money-Changed-Hands, which plays up the resentment of the underpaid working class for the benefit of those who underpay them. We Have Our Own Numbers, quibbling over the details rather than the larger principle at stake. Minimizing an effect by playing Absolute-and-Relative (here’s another egregious example). Saying We’re At War, as if open discussion weren’t even more important in a crisis. Playing Dumb, which has gotten me through many a day and many a night, but doesn't belong in serious political discourse. Labelling, disqualifying a source as “far-left” before rather than after hearing them. Guilt by Association, tarring with a broad brush before generous application of feathers.

Learn to recognize these common rhetorical moves and be on the watch for their effects. Don’t believe the hysterical conservatives, but don’t be too quick to believe the liberals either, at least not those who like to slumber on while dreaming of their shining white knight preparing to reclaim Excalibur. Just believe the facts, try to get them from the source, and from as many sources as possible. Keep on gathering them until you collapse under their weight.