MIRROR, MIRROR, ON THE WALL... :

Dump Dem Bums (MAUREEN DOWD, June 2, 2002, NY Times)

If the spirited Nancy Drew had grown up, she would probably have ended up a dispirited whistle-blower.

That's what happens to women of ingenuity and integrity in macho organizations - from Sherron Watkins at Enron to Coleen Rowley at the F.B.I. - who piece together clues and ferret out criminal behavior and management cover-ups.

First, their male superiors tell them to shut up. And if the women point fingers anyhow, they end up being painted by their status-quo colleagues as wacky, off-the-reservation snitches with dubious futures.

Here's what it means to be Mo Dowd : on November 25, 2001, she took conservative straight white Christian male John Ashcroft to task for racial profiling when he detained Middle Eastern immigrants after the 9-11 attack. Six months later she thinks he was an idiot for not racially profiling Arabs prior to 9-11, as a young woman in the FBI recommended. That kind of whiplash-inducing reversal would be fine if, like her colleague Nicholas Kristof earlier this week, she had the moral courage to acknowledge that liberal caterwauling about racial profiling, like that of the NY Times editorial page, had contributed to what she now decries as "timidity" by the FBI and the Justice Department. As Mr. Kristof said :

As we gather around F.B.I. headquarters sharpening our machetes and watching the buzzards circle overhead, let's be frank: There's a whiff of hypocrisy in the air.

One reason aggressive agents were restrained as they tried to go after Zacarias Moussaoui is that liberals like myself--and the news media caldron in which I toil and trouble--have regularly excoriated law enforcement authorities for taking shortcuts and engaging in racial profiling. As long as we're pointing fingers, we should peer into the mirror.

The timidity of bureau headquarters is indefensible. But it reflected not just myopic careerism but also an environment (that we who care about civil liberties helped create) in which officials were afraid of being assailed as insensitive storm troopers.

So it's time for civil libertarians to examine themselves with the same rigor with which we are prone to examine others.

Unfortunately, like the evil Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Ms Dowd's mirror doesn't actually reflect a potentially blemished image back when she looks in it--instead it serves only to flatter her vanity and assure her that she remains the "fairest one of all".

UPDATE :
WHO'S THIS UPSTART? :
In Search of Makeovers (Mary McGrory, June 2, 2002, Washington Post)

I feel sure my old friend Elliot Richardson would salute Coleen Rowley, the general counsel of the Minnesota FBI office who blew the whistle on the constipated thinking of her superiors. Like Richardson, she risked a job she loved to tell the truth.

The Minnesota office was on to Zacarias Moussaoui, who is now in a Virginia jail awaiting trial as the "20th hijacker" in the September plot. The G-men were thwarted in their attempt to search his computer, Rowley wrote: Everyone phrased the request so obtusely that it invited rejection. This reluctance has struck Washington dumb: The FBI has slapped a phone tap on just about anybody whose views rankled.

Rowley couldn't persuade the CIA's terror specialists to give Moussaoui the once-over either.

You didn't think that Mary McGrory, the grand old dam of the columnists, was going to let that whipper-snapper Mo Dowd steal a march on her did you? Compare this impassioned defense of Coleen Rowley, who mysteriously couldn't get anyone to investigate Moussaoui as a terrorist, with Ms McGrory's own condemnation--Bungling on the 9-11 Prisoners (Mary McGrory, February 10, 2002, Washington Post)--of the Feds for investigating a not dissimilar suspect after 9-11 :

Tony Oulai was caught up in the great dragnet that followed Sept. 11. He has been whisked around six U.S. prisons since the day he was picked up at a Florida airport and screeners found a stun gun and flight manuals in his luggage. In one jail, he alleges, he was beaten. The administrator of the Baker County (Fla.) Detention Center retorts, as a denial, that the facility has TV and microwave ovens in every cell. The Justice Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service are involved because Oulai overstayed his student visa. They refuse all comment, even on a secret document obtained by The Post that exonerates Oulai from any involvement in the events of Sept. 11.

Boarding a plane with an expired visa, a stun gun, and flight manuals? And Ms McGrory can't understand why he was being detained? Maybe Ms Rowley should have written her a memo, huh?

UPDATE II :
HERE'S WHAT'S LEFT ONCE YOU REMOVE THE RACIAL PROFILING :
On closer look, Rowley memo ignores Constitution (JONATHAN TURLEY, May 31, 2002, Houston Chronicle)

Rowley's criticism of the FBI largely turns on disagreement over the meaning of probable cause. Rowley insists that there was probable cause to secure a search warrant for Moussaoui's computer and personal effects. FBI headquarters disagreed, and it was right.

On Aug. 15, 2001, Moussaoui was arrested by the Immigration and Nationalization Service on a charge of overstaying his visa. At that time, the Minnesota office only had an "overstay" prisoner and a suspicion from an agent that he might be a terrorist because of his religious beliefs and flight training. If this hunch amounted to probable cause, it is hard to imagine what would not satisfy such a standard.

I happen to believe that profiling is a useful law enforcement tool and I'd be lenient about "probale cause" where someone fits a profile. Do their columns lionizing Ms Rowley mean that Ms Dowd & Ms McGrory think so too?

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 2, 2002 12:38 PM