'Political Correctness' Kills - NYT Reports

Yesterday's (6/10/05) NYT had a front page article headlined "Report Details F.B.I.'s Failure on 2 Hijackers", detailing "a series of bungled opportunities in an episode that many officials now regard as their best chance to have detected or disrupted the Sept. 11 plot."

Citing a Justice Department report released on Thursday:

"The report provides new information about the bureau's mishandling of a warning from an agent in Phoenix in July 2001 about Middle Eastern extremists connected to Osama bin Laden using American schools to receive aviation training.

"The F.B.I.'s cumbersome computer system - still beset by problems today - did not automatically forward the agent's memorandum to bureau officials who were supposed to receive copies of it, the report found. Those agents who did see the warning did not have the time to follow it up, or disregarded it because they felt the presence of Middle Eastern flight students was already commonly known. The agents were also concerned that racial profiling had become so "hot" an issue that they could not pursue the Phoenix agent's suspicions, according to the report." [italics added]

In other words, if it weren't for 'political correctness', chances are greater that 2800 people would still be alive, the airline industry wouldn't be entirely bankrupt, the economy wouldn't have taken a $100Bln hit, and New York's skyline would be intact.

One of the most important principles that Ayn Rand has always stood for is that: ideas matter. In other words, having and acting on true ideas is an issue of life and death. Unfortunately, Americans have long been non-intellectual or even anti-intellectual, shrugging off and ignoring the nonsense that spews out of our leftist colleges. It is nonsense, but it's also dangerous nonsense. These ideas need to be confronted head on -- not left to surreptitiously infiltrate our culture and ultimately tie the hands of our law enforcement officials.

Of course, we still haven't learned our lesson, as any 85-year-old Chinese grandmother who has had her shoes searched at airport security could attest. We waste tremendous resources searching those who pose an impossibly low probability of being a threat, 'going through the motions' so as not to 'offend' anyone.

So it could easily happen again.