Green Party official busted at gunpoint

[/ dave /]

Rob Schaap wrote:

> I hate it, too, when dissentors get caught messin' with the facts (if, of
> course, that's what she did) - it allows t'other side to ridicule all
> dissentors, and thus avoid The Point.

It goes beyond that, I think.

We have yet to get the word on what really went down vis-a-vis the "profiling"
Oden alleges, but if it ends up looking like she made a point of spinning the
incident as an instance of targeted political oppression when it was something
else entirely (importantly, a "something else" already amply endowed with
questions and concerns), the "other side" you mention above will be the least of
our worries.

There is now an email/press release from the Greens circling the globe, spreading
ever outward as a highly-charged email inevitably will do, making its way into the
mailboxes of millions of people of all political persuasions and varying degrees
of political involvement, many of them eager for information that will enable them
to understand the state of things and make informed opinions.

Few would deny that, however little or much Oden was involved in provoking the
officials, her treatment was deplorable in many respects. And few would deny that
the general drift of official behavior has taken a nasty turn of late, and we need
to be concerned and take action wherever possible. But the entire thrust of the
email is built around the explicit claim that Oden was initially singled out as a
result of the stance of the Greens in relation to the bombing (and she even goes
so far as to refer to an article she wrote a few days before as a catalyst), when
in fact there is no substantiation for said profiling claim in this instance, and
there may well never be.

Given what we know of government behavior, we're no doubt fully entitled to
suspect that said singling-out would be possible, but possible and verifiably true
are two very different things. Does the possibility that it might be true remove
us from the obligation of actually following through and verifying things? No.
Furthermore, when there's no evidence whatsoever presented to substantiate the
claim, wouldn't most sensible people understandably balk at accepting the conclusion?

And the key point is, anyone with any sense can see this. The leap Oden makes
from, "An official told me that my name had been flagged in the computer," to, "I
was targeted because the Green Party USA opposes the bombing of innocent civilians
in Afghanistan," is breathtaking, almost comical in its naive audacity. She goes
on to say, "Of course I had cooperated; why do I care if they search my bags? ...
What I didn't like was being singled out because of my political views."
Interesting how readily she jumped to this conclusion. Even if we gave her the
benefit of the doubt, and allowed that it was all some kind of misunderstanding
owing to her being flustered and not thinking straight at the time, it doesn't
justify her staying with the conclusion long after she walked out of the airport.

Was there at no time after the incident a sober assessment of what had transpired,
by Oden and the others she consulted with, before they blanketed the internet with
their press releases claiming she had been targeted? Did it ever occur to them
that there may have been other reasons for the search that didn't flatter what
would seem to be a sort of reflexive, self-absorbed activist paranoia? It's hard
to imagine that someone wouldn't have pointed out the disconnect between "I was
singled out" and "It was because...", but maybe there was a kind of
group-solidarity reinforcement thing happening that squelched any dissonant
thought patterns (the phenomenon is well-documented). Does this increase the
credibility of the Greens in the eyes of the public-at-large?

Whatever it was that justified the claim in the press release, it will likely
precipitate yet another maddening situation wherein significant numbers of
"regular people," i.e. non-activists, will instinctively move a step away from the
left and important left causes because said left will be seen to have been trying
to pull the wool over the eyes of those non-activists to make a cheap point. Since
those non-activists are nowhere near as gullible as some might imagine them to be,
whatever bonds of trust and solidarity have been built up over many months will
have been dealt a glancing, if not stinging, blow.

It's an all-too-familiar situation, where (as I wrote few months ago in relation
to another incident) "individuals begin to fall away in their sympathies for the
cause, because although they may be inclined in their hearts to support the
overall aims of the movement, they intuitively shrink from getting behind
something that they feel can't stand up to scrutiny."

So unless the authorities confess publicly in the next few days to deliberately
targeting Nancy Oden (ha!) or evidence of a plot against her is uncovered by wily
investigators, those of us on the fringes of the activist community who have spent
hours and hours since 9/11 trying to engage with family members, friends,
co-workers, and others to convince them through the strength of solid, supportable
arguments that this "war" is not what it seems will begin to receive the
inevitable emails and comments over the next few days prefaced with, "So, did you
see that email from the Greens that's making the rounds?" and we won't have to
wonder at the cynical commentary and professed disillusionment that will follow.
Ah, well. It's all in a day's work, I suppose...

--

/  dave  /