> 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...
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/ dave /