Mark Steyn asks "does political correctness kill?" He answers the question by posing another question: why didn't the FBI follow up on the famous "Phoenix memo" about radical Islamists attending flight schools?
Three weeks ago, FBI director Mueller was asked why the Bureau had declined to act on the memo. He said, ‘There are more than 2,000 aviation academies in the United States. The latest figure I think I heard is something like 20,000 students attending them. And it was perceived that this would be a monumental undertaking without any specificity as to particular persons.’A ‘monumental undertaking’? OK, there are 20,000 students. Eliminate all the women, discount Irv Goldbloom of Queens and Gord MacDonald of Winnipeg and Stiffy Farquahar-ffarquahar of Little Blandford-on-the-Smack and just concentrate on fellows with names like ...oh, I dunno, Mohammed, and Waleed, and Ahmed. How many would that be? 150? 200? Say it’s 500. Is Mueller really saying that the FBI with all its resources cannot divert ten people to go through 2,000 names apiece and pull out the ones worth running through the computer?
Well, yes, officially, he is. But what he really means is not that the Bureau lacked ‘any specificity as to particular persons’, but that the specificity itself was the problem. In August 2001, no FBI honcho was prepared to fire off a memo saying ‘Check out the Arabs’.