City Life
To have a conspiracy, you need competency
By John RatliffJanuary 29, 2004
Here -- as far as I can tell -- are some facts:
On Feb. 4 of this year, an academic conference titled "Islam and the Law: The Question of Sexism" took place in the Eidman Courtroom at the University of Texas law school.
On Feb. 9, two men who identified themselves as Army Intelligence agents appeared at the law school and asked for a list of the conference participants and a tape of the conference proceedings. They carried neither subpoenas nor search warrants. After talking to a number of people and attempting unsuccessfully to find the organizers of the conference, they departed empty-handed. One of them left a business card identifying him as Special Agent Jason D. Treesh, Department of the Army, MI Detachment.
On discovering that Army Intelligence agents were looking for her, Sahar Aziz, a conference organizer, called Malcolm Greenstein, a lawyer, who in turn called the number Treesh had written on the back of his card. Greenstein was told by Treesh that two Army lawyers had attended the conference, where three men had brought suspicion upon themselves by questioning the lawyers about military matters.
(Full disclosure: Greenstein and I were once both part of the same canoe trip down the Rio Grande which involved almost as much carrying of canoes as paddling them. Though the low water level was not technically his fault, I remain bitter.)
On Feb. 13, Aziz and Greenstein held a press conference along with several other lawyers and law students to denounce the Army investigators' actions.
Collectively, they have made a number of assumptions about the situation, many of which would appear to contradict each other:
• On the one hand, nobody at the conference was specifically identified as being affiliated with the Army, so there would have been no reason for anyone to ask about military information. In retrospect, however, the organizers now believe that they have identified Treesh's sources as two lawyers wearing cowboy boots and carrying green military-issue notebooks.
• Law enforcement has a technical term for this kind of imaginative leap: It's called "profiling." (On the other hand, maybe what they were asked was something like "Hey, where'd you get the fly notebooks?")
• The group's lawyers stressed that the conference was a nonpartisan, nonpolitical event. But they also repeatedly characterized this investigation as part of an intentional, ongoing attempt to shut down criticism of the Bush administration. So was the conference political, or wasn't it? When this question was raised at the press conference, there was a moment of silence, followed by attorney Jim Harrington's answer: "The Bush administration views anything connected with Islam or Muslims as a threat." Oh. You forgot to mention that part.
n Aziz suggested that the alleged agents went door-to-door in a blatant attempt to intimidate UT students and faculty. (Whether they meant to or not, that was the effect produced.) But as Greenstein lamented, "One of the most distressing things about this is that here, in this place where people are being taught about their rights, law school employees were saying 'I don't know, maybe you could try that office. . . .' " In other words, Treesh and his associate were going door-to-door because they were being sent door-to-door.
So considering that this is a bunch of lawyers we're talking about, the organizers' argument is frankly a little leaky.
It is not, however, beyond the realm of possibility. These days, even the most actively depraved imagination is routinely outstripped by U.S. government activity; you practically need to be hallucinating just to keep up.
But more to the point, if I were a Muslim who had attended the conference, I wouldn't take much comfort from these discrepancies. As you may have noticed, American citizens can now be imprisoned indefinitely, without access to lawyers or anyone else, as long as they've been designated "enemy combatants" by the president.
All such citizens currently being held -- as far as we know -- are Muslims. And who are they being held by? The U.S. Army.
So if you're an American Muslim, and someone claiming to be Army Intelligence comes looking for your name on a list, the question isn't whether you're being paranoid. It's whether you're being paranoid enough.
The problem with the Bush-did-it theory is the same with most such theories: It assumes endless competence and organizational skills on the part of the powers that be, and it doesn't take into account the banal, real-world static that flourishes in big organizations: accident, coincidence, miscommunication, bad faith, incompetence.
A conversation with Treesh himself does not exactly inspire confidence in his judgment, or in his ability to carry out a sensitive intelligence operation. By the time I called his cell-phone number, whoever answered was denying he was Treesh, and his tone -- by turns plaintive, defensive and aggrieved -- resembled that of a kid who's just found out putting cherry bombs in mailboxes is a federal offense.
Every time I asked him who was, he replied, almost tearfully, "I've talked to 40 people today!" He gave me another number, but wouldn't tell me what relevance it had to my questions. "My boss told me to give you her number," said Treesh/Not-Treesh. Your boss? "We all go to our bosses for help, sir," he said.
(Later, I called him for clarification about the number he'd given me -- "Jason Treesh," said the voice-mail message -- and when he returned my call, he identified himself, apparently forgetting that he wasn't giving out that information.)
You don't have to be convinced of an administration anti-Muslim plot to think that allowing the Army to conduct domestic intelligence operations is a really, really bad idea.
But in a way, a conspiracy might be comforting. After all, an organized conspiracy means that someone is in charge of it. Which means that someone can stop it.
The alternative is believing that American citizens are being terrorized at random by incompetent, petulant government officials who don't recognize the Constitutional limits of their power, who won't admit when they're wrong and who won't take responsibility for their actions.
Now that's scary.
johnratliff@earthlink.net
