Fake Marriages Are Not Terrorism

The Bush White House has tried to keep Americans as hyped up about the threat of terrorist attack as much as possible. This state of perpetual hypervigilance has been justified by supposed evidence of terrorists lurking everywhere, always on the verge of attack.

Among other things, the right wingers have pointed to the large number of anti-terrorist prosecutions conducted by the Department of Justice. If there are so many anti-terrorist cases being prosecuted, the argument goes, there must be a lot of terrorists.

What if those anti-terrorist cases weren’t against terrorists at all? Well, according to the logic used by the right wing, that would mean that there actually are not so many terrorists threatening us. As luck would have it, that’s just what an audit has found. According to a new audit of the Department of Justice, many of the cases that the Bush Administration has claimed as anti-terrorist victories actually have nothing to do with terrorism at all.

One of the examples from the audit is the case of a prosecution of a marriage broker who arranged fake marriages between foreigners and American citizens. That’s illegal, but it has nothing to do with terrorism. The marriage broker wasn’t trying to smuggle terrorists into the USA.

In another case, a Mexican citizen tried to use someone else’s name on an application for a passport. That’s a crime, but is it terrorism? In the world of the right wing, it is. The rest of us can recognize that it isn’t.

Terrorism is a bad thing, to be sure, but it isn’t nearly as pervasive as the right wing claims it is. We need a new President who can see terrorist threats as they really are, not as their overworked imaginations would like them to be.

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