Are we a bit overly suspicious on the border?

An interesting take on the issue of border security from the Seattle PI. The leading newspaper in Seattle examined the current climate on both sides of the border and found that perhaps Canada is taking on too much of an American psyche when it comes to crossing the line.

Joel Connelly one of the PI’s columnists, recounted a recent attempt by a Seattle gardening expert who seemed to arouse suspicion among the cautious members on Canada’s side of the border. In an article titled, “Leaders cultivate fear here and in Canada”, Connelly provided the almost comical story of Dan Hinkley, the gardening expert who was on his way to Victoria for a meeting of the North American Rock Gardening Society.

His declaration of intent at the border, led to his being asked to step aside for further investigation, as the Border officials apparently mistook A Rock for Iraq and ran up the red flags.

It’s almost worthy of an Abbott and Costello routine of who’s on first as poor Hinkley tried to explain just what rock gardening is, eventually resorting to a closed fist rendition of rocks upon each other, which only seemed to alarm the border folks further.

You sense that it was more of a mis-understanding rather than incompetence, but surely they can handle these things a little bit better, a gardening expert is probably not high on the jihadist list of those wishing to do us harm. Surely some common sense would have solved this particular incident before it got to such silly lengths.

It’s a cautionary article about the politics of fear and how it is changing our every day handling of simple tasks such as crossing the border for business or pleasure. Connelly traces some past incidents; some recent and some historical. He sounds the alarm that manipulation of fear can cause great repercussions for individual freedoms and our sense of democracy.

It’s well worth a read, if only for the visual of a rock expert trying to convince a border guard that he comes in peace and means no ill will. Check it out below!

Leaders cultivate fear here and in Canada
By JOEL CONNELLY
P-I COLUMNIST
Monday July 3, 2006

Against a backdrop of Fourth of July and Canada Day celebrations, easygoing homegrown events bespeaking the charm of free societies, a funny but sad e-mail arrived recently.

Its sender was Dan Hinkley, the gardening expert whose world-renowned Heronswood Nursery was recently shut down by the Philadelphia-based Burpee seed company.

"I was heading to Victoria the other day to give a talk at a conference of the North American Rock Gardening Society," Hinkley wrote. "I was questioned at the border as to what I was going to do in Canada, and I told the guard I was going to a rock-gardening conference.

"At that time, he asked me to step aside and brought out his supervisor, and they chatted. Then, the supervisor came over and asked the nature of the gardening conference on Iraq.

"I said, 'a rock.' He said, 'Whatever,' but what kind of 'a rock?' It was not all that easy to answer. Like, how big do you make your rocks look with your hand? So, I put my fists together and said, 'You know, a rock.'

"He actually backed away for a moment and then I asked if I could get out my promotion material. He let me go, but I'm sure with a little embarrassment.

"Not until later did I realize what had gone on. I chuckled to myself the rest of the trip, thinking how insane this world had become."

An Iraq gardening conference? Well, Saddam Hussein did once scheme to rebuild the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. He settled for tacky palaces.

The point is that officialdom, in the U.S. but also north of the border, is cultivating a climate of suspicion and fear.

What for? The obvious goals are threefold: a) to dampen growing public unrest at what seems to be a quagmire in Iraq, b) to expand state powers to intrude into citizens' lives and c) to pare back citizens' insistence on openness and accountability.

In Canada, there was the recent high-profile arrest of seven Muslim men, who stand charged with plotting to detonate truck bombs at the Toronto Stock Exchange and an office of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, and even to invade Parliament and behead Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

It was a massive story -- Canada's loss of innocence, said some pundits -- coming just as Harper's new conservative government moves to tighter ties with the Bush administration.

U.S.-style security measures had delegates backed up when Harper headlined last month's United Nations urban forum in Vancouver, B.C.

What's unclear is whether these men, whatever their hatred of Canada, ever got beyond talk and how far they moved to acquire tools to do the deed.

Similarly, after a group of young Black Muslims in Miami was busted, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced with fanfare that a major plot aimed at blowing up the Sears Tower in Chicago had been broken. It seems, however, that the government's informant had a key role in obtaining the fertilizer essential to bomb making.

The announcement came amid dissent over terrorism-fighting tactics of the Bush administration and on the eve of a major Supreme Court decision on legal rights of those imprisoned at Guantanamo.

The administration holds people (even American citizens) without trial. It has told us it can eavesdrop on overseas calls with no court order. It has hinted at treason when The New York Times disclosed the surveillance of suspects' bank records.

If scared, citizens in democratic societies go along with suspensions of civil liberties -- even internment of Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians during World War II.
Only later, do they ask: What purpose was served in sending future U.S. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta to a camp, or the boyhood internment of the great Vancouver scientist-ecologist David Suzuki?

Was the U.S. made safer in the Cold War for turning back leftist Vancouver Alderman Harry Rankin at the border? What was gained by blocking Canadian author Farley Mowat from a California speaking gig because of his "security file?"

What purpose will it achieve if shoppers and people transporting goods across the world's longest peaceful border must produce passports?

Heightened measures against terrorism are necessary: We learned that when a vehicle filled with bomb ingredients, driven by a man named Ahmed Ressam, was stopped coming off a ferry in Port Angeles, a month before the new millennium.

It took 9/11 to expand policing and staffing at the U.S.-Canada border and at last to put a dent in lucrative drug- and people-smuggling operations.

Still, the Bush and Harper regimes seem intent on using border drug busts to discredit Vancouver's widely watched effort to move from a punishment to a treatment-based drug policy.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. It goes both ways, a readiness to resist those who would do us physical harm and to realize that those in power manipulate our fears to achieve their political ends.

"The tragedy of Sept. 11 shook our sense of security and made us realize that we, too, are vulnerable to acts of terrorism," U.S. District Judge John Coughenour said in sentencing Ressam.

"Unfortunately, some believe that this threat renders our Constitution obsolete ... If that view is allowed to prevail, the terrorists will have won."

P-I columnist Joel Connelly can be reached at 206-448-8160 or joelconnelly@seattlepi.com.