Shortly after the assault of Sept. 11, a buffoonish Republican congressman from Louisiana named John Cooksey—incredibly enough, a member of the Committee on International Relations—had made the following contribution to the debate on ethnic profiling: "If I see someone come in and he's got a diaper on his head and a fan belt around that diaper on his head, that guy needs to be pulled over and checked."
OK, it's very bad form to link to Christopher Hitchens twice in two days, but he's written a fascinating response to the claim, endlessly repeated by Frank Rich and others, that a frat-house secret police force is running amok in post-9/11 America. Rich specifically referred to an allegedly ominous comment, made by the then White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, that "Americans... need to watch what they say, watch what they do". Read Hitchens' account of the actual context and see how it differs from the version spun by Rich et al. I don't imagine the Al-Jazeera journalist interviewing Hitchens for a programme about the US "fear industry" will have wanted to hear that particular anecdote.