On bangs and whimpers

he was finished. He was censored by the Senate on 2 December 1954, and died on 2 May 1957, at the age of 48, of alcohol-induced liver failure.

— The Fulbright Hearings. Senator William Fulbright (D-Arkansas), chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, conducted a series of hearings between 1966 and 1971 on the on-going Vietnam War. The most important hearings were held on eleven different days between 20 April 1971 and 27 May 1971, and helped galvanize public opinion against the war.

— The Church Committee hearings of 1975-76. Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho) headed the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. In 1975 the committee conducted hearings on attempts by the CIA to assassinate foreign leaders, including Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, the Diem brothers of Vietnam, Gen. René Schneider of Chile, and Fidel Castro of Cuba.

Under recommendations and pressure by this committee, President Gerald Ford issued Executive Order 11905 (ultimately replaced in 1981 by President Reagan’s Executive Order 12333) to ban U.S.-sanctioned assassinations of foreign leaders. The ban is in effect today.

After the first session of the Islamic radicalization hearings, we already know that these hearings are not going to become truly important congressional hearings. In today’s political climate, nothing can bring a conversation to an end more quickly than accusing a public figure of engaging stereotyping ethnic or religious minorities, of ethnic profiling and scapegoating – whether or not such accusations have any merit. This is the case with these hearings, and you could see it in the tone and body language of many of the Republicans on the committee. Yes, they denied charges by Democrats that this was a case of witch hunting and stereotyping, but they acted as if they were simply hoping to ride out the hearings without doing anything too disastrous.

The final stanza of T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Man” ends with: “This is the way the world ends /Not with a bang but a whimper.” We have to wait until the hearings are over, but the sense here is that Eliot’s lines would be a fitting epitaph for this particular effort.

2. Privatizing airport security

The debate about whether or not to privatize security at U.S. airport continues. Representative John Mica (R-Florida) is determined to have the 60,000 or so Transportation Security Administration (TSA) personnel at airports security checkpoints replaced by private contractors. For