Background:
The following discussion (which appeared on Anderson Cooper 360 on August 12, 2010) concerns the topic of so-called "terror babies," the notion that terrorists will come to the United states to have children, then take them back to their home countries and raise them as terrorists. Since the children are born in the U.S., they will be citizens; thus they will be eligible for U.S. passports. Having the passport will allow them to easily enter the country and thus, as the theory goes, the indoctrinated children (now adults) will be able to launch terrorist attacks in the U.S.
Analysis:
Anderson Cooper does a good job of asking Rep. Gohmert for evidence that terrorist groups really are trying to take advantage of U.S citizenship policy and pointing out flaws in his argument. The part of the discussion that I am interested in here begins at about 4:50 into the clip. Cooper tries to point out that a former FBI agent has said that there is no evidence that terrorists are trying to implement the terror baby plan. From the transcript:
COOPER: Are you willing to have a conversation or do you want to just yell?So, just to summarize: Gohmert admits that the FBI agent has claimed that there is no credible evidence of such a terror baby plan, but then he claims that the same agent would have said, on 9/10 that there was no credible report that terrorists were trying to bring down the World Trade Center. Though once again Gohmert is not explicit about his conclusion, he apparently is trying to argue that we should discount the FBI agent's claim.
One of the things that the former FBI agent pointed out --
GOHMERT: You will not let me present what we have --
COOPER: OK, one of the former --
(CROSSTALK)
COOPER: One of the former FBI agents pointed out on this program last night that terrorist groups have no problem recruiting U.S. citizens, have no problems sending people over here, that they don't need to prepare 20 years from now.
(CROSSTALK)
GOHMERT: -- there is no credible report of such a plan.
COOPER: Where it is?
GOHMERT: And I bet you, on 9/10, he were to come on your show and say there is no credible report of a plan to take down the World Trade Centers, because he didn't have one.
COOPER: OK. So, you don't believe the FBI when they currently say there is no credible report?
(CROSSTALK)
GOHMERT: -- taking shots at me and look at the gaping hole in the security of this country. I'm an easy target, and you and Jon Stewart can have your fun. But please, at some point, look at the gaping hole in our security.
Let's formalize the argument:
(1) An FBI agent says that there is no credible report of a terror baby plan.
(2) But the same FBI agent would have said, on 9/10/2001 that there was no credible report of a plan to crash planes into the World Trade Center.
Therefore,
(3) We can safely ignore what this FBI agent says.
I think that there are a number of ways to analyze the fallacy committed here. But I think that the most serious problem is that Rep. Gohmert seems to want us to take a lack of evidence there there is a terror baby plan as actual evidence that there really is such a plan. We might paraphrase this line of reasoning as follows: "The FBI had no credible evidence of the 9/11 terror plot and yet it obviously happened. So since there is no credible evidence of a terror baby plot, we need to take such a plot seriously."
This is a case of an argument from ignorance fallacy. Presumably the FBI is sometimes wrong about future terror plots, but the fact that there is no evidence of a given plot cannot be taken as evidence that the plot is genuine. Of course we are not commenting here on the truth of premise (1); we aren't in a position to say whether the FBI agent would have claimed that there was no credible evidence of the 9/11 plot. We are only criticizing the form of Rep. Gohmert's argument to the effect that we can discount what the FBI says about the alleged terror baby conspiracy. That we lack evidence that some claim is true is not evidence that the claim actually is true. This argument is DOA.
