When in Danger, Profiling Is Rational
I’m going to offer a lukewarm defense of TSA’s new procedures. Well, not quite … but I do want people to back away from the more absurd rhetoric.
Yes, I had a good laugh about that T-shirt: “We get off before you get on.” And there are undoubtedly some TSA employees who are enjoying the chance to grope. But I am sure that this article about how upset many of them are about having to do these intrusive searches is more typical. A friend of mine works for TSA, and several weeks ago he told me that he was actively seeking new work so that he would not have to start touching people in intimate areas.
But let’s not forget why the whole body scans and the intimate pat-down are now part of airport screening: it is because of the Fruit-of-the-Boom incident last December, and the less widely known explosive packed bras of Chechen “black widows.” TSA’s efforts do not stem from a desire to annoy us or to deny Americans their civil liberties. They are based on very real security concerns.
Now — is there a better way to do this? Almost certainly, there is.
At least part of the problem is that Bush’s Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta was dead set against “ethnic profiling.” In light of the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II (Secretary Mineta was an unwilling participant), this is not surprising. But what is the alternative? There is a very strong correlation between religion and ethnicity and the likelihood that you are going to blow up an American airliner — indeed, nearly 100%.
Is this unfair to Muslims and Arabs? Yup. Life is hard. Get used to it. We are at war. There is no need for TSA to be rude about focusing their attention on passengers who fit the profile, but it sure makes more sense than what we are doing now. I’ve experienced a very similar form of profiling, and while I didn’t like it, I completely understand its regrettable necessity. I hope that those who would get shunted aside from more detailed questioning and searching based on fitting the profile will understand it, too.
While you are correct that profiling is sensible, you are wrong to think that it is enough to focus on obvious Muslims. The terrorists have been very successful in converting and recruiting people who wouldn’t fit any profile and in finding new ways to hide weapons. The more difficult we make it for them, the better the chance they will screw up.
Really vb? I’ve read this converting thing before, but I can’t think of an instance of a non-muslim “converted” into carrying a bomb, etc, onto an airplane.
Usually people coerced into such an act will foil themselves by their actions. The ability to calmly carry something like these attempts out is small without showing signs. Almost all of these attempts have been clearly suspect and only have gotten as far as they did because of political correctness or flat-out security break-downs, like the underwear bomber.. never should have been allowed on a plane..
I said obvious Muslims. I support profiling, but it has to be a part of a broader intelligence effort, including things like monitoring internet sites and tracking phone calls. And we shouldn’t announce that we are only going to look closely at Muslim males under 40. That’s like posting the combination to your safe on a prison bulletin board.
This is where I think people get it wrong. It’s just the like the left to pull the race/bigot card. The fact is, to me at least, it is profiling behavior tags. It is not profiling nationality, religion, or any thing else. What they are trying to do is identify things or behaviors that don’t fit the situation. If some thing doesn’t track, they can escalate the investigation up to the point of a body scan or search.
Chechens are Muslims from Russia. There are 30 million Muslims in China. Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim country. Many Africans are Muslim. Muslims from Yugoslavia are the same ethnic stock as Christians there. Many are fair-skin and blond. (Forced conversions, during the Ottoman conquests in the 16th/17th century). North Africans, such as Berbers, can be blue-eyed. Some Afghans have green eyes.
Profiling by obvious appearance is not simplistic.
The Israelis profile behavior, circumstances of the visit.
It’s the NON-obvious Muslims that you need to be concerned about!
First of all, al Qaeda likes to use Balkans Muslims from Bosnia or Albania who can’t easily be distinguished from other white Europeans.
Islam is an ideology; it is neither a nation nor a race. For that reason, its adherents can be of any racial or national origin. There are all too many native-born, English-speaking Americans who have converted to Islam, perhaps in college, in prison, or as a result of marriage to a Muslim.
It is unsafe to assume that only young Muslim men are dangerous, not Muslims in general. Islamists are happy to sacrifice any of their own people, of either sex and of any age, in pursuit of the advancement of Islam.
By politically correct American standards, if a woman was raped and the perpetrator still in the area, everyone would be stopped regardless of description, whites, blacks, men, women, children and nuns. The TSA can go straight to hell.
While I appreciate your practical rhetoric on the matter, I disagree. What if we find out a terrorist is packing C4 in their rectum, by luck; do we then begin body cavity searches on every passenger? Where does this stop? Our entire society is coming to a grinding halt, and our limp-wristed leaders won’t even use the word Islam in the pejorative. We are focused so much on airlines now that when the next big thing comes we’ll be completely oblivious. Then we’ll move our draconian measures to stopping another of that type of threat.
You cannot have free travel without risk. You minimize that risk by dealing harshly with individuals who attempt or perpetrate these acts. The Time Square bomber nearly killed a thousand or more people and it has almost been forgotten by our complicit media. Instead its more and more invasive focus on airline passengers.
Until we are willing to shut down mosques that preach terrorist acts, or until we are ready to even admit that the enemy of our freedom (I understand that sounds cliché, but think about how freedoms are being severely limited) are single minded adherents to one religion, we will be helpless to stop this. When a Victory Mosque may get built with the help of federal dollars set aside to aid rebuilding the areas effected by 9-11, and a Greek Orthodox church cannot build because of hindrances put in place by the same port authority that fast-tracked the Mosque, then we are in big trouble, and no amount of grouping by TSA officials is going to fix that.
Rik,
You make a very good point. The time is fast coming where all Muslims are going to have to choose between Western freedom and their religion. This may sound harsh in a country that values Freedom of Religion. But violent Islamists are using that freedom, and others, to prosecute a war against us that our leaders are loathe to acknowledge. I understand their desire and strategy to marginalize the extremist Muslims. However, it is becoming more and more apparent that the the extremist Muslims are also the most devout Muslims…. the ones who have the power in their religion. I believe that many Muslims are peace loving people. Many of them came here to escape the oppression over there. I suspect many of them would embrace the need to renounce Islamist philosophy…. or perhaps choose a new religion. How many of them would actually object to profiling at airports and to deporting those brethren who are bent on violence…. and on the subjugation of others. Islamist behavior is not compatible with civilized society. It must be driven out… wherever it exists.
Throughout the history of mankind, those who have discriminated, profiled and utilized extreme prejudice have survived the best. It’s in our DNA to attempt to survive.
We – the American people – know who the enemy is. Somebody should call the president and enlighten him.
It’s either them or us. I prefer us.
When at war, not profiling and political correctness (which is a term that should banished to hell, along with tolerance) is irrational, destructive to the mindset of those ostensibly being protected, completely ineffective (which is precisely what the statists want), and guaranteed to get more of us killed, molested, cowering to our supposed masters of intelligence, or in general turn us into slaves of the elite.
Sorry to run on there but I was on a roll.
As much as I like General Petraeus for what he did in Iraq, I think he has designed us into a trap of COIN PC war waging, but that’s another topic for another day, probably soon.
Just exactly which rhetoric is it that you find absurd? That this government agency, without any input from the public and exactly zero Congressional approval, has decided to unilaterally throw out the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution wholesale?
I’m sorry. In any other instance, in every state in the country, and medical imaging device is required by law to be operated by trained personnel. Specifically trained personnel. That training requires at least two years of specific education, plus clinical rotations, plus certification by examination and in most states licensure. TSA agents require a high school diploma or GED, though there are ways around that.
And make no mistake, the scanners are regulated by the FDA and that makes them medical imaging devices, devices that have been only minimally tested and about which there is great concern in the medical community.
Then there is the issue of the scans themselves. Virtually everything that TSA has said to the public about the scans, how they will be handled and the uses to which they will be put is an outright lie. Not a misunderstanding or poor communication. Deliberate lies. They say the machines cannot save scans when they most certainly can save scans and not only can they save scans (they are all equipped with a USB port), they transmit them to a computer in another room for viewing purposes. If you can transmit to one computer, you can transmit anywhere. They say the scans aren’t saved, and yet Federal agents have been caught with a database of over 35,000 of them. These scans are so shockingly detailed that under any other circumstances they would be considered pornographic. As a matter of fact, they are detailed enough that they could reasonably act as whole-body fingerprints.
And then there are those “pat downs” – “pat downs” that literally feel inside your underwear, cup your breasts, finger your genitals. If your local police department did that to you at all you could sue them. If they did it without a warrant heads would roll. Exactly what is it do you think gives some low level government hack that makes little more than a McDonald’s burger flipper any just cause to search women, the elderly, nuns – or even just touch your junk? A strip search is less intrusive!
And it is not either/or you know. Yes, if you reject the scans – and you should – you will be subjected to the Gate Rape. However, if you don’t reject the scan and set off an alarm or have a breast prosthesis, an artificial knee, a prosthetic leg, you will be subjected to that Gate Rape anyway – in addition to the scan.
Not a single terrorist that has snuck something onto a plane has originated inside the United States. These police state tactics would not have stopped the shoe bomber or the underwear bomber or anyone else.
Ben Franklin used to say (he said it more than once) that those who would give up freedom for temporary safety deserved neither. One of our most precious freedoms is the Freedom from Unwarranted Search and Seizure. The Fourth Amendment has long been one of the biggest differences between the United States of America and the rest of the world. If we stand for the literal overthrow of our Fourth Amendment rights at the airport gates, then we have essentially thrown them away permanently. Everywhere.
So, exactly which rhetoric do you think is absurd Clayton?
Applause! You said it best, Granny.
Wow, Ms. Granny! If you don’t already have a blog, consider starting one. This was well-written, well thought out and powerfully expressed. Props to you!
No, Mr. Cramer, let us put the blame where it really belongs: on every TSA employee who takes the attitude that borderline sexual assault is a tolerable price to pay for being a Federal bureaucrat…if, indeed, it is not to be considered a perq.
well yelling at our government gets us absolutely no where, maybe if we can make tsa employees angry enough they will quit en masse and then MAYBE just maybe the government will listen
It’s time to stop yelling. As a man on Limbaugh’s show today stated and also challenged the rest of us: It’s time to start acting like men, not pawns. It’s time to say enough is enough.
Stay off the planes. Stop this complete intrusion into everyone’s life.
Your business suffers? Too Bad. Your mother died? Too bad. Do you really want to cave into the Administration’s takeover of your liberties? This is just one of a myriad of encroachments into our lives that we have let happen.
Kill the muslim jihadists and let’s have done with it.
It wasn’t just Norman Minetta. It was political correctness, a systemic intellectual rot that makes commonsense impossible. Until we can get over the idea that people have a right to go through life without getting their feelings hurt, the TSA idiocies will be with us and become even more totalitarian.
The last time I was strolling through the local ghetto, this lady heard me walking too close to her and she yelled out; “Halt! Who’s profiling there?” Everyone within the sound of her command froze in place. I later found out it was Maxine Waters.
Excellent that you put in that McVeigh considered himself an atheist/agnostic. The claim that he was driven by Christianity is often made by the “grasping-at-straws” crowd of relativists and, ironically, atheist/agnostics.
With regard to Hitler, well done. Here’s a like to a pdf describing Hitler’s relationship to the churches based the near-contemporaneous research of Gen. Donovan for the Nuremberg trials. Here’s a link to an index of other Nuremberg documents many of which relate to Hitler’s attempts to end Christianity.
For more irony look at the Nazi attitude towards Christmas. You can see it reflected in the face of just about every American public school superintendent.
Ouch
VB-
All attempts on airliners in the last decade have been by Muslim extremists. Although we keep hearing that the terrorists will recruit elderly Presbyterian women to carry bombs, this isn’t the case.
Might they recruit people who don’t “look the part”? Possibly. But this can be countered as well: pre-boarding questions can be designed to illicit a strong emotional response from muslim extremists, and those who react, subjected to intense scrutiny, and of course, full body searches. Find the bomber first, then the bomb.
The current situation, an over reaction to the reaction against the Japanese in 1941, makes about as much sense as it would for Roosevelt announce that since we don’t want to stigmatize the Japanese, and theoretically ANY aircraft might be carrying a bomb, the response to Pearl Harbor will be limited to shooting down a few aircraft, here and there, selected at random.
i agree Ben,
sure the jihadists will recruit others that dont fit the profile once we actually take measures proactively
but to not take the reasonable first steps (profiling, monitoring of no fly lists, cargo scrutiny, etc.) to “protect” from hypothetical second and third steps leaves us limp and powerless
“The more difficult we make it for them, the better the chance they will screw up.”
The only people we are making it difficult for is us. It is costing them absolutely nothing. This is insane. Get some Israelis over here and get this mess straighten out.
Get some Israelis over her?
WTF. Are you a complete wimp?
You actually are the antithesis of why we should fight for our liberty.
Why don’t you start digging your grave.
Mr Cramer is exactly right. Rather than heap our scorn on the TSA examiner, who, more than likely, doesn’t want to grope your private parts any more than you want to grope his/her privates. But they’ve got a job to do that is getting more and more “revealing”, as it were, by necessity.
We should profile.
We should blatantly profile young, able bodied males. Profile folks who paid cash for one way tickets, who have little or no baggage. Who show up at the last minute for check-in, who are sweating, etc, etc. Some folks are indeed going to be “offended”. Get over it.
This politically correct fear of “offending”, or of our shrinking at the contrived shouts of “racism!”, “prejudice!” plays right into the hands of those potential terrorists bent on killing you and me. Right now. Our Islamist/Muslim terrorist candidates and their mentors are schooled in “Lawfare”. They’re very effectively using our hard earned freedoms against us.
Moreover, we’re fighting a new kind of war. Mineta’s personally justified loathing of profiling is nowadays outdated. But, during the extreme uncertainties of the months immediately after the Japanese attacked his State, it was thought the quickest way of containing those potential enemies we could not at that time identify.
We’ve got a new brand of individually operating out-of-uniform killers, who, we in turn must disable or kill prior to them killing you or me.
Airplanes are their weapon of choice. What does it take to make us aware of this nine year old reality?
You are so common sense!!!! I do think we paint TSA agents with too broad a brush, and we should shift those who otherwise would be good prospects for law enforcement into Customs (especially Houston – my god, I love Continental Airlines, but IAH is seriously understaffed for processing returning travelers). We should have a sliding scale of profiling (lets start by exempting non-Muslim female senior citizens and blue-eye blond/red hair and obviously american black younger adult females right off the bat). Lets offer Muslims a pat-down redemption rewards card (in exchange for signing onto a “no-sue” agreement) that will make the extra scrutiny worth it and also provide a proof of travel activity.
“lets start by exempting non-Muslim female senior citizens…”
How do you tell a non-Muslim by sight?
“and blue-eye blond/red hair…”
There are red-haired Muslims. I heard Captain Nathaniel Fick (USMC-ret) talk about the fighting in Iraq; he mentioned seeing red-haired jihadist fighters, probably Chechens. And hair dye and contact lenses aren’t exactly high-tech.
“obviously american black younger adult females…”
There have been numerous cases of American Muslim women demanding special religious accomodations. Many of these women were black American converts. There is a dangerous Islamist group, Jamaat ul-Fuqra, composed mostly of black American converts; it has dozens, perhaps hundreds of members living in fortified compounds around the U.S.
I would also note that terrorists cross-cooperate. One of the worst terrorist attacks on Americans was the massacre of 17 Puerto Rican Catholic pilgrims at Lod Airport in Israel (8 Israelis and a Canadian were also killed). The killers were “Japanese Red Army” terrorists acting for their Palestinian allies. Being Japanese, they passed through Israeli profiles.
Profiling will help – but if we rely on it, the terrorists will adapt to defeat it.
…while the media mention and agitate at new “outrages” [..a word used in a headline...] performed by the TSA screeners, we should instead aim our wrath at the genuinely outrageous pacific attitudes of the Muslim/Islamist “seculars” who are quietly content to stand by as their co-religionists murder American citizens right in our midst. This is hypocrisy of the highest order.
We Americans should demand action within Islam itself to stop the homicidal elements “justified” by rationalization of their origins some centuries ago in the Arabian Peninsula.
Of the billion or so “moderates” advertised to reside within worldwide Islam, what specifically is this billion people actually doing to stop this mayhem?
Norman Yoshio Mineta used the post-9/11 chaos to push through his personal agenda – “no profiling under any circumstances”.
Mineta – a Democrat – abused the position entrusted to him by George W. Bush to indulge his personal vanity as retribution for injustices he suffered as a boy at the hands of a DEMOCRATIC administration trying to look tough. (And by the way, the Japanese did have a well-organized “Fifth Column” among Japanese in the U.S.)
At a personal level, Mineta’s reaction is understandable. He may even feel he made a noble choice. But a greater man would have realized that we are in a war, and that hard choices rather than PC pieties are called for. By allowing his vanity to intrude, Mineta betrayed the trust placed in him.
You guys are more interested in fighting the culture war (political correctness, multiculturalism, affirmative action, desegregation etc.) than terrorism. What form of profiling would have stopped Richard Reid? And what of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, especially if he were carrying a fake ID and passport? What of European Muslims from places like Chechnya and Kosovo? And what if Johnny Walker Lindh had decided to be a suicide bomber?
Now there are two separate arguments. A) Whether profiling is a violation of the Bill of Rights whether it works or not (and that’s why we can’t simply say “Life is tough, deal with it”, and it is also why a scared female running away from you is completely different from being confronted by an armed government agent) and B) whether profiling actually works. Now in the case of Rudy Giuliani’s street crime unit, it appears to have worked, but there were still very severe constitutional questions over their tactics. But in the case of profiling for Muslim terrorists, we don’t even need to get into the constitutional questions, because the fact is that it won’t work. There are far too many non-Arabic Muslims, and the nonsense about asking them questions to provoke a reaction … a lot of Muslim terrorists are actually secular, and not religious fanatics (as was the case of the homosexual Yasir Arafat, and also the guy who tried to blow up an SUV in New York), plus TRAINED TERRORISTS can lie well enough to fool a lie detector test.
It is time to get past the “culture war” mentality (I already saw the ridiculous Maxine Waters reference above) and start treating this for what it is: a national security issue.
richard reid? just a casual look at this one should trigger the warning bells
abdulmutallab? same
european muslims—> lets profile the obvious in order to force their hands then we can make some progress
Right. It makes perfect sense to pat down/grope/x-ray old ladies and little kids. You never know when one of ‘em might be packing C-4.
I don’t think you understand all the subtleties involved in, say, Israeli-style “profiling.” It’s not just looking people over and thinking “Hey, that guy looks like a nervous, sweaty Arab.” It’s not superficial or based on gut instinct. There’s a system, and evidently it works where it’s applied correctly.
Unfortunately, “profiling” in this discussion has been grossly oversimplified. “Groping,” however, has not.
The TSA is focused on THINGS rather then people, and the obvious criticism is that current procedure can’t detect body cavity placement of explosives, so perhaps it’s time to ask whether or not the focus of the TSA ought to be more people oriented.
Unlike a small country like Israel we have too many airports and too many travelers to do Shin Bet style professional profiling. Profiling can’t work in that determined and well funded bad guys will learn to recruit destitute nordic blondes if necessary. As much as I’d like to agree with the “it’s only muslims so profle them” people, a war stipulates that this will not necessarily always be true.
And yet… the government seems suspiciously confident that the THINGS approach of the TSA is right and proper. I submit the possibility that the new machinery is more capable than advertised, that these are designed to work at (e.g.) power level 1 whereas a second quick burst at (e.g.) power level 4 could well work more as an X-ray. We just don’t tell the bad guys that this is the case, and we don’t go to power level 4 until we really have to.
As for radiation concern the machine gives one a 0.05 mrem dose whereas an hour of flight exposure is 1 mrem (i.e. at current radiation levels the machine is less lethal than a 1 hour flight at 30,000 ft.) This gives a lot of radiation power wiggle room.
There are two things I don’t like about the X-ray scanners.
1) All the radiation is deposited or reflected near the body’s surface, unlike medical x-rays which tend to pass all the way through, so the radiation dosage to the skin is much higher than the overall body average. This is bad news for skin cells (even if it is good news for cells deeper inside the body). Personally, I would rather be strip searched than given cancer.
2) Even well-designed x-ray machines send some very small amount of the x-rays off target, which is the reason medical technicians leave the room before they x-ray you. Over time as the medical technician x-rays patient after patient, this extra small amount of exposure adds up to dangerous levels. So people standing in line at the air port waiting to be scanned are — just like medical technicians who don’t leave the room — going to be absorbing some of the off-target x-rays. Has this been included in the exposure calculations? And the TSA screeners themselves could be absorbing a massive dose, standing there shift after shift while the x-ray scanners run. Let the TSA employees understand this, and they may refuse to operate the machines just as a matter of their own personal safety.
And the TSA screeners themselves could be absorbing a massive dose, standing there shift after shift while the x-ray scanners run.
True enough. Although I suspect that if there’s a concern then you’ll soon see agents wearing dosimeters.
Actually, the right kind of profiling IS effective, and it has nothing to do with ethnicity. It has to do with travel, behavior, and illegal presence in the US.
If our immigration service had been doing its job in 2001, most of the Saudi terrorists would have been bounced from our country.
Our current extremely wasteful and onerous, politically correct, totally misguided approach to security from Terrorism is lunacy, and plays directly into Muslim terrorist’s hands by making flying ever more unpleasant for the Americans and Westerners who make up the vast bulk of flyers, with the added bonuses that legitimate, peaceful travelers are hugely inconvenienced and badly treated, roiling and heating up the general atmosphere among us “unbelievers,” the airlines and our economies suffer, and it makes our government even more mistrusted and unpopular.
It used to be that “good police work” was to focus scarce manpower and resources on places where crime was highest, and on groups and individuals that had a track record of committing the most crimes and, therefore, were likely to commit more crime, and that is what should be done here.
Since the “religion” of Islam is based on a worldview that divides all mankind into two groups; Muslims, said by the Qur’an to be “the best of peoples,” and “unbelievers,” said by the Qur’an to be “the vilest of creatures,” and since the Qur’an, Muhammad, and Islamic leaders, down through the ages and today, have said that Muslims have a fundamental religious obligation to wage Jihad eternally—both violent Jihad and “stealth” Jihad—against all unbelievers, until all unbelievers are either converted, made second class citizens under Muslim domination and control (dhimmis), are enslaved, or, if they resist, killed, and Islam and its Shari’a law rules all the World, and all its nations and peoples, and since Islamic practice calls for Muslims to use the “Holy Deceptions” of Takiyya (lying) and Kitman (partial truth) in all their dealings with unbelievers, if it will safeguard or advance the cause of an individual Muslim or of Islam, and since Muslims, all over the world today, repeatedly and explicitly call for Islam and Muslims to dominate, conquer, and destroy Western civilization and particularly the United States and Israel, and since the vast majority of terrorist attacks are committed by Muslims, I would focus our scarce resources on Muslims and their supporters, and not on American soccer moms, arthritic grannies, and their children.
In our highly technological age, I would use all of our information gathering and analysis capabilities to profile the hell out of the particular class of Muslims who are responsible for the vast majority of terrorist attacks, namely young male Muslims—to learn what their activities and contacts had been, groups they might be involved in, where they had traveled to and were coming from, any information I could find–you name it. And if they traveled by aircraft–as in the very successful Israeli program—I would have each and every Muslim who is suspect carefully observed, examined, and interviewed at length, face-to-face, by a very highly trained security official—not, I note, by one of the semi-literate, barely above flipping burgers at McDonalds TSA types one currently sees at our airports, (and, as well, I would also have each such suspects searched, patted down, X-Rayed, and force all Muslim women to remove head coverings for security checks—I note that several male Muslim terrorists have made successful terrorist attacks or, once captured, have hidden, tried to, or made successful escapes dressed as women in Burkas). And, if Muslims complained, I would tell them–as the TSA has told us–that this is the price of being able to fly these days–and, if Muslims don’t like it, let them drive or walk to their destinations.
Such a radically changed policy would make us safer, by far, than today’s increasingly obnoxious and ludicrous, politically correct clusterfark, which is ineffective on its face, and wastefully dilutes our anti-terrorist efforts by spreading them out to cover all travelers—however unlikely or innocuous—rather than concentrating them on those travelers—based on their “religion,” age group, sex, and track record of past terrorist attacks–most likely to commit new terrorist acts. By their violent, xenophobic ideology, statements, and actions Muslims have self-identified themselves as the most likely suspects, have made their bed, now let them lie in it.
Seth,
I think that you are on a track, a good one. I also think that the problem we are addressing is beyond thinking logically, or rationally for the solution.
If the antagonist, or enemy puts us in a position that is anathema to our core beliefs, i.e. he/she places us in a position where they are willing to kill themselves and us, do we are not then do we have the right to destroy them?
I say yes. Some say no, because we must respect the other’s point of view. This is lunacy.
And yet we have high government officials saying just that. The gov’t is telling us that we must respect those that have repeatedly told us we are bad and must be destroyed.
I say we must destroy every last one of these people that believe in a system that wants to deprive us of our liberty.
If there is some such animal as a moderate muslim then step up. You have had many years. But really you are cowards
If you know an islam professing person then you must, at the very least, avoid them. Get them out of your life completely.
How do you expect anyone to read all that when you refuse to use periods? When you read something you are effectively experiencing the thoughts of the writer. With your writing I quickly came to the conclusion that you need attention. You won’t get it without periods.
Not only is political correctness irritating, it is in fact dangerous. Until those with common sense demand an end to this insanity, our country will be destroyed by fear of offending. But don’t forget it’s the lawyers that make this all possible. Tort reform needs to be a high priority as well.
Quote from Gerald:
“You guys are more interested in fighting the culture war (political correctness, multiculturalism, affirmative action, desegregation etc.) than terrorism.”
No Gerald we are not necessarily more interested in one or the other. The national security issue encompasses all of the above, sir.
I believe we are interested in them all. And I don’t think we, worldwide, are approaching the problem in a very sane or rational manner.
I think that any islam believer should be questioned, searched, and fondled, especially the ones who hide behind their dress.
Am I a profiling? You got that one right. And if you want to stick your head in the sand about every terrorist airplane attack over the past ten plus years then you are just ignoring reality, while the rest of us try to make it through a flight.
If any practitioner of islam meets me and admits to it I will probably steer clear of him/her if not take him to a place he/she doesn’t want to be.
The Islamic population is in for some very degrading bad times as the world turns.
And yes, take that as a warning.
Clayton E. Cramer, You zero in on Norman Mineta when from the beginning the Democrats were beating the anti-profiling drum. American Muslims object to being lumped in with their terrorist brethren, however, I have not seen a concerted effort by them to counter the terrorist hiding among them.
The latest efforts by the DHS/TSA are definitely not common sense in any shape or fashion!!! They are over kill perpetrated on an innocent population! There have been no, zero, airline bombing attempts originating from inside the US!!! The reason the underwear bomber got so close to bringing down the plane was governmental bureaucratic incompetence!!! But, then the, ‘System Worked,’ because the passengers and cabin crew took care of him. Just lately, no-one thought it strange that someone in a third world country, Yemen, was sending an old copier with toner cartridge to Chicago. A new copier with more whistles and bells would have cost less than the shipping. Does anyone at DHS know what Duh means? We should replicate what the Israelis do. Before you tell me they have only one airport, we have as many agents at each of ours as they have at theirs. While we’re at it we need to ban government service unions.
By the way, my references to aspects of “police work” in my comment #19 above are not to be taken to mean that I believe that the “police approach” to terrorism, which regards terrorism as criminal activity prosecutable in criminal courts rather than as an act of war to be adjudicated by military courts according to the laws of war is the correct one.
I believe that acts of terrorism are very clearly acts of war, and that only the laws of war, as adjudicated by military tribunals, should be used to try terrorists.
I believe that Muslims have been at war with the unbelievers of the West since the beginning of Islam in the 7th Century A.D, and at war with the United States–off and on–since the very first years of our Republic’s founding, when Thomas Jefferson had to create a Navy and Marines to go to Tripoli in North Africa in the early 1800s to destroy the Muslim pirates whose bankrupting Jizya i.e. “protection” payments our Congress was forced to pay to protect our absolutely critical ocean commerce were intolerable, and that 9/11 was merely the latest high profile installment in that ancient and ongoing War.
There are many people who can be cleared to fly with far less invasion, so why aren’t they? Because it will “offend” those who match a profile, or a likely potential profile of a terrorist. So, you see, profiling is taking place, it’s just not being announced. We are looking at the “negative-space” of profiling terrorists.
But, of course, there is a real legitimacy in scanners and pat downs, which may be the actual impetus. It is to ensure 100 percent safety, not risking an interview with a passable liar. However, in this may we ask, “To what end?”, because once the airports are secure won’t terrorists find other targets, of which the public will be that much more complacent for extending pat-downs and scanners in those venues? So, society gravitates toward a police state. Grocery stores, sporting events, concerts, parks, etc. It should be tantamount in the public’s and government’s attention to find a resolve for spotting terrorist early, while these “temporary” measures are taken.
So, the idea that invasive searches is based on political correctness is circumstantially derived, based on the further circumstantial evidence that this government will not address radical Islam (for whatever reason). Our inability to take actions based on circumstantial evidence may be a suicide pact in the end, as you can be sure that the devil will appear clean as a whistle. And when I say suicide pact I don’t mean physical death of the body, but the conceptual death of a free society.
Searching or x-raying every person is a failure of control, of course. And it shows that terror is felt.
The left seems quite supportive of the Obama administration’s TSA enhancements and would probably eventually submit to body cavity searches in airport security lines as an anti-terrorism measure.
Contrast that to their reaction to the Bush administration when they saw the Patriot Act and the electronic surveillance of international phone calls as a dire threat to civil liberties.
If you’d like to drive cross country you are free to do that. But if you are getting on a plane that I’m flying on, you’re going through the
TSA screening. If you don’t like it, there’s the road. If you must rebel against authority, fart when they touch your junk.
Just exactly what grounds do you have to deny me MY rights under the Fourth Amendment? You do not own the plane, you do not control the ticketing. Your rights do NOT supersede mine. If you don’t like that, then YOU are perfectly free to take Greyhound! See you in St. Louis…..
Pay attention. Public transport isn’t a right, meaning that the 4th doesn’t apply. The 4th is what keeps the government from kicking down your door when it feels like it.
I used to be an EOD technician in the US Navy and guarantee you that with access to the right types of plastic explosives I could easily board any plane in the country as could most EOD techs. But not being a jihadi obsessed Muslim lunatic I’m not likely to ever do something so stupid. These scans and pat downs are useless against a sophisticated enemy. Fortunately for us our enemies are inept morons. Unfortunately for us so are our Dept of Homeland Security and TSA.
We need to stop the absurd opposition to profiling and focus on those that we KNOW to be the most likely to try to blow up our aircraft, MUSLIM MEN UNDER THE AGE OF 40. The ACLU and other groups like them are endangering all of us with their false concern for racism and discrimination. Who funds the ACLU and do they get any money from the Federal government, i.e. taxpayer? GOP members of Congress want to know.
“The Islamic population is in for some very degrading bad times as the world turns.”
From who? Certainly no one in American law enforcement, no one in European law enforcement. Who exactly is going to give them those bad times?
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/gz_mosque_in_cash_grab_zgPtEj6W8mPjB9WTTwIxUN
“GZ mosque in 9/11 cash grab”
Certainly not the American taxpayer.
So who?
AMEN! Mr. Cramer, you are completely right. I have been screaming this since 9-11. Political Correctness is destroying our Country, and now it could actually KILL us. Political Correctness is warping our brains.
Political Correctness is not banal, as I considered it for a long time. It is not semantical, as it is designed to appear. It is a fundamental affront to our way of life, invented by the progressives to divide us and undermine our “melting pot.” We must make “multi-culturalism” a BAD WORD. It is a step towards a “One-World, New World Order.” Do not use hyphenated-American descriptions anymore. REBUKE P.C. REJECT IT LOUDLY! We must destroy it everywhere we find it, it is a VIRUS. If we destroy P.C., we destroy the the progressives’ control of the dialogue.
Profiling is used successfully by law enforcement trying to catch certain types of criminals, and nobody makes a big stink about it. Lawyers use it in choosing juries. Companies use it to develop consumer-profiles tracking individual’s buying behavior, for goodness sake. I don’t think all of the profiling needs to be centered around Muslims, either. Basic behavior profiling would have value, since certainly a terrorist can look like Jihad-Jane. A robotic walk, irritability, sweating, tics, nervous behavior, breathing pattern, staring straight ahead, mumbled prayers, that kind of thing. Instead, most TSA officers keep their heads down, not wanting to meet the eyes of the disgusted passengers they’re dealing with. Sure, you’re going to tag some nervous fliers or people who just really, really have to pee, LOL, but the security people do need to be vigilant.
There is no defense of TSA employees. None. “I was just following orders.”, is NOT a defense. They do NOT have to do this. They can choose to limit the pat-downs. They can choose to restrict them to young males.
The orders come from on high, and these employees blindly follow these orders which blatantly violate the 4th article of the Bill of Rights. The superiors pass on the orders, and the flunkies obey, each thinking he has no choice. If the employees all decide not to participate, and proceed to do it in a more sensible manner, then what happens? Probably nothing. “Oh, I might get fired!” Sue them for wrongful termination. Get a class-action suit going. The orders are unconstitutional, illegal.
Folks, in time of War, Habeus Corpus CAN be suspended, but the declaration of suspension must be announced and reviewed, etc…. It has not been suspended! They are simply acting like it has! The States need to protect their Citizens from the Federal Government. They MUST act to stop this. Only a couple more months until the new Governors are in charge, but appeal to the current ones now. This. must. stop.
I’m sure someone else has said it but, it’s not “”ethnic” profiling. It’s profiling. it’s not “racial” profiling. It’s just profiling. They profile you when you go through customs. Try to imagine what would happen to the international flights if they searched everybody. Now switch it around and think how it would be to board a plane if they profiled instead of having everyone go through what they have to today. Then think about how much time and money would be saved.
On another subject, those aren’t illegal immigrants picking lettuce, tomatoes, apples etc. Those are migrant workers and they are here legally.
Something for the next time somebody wants to talk about the evils of allowing the TSA to profile or how vegetables would cost $10 a pound if it weren’t for illegal immigrants.
Not profiling is literally taking common sense out of the toolbox of national security. It is a devolution into a more primitive form of animal that cannot learn from past experience and is doomed to go extinct because of it. People like Vivian Schiller at NPR are either lying about the way they really feel deep down or they are, quite simply, not as evolved as the rest of us. She never learned that the red glowing coil on top of the stove is hot. It’s as simple as that. That she seems so obliviously proud of her defect is what makes her such a laughing stock to those of us who still have common sense in our quivers. If she wants to stand out in the rain like a wet dog to prove how “tolerant” she is, she’s more than welcome to do so, but not at taxpayer expense.
Amidst all the furore over profiling, what’s forgotten is that before 9/11, aviation security routinely profiled.
I’m Irish. In the 90′s I worked in Iran. Flying through the UK and US on vacations I was routinely profiled: Irish + Middle East stamps in Passport = maybe IRA, therefore thorough bag search and a game of 20 questions. One young security officer in Manila at the Northwest check-in got very visibly nervous when he saw all the ME stamps, my pre-check in interview took almost half an hour, and that was in 1995!
I understood what was happening and I didn’t think it unreasonable.
Profiling and Stereotyping is rational any and everyday. The most successful profilers and stereotypers are often the most socially successful people. It helps them engage the world around them, and manage the massive amounts of information pouring in from the world, without spending too much brain power on it, thus leaving brain resources for higher level thought processes. The best salesmen are often the best stereotypers and profilers.
To consciously dissallow yourself to stereotype and profile is to consciously dumb yourself down, for others benefit.
Like the Guilty White Liberal that moves into a black neighborhood, then is surprised when he becomes the victim of crime. Or the women that jogs by the black neighborhood in the park in the early morning and is surprised when she finds herself raped. It’s no secret that black Americans have a higher instance of crime, and that black on white rape is much more prevalent than white on black…but it has been enshrined as sainthood for white Euros to put themselves in dangerous situations, eschewing rational thought processes, in order to promote diversity and kumbayaism. Just as it is a pious duty, not to profile Muslims and put oneself at risk of being blown up or otherwise killed by violent supremacist Muslims….or to recognize the threat to ones liberty by mass immigration of Muslims and their access to democratic institutions to implement Muslim Supremacy, Shariah Law.
It’s insanity!
Wayne, you wrote “This may sound harsh in a country that values Freedom of Religion.” The fact, discussed at length on many websites and books, is that “Freedom of Religion” does not apply to islam, because it is NOT a religion but death cult that demands total obedience from its followers in everything they do, and I mean everything – even how to clean yourself after doing a “big job”. It is a totalitarian agenda based in political ideology of the worst kind – to ake over the world, literally.
Likewise, as many have pointed out here, the type of profiling that Israel practices for flying with El Al does not involve racial profiling, but behaviour profiling of the most in-depth kind.
In addition, I cannot see “racial profiling” being said about muslims… islam is not a race, therefor saying that profiling muslims is “racial profiling” is utter nonsense.
I think that the USA has gone the wrong way completely with their high-tech scanners and frighteningly invasive “pat downs”, and the TSA should take a lesson from Israel… it is not “racial” profiling, and that idiot John Pistole has not enough brains in his head to fill a thimble if he thinks that what Israel does is “profiling”. I wonder if he has any stocks in the companies that produce the back-scatter naked scan machines, like others … capitalistic corruption at its worst. The federal DOJ should start a huge inquiry as to how these people were advised to buy shares in the stupid machines. I’m sorry, but the USA, with the corrupt politicians and business people who are screwing the general public right and left, is going down the tube quickly, and that is a shame – a terrible shame for a once proud and stupendously strong country that once was the guiding light to the rest of the world. Corruption and lobbying and greed has just about put that light out now.
Until we name the enemy, Islam, we have no chance of winning the war that Islam has declared on non Muslims and the Christian West in particular.
MMG beat me to it. I’m less purebred Irish, but I had flaming red hair until it turned darker at age 40 (go figure).
Had I been flying around during the time of the “troubles” I would also expect extra scrutiny due to my appearance.
The perpetually offended will be offended no matter what, we have to be safe, and of course the techniques to achieve a measure of safety have to be effective. I’m not sure how long this technique or any technique including profiling on appearance or behavior, will be effective
I hope people are picking up on the pattern here. When the left screamed about so-called “warrantless wiretapping”, Americans were not feeling any real effects from this, only the jihadists and their allies. Our enemies were being hassled, not Americans. The refrain commonly heard by the left about the threat of jihadism was “fear-mongering” and “boogeymen”. Now we have the situation at hand, with Americans being hassled, and many, especially conservatives, teed off about it. What is the left’s reaction to it? They want more of it.
Draw your own conclusions.
The analogy is silly. The woman walking alone at night isn’t pulling a gun on random male strangers in the street and demanding they empty their pockets and submit to a body search just because they’re male. Or are you suggesting that she should?
I think the TSA has lost the plot. CYA tendencies and the gradual ratchet-effect of endlessly responding to the last newspaper plot has finally reached the point where people are wondering if there’s any sense to it. I’m surprised it took this long.
And none of it matters a toot. Nobody has actually boarded a plane in the US with the means and intent to hijack it or bring it down since 9/11 (and those guys were carrying obvious weapons that were perfectly legal at the time). Every single attack since then has originated elsewhere, and has been foiled through passenger vigilance, luck or specific intelligence.
I’ll be impressed if anyone can point to a case where a terrorist has been caught at the airport gate by security. Just one. It apparently hasn’t been the case that security isn’t invasive enough to catch them (or there’d be a plane wreck to testify), and we can endlessly come up with new possible schemes until eventually all passengers have to strip naked and be anesthetized and stored in tubes for the flight.
Now somebody just has to cook up a way to point out the obvious and walk back the nuttery without bursting the “won’t somebody just DO something?” mind-set that drives the debate (and funding).