Posted on 05/20/2002 9:50:23 AM PDT by CreekerFreeper
"Overwhelmingly the terrorist have been Mohammadean males, moody representatives of a dysfunctional civilization that peaked in the twelfth century and knows it. Now, since these loons are known to be very high risks for blowing things up, it might make sense to focus on them in searches. Ah, but this would be profiling. It might offend terrorists. So we randomly search people we know not to be terrorists, thus avoiding profiling. See? It's like losing your watch under a street light, but looking for it in a dark alley."
It would perhaps have been better if it had been designed to keep weapons off airplanes.
As I said earlier, the system worked as planned. The system was obviously not adequate to achieve its goals. The fault lies with those who designed the system, not those who were running it.
Short of strip-searching all the passengers, there is no way to prevent knives which are much nastier than box-cutters from making it onto aircraft. After all, knives which can evade metal detectors are stone-age technology.
The real weapon terrorists had, though, was the crew and passengers' years of indoctrination that one should acquiesce to hijackers. Fortunately, that weapon has been pretty well shot to pieces and will not reappear within living memory.
But now they don't even have to bother enlisting non-Arab looking lunatics. The point of profiling is precisely to make things more difficult for the likes of al Qaeda. Nobody says it's foolproof, just that it's common sense. See Ann Coulter's column today for a fine rant on this subject.
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