Meanwhile, CAIR's instant response was to issue a press release:
Plane Incidents in Ariz., Mich. Raise Profiling Concerns:
...The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today called on airline passengers, crews and security personnel to avoid ethnic and religious "profiling" in the wake of the attempted bombing of a flight arriving in Detroit on Christmas Day...
And pay no attention to that man behind the curtain...
"Syme: It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. You wouldn't have seen the [Newspeak] Dictionary 10th edition, would you Smith? It's that thick. [illustrates thickness with fingers] The 11th Edition will be that [narrows fingers] thick. Winston Smith: So, The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect? Syme: The secret is to move from translation, to direct thought, to automatic response. No need for self-discipline. Language coming from here [the larynx], not from here
[the brain]" -1984 (film) |
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Expect avoidable delays
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1261364519696&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Against the relentless menace of Islamist terrorism, Westerners need to find a middle ground between a state of permanent - and unsustainable - high-alert, and the reckless attitude of "What, me worry?"
The days when travelers could journey by air without fear of their planes being hijacked are history. ...
Checkpoints cause inconvenience to Palestinian commuters by extending journey times. But there is often no way to intercept terrorists without inconveniencing the general public - not on a northern West Bank road and not at international airports.
Those who defend freedom must make it hard for terrorists to disrupt the lives of innocents while minimizing the misery caused them in the process.
ONE way to reduce inconvenience and increase security at busy airports is by a greater use of profiling. Farouk Abdulmutallab should not have been free to try and blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 with 289 people on board over Detroit on Christmas Day.
Profiling would likely have identified the 23-year-old engineering student as a potential Islamist terrorist; he would have been methodically searched and stopped at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport.
Abdulmutallab, the privileged son of a banker, got his US visa in London in 2008. Family members told The Daily Telegraph that the bomber had been radicalized while a student in Britain. To his credit, Abdulmutallab's father recently warned American consular officials in Lagos that his son posed a danger. The young man was then placed on a catch-all anti-terrorism database, but not on the "no fly" blacklist that would have prevented him from boarding any US-bound airliner.
Mercifully, an alert passenger subdued Abdulmutallab just as he was igniting his explosive device. Those responsible for security in Lagos (which he may have reached from Yemen) and in Amsterdam (where he changed planes for Detroit) need to explain how they let him get on an airliner with a concealed syringe and the crystalline high explosive, pentaerythritol, sown into his underwear, reportedly, in a condom.
IN response to the Abdulmutallab affair, US and European authorities are initiating more stringent and time-consuming searches of allpassengers. Absurdly, travelers headed for the US may be required to remain seated during the final hour of their flights - no toilet - and will not be allowed to keep anything on their laps.
Rather than adding profiling to security procedures, thereby identifying possible Islamist terrorists - protecting the rights of the many while infringing minimally on the rights of the very few - all passengers will be subjected to unnecessary, sometimes painful, inconvenience.
The alternative to profiling is requiring all passengers to go through whole-body imaging scanners that can reveal objects beneath a person's clothes. But these devices are pricy and raise all sorts of civil liberties issues.
Unless Western decisionmakers reverse course, their adamant and misguided refusal to utilize profiling will senselessly subject millions of air passengers to a form of collective punishment.
to avoid ethnic and religious "profiling"
Amazing how language is distorted to produce the above and the terrible results.
Any decent security check looks for the profile of a terrorist. What that looks like depends on a whole list of factors.
By the way
Chertoff: Squeamishness or Security?
He also says that the U.S. needs to “press Europeans” to be more vigilant in alerting American authorities after they reject someone’s visa. (It turns out that Britain had rejected the visa-renewal application of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man accused in the failed Flight 253 bomb plot.)
Now why did the Brits do that? Reject the visa renewal and not inform the US? Maybe they did but the dept., concerned had "more important business" to contend with.
Profiling is a tool. It is not inherently evil, any more than use of a gun or a stethoscope or a Google search is evil. What matters is what you do with it.
As I wrote a while back, profiling is an indispensable part of a policeman's toolkit. If you order a policeman (or a security guard) not to profile, you're not only making it extremely difficult for him to do his job; you're also putting him in serious personal danger.
Profiling should not be used for purposes of discrimination; I think everyone would agree on that. (On the other hand, sometimes scrupulously fair profiling can look like discrimination. The profilers themselves need to be checked now and then.)
By now, it should be obvious to everybody:
1. Most Muslims are not terrorists...
2. ...but most terrorists are Muslims.
3. Therefore, if we're looking for terrorists, we will find most of them among Muslims. Doing so does NOT contradict point #1; it simply means that we are looking with our eyes open.
respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline
Like any tool, profiling has limits. If we rely on it too heavily, all the jihadis have to do to evade detection is to use
operatives or shahid-wannabesHBDS (Human Bomb Delivery Systems) that don't fit the profile.Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is a Nigerian; he's black and does not fit the profile of a young Middle-Eastern man, although the Islamic name and his coming from Yemen could have triggered some concern. Likewise Richard Reid, the "shoe-bomber" may have looked the part but was not a Middle Eastener. Three of the 24 arrested in the UK for plotting to blow up transatlantic flights were British converts to Islam.
What about other tools?
What do do? Use some seikhel. Israeli security has a perfect track record, so far, and they did it for years without making everyone take their shoes off. Israel focus is less on finding contraband -- bad stuff -- and more on finding bad people. Israeli security agents use psychological screening. Maybe their protocols for international flights and passenger boats in and out of Haifa wouldn't scale well for the volume of US domestic air travel.
Nappy favors full-body scans and some profiling but also psychological screening. When Israeli security screeners ask you about your itinerary and your luggage, they're paying a lot more attention to you and how you answer than to what you say. Like good poker players, they're looking for a "tell."
What about the Christians?
http://www.weaselzippers.net/blog/2009/12/video-its-those-radical-christians.html
Oh, yeah. One more thing: Air marshals.
There's at least one armed, undercover marshal on every El-Al flight. There ought to be more of them -- lots more of them -- on US flights.
Nappy wonders what would happen if more people carried weapons. When only the bad guys have guns, they call the shots. (Pardon the pun.) How far would the terrorists have got on 9/11, on Flight 93 or the others if some of the passengers were skilled shooters (trained and licensed) and were packing?
It's a Gordian knot solution to airline security. Trying to make the screenings airtight is like playing Whack-A-Mole -- the bad guys just find more ways of eluding the system. It's like Spy vs. Spy or the avionics measures and countermeasures race in electronic warfare. Nappy's modest suggestion is that maybe the way to go is to stop trying to keep all the bad stuff off planes and just make sure there are enough people on board who can deal with threats. Air marshals and citizen soldiers.
Jeff Jacoby makes some of the same points in Wednesday's column.