The Real Reason Profiling Fails

[marmar]

from the American Prospect:



The Real Reason Profiling Fails
We have more Muslims who want to cooperate with us than who want to bomb us. That's why profiling will never be an effective tool.

Matthew Yglesias | January 7, 2010 | web only


Conservatives looking to engage in their favorite sport of national-security hysteria got their wish Christmas Day, when a young man named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded an Amsterdam-Detroit flight with incendiary chemicals stashed in his underpants. The would-be bomber failed to destroy the plane and certainly did no fundamental damage to the United States of America. He did, however, get Fox News personalities Brit Hume and Bill Kristol to proclaim the attack a success. Under ordinary circumstances, you would expect the conservative press to avoid acting as al-Qaeda’s hype-men. But with partisan hay to be made, an attack in which only the attacker was injured becomes a victory for America’s enemies.

Coupled with the failure-as-success narrative, new calls have come for stepped-up racial or ethnic profiling. Tom McInerney, a retired Air Force lieutenant general, offered an extreme version, proposing that we "be very serious and harsh about the profiling" to the extent that "if you are an 18- to 28-year-old Muslim male you should be strip searched." Andy McCarthy at National Review Online and Bret Stephens in The Wall Street Journal expressed only slightly more restrained versions of profiling enthusiasm.

These proposals to entrench systematic, formal discrimination against the world’s Muslim population raise troubling ethical issues. More fundamentally, they completely fail to grapple with the logic of anti-American terrorist violence or the responsibilities of a global power.

Al-Qaeda's capacity to damage the United States is actually very limited. Even the devastating mass murder of September 11 left the country’s economic strength, infrastructure, and military might entirely intact. Al-Qaeda has since hit some soft targets abroad and attempted -- but failed -- to blow up airliners. Obviously, it would be a bad thing if someone like Abdulmutallab or "shoe bomber" Richard Reid killed a plane full of people, and the government rightly seeks to avoid this sort of attack. But a clear distinction should be drawn between a threat on that order and genuinely big-time dangers to national security like Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and nuclear proliferation. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_real_reason_profiling_fails

[Bitwit1234]

1. You know what

The next thing the republicans will scream for is to have all Muslims fly on a separate plane.