How to End Humiliating TSA Screening & Patdowns: Profile
by P.A. Madison on November 22nd, 2010
I’m afraid overbearing domestic airport security is really not about serious domestic threats to airline safety but more about modern liberal political correctness that says profiling is wrong. Because profiling would be considered a greater tragedy then what occurred on 9/11 by Civil and Human Rights Activists, everyone is left to equally endure the humiliation of full-body screening and painful boarding delays.
President Obama has stated the government’s case as:
At this point, the Transportation Security Administration, in consultation with our counter-terrorism experts, have indicated to me that the procedures that they’ve been putting in place are the only ones right now that they consider to be effective against the kind of threat that we saw in the Christmas Day bombing.
What Obama didn’t say was the Christmas day bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, aka the “Underwear bomber,” was a Muslim Nigerian citizen whose flight did not originate domestically but from overseas.
Proper domestic airline security should revolve around focusing on the prime suspects who would have a high statistical likelihood of having been exposed to a doctrine of self-sacrifice to please Allah and the rewards in the hereafter for mass murder. These suspects can include Muslims traveling within the United States on passports; anyone caught using fake documents, naturalized citizens from such countries as Pakistan, those who travel or communicate to countries that are known to have groups that recruit and teach suicide bombers, etc.
Profile of Prime Suspects
Mohamed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, wrote to himself in a document called “The Last Night” to be “optimistic, calm, because you are heading for a deed God loves and will accept. It will be the day, God willing, you spend with the women of paradise.” It is pointed out to would be Muslim terrorists that the Quran “promises virgins” when they die fighting infidels in jihad. Both the 9/11 hijackers and transatlantic sky terror plot members left behind martyrdom videotapes with the common theme of “sacrificing life for Allah.”
While religion plays an important part in recruiting and motivating suicidal murders, it is not always the exclusive underlying cause behind suicidal killings. Generally other causes are involved such as political desperation and local tradition of resistance. Mixing the custom of resistance with religious fervor is an explosive mixture to be on the lookout for.
I’m not aware off hand of any local American religious cults or groups, who recruit, teach and train one in suicidal murder of innocents for religious purposes or political desperation. Some might bring up the name Timothy McVeigh, but he was more interested in self-preservation than self-sacrifice which explains why he didn’t remain inside the Ryder truck when it exploded. In other words, McVeigh was never a threat of boarding an airline to commit suicide to please Allah.
Since there is no American organized threat of promoting, teaching and executing mass airline murder through suicide (as evidenced by the lack of suicide bombings in American cities), profiling only for would be suicidal killers is a very viable solution. Prime suspects to closely examine would be any Muslim or person traveling on a passport, foreign students from certain countries, etc.
Profiling is Effective and Works
When the future “shoe bomber” Richard Reid decided to fly in July 2001 from Amsterdam to Israel, El Al security personnel quickly selected him for profiling included close examination from head to toe with x-ray scanning of his shoes. El Al was so suspicious of Reid they put him close to an armed sky marshal, who was instructed to keep a close watch on him.
Israeli security policy is to question all passengers travelling to and from Israel by security staff with the process taking only a few minutes for Israelis themselves that includes simple questions such as if they packed their own luggage and if anyone else could had access to it. Non-Jewish travellers receive more thorough questioning and searches. Passengers who are here on visas, passports or have been to flagged countries in last 10 years should be the ones arriving an hour or two before departure.
As horrendous as the left will make profiling sound (they will argue amounts to racism), no doubt such criticism is a result of the liberal policy of transforming the American identity to one of a global multicultural society where racial sensitivities flourish.
Would profiling pass rational court tests?
A 2003 case involving John Cerqueira, a Portuguese, who was escorted off a jetliner and questioned by police for two hours because American Airlines personnel thought his dark hair and olive complexion made him look Middle Eastern. Cerqueira sued American Airlines for discrimination and won. An appeals court in Boston reversed that decision, and the Supreme Court refused to examine the reversal.
In conclusion, subjecting every domestic American passenger who obviously profiles way outside of that of a trained, religiously motivated suicidal bomber to rigid security measures is both unnecessary and waste of resources. The same amount of security against suicide threats can be maintained by carefully profiling those who have the greater likelihood of having been recruited and trained in suicidal killings instead of everyday Americans going about their typical business. Those who might be mistaken for a suspect class do not warrant forcing everyone to undergo invasive searches in order they may be viewed as non-arbitrary.
Good common sense solution. I would be all for it but as you say liberals will call it evil.
Give your ticket back — so little probable cause it fails the rational test — the attack of the 300 pound woman
Give your ticket back — get your rights back. 🙂
There is so little probable cause to hold a person for questioning because they refused to be electronically ogled or personally pawed at the airport (the $11,000 thing) that it probably violates the rational test. If you could not hold them without the rule — because the Fourth Amendment says you could not. For the same reason you cannot make the rule to hold everybody for questioning to catch the one in a million bomber (who will never decide to leave because of privacy concerns — who is leaving in any case; no imminent danger — ergo, not even a rational relationship to a valid state objective: Fourteenth Amendment violation).
Which brings us to the partially depersonalized strip search or too private groping (most in public view! — I’ve been on 150 prison visits with no aversion whatsoever to the most serious but normal, private parts free, frisking). You could not make such an invasive rule under the same one-in-a-million type risk situation anywhere else in life.
Don’t like it, don’t fly? Too easy; this is not 1950. Flying is as much a part of everyday 2010 American life (3 million passengers a day — a billion passengers a year) as anything else. And what does it take to outflank the TSA’s Fourth Amendment free Maginot Line: one 300 pound women with enough room between her cheeks to hide all the fixings of a Thanksgiving dinner. 🙂
Case closed: I think most people would take the risk level of driving (10X the danger of flying) if all other things could somehow be held equal (convenience, price) over living in the condition of perpetual prison convict humiliation.
As an American how happens to have been born with Hispanic origins, and consiquently with features that someone could easily “mistake” as middle eastern, much like the Portuguese man you mentioned, I’d be all for this at the airports. Provided that the same is done to white males whenever a they come close to a school or whenever a serial killer is suspected to be on the loose. Since historically speaking most pedophiles and serial killers are middle aged white males.
Dave, I think you need to check the Meghan’s Law Database near wherever you are. You are mistaken. If you search a predominately white area, the perverts and killers will be predominantly white, you search a mixed area, perverts and killers are mixed.
I doubt very seriously trained security officers are going to mistaken a Hispanic for a middle eastern Muslim.
The problem in the USA is that our population has allowed the dems, libs, and media to define and name the terms we use every day, but unfortunately for this country, these terms are usually innaccurate and just plain WRONG. Instead of challenging these terms and replacing them with functional ones, we give in, simply to get along. “Racial Profiling” is an absurd title and we should not accept its’ use. A functional, accurate name that is NEVER USED would be “Criminal Profiling” since it is entirely intended for identification of persons suspected of crime. Crime comes in many forms, and includes all acts of terrorism. A law enforcement official would use many different factors such as AGE, GENDER, OCCUPATION, CRIMINAL RECORD, COUNTRY OF ORIGIN, COUNTRIES VISITED, PAYMENT OF AIR TICKETS BY CASH, KNOWN ASSOCIATES, RACE, RELIGION, COLOR OF HAIR, COLOR OF SKIN, COLOR OF EYES, and on an so forth . . . If it’s correct to call it “racial profiling” than it would be just as correctly called “age profiling”, or “criminal record profiling”, or “cash payment profiling”. These terms would be absurd, because they would not be an accurate description of the profiling process they are describing. Refuse to accept the innaccurate term “racial profiling”. It’s like saying “tax cuts for the rich”, when in fact, we are talking about “tax cuts for ALL TAXPAYERS”. Notice how we’ve allowed them to re-define the name for when ALL TAXPAYERS recieve tax cuts. As for profiling, we need more “criminal profiling”, not less.
Why not a little common sense? If an American is traveling to their home city, mark their boarding pass and send them through normal security with the metal detector. This would cut the scanning and groping almost in half. Or let us apply for a “flying license” that will allow us through. Trying to fully screen EVERYONE is madness.
Will America be undermined from within by an administration obsessed with political correctness and intoxicated with the adolescent thrill of exercising its new-found powers? Stay tuned.
Too late…already there.
I am Hispanic and I am asked if I am middle eastern BY middle eastern people all the time.