The Oxford pocket American Dictionary defines non sequitur as: “n. a conclusion that does not logically follow from the premises.
It doesn’t logically follow the premise that protecting civil rights and privacy is a sacred right and should take precedent over protecting people’s lives.
Profiling can take the form of looking at certain groups of people or looking at certain behavior. When looking for the first signs of potential terrorists it should not be certain ethnic or religious groups that should be profiled, it’s their behavior.
Normal law enforcement and anti-terrorism forces look for the following behavior in a terrorist bomber:
- Inappropriate clothing
- Robotic walk
- Irritability
- Sweating
- Tics or jerks in face or body
- Nervousness
- Breathing heavily
- Staring straight ahead
- Mumbled prayer
- Large bag
- Hand in large bag (possibly holding a detonator or weapon)
This is a long list and not all 11 fit a potential terrorist profile. Five or six should be enough to arouse suspicion.
This is not to say that certain groups of people cannot fit another type of profile and this is related to the long list of successful terrorist bombers. Over the last 40 odd years, identified terrorist have been: (1) male, (2) between the age of 18-30, (3) Muslim, and (4) most with Middle Eastern family names.
Let’s look at Umar Farouk Addulmutallab, the terrorist bomber of North West Flight 253. Only the people who saw him before or after he boarded his flights can answers questions about the 11 signs of potential terrorist behavior. However, Umar is male, he is 23 years old, he is a Muslim, and his name is Umar F. Abdulmutallab. There’s more: he paid a reported $2500 for the ticket in cash. He bought a one way ticket. Although he was traveling for an extended period he had no checked luggage.
This is not profiling – this is a suspect.
One has to consider that Israel has long been a target for terrorism, and then ask why El Al air planes have never been hijacked or destroyed from inside the aircraft for the last 41 years – the last El Al hijacking took place on July 23, 1969.
The Israelis do not rely exclusively on technology and searches. The Israelis use intelligence databases (which the U.S. seems not have mastered yet), they train their security personal to “profile” everyone, they have armed air marshals on every single flight, they have special equipment to check every piece of checked baggage, and they routinely test the security at all airports where Al El fly.
Almost 10 years after the 9/11 terrorist catastrophe what do we have: (1) potential profiling of terrorist suspects is still not looked upon with favor, (2) the U.S. cannot connect the dots even when they have good intelligence on a suspect, (3) body and carry-on bag searches alone accomplish nothing by themselves; and, (4) we have knee jerk reactions of increased restrictions on passengers before boarding or on a flight to show that the governments is “reacting” to an unknown threat (or is that over reacting?).
It is not always suspicious people but certainly SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITIES that need reporting to the proper authorities and investigated.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
This is an excellent summary of our current security and safety problems. I fully agree .We need to profile and adapt what the Israelis do.
Thank you for an excellent bloc
Wow! I look forward to future articles. Political correctness will lead to massive loss of life.