Mary Gets Profiled

Well, we finally have profiling at US airports.  The Transportation Safety Agency inspectors immediately spotted Mary as a potential carrier of suspect liquids.  They got their woman.

Mary and I planned this trip more carefully than usual: sent a suitcase full of stuff including forbidden liquids ahead to daughter Kelly, left ourselves nothing but carry-ons. We plan to train and drive back to Vermont so can carry anything on the return leg.

Get to the airport on my schedule (early, fortunately).  Already have home-printed boarding passes.  Government-issued picture IDs at the ready, we breeze through the short pre-screen lines. Off with easy-to-slip-off shoes, computers into the plastic trays, cellphone into attaché case (why does that computer go in the bag when the other one comes out?), no metal in pockets, bags on the conveyor belt, we trigger no alarms as we go through the scanner.

My bags quickly emerge.  They look at Mary.  They x-ray into her bag.  They pull the bag, rummage to depths she probably hasn’t gotten to in years in the makeup kit.  Aha! Yahvol! Eureka!  Mascara! And some other semi-liquid I didn’t even know existed.  Gotcha, you evil-doer; back to square one and the bagcheck line.  Do not pass Go!

They didn’t even glance at the rat’s nest of wires and strange devices that always lives in my nerd bag, much better potential there for an explosive device but profiling made it clear that I’m not a likely mascara carrier.

Seriously, it’s time we got over this nonsense.  We do need to profile.  I won’t go over the arguments you already know about the success never-hijacked always-threatened El Al has had with profiling nor will I bore you with statistics on how few grandmothers have been suicide bombers.  We need to look hard at those most likely to be a threat even though most that we look at will be totally innocent.

I’m a male of Middle-Eastern extraction.  I happen to be Jewish but I think I look disturbingly like the leader of Hamas.  You can’t tell me from a Lebanese or Jordanian and I can’t tell that they’re not my cousins since they were a few hundred generations back.  So I would get caught in the profile snare I’m recommending.

That’s OK.  I’d rather get to the airport fifteen minutes early knowing that I’ll be intensively screened (as I am in Israel) than get there an hour early because the lines are stalled by random searches of frightened and confused wheelchair-bound great grandmothers.

Oh yeah, I know the argument: the terrorists’ll start recruiting great grandmothers. Wanna bet?  More likely Mary’ll recruit me to carry the mascara.

Comments

[Dave Hinton]

“Oh yeah, I know the argument: the terrorists’ll start recruiting great grandmothers.”

Not great grandmothers, but they’ve already started recruiting respectable white middle class folk in the UK: One of the people arrested last month over that plot to blow up planes over the Atlantic was the son of a Conservative ex-MP.

[Anon E. Mous]

Tom- it's not 15 simple little minutes. If we started Israel style screening it'd be as much as 3 solid hours (this is fact from experience) of grilling. People in Tel Aviv miss their flights due to the multi-layer screening.

In essence if Americans have to live with the level of paranoia that many Israelis do, I would submit that the madman in the cave has already won and it's all over for our powerful economy.

Israelis tend to see freedom as a "nicety" not as a constitutional must. They live in a constant state of war. If to defend freedom, we need to create a police state with its consequent disastrous effects on the economy, then GAME OVER.

While I find it admirable that you would support more profiling even though you could ostensibly be snared, I think you're safe in the knowledge that being Jewish there's a snowball's chance in hell of you being treated to an all expense paid trip to a torture chamber on uncle Sam's dime: see

http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20060920/cm_usatoday/everysuspectisnotaterroristjustaskhim;_ylt=AgNes_2CxhSiLYz5KdtkT3z9wxIF;_ylu=X3oDMTA0cDJlYmhvBHNlYwM-

Maher Arar's only crime was being a muslim and having an Oracle database that pointed him out as a threat. In the current Gestapo climate, that led to him being abducted, humiliated and beaten mercilessly with an electrical cable.

Sorry Tom. The "please frisk Abdul not me" stuff only works for a while until "they" get a jewish convert called Tom to do something nasty.

Then who'll we profile?

PS- for the crowd that believe that they hate us because of who we are, this makes for some good reading

http://www.amconmag.com/2006/2006_06_05/buchanan.html