[Bret L]

“No Smoking Gun”? What About Detroit Bomber’s Profile?

By Steve Sailer

"We have it on the authority of John Brennan, Obama Administration counterterrorism advisor appearing on the Fox TV network today, that there was “no smoking gun” that should have alerted US intelligence agencies to the attempted Christmas Day suicide attack. [Security adviser: No smoking gun to stop attack, By John Amick and T. Rees Shapiro, Washington Post, January 3, 2010].

So that’s OK, then!

I mean, who could have guessed?

Who could have imagined that somebody named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab
would try to blow up a plane headed to Detroit on Christmas Day?

And how could we expect airline security to notice Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab was smuggling a bomb onto the plane when there were all
those grandmothers and little children to search?

Who could possibly have known?

I mean, besides his dad, the chairman of the board of one of Nigeria’s
biggest banks, who told the U.S. embassy in Lagos on November 19 to
watch out for his Muslim radical son.

I’m not sure I want to know how the Underwear Bomber’s father made his
fortune. But, clearly, he’s the kind of man who should be taken
seriously when warning about his own son’s extremism.

Two days after terrorism attempt, Homeland Security secretary Janet
Napolitano told ABC News, the “system has worked really very, very
smoothly".

Two points stand out:

*

More than eight years after 9/11, we still don’t have an
effective computer system for tracking potential terrorists trying to
board airplanes.

(Recall how President Obama has been boasting for a year about how his
administration is going to cut medical spending by spearheading a
computer system to track all your health information. What’s your over-
under date on when that gets finished? I’ve got dibs on 2033.)

*

It’s increasingly obvious that neither Bush nor Obama has wanted
an effective airport security system.

Effective security would impose a “disparate impact” on guys with
names like “Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab” (or, for that matter, “Barack
Hussein Obama”). Both Presidents actively worked against profiling and
disparate impact. Why? Because noticing patterns is just plain wrong.

Stupidity is our strength!

Since September 11, 2001, whenever somebody with a name like Umar
Farouk Abdulmutallab commits terrorism, I’ve been writing virtually
the same article about the American ruling class’s pathological
prejudice against profiling. (See for example Bush’s Racial Profiling
Guidelines Could Be Worse – And May Well Be and The One Word Grand
Strategy for Westerners and Muslims: "Disconnect".)

How big a calamity is it going to take to make them wake up, stop
randomly dissipating prevention efforts, and instead focus on those
most likely to commit terrorism?

For example, look at this typically hysterical reaction to retired Lt.
General Thomas McInerney’s recent advocacy of profiling: Former Lt.
General "Goes There": Calls for all Muslim men between 18-28 to be
strip searched, by Joseph Marhee, Examiner, January 3, 2010.
(“McInerney is deliberately using inflammatory and incendiary
proclamations to incite hostilities. It is simply unacceptable and
irresponsible for someone of his public profile to advocate such
blatantly unconstitutional and socially dangerous rhetoric into the
mainstream.” Yawn).

In contrast, naïve Nigerians have tended to assume that of course
their countryman’s shame will bring more suspicion and searches down
upon themselves. Thus Nigerian vice president Goodluck Jonathan
lamented:

"A Nigerian has created an additional problem for us by wanting to
blow up an aircraft … That means that those Nigerians who travel out
of this country will be subjected to unnecessary harassments and
searches."

How unworldly Goodluck Jonathan is! Apparently, he isn’t aware that in
21st century America, it’s considered shameful to notice such
patterns. Learning from the past is simply inappropriate.

Instead, the MainStream Media rushed to fret over the real danger:
backlash.

As you’ll recall, in November, General George Casey’s response to
Major Nidal Malik Hasan shooting up Fort Hood was: “Our diversity, not
only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific
as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think
that’s worse.”

Similarly, after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s arrest, the New York
Times headlined ‘Shocked’ Nigerians in U.S. Express Fears of Guilt by
Association After Arrest. (By Mary M. Chapman, December 29, 2009).

Nothing ever changes.

On the evening of 9/11, I wrote an article entitled Bush Had Called
for Laxer Airport Security, pointing out that President George W.
Bush, in an effort to win Arab and Muslim voters in (ironically) the
Detroit area, had denounced profiling during his second debate with Al
Gore in 2000. In 2001, Bush’s Transportation Secretary,
“Underperformin’ Norman” Mineta, ran a national disparate impact study
to make sure airport and airline employees had gotten the message—not
pay more attention to Muslims and/or Arabs.

In 2005, we finally learned that the clerk who checked in terrorist
ringleader Mohammed Atta for his first flight on 9/11 admitted:

"I got an instant chill when I looked at [Atta]. I got this grip in my
stomach and then, of course, I gave myself a political correct
slap."[“I Was The One,” Interview with Oprah Winfrey, September 12,
2005]

Has any official ever been held accountable for security lapses? Did
anybody else even criticize the President of the United States for
having worked against airline safety?

Republicans won’t do it because Bush is a Republican. And Democrats
wouldn’t do it because their brains would implode if they ever stopped
to notice how much Bush shared their values.

Instead, we’ve submitted to a truly mindless system of random airport
security spasms.

For example, in 2002, Joe Foss, an 86-year-old retired brigadier
general and former governor of South Dakota, was on his way to give a
speech to the cadets at West Point, when he was subjected to 45
minutes of interrogation because he was carrying a suspiciously pointy
object onto an airplane: his Congressional Medal of Honor.

We’re constantly told by people who think they are sophisticates that
profiling can’t possibly work. If we start concentrating our efforts
on people named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, then Al-Qaeda will
obviously just go out and recruit as suicide bombers 86-year-old Medal
of Honor winners. It’s simple logic!

The government’s initial response to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was in
the same tradition of inanity: ban passengers from going to the
bathroom for the last hour of the flight. Nobody is allowed to devote
additional attention to people with names like Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab—but you can push around the weak-bladdered all you want.
They aren’t a protected minority.

The government’s last-hour ban was particularly stupid because a hole
blown in a fuselage at low altitude and low speed would be less
dangerous to passengers than the same explosion at 35,000 feet and 600
mph, when the air pressure inside the cabin might rip the hole wider.

The ideal place to bring down an airplane with a small explosive is
not while approaching a runway, but over the ocean where there’s no
place for an emergency landing. (Think of the Air France flight that
disappeared June 1, 2009 in the middle of the Atlantic.)

The Administration presumably assumed that locking passengers in their
seats for the last hour would prevent Al-Qaeda from using a damaged
jetliner as an unguided missile. Yet plane crashes in urban areas
typically kill just a few people on the ground—population densities
just aren’t that high for unguided missiles to do much damage. For
example, the February 12, 2009 crash of a Continental Connection
flight in a residential area near Buffalo killed all 49 people on the
plane and one person the ground.

Remember the scene in The Aviator in which Howard Hughes wipes out a
block of houses in Beverly Hills on a test flight? That horrific 1946
crash didn’t kill anybody.

Moreover, planes are most dangerous to passengers on the ground not
when they are landing, but right after they’ve taken off and are still
full of fuel. (Jet fuel fires are what pancaked the Twin Towers.)

Locking the lavatories was such an obvious dumb idea that the
Administration reversed itself and decided to leave the ban up to the
pilots.

Here’s a better idea: Let the captain of each airliner profile the
passengers.

Before he backs away from the gate, the pilot should walk the length
of the aisle. Any shifty-eyed character whom the captain doesn’t like
the looks of, off he goes.

(Somewhat similarly, banks have cut down on robberies lately by having
employees greet everybody who walks in off the street. Eye contact
demoralizes and dissuades bad guys.)

The media is instead debating whether every passenger should be given
a full body X-ray scan at each airline gate—because scanning only
people with names like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab would be worse than
airliners falling out of the sky. Personally, having had a few dozen
CT and MRI scans during my battle with cancer a decade ago, I don’t
want many more. If I were a woman who was pregnant in the first
trimester, I definitely wouldn’t want any more.

Here’s another better, cheaper and safer. idea: dogs. You can train
dogs to sniff out explosives. (Indeed, the dogs that are the most
trainable can be mated to create a new breed, the way, say, the
remarkable Newfoundland was developed to save drowning sailors.)

Still, we would never ever post sniffing dogs at airports because that
would be culturally insensitive: most Muslims consider dogs to be
ritually impure. (Consider what else dogs sniff.)

What’s that? Discouraging fanatical Muslims from flying to America
strikes you as an advantage, not a detriment, of the dog system?

Well, that just shows that you are a bad, bad person—who uses his
brain."

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/100103_no_smoking_gun.htm