The price of profiling

By Libby This is what happens when you start treating every person of a certain ethnic group as a potential terrorist. Chaos that would be comedic if there wasn't a good chance that such panic, (or hate) driven hysterics will only grow, especially since the Malkin style vigilantes of the world encourage it to thrive. SAN DIEGO – A conflict between passengers at Lindbergh Field Tuesday night caused the overnight delay of an American Airlines flight headed to Chicago. Flight 590 was scheduled to depart at 11 p.m. for Chicago O'Hare International Airport but was rescheduled for Wednesday at 10:15 a.m. after some kind of dispute among customers started at the gate and continued onto the plane, said American Airlines spokesman Tim Wagner. While Wagner said it is the airlines policy not to disclose any information about their passengers, televised reports claimed that the incident involved a group of six to seven Iraqi Americans and another passenger who was apparently uncomfortable that the men were speaking in Arabic. I suspect these guys could have been speaking Bulgarian and this still would have happened because they fit the profile. And who were these nefarious foreigners? Via TBogg, we get the answer. The six Iraqi passengers had been training Marines at Camp Pendleton and worked for Defense Training Systems, a unit of International Logistics Services Corp. of Anchorage, Alaska, said Dave Stephens, the company's chief executive officer. A passenger who was traveling with two children got into an argument with the Iraqi men, Wagner said. Since this was a passenger problem the details are sketchy but it's not much of a stretch to imagine the instigator demanded the men speak English in America or something of that sort. Yet these are the Muslims I'm told don't exist, the ones trying to help us counter the terrorists. It's only natural they would speak in their native language when alone together, just as we would speak English to each other while on tour in a foreign country. Meanwhile 126 people didn't get to their destinations on time. Who's to say what important work didn't get done because they didn't get there. Perhaps something that also would help counter-terrorism efforts. Perhaps a relative died while they were delayed in arriving at the bedside. The airline schedules got screwed up. Multiply that by 10 a day and consider the incovenience. Multiply it by 100 and consider the price we would ultimately pay for panic driven profiling. If we see another terrorist attack, which considering the ineffective policies of our DHS is not an impossibility, that could certainly happen. It would cripple our airline industry and we still wouldn't be any safer from terrorists. Doesn't seem worth it to me.