Profiles in Ignorance

Ruth Marcus gives a reasonable, if not convincing, defense of the TSA's invasive new practices.

Her willingness to have her "saggy butt" anonymously viewed by a TSA agent in another location is for the greater good. Just as allowing a federal worker to feel in between the crevace of one's butt cheeks satisfies the same social contract for safety's sake.

As it is, polls show that a majority of Americans are willing to submit to such procedures for the greater good (security), Marcus and others talk about. In their view, the marginal benefit of being extra safe outweighs the indignity of being probed.

As for profiling, Marcus, like her colleague Gene Robinson, doesn't believe it will work because eventually terrorist leaders will recruit white, grandmotherly types to do their suicide bombing for them. This seems a stretch. Suicide bombers have a particular psychology that is played upon over months and sometimes years. The likelihood of Al Qaeada leaders being able to recruit a 56-year-old woman from Norfolk willing to blow herself up to kill hundreds of innocents is so remote that it isn't worth protecting against.

What are the other possibilities? Could such terrorists sneak enough PETN and TAPN into such a person's underwear for them to unknowingly carry the explosive onto a plane? Maybe. But then they would have to detonate the device by combining the two subtances. So no. They would need a willing subject.

What about holding family members hostage, threatening to kill them unless the old lady cooperated? That too, seems unlikely to work. What reasonable guarantee could the terrorists give that they would let the family go after the woman blew herself up to induce her to go along with the plan?

No, profiling would work. But it is shied away from by politicians and bureaucrats afraid of the CAIR and the PC police. If we are to be told that it is part of the social contract to allow physically intrusive searches of our bodies in order to protect the lives of our fellow citizens, then federal screeners ought to be ordered to use even more effective means for ferreting out terrorists. Our state department declares whole countries to be dangerous for American citizens to travel to. Our government declares certain countries to be exporters of terrorism. Why can't citizens of those countries receive greater scrutiny when traveling by air in this one?