I'm with Dave.

McVeigh was a professed Christian. Anti-abortionists who bomb clinics are, without exception that I am aware of, professed Christians. By the logic suggested for airline security above, all Christians are possible bombers. And should be search without probably cause, well, just because.

Now, I actually occupy some middle ground. I think the current stance of the government is a little PC'd, in that they are denying that they are profiling, while they in fact are. Which to a degree, I'm fine with. But I think and hope that the profile is a lot more sophisticated than searching anyone who might have ever worn a beard and a turban.

And the danger is that we as a society start to engage in the behavior that happened on some flights right after 9-11, where the passengers decided that they didn't want to fly with some people of middle eastern descent, and asked them to be removed from the plane. These folks were law abiding american CITIZENs.

Most of us have some degree of black/polish/german/irish/catholic/protestant/jewish/japanese/chinese or other non upper class english aristocratic heritage in us. All of those groups were treated like this at some time. The great part about this country is that we have generally decided that that ain't cool.

Let me demonstrate how irrational simple profiling is. We have to remember that the terrorists are individuals, who hate us, who happen to MOSTLY be muslim. If there are 100,000 of them in the world, which probably overstates their numbers by at least a factor of 2, then that means that the next muslim you meet has about 1 chance in 70,000 of being a terrorist. At best. Sound pretty bad? Well, let's scale it a little bit. How do we compare to that number. There were 60,000 murders in the united states last year. Assuming that this rate continues next year, this implies that the next American you meet has about a 1 chance in 4,666 of being a murderer (making some simplifiying assumptions about 1 murder per murderer, 280,000,000 americans, etc). That includes you. So, YOU, are more than ten times more likely to be a murderer, than the next muslim you meet is of being a terrorist.

So, since you're likely to be a criminal, how do you feel about being strip searched? How about being thrown off a plane? Sound like a good thing to improve public safety? Yeah, I don't think so either. I'd rather the law enforcement boys have good reason to give me the full body probe.

Now, there are more powerful ways of doing the profiling, and I happen to think the FBI is capable of doing good work in this area. I hope they continue to do it. Let's let them do it, however, and not let our compassion and fellowship towards our fellow man wither at this trying time.