Profiles in Haste

By Jasper Hicks, Staff Columnist

Published on Wednesday, January 6, 2010

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On January 4th, the United States government put into place a round of security measures that it hopes will be a “significant enhancement of our security posture.” What these new measures call for is the screening of 100 percent of passengers from 14 countries deemed “terrorism-prone.” On that list are countries such as Nigeria and Yemen — where Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was respectively raised and trained — along with other African and Middle Eastern nations, North Korea and Cuba. All passengers from these countries — and possibly non-citizens passing through them — will be subject to a full-body pat down and extra scrutiny of their baggage regardless of race or creed under the new guidelines that went into effect Monday.

Some supporters of this reform have touted it as a step in the right direction, leading eventually to profiling nationalities, creeds, genders and ages from which the United States government believes terrorists come. Lt. General Tom McInerney, for instance, proposed on Fox News a more in depth system to the one enacted Monday, deeming it necessary that every Muslim between the ages of 18 and 28 be strip-searched before flying.

But this new round of measures, along with the system McInerney envisions, is quite shortsighted. Profiling based on the 14 “terrorism-prone” countries assumes terrorism to be a static entity. Such specific targeting assumes that terrorism is located within the confines of specific state borders in specific regions of the world. Likewise, these new measures narrowly focus on known terrorists, failing to target terrorists that may have been recruited from non-“terrorism-prone” countries as well as domestic terrorists (the massacre at Fort Hood comes to mind). These enacted measures thus fail to recognize the ability of terrorists to recruit worldwide.

Like the measures that required all passengers to remain in their seats for the last hour of the flight, this statute also punishes the innocent for the actions and intentions of the guilty. While noncitizens whose travel itineraries send them through “terrorism-prone” countries will be searched, the 14 countries’ citizens will be profiled regardless of their trips’ origins. This not only unfairly targets many innocent men and women, but it also targets the men and women we desperately need to recruit to combat terrorism abroad. Cooperation with these countries and their citizens is what will help us combat terrorism in the long-term. With the measures enacted on Monday, we risk alienating a key population in the fight against terrorism.

One such member of this key population is Dr. Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, Abdulmutallab’s father, who went to the U.S Embassy prior to the Christmas Day attack to warn of his son’s possible radicalization. If we alienate similar men and women, we will lose those red flags in the future.

In addition to the problems with the profiling that went into effect on Monday, even more troubles are associated with the racial, ethnic and age profiling proposed by McInerney. The belief that terrorists cannot recruit members older than 28 or younger than 18 is illogical. If we have not learned by now, terrorism is about surprise. Terrorists will recruit new members from places and of ages we would not expect to foil such systems of profiling.

It would also be nearly impossible to profile based on religion. With such a statement, I believe McInerney and others have wrongly assumed that all Muslims look like Arab Muslims. In reality, Muslims come in all colors. They are not just Arabs. In fact, a majority of Muslims are not Arabs.

The correct move the government should have made here – instead of enacting new measures on top of old ones – is to focus on correcting our current system that did anything but work like “clockwork” as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano concluded after the Christmas Day attack. To President Obama’s credit, he ordered a review of our intelligence system. But instead of rushing to create a blanket of false security that probably will not even stop many terrorists, the United States should have used this foiled attack as an opportunity to boast America’s unwillingness to balk in the face of terrorism.