Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano got it right when she said, “When it came right down to it, the system worked…Once this incident occurred, everything happened that should have happened.” She was unwittingly explaining how a terrorist from Nigeria who was already on one terrorist advisory list managed to board a plane in Amsterdam without a passport and successfully smuggle and ignite a chemical explosive aboard a plane in Detroit. Yes, the system works; it’s ineffective by design.

Fortunately the explosion was a dud. According to one report, the detonator hidden in the suspect’s underpants was too small, resulting in a fizzled explosion that merely scorched the man’s own little detonator.

In fairness to Napolitano, our airport security system is not her creation. It was established in 2001 by politically correct liberals and skittish conservatives who thought it would be unfair to profile those most likely to blow up airplanes. As a result, we’ve been fighting a terrorist group for nearly a decade, yet we still dare not speak their name: Muslim religious fanatics. Meanwhile, the random search method has remained virtually the same since 9/11 and remains a misguided policy that’s more public relations than public security.

Profiling potential terrorist suspects based on what we already know is going to get a better result than any system that uses random factors. That’s a mathematical fact. But isn’t it unfair? Yes–that’s why it’s effective. The more unfair, the better the results. In sports it’s called gaining an edge over your opponent. In Las Vegas it’s called playing the odds. In warfare it’s called military strategy. Random searches might be more foolish than trying to draw an inside straight. It’s certainly more deadly.

Being nice to radical Muslims may rate us points at U.N. cocktail parties, but it’s no way to confront the very real and very dangerous situation in which we find ourselves. We know our enemy, their ideology, and their intentions. The time is way overdue for a more realistic approach. Profiling won’t be the end all to the war against Islamo-fascism, but it’s the right place to start.

Tags: airport, extremism, extremist, homeland, Janet, muslim, Napolitano, security, terrorism, terrorist

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 at 5:38 pm and is filed under Children, Fools and Bureaucrats. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.