Round 'Em Up
by digby
Here we go again:
Gallagher: But guys, let's look at the inevitable, the 800-pound gorilla in the room. How about we scrutinize young Middle Eastern men to stop this.
What happens when El Al Airlines, the airline run and operated by the state of Israel, if a Palestinian tries to board that plane? Do you think he goes through an extra degree of security? Well, let's do that with Muslims, let's do that with anybody named Abdul or Mohammad or Ahmed, let's take them and put them in a room and make sure they don't have explosives sewn into their underwear.
If you add in Africans (as you must by this logic) that's about half of the global population right there. But then how do we know that some guy named Bob isn't a Muslim? Or that some young woman named Samira isn't a terrorist? It gets really complicated. The only profiling that will really work is to not let anyone in the US at all and to require all US citizens to wear designations on their clothes to indicate which religion they are. Anything short of that just won't get the job done.
Alternatively, we could invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.
Short of that, I would guess we're going to have to continue to do the delicate balancing act between security and civil liberties and sharpen up the huge unwieldy anti-terrorist bureaucracy. As someone who was once lauded as a super-hero terrorist fighter always said, "it's hard work."
.