Reason to Profile

An American woman in Pennsylvania has been accused of joining Islamist terrorists and has been termed "Jihad Jane". As it happens, she is reported to have been a US-born citizen with blond hair. ABC's Good Morning America had former counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke on to use this case as a rationale for why we can not successfully profile terrorists. This contention is absurd on its face, the woman is clearly an anomaly, as Clarke himself even conceded with his terming her a "misfit". The United States has spent billions of dollars, particularly through the Transportation Safety Administration, subjecting millions of innocent travelers to intrusive, expensive, time-consuming searches that Israel which takes security plenty seriously would never subject visitors to, but instead, uses a different set of metrics that include behavioral observation but also utilizes profiling to secure her airliners. The September 11 perpetrators were easily identifiable had anyone been looking, the London mass transit bombers largely fit the profile, and I would lay odds that the next attack will come from Muslim males, under the age of forty of South Asian, Middle Eastern, or African appearance. It is a shame that political correctness forces the removal of common sense from the battle against crime and the war on terrorism.