Advice for Police:

[SheilaT]

45. I don't want to assume what your intent is here, but it feels as if

you're saying my brother-in-law would have been profiled as a potential terrorist. If he were here he'd be laughing out loud at you.

Now I want to make it very clear that I'm an anti-gun nut, as extreme in my way as certain gun nuts are in there way. But even in my extremism I can understand that someone like him simply was never a potential terrorist.

And that's precisely what's wrong with both profiling and the current system at airports. I'm a former airline employee. I went to work as a ticket agent at DCA in January, 1969, well before any security. We used to happily let people out on the ramps if the wanted to photograph airplanes. No one thought it was a problem of any kind. And then certain nut cases decided it would be giant fun to hijack airplanes to Cuba. Which is exactly why the first security procedures came into effect in 1971, I think. And they worked very well.

Which is exactly why I know that the current security bullshit is just that: bullshit. It doesn't make us safer. I do NOT feel safe when I see elderly nuns patted down, or two year olds being sent through the metal detector while crying for mommy.

Plus, every so often I think about what I might do were I do want to perpetrate some sort of terrorist attack. Keep in mind, I have zero interest in actually doing so, and my knowledge of guns or explosives is less than minimal, and I haven't a clue how to get ahold of such things. But those considerations aside, various sorts of terrorist attacks would be remarkably easy. I once briefly discussed one such scenario I had in mind with the afore-mentioned brother-in-law, and he agreed it would be fairly easy to pull off, once the appropriate weapons were obtained. Sometimes I'm surprised that such an attack has never happened.

Which, I think, tells us a lot about the potential terrorists and how much of our culture they don't understand.

As an American, with my understanding of our culture, if I wanted to attack this country, I'd do it on a Super Bowl Sunday. If I were patient enough, I'd wait for a year when the Washington Redskins (or whatever name they might have in the future) were in the Super Bowl. Trust me, having lived in DC one year they were in the game, a foreign army could invade, no one would notice until after the game were over, or perhaps not for two or three days were the Redskins to win.

Clearly, our potential enemies really don't understand this country.