'Racial profiling' of air travelers?

What patting down airline passengers from 13 Muslim countries and Cuba will and won't do for U.S. security

The Obama administration said Sunday that anyone flying to the U.S. from 14 terrorism-prone countries, including Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and Yemen, will face a new regime of intense airport security screening. Americans and passengers not traveling through the 14 countries on the list will be subjected to random patdowns and body scans. The new measures are a response to the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day. Civil rights groups are complaining, saying it's wrong to treat travelers differently because of their nationality. Is the new policy unfair profiling, or a wise precaution? (Watch a panel discuss racial profiling as a terrorism prevention tool)

Profiling is wrong, and pointless: Singling out travelers from a handful of countries is morally "outrageous," says Gregg Carlstrom in The Majlis, and it doesn't even make us safer. For one thing, the list of suspect countries includes Cuba, but omits Egypt and United Arab Emirates, which produced 9/11 hijackers. This policy of "institutionalized racial profiling" isn't based on sound intelligence—it's just an easy way for the administration to say it's "doing something."

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