Reply #7: Richard Reid was a British citizen of Jamaican descent. [View All]

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

He didn't fit the Arab-Muslim profile, either.

Then there's guys like Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolph; the pregnant irish woman who was carrying a bomb for Abu Nidal; and hundreds of skinhead Aryan Nation types. We've also got Sendero Luminoso, the IRA, various Indonesian terrorist groups, and all manner of other bad actors, none of whom can be pigeonholed into a single group of obviously ethnic characteristics. Point being, it's not possible to profile all the passengers in line at the airport by their racial or ethnic appearance. You not only target innocent people unfairly, you run the risk of missing the real bad guys. Profiling, if you want to call it that, has to be done by behavioral characteristics, travel patterns, etc. You can't just round up all the "Muslim-looking" people and interrogate and strip-search them and figure it's safe.