(trying again-first attempt to post was lost).

racial profiling may be inevitable but is probably ineffective. There are extremist Moslems from every racial group on Earth. Simply watching "Middle Eastern men" won't be very effective.

Still, we need to be careful about a lot of things. Even seemingly innocent activities such as videotaping high profile potential targets can be suspicious. The people taking the pictures may be innocent tourists or they may be putting together information for future attacks. Here are 3 stories to illustrate my point.

The first story involves a professional baseball player from the 1930s named Moe Berg. Berg was a very intelligent man with an Ivy League degree and was fluent in several languages. He took part in a 1934 tour of Japan with other American players. While there, he took a lot of pictures and home movies. Those movies were later used by the Doolittle Raiders to help plan their attack runs. Berg went on to serve in the OSS in WWII. On one of his missions, he attended a lecture by Heisenberg to try to determine if the Germans were developing the atomic bomb. His orders were to kill the Heisenberg if necessary.

The next man was an Australian aviatior and businessman named Sidney Cotton. In the months leading up to WWII, Cotton made many business trips into Germany flying his Lockheed Model 12A. Carefully hidden in the belly of the plane were retractable panels covering cameras. As Cotton made his trips around Germany, his cameras were recording pictures of all sorts of future targets. He sometimes took these pictures while giving high ranking German officers rides in his plane. Cotton later went on to establish the units responsible for aerial photographic reconnaissance.

The third man was a Japanese agent attached to their consular office in Honolulu in 1941. He travelled all over the islands taking pictures, including chartering a plane to fly over Pearl Harbor. Those pictures were used to plan the attack.

The point of all this is that seemingly innocent activities can be used against us in wartime. We have to be on guard.