Tim McVeigh was a lone crackpot, not a representative of an organized terror movement of thousands of like-minded individuals. He shouldn't even be a point on this graph (I don't buy the notion that he was connected to Iraq.)

It is the height of idiocy to try and avoid the concept that radical Islamists attempting terror attacks are for the most part going to be Middle Eastern. In the same way, if we were looking for Nazi terrorists, one would not focus one's suspicions at black people.

While it would be obviously stupid to abandon random inspection of passengers entirely and only look at Middle Easterners, the opposite pole, where a little old lady in a wheelchair is assigned equal suspicion to a Middle Eastern immigrant, is also ludicrous. The latter is largely where we are now, due to hysterical fear of political incorrectness.

You point out that nobody profiled the Middle Eastern hijackers before 9/11. Well, duh. Why would they? Nobody had ever committed such a crime (airplanes as weapons) before at all, much less Middle Easterners. They all had moved through America unmolested, secure in the knowledge that even marginal scrutiny by the authorities before the crime would have the scrutinizers hung by the ACLU. Also, the blase attitude towards immigration in this nation worked in their favor.

The one thing the hindsighters keep avoiding is the fact that had the FBI hauled in these guys before the fact, solely because they were taking flight lessons or had funny papers, the FBI personnel involved would have been cashiered as racists. Even now in Canada, this is happening to cops who are trying to pin down possible terrorists who have yet to commit crimes.