As anyone who has read more than two messages I've written here should know, I have very little sympathy and quite a few anti-Democratic party tendencies. (I've got my problems with the Republicans; I'm not registered with either party, but I'm not quite so far along as to register as a Libertarian or one of the other fringe parties.)

I forget where I read it (Walter Williams or some columnist like that), but Gore was searched twice at airports during the weeks around July 4. Some other congresscritters have themselves been searched upwards of a dozen times.

This has to go under the "What the hell are they thinking"? category. Do they expect a former Vice President with delusions of Presidential asperations to bomb or hijack an airplane? Do they expect a Congressman in good standing to bomb the White House? There's a time to be non-discriminatory and color and race blind, and there's a time to say, "Hmmmmmm. Do we search a former American-born Vice President, or do we search and do background checks on this Islamic crop dusting student who may or may not be in the country illegally with a fake visa or a fake ID?"

There's a time to be "fair", and there's a time to be sensible. Amongst these and other rank so-called security stupidities, there is no room for political correctness or fairness or other bullshit; life isn't fair, someone searched because they're an Arabian immigrant or student had better get used to it.

We disagree on everything.

Now, I'm not saying profile *just* because they're Arabic. There are lots of suspicious behaviors. Richard Reid, so-called "Shoe Bomber", a British citizen with British papers, perhaps not obviously Arabic but certainly a bit odd-looking with a "druggie" look (one account says, and the pictures I've seen agree with that assessment), raised red flags when he tried to board a flight from Paris to Miami - so much so that he missed his plane while being interrogated.

Perhaps the white chick with the Arab boyfriend might not raise the same flags, but her carry-on baggage has to go through the same machines. (Which raises other questions, such as Cincinnati's 57% failure rate to spot OBVIOUS guns going through the X-ray machine, but that's almost beside the point. The people at those X-ray machines are mininimum-wage people, commonly non-citizen immigrants, some here illegally, some of who likely wouldn't care if the entire Western seaboard fell into the sea, some of whom, so it appears, don't even bother to check if the X-ray machine is on.)

Current airline security is *still* a joke. Bomb-sniffing equipment for checked luggage has been installed in, what is it, .01% of the airports in the U.S.? Air marshals are few and far between and there are people who argue against giving the pilots *anything* more than the axe they have in the cockpit to help protect themselves.

Leaving your security in the hands of the government (or the airlines, or private corporations) has proven almost worse than uesless. Richard Reid was brought down by fellow passengers, not security screeners, but he's one fellow who could have and should have been profiled out the wazoo.

Okay, but it seemed that you did. Okay, Arabic, in the US and trying to board a plane.

Given that the 19 September 11 bombers were Arabic (18 of them Saudi Arabs, in fact, some with perfectly valid visas, some with forged ID and papers) it doesn't strike me as too terribly bad to give them a bit more scrutiny than the 80-year old combat veteran who had shot down 26 Japanese planes during the Battle of Midway. And any supposed screener who can't tell the difference between the Medal of Honor and a weapon should be fired on the spot.

Those in the FAA who issued "confiscate nail files and fingernail clippers" rules should also be fired. ASAP. (Not that the bureaucracy is going to let that happen.)

This is a problem because it conditions the security personnel to focus on the Arabic look.

That's a bureaucratic answer to the problem, which is not what we need. The trouble is, damn bureaucrats need to make rules and Oh My God Forbid that they be unfair to a particular racial group no matter how weird their behavior might have been. We need to hire, and pay for, intelligent screeners.

Racial makeup *should* be taken into account. Detaining a 10-year naturalized Arabic US citizen just for his racial makeup is dead wrong. But totally ignoring race ignores the facts: 18 Saudi Arabs, members of a fanatical faction of Islam, killed upwards of 3000 people (it's a miracle they didn't kill more) and inflicted billions of dollars of damage. Ignore that and you're burying your head in the sand.

(side note: the U.S. is doing this, burying its head in the sands of Saudi Arabia, despite Saudi support and funding of terrorist groups. We've got to issue an ultimatium. You give one more dollar to Osama binLaden or whoever his successor is, and we'll replace you and your government with something else. Whatever it takes.)

The security personnel are human and will make mistakes. To crack them, you send a series of false positives through. Meanwhile, you're slipping your weapons through on the least Arabic looking mule you can find.

I'm not sure you can really call the security personnel currently on duty (still pretty much the same minimum wage people who were on duty September 11, although there have been *some* firings and investigations) human. Every other day it seems you hear of some other abuse; patting down in great detail curvacious blondes while ignoring the wild-eyed unshaven guys who would meet any profile you might come up with. They've issued new regulations about that (female examines females, f'r instance) but I haven't heard much about disciplinary actions against those jerks who got their jollies out of searching women who had a spec of metal in their uplift bra.

Exactly. When you ONLY try to secure the access points, you have problems. Each flight should have one or two ARMED and UNIFORMED security personnel next to the cockpit. Facing the passengers.

Seriously disagree with this. A uniform means the security guy (air marshal or whatever) is an obvious first target a terrorist will plan to take out. Unless the marshal is holding his gun in his hand at all times, some terrorist can walk down the aisle to the first class section (or wherever the marshal is sitting) and, if prepared (as he would be), likely draw and shoot faster than the marshal can get his gun out of his holster.

And if there are four potential martyrs on the plane, the marshal(s) are unlikely to be able to outgun them.

Air marshals or armed security on every flight, I'll go for that. Just don't make them obvious targets.

Even this won't prevent 100% of the attacks. A terrorist can still spend years working his/her way up to commercial pilot and then crash into a building.

Or crash an aircraft into the ocean, as happened a year or two ago (and, if I remember correctly, Egypt still denies that it was a suicide.)