"'What ifs' won't protect the country"
Blogger Michele Catalano (A Small Victory) is troubled by the renewed fervor for targeting Arab men sparked by Jacobsen's account.

"I don't know what to think. Racial and ethnic profiling makes me uncomfortable. I have too many Arab neighbors to start thinking that every Arab I see is a potential terrorist. Are people, given the abundance of threats hitting the airwaves these days, seeing things that aren't there?

I suppose I should be honest and say the main reason I don't believe this story is because I don't want to believe it. I don't want to think that our national security is at risk because people's suspicions aren't taken seriously or because we have a quota on how many people of a certain nationality we can give the once over. Which all flies directly in the face of my stance against ethnic profiling, I know."

Yet she, too, is ready to err on the side of caution.

"The more I write about [this story] the more I think, why not? They keep saying they're going to do something, why would I think this story is not true?

"Again, I don't want it to be true. The implications are not something I can let my brain chew on right now. Head, meet sand. But what if? What if they were making a dry run? You can't really protect the country by dealing in 'what ifs'. So what's the solution? Or is there one?"

Such concern for civil liberties ultimately "annoys" editor David Horowitz, whose Front Page Magazine has featured both Jacobsen installments. Horowitz offered a like-minded story of his own back in mid-June, in which menacing Arabs looked uncannily like 9/11 hijackers.

"I flew home through Frankfurt and country where Mohammed Atta organized a 9/11 terrorist cell. My flight was to Detroit, a city with the largest Muslim population in the United States. While waiting to board I noticed a group of young ascetic looking Muslim males, two of whom were so similar to Atta in facial expression and general appearance that they could have been his brothers. They didn't appear to be students or have any business purpose (no suits for example) and my first thought, really a question to myself which I know everybody who flies occasionally has the impulse to ask but suppresses was 'Are they going to blow up this flight?' My second thought was why am I jumping to the conclusion that they're terrorists? My third was anger at Mohammed Atta and the Islamo fascists for making this a reasonable fear and at the politically correct for making me feel guilty about having a reasonable fear while paralyzing -- or so I thought -- the security forces that are suposed to protect us by barring them from profiling obvious suspects (even if they should turn out to be innocent on inspection). It was ... annoying to think that thanks to [Transportation Secretary] Norm Minetta our security forces would not be able to scrutinize these guys a little more carefully than say they would scrutinize me."

Daniel Drezner, a political science professor at the Univerity of Chicago, sees a chilling lack of homeland protection -- on a much broader scale. He points to a new book by former Coast Guard commander Stephen Flynn, "America the Vulnerable: How Our Government Is Failing to Protect Us From Terrorism."

"Two months after the September 11th attacks, I heard Stephen Flynn give a talk about homeland security and American vulnerabilities -- and he scared the crap out of me. Listening to Flynn -- a former Coast Guard commander -- describe the various soft spots of America's infrastructure was to realize just how much 9/11 required a rethink of how America defends itself. Flynn wasn't defeatist during his talk, he just laid out what needed to be done. And it was a long list."

Drezner turns to sobering excerpts from Flynn's new book:

"'The U.S. has no rival when it comes to projecting its military, economic and cultural power around the world. But we are practically defenseless at home. In 2002 alone, more than 400 million people, 122 million cars, 11 million trucks, 2.4 million rail freight cars, approximately 8 million maritime containers and 56,596 vessels entered the U.S. at more than 3,700 terminals and 301 ports of entry. In general, frontline agents have only a matter of seconds to make a go/no-go decision on whether to allow entry: 30 seconds for people and one minute for vehicles. And then there are the 7,000 miles of land borders and 95,000 miles of shoreline, which provide ample opportunities to walk, swim or sail into the nation. Official estimates place the number of illegal migrants living in America at 7 million. Given these immense numbers, it is a sense of futility, fueled by the lack of vision about what sensible measures are worth pursuing, that lies at the heart of our national inertia on the homeland-security issue ...

"'From water and food supplies; refineries, energy grids, and pipelines; bridges, tunnels, trains, trucks, and cargo containers; to the cyber backbone that underpins the information age in which we live, the measures we have been cobbling together are hardly fit to deter amateur thieves, vandals, and hackers, never mind determined terrorists. Worse still, small improvements are often oversold as giant steps forward, lowering the guard of average citizens as they carry on their daily routine with an unwarranted sense of confidence.'"

Drezner says the Bush administration's floundering Department of Homeland Security should spell golden political opportunity for John Kerry -- though he finds little comfort in the Democratic presidential candidate's own plan to safeguard the nation.

"If I was John Kerry, I would bash Bush again and again and again on this front. Reviewing the Senator's own proposals, however, I'm thoroughly underwhelmed. There's a recognition of the importance of port security, but nothing else about protecting critical infrastructure (and, it should be noted, port security is actually one of the unheralded initiatives of the current administration). Most of Kerry's proposals focus on emergency response rather than prevention."

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