(Untitled)

[kateorman]

And in the continuing quest to thwart anti-terrorism efforts by alienating the Muslim community, a former British police chief has got stuck into them. "I'm a white, 62-year-old, suit-wearing ex-cop - I fly often, but do I really fit the profile of a suicide bomber?" he asks. Perhaps not, although fellow critic of political correctness Theodore

Comments

[hiraethin]

My point. Kaczynski was a letter-bomber... and McVeigh et al. used a truck for their single mass attack. Analysis of bombings aimed at aircraft, in particular, would suggest elderly white males are not the likeliest suspects.

"Profiling", or as I prefer to describe it, "pattern analysis", should take more into account than just the recent plot and a few white guys thrown in for diversity. It examines the commonalities shared by most offenders.

For example, terror offenders in the last 5 years are mostly male, but not always; mostly 18-35, but not always; and mostly muslims of arab ethnicity, though not always. That's not racial or religious prejudice. It's statistical analysis.

Back to the original post for a moment - certain former Police chiefs should know better than to make such remarks. Especially when they are newsworthy, as such a remark must inevitably be in the present climate. Not to mention that, profiling aside, security checks should apply to *everyone*, at least to a certain extent. Even 62-year-old white males. Else they are visibly weak.

[kateorman]

British Muslims seem more upset about being arrested as terrorism suspects than being searched at airports.

[kateorman]

See here.

[kateorman]

Decent, law-abiding Muslims seem keen to cooperate with the authorities, but you can see how hundreds of apparently baseless arrests would put them off.

I'm disturbed by the frequent suggestion that it's the Muslim community's own fault that its innocent members are being arrested. To draw a very rough analogy, while most men are not rapists, almost all sexual assaults are committed by men; but when bad police work puts an innocent man in jail, the blame attaches to the police, not to men as a whole.

[kateorman]

I think the police are generally supposed to have a bit more to go on than "looks a bit like the criminal" before they start arresting people! I think they should also have a bit more to go on than "was named by a single informant who was basically bribed and/or threatened", if what that lawyer says is true. As I said, I can understand the fear of missing a genuine tip-off amongst all the baseless ones, but surely a theat this serious needs more thorough investigation and a better use of resources.

[kateorman]

I've been talking about evidence, not "proof". Besides, a witness trying to pick out a criminal from a lineup is generally neither threatened or bribed.

"Pissing a few dozen people off" would be one thing. The public shooting of an innocent man is another. So are hundreds of fruitless arrests, and high-profile raids - not to mention thousands of largely useless stop-and-searches - which piss off the very community best placed to help the police.

I'm reading bits of Seymour Hersh's book Chain of Command, which includes a chapter on the intelligence failures before 9/11. I've only skimmed that, but apparently FBI agents were concerned about the flight students; further, the CIA reported that bin Laden was planning to attack America soon. They had good evidence, but it wasn't acted on.

It's easy to see how the horror of that hindsight could drive police to follow even the flimsiest leads. And, in principle, I don't disagree with you - I'd rather they followed a lot of negative leads than missed a positive one. In practice, though, it's not ony wrecking innocent lives, it's damaging their ability to get those positive leads, and contributing to the atmosphere of enmity which stimulates terrorism in the first place.