Terrorist Profiling
U.S. Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D–WA) claims that the U.S. government engaged in “unforgivable” “profiling” after the 9/11 attacks.
IN FACT, unessential bans on profiling impeded the FBI from acting on intelligence that may have prevented the 9/11 attacks and saved 3,000 lives. Here are the specifics:
- On July 10, 2001 — 2 months before the 9/11 terror attacks — an FBI Special Agent in Phoenix sent a memo to 11 people at FBI Headquarters and its New York Field Office warning that an “inordinate number” of “Sunni Muslim” foreigners who are “supporters” of “Usama Bin Laden” were “attending” or “have attended civil aviation universities and colleges” in Arizona, and there was “reason to believe” they were doing this to “conduct terror activity against civil aviation targets.”
- Beyond providing intel like the fact that one of the suspects had photos of Bin Laden and other terror leaders “tacked to his livingroom wall,” the memo asked FBI Headquarters to “discuss this matter with other elements of the U.S. intelligence community” and “obtain visa information” on aliens attending aviation schools and track them.
- Instead of taking “action” on the memo, recipients of it “discussed whether they would be able to implement” the memo’s recommendations “because the issue of racial profiling was ‘hot,’” and they “believed that the FBI’s attorneys” in the National Security Law Unit “would consider it racial profiling to send leads to the field to collect information about Middle Eastern men who happened to be attending schools related to civil aviation.”
- One month later on September 11, 2001, 19 Muslim aliens who were living in the U.S. slaughtered 2,977 people by hijacking 4 airliners loaded with people and flying them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the ground.
- In the run-up to the 9/11 attacks, the Clinton administration ended a requirement that passengers flagged as potential terrorists — as 10 of the 19 hijackers were — be subject to a “secondary screening” of their “person and carry-on belongings” on days with Level III Aviation Security Alerts, which was the case on 9/11. A “central” reason for this decision was “fear of potential discrimination or the appearance of it.”
- After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration issued guidance that called “racial profiling” “morally wrong,” banned “federal law enforcement officers” from acting “on the belief that race or ethnicity signals a higher risk of criminality,” and explicitly imposed “more restrictions” on “racial profiling” in “many cases” than the “Constitution requires.”
- The Constitution’s 14th Amendment requires “equal protection of the law” for all “persons,” and the Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that this “prohibits selective enforcement of the law based on considerations such as race,” but it doesn’t ban law enforcement from using race as a factor to identify suspects, as long as it is not the only factor.
- A 2000 report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights notes that “there is no federal legislative ban on racial profiling.” Certain politicians have been sponsoring bills to enact such a ban since at least 2001, but none have become law.
- As explained in a paper published by the Journal of Criminal Justice, “Since crime rates do vary according to age, sex, and racial groups, a stop and search strategy which does not take these attributes into account is an invitation to higher crime rates.”
- Contrary to the allegations of racial activists, people of different races in the U.S. are generally stopped, arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced at rates that accord with the frequency and severity of their criminality. A notable exception to this rule is murder because blacks are more likely than whites to get away with this crime.
- Per the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, and the Supreme Court, the core duty of government is protecting people’s life and liberty, which the federal government failed to do on 9/11 partly because it missed multiple opportunities to uncover the plot due to gratuitous bans on profiling.
