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Comments by YACCS

 

Something's missing...

New York City agencies are helping to train landlords as to what to look for in identifying potential terrorists. Or at least, that's the theory.

Landlords should be suspicious of tenants who insist on first-floor apartments, have little furniture, use cash, prefer pay phones and try to hide their identities, New York Police Department officials said yesterday at a briefing on fighting terrorism.

Somehow I think there's an even more important element in identifying terrorists, though. What's the most obvious thing that the 9/11 hijackers, as well as the Cole bombers and the embassy bombers, had in common? Hint: it wasn't a lack of furniture. Either the New York Times is being politically correct in not reporting the obvious, or law enforcement is still not being serious in fighting this war on terrorism.

Nobody is suggesting rounding up all Arabs and Arab-Americans into internment camps. But as long as the government continues to pretend that the single most important identifying characteristic isn't religion/ethnicity, we're going to be faced with the spectacle of 90-year old grandmothers and 5-year old kids being randomly screened at airports, while civil servants ignore Arab immigrants who talk about blowing up American cities.
posted by David Nieporent at 6/09/2002 09:56:00 PM |