Once Bitten, Twice Shy

It would appear that British common sense is still alive and well:

British law enforcement has begun to use racial profiling to identify and search terrorist suspects as the hunt continues for a possible third terrorist cell in London - with most government officials expressing at least tacit support for the controversial new policy.

Interviewed by the Daily Mail on Sunday, British Transport Police Chief Constable Ian Johnston first broached the issue, saying his officers would not shy away from targeting those groups most likely to present the greatest threat.

"Intelligence-led stop-and-searches have got to be the way," he told the Mail. "We should not waste time searching old white ladies."...

This was not an isolated sentiment:

Interviewed on BBC Radio 4, Home Office Minister Hazel Blears defended the new racial profiling policy.

"What it means is if your intelligence in a particular area tells you that you're looking for somebody of a particular description, perhaps with particular clothing on, then clearly you're going to exercise that power in that way," she said. "That's absolutely the right thing for the police to do."

Tory MP and former Home Office Minister Ann Widdecombe concurred, telling BBC 4 on Monday, "People understand that at the moment there is a certain form of person who is a danger to society and that sort of person is more likely to fall in to that category."...

National Black Police Association Superintendent Ali Dizaei agreed, telling BBC 4 that racial profiling was acceptable because "these are extraordinary times.”

Maybe there's hope for the Brits after all. Or maybe, as in the home of 9/11's "ground zero," it's just a matter of temporal proximity.

There's an old Calvin & Hobbes strip that does an outstanding job of capturing this psychological tendency:

In panel #1 Calvin is sitting at his school desk, bored out of his mind and day-dreaming about dinosaurs. In panel #2 his teacher, Miss Wormwood, noticing that Calvin had stopped paying attention, smacks her yardstick down two inches in front of the boy's nose, grabbing that attention by (probably literally) scaring the piss out of him. In panels #3 through #5 we see Calvin's initial rapt attention gradually wane until in panel #6 he's right back where he was, not paying attention and daydreaming about dinosaurs again.

The British are less than a month from their version of 9/11. We're coming up on four years from ours. Small wonder that our "mother country" is displaying a ton more common sense about internal security techniques at the moment than we are - indeed more than we ever have before or since 9/11.

There is irony in such decadent short-sightedness. The very fictional curtailment of civil liberties about which those on the Left shriek against the Bush Administration in Chicken Little fashion will be the inevitable consequence of an even bigger (i.e. WMD) terrorist strike here at home the aversion of which can be enhanced by reasonably heightening common sense law enforcement steps in the here and now. And proximate-cause profiling is an integral part of that.

There's another Calvin & Hobbes that depicts Calvin's impatience with his dad's barbequeing. Dad tries to explain how some things are worth waiting for, and Calvin replies with a crack about whether he should just go to McDonalds or starve to death. His dad replies, "Yeah, I know, you think you're going to be six years old for the rest of your life."

If the so-called "civil libertarians" get their way, we'll receive our own "Childhood's End" - only the "devils" will be the ones shouting, "Allahu Akbar!"