I was impressed with your signature line ....""Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness." Mark Twain " and you will therefore sympathise I'm sure and be ope minded when I say that we also live in a world where people choose to ignore .....
Perhaps you should google "behavior pattern recognition " as well as "screening passengers by observation techniques" and look a little more at how Ben Gurion Airport .... possibly the potentially most dangerous target airport in the world and how they have reduced risks impressively before concluding on the issue.
Oh, I have a relatively open mind, and also know a number of highly trained people in various professions within the mental health field. While some of them are capable of evaluating people, the process is far from one of casual observation in a crowd.
You really can't compare what SPOT does with anything else- the difference in the level of training and clinical experience being a major issue. A few days of training does not begin to give insight into the complex range of human motivation, even if the person receiving said training is very self aware. The incident in at Philadelphia International Airport should be a lesson in how this program fails to be effective, and in fact can lead to wrongly subjective conclusions that can damage the lives of innocent people. It would be better if they stuck with WEI, and forgot the domestic witch hunting, as in the above case.