This first part of this post is intended to a devil's advocate post, so please treat it in kind.

Given with what we saw on 9/11, 19 Muslims hijacked and flew planes into 3 buildings, with a 4th being heroicly crashed by the pax on board.

Compare that to the many more shoes that have been screened (I'm willing to bet more than 1.5 billion shoes have been removed since TSA's inception ala shoe carnival), with only one shoe bomb found. Yet TSA focuses much more resources on detecting a shoe bomb when it was at least 19x more likely that a Muslim would conduct a terrorist act.

Statistically speaking, Muslims would be much greater threats than shoes. So I can at least see how the above argument for profiling could be made.

Now with me personally, I figure if I'm going to die at a certain time regardless of whether I'm in a plane, car, or at work. So I don't fear the Muslims. I DO fear, however, that with some security practices I have seen, an incident could easily be blamed on Muslims and there would be ample opportunity to plant something in a carryon bag if a screener truly were racist. I think back to one time at SLC where my wife's purse was dumped with nothing of interest found, repacked, and taken back to x-ray while we HAD to stand back by the inspection table. I immediately thought I was glad I'm not middle eastern, because that was an easy opportunity for something to be planted. That was before TSA, but with some practices, abuse can exist.

If any profile were to exist, I think it should be based on who is more likely NOT to be a terrorist, like an 85 year old grandma or a 3 year old kid. To address muling, at least in my book, I'd be much more willing to strap a suicide bomb on me (under duress, of course) than I ever would to put one on my child. I would hope that I would be screened and "taken care of" so I wouldn't have to die.

Super