Just shut up and take it, says Debra Saunders

> In 1986 a pregnant young Irish woman named Anne Marie Murphy was planning on flying to Israel to meet her fiance’s parents. Little did she know the fiance had hidden plastic explosives in her suitcase. Israeli security stopped what would have been a horrific terrorist attack because they did not rely on the profile alone. What Saunders fails to point out in her little example above is that Anne Murphy was stopped from flying not by an X-ray scanner or some other machine, but by trained behavioral experts who ended up finding the bomb in her suitcase after an interrogation.

So yes, profiling by sight alone doesn’t get you your criminal every time. But neither does taking naked pictures of everyone. What Israeli security did with Murphy is exactly what we should be doing here: they asked her some key questions, which then led to more questions, which then led to searching her bags. Not the bags of the 40,000 innocent people flying that day, but just HER bags.

The plastic explosives in Murphy’s suitcase would have made it onto a plane if she had been in the U.S. instead of Israel. Because, hard as it is to believe, the TSA still doesn’t scan everyone’s checked baggage. Only our carry-ons.

Why? Because in the U.S. we spend all of our money on theater. Scanning luggage happens out of public view, whereas the big X-ray machines are right there in front for all to see.

So no, we’re not a nation of whiners. We’re a nation of sheep like you, Ms. Saunders, who happily trade convenience and our constitutional rights for a fake, illogical feeling of safety.