Another Odubya Moment

Spencer Ackerman pulls no punches on calling President Obama's new airline security policy what it is:  de facto profiling (emphasis mine):

We need to call this what it is: a security risk. If you are one of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims, a president who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia is sending you the message that you are considered a threat. Not even Michael Chertoff and Mike Hayden think this is defensible. That ought to tell you something profound. al-Qaeda shows every sign of diminishing potency — that is, its ability to attract qualified recruits and have its message resonate among the world’s Muslims — while U.S. military, intelligence and law enforcement capabilities increase. Its strategy — its only strategy — has always been to get the U.S. to overreact, overreach and counterproductively lash out and draw Muslims into al-Qaeda’s corner. Usama bin Laden is really explicit about this.

From this perspective, Matt Duss is wrong and Bill Kristol really is correct: al-Qaeda couldn’t pull off a successful terrorist attack on Flight 253. But it’s getting its victory nevertheless, every time a Pakistani family is pulled out of line on an airport and searched. Kristol doesn’t understand why he’s right, of course, and he’s actually doing al-Qaeda’s work for it here, but it’s nevertheless true. And this is happening not while the hated George W. Bush is president, but during the term of the man who stood up in Cairo to say that America and Islam are not at war. If this sort of dangerous hysteria is what emerges after a failed attack, imagine what will happen if al-Qaeda, God forbid, pulls off something at home.

Ackerman is 100% correct here.  AQ's entire goal has been to make the Muslim world hate the United States.  When recruiters and jihadis can point at this policy and go "Do you see?  America already considers you the enemy of their country.  They do not consider you to have rights.  They do not consider you to even be human.  They pull you aside because you are a Muslim.  To them, this is a crime."

And again, this is Obama's policy...or should I say Odubya's policy.  To recap:

“It is unfair to discriminate against over 150 million people because of the behavior of one person,” Dora Akunyili, Nigeria’s information minister, said Monday, referring Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian accused of hiding explosives in his underwear on the Dec. 25 flight.

The Algerian ambassador to the United States, Abdallah Baali, said he would file a protest once he was given formal notice of the change.

“The United States has the right to protect the security of its citizens,” Mr. Baali said. “But this is discrimination against the citizens of Algeria, who do not pose any particular risk to the people of the United States.”

And we do have the right to protect our citizens.  We do not have the right to assume 1.6 billion people are the enemy and treat them as such, unless you're heavy into self-fulfilling prophecies.

And yet that's exactly what Obama's new policy is doing.  Republicans still run our foreign policy, and the whole point of that policy is to allow the complete trashing of our civil liberties.  We're trading liberty for security, and we deserve neither, as Ben Franklin said.