There are seductive arguments for racial profiling by law and order operatives. A New York Police Department official explained some years back that since the 9/11 terrorists were Muslims, further terror attacks could be detected by the close monitoring of Muslims in the country, whether they were visitors or US citizens. The argument was simplistic and dangerously wrong. It ignored the revulsion that the entire Muslim world felt at 9/11. It entirely overlooked the anger that all good Muslims felt that this horrific crime had been perpetrated by fanatics who claimed to be acting in the name of Islam. Nevertheless, despite its ludicrous basis, the idea that every Muslim in America should be an object of suspicion took root in official channels. The Department of Homeland Security stoked up both a bureaucratic and, to a degree, a public campaign of Islamophobia. Mercifully the reaction of ordinary Americans was to deplore the rednecks and racists in their bile-filled campaign against Muslims. It was, however, different at federal, state and city levels. The New York Police Department set up its “Demographics Unit” which mounted a considerable spying campaign, bugging mosques and coffee houses and even, it has been claimed, the homes of individuals against whom there was no prima facie evidence whatsoever. In short, New York's Finest were embarked upon a massive fishing expedition which, in the event, showed up precisely nothing. Moreover, there are unconfirmed reports that the FBI may have used some of the innocuous data collected to identify individuals against whom ultimately unsuccessful agent provocateur sting operations were mounted. Yet while New York's police were deploying these massive resources against the city's Muslim population, they failed utterly to unmask the 2010 Times Square bomb attack. It is, therefore, absolutely right that at long last, the plug is being pulled on this ill-conceived, highly expensive and spectacularly ineffective racial profiling unit. Other US agencies charged with security, including the CIA and the electronic-snoopers of the National Security Agency in Maryland, have also been involved in questionable activities. With the ending of the Cold War and the defection of former Warsaw Pact countries to Europe, there was no longer any requirement for the substantial US intelligence resources that had been aimed at them. A nervous security establishment knew that it could only hide its overblown bureaucracy behind the secrecy of intelligence for a finite amount of time. This was particularly true of the NSA. Then came 9/11 and overnight the intelligence community's bleak outlook was transformed. It has been in its interest to inflate the risks of terror in order to inflate its own importance and budgets. Indeed, the NSA also expanded its activities so that it began to spy on the phone, email and text communications of US citizens in what has been a clear breach of the US Constitution. The revelations of the whistleblower Edward Snowden on the astonishing extent of this spying also led to the NSA's grudging admission that no serious plots had actually been uncovered in all the years of snooping. However, the one good thing that could be said in favor of the NSA's eavesdropping is that it was applied to all Americans, regardless of racial profile. But then to have simply targeted US Muslims would not have called for such plump budgets and so many extra resources.
