Mineta’s Folly
Norman Mineta may not necessarily be the least impressive Bush cabinet secretary, but he is certainly the most dangerous.

January 10, 2002 10:40 a.m.

ransportation Secretary Norman Mineta may not necessarily be the least impressive Bush cabinet secretary — there's competition there — but he is certainly the most dangerous.

When President Bush the other day said that he would be "madder than heck" if his Secret Service agent had been ethnically profiled, he wasn't just playing to the media or seeking to assuage the agent's feelings, he was enunciating administration policy: no profiling on the basis of ethnicity or national origin whatsoever.

As I write in the latest National Review, this is an instance of a piety of our racial politics — no "racial profiling" — triumphing over experience and commonsense. Islamic terrorists will necessarily be Muslims, and probably from the Arab world.

Not to try to single out young males with these characteristics for extra attention — more extensive searches and questioning — is folly. It ignores, among other things, the successful Israeli experience securing El Al from attacks.

But adopting something along the lines of the Israeli system would require a tough-mindedness, and instead of tough-mindedness, we have Norm Mineta. On the issue of profiling, Mineta's ignorance appears to be nearly invincible.

Mineta's Japanese-American family was interned during World War II. He implies at every opportunity that by standing in the way of ethnic profiling, he is preventing a similar enormity today. "A very basic foundation to all of our work," he says, "is to make sure that racial profiling is not part of it."

Asked on 60 Minutes if a 70-year-old white woman from Vero Beach should receive the same level of scrutiny as a Muslim from Jersey City, Mineta said, "Basically, I would hope so." Asked if he could imagine any set of circumstances that would justify ethnic and racial profiling, Mineta said "absolutely not."

To be fair, other Bush cabinet secretaries at least pretend to be equally obtuse on the question. According to Spence Abraham, eschewing profiling is what the country is all about: "Ethnic stereotyping has no place in a nation that cherishes its freedom," he says. (Abraham apparently also thinks that there is no such thing as an unhypenated American: "Each of us is an Arab-American or a Japanese-American, Irish-American," etc., etc.)

But it is Mineta who takes the anti-profiling position all the way to its most absurd conclusion. "Surrendering to actions of hate and discrimination," he maintains, "makes us no different than the despicable terrorists who rained such hatred on our people."

Since Mineta thinks "discrimination" includes ethnic profiling, this must be one of the laziest statements of post-Sept. 11 moral equivalence this side of Susan Sontag.

The airlines are only too happy to play along with this. A Sept. 21 memo to Delta employees from CEO Fred Reid has the subject line "tolerance," and disavows ethnic profiling in the strongest possible terms: "We cannot afford to follow this tragic behavior. It is exactly what our enemies are striving for: the end of our open, diverse, and tolerant way of life."

In other words, if we take steps to frustrate the terrorists — the terrorists will win!

All this is so much nonsense. I'm glad that American Airlines stood up for its pilot who booted the Secret Service agent the other day, but there is also something enjoyable in seeing the airlines' hoisted on their hypocrisy.

American swears it would never ethnically profile — the very idea is unimaginable. But are we really supposed to believe that in his long confrontation with the Secret Service agent the American pilot never noticed that the agent looked like the Sept. 11 hijackers? If not, he would have been a fool.

One reason that such conflicts are taking place in the first place is the lack of real ethnic and national-origin profiling before anyone gets near a plane. It contributes to the nervousness of pilots, passengers, and security personnel who don't trust the current system and therefore attempt to do amateur profiling on their own.

American Airlines should have the courage of its convictions and let it be known that, to help keep its pilots from making such difficult on-the-spot security decisions, it is going to add ethnicity and national origin to the already existing computerized profiling system.

If Norm Mineta doesn't like it, well, he can fly Delta.