where does the racial profiling lead to exactly? is that going to solve all our problems or might it create some new ones as well?
This is a good question and I'll tell you what we've done to avoid religious/ethnic/racial profiling:We profile origin, nationality, and transportation route for international visitors. We list Yemen, Saudi, Pakistan, India, UAE, and a few others and sprinkle in Italy, Sweden, and some others based on intelligence or just as a diplomatic offset. Why do you think citizens of European countries need visas to enter the U.S. now? It's not because we had an exponentially increased security risk from those countries (with the exception of the UK), we did it as a diplomatic trade off so we can give extra attention to those people coming in from high risk countries, and from lower risk travelers from Indonesia, Malaysia, or Turkey.
Domestically we are going to have a difficult time doing that, especially with American citizens. It is an extremely slippery slope to overtly profile someone because of beliefs shared by 1.5 billion fellow earthlings.
In the military it's even harder and there was nothing in this guy's background prior to his entry that would set off alarms as far as I know. The stuff that happened while he was in can be explained by a few things. For one, he was a guy that entered the military for the sole purpose of becoming a doctor. So the military paid for his medical school, his internship, and his residency and then he thought it was a good idea to get out. Guess what? This happens all the time and the military takes a firm stance with these people because they can't have people flipping them for a medical degree and internship then punching. So even if there were alarms many may have just thought it was his way of pressing all the buttons for his discharge.
He also didn't want to deploy or fight his fellow Muslims which is not uncommon. Some Christians don't want to deploy to kill others, it happens all the time. But the majority of these cases IMO are of those that just don't want to do very tough duty, away from their friends and family, out of their comfort zone. So they invent things to try to get out of it whether it be a physical condition or a religious proclamation. Seems like it might have been more than that with this nut but as this travels up the chain of command and given his history of wanting out of the Army, some probably thought what he was doing was shtick. Now this doesn't include attempting to communicate with terrorists but almost everything else does. I'm not saying this is right, but the Army is a huge service and there are continuity, time, and record keeping issues that make it reasonable that this guy wasn't identified as someone who could really do others harm. Given he was also a Mental health doctor, well you would just expect him to be able to work out his issues.
Anyway I'm off track here but I thought that the racial profiling conversation is an interesting sub-topic and one that requires a lot more thought. I think England has addressed this very same problem and it has had mixed results. They certainly have a much bigger issue with home-grown terrorism but they've also stirred the pot to the point it has spilled over and the people are really up in arms about certain tactics they've used. Then again they have averted some terrorist acts doing what they are doing, so I'd guess we might pay a little more attention to the subject.
But we are watching certain people, and it's not always the people you think it would be. Apparently we have quite a few former black panthers who are moving over to radical Islam. Most of the guys in that article are Americans, born and raised here.