Where do you come up with this foolishness? The agent should have been profiled up and down, but both for the agents sake and that of other air passengers and flight crews, the agents identity should have been checked out. The pilot FAILED to do that and FAILED to call in SWAT to do that for him. How many times in the past three months have you heard of people being escorted off a plane by SWAT or the FBI for opening a birthday card with confetti or carrying the wrong book on board. You would think carrying a gun would raise to atleast the same level as confetti. Dont you?
Profiling means focusing your screening on certain individuals that fit the pattern of prior terrorists or criminals. You then check them out and if all concerns are eliminated (i.e., the agent is who he says he is and is on mission that he claims, you allow him to board. If you are still concerned about the gun have it stored either in the cockpit or have it checked.) Profiling does not mean just arbitrarily eliminating the right to fly to a whole class of people. That is discrimination, and unlike profiling, is against the law.
Exactly right. This is what Christ would have us do. He said love your enemy not call no man your enemy. Terroist are our enemies. Our love for them means we do our best to caputre them alive then try them for their sins. We don't just shoot them and we don't just kick all Mid-Easterns off airplanes. We treat all with respect giving they at least the ability to prove their innocense.
The Pilot did everything right. Right up to the point that he refused this Agent, the right, to prove he was an agent. I really have a hard time believing this Pilot really thought there was no way to verify this man's right to be on this plane. I wonder if this agent had ever filled out one of these forms himself. Someone would have typed it out for him before he went to the Airport. It is not his job to fill out this form. It however was the pilots job to assure that his flight was safe. That means using profiling the passengers then checking them out if necessary. But he only did the first part. Once he profiled this agent he just looked for excuses to kick him off the plane and never once considered the Agent might really be an agent. These Agents fly all the time. No doubt the have to change planes once in a while. It was unrealistic to expect this agent would fill out this form perfectly the first or even second time. But unforgiveable that he made no attempt to verify the agents authinticity. Even more unforgiveable that he didn't call in the FBI or someone else to take this Terroist into custody once the pilot determined that is what he was. Asking for pictures of Terroist sure makes me think that is what he thought, and I would have thought the same thing.