| Chairman-Mao said: Wow why are people so upset by this? He's talking about imprisoning suspected terrorists here. If a little racial profiling can save innocent lives then I'm all for it. |
This is a lot different that racial profiling ...
Profiling (racial or otherwise) is, essentially, using an understanding of who is most likely to commit a crime and being careful to pay additional attention to these people. The primary problem with profiling is that someone being more likely to commit a particular crime doesn’t mean that they will commit that crime, or that someone who doesn’t fall into that categorization may commit the crime; so you have to be careful that enhanced focus on a particular group does not translate into a reduction of rights for those individuals, and you also have to be vigilant not to suffer from tunnel vision.
What Obama is arguing here is (in my opinion) significantly worse than Bush’s position. Bush’s position is essentially that these enemy combatants are not citizens of the United States and did not commit their crimes on US soil so they are not bound by the protections within the constitution; Obama’s position is that, even though these individuals are protected by the constitution, there is no reason why someone who has arbitrarily been determined is a danger to society can be imprisoned indefinitely without due-process.
