So very stupid

Look - I'm all for homeland security. I am not, however, in favor of random profiling of, say, people wearing headscarves. Hell, if we were going to profile terrorists, shouldn't we be stopping every nebisher-looking geek (like Terry Nichols) and every blonde, clean-cut army veteran (like that asshole from Wheatfield, McVeigh)? A group of local residents who happen to be Muslim attended a conference in Toronto this past weekend called "Reviving the Islamic Spirit." I guess that sounded pretty fricking creepy to some cretin or another. So, when people started crossing the Queenston-Lewiston Bridge on Sunday and declared that they had been attending the "Islamic Spirit" conference, they were immediately detained. Some for 6 hours. Many were natural-born citizens. Many more were naturalized citizens. Of the USA.

"An Islamic civil rights group accused United States border agents on Wednesday of religious profiling after dozens of American Muslims were searched, fingerprinted and photographed while returning from a religious conference in Toronto. Some of those stopped said they were held at the Lewiston-Queenston Bridge for six hours or more with no explanation. A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security's Customs and Border Protection bureau, Kristie Clemens, said that agents had detained anyone who said they attended the three-day convention, titled 'Reviving the Islamic Spirit.' She said that such gatherings could be a means for terrorists to promote their cause."

OK, Ms. Clemens. Point taken. But - if that conference was such a concern, couldn't one of our crack intelligence agencies, like the CIA, have attended this conference? Don't you think the Canadians had someone monitoring this conference? You know - 9/11 was over 3 years ago. If Bush & Co. haven't gotten our intelligence agencies up to speed on the smart way to do stuff like this - i.e., gathering intelligence without turning the US into a police state for certain people - then what the Christ have they been doing?