FBI: MUSLIMS DETAINED AT STADIUM WEREN'T PROFILED

So there's a brouhaha afoot about some Muslim football fans that were "detained" at the Giants game on September 19th.

EAST RUTHERFORD, New Jersey (AP) -- Five Muslim football fans were detained and questioned during a game at Giants Stadium because they were congregating near an air duct on a night former President Bush was in the stadium, the FBI said Wednesday.

Okay, here's the situation. The former President Bush was in the stadium that night. Security was obviously heightened. The fans got up from their seats to go pray. The spot they picked to throw down the ol' prayer rugs was right next to an air vent. The FBI, state troopers and stadium security thought that was a bit suspicious. The fans were detained and questioned. They were allowed to finish watching the game, but were moved to other seats with guards stationed nearby. After the game they were escorted to their cars. They are quite bent out of shape about this. "Racial profiling" they call it. The FBI claims it was no such thing.

FBI agent Steven Siegel, a spokesman for the bureau's FBI office, said the men had aroused suspicion because they were congregating near the main air intake duct. Bush was in the stadium that night as part of a fundraising campaign he and former President Clinton were leading for victims of Hurricane Katrina.

"You had 80,000 people there, Bush 41 was there, and you had a group of gentlemen gathering in an area not normally used by the public right near the main air intake duct for the stadium, and a food preparation facility," Siegel said. "It was where they were, not what they were doing."

I'll buy that. Actually, I'd not be upset if the FBI just admited they were profiling. Let's face it, on September 11, 2001 those planes weren't piloted by elderly, blue-eyed, Swedish grandmothers; the men at the controls were Muslim males from the middle east. As Neal Boortz points out, "That is the profile of every foreign terrorist to strike the United States in the last quarter century. It is simply a waste of time and resources to bother looking at any other class of people."

When elderly, blue-eyed, Swedish grandmothers start flying airplanes into buildings and setting off bombs in subways, then we'll need to start profiling them too.