During all of my driving in the last couple of days I saw a billboard that struck me as funny in a very sad way. Somewhere on I-75 is a billboard with a photo of the burning Twin Towers and the text "Wake Up America! Profiling could have prevented this tragedy!" So what exactly was funny about this billboard? After all aren't all terrorists towel heads?

Well, if you look at terrorist acts in the United states in the past 50 years you'll see that profiling past terrorism in the United States would have led to very different results that the creator of that billboard would have expected.

In the 1950s terrorism seems fairly common. The most famous, at least to me are the church bombings in the South, especially in Birmingham, Ala. I don't remember it being Islamic Fundamentalists blowing up all of those churches and killing those four little girls in Birmingham. Oh, wait, it's because they were conservative white males between the ages of 20 and 40.

Then there's the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 that was the largest terrorist act ever in the US until Sept. 11, 2001. Timothy McVeigh doesn't sound very Arab to me, probably because he's not. Timothy McVeigh was a registered Republican and NRA member. Again, it's a conservative white male between the ages of 20 and 40. His accomplice also fits that profile.

The next year saw the Olympic Bombing in Atlanta. Eric Robert Rudolph doesn't sound like an Arab name to me either. In fact, Rudolph was a good Christian white boy, and, like McVeigh who was likely supported by other Christian fundamentalists during his time as a fugitive. There were successfully-sold T-shirts with the slogan "Run Rudolph Run". In addition to the Olympic bombing, Rudolph was also convicted of bombing two abortion clinics in Georgia and Alabama and a gay and lesbian nightclub. Rudolph wasn't as successful as McVeigh, only killing two people in the four bombings, but he did manage to injure over 100 in the Olympic bombing alone.

Like Rudolph, Paul Jennings Hill, Michael F. Griffin, and the Reverend Michael Bray. Eric Rudolph, Clayton Waagner and James Kopp, have all committed violent attacks on abortion clinics. Hill and Bray are Christian ministers.

Of course there are exceptions to the profile of conservative white men committing terrorist acts on American soil in the last 50 years. There was that 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center that killed six by Islamic terrorists, a smattering of low level terroristic events by liberal whites. I'm not sure what end of the spectrum you'd label Ted Kaczinski. Of course all that just furthers the white part of the profile of domestic terrorism in the US even if it undermines the conservative part a bit. The non-political terrorism in recent decades has often been at the hands of young white men in their teens or early 20s shooting up their schools (although the most recent guy being neither white nor arab. Seung-Hui Cho was a thoroughly Westernized child of Korean immigrants.)

Arab/Islamist terrorism wasn't non existant, it just rarely happened on American soil. American interests have frequently been attacked in the Middle East and even in Europe and Africa, but it's been rare to see them actually pull anything off here.

So really, if authorities had been using profiling in order to prevent serious terrorist attacks that they didn't know where coming, they would have been infiltrating Young Republican clubs in Universities across the nation and bugging Charlton Heston's offices at the NRA headquarters. They still wouldn't have stopped the attacks, though. They might have kept Cheney from shooting that guy in the face, though.