Time To Discriminate?

That's what Newt Gingrich suggests in an op-ed at Human Events, arguing that the U.S. government needs to apply a "new honesty" in its approach to fundamentalist Islamic terrorism.

Though he uses the word, Gingrich's proposals don't articulate a strategy of discrimination in the terms we're used to: he says we should root out the proprietors of radical websites, create a global anti-terrorism strategy that's broader than the debate over Afghanistan and includes Yemen, fire Dept. of Justice attorneys whose law firms did pro-bono work for suspected terrorists, keep Guantanamo open, and try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a military court.

The way he phrases his call for discrimination is: "It is time to know more about would-be terrorists, to profile for terrorists and to actively discriminate based on suspicious terrorist information."

While Gingrich's suggestion is for something different, it hints at the debate over racial profiling that's been reignited by the Detroit incident.

It's "time to be honest about what we know," Gingrich writes. "We know how to identify these enemies but our elites have refused to do so."

The idea that elites have refused to take action seems to imply that politics and political correctness have something to do with it. The goal of TSA, Homeland Security, and the CIA is, quite literally, to "discriminate," but now a debate has been opened about how we do that.

Some say more overt profiling methods are called for. From reading Gingrich's op-ed, its hard to tell whether or not he's among them, but the general sentiment appears to be there.