President's anti-profiling exception is carefully drawn

Dallas Morning News: When it comes to racial and ethnic profiling by law enforcement officers, President Bush has not minced words. Early in his administration, he condemned the practice as wrong and promised to end it. Last week, Bush put some muscle behind that pledge by issuing the first across-the-board guidelines on when federal law enforcement agents can take note of race and ethnicity and when they cannot.
There is one catch: The policy spells out exceptions for investigations that involve terrorism and national security. That has some groups yelling "foul" at what they see as the government allowing itself to single out individuals of Middle Eastern descent.
But that simply isn't so. Upon closer examination, the Bush policy is fair and reasonable. It's also steeped in common sense. It says that investigators cannot conduct random traffic stops to boost the number of drug arrests in a given neighborhood based on the area's racial or ethnic composition. Yet it also says that if agents have information that terrorists of a certain ethnicity plan to hijack a plane in a given state, it is OK to subject to "heightened scrutiny" people of that ethnicity boarding planes in that state.
Precision is the key
That is just good police work. The information is specific, and the response of authorities is measured and targeted. The key in all this is precision. No policy is perfect, and any policy is only as good as the people who implement it. In this case, there can be no abuse, no shortcuts, and no singling out of any one group.
In other words, there can't be a repeat of what happened in the case of more than 700 Middle Eastern detainees rounded up by federal agents after the Sept. 11 attacks. Not one was charged with a terrorism-related crime, and many came to authorities' attention only through tips that have since been shown to be unreliable.
One has to wonder: Had the new policy been in place at the time of the detentions, would it have forced the investigation and preserved civil rights? We would hope that is the case. We may never know, now that a federal appeals court has ruled that the Justice Department can keep secret the names of the detained.
These are interesting times all right -- times where it pays to remember that Americans and the government that serves them have a duty to preserve both security and liberty, and not sacrifice one for the other.