This is why I have no faith in our nation's police forces. If it's this bad in the skies, you can only imagine how bad it is on the ground.

Seems that on a post-9/11 flight, one of the passengers started acting strangely. So two U.S. air marshals handcuffed him and threw him into a seat in first class, then one of them pulled a gun. In the words of the above-linked New York Times article, "The marshals loudly demanded that all passengers remain in their seats, and remain still. They barked a series of orders. No one should stand for any reason. Arms and legs should not extend into the aisles. No one should try to visit the restroom. The message could not have been clearer: anyone who disobeyed the marshals was in danger of being shot."

It didn't end there. When the flight landed half an hour later, the marshals not only arrested and threw the initial passenger into a rather dirty prison cell, they also handcuffed and hauled off some random first-class passenger and threw him into another dirty prison cell. He didn't have anything to do with the incident, he was minding his own business but he happened to be of Indian descent and therefore might've been perceived as a potential threat because he looked Middle Eastern. This is in spite of the fact that he is a U.S. citizen and has even served in our nation's military. A spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration later offered the explanation that he was detained because he had watched the unfolding incident "too closely."

Excuse me? He was watching too closely? Forgive all of us for having any interest in a situation that might involve gunfire, especially one in a pressurized cabin where a single bullet hole could wreak major havoc on the plane's airframe. Let's just call a spade a spade, shall we? Our overzealous air marshals decided that this guy looked suspicious and they had their little power play in suspending the Bill of Rights.

Shall I go back to my rant from a few weeks ago where I reminded you all that Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber were white American males, and I asked how come people like me who look like either of those guys aren't being detained and racially profiled? Shall I ask why, with the blessing of our Fearless Leader, our nation's airport security personnel are not required to have even a high school diploma -- which might help to guarantee that weapons or potential hijackers don't even make it onto the planes in the first place -- yet are licensed to carry firearms, exert deadly force, suspend civil rights and throw people in jail at will? Shall I ask why we're being so closed-minded to the potential threat of terrorism from other avenues, but we're only thinking planes might be weapons because they've been used before so we're throwing all our security measures at our airports -- so do we have to be subjected to a suicide bombing or a bomb on a ship in a harbor or a car bomb before we begin to consider those possibilities?

I don't know about you, but I think I'm more scared of our security personnel than I am of potential terrorists.