I don't see anything wrong, my skin color is similar to him and I wouldn't mind them checking me out first, I would gladly cooperate so that they can move on and find the real bad guy.
Setting aside all ethical issues, using ethnicity alone to determine probable cause is a violation of the law. If you would like to see it be acceptable to use skin color as the sole determinant for probable cause, that's fine. Just change the law. But until then, it is not allowed.
It's not a "'politically correct' statement", it's part of the law. If you think that it's OK to search someone's apartment based on their ethnicity alone, I can only assume that you have no respect for the rule of law.
And from TFA, I could not see any other distinguishing factors that were used to determine probable cause to search this guy's apartment, instead of any of the other people at the scene. The only factor was his ethnicity.
Don't need probable cause if the roommate consented to a search. "you have nothing to hide, do you?" 2nd oldest trick in the book.
And like I said, this is speaking purely legally. Even if they didn't have a search warrant, the fact that they targeted this guy for his ethnicity alone was unethical.
I am sure that legally there are no problems there, but ethically? There is unstated element of coercion there.
While you could say that there is an elevated chance that the terrorist is of Arabic descent (and frankly, the odds there are not that strong. Maybe better than 50%, but I wouldn't put my money even on that...) that is only a small part of the picture. You must also consider the possibility that any given person of Arabic descent is a terrorist (an absurdly small probability). When you combine these two factors then you can decide how probable it is that he is the terrorist, given his descent.
If you actually work out the numbers here, you will undoubtedly discover that the probability he is responsible falls well below any rational standard for harassing the man.
Edit: To get a grip on what sort of standard you would usually demand: consider a murder in a small isolated town. With no clues at all, lets say the murderer could be anyone. In a town with 3 people, each person could be said to have a 50/50 chance of being the murderer. Is that enough for search warrants for both (not under our legal system, but just ethically/morally)? Sure, I'd accept that. If there were a hundred people in that town? No way. So, does "terrorist, given arabic descent" go over 1%? I HIGHLY doubt it.
The only thing that man has over the likely thousands of others that in some way participated in the event is his skin color. Everyone else there had those same properties. So if we are considering the population of people in the general area at the time, then no. They used only his descent. They, and djanogo[edited], used P(arabic|terrorist) to justify a search. In order to justify a search you need a reasonable P(terrorist|arabic).
Assign some reasonable numbers to each factor off the top of your head, work it out on a napkin, and come back to me with whatever figures work out to be over whatever a reasonable threshold might be.
If the bombs were really placed in backpacks that were left sitting on the ground, I would further suspect that the bomber placed them much later an hour before. Wouldn't want someone to steal your bomb...
Furthermore, maybe the sick fuck wanted to watch so he stuck around at a short distance instead of booking it.
Who knows.
This person is now labelled across the United States as a potential terrorist. Even if he is exonerated, the damage would have been done.
It will likely have a great impact on his future. We also don't know at this point how he has been treated.
You state that the "likelihood of him being suspect were greater than others". Who decides this? If there were 1000 runners with a heavy middle eastern accent, would they all have been arrested? Do you put all middle eastern people in camps (as was done to the Japanese in US and Canada during WW2)?
I don't have answer to these questions, I do object to your notion that there is nothing wrong with this.
Because if there isn't than this is plain old racism.
After all, that's just co-operation so that they can move on and find the bad guy.
As Ben Franklin said: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."