Posted on 07/12/2007 4:04:49 AM PDT by chet_in_ny
NEW YORK -- A plane headed for London has been diverted to John F. Kennedy airport in New York due to a suspicious passenger on Thursday, according to a Transportation Security Administration spokesman.
A member of an American Airlines flight crew reported a suspicious passenger on flight 136, which took off from Los Angeles' LAX airport and was bound for London's Heathrow airport, according to TSA spokeswoman Andrea McCauley.
McCauley said the flight was canceled and all passengers have been off-loaded in New York.
A passenger boarded the plane after getting off an employee bus without proper identification, according to broadcast reports.
Check back with WNBC.com for more details on this story as they emerge.
Ted Kennedy should know better.
no name? could it be Achmed....or Mohammed?
enquiring minds NEED to know.
Maybe the Brits sent a signal, huh?
Yes, it was suspicious but once they got in the air wasn’t the best time to get a clue. So airline employees can bypass security? So then................well you can see where I am going with this.
btt
So a passenger who was NOT an employee, got off an employee bus, and
boarded the plane without proper ID, and the plane still took off?
I still can't believe we've actually made it this long without another serious attack
in this country?
>>> no name? could it be Achmed....or Mohammed?
Probably a name like Ian or Sean; you know how the Brits feel about their Irish brethren. /sarc
lol
Send the bill to CAIR.
‘I still can’t believe we’ve actually made it this long without another serious attack
in this country?’
While I am thankful, I couldn’t agree more. If accurate, this certainly shines a light on a chink in the armor doesn’t it? With porous borders, sanctuary cities and lax airport security (well lax for everyone but grandma), we have indeed been blessed. I would like to know a bit more about how airline and airport employees are processed before boarding. Are they subjected to the same process as we are? They should be as anyone can get a job at an airline. Not exactly infiltrating the KGB is it? :)
They did that to my 14 month old daugther at Belfast (UK) airport last weekend.
lol
No prob, it's an outbound.
However please watchout for those inbound flights. Those are definitely cause for concern.
American Airlines security has since identified the person as an executive platinum traveler with a bona fide round trip ticket that was purchased on April 19.
http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=local&id=5473853
An American Airlines plane. An American Airlines flight heading from Los Angeles to London was diverted to New York over security concerns but US authorities said the incident was likely a "misunderstanding", US media reported.(AFP/File/Jean-Pierre Muller)
thanks for that update!
There was a news item here in ATL the other day, that TSA is starting to do random security screenings at employee entrances at Hartsfield.
Used the employee only shuttle - probing our security.
Note the LACK of disclosure of race/nationality/islamic-first name. It’s almost a sure thing he’s one or they would have been shouting “home-grown” all over the news.
No wonder they were suspicious.
“no name? could it be Achmed....or Mohammed?
enquiring minds NEED to know.”
Since the news is now that he was a “platinum executive”, I’d guess Bob, Tom, John or something similar.
This one passenger may be "platinum," but the same cannot be said across the board about airline and airport employees. How many articles have we read aout baggage theft rings, smuggling, or illegal/unvetted personnel busts? And that's just what's been reported.
Pilots and attendants all seem to go through regular passenger screening lines. So we're talking ground crew, baggage handlers, mechanics, food service, cleaning crew, screeners? People with access to the belly of the plane, and things that go in the plane. Brilliant.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/07/12/plane.diverted/index.html
"I think they're still in the process of sorting this out," he said of airport officials. "It may turn out that this is nothing more than a misunderstanding with an employee who used an employee bus to get on a plane for a private flight." Whitemon told CNN the passenger is not an American Airlines employee.
…
Shortly after landing, Loynes said, security officials boarded the plane and left with a man of "Middle Eastern descent." A woman sitting next to the man was also questioned, he added.
Good catch Thinkin’ Gal.
Speaking of access to the belly, let us keep in mind the good ole islamic muslim fanatic jihadist doctors involved in the attemped Glasgow airport suicide/attempted mass murders bombing.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told CNN that American Airlines said in an early statement the passenger might have been an off-duty employee.
“I think they’re still in the process of sorting this out,” he said of airport officials. “It may turn out that this is nothing more than a misunderstanding with an employee who used an employee bus to get on a plane for a private flight.”
Whitemon told CNN the passenger is not an American Airlines employee.
According to Russ Knocke, with the Department of Homeland Security, American Airlines security officials identified the man as an executive platinum traveler with the airline who purchased his round-trip ticket on April 19.
Knocke did not say whether the man had proper identification when he boarded the employee shuttle and passed through the employee access-only entrance.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/07/12/plane.diverted/index.html
Osama Bin Laden is a billionaire. I guess any executive who reaches that strata wouldn’t be interested in committing acts of terrorism.
After all, we hear that it is poverty that drives them to terrorism...
I didn’t know this thread was posted earlier. Here’s a comment I made recently:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1864711/posts?page=15#15
So what? Highly skilled doctors have been known to be jihadists.
Doesn’t matter if they’re a US Senator or the Dali Lama, they still go through security just like every other plain Joe and Jane.
Nor does it matter that they are an employee, they could also be a jihadist, an Al Qaeda sympathizer.
naa, just that prankster Larry again.
The Face of the New Global Jihad
In one of the first comprehensive non-governmental studies of its kind, Dr. Sageman collected data on 400 terrorists, focusing on those targeting the West as opposed to their own governments. He divided them into four large clusters: the old leadership of Al Qaeda; the Magreb Arabs (people from North Africa, Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria), including the second generation who grew up in Western Europe and whose parents come from those regions; the “core” Arabs (Egyptians, Saudis, Jordanians, Yemenis and Kuwatis); and Southeast Asians (Indonesians). The results, he says were surprising.
“It turns out that the terrorists are very much like us,” he says. “They’re not really all that different.” In a 2004 speech, Sageman explained, “Most people think that terrorism comes from poverty, broken families, ignorance, immaturity, lack of family or occupational responsibilities, weak minds susceptible to brainwashing — the sociopath, the criminals, the religious fanatic, or, in this country, some believe they’re just plain evil.”
But Sageman found that three quarters of his sample came from the upper or middle class. The vast majority — 90 percent — came from caring, intact families. 63 percent had gone to college, as compared with the five to six percent typical in the third world. “These are the best and brightest of their societies in many ways,” he says.
The terrorists he studied were not, for example, “the Palestinian 14-year-olds we see on the news,” but they joined the jihad at an average age of 26. Three-quarters were professionals or semi-professionals. They are engineers, architects, and civil engineers. Bin Laden himself is a civil engineer, his right-hand man Ayman al-Zawahiri is a physician, and the 9/11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta was an architect.
+ Absence of a “Profile”
Whatever commonalities there might appear to be, Sageman says, there is no psychological common denominator among the terrorists he studied, aside from their link to the jihad. “There’s really no profile, just similar trajectories to joining the jihad and that most of these men were upwardly and geographically mobile,” he says. “Because they were the best and brightest, they were sent abroad to study. They came from moderately religious, caring, middle-class families. They’re skilled in computer technology. They spoke three, four, five, six languages including three predominant Western languages: German, French and English.”
But according to Sageman, despite their intellectual acuity, his subjects were ultimately ill-prepared for life in the West. He traced their transition to radicalism back to a universal human motivation — loneliness. “When they became homesick, they did what anyone would and tried to congregate with people like themselves, whom they would find at mosques,” he explains. “They drifted towards the mosque, not because they were religious, but because they were seeking friends.”
These cliques often formed in the vicinity of mosques that had a militant script advocating violence to overthrow the corrupt regimes, thereby transforming these alienated young Muslims into terrorists.
“It’s all really group dynamics,” he told an audience last year. “You cannot understand the 9/11 type of terrorism from individual characteristics.” Sageman points to the Madrid bombers, who blew themselves up when the police surrounded their apartment, as a perfect example: “Seven terrorists sharing an apartment and one saying, ‘Tonight we’re all going to go, guys.’ You can’t betray your friends, and so you go along. Individually, they probably would not have done it.”
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/front/etc/today.html
Nor Medical Doctors........
But I heard from the glowing television that they’re terrorists because of poverty and broken families.
/lib
Thanks for the information. I suspected as much but hoped I was wrong. It is really hard to believe because as I stated in my earlier comment, getting a job at an airline or airport isn’t exactly infiltrating the KGB. Homeland Security and Chertoff should be fired. Whose homeland are they securing, certainly not ours? The Freepers on this thread seem to have more knowledge on the matter than Chertoff and I would feel far more secure flying if you, and they, were in charge.
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