Posted on 01/03/2010 1:37:40 PM PST by Schnucki
What were those Northwest Airlines screeners thinking when they let a young Muslim man with no luggage and a one-way ticket board a transatlantic flight without the minor inconvenience of a full body search?
You may not remember the story the press dubbed the “Flying Imams” case, but it had a long grisly life in the American courts and must still haunt the dreams — and stay the hands — of anyone who works in the airline industry.
It all began in 2006, when six Muslim clerics boarded a US Airlines plane at Minneapolis-St Paul Airport but were removed after a number of passengers and the cabin crew, and eventually even the plane’s pilot and the federal air marshal, decided their behaviour was suspicious. The men first attracted attention by gathering for a mid-day group prayer in the departure lounge. Once on the plane passengers claimed they moved around the airliner, not taking their assigned seats but finding a way to distribute themselves in groups of two. (Passengers called it a “9/11 plane configuration.”) Then they were said to have loudly cursed American policies in Iraq. They also requested heavy metal seat extenders which they did not appear to need and instead of using them laid them on the floor at their feet.
The Muslim clerics, who had been attending a conference together, held press conferences where they offered a reasonable-sounding rationale for all the complained-about behaviour. And then they did the good ol’ American thing: they filed a very scary, very punitive civil rights law suit naming not just the airline (as per usual in these cases) but local law enforcement, the airport authority, and even the passengers who had passed discrete notes to airport personnel. The suit, filed in 2007, took years to wend its way through the
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.telegraph.co.uk ...
OK, are the screeners employed by Delta in Amsterdam? Or do they have their version of the TSA.
I stand in awe of the people who think what we do HERE has much of an impact on what they do there.
Can someone enlighten me about this?
I don't think so. On the other hand, the "flying Imam" trick laid the groundwork for cries of profiling and bigotry all over. I am sure more than one screener worldwide is afraid of losing their job in the face of political correctness.
Here's one report:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/30/body-scanners-blocked-us-netherlands
If that's true (and I don't know that it is), why would the idiots in charge of us do that? Because it isn't "fair" to the rest of the world? That would be the attitude of Obama and his cabinet. It isn't "fair", because we're all just "citizens of the world", don't ya know.
"Fair" is gonna get us killed. Though I must admit I don't like the idea of some airport screener scanning my privates. Kinda creepy. And there was more than enough information out there on this lowlife, long before he got on the plane.
Wonder where they learned that ??
There was a statement from a spokesperson in Amsterdam, a woman, that led me to believe that screening was done under EU regulations. She said that he was not subjected to a full body scan.
The body scanners are B.S., I have read. They would not have noticed this guy’s peenie-bomb and they are no match for an internally inserted anything.
Explosives detectors or sniffing dogs would be much more effective.
I asked the screener if I could watch the screen while he scanned it, and he gave me the okay.
I was amazed at how thorough it was. He could turn the dials to different RF frequencies and zero in on what was inside the tubes on my mountain bike's frame. In color, sharp as a tack.
I was amazed. And that technology is now 15 years old.
If they want to find this crap, they have the technology to do so. It's all about sick politics. Political correctness.
However, you can't x-ray people for that long and low density items are hard to see when, um, inside.
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