There are a bunch of these people here ... and they have been here a long time ... and more are coming across the southern border and elsewhere every day (OTM's don't you know). They are gearing up for round two … Jeff Head
Lax security measures are one thing. The purposeful imposition of legal barriers to prevent the identifying of potential terrorists, simply in order to placate the politically correct among us, is quite another. The former represents laziness or carelessness. The latter is insanity. And there is an excellent chance that it is the insanity of the latter that will result in ‘9/11, The Sequel’.
How many of us are aware that there are federal statutes prohibiting air carriers from subjecting any air traveler to discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, or ancestry (specifically 49 U.S.C. 40127(a) and 49 U.S.C. 41310)? How many of us are aware that, post 9/11, airlines have been fined countless times because they have held more than two Arab males, scheduled to board a single flight, in secondary questioning. That is considered illegally ‘discriminatory’.
Until I recently read the testimony of Michael Smerconish in the hearing before the Government Subcommittee on Passenger Screening and Airline Authority to Deny Boarding , I was not aware that a potential twentieth hijacker may have been thwarted on 9/11/01 by an alert airport security officer – which is probably why only three of the four hijacked airliners involved in the 9/11 tragedy had five hijackers aboard. The fourth airliner was probably missing one of its terrorists because an alert Customs and Border Protection Inspector at Orlando Airport wisely practiced what today might well be defined as ‘illegal profiling’ and kept the fifth hijacker from boarding United Flight 93, which met its fiery fate in a western Pennsylvania farm field.
From Smerconish’s testimony:
… I point to an American hero named Jose Melendez Perez for support of my view. This man engaged in what some would deride as ‘profiling’, and probably saved either the White House or U.S. Capitol Building in the process. Let me explain.
Three of the four aircraft involved in the hijackings on 9/11 had five hijackers aboard. But United Airlines Flight 93, a Boeing 757 that departed from Newark bound for San Francisco at 8:42 AM, and crashed in a field in Stony Creek Township, Pennsylvania, at 10:03 AM, had only four. Surely that was not its intended target. Presumably, it was headed for Washington, D.C. Perhaps being one man shy of the other planes hijacker population is the reason why this airplane crashed. And for that, we can probably thank Jose E. Melendez-Perez.
On August 4, 2001, Melendez-Perez was a U.S. Customs and Border Protection Inspector at Orlando International Airport, Orlando, Florida. Reflecting before the 9/11 Commission on his role that day, he said:
‘…I note that another inspector on duty that day made a comment that I was going to get into trouble for refusing a Saudi national. I replied that I have to do my job, and I cannot do my work with dignity if I base my recommendations on refusals/admissions on someone’s nationality.’
At approximately 1735 hours, he was assigned the case of a Saudi national who had arrived on Virgin Atlantic #15 from London, Gatwick Airport … Melendez-Perez sized up the situation by noting the individual’s nationality (Saudi), his grooming, dress, height, and shape. He figured the man to be military. And, he thought he was cocky. Dare I say it, he was profiling. And thank goodness he did. Keep in mind this was pre-9/11. If such an assessment occurred post-9/11, you would say, ‘well, of course’ this is how it should be handled. But this was before those horrific events. Melendez Perez told the 9/11 Commission that the man ‘gave him the creeps’. The man was put on a flight out of the United States.
So who was the man and what was he doing? This became clear when Melendez-Perez was questioned by Richard Ben-Veniste. It turns out that while Melendez-Perez was performing his duties at Orlando Airport on August 4, 2001, and screening a man named Mohammed Kahtani, there was someone else present at that very airport: Mohamed Atta, the presumed ringleader of the operation. Coincidence? Hardly. According to Ben-Veniste, while Melendez-Perez was questioning Mohammed Kahtani, and while Kahtani was claiming that someone was upstairs to meet him, Mohamed Atta made a telephone call from that location to a telephone number associated with the 9/11 plot. In other words, the good work of Melendez-Perez kept out of the United States the presumed 20th hijacker.
So … as insane as it appears, long before the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, long before the routine frisking of grey-haired old ladies and Boy Scouts (so as to abide by arbitrary quotas, and so as not to offend, or trample on the civil rights of, anyone of Middle Eastern descent), a kind of necessary, common-sense ‘profiling’ apparently kept the last of the terrorists from boarding the doomed United Flight 93 on that fateful day. And there is an outside chance that it may have even prevented that plane from reaching the White House or the Capitol. Yet, post-the worst foreign attack ever to occur on American soil, such rational, potential heroic behavior is now considered illegal.
Simple incompetence will not be the catalyst for the next terrorist attack on America. If truth and justice are served (and, in America 2004, I figure the odds of that are about even), the blame will be laid at the feet of the scourge known as political correctness.
In 1955, Israeli philosopher Yishavayahu Leibowitz, in a letter to Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, complained about innocent Palestinians killed in Israeli operations.
Ben Gurion replied:
I received your letter and I do not agree with you. Were all the human ideals to be given to me on the one hand and Israeli security on the other, I would choose Israeli security because while it is good that there be a world full of peace, fraternity, justice, and honesty, it is even more important that we be in it.
~ joanie
When I was heavily into building my airplane - back in the mid 90's - I spent a lot of time at my hangar at Titusville, FL. I always had my handheld radio tuned to the tower frequency just to know what was going on.
Thinking back, there were a lot of Middle-Eastern students taking lessons back then. They could hardly speak English. The tower controller had to repeat everything for them.
We had even more students from Great Britain, two of whom I spoke with one day to ask them why they came all the way over here to learn to fly.
They told me that America was the last place on earth where people were free to fly. Oh, nominally they could still fly over in Europe, but the government had made it so regulated and so expensive that it was impossible. They have landing fees over there, so every time a student practices a landing (you have to do literally hundreds to get it right), it cost him $400 or so.
The Brits said they could come over here on an airline, spend two months in a nice hotel or condo, learn to fly, visit all the attractions, all for half what it cost just for the flying in England.
Regardless of the anti-freedom rabble here on FR, I will not let it go without a fight.