Posted on 08/11/2004 10:32:23 PM PDT by sockmonkey
This is Part V of the ongoing series entitled “Terror in the Skies, Again?”
A few days ago, WomensWallStreet.com received an important email. It was from Billie Jo Rodriguez, another passenger who was on Northwest Airlines flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles on June 29. Billie Jo is a Certified Public Accountant living in Oxnard, California. She had some additional, disturbing information about flight 327 that she felt someone needed to know. She had been so terrified by what happened on the flight that she sent two emails to the Department of Homeland Security telling them about the experience, but she hadn't heard back from them. Then, through a series of events, she heard about my article, "Terror in the Skies, Again?" She and I have had numerous conversations and she is willing to share her story on the record. The following interview is based on conversations Billie Jo and I have had, as well as a discussion she had with my editor.
ANNIE: Where were you sitting on flight 327?
BILLIE JO: I was in seat 21-C. Three of the Middle Eastern men were sitting right near me --- the man in the jogging suit [with Arabic writing] was in the aisle seat right behind me (22C), another man from the group sat right next to me (21-B) and another man from the group sat one row in front of me (20-E).
ANNIE: Tell me what the men were doing that was out of the ordinary?
BILLIE JO: It was when we were up in the air and they started walking up and down the aisles. And the eye contact. The thing that really got me was the eye contact. It was so subtle. If you know somebody, you look at them. You nod your head.
(Excerpt) Read more at womenswallstreet.com ...
Okay you could be right. Who were these guys on the plane? They were a musical group touring the country. Accessing alot of planes. Not everyone is a suicide bomber correct?
So I am assuming sometime before september 11th you came up with the idea of box cutters? Look al queda was willing to take 5 guys per plane to kill thousands. I am curious about your confidence that you know what they are willing and not willing to do to get the job done.
also would a richard reid shoe bomber fit into your theory?
Often times a complicated plot is dry runned, and all the failure prone steps are replaced with more robust actions.
Practice, practice, practice...
Yes, they would need multiple people to take over a plane. That is logical. You would need at least one or two to control it and also have a few guys to act as muscle. That is because of what they were trying to do. It fits. To blow up a plane, you only need to have one person. It is a quick and dirty job. You don't need 5 people to do it. Yes, Richard Reid fits perfectly into this thinking.
and what if they wanted to blow up multiple planes on the same day through timed devices placed months ahead of time in the septic tanks of planes? How many people would that take so they could go plane to plane to plane?
Practice, practice, practice...
Agreed 100%. This is how our military trains. The problem is in doing the training, you can't give yourselves up. It defeats the whole purpose.
If they want to do that, why not just get some people hired to work as baggage handlers? On the day in question, just throw the explosives into one of the air cargo containers and be done with it.
I don't buy your idea simply because there are way too many things that could go wrong. First off, how would the explosives and detonators react in a caustic environment? They would also need to know airline procedures for how the 'septic tank' is maintained, etc.. If they have access to that, they have access to better ways to do it and wouldn't need to go through a wondering musician parade on the plane.
OTOH The whole point is to create terror, which they did to a whole plane load of passengers.
The rest of us are even more reluctant to fly, as we have seen just how ineffective our TSA is yet again.
Airlines lose even more business.
The 'musicians' ran essentially no risk, they weren't even deported when the FBI found that their visas had expired.
Yet they gave the airlines another small cut that is still bleeding today...
bttt
WOW!!! Scary stuff....
Not true. The point of terrorism is to cause resentment in a population. This is done by causing the government to crack down on the population. This leads to a change in the system as the people themselves create the mechanism for giving the terrorists what they want which is a change in the government. The idea of terror just for the sake of terror serves no purpose.
bump
or plant something
How do airliners dump toilet waste?
Seems to me to put the final nail in the coffin of this bathroom theory.
Hmm So in your world terrorists only attack the way you might think they attack? No other possibilities? I think I was very clear my thoughts were just a theory. Your thoughts are.... well .... interesting. I am curious in what other contexts in your life do you think this way?
Huh? in what way specifically?
Of course there are other possibilities, but it comes down to creating a threat profile and doing a cost/benefit analysis. This works from both sides. Unfortunately, the bad guys have a better track record at this point. The US government completely fails in this regard because they keep doing feel good measures that really have no use. I guess it is the nature of government to simply throw money at a problem and then hope it has some beneficial effect.
For example, they could simply mandated bomb resistant air cargo containers on planes. Checked baggage then doesn't have to be searched as thoroughly since if there is a bomb, it is not going to take down the plane. This is one thing that El Al does. I have no idea why it is not done here. The only thing I can think of is adding more employees to the federal payrolls to do the searches and spending hundreds of millions on high tech equipment makes the guys in Washington feel better.
Throwing security measures in place without first determining what you are trying to protect and from who is useless. First you make those determinations and then you figure out the best most cost effective solution that will give you what you want. What we have scene with airlines is mainly very poorly thought out knee jerk reactions which have no use at all. This is why you have bans on tweezers and morons cutting locks off my bags when I fly.
I am curious in what other contexts in your life do you think this way?
Mainly in my line of work but the basic ideas apply to life in general and everyone does it. Before you are going to do something you make a personal determination if the reward outweighs the risk involved. You also determine if the cost to do something outweights the benefit involved. Simply put, it is what keeps most people from going out and robbing a bank. Sometimes you get it right, sometimes you get it wrong. The idea is to try to get it right most of the time. :)
I agree. However I know for a fact this feeble government has stopped several terrorist attacks the civilian public will probably never know about. So it skews the perspective of what has or has not been done.
Of course they have. Probably numbering up into the hundreds. The point I am trying to make is they could have done it at the same time as spending less money, less man hours, and inconveniencing much fewer people.
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." -- P.J. O'Rourke
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