Posted on 07/15/2002 2:28:28 PM PDT by white trash redneck
Well, at least now we know how Mayor James Hahn and the local FBI leadership will treat the public during a time of violent crisis:
Like children, who need to be lied to.
The shooting at Los Angeles International Airport was just a few hours old when Hahn stepped up to the microphones and declared, "We have no reason to believe that this was a terrorist activity."
No reason? That the attack came on July 4, at a favorite airport among terrorist plotters, and at the one ticket counter in all of Southern California that represented the state of Israel were not reasons, apparently.
Other telling factors that were perfectly well-known to authorities at the time of Hahn's first press conference: The assailant was described by several law enforcement eyewitnesses as looking "Middle Eastern" or "Arab." He used both a knife and a gun, indicating premeditation. El Al ticket counters have been specifically targeted at least twice in the past by terrorists.
It is one thing to be reluctant about jumping to conclusions -- a perfectly normal and admirable tactic in high-profile law enforcement. But it is quite another to cross the line into actively encouraging a rattled public to conclude that it wasn't an act of terrorism.
FBI Agent-in-charge Richard Garcia quickly set the tone for the government's insulting and incomprehensible approach: "The El Al connection appears to be coincidence," he told reporters, shortly after Hahn was done.
Throughout July 4, Garcia, Hahn, Gov. Gray Davis and various other law enforcement spokesmen all responded to queries about terrorism by stressing that the rampage was an "isolated incident."
It does not take a particularly agile mind to figure out that there is nothing contradictory about the terms "isolated incident" and "terrorism" -- what was Timothy McVeigh's Oklahoma City massacre, if not an isolated act of terrorism?
But Hahn and his crisis-team pals surely knew how this false opposition would play out in the trigger-happy media: like a soothing (if temporary) reassurance that we weren't under attack by terrorist neighbors on Independence Day.
By the morning of July 5, we knew that the shooter was a 41-year-old Egyptian national and Irvine resident named Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, who owned a small limousine service, had been angry at a neighbor for flying an American flag after Sept. 11, and had placed a "Read the Koran" bumper sticker on his front door before taking two guns, a hunting knife and some extra ammo to LAX.
Yet, according to White House spokesman Ari Fleischer later that day, "There is no evidence, no indication at this time that this is a terrorist."
No indication?
By the evening of July 6, The New York Times had quoted one of Hadayet's former limo drivers as saying: "He had hate for Israel, for sure. He told me that the Israelis tried to destroy the Egyptian nation and the Egyptian population by sending prostitutes with AIDS to Egypt."
Yet the next afternoon, the FBI's Garcia portrayed terrorism as the least likely of four possible motives, and said it still wasn't known whether Hadayet "harbored anti-Israel feelings."
We can speculate all day long about why officials are going out of their way to downplay the terrorism angle. Maybe they don't want to show their investigative hand, or trigger some kind of implausible anti-Arab stampede. Maybe they wanted to make us feel calm about traveling. Each explanation, if true, would indicate an unacceptable condescension toward the people who pay their bills.
But more dangerously, maybe they just don't want to inflame Egyptian public opinion at a time when cooperation with that country's law enforcement is crucial to both this case and the broader anti-terror campaign.
Why is that dangerous? Because the recent past is littered with costly and infuriating investigative debacles whenever the FBI has been mixed up with our putative "friends" in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
The June 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 U.S. servicemen, took six years of Saudi obfuscation and White House waffling to produce indictments of 14 men (13 of them Saudis). None is known to be in American custody.
The October 1999 crash of EgyptAir Flight 990, which killed 217 people, was known within one month by National Transportation Safety Board investigators to have been caused by the deliberate actions of an Egyptian co-pilot. Yet it took 28 months, and tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, to produce a report that the Egyptians still reject.
In both cases, the FBI complained of White House meddling motivated by fear of giving diplomatic offense.
Well, no offense, diplomats, but the families and friends of Yaakov Aminov and Victoria Hen deserve more dignity than that, and we are at war.
Residents of L.A. need to trust that their leaders, when under fire, will shoot straight. Hahn and company have failed their first major test.
Our government officials are beginning to sound like the European government officials. They are either in serious denial, or they are lying right through their teeth.
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