KY,
Well before you go on about police states here, do think it is unfair of us to not be allowed to take firearms on to an airplane? I mean there is the 2nd ammendment and all.
Sure it is just an everyday occurance that two guys on consecutive bridges along a 12 lane (yes 12) highway are staring in the same direction in the same time frame as someone spots a person week after week doing the same thing on another busy Highway within 20 miles of each other. Oddly enough I had not this happen in 35 years of living here and it just so happens that all of the suspects are middle eastern. Nah, your right just let them go right on. Oh by the way did you read this?
Scouting jetliners for new attacks
By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Flight crews and air marshals say Middle Eastern men are staking out airports, probing security measures and conducting test runs aboard airplanes for a terrorist attack.
At least two midflight incidents have involved numerous men of Middle Eastern descent behaving in what one pilot called "stereotypical" behavior of an organized attempt to attack a plane.
"No doubt these are dry runs for a terrorist attack," an air marshal said.
Pilots and air marshals who asked to remain anonymous told The Washington Times that surveillance by terrorists is rampant, using different probing methods.
"It's happening, and it's a sad state of affairs," a pilot said.
A June 29 incident aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles is similar to a Feb. 15 incident on American Airlines Flight 1732 from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to New York's John F. Kennedy Airport.
The Northwest flight involved 14 Syrian men and the American Airlines flight involved six men of Middle Eastern descent.
"I've never been in a situation where I have felt that afraid," said Annie Jacobsen, a business and finance feature writer for the online magazine Women's Wall Street who was aboard the Northwest flight.
The men were seated throughout the plane pretending to be strangers. Once airborne, they began congregating in groups of two or three, stood nearly the entire flight, and consecutively filed in and out of bathrooms at different intervals, raising concern among passengers and flight attendants, Mrs. Jacobsen said.
One man took a McDonald's bag into the bathroom, then passed it off to another passenger upon returning to his seat. When the pilot announced the plane was cleared for landing and to fasten seat belts, seven men jumped up in unison and went to different bathrooms.
Her account was confirmed by David Adams, spokesman for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS), who said officers were on board and checked the bathrooms several times during the flight, but nothing was found.
There you go, no harm done, it was all a coincidence. Sure.
Best Regards,
Boiler Plate
Actually, I would agree with the principle of prohibiting "things that go boom" from being carried onto the plane. While I'd feel a lot more comfortable if I were armed, putting a hole in a pressurized tube at 30 or 40 thousand feet is a non-stop ticket to loss of structural integrity. However, I like the idea of the pilots being armed, and I am all for armed air marshals. I think those guys are are a great defense against future hijackings, and they've been giving the appropriate training for discharging firearms in pressurized planes. One hopes they have, at least!
I have read that. It's been posted here about four hundred times in the last couple of days. I have no doubt that there is another attack brewing. It sounds like the air marshals did a good job of keeping an eye on the situation. But we're talking about two entirely different things. Trying to rip the mirror out of an aircraft's lavatory and watching cars go by are not equalivant! Even giving them an extreme benefit of the doubt, it sounds like these guys were failing to comply with the flight crew's instructions. They were certainly in a position to endanger the safety of the other pax if the plane would have hit some turbulence -- having 180 pound ragdolls being tossed about the plane can certainly cause injury to innocent by-sitters.
In the case of airliners, though, there is nothing that can be done to provide complete security against hijackings short of handcuffing each pax and shackling them to their seats. They found a way to go "low-tech" and get through our "no things that go boom" armor on 11SEP: They proved themselves determined enough to use small blades to slaughter the flight crew. Do you seriously think that they won't find something else, now that box cutters are disallowed? A broken piece of glass? A pencil's stab wound to the throat? A garotte? If we say that we must sacrifice everything to provide airliner security, I submit the only possible way is to shackle pax in their seats, handcuff them, and ship their luggage (and carry-ons, and purses) on a seperate cargo plane, after hand-inspecting every single item in every single bag.
The same applies for targets closer to the ground. If we say we value our security more than anything else, I submit that the logical conclusion of this slipperly slope is to mandate state-issued travel papers, outlaw photography, prohibit any outdoor painting or sketching, and to arrest and prosecute anyone who is outdoors and not actively moving. You keep pressing the point that it's just middle eastern men that you're seeing, and I'll grant you that, right now, that's not an altogether invalid point. Right now that is where the main threat is from. But what happens when they start winning converts from other ethnic groups? If they work with the Irish, then we'll only arrest arabs and redheads for looking at a building for more than 3 seconds. Then they'll work with the North Koreans, and it'll be arabs, redheads, and asians. Then, maybe the pakistanis, and they look kind of like Indians to a lot of people, so throw them into the mix as well.
Yes, that is taken to the extreme. My point is only this: There must be a point where we decide we are as secure as we can get without giving up "too much" freedom. I believe that when we're to the point of making it illegal to take photographs of public landmarks, we have traveled past that point of "too much".