[rescue] Airport Security and Rescues...

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 11:03:17AM -0500, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> Okay, yes, we had that incident in 2001, but I doubt that any future
> attempt at the same trick would work again.  Any poor idiot heading to
> the cockpit screaming in a foreign language with a knife, box-cutter, or
> cocktail fork would have his back broken by every able-bodied man and
> woman in that vessel while he made his attempt to break through the
> now-locked and now-reinforced cockpit doors.

I don't understand. Do you think that the only thing they can do is
to have cleaners hide box cutters? In the late 1990's a Pakastani
tested a binary explosive built on the airplane bomb in the Philipines.

He was stopped because he pissed off the superintendent of his apartment
building who called the police on him. He escaped out the window 
as they were banging on his door. If he had not been stopped he would
brought U.S. flights to Asia to a stop for weeks if not months.

He later resurfaced last summer with a much larger plot to blow up
airplanes over the Atlantic ocean. He of course, was not caught and
will do it again. He used common electronic entertainment equipment
and binary explosives smuggled in baby bottles, etc.

Then there were the London 7/7 bus bombings. 

If there were similar plots, and I'm sure there were they were stopped
because the U.S. government was not as lax as the English.

You also have the problem of 12 million illegal Mexican immegrants.
If one in a million decides to yell "viva Pancho Villa", or something
like that, and start shooting or blowing themselves up, the U.S. will
be in a panic. 


 
> Thus, I argue, there is no need for all this government thuggery.  The
> problem is minimal, and I believe, now that people realize that being
> hijacked doesn't necessarily just mean an unplanned detour through Cuba,
> can be dealt with by the flying public.

Only to the point that they may stop one or two hijackings. After that,
or if there are rash of successfull bombings people will stop flying.


The problem is that you look at it through your system of values and
ethics. The terrorists come from a sect of Islam which teaches that you
can do anything to further the religion as long as it is against people
outside of it. You can cheat, lie, steal, kill, etc. 

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM