Via MSNBC, AP is reporting that six men described by the US Airways crew as “Middle Eastern in appearance” were seen engaging in “suspicious activity” and removed by police from a flight departing Minneapolis for Phoenix on Monday evening. AP says, “A passenger initially raised concerns about the group through a note passed to a flight attendant...”
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This is not a tirade about how some idiot saw some innocent men who look like they’re from another part of the world and acted unreasonably out of xenophobic fear and suspicion. This is not about how wrong that is, and about how the wrong is compounded by Bu$hco and its followers having cynically and intentionally encouraged such insanity in an attempt to lend credence to their “war on terror” for political gain. (We all know that didn’t exactly pan out for them.) This is not really about how it smacks of the Third Reich to have people dragged off an airplane to be “questioned by police” based on (probably) no more on their ethnicity.
I wasn’t there, so I don’t know whether these six men actually did anything to cause reasonable concern or not. For all I know, they could have been passing individual pieces of a plastic gun to a single shooter for assembly, though I suspect not. It strikes me as much more likely that they noticed people noticing them and got nervous. We know Bu$hco has done everything in its power to foment that atmosphere of fear and distrust.
Security? What security? What struck me about the AP report was this: the men were hauled away after a mere passenger raised “concerns” and the onboard crew “saw suspicious activity.” Think about that for a moment.
These six men had already passed through security and been allowed to board the plane!
After 5 years and God knows how many gazillions of dollars, we have in place a so-called airport security system that is so unreliable that it cannot be relied upon to produce even the slightest measure of security. At the same time, this so-called screening system has subjected hundreds of thousands of innocent Americans to searches of their carefully packed personal belongings, millions of wasted people-hours standing in lines, stupid restrictions on what they can and cannot carry with them lest their checked baggage be “lost”, invasive body searches including sniffing, patting and wand waving, denial of boarding rights based on having the same name as someone else and gosh knows what all else. I know of one case where a foster parent friend escorting a retarded foster child to her plan was hauled away to be sniffed for explosives and forced to leave her behind, terrified and all alone with no one to calm her.
All of this has produced no sense of security at all, let alone enough security to be trusted in the face of a note from a passenger. Having passed through this system availed these six men in Minneapolis absolutely nothing. They were hauled off for questioning by police. (Assuming they are guilty of no more than feeling funny being stared at by others on the plane for being of the “wrong” descent, good luck to them finding space on another flight two days before Thanksgiving!) AP also reports that “The other passengers on the flight, which was carrying 141 passengers and five crew members, were re-screened for boarding. The plane took off about three hours after the men were removed.” So everyone else on board, who had also already passed through intrusive and time consuming screening, got to get off and do it all again.
This is insane. If what “the terrorists” wanted was to disrupt America, they have certainly succeeded. In addition to this airport crap that anyone can experience in real time as it happens to them, we have warrantless wiretaps, secret detention without charge or access to counsel or the courts, wholesale rummaging through personal financial records and you name it. So far as I can tell, none of it makes us any safer, and all of it makes us less as a nation and a people.
At some point, we as Americans are going to have learn to accept that there are risks associated with being alive and that we cannot escape them all, nor should we try. We are fallible and mortal, and stuff is going to happen to us. We kill 40,000 people a year on the roads, more or less, probably half of them the victims of drunk drivers. What do we do? We lower the blood-alcohol limit to guarantee full employment for DUI defense lawyers and rehab centers while we listen to the booze companies warn us to “drink responsibly” right after they promise us great sex and great wealth if we consume their product. Hundreds of thousands die agonizing deaths caused by cigarette smoking. Our response is to slap a warning on each pack of butts. Those two causes alone drain billions from our economy every stinking year. And we collectively wink at the problems because they present no “foreign enemy” to be demonized and feared for political gain.
We lost about 3,000 people and a couple of buildings on 9/11. Very sad, indeed. I hope it never happens again. Every reasonable and constitutionally acceptable effort should be made to prevent it from ever happening again. But if it does, it will not mean the end of America the way that all this airport security, warrantless searching and dehumanizing one another will mean the end of America.
In my opinion (as I have said here before) the terrorists have already won. They’ve gotten us to change the way we do things, and Bu$hco has been more than happy to help out at every turn. This is insanity has got to stop before we no longer have a nation worthy of protection.
We got the House and the Senate. It’s time for the Congress to stand up to the tyranny of the neocons, undo the grievous harm that has been done us all under color of law by the purveyors of fear and hatred and restore America to its former respect for the individual. I am counting on our Democrats to do exactly that.
So there.