Slashdot Mirror
Defending The Skies Against Congress And The Elderly
theodp writes "After watching a burly airport screener search her lymphoma-stricken father, forcing the frail and faltering 78-year-old to hand over his oxygen meter, stand at attention with arms spread for a wand search, take off the Velcro strap shoes that he'd struggled to put on, and strain to keep his balance as his belt was tugged repeatedly, a Newsweek columnist wonders: have we lost our common sense when it comes to passenger screening?" An anonymous reader writes "CNN reported that Kennedy wasn't alone in being listed in the airport watch list as reported in a Slashdot article. Rep. John Lewis, D - Georgia, a nine-term congressman, has been stopped many times because his name appeared on an airline watch list as told to Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on border security. He contacted the Department of Transportation, the Department of Homeland Security and executives at various airlines in an effort to get his name off the list, but failed. Instead, he received a letter from the TSA indicating he has cleared an identity check with the agency even though he might still be subject to extra security checks."
look, when the next attack comes, he'll be mid 20's, arab, and answers to muhammad, achmed, or habib. oh yeah, he smell like camel dung from 7 weeks of not showering. this is a direct result of our hyper-sensitivities to damn near everything. if you're offended, get over it. i'd rather fly safely. and no, we're not harassing the shit out of innocent citizens. we're at war, like it or not. it wasn't our fault that we were attacked, and it isn't our fault that a handful of fanatics want to go back the golden years of the 7th century and live in a cave.
going back to 1979, every singe terrorist act against US interests has been conducted by arab muslims. (and don't mention oklahoma city. nichols and mcveigh spent a year in an al qaeda camp in the philippines.) and by focusing on a few select groups, we're becoming nazi germany. defend them all you want, they want to kill you too!!
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
OMG it's a conspiracy!!!! It's another BushCheneyNeoConFascistMonarchyForOilHaliburton scandal to destroy the opposition and kill baby pandas!
How can they do this if they can't even search more than 2 people of any given race before the planes are boarded? (Don't you love political correctness?)
Something everyone should be forced to read
HA HA!
Well, seriously, I hope your over-paranoid laws won't spread all over the world. And I hope you are going to change the leadership of your country. Vote for democrats, goddamnit and if they keep on going like the current administration, then you are fucked!
They only bring up the terrorists regularly because they are cowards who can't live life with courage. In general, most of the cowards I've met in my life have been on the right end of the political spectrum. Not all, but most. Personally, have never had any fear of terrorist attacks from "illegal combatants" of foreign nations. I am pretty confident that any attack on U.S. soil that we see is likely to be orchestrated from inside the Whitehouse. That's why I'll be voting for Kerry in November.
Un-news
The terrorists are winning? Really? Maybe I've just missed the news, but I've been under the impression that Al Qaeda has not managed to mount on attack in the United States since the WTC attack.
The reason they haven't been able to do so is quite clear: because we are led by a highly capable president who knows how to fight a war and win it, many Al Qaeda members are now in US custody (good) or dead (better) and we have a lot of terrorists who would otherwise be trying to attack us at home or abroad tied up in Iraq, where they are dealing with a professional army and dying. This is a Good Thing.
If you take a look a little further back in history to WW II, you'll find that one of the major reasons we not only won the war but emerged as the dominant superpower when the shooting was done is that we made sure the combat took place on enemy soil. Hawaii (then a territory) was the only part of the United States to see major combat, and that happened only once.
We are quite correct to be following that pattern again. Let the fighting be in the terrorists' backyard, not ours. History books will quite possibly look back on this war and say that it was indeed WW III, as some commentators believe. And they will look back and see that one of the big reasons we decisively won it is because we fought it on our enemies' ground, not ours.
It is for that reason that President Bush will be getting my vote in November, something that I would otherwise not be inclined to give him. Certainly, I differ with him on a wide range of policies, despite the fact that I have been a registered Republican ever since I was old enough to vote. What we need most of all is a tough, war-fighting president who is willing to go it alone if necessary and who is not afraid to take the war to our enemies and kill them where they are. We have such a president. Everything that Kerry has said on this issue has convinced me that if he is capable of doing that at all (which I have doubts about), he is a good bit less capable of doing it than is our current president.
As for the issue of airline no-fly lists, they are certainly screwed up, and seem to go on nothing but a name. The Ted Kennedy on the list was not the Ted Kennedy who sits in the Senate, I've read, but just someone with a pretty similar name.
However, those lists are not the government's doing. The airlines maintain their own lists, and there is no central authority and maybe even no central list. There have been calls for there to be a single list, run by DHS, but that has not yet been done. I think it will clear up a lot of the confusion if they make such a list.