Homeland Security To Scan Citizens Exiting US

An anonymous reader writes "The US Department of Homeland Security is set to kickstart a controversial new pilot to scan the fingerprints of travellers departing the United States. From June, US Customs and Border Patrol will take a fingerprint scan of travellers exiting the United States from Detroit, while the US Transport Security Administration will take fingerprint scans of international travellers exiting the United States from Atlanta. The controversial plan to scan outgoing passengers — including US citizens — was allegedly hatched under the Bush Administration. An official has said it will be used in part to crack down on the US population of illegal immigrants."

Comments

Idiocy

[vux984]

"An official has said it will be used in part to crack down on the US population of illegal immigrants"

Why not just let them leave? And bar them when they try to come back. What is the point of catching someone you don't want in the country when they are leaving it??

Re:Idiocy

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Probably because we don't actually seem to care much.

On the other hand, the fact that a fair few Americans are more xenophobic than they are freedom-loving presents a golden opportunity...

Re:Idiocy

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

And so is the continual expansion of State power, particularly at the federal level, in the name of "security". I'd argue that a lot of people are letting their fear of immigrants drive them right into that.

Re:Idiocy

[Stuart Gibson]

I'm more interested in what they're going to do if I refuse? Throw me out of the country?

Re:Idiocy

[Jurily]

Why not just let them leave? And bar them when they try to come back.

Apparently, they already failed at that once. I don't understand this move, but once again it's clear that the US borders are not a privacy dream. Next up: state borders and continental air travel?

I'm so glad I'm not American.

Re:Idiocy

[Wrath0fb0b]

It's not a matter of xenophobia. For most people anyway. Illegal immigration is a very real social and economic problem.

I'd like to second this. I'm not xenophobic -- I support allowing a large number of legal immigrants into the country each year under fairly generous terms. I oppose all forms of ethnic quotas and other restrictive immigration policies. I support giving legal immigrants nearly full access to the benefits of citizenship as soon as they arrive and additional services (if they want) to help them in adjusting to a different country. Hopefully, this is enough to convince people that I'm not, by any stretch of the imagination, anti-immigrant.

On the other hand, I am a firm believer in the need to enforce the law with regards to illegal immigrants -- deport them and bar them from reentry. These positions aren't contradictory and, in fact, I see them as complementary -- by increasing legal immigration and throwing out all the illegal immigrants, we will be rewarding those honest people that follow the rules instead of those that decide that they have the right to break the law to get what they want. Those are the kind of people that we ought to be allowing to immigrate. The incentives in our current system are perversely the opposite of this -- it punishes those that want to follow the rules with onerous waits and arbitrary terms while rewarding those that skip in line with amnesty and "safe haven". It's ludicrous, and I blame both the GOP for stymieing legal immigration and the Dems for stymieing systematic attempts to identify and deport illegals and punish unscrupulous employers (only the really negligent, of course -- not every contractor that accepts a forged SSN deserves to get canned, but the ones that intentionally look the other way certainly do).

Such a partisan football is made out of what I thought was just common sense -- it's depressing really. I can't understand it -- I just can't. It's some sort of collective insanity we've entered in this country.

Re:Idiocy

[vux984]

So, what nation do you live in that allows ppl, including criminals, to come and go freely?

When the primary punishment for being an "illegal alien" is deportation, what exactly are you going to do when you catch them trying to leave? Make them leave?

Re:Idiocy

[cyberprophet]

The people who allegedly did the 9-11 attacks had brown skin and are rather indistinguishable from the brown-skinned people south of the U.S border.

Are you really suggesting that you can't tell the difference between someone from Central America and someone from the Middle East?

Re:Idiocy

[Wrath0fb0b]

How about the contractors who accept forged SSNs and then proceed to duly withhold and file all payroll related taxes?

Don't care. They knowingly accepted a forged SSN and should be punished for violating a fairly simple and straightforward law. Yes, it's nice that they paid taxes, but my main concern with illegal immigration is not taxes -- it's basic fairness.

It is unfair to the legal immigrants who did things according to the rules to allow those that skipped the lines to have the same benefits.

Re:Idiocy

[vux984]

Also, how can this be about illegal immigrants if they are going to scan US citizens???

Precisely. My post was that this was an absurd rationalization to pander support. He might as well have claimed it would stop child porn too.

Re:Idiocy

[phyrz]

And he's modded insightful lol. If you can't tell the difference between a Mexican and an Afghani you are lacking in insight, to be sure.

Re:Idiocy

[rzekson]

Suppose you are a politician and the uneducated hard-core conservatives want the competition out; ideally, nobody would ever immigrate. There are two options: you can kick out people whom you can control (those who follow the law), or kick out people whom you can't control (those who enter illegally). The latter option is very difficult to implement: after all, if you can't control or even identify someone, you can't kick them out. So in order to demonstrate that you listen to your voters and do something to protect them from the evil "aliens", you generate all sorts of restrictions on people who follow the law.

Re:Idiocy

[ScrewMaster]

I beg to differ: both mexicans and afghanis are very mixed.

A better question would be, what cultures are left on this planet that aren't racially mixed?

Re:Idiocy

[moosesocks]

Cut me a break. 95% of the time, the folks fighting against illegal immigration are racist as hell, and automatically label any hispanic person as a probable 'illegal'

Is it an economic problem? Definitely. Is it as bad as people are claiming it to be? Probably not.

The solutions aren't great either. Immigration is something we're either going to have to put up with, or commit some pretty severe human rights violations to correct. (Also, are there many native-born Americans who are willing to pick fruit for $3/hour? Like it or not, we've had so many illegal immigrants for so long that the illegal labor force has become an integral part of the economy)

Re:Idiocy

[SydShamino]

The Japanese?

Re:Idiocy

[BigSlowTarget]

Really? Most of us are justifiably afraid of terrorism? Some Americans are not cowards and are not willing to sacrifice the very living ideals that make the country special for the petty illusion of 'being safe.' 0.001% of the US population were killed when the towers fell. That is definitely a cause for seeking justice, might be a cause for preventative actions and could make some call for revenge, but fear? You have a better chance of dying in the bath.

Get real people. YOU ARE MORTAL SO YOU ARE GOING TO DIE. Make your life worth something instead of cowering from shadows. Prove that you're worth the soldiers' noble sacrifices and their exposure to real danger by shouldering just a little tiny bit of the burden. Fight fear and choose wisdom. Don't call for killing American freedom this way and don't support it when it happens.

Re:Idiocy

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Really? Most of us are justifiably afraid of terrorism?

Sure. Terrorism is scary. It's false bravado to claim you aren't worried about it to some degree. YOur stat of 0.001% of the US population dying in a single day is quite a bit. I'm frightened of street crime. It's a rational fear.

You have a better chance of dying in the bath.

Not me. I don't take baths.

Don't call for killing American freedom this way and don't support it when it happens.

You seem to have misunderstood GP's post. He said that was also bad, and he thought this was on the wrong side (I also think this action is too extreme).

But it's as stupid to stand up and shout at the wind that no safety conditions are worth any amount of safety as it is to stand up and shout that we all must be enslaved to get safety increased a bit. All of life is a balancing act. Name one public policy where one extreme is always right?

Re:Idiocy

[ScrewMaster]

Really? Most of us are justifiably afraid of terrorism? Some Americans are not cowards and ...

Well, you rather missed the point. In an attempt to avoid a response like yours, I specifically said real terrorism. As opposed to the mere threat of terrorism which we're constantly subjected to by our government and news media, and the tremendous cost of dealing with that (ahem!) "threat." I simply want people to note that our government is generating more fear among the populace than any number of actual terrorists. Also, assuming that the threat is severely overblown, I want to know why they're doing it. Is it just the usual rationalization for a massive power-grab, or is it something else?

Otherwise, I agree with your sentiments.

Re:Idiocy

[misexistentialist]

If you really want security, you have to accept that the bad guys are indistinguishable

In other words security is impossible without monitoring/restricting/imprisoning everyone. Which is exactly what the governments of the world are starting to do. Usually such governments crumble, but this more gradual and impersonal method of totalitarianism might finally be the solution to creating the Great Dystopia. Technology has advanced to the point where the communication of dissidents (who will be called "domestic terrorists") can be detected and disrupted, and once organized action is impossible so is meaningful resistance.

Re:Idiocy

[Mr. Slippery]

Most of us are justifiably afraid of real terrorism.

Cancer and heart disease have killed somewhere in the neighborhood of ten million people in the past ten years. Over a million people died in accidents in the past decade; about 400,000 of those were killed in motor vehicle accidents.

In the past ten years, about 160,000 people were murdered.

About 30,000 drowned.

Only 2,974 were killed in acts of terrorism carried out by foreign nationals within the U.S.

If you're justifiably afraid of terrorism, you must be justifiably scared shitless of all this other, much more dangerous stuff.

And yet nobody gets all bent out of shape about how we have to suspend habeus corpus to protect ourselves from the dangers of swimming pools, cars, and Big Macs.

So long as we think fearing terrorists is justified, we will want Big Government to protect us. (Never mind that it's the brutal and stupid foreign policy of Big Government that motivates the terrorist's hate.)

Re:Idiocy

[LateArthurDent]

Sure. Terrorism is scary. It's false bravado to claim you aren't worried about it to some degree.

Bullshit. I have one or two orders of magnitude greater chance of dying from heart disease, but I still eat greasy burgers. But I don't fear it enough to stop eating greasy burgers. I have a greater chance of dying on a car accident, but I don't fear it enough to avoid getting in my car everyday to go to work. You're telling me I should fear fucking terrorism enough to inconvenience me to take my shoes off at an airport? Fuck that. I don't, and I can't possibly understand how anyone else in the security line can justify it when they had the courage to drive to the airport and eat mcdonalds for lunch. Hell, the chances of their plane crashing from accidental causes is greater.

Terrorism is a non-threat. When you believe otherwise, you're doing the terrorists a favor because terrorizing you is the whole point.

Re:Idiocy

[LateArthurDent]

No. Fear isn't all or nothing. It's stupid not to fear terrorism at all.

No, it is not. If you're going to be afraid of things that have almost no chance of ever affecting you at all, you're not going to live your life normally. In fact, we're NOT living our lives normally because of that stupid fear. We're putting up with crap we would never have put up with before 9/11. Get the number of American deaths due to terrorism (any type, including not on american soil) over the past 10 years. Get the number of American deaths due to traffic accidents over the past 10 years. Then tell me the fear is justified.

19 guys were able to do significant damage to the US. They since have successfully operated in Britain and Spain. Isn't that frightening on some level?

No more than Timothy McVeigh's bombing, but nobody seemed to go batshit insane after that (2 people caused ~600 deaths with the oklahoma city bombing vs 19 people caused ~3000 deaths with 9/11...I'm not sure why this is relevant, but your point seemed to be that because only 19 people caused all that damage, this is something that has never happened before, so I guess I should point out that in actually deaths per person responsible ratios were higher with an event of terrorism that happened before). They found out who was responsible, had a trial and that was that.

Look, I'm not saying law enforcement and intelligence agencies don't need to take steps to try to prevent that type of thing, but it's a pure law enforcement problem. It's like gang violence. You don't change your life because some kid on the other side of your town got shot. You don't change your life because some nutjobs are killing people. You worry about things that actually have a chance of affecting you. You don't want to die of cancer, be afraid of smoking cigarettes. You want to avoid dying in a traffic accident? Try to be a more attentive and careful driver. You're afraid of heart disease? Try to eat healthier. Those steps you take will have a much greater positive effect in your life than getting fingerprinted when you leave the country ever will.

I really don't get it. Some crazed American anarchist bombs a building and people react normally to it (there's grief, there's anger, that's all normal. We don't have a fundamental change and start fingerprinting people who enter the proximity of federal buildings). Some crazed religious nutjobs hijack planes and crash them into buildings and everyone freaks out because they're foreign and hold a religion not of their own and people start thinking it's ok to wiretap our phones without warrants, it's ok to fingerprint americans just because they're leaving the country, it's ok to hold people prisoner without trials...

Also, fear is usally not of death. More people are frightened of public speaking than death.

Alright, "fear of public speaking" is a fear, but it's a completely different fear than fear of death. It gives you some knots in your stomach, depending on your anxiety levels it might even cause you to avoid speaking in public at all. If you're genuinely afraid that you're going to die, you're going to do things that you would never do under any other circumstances. People were jumping off the towers because they'd rather die by splatting in the concrete than in the fire. You're not going to jump off a building because you're rather not make that 3pm presentation. This is my entire point, btw...you should be more scared of traffic accidents than terrorism, just like you should be more scared of death than of public speaking.

Fear of violence, uncontrolled violence, is scarier than dynig at an old age in a medical bed

Seriously? Dying a slow, possibly painful, most likely undignified (being unable to go to the bathroom by yourself) death is scarier to you than 2 minutes of panic followed by a quick death?

Bottom line is that

Re:Idiocy

[BrokenHalo]

and looks like he is from Egypt. When I asked him where he was from he told me Canada...

Well, why do you all get so wound up about skin colour anyway?

I understand there was supposed to have been some guy by the name of Jesus who is meant to be fairly highly regarded in the US, and I believe he would have had a middle-Eastern appearance too.

Re:Idiocy

[Kazymyr]

There are a few countries in Eastern Europe that are so racially uniform it's not even funny.

Re:Idiocy

[identity0]

Oh, yes. There was one math professor I had (Mr. Samardar) who the kids in class would make a game out of trying to guess where he was from. He was darker-skinned than most white people but not really 'dark', and his accent was light and sounded kind of European(to me, at least). Popular guesses included Egypt and Peru.

Now I just looked him up, it seems he was the chair of the local Iranian-American Association. So there's at least one person who couldn't easily be profiled by looks.

Add to that the fact that Latin Americans can range from very European-looking to very native-looking, and you have a lot of chances of misjudgement.

And speaking as an Asian, people from my country often think I'm from another country(because of my clothes or hairstyle, I think), and I know Asians in the US who have been mistaken for Native American.

One step at a time . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

You can see how they take little baby steps. One at a time. In ten years imagine what will be happening.

Re:One step at a time . . .

[tsm_sf]

You can see how they take little baby steps. One at a time. In ten years imagine what will be happening.

Weird to see a post from 1999 pop up randomly.

Re:One step at a time . . .

[dov_0]

In Soviet Russia, um. Well, actually it's getting pretty similar...

Barriers to leaving a country

[ceoyoyo]

All countries exercise at least some control over who can enter, but there's only one kind of country that erects barriers to who can leave. How long until you guys build a wall? Oh, apparently you've started already.

Re:Barriers to leaving a country

[nokiator]

Welcome to East Germany 2.0!

Re:Barriers to leaving a country

[ceoyoyo]

It'll be interesting to see, the first time some guy (or girl) has the stones to tell the customs agent to screw off.

Even better, what happens if your fingerprints DO come up as an illegal alien? Do they not let you leave? Give you a completely redundant kick to speed you on your way?

Re:Barriers to leaving a country

[ceoyoyo]

Sure, "yo, I'm leaving", "yes sir, here, let me stamp your passport."

That's not a barrier to leaving a country, and it's not "customs." Requiring you to be fingerprinted is a whole different league. Interesting that this story shows up alongside another today where some cancer patient was detained because they couldn't get a good set of fingerprints off him. I actually just got back from a conference in Hawaii with this guy who got hassled at the border because he climbs and his fingerprints aren't all they could be.

totalitarianism

[u4ya]

it keeps creeping in, step by step, for as long as enough of us remain silent.

Why?

[sweatyboatman]

"We are trying to ensure we know more about who came and who left," [Michael Hardin] said. "We have a large population of illegal immigrants in the United States - we want to make sure the person getting on the plane really is the person the records show to be leaving."

huh? so the epidemic of people pretending to leave the country on commercial flights by booking flights and sending doppelgangers in their place is finally over! rejoice Americans! we are all now super safe!

Re:Why?

[phantomfive]

I think he is being honest, as weird as it sounds. Think about it, why was the DHS formed? Why does it seem so incompetent?

Originally Bush was opposed to it, but under congressional pressure relented and agreed to its creation. Ever since then it has done almost nothing except......export illegal immigrants. It does that a lot. So I am theorizing that Bush thought, "Fine. They can build the organization and call it whatever they want, but since I'm in charge, it will DO what I want." And what he wanted was to get rid of illegal immigrants. So that's what happened. Besides a few token operations to live up to its name, it focuses almost entirely on getting rid of illegal immigrants. Has nothing to do with security.

Won't work

[royallthefourth]

None of the illegal immigrants I've ever met have arrived by airplane.

This leaves two options: either these guys are really stupid, or the real goal is different from the stated goal.

Re:Won't work

[Anonymous Coward]

None of the illegal immigrants I've ever met have arrived by airplane

Not necessarily. There may be people arriving legally on student or tourist visas, and then overstaying them (sometimes permanently).

Still, the way the justification was fomulated leads me to believe something was not said.

Re:Won't work

[rubycodez]

those visa people are ALREADY fingerprinted coming and going

B frankin S

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah this seems like a real efficient way to catch illegal immigrants, I'm sure most of the come to the U.S. to catch international flights from Atlanta and Detroit. That's how dumb the government knows the average person is.

Free

[Longjmp]

U.S. of A. the Land Of The Free. Sorry, just couldn't resist.

Re:Free

[cptdondo]

No shit. I was born under communism; I vividly recall the grade school lectures about leaving the country being a crime.

We left there to the land of the free. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would live to see the day when borders in formerly communist nations are no more and Americans must present the proper papers and fingerprints! to leave the country.

what a difference 10 years make

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, I'm a Canadian, and ten years ago, I would have voted to join the US. I felt that Americans recognised the value of their freedoms and that they had, and would fight to keep, a more free society than just about anywhere else on Earth. Today, I won't even travel there. It reminds me of all those B movies just after WW2 "Achtung! Show me your papers". How could y'all have just let this happen ?

Re:what a difference 10 years make

[kklein]

Thank you. I had a couple friends (a couple) who were going up to Canada to camp (from Colorado--long trip). The guy is white, the girl, Latina.

They were detained for half a day, subjected to lots of separate questioning... It turns out that for some reason these yahoos got it in their head that the guy had picked up an underage prostitute in Mexico and was fleeing to Canada. The girl was--and looked--27.

After every conceivable search and interrogation, they finally said "You're free to enter Canada," to which the guy said, "You know what? Fuck Canada," and they turned around and went back home.

So that's N=2 now, but I suspect there are a lot more.

Ya this is kinda scary

[Sycraft-fu]

Saying who can and can't enter is, well, part of being an nation. I would place it akin to an individual being able to decide who can and can't enter their home. Part of being a sovereign nation is you need to be able to decide who is allowed to come in.

However not being able to leave? Well again I'd say it is like a private individual and while you can tell me I can't come in to your house, once you've let me in you have to let me out when I want to go. Barriers for exit are things that are normally associated with extremely oppressive societies. The USSR had very strict border control and it was more to keep their populace in than to keep foreigners out. Thus I see this as a step down a very bad path.

It also raises some serious legal questions for people like me. I am a citizen of two nations, the US and Canada. I have a right to go to either nation. So is it legal for the US to say "No, you can't go to Canada,"? Who are they to tell me I can't go to my country?

Now youll know

[alexborges]

How it feeels.

Re:Honestly, what's the big deal?

[ledow]

"So what if they want to fingerprint travelers entering the country? I think this is a good idea"
"So what if they want to fingerprint travelers exiting the country? I think this is a good idea"
"So what if they want to fingerprint travelers changing flights at the country? I think this is a good idea"
"So what if they want to fingerprint travelers flying past the country? I think this is a good idea"
"So what if they want to fingerprint drivers? I think this is a good idea"
"So what if they want to fingerprint cyclists? I think this is a good idea"
"So what if they want to fingerprint pedestrians? I think this is a good idea"
"So what if they want to fingerprint everyone? I think this is a good idea"

It's called "unnecessary feature creep". Providing fingerprints at a border helps no more than providing other, non-biometric, information at the border, whether you've just murdered someone or not. Either you're on the database (and thus can be flagged in an instant by having an A.P.B. put out) or you're not. But unnecessary feature creep paves the way to a surveillance society. 50 years ago we didn't even *have* this technology, now it's being made compulsory if you want to fly, drive, cycle, ... and eventually it's just compulsory.

Plus, that data is *personal* under most country's definitions of personal data. In the EU that means it's subject to the Data Protection Act which means I have a legal assurance (whether it's carried out or not is another matter) that the data will be kept private, not be disclosed except for explicit purposes and that only authorised people will see it. The US does not, and never has, provided such guarantees to visitors (even if it intended to break them anyway once they were on paper)

"Please tell me how this is an infringement on your 'rights'?"

I have the right to pass freely through almost every port in the world without undue let or hindrance. The US just removed that. I also have the right to protect my personal information and to refuse to give biometric data if I so wish. That right was just lost. Just because in America you didn't HAVE those rights in the first place, that's no reason to not understand why other people are upset (and we are by definition talking about international travellers here).

"The DHS/ICE already do biometric scanning of all *permanent* residents when they're entering the country, and I mean fingerprinting all the fingers in both of your hands. People with US Passports, by comparison, are waived through, which I think is a incredibly stupid thing."

Yep. Because you've just scanned the fingerprints of someone that, by definition, you have zero record of anywhere else (because they are not a US citizen until that time). Yet you let known criminals walk through because they have a US passport. That's just STUPID. And another nail in the "we need this" coffin. It's an *unnecessary* measure.

"Besides, the EU has been doing this for quite some time. Get over it."

No they haven't. I am an EU citizen and have NEVER provided my fingerprints EVER for ANY purpose in ANY country - I even have a 10 year British passport, a 10-year British driving license (both with EU-certified RFID etc. in them) and never had to provide anything but an authenticated photo and documentation (for the next renewal in a decade's time it might be more tricky to avoid being fingerprinted if people don't stand up to this crap NOW) - and only last year I travelled through 10 countries in the EU within two weeks on a cruise ship. In fact, that's why I'm not flying to the US ever again - that and the "we need the right to copy your laptop data and not tell you what we did with it" - that's a KILLER for me, because it means I would be breaking the law in my own country by disclosing private, personalised business data.

You're throwing a right away every time you say "I don't see a problem with it, so okay". What you should be saying is "I don't see the need. So why should I?". Whethe

Now you know..

[msimm]

we hated the USSR out of jealously. And now look at how swiftly we race to embrace statism.

Re:maybe those who are complaining can explain:

[msimm]

I can't wait until we can view ads from sponsors during the scanning. Hope you enjoyed your visit! And Drink Pepsi!

As a famous terrorist leader once said...

[Anonymous Coward]

>>I might be less critical of such actions if it weren't for the fact that "security" isn't being improved or actually even being addressed.

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Of course, this was also said by a major figure of what we would call, today, an insurgent force, fighting against the established government of the country. He spent much of that war in another country, raising funds to support what those who claimed they had a legitimate government considered to be a terrorist action. By recent standards, for the funding part alone, two guys were sentenced to 65 years, just this week.

His name was Benjamin Franklin.

Re:As a famous terrorist leader once said...

[hairyfeet]

I know this will get me marked as flamebait or troll or whatever, but frankly I don't care. You want to know why we have trouble with terrorism and have all this crap going on in the Middle East? Because pretty much our ENTIRE Middle East Policy of the last 50+ years can be summed up in this sentence- "Jesus won't come back! Praise Jesus!"

I really wish I was joking, but sadly I am not. You have one of the most powerful nations on earth basing an entire region's policies on whether or not a 2000+ year old dead guy will be able to walk down out of a cloud. That is pretty fucking scary. Hell look at this where they were putting top sheets on the war plans for Iraq with scripture!

Now I don't care which bloody religion you are, that is fucking scary shit! NO country, especially one with as much devastating firepower as the USA, should be basing their foreign policy on what it will take to ensure some 2000 year old dead guy will float down from the clouds. And Christians, a word of advice- if your God is so weak that the only way he can "come back" is with the backing of the F-18 and the USA giving Israel weapons tech? Then you might want to look up in your good book what it says about a guy named "AntiChrist" because I don't think an actual deity would need the USA to save his ass, or that of his "chosen people" okay? if he can part the Red Sea and turn rivers into blood I think he can take care of himself,okay?

I am not saying the Arabs aren't as much to blame, but to anyone that isn't a Christian this frankly looks like the height of insanity. It also gives Israel a license to do whatever they want because they know the hawks in the USA will scream "Jesus won't come back!" and back them no matter what. Allow me to quote Moshe Dayan describing the events before the Six Day War for an example-"We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn't possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn't shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance farther, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that's how it was. I did that, and Laskov and Chara did that, and Yitzhak did that, but it seemed to me that the person who most enjoyed these games was Dado"

And the whole reason they could do that was because they knew the USA, being led by the "Jesus won't come back!" brigade, will always back them up. Maybe if we didn't they would have motivation to try to work out something with their neighbors, instead of starting shit. And until we base our Mid East policy on something other than "Jesus won't come back" everyone in the region who is NOT Israeli will hate us. We can't base our entire foreign policy on a 3000+ year old book and whether or not a 2000+ year old dead guy will have a place to land his cloud. Sorry, but that is just fricking nuts!

Re:maybe those who are complaining can explain:

[MaskedSlacker]

Precisely because of shit like this.