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Man Tries To Use Explosive Device On US Flight
reporter writes with news that a Nigerian man allegedly attempted to set off a small explosive device — possibly a firecracker — on a Delta Airbus 330 airliner bound for Detroit yesterday. "There was a pop and then smoke wafted through the cabin. A passenger then climbed over several seats, lunged across the aisle and managed to subdue the suspect, the eyewitnesses said. The Nigerian man was placed in a headlock before being dragged up to the first class cabin. Passenger Zeina Seagal told CNN that after the suspect was collared and parts of his burning pants were removed, flight attendants quickly grabbed fire extinguishers and doused the fire at his seat." The man has claimed links to al-Qaeda, though the investigation hasn't confirmed that yet. (They're not taking anything for granted given that his pants were literally on fire.)
Just wait when they ban laptops because of explosive batteries! Terrorism on a plane is just pointless for this reason alone. The passengers will fight the fool to his death.
Crazy loner sets off home made firecracker on plane and lights pants on fire.
... that the plane landed in Havana, the hijacker got off the plane, and everyone went around their business or it landed in Tel-Aviv, the plane on the ground, and the hijackers shot/arrested with one or two dead passengers that the hijackers had killed to show they were "serious". The passengers sat in their seats and waited it out.
Those were the days when hijackers could depend on the passivity of passengers.
With planes being flown into buildings, passengers are no longer passive. It's not the TSA that keeps planes safe, it's the passengers and crew that will beat the snot out of the latest Al-Q "martyr."
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BMO
This seems to be a looping problem. All the government can think about is the last attempt, only backwards. There has been lots of dedication into flights after 9/11, while leaving all the other security problems open. Now its the same thing. This single thing happened on the last hour of flight, so they're thinking it's always going to happen on last hour of flight now.
And you are perfectly correct, even 9/11 happened in first minutes of flights, since they were flights leaving from US.
Don't solve the problem by looking backwards and making stupid rules to counter those; solve the whole problem and look why it is happening.
Why isn't the TSA strip searching Muslim males? That's easy:
1. They couldn't identify which men are Muslim or not. It's not like there's a big sign written on each Muslim saying "I am a Muslim" (and if there were, a reasonably smart terrorist wouldn't wear it when they went to bomb a plane).
2. The First Amendment of the Constitution protects the free exercise of religion, Islam included. Treating members of a particular faith as second-class citizens would definitely violate that. And yes, there are Muslims citizens of the US, some of them currently serving the country in Iraq and Afghanistan, who are more loyal to the US and what it stands for than you are.
3. At least 99.9% of Muslim men aren't terrorists. You're arguing for strip searching about 800 million people in order to find a few thousand people. Your odds are only slightly better than strip searching the 99.99% of Christian men who aren't terrorists to find the 0.01% who are (e.g. Tim McVeigh or members of the Real IRA).
I am officially gone from
Amazing. Given US's kneejerk reactions to these kinds of events, is it at all surprising that more and more people are refusing to visit the United States for anything other than business purposes? These idiots either don't realize or don't care that overreaction does have its price.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Expect the Authorities to milk this event for what it's worth when it comes to justifying mandatory pre-flight anal probing sessions, more mass surveillance and the outlawing of encryption they're not sure how to crack.
It's important to remember that the goal here is not to bring down planes or buildings - it's to create turmoil and terror. Simple actions like this cause millions to billions of dollars of cost to our economy for the investment of a can of lighter fluid and a firecracker. Because of one case of semi-successful action by one clown millions of us will now be subject to ineffective additional screening, more TSA invasions of privacy and general police state tactics, more delays. I don't have the answer - but I know the ROI from a terrorist perspective is outstanding.
Are you really trying to convince me that they are a bunch of incompetents who just manage to cause a little damage but that is all ?
Most terrorists, like most other criminals, are not smart people. Smart people don't tend to try and blow themselves up.
Please don't talk about 9/11 like its an annual holiday. It was 9/11/2001. Almost 10 years ago. Flying is safe. Safer than taking a shower.
Lets go Swiss. Everyone is required to complete military service (4 to 6 years). In which, they get trained on weapons usage, self defense, martial arts, etc. Now, you have a whole plane load of security experts.
Freud might say that Intelligent Design is religion's ID.
After all the billions of dollars spent on TSA, great delays and annoyances to customers, fictitious work of thousands of employees, and the unfathomed damage to the airline industry, the one time when an actual terrorist tries to smuggle explosives on board and all this charade fails spectacularly.
The response? Add more of the same ineffective measures.
Thank goodness for the incompetence of the terrorist.
Take this argument out of the airplane context, and think about it.
At the Fort Hood shooting, who took out the shooter? He started the shooting in the middle of a group of well trained, but unarmed individuals. Who took him out? An armed civilian. When you take away the ability of people to defend themselves, they are left defenseless.
Not to say a shootout on an aircraft would be a good thing. That's the last thing anyone would want to be involved in. A very dense population, with no place to run to, in an environment that is more dangerous to shoot in. Anyone who would consider such a thing would already consider, their odds of success are much smaller in any group of people who can defend themselves.
Before 9/11, I knew a guy who worked personal security. He brought his sidearm on board a couple times. Once was accidentally, where he forgot it was in his bag (he thought he moved it to checked luggage) and discovered it in his carry-on mid-flight. The other, he discovered he carried it to the checkpoint, but with his credentals, he was told to bring it on with him. He was asking to be allowed to check the bag, and was told "oh, you're clear, go."
Neither time did he create an incident, but if an incident did happen, he would have been the armed civilian who could have ended the situation.
It isn't just on the aircraft where the situation is amazingly dangerous. Consider the 2002 LAX shooting at the El Al terminal. He was shot by an airline security guard, who was one of the few armed people in the area.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
The passengers will fight the fool to his death.
Exactly! 9/11 will never happen again. Not because of the ridiculous tactics of the TSA, but because the rules changed on that day.
Used to be that your plane was hijacked, you flew somewhere obscure and waited on the tarmac while a deal was worked out, and then you were free. That's how box cutters were enough of a weapon to take over the flights.
Now we all know that someone doing trying something like that could very likely end in disaster, so when we passengers see something going down, we put an immediate stop to it.
Exactly. We don't need ANY airport security anymore. Just laws granting civil and criminal immunity to passengers and crew defending themselves on flights. The people onboard can and will protect themselves.
What's that you say? He was only scratching an itch? Not activating a bomb? Oh... wow, good thing I've got immunity for what I did... here then, his family can have his scalp back.
You can't take the sky from me...
Wow, that's pretty stupid. Attackers who are captured alive can give further information, while dead ones can't. Maybe he was a lone nut, but maybe not. But I'm sure making you feel like Jack Bauer is totally worth not potentially preventing other attacks.
Have you noticed a pattern to most Terrorism attempts? They tend to fail.
bin Laden's mates bought some loser a plane ticket for a few thousand dollars and we then impose restrictions that will cost billions of dollars over the next years and assist with driving more airlines into bankruptcy.
And you call that a failure?
The sad thing is, these pathetic incompetent terrorists are going to be responsible for causing billions of dollars to spent on extra airport security and many, many lifetimes of time will be wasted in stupid delays.
Some incompetent terrorists tries to blow up the plane, but can't build a proper electronic detonator that a 10th grader could solder together? Now we all have to be humiliated by taking our shoes off.
Some incompetent wanna-be terrorists think about a liquid bomb because they saw it in the movie Die Hard 3? Now millions of Americans have to buy overpriced beverages and/or die of thirst. Not to mention that the world's best chemists don't know a reasonable way to make a liquid bomb actually freakin work.
And now, some useless waste of space terrorist doesn't build a proper bomb using over the counter ingredients like fertilizer/diesel fuel or tannerite. (both are so easy to get that a 10th grader could order either of those explosives). No, the idiot tries to blow up an airliner with what sounds like a gunpowder bomb. And despite only managing to burn his own pants off, undoubtedly some new round of draconian security measures will kill many lifetimes of wasted time at security checkpoints.
Fact is, the United States has killed far more of it's citizens through reacting to the actions of terrorists than terrorists have ever harmed.
That's a really expensive way to do it - in terms of opportunity cost. Those are years of peoples' lives. They could be doing something else, being productive members of society, living their lives (some of the best years of their life, too). In terms of lost wages alone that service would easily cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars - to say nothing of the price of my liberty.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
"(1) the aircraft had not landed so this was not an attack "on American soil;""
Under US law, it was similar, though. Much like attacking a US flagged ship at sea.
"(2) the nutjob at Ft. Hood had been open and clear that he did not want to be deployed - to the extent of trying to buy his way out of the service. This is not terrorism - it is a mass murder by a man who should have been identified and stopped well before the Ft.Hood shooting."
The nutjob at Ft. Hood didn't want to be deployed because he became sympathetic to the enemies US troops are fighting. He was in regular contact with jihadist groups in the months leading up to the attack, and even wanted to have some of his own patients tried for war crimes. The man cried out "Allahu Akbhar" before he mowed down his fellow soldiers. Admit it or not, this was terrorism. He certainly thought it was.
(3) Your thinly veiled indictment of the changed political culture of the USA now requires that you be outed as the Glen Beck puppet that you are."
And does your silly screed make you a puppet of Micheal Moore and the like?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
They could be doing something else, being productive members of society, living their lives (some of the best years of their life, too).
So you're saying members of the military aren't productive members of society and that they gain no life experience from service. Speaking as someone who served in the U.S. Navy as a submariner, I find that position laughable. The value of the life you live shouldn't be based on a few years worth of a salary that you're so certain could have been higher.
to say nothing of the price of my liberty
You have your liberty because others are willing to serve. How about getting your head out of your ass?
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
History disagrees. The Troubles mostly stopped when the British government started seriously negotiating with Northern Irish Republicans. The PLO stopped using terrorism when Israel sat down to negotiate.
Terrorists do what they do for a reason. That reason can usually be addressed by politics. There will always be a hardcore that doesn't think the political solution proposed is sufficient (witness IRA splinter groups and Hamas in Israel), but political action can kill most of the support for them. One thing that history did teach us, is that repression is definitely not the political action that works, unless you're prepared for some unacceptable politics (aka, genocide) on the non-terrorist side.
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?