-- On 4 Nov 2001, at 1:58, Raymond D. Mereniuk wrote:
What am I missing here? Was the prospective passenger carrying weapons or anything which could be judged as a weapon.? Was the prospective passenger deemed a threat to any of the other passengers or the completion of the flight to its destination? ]
Let us imagine the following scenario. You are going to board a plane. Someone who is known to be, or plausibly alleged to be, a supporter of the terrorist movements the US is currently at war with, also wants to board the same plane. In that situation, your views on their right to travel by plane will probably undergo a sudden change. The enemies of freedom, which this woman certainly is, see freedom as weakness and fear, and use it against us. This creates the danger that they succeed in making us give up freedom, as has perhaps happened in this case, but it is not merely a matter of dumb fucks using terrorism to institute a police state. There is a real threat here, which has to be met with real violence. Analogously in Vietnam, the enemy mingled with the populace, so that even with the best of intentions, US forces wound up killing a lot of ordinary civilians, a problem made far worse by the stupid "body count" policy, where young ambitious officers, like the future Senator Kerrey, were apt to rack up very large body counts by any means convenient. Senator Kerrey was cerrtainly a mass murderer, and the guardsmen who stopped her from flying were certainly thugs, but the reason there are arguably grounds for overlooking Kerrey's cynical murders and the guardsmen's thuggery ,is that in the face of this quite real threat even good people will do things that are hard to distinguish from the things that bad people do. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG 27HMOB8BBeIGfg7aT3n+oRAgMH8E0Sjhpgg7w6id 42AvXfoapB6NduA4gJt1a16zWy7lOQmEju4DrrtGm