Maine National Guard bars Green Party leader from flying

[jamesd at echeque.com]

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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. 

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         James A. Donald
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