Airport insanity

[Bill Stewart]

At 12:03 AM 10/17/2004, James A. Donald wrote:

>On 16 Oct 2004 at 19:42, Adam wrote: [...]
> > Second of all, you make it sound like McVeigh was just your
> > average-Joe American. How could a non-fundamentalist
> > knowingly kill 168 people?

Fundamentalism doesn't make people kill people.
Being pissed off does.  Being scared does.
Believing that those people are a threat to a Higher Cause
you Believe In does, whether it's religion, country, family, etc.
Wanting other people's stuff does.
Failing to believe that other people matter does
if they happen to be in your way.
Failing to believe that other people matter does
if it looks like it'll help you get what you want.
Being stupid might not directly make people kill people,
but it can affect whether you think the other conditions apply
and/or who you kill if you're going to kill people.

Some of those things make you willing to die in the process
of killing the people you want killed, and some don't,
though there's the intermediate case of being willing to have
people on Your Side get killed as long as it's not you.

McVeigh was pissed off, and he believed that the Feds
as a whole were a threat to America, so he decided to kill
Feds who were an easy target, as opposed to, say,
raiding a well-armed BATF headquarters.
The kids in the next buildings were just collateral damage.

Bush, on the other hand, doesn't believe other people matter,
and getting US soldiers killed or Iraqi children killed
or lying to the American public about them being Safer is fine,
though Saddam trying to kill his Daddy really pissed him off,
and war is the health of the state, which is him and his buddies.

> > Third, does not being a suicide bomber make your cause more noble?
>
>Not being a suicide bomber means there is no need to screen you
>from flying on planes.

You really don't want Carlos the Jackal on your flight.
Non-suicidal airplane bombers might bring a bomb onto a plane
and hide it under the seat so it'll blow up on the next flight,
or hide it inside somebody else's luggage so it'll blow up on
_their_ next flight, or whatever.  And they've usually done
more thinking about how to get away with it, though they're
trying to solve a much harder problem than suicide bombers are.

James Bamford's latest book "A Pretext for War"
is mainly about the Bush Administration's willingness
to use 9/11 as an excuse for the war they wanted even before
they got into office, but he spends a while excoriating the CIA
for being a bunch of bleeding incompetents.
The CIA spent a while trying to chase and kill bin Laden,
while constantly losing track of most of his organizations,
but they didn't ever try infiltrating Al Qaeda, because they
thought it would be too difficult to pass off their infiltrators
as credible due to cultural differences.
Yet Johnny Walker Lindh and Richard Shoebomber Reid
didn't much trouble joining them.  Bamford apparently
believes that Reid was the genuine article, though Reid sure
looks like the ideal guy you'd use if you wanted to
scare the public by planting an unsuccessful crazy bomber wannabee.


----
Bill Stewart  bill.stewart at pobox.com