UPDATE: This story has been widely circulated and investigated by many. After all I’ve read I am unconvinced that, musicians or not, this group was not conducting skulduggery aboard that flight. If nothing else, however, the story and the attention given to it should serve as a call to action. We should contact our elected representatives, including President Bush, and demand an end to politically correct policies that endanger our security. I’ll state it as plainly as I know how: racial profiling at airports and other high-security locations should not be prohibited; it should be policy.
James Lileks today linked to one of the most chilling articles I’ve read in a while. Like the rest of you, I’d heard that our airports weren’t as secure as they ought to be; you hear of the most innocuous of passengers put through rigorous security screenings while the anti-profiling rules permit the most likely suspects of terrorist activity to waltz onboard. This story confirms that to a ridiculous degree.
The take-off was uneventful. But once we were in the air and the seatbelt sign was turned off, the unusual activity began. The man in the yellow T-shirt got out of his seat and went to the lavatory at the front of coach — taking his full McDonald’s bag with him. When he came out of the lavatory he still had the McDonald’s bag, but it was now almost empty. He walked down the aisle to the back of the plane, still holding the bag. When he passed two of the men sitting mid-cabin, he gave a thumbs-up sign. When he returned to his seat, he no longer had the McDonald’s bag.
Then another man from the group stood up and took something from his carry-on in the overhead bin. It was about a foot long and was rolled in cloth. He headed toward the back of the cabin with the object. Five minutes later, several more of the Middle Eastern men began using the forward lavatory consecutively. In the back, several of the men stood up and used the back lavatory consecutively as well.
For the next hour, the men congregated in groups of two and three at the back of the plane for varying periods of time. Meanwhile, in the first class cabin, just a foot or so from the cockpit door, the man with the dark suit – still wearing sunglasses – was also standing. Not one of the flight crew members suggested that any of these men take their seats.
If I had been on this plane I would have been absolutely freaking out. At least on the inside. I don’t know what I would have done on the outside. If you read the entire article you will note that had the men actually assembled something and decided to use it there would have been absolutely no way to prevent them from detonating it. At the most, the air marshals could have prevented the plane from being used as a projectile, but that wouldn’t have done the passengers much good.
Folks, this is downright suicidal behavior on our part. If you happen to be a middle-easterner with a heart of gold then I really hate it for you, but there is no way you should ever be allowed on an airplane without a thorough screening and search of all of your belongings. I guarantee you that if my family and I are traveling by air and any sizeable group of Arabs is getting on the plane I will pick up my family and my stuff and get the heck off. Unless, that is, there are some major changes in how we conduct passenger screening that recognize that our enemy has certain defining characteristics and that to ignore that fact in the name of sensitivity is tantamount to putting the gun to our own heads.
I can only offer a hearty ‘Amen’ to Lilek’s sentiments in the last paragraph of his bleat:
I hate this; God I hate this. But I don’t have any longing for normalcy, as Noonan put it the other day, because normalcy was a delusion, a diaphanous curtain draped over the statue of Mars. Nor do I want a time out, a breather, an operational pause. I want to cut to the chase. I want Iran in the hands of its people and leaning to the West again, I want Lebanon independent of Syrian rule, I want Syria isolated and cowed, Arafat dead and buried in the land of his birth – or Paris, symbolically – and the Saudi Civil War done and over with pragmatists in power. I’d like this all tomorrow please.
Noon is fine, if it works for everyone else.
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