As we enter a new round of general hysteria, we have the exciting tale of the disruptive passenger:
A woman passenger has been arrested after a flight from London to Washington was diverted to Boston because of an on-board disturbance.
Transport officials said the 59-year-old woman was held in connection with a confrontation with the flight crew.
She was carrying hand cream - a banned item - and matches on board the United Airlines flight.
The aircraft was escorted into Logan airport by two jet fighters.
The article goes on to note:
Reports that the woman was carrying a screwdriver and a note referring to al-Qaeda have been denied.
I heard one of those reports on CNN radio today, and before it disappears down the memory hole I would like to point out that not only was the woman supposedly carrying a note about al-Qaeda, but the note was supposedly written in Arabic!
1. This has been zipping about, but if you haven’t seen it already, don’t miss the take of Craig Murray, the former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, on the latest terror plot. (Murray was fired by the British Foreign Office for criticizing Uzbekistan’s routine torture, thereby mucking up England’s highly moral and extremely rational foreign policy.)
I have been reading very carefully through all the Sunday newspapers to try and analyse the truth from all the scores of pages claiming to detail the so-called bomb plot. Unlike the great herd of so-called security experts doing the media analysis, I have the advantage of having had the very highest security clearances myself, having done a huge amount of professional intelligence analysis, and having been inside the spin machine.
The boy and I were diving through a chlorinated waterfall running down a faux rock face when I surfaced and saw a Nazi tattoo on a big white arm. I couldn’t believe it. Open militarism is one thing, part of Americana, a disease you somewhat get used to; but an actual swastika is a deeper statement. The guy wearing it was large and muscular, looking like a bodyguard or bouncer, his head shaved, his goatee closely trimmed. The swastika was surrounded by two tiny American flags with an eagle atop…Check please!…
We moved through the parking lot choked with SUVs, Hummers, and pick-ups, many boasting “Support Our Troops,” “These Colors Never Run” and “USA Number 1″ bumperstickers. I couldn’t wait to get home, lock the door, and drain a stiff drink. But my son strolled along, oblivious to the raw nationalist sentiment on all those gas-guzzling symbols of our collective arrogance and greed, and thanked me for taking him to the park, saying “This is one of the best days ever. I had a blast, Dad!”
This filled me with happiness, love, and fear. Poor kid. Look at the world that awaits him.
Chuck Roberts on CNN Headline News, interviewing Ned Lamont, apologized today for these comments with the following:
You know, I owe you an apology. Last week, I led into an interview with a guest analyst and really botched the set-up. The guest had wanted to discuss the Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman statements suggesting that terror groups — Al Qaeda types, to use Cheney’s words — would be buoyed by your win, but I posed it badly, stupidly ad-libbing about “some saying Lamont is the Al-Qaeda candidate.” No one, in fact, used that construction. Anyway, I wanted to correct the record, and I’m glad we had this chance to do it. Now, let’s get to the insinuations that were lobbed…
After which the guy gave Lamont the chance to rebut Cheney and Lieberman.
Insert the same reservations I always have about news media. But for once, somebody did the right thing. Cheers.
PS — Just back from Florida where I had limited access to the Internet, air conditioning, and my own common sense. This worked out surprisingly well. More as I unpack.
Three-quarters of Americans can correctly identify two of Snow White’s seven dwarfs while only a quarter can name two Supreme Court justices…
[snip]
Asked what planet Superman was from, 60 per cent named the fictional planet Krypton, while only 37 per cent knew that Mercury was the planet closest to the sun.
Respondents are far more familiar with the Three Stooges - Larry, Curly and Moe - than the three branches of the US Government - judicial, executive and legislative. Seventy-four per cent identified the former, while 42 per cent identified the latter.
For some time now Billmon has been engaged in a series of posts I call Things I Wish I’d Written. (Of course, I’m one of many in this regard.) He’s now at #4529.
#4529 points out the weird, um, undertones of a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed blasting the “secular transnational professional class” who supported Ned Lamont.
After all, we’ve heard about the secular transnational professional class before, haven’t we? They’re always up to no good. As Billmon says:
I think its obvious that the big problem here is all the liberal doctors.
You gotta figure there’s some kind of conspiracy behind it.
“I’m worried that too many people, both in politics and out, don’t appreciate the seriousness of the threat to American security and the evil of the enemy that faces us — more evil, or as evil, as Nazism and probably more dangerous than the Soviet Communists we fought during the long Cold War,” Mr. Lieberman said.
* * *
I’m sorry, but this is just a deranged, or at best deeply confused and manic, thing to say. It shows a lack of perspective and reality and responsibility, even in its lack of clarity about what exactly the threat is and how to defeat it. Why does anyone accept that this kind of blather can be considered taking the threat more “seriously”? It’s not. It’s hugely unserious in its trivialization of the great moral challenges of the Twentieth Century and it’s bald politicization of the current challenge.
I have mentioned before that the New Haven Register is perhaps not the gold standard by which journalism should be judged. A small example: for two days running, the paper has featured on its front page a small controversy brewing in the nearby town of Milford:
City veterans’ groups are calling on the public to boycott a River Street liquor store because the store’s owner has a small poster in his window that the veterans say demeans soldiers, particularly those serving in Iraq, by suggesting the unemployed should join the Army.
But TJ’s Package Store owner Thomas Jakubisyn, who served in the Navy aboard the USS Des Moines before and during the Vietnam War, says his poster has been misunderstood and he won’t take it down. He says it was put up as a simple protest to the war in Iraq.
The small poster of a political cartoon, depicts a camouflage-clad soldier and says, “Out of Work? Undereducated? No Health plan? Join the Army and see Iraq.”
* * *
The cartoon, by artist Chivast, originally appeared in the New York Times; Jakubisyn says he’s had it up since the war started in 2003.
Okay, so here’s the thing: although he is mentioned in both articles, there is no “artist Chivast”. There is a very well known artist named Seymour Chwast, cofounder of the legendary Pushpin Studios and a frequent illustrator for the New York Times, whose signature features a stylized “W” that — I’ll be charitable here — might be misinterpreted as an “I” and a “V”. Chwast is, of course, the illustrator who created the image in question, to accompany a Frank Rich column from 2003.
Took me about five minutes to track that down, using information from the Register’s own article. I was able to pinpoint the date of the initial illustration with Google, and then tracked down the actual image with a little help from my wife the academic, who has access to some specialized databases. (They’ve blocked off a small part of the illo “due to copyright” but Chwast’s signature is still clearly visible). Now, presumably the Register has resources at least comparable to those of a cartoonist sitting at home on his butt in front of a computer screen, but even if they don’t, you’d think they might have called someone at the Times to track the artist down, maybe get a quote from him. Front page news, two days running, you’d think a comment from the artist responsible for the controversy would be of some relevance.
At the very least, you’d think they’d try to get his name right.
* * *
Incidentally, kudos to Mr. Jakubisyn (assuming they got his name right) for not backing down. If you’re in the area, you should throw some business his way.
The White House is sure to follow suit any minute now, insinuating — or explicitly claiming — that this incident proves that Bush was right about the whole array of our country’s foreign policy disputes, from Iraq to the current Israel-Lebanon war. This naked exploitation of terrorist threats for political gain occurs every time a new terrorist plot is revealed, no matter how serious or frivolous, no matter how advanced or preliminary, the plot might be. Each time a new plot is disclosed, administration officials and their followers immediately begin squeezing the emotions and fears generated by such events for every last drop of political gain they can manufacture.
But this effort is as incoherent as it is manipulative. Nobody doubts that there are Muslim extremists who would like to commit acts of violence against the U.S. and the West. No political disputes are premised on a conflict over whether terrorism exists or whether it ought to be taken seriously. As a result, events such as this that reveal what everyone already knows — that there is such a thing as Islamic extremists who want to commit terrorist acts against the U.S. — do nothing to inform or resolve political debates over the Bush administration’s militaristic foreign policy or its radical lawlessness at home. Opposition to the war in Iraq, for instance, is not based upon the premise that there is no terrorist threat. It is based on the premise that that invasion undermines, rather than strengthens, our campaign to fight terrorism.
Invading and bombing Muslim countries do not prevent terrorism or diminish the likelihood that British-born Muslims will blow up American airplanes. If anything, warmongering in the Middle East exacerbates that risk by radicalizing more and more Muslims and increasing anti-U.S. resentment. And the more military and intelligence resources we are forced to pour into waging wars against countries that have not attacked us, the less able we are to track and combat al-Qaida and the other terrorist groups that actually seek to harm us. There are few things that have more enabled terrorism than turning Iraq into a chaotic caldron of anarchy and violence — exactly the environment in which al-Qaida thrives.
NEW HAVEN — A 13-year-old boy shot in the head last weekend after he left a carnival near his house has died.
Justus Suggs’ family removed him from life support Tuesday afternoon. He died a short time later.
The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner confirmed an autopsy was scheduled for today.
Justus never regained consciousness after he was shot July 29 near the intersection of Sylvan Avenue and Orchard Street, just a few blocks from the carnival at Career High School.
Justus’ family did not make any public statements Tuesday. His mother, Tracey Suggs, who was at her Davenport Avenue home Tuesday night, indicated that she wasn’t ready to talk about the loss of Justus. Police have said that he did not appear to be the intended target.
He had spent the afternoon working on the dirt bike behind his apartment house and in the evening went to the carnival with another group of friends with instructions from his mother not to be out too late, his family has said.
The shooting occurred just after 10 p.m., when the occupants of a car rolled up and at least one of the occupants opened fire on a crowd of youths, hitting Justus once, police have said.
Police last week said they were following promising leads, but the investigation apparently did not progress as quickly as hoped.
* * *
Justus’ shooting came six weeks after a 13-year-old girl, Jajuana Cole, was shot to death near her house when a gunman fired into a crowd. Five people have been arrested in that case.
There’s been a lot of senseless violence in New Haven this year. Too many kids with guns. There’s more to the state of Connecticut than a fun and exciting Senate race. We’ve got some pretty intractable problems here. I wish there were easy answers, but there aren’t.
I’m sitting in Europe, scheduled to take British Air back to the states on Friday, and I’m watching British Authorities meltdown in the face of an alleged terrorist plot. Rule of thumb–initial, panicked reports are usually unreliable. The Brits reportedly have taken at least 18 people into custody–all residents of Great Britain.
The last significant, successful plot to bomb a plane was in January 1995, when a group linked to Osama Bin Laden (this group included Ramsi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and Khalid Sheik Muhammed, nephew of OBL) had devised a way to carry on a liquid explosive disguised to look like water. The detonator was a combination of gun cotton (looked like cotton balls), a small light bulb, a nine volt battery, and a Casio data watch. Ramsi Yousef conducted a successful dry run of this device and planted one on board a Philippine Airline flight in December 1994. That bomb killed one man (a Japanese citizen) and almost brought down the plane. The plan was to blow up twelve US jets transiting the Pacific basin. It was disrupted when an informant, Ishtiak Parker, walked into the US Embassy in Pakistan and ratted out Ramsi Yousef.
So, what next?
Instead of a common sense approach to security, the Brits have hit the panic button. Here’s what needs to be done:
1. No liquids on board a plane weighing more than one pound. Eight ounce bottles are okay but you must drink the liquid to demonstrate it is not an explosive.
2. One carryone bag per passenger. All carry on bags hand searched.
3. No cotton balls.
4. No third party cargo on passenger aircraft.
The latter is the real gap in aviation security. Right now most checked baggage is subjected to inspection by a machine that can detect explosives. Hand carry and cargo are not. You can deal with the threat of hand carry by physical inspection but cargo is a different problem.
In the back of my mind I worry that this threat might be trumped up in order to divert attention from the disastrous US and British policy (or lack of policy) in Lebanon. More likely, we have an informant in the UK that identified a potential plot that was in the dreaming stage but had not progressed to actual implementation. Rather than act like security professionals, the Brits are acting like panicked nannies. Very sad.
