I want to remind everyone that this latest bozo was a black man from Nigeria.
Richard Reid was half English, half Jamaican, and travelling on a British passport.
Extra scrutiny on “brown-skinned” Saudis, Pakistanis, Yemenis, etc. would have missed both of them. Logically, you’d have to check all non-US travellers with extra scrutiny, as the OP says.
Which means all the terrorists have to do is get US citizenship for one of their number to avoid the extra screening. Or indeed, activate an antagonist who already has US citizenship.
Like Sage Rat says, it follows the path of least resistance. Even worse then: if the screeners say “that 70-year-old Jewish American woman can’t possibly be a terrorist. Let her through,” then she will become that conduit, by whatever means. For example, being coerced as a mule by real threats to her loved ones.
And if I had made the claim that you don’t check 70 year old Jewish American women then you’d have a point. I said, “It doesn’t mean you don’t search both, but if you’re going to spend the time to go the extra step to strip search one over the other, it doesn’t make sense to waste much time on the old lady.” Now if 70 year old ladies start showing signs of terrorist activity, then by all means manage the resources accordingly.
That took me 4 minutes of googling, from memory. I am sure it would be trivially easy to find more profiles like this that don’t match your evident stereotypes.
“Never done before”? - kha, no one used planes as missiles against skyscrapers previous to the first time. Pure bollocks as analysis when it is self-evidently possible.
I know you are all in a kaffufle over my supposed racism, but here is what I said, “We’re not talking about fighting terrorism in general here, but protecting airplanes and the people on them.”
Your link does not mention anything about plotting to blow up a plane. It talks about buying tickets on a plane to go and fight in other locations, but not about blowing up the actual plane. It actually wouldn’t make much sense for them to attempt to blow up a plane as it would make it harder to get to where they wanted to go to fight. Not that I’d expect such logic on their part.
And when you do, they’ll switch to some other group while you harass old Jewish ladies. Again; all we would do by concentrating on stereotypes the way you suggest is act like as bigots and make it easier to bypass our security.
And I still fail to see how treating tens, hundreds of thousands of black men as automatically terrorist subjects and strip searching them is anything but exactly that; bigotry. It certainly will be seen like that. And I rather doubt that it will do the airlines much good when pretty much every dark skinned man ( probably dark skinned anyone ) refuses to fly and they are subjected to constant protests and lawsuits. Especially with the guaranteed incidents of abuse inflicted upon the few dark skinned men ( and women and children ) who dare to fly; and such incidents WILL happen when you essentially change the job description of the job of airport security to “abuse dark skinned men”. They’ll be swarmed with racist job applicants who want to get a nice, legal job abusing the people they hate.
Currently, we’re all treated like terrorist suspects. I’m saying focus more attention on the group that fits the current profile. Assuming, of course, that you have limited resources and aren’t going to strip search every single person. Nor do I suggest that you do strip search every male dark-skinned Muslim. But lets not be naive and think that there is the same level of potential risk between the two groupings of people. Nor is pointing that out bigotry or racism.
Pretending that the difference is other than minuscule IS racism. You could use the same logic to justify strip searching every black man in New York because three black guys shot up a shop and killed the patrons.
Then why search anyone for more than obviously stupid items (eg, someone carrying a gun or 5 gallons of gasoline)? The chances of anyone wanting to blow up a plane they are on is minuscule. If it wasn’t for a very few people we wouldn’t be subject to this security charade.
Perhaps you need some remedial thinking assistance, but other than being tendentiously narrow in your reading to the point of myopia, I was illustrating the real and current existence of “people who want to blow up planes” (i.e. Al Qaeda tendency radicals, who want to “do jihad”) who also happen to be non-brown, have Anglo Saxon names, and have US passports.
It’s mind boggling you don’t see what this does to your responses.
There are lots of people who fight in a ‘jihad’ against the west both internal and external to the US. Yet, only a small subset of them want to get on a plane and blow themselves up. Most don’t want to die, they just want to kill for jihad purposes. Those that are willing to blow themselves up on a plane, to this point, fit the profile I’ve suggested. You’ve submitted nothing that disproves this.
Actually, I agree with DT at this point. It probably would do more harm than good to deliberately select groups of people for selective screening based upon something like skin colour.
I still think my point stands that there are sub-groupings of humanity that are more likely to deliberately blow themselves up on planes than others. Btw, it isn’t because one of the sub-groups happens to be brown skinned. That is coincidental to the culture that conditions them to these actions. If there was a way to reliably identify people based upon that then I’d say take them aside for special screening. But it would probably involve mind-reading and if we could do that we’d eliminate all the terrorists world wide.
Yep. To think that taking away my nail clipper makes anyone safer is ludicrous. That’s why traveling in the middle east is far more pleasant than in Europe and NA. They go through the motions, but could care less that you show them how much liquid you have packed in your carry-on or have you take your laptop out for display. I don’t feel any less safe because they don’t do it, at least.
Beware anecdote: A couple of months ago I was leaving Calgary. I went through the check, even had my liquids in the government approved baggy, all that is except a small sample vial of cologne that was buried in the bottom of my shaving kit. It had to have at the most a mil of liquid in it. The security drone took it out and I placed it in the baggy. Can I go now? Nope, through the scanner and even the wand again to prove that I hadn’t carried any contraband from the secure side of the airport to the unsecured side in order to bring it back to the secure side. Farce? Yeah.
I don’t think we should start opening fire on laptops or nothing, but screening foreigners before even come aboard would be helpful. A better idea is to look at countries these people are coming (e.g. Yemen vs. the UK). There is no easy solution.
How about this, stop reacting to what they do and be proactive. Try and identify weaknesses and get good intelligence on what they are planning and stop that. Instead of going all orgasmic like Uzi is over strip searching muslim males, or people from Yemen v the UK as the poster above suggested, try and see what they are trying to do. Making a spectacle out of some poor student from Yemen is going to be very counterproductive, good solid intel that you know, four guys from Leeds are going to blow up the underground OTH will be very good.
infiltrating and proactively stopping the actions of disconnected and decentralized guerilla groups is extremely difficult. the only feasible way to do this is to remove their raison d’etre.
