<p>A friend of mine is a pilot who flies overseas with a major airline. I asked him shortly after 9/11 what he thought had happened. He said that standard policy at that time during a highjacking attempt was to bring the captain into the situation, using his/her authority to calm the situation down. It was also assumed that it would be unlikely that the pilot would be killed because he/she was needed to land the plane. The 9/11 terrorists trained their own pilots for years and caught everyone unaware. Of course, their pilots only learned to fly – there weren’t concentrating on landing. </p>
<p>Pilots won’t come out of the cockpits anymore. I also think passengers are very likely to swarm someone with a weapon. But it’s true that a bomb that could be detonated quickly could bring a plane down. </p>
<p>A crazy person could walk into a McDonald’s and slit a child’s throat before momma has time to scream.</p>
<p>"Pilots won’t come out of the cockpits anymore. I also think passengers are very likely to swarm someone with a weapon. </p>
<p>A crazy person could walk into a McDonald’s and slit a child’s throat before momma has time to scream."</p>
<p>That’s absolutely true. I’m so glad so many of you are comfortable with being in an enclosed space with a person with a weapon. I’m not. I remember the guy with the sword on the Staten Island ferry. He may not have sunk it, but he did a lot of damage. The inherent danger of an armed criminal on an airplane, even if he can’t achieve the hijacking, is something out of a nightmare. Also, if there’s one, who knows if there are two or three or more? A group of people armed with non-scary box cutters COULD bring down a plane in a variet of ways.</p>
<p>A group of people armed with non-scary box cutters COULD bring down a plane in a variet of ways.</p>
<p>TSA disagrees. Metal scissors with pointed tips and blades shorter than four inches are explicitly allowed in the cabin. Such blades can be a sharp as razors.</p>
<p>Sorry, I’m not panicked about the ability to injure or kill many. I’m worried about the ability to kill thousands.</p>
<p>Shouldn’t school shootings and other similar events point out that killing many people is NOT difficult in the USA. However, killing thousands remains a decent challenge. Therefore, as I don’t view this to be a hijack threat, I don’t really care. I am not at any greater threat than normal.</p>
<p>Also, those books sound rather interesting, I would like to understand where Muhammed is in the Bible(Time travel? Wow). However, I doubt this guy is as intellectually minded as myself. But I don’t see how this is a muslim exclusive threat. Extremists of all nationalities and religions are a threat. And to assume that every stupid muslim person is a terrorist is lunacy. Perhaps my having spent decent amount of time in Dearborn(largest Muslim population in the US I believe) it is clear that Islam doesn’t make people any better or worse. There are addicts, racists, thugs, and whatever other bad parts that are not terrorists, and just the same there are doctors, lawyers, mathmeticians, and other stand up members of society that face persecution due to a conviction that all Muslims are terrorists.</p>
<p>“Sorry, I’m not panicked about the ability to injure or kill many. I’m worried about the ability to kill thousands.”</p>
<p>Even one death at the hand of a criminal on a plane is too many for me, so we have a fundamental disagreement. I’m not sure where you got the “every stupid muslim person is a terrorist” line. No one here said that and I’ve seen no indication that anyone believes it, but it’s simply not serious to pretend that there isn’t an aspect of Islam that provides some of its its followers an excuse to violence. The “Islamist”/“Christianist” theme of Andrew Sullivan to refer to religious extremists makes the distinction well. I’ve posted this before, but my boss is a Pakistani Muslim. He, obviously, lives and works in NYC and loves his country and his religion. He is a very liberal man in terms of his politics. But he believes with complete conviction that some followers of Islam are violent and irrational, and he is astounded by the need of some Americans to show their enlightenment by ignoring what is completely obvious to him. For the record, it makes him very sad that the religion he loves and some of its followers are used for ugly political aims by unscrupulous people.</p>
<p>Kbaloney–did Mick Huckabee’s son get caught trying to bring a gun on an airplane? don’t mean to hijack the thread–but, details, please? I guess I’m out of touch with the “news”?</p>
<p>If he was really trying that as a terrorist action, he is a very stupid person. Firstly, box cutters are useless for hijacking nowadays. They’re only really useful for small scale assault, and not great at that either.</p>
<p>In any case, if everyone’s so worried about people bringing box cutters on, it’s not all that difficult. The amount of things like that that slip through is mind boggling, and the ease with which it is possible to bring such things through is equally surprising. Think it’s hard to bring in a thin metal blade when people bring laptops in all the time? What about the guy who tapes a razor blade to the bottom of his laptop? What about glass knives?</p>
<p>Personally, I feel no more safe with the TSA on patrol than without. Anyone with a whit of creativity will still be able to get through, sadly. That’s part of the reason why I really don’t buy this “war on terror” crap. There are always going to be terrorists who are smart enough to circumvent your security, somewhere. The way to make the country as safe as possible is not to have an ongoing arms race with enemies over who is smarter - security people or those trying to break through. The way to make the country as safe as possible is to make it so the people who are adversaries now do not want to attack at all. And that requires a lot of things that haven’t been done, lately.</p>
<p>“The way to make the country as safe as possible is to make it so the people who are adversaries now do not want to attack at all. And that requires a lot of things that haven’t been done, lately.”</p>
<p>Like what, and how do you reconcile that with the attacks prior to the Bush presidency?</p>
<p>Gave blood to Red Cross today. Of course the standard questions, but the one that got me is if I have been exposed to BSE or CJD. I said I don’t know, I eat meat and probably 10# of hamburger in the last two years. I passed. But when I was in Food Processing, we naturally had the drill, on how fast and accurately can be track down a run of canned food. I bet the blood banks are scrambling.</p>
<p>me too…that bible is evil…anyway…it is kind of scary that you have to worry what books you carry</p>
<p>I always take a murder mystery of some sort on the plane, a guilty pleasure</p>
<p>lets look at the books, shall we</p>
<p>you got the bible
you got fear itself- a scary thriller novel
you got Muhammad in the Bible- a book about how the coming of the Prophet Muhammad in the bible book : Description
interpretation of the meanings of the Noble Qur’an (word of God) with Arabic text in the modern English language. A summarized version of At-Tabari, Al-Qurtubi, and Ibn Kathir with comments from Sahih Al-Bukhari. (from amazon)</p>
<p>zm: Like diplomatic engagement and a humbler foreign policy. How do I reconcile that with the attacks before the Bush presidency? Because Clinton wasn’t great at it either. But America’s foreign policy is undeniably part of the reason for the attacks (everyone says “it’s our Western lifestyle” yet the countries with the same lifestyle yet humbler foreign policy are largely not targeted). </p>
<p>Frankly, I don’t feel any more safe now than I did on 9/11. People are still out there who would love to attack America and other Western countries. Some of them are dead; many who were previously not enemies have become enemies as a result. Some avenues of attack have been closed - but others will open. I do not, on a fundamental level, believe that an arms race of safety will end up giving lasting results. For that, I think, a paradigm shift needs to be made so that emphasis is put not on building more weapons and defenses, but on creating change in mindset abroad, so that instead of having to defend against these people, they simply to not attack in the first place.</p>
<p>what you have is a boxcutter, which is not the same as a book. What you have is someone who wilfully chose to bring a concealed weapon onto a plane. It is the presence of the Qu’ran that causes a certain mindset to need to prove its open-mindedness by indicating no fear of such because, after all, they are better-smarter-more enlightened than the frightened masses. I’d rather be safe than enlightened.</p>
<p>We eat far more vegetables and fruits than most people eat. I have too much iron, that is why I give blood, and Francis Lappe Moore gives me gas.</p>
<p>1of42, I’d like to thank you for your courteous and informative response. I very much appreciate learning other posters’ appreciate points of view. I also feel no safer than on 9/11. I respect your point of view completely, but I don’t share all of it. I think there is a group of people, a particular worldview, with whom we can never engage and with whom peace is not possible because that group has no goal other than to kill us and to destroy Israel. I sincerely don’t believe that you can negotiate with that. I think we’ve been engaged to a fault with the Saudis and they are, in my opinion, the greatest threat we face – particularly the ideology that they espouse.</p>
<p>Not that it matters, but there is no evidence that the hijackers used box cutters. The 9/11 Commission found evidence that they had bought folding “utility knives” that were not left behind so the assumption is that they brought them on board.</p>
<p>I kind of agree, at this point there may be some who are irredeemably bent on massacring innocent people merely for being American or Israeli. And I don’t know how to deal with them.</p>
<p>But my concern is for the huge numbers of “freedom fighters” who are in reality young men and women, disillusioned with the consistent American interference in the Middle East, who fall easily under the sway of radical clerics and end up doing horrible things. I want to focus on the majority of terrorists who I believe to be made up of those young men and women. And then, once we have figured out how to keep them educated and working and not involved in terrorism, only then can the ringleaders, the religious extremist clerics and organizers, financiers etc. make the whole thing tick, only then can they be dealt with, in whatever way necessary.</p>
<p>“And then, once we have figured out how to keep them educated and working and not involved in terrorism, only then can the ringleaders, the religious extremist clerics and organizers, financiers etc. make the whole thing tick, only then can they be dealt with, in whatever way necessary.”</p>
<p>I agree completely with your analysis that the problem is very much economic (did you read the heartbreaking article about young people in Egypt in the Times this week?), but I respectfully submit to you that it shouldn’t be up to the American taxpayer to provide for the citizens of other countries. The problem that I see is in the proliferation of failed states that happen to have a Muslim population and, therefore, fall prey to extremism. I really don’t know what the answer is, but I don’t think it is our fault and I don’t think it’s realistic for it to be us to fix the problem – what I mean is that I don’t think we possibly could.</p>
<p>You’re right, but there are some things that America could do. These include changing the guiding policy at the IMF and World Bank, which have decimated the human capital, traditional livelihoods and self-determination of many developing nations’ populations. Unfortunately, these policies are directly controlled by America and certain EU countries, and are hugely detrimental worldwide. Other things that need to be done include cutting tariffs unilaterally; distortions in international markets are also hugely detrimental to people in developing nations.</p>
<p>But the biggest thing that America needs to do is approach the international table in a humble way. This is what, more than anything else, Bush has screwed up. There is little humility and respect, and a lot of “my way or the highway”. And I think it’s backfiring… hard. The point that America provides a lot of financial backing and should have a lot of say is certainly valid, but humility is nonetheless necessary, and is something that I think would go a long way.</p>