You’ve gotta wonder how many of the ‘terror threats’ are just as baseless as the two highlighted below are. Indeed, just a week before the 10th anniversary of 911, we the public were regaled with news about an unsubstantiated terror threat that could possibly interrupt the 10th anniversary celebrations. Nothing happened to get in the way of our post 911 angst except our own fears.
Local and federal law enforcement officials had told ABC News Sunday initial reports of “suspicious behavior” by multiple passengers that prompted the emergency call for F-16s was suspected of being a couple “making out” in the plane’s lavatory mid-flight. When the flight landed, the plane was taken to a remote area for security screening and three passengers were briefly taken into custody.
In the course of their investigation, the FBI found that one of the passengers, who felt sick, happened to get up and head to the bathroom at approximately the same time as another passenger. None of the three people taken into custody knew each other, the FBI said.
Of course we’ve been all conditioned to say the response of authorities was appropriate and not comical, which was really the case. We’ve also been conditioned to look the other way when people who disrupt the transportation industry are not our typical view of what a terrorist should look like.
A Long Island woman worried about her mom and brother flying to New York on the eve of 9/11 was busted for trying to ground their flight — by twice phoning in false bomb threats against the Southwest Airlines plane they were taking from Arizona, the feds said today.
The loony Saturday morning stunt by ex-con Mary Purcell, 37, of Lake Ronkonkoma, sparked a massive security response at Tucson Airport — where a horde of police, bomb-experts and explosive-sniffing dogs quickly swarmed around Flight 2475 to re-screen luggage and passengers as a security alert for the entire airport was elevated.
“We felt that it was a credible threat,” said John Ivanoff, chief of the Tuscon Airport Authority Police. “We were already at a heightened state of alert [because of the 9-11 anniversary Al Qaeda threats], but more manpower was needed.”
Purcell, a convicted felon, doesn’t fit our image of a terrorist, but America doesn’t seem to be upset that a lot of resources were wasted on her ‘threat’ or that Americans somewhere in the transportation system of our country were inconvenienced or maybe had their rights as citizens of this Republic abridged because of the actions of a loony and an over responsive federal government.
Finally, there’s the story of the American teenager who was found driving around in his city alone without a drivers
license BUT with an AT4 rocket launcher in the back seat of the SUV. It’s clear this boy’s name is not Arabic or his religion Islam, for had it been, he, his father and brother, who are connected to the US military, would be linked to al-Qaida, conspiracies hatched and foiled and headlines proclaim how Islam is trying to take over the country and establish sharia. The young man was not named because he’s underage, but driving around during school hours with blaring music is a sure way to draw attention to ones self. As far as the press is concerned, however, it’s just another teenage prank.
So, while we were informed of security alerts surrounding the 10th anniversary of 911 based on unsubstantiated information that cannot be verified, the two news items above barely scratched the attention of the Nation and were strictly a local event……as they should have been. However, we should not have been frightened with alerts that really had no basis in fact but which served a political purpose for the party(ies) in power. Don’t we deserve better than that?
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