Are We Safer Yet?
From a BBC America interview, US fears Europe-based terrorism: “One of the biggest threats to US security may now come from within Europe, US Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff has told the BBC.”
Yes, folks, the terrorists are now coming through Europe and we never subject people on flights from Europe to any scrutiny… well almost never… unless they are Icelandic Christmas shoppers that everyone recognizes are Islamic terrorists at heart, willfully ignoring visa restrictions in Macy’s.
With retail in a slump and the dollar way down, I’m sure every major retailer in the US wants to hear that we are hassling the potential customers in Europe. Europeans will just flock to the US knowing they are going to be treated like criminals at our ports of entry, right?
Only 369 days to sanity.
8 comments
Yes, I saw that on the ABC yesterday. *sigh*
I figured you would see it and post.. I was curious to see what you’d think of it… I could tell you what I think… but this is a public blog and I don’t want to be responsible for traumatizing kiddies.
Strangely… I have this weird memory that remembers things that happened long before 9/11. I know this is unbelievable to many Americans (well, let’s be honest… many have a problem remembering last week). I seem to remember that most Terrorists when I was working intel were from Europe, or East Asia… or USA, or UK or Aus or… well, everywhere really! Wow! Better go hide under your beds! There are bad people who want to rape and murder you everywhere! Even at home! :O
Idiots.
I was in Europe in the early 1970s, primarily Germany, and there were bomb threats at our barracks all the time, and an US Army facility in Frankfurt was blown up. The Bader-Meinhof gang was creating havoc all about, the Munich Olympics tragedy, etc. This has been going on for decades and these fools think they have just discovered terrorism. 9/11 was the second attack on the World Trade Center.
Oklahoma City, the Unibomber, Eric Rudolf, the anthrax letters, the militias, Waco, Ruby Ridge, we have plenty of our own whackos and nutters who blow things up and murder people. Chertoff has no clue as to how you do a threat assessment.
This is all about making people afraid, not solving problems.
I live in an area that depends heavily on tourism. We have had empty rentals and falling attendance every year since they started this stupidity. People won’t fly unless they have to because of the crap you have to put up with to get on an airplane.
Every day this place is becoming more like Spain under Franco, and Greece on the colonels, two places I was very familiar with from flying around the Med. I didn’t like it then and I don’t appreciate it happening in my country.
Yes. I had similar problems when I worked in the field. In all honesty, we had more problems working in Europe than I did when I worked the ME (Middle East). And I worked in one of the weirdest and worst places in ME, Fujairah in the UAE (United Arab Emirates). They are very nomadic and proud there and their laws are ancient. But we learned the rules and respected them, and we had no problems (though we kept our passports on us and an open flight ticket just in case!) 🙂 I had more trouble in Germany, and Italy.
And I do understand and believe you when you said you didn’t want to see it happening in your country. I felt the same way about mine under Howard.
I knew several people here who will not travel to the USA under any circumstances, even just a layover on the way somewhere else. A young friend of mine recently departed on a tour to several counties, and went out of the way to plan a route that bypassed the USA. Not because of fear of terrorism etc, simply because after speaking to others who had and hearing the horror stories about what happens at the airports, it just wasn’t worth the trouble.
Though… given the decline in air travel safety lately… I think people have other reasons not to travel anyway. 😉
Hopefully… not long to go before sanity prevails one again.
Reagan fired all of out air traffic controllers to break their union, an people wonder at the problems. That is an occupation that requires apprenticeship, not classroom work. The control infrastructure is antiquated, under-manned, and over-worked. I hate flying into any of the hub cities, because I know it’s a mess.
Even with an official duty passport and NATO orders we had problems with authorities in Europe. We would get flight plans altered at the last minute for no known reason and even flying in the US, we had flight directives regarding climb-out after take-off that the airframe was literally incapable of doing, because it was too heavy to respond and too slow to accelerate after take-off compared to commercial airliners.
I don’t want to put up with this crap as it is a damn sight more invasive than what I went through to enter NSA headquarters or other facilities when we had to divert. It’s a stupid over-reaction that serves no purpose. I assumed that people would plan around the US just because of the way the system has evolved.
368 days, but who’s counting 😉
I try and tell people all the time that they are being stampeded by this administration and that 9/11, tragedy though it was, was just another in a long line of terrorism and that responding in the way we are is what the goals of the terrorists were in the first place.
Back in the late sixties when I was stationed in Cyprus travel meant being frisked before boarding and pointing our your bag on the tarmac so it would be loaded on the aircraft with you. Bags that were not identified by a boarding passenger didn’t travel.
It also meant checking in real time before you went out for the evening. More than once my intended restaurant or bar was a heap of rubble when I got there. UN checkpoints, Turks with machine guns blazing riding the streets on motorcycles…those were the good old days. Terrorism has been with us forever and changing society for the worse because of it just sustains it. Reasonable precautions sure but what we are going through is insane.
Agree fallenmonk & Bryan.
This is a little OT but relevant. Another part of the reason people are avoiding the USA is that Americans are seen as hypocrites. I and most of my friends know that’s not true of all, or even most Americans, but when one sees things like this… well, phrases like “birds of a feather…” or “tarred with the same brush” etc come to mind with some people. *shrug*
Ex-Mich. congressman indicted in terrorist fund-raising conspiracy
And yet another link between Prez Raygun’s cabinet and the Bushmoron’s cabinet and the neo-Christian fundie nutters, and hypocrisy, corruption and law-breaking.
Business as usual I guess. 🙂
Many Americans have never traveled to Europe, many have never left North America, less than half have a passport (actually, the figure is way lower, I have read anywhere from 10 to 20% have one, but I can’t find an official link). But I digress… my point is, it’s easy to scare them (there’s that word again) because they don’t know what security is like over there.
When I went to Italy in 1998 it was a shock to me to see the military patroling the airport… machine guns hanging off their shoulders. I thought there was a problem, but no, they said that’s the way it is there. It does help further your understanding if you actually leave the US once in a while. I asked a friend if he had gotten his passport now that the rules for travel had changed… and he said, nope, no reason, I’m not leaving the US!
I’m still not feeling safer.
I was stationed at Rhein-Main which is on the other side of the runway from the Frankfurt am Main airport. Flying back to the states involved a short bus ride to the terminal and going through security. On catwalks above the passenger screening area where everyone was frisked by hand were 18-year-olds with submachine guns doing their national service.
It wasn’t an everyday occurrence, but there were times on the Mainz-Kassel autobahn when a dark BMW would go whizzing by followed by a green Polizei Porsche and small arms fire coming from both vehicles. -It was a movie folks.
The EFP [explosively formed penetrators] were used in Germany a hell of a long time before they were used in Iraq, and they were used against German “capitalists”, not US troops.
One of my friends had a cooler by the door of his room to take into the parking lot for the bomb searches.
It was really annoying, and you have to pay attention to your surroundings, but you went on with your life. just as the Londoners went on with their lives during the Blitz and the IRA terror campaigns. If you make major changes because of threats, the terrorists win.
The Hedgemony wants everyone else to be as frightened as they are, and I’m not going to give in. Hell, when my Dad was stationed in Europe in the late 50s he had an issued M-2 fully automatic carbine in the trunk of the car in case of a Soviet invasion – my Mother used to dust it. I think there were thermite grenades in another box, but it got dusted too. [The box had a seal, so no one opened it.}
Get a grip.