Terrorism: September 2006 Archives

What does it take to get you detained at the airport these days? Well, other than being Ted Kennedy or being randomly placed on the no-fly list by some prankster at the TSA that is, or unfortunately having been born with a skin tone other than white? Call the director of the TSA, Kip Hawley, an idiot.

Last week, Ryan Bird, of Milwaukee, dutifully put his highly explosive personal grooming liquids into a plastic baggie (because Lord knows, when a bomb's about to go off, nothing stops it faster than Ziploc), and wrote the words "Kip Hawley is an idiot". It was his own little way of protesting the stupidity of the whole theatre of security we're being made to go through with planes right now.

Instead it got him detained for almost 30 minutes while the TSA and a sheriff's deputy and the TSA supervisor questioned him. According to the TSA supervisor, and the deputy for that matter, we don't have freedom of speech past the checkpoint at the airport. Because the phrase maybe made the supervisor feel "threatened", writing that wasn't protected speech.

Wow.

Ryan's first-hand account of the incident if available here.

Two weeks ago I highlighted the comments of former NPR correspondent Sarah Chayes, who's living now in Afghanistan and recently reported that all of the reports made by the Northern Alliance about how hard they fought the Taliban and Al-Qaeda were US fabrications. This week I finally got around to watching the CNN special "In The Footsteps of Bin Laden" by Christiane Amanpour. In it, Amanpour interviewed a former CIA operative that was in Afghanistan directing efforts in the Tora Bora mountain range against Bin Laden. He claimed that they'd captured a radio from a dead Al-Qaeda fighter and they could hear Bin Laden apologizing to his soldiers for leading them to this mountain range where they were trapped. The operative said that he kept calling Washington and asking for 500 or more US soldiers to arrive to complete the mission and capture Bin Laden but that Washington continued to rebuff him.

The maximum number of soldiers they gave him? 50.

If Bin Laden was going to be captured "dead or alive" as Bush promised in the days after 9/11, why send only a few troops and let him slip away?

There are more blasts in India today. Link: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1971077,curpg-1.cms

Mostly Muslims and a mosque were targeted. Will I get stoned for thinking that this might be retribution for the Mumbai bombings this summer by hardline Hindu elements in India? It would not be the first time Muslims were killed by Hindus.

Anyway, India immediately blamed Pakistan but that doesn't make sense to me on the surface. Sure I can spool out conspiracy theories, but I don't want to walk that path yet.