Carl,
Before Sept 11th, I also would have thought that protecting the cockpit would be a useless thing to do. The reasons are as you site..."suppose the "hijackers" start killing one passenger a minute until the pilots open the door? ". But, for the life of me, I never thought of the idea of using a fully fueled jetliner as an offensive weapon. It just never crossed my mind. Now that I have seen it done, it's like.. Duh! Simple and effective..unfortuneatly.
The idea of the steel door is to protect the plane from being used as a bomb. Sure you may lose the passengers, but the plane could land and the perpertrators caught. More importantly, the "detterent" effect of the door would in itself eliminate the hijacking in the first place! Why would some maniac hi-jack a plane he knew he could never take over and then know he'd be caught in the end anyway. In effect, the plane becomes a useless tool of the terrorist. Adding guns to the pilots gives even a greater dimension. Let spend a little money quickly (it would be relatively easy to do a retrofit) instead of spending millions on more security. They took these planes over with knives for pete's sake. Next it will be with just fists.!! The more I think of this idea, the more I like it and am thinking of forwarding it to the FAA. I'm sure I am not the only one who thought of it though.
As for a war with Afg., I sure hope we find someway to avoid it. These are hardened, well trained (by our CIA), commrades. I would not want to be going over there. I don't think we can bomb Afg. back to the stone age, because I think it would do no good anyway. The place is in the stone age already. And I can't ever see our govt. bombing innocent civilians.
The fact of the matter is this is a damned if you do, damned if you don't case. You can't do nothing as that is unacceptable. So when we do something, it will only initially bring more terror to the US. The US will have to be very careful here. Having worldwide support will be a big key here. This is a global war.
As far as Bin Laden, they had some former CIA agent on TV last nite. He seemed convinced that it may not be bin laden. He said he could be wrong, but there are others out there he felt was more than capable of doing this. He stated that if we bomb Afg. and it was NOT bin laden, we could be in for a heap of terrorist trouble in the future.
Mark
PS. I thought we did declare war on IRAQ. |
