The American Pyromaniac Firefighter:
FBI says name errors led to Air France flight cancellations
Fri Jan 2,11:37 AM ET
WASHINGTON (AFP) - Confusion over the identities of passengers that were considered potential terrorists led to the cancellation of six Air France Paris-Los Angeles flights last week, an FBI official said on condition of anonymity.
The agency supported statements by French government officials that mistaken identity over some of the passengers booked on the flights had led to flights being grounded on security concerns.
But FBI does not consider the moves taken were wrong.
"During intelligence collection you may come up with a particular name and you really don't have much more than that," the official told AFP on Friday.
"Once you get a piece of intelligence that gives you a name of a person who may be involved in a terrorist threat you have to act upon that.
"Sometimes its not until you physically ID the person you find out it is not the person."
But the official added that US intelligence thought it was right to urge the French government to cancel the three Air France flights from Paris to Los Angeles as well as the three return legs on December 24 and December 25.
"I don't think the public would like to take any chance."
The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that one of the Air France passengers singled out by the FBI was a child whose name happened to be the same as a wanted Islamic extremist from Tunisia.
The others on the list were an elderly Chinese woman who had at one time run a restaurant in Paris, an insurance salesman from Wales and three French nationals, the paper said.
The FBI official said the newspaper's account was accurate.
The Air France flight cancellations came amid heightened fears of a terror attack against the United States over the Christmas and New Year period.
Several British Airways flights originating out of London bound for the United States have been grounded, due to security fears, in the past two days, including BA flight 223 which was to leave London-Heathrow for Washington Friday.
story.news.yahoo.com
Over here in Europe --especially in Spain, France and Italy-- there's a psychopathic figure that keeps popping up every summer in the bushy landscapes of Provence, Corsica,... namely, the "pompier pyromane" --the pyromaniac firefighter. It's usually a man in his 20s or 30s who is a compulsive arsonist, yet smart enough to repress/conceal his pathological impulses to set fires --most often in his own environs... Hence his pervert cast of mind prompts him to enroll as a firefighter in the local fire brigade. That way, when summer sets in and mistral squalls blow across Southern France, our pyromaniac firefighter gets his thrill both ways: first when he sets the bush aflame and next when he gets a piece of the action fighting the blaze... together with Canadair flying boats buzzing over on their way to refill or drop their waterload.
Likewise, 911 and its aftermath provided us with the "policier terroriste" character, that is, an intelligence outfit or a cluster of intelligence rogues that are, one way or the other, involved in the current terror wave AND, at the same time, cry wolf and posture as our trustworthy law enforcers.... However, just as with the pyromaniac firefighter, it's a matter of time before they're nailed.
Gus |
