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Politics : America Under Siege: The End of Innocence -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MSI who wrote (1797)	9/14/2001 11:24:26 AM
From: Rob S.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 27666

The U.S. has been an extremely easy target. These guys, as vicious and determined as they are, are not rocket scientists or talented actors. Despite the fact that they are foreigners who apparently hardly tried to disguise their hate for Americans and despite the fact that they lived in areas where terrorist sympathizers have been know to have lived before, they were easily able to come into the country, plop down their wad of cash and take six months of extensive flight training for commercial airplanes. We did everything to help them except give them a free ride in a FBI limousine to the airport on Tuesday. "You got money, you are welcome here to do whatever you want,just don't tell me about it." OK, I'm exaggerating a great deal but flip this around and think about all the things that they did wrong and still went undetected: These guys looked and acted like the radical extremists that they are: Some wore heavy uncut beards (according to news reports they will release pictures as early as today). At least a couple of them came over from Germany where they were under suspicion for terrorism activities and plots. They had lots of cash that they flaunted; always paying in cash should have set off some alarms. They visited bars and strip clubs and publicly denounced America and said that "blood" would flow. They may well have gone to the bars knowing that doing this went against the profile of radical Muslim thought - that alcohol and exposed women are the products of infidels and against the teachings of Islam. By doing this they may have thrown off suspicion rather than attracted it: "Hmmm . . . they look like more of those Arab camel drivers who are getting trained to fly for Saudi Airlines. . . the kind that denounce American ways while sitting in a nuddy bar and gushing down their tenth shot of liquor." All this time they were being openly trained to fly sophisticated Boeing aircraft to crash them with all the skill we could impart to them into the WTC Towers. What if these terrorists had gone to acting school for a few years and learned to fit in to various character roles and learned to become expert in the art of disguise? (Maybe they did). Does anyone think it would be that difficult to get past some high-school dropout, $7 an hour airport "security" worker? American airport security has been a time-bomb waiting to explode. I don't blame the airport workers for this problem. Although individuals may not be without fault, the system has been that hordes of busy passengers get scheduled to fly in and out of airports at the same peak hours. They impatiently (myself included), stare at the security check persons with disgust "Why the hell is this taking so long, I have a plane to catch in ten minutes?" Faced with that continuous pressure and fact that their job is to spot the one in a million occurrences, no wonder things float by. In a perfect world, this is a failure of a good system. In the human world the system has been totally broken for some time.