Wednesday, August 27, 2008

The Do Not Fly List


Terrorist groups have already used their "terrorisim by airplaine card". They won’t use it again, why? It’s because we’re expecting them to! Do you really think terrorist will attack us in a way that we are expecting them to? The terrorists know that if they try to jack another plane the public have no qualms with risking their lives or even dying to stop their plans. Back in the "good ol’ days", terrorists would jack a plane to scare, intimidate and try to push forward their political purpose. Then for the most part, everyone would get let go. Since 9-11, air traveler’s have the "OH, HELL NO" attitude, and will jump a terrorist at first blush. Which makes me think, when was the last time you heard of a hijacking since 9-11? Oh yeah, NONE!! That’s because every time any fool even thought about it, the passengers and crew shut them down HARD and FAST!

We need to be looking where we are not. (good luck with that one right). The reason 9-11 happened is because of our collective lack of imagination. 9-11 was so devestating because it was completely outside the realm of our imagination. No one would have ever imagined that it would be possible to hijack that many airplanes simultaneously, and to accurately destroy so many high profile targets at the same time.

The airport security we know is a complete facade. I used to be employed by a major airline at a major airport as an aircraft cabin cleaner. The first day I went through the back-end security, I started laughing out loud! (and this was well after 9-11). So here I am just some guy with an electric cart loaded with all sorts of boxes, bottles, bags etc. And there is just some "rent-a-guard" at the gate that just gives my cart a cursory "look over". Oh yeah, these cursory "look over’s" ARE RANDOM! I would go days and days with out doing much more than just swipe my badge and the gate goes up.

The scary thing is, in order to get this level of trust and ACCESS to aircraft and passenger’s lives is to simply not have been convicted of a felony and to be able to pass a basic background check. So any terrorist group could easily come up with some guy who has a clean record, to get a job with an airline, working on the ramp, in order to get access to aircraft to be able to carry out some plot. It’s a piece of cake AND SCARY AS HELL!!

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