From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Aug 20 2002 - 18:35:18 MDT
--- Harvey Newstrom <mail@HarveyNewstrom.com> wrote:
>
> On Sunday, August 18, 2002, at 08:01 pm, Brian Atkins wrote:
>
> > At this point the various governments and corporations still
> haven't
> > figured out how to perfect a multilayered defense against 40 year
> old
> > offensive weapons (jet passenger planes),
>
> Actually, this is not quite correct. Many of the assumptions
> floating
> around since 9/11 are not quite accurate.
>
> 1. We can prevent these types of hijackings. El Al does it all the
> time. We just never bothered to do this in the U.S. because we
> didn't think it was necessary.
El Al's most effective procedure we do not, and will not, put into
place: that is the interview of every passenger by a skeptical security
professional who is not paid by the airlines and cannot be fired or
transfered for rejecting 'too many' passengers from the flight
manifest.
Until this technique is put into practice in the US, we will remain
vulnerable, far more so than El Al is...
>
> 2. The airport security systems didn't fail. They prevented people
> from
> bringing guns onto the plain. The hijackers had to resort to using
> box-cutters which were allowed under the rules. The rules worked as
> desired. We just need to adjust our our rules to block other
> dangerous weapons, such as blades, as well.
This is not quite accurate. While the hijackers did not try to bring
guns on board, so far as we know (although there are reports that one
stewardess reported to controllers that a passenger had, in fact, been
shot, on one of the flights, though the tapes of that flight are now
suppressed and classified information), FAA tests both before and after
9/11 found that over 90% of firearms that testers attempted to bring
through checkpoints made it through undetected by airport personnel.
Furthermore, it should be noted that the phenomenon of hijacking in the
US did occur until the 1960's when stringent gun control laws were put
into effect across much of the US, and guns were banned on commercial
airplanes.
>
> 3. The hijackers do not have weapons of mass destruction (yet).
> They had to resort to using our own airplanes as weapons because they
> didn't have any of their own. As far as we can tell, they have been
> unable to get their hands on these weapons.
This is also inaccurate. A number of the hijackers had obtained flight
instruction in Saudi Arabia on airliners. The reason they acted as they
did was because it was the least cost method of obtaining large planes
within the US borders without detection, fully fueled, and retain the
element of surprise. If they had obtained their own aircraft abroad,
they would have had to fly them into US airspace through our boundary
defense radar systems and been subjected to IFF interrogation
electronically as well as risk interception by US fighters if they did
not respond with acceptable IFF codes. Since the 'ordinance' they used
was in the form of jet fuel, they would have had to land and refuel
(paid with what? by whome?) at a US airport anyways to be effective in
their attacks.
>
> In other words, many of our security procedures work just fine. It
> is not true that we are incapable of defending ourselves. We just
> haven't really tried before. Now that we know security is
> imperative, we can
> apply what we know in ways we have never tried before. We shouldn't
> have to reinvent everything from scratch.
No, we shouldn't. Restoring the ability of law abiding Americans to
exercise their constitutional rights while onboard aircraft would go a
long way to preventing future hijackings.
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