Image courtesy of The Bush Center under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
Just when airlines were beginning to recover, President Bush comes out with another scare story that is bound to further inhibit the passenger business. The same man from Waco who brought us daily stories about “weapons of mass destruction” is now telling us that he has intelligence suggesting the al Qaeda are ready to use our own airplanes against us again, particularly those planes on international flights.
On national television, Bush is personally warning us that the al Qaeda have a “mindset” to use “methodologies that worked in the past.” Then he goes on to refer to one that didn’t work so well.
Seeming to contradict himself, he tells us that this time the hijackers will tell passengers that they are merely being abducted for awhile. No doubt, the hijackers think this will keep passengers who reason that they are going to die anyway from attacking the culprits as they did on United Flight 93 on September eleventh.
A twenty-five percent failure rate would be enough to make most reasonable people wonder about using the same tactics again, but there are many more questions that come to mind.
For one thing, wasn’t it the attacks of September 11th that caused us to put armed air marshals on every flight and allow pilots to have guns behind impenetrable doors? Do these people stand down if the hijackers are just taking hostages?
More importantly, whether you call it terrorism or guerilla warfare isn’t surprise the crucial factor? Don’t the terrorists want to catch the giant sleeping, catch him unaware, ambush him, and only then inflict the most damage possible? Isn’t not knowing how and where the next strike is coming from the thing that terrorizes a population?
Does that sound like someone who has a “mindset” to keep repeating “the same methodologies that worked in the past?” If guerilla warfare operated that way, the Indians would still be waiting at Bull Run for the 3rd Infantry to return.
Meanwhile, the United States is wide open to subversive attack from many angles. For instance, something like six million containers a year are off loaded in our seaports and sent by truck and train all over the country while only two or three percent are inspected. The narcotics business brings in tons of white powder that could just as easily be anthrax or something worse.
If the al Qaeda are as heavily funded as we are told, maybe we should be thankful they haven’t shipped in more tools of destruction, even nuclear devices. Perhaps Saddam Hussein sent all of his chemical and biological laboratories to our shores in 40 foot containers. And did you know that China recently opened the world’s largest container shipping operation right off our Florida Coast in Grand Bahama?
Still, if the President of the United States is willing to make such a bold statement to the American people without letting one of his minions do it, and does so when he is being widely criticized for his statements about weapons of mass destruction, it has to make you wonder. He certainly wouldn’t want to be crying wolf again.
And that gets us into even more paranoid questions that still need to be answered about 9/11 like whatever became of the “Home Run” technology developed in the Seventies that allowed a hijacked plane to be controlled from the ground like a drone with all its onboard instruments shut down. We are still waiting for the answer to that one.
“Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”