Attempt To Blow Up US Passenger Jet

The US government does not keep records on the religion of citizens

A plot to blow up planes in flight from the UK to the US and commit "mass murder on an unimaginable scale" has been disrupted, Scotland Yard has said.

"We believe that the terrorists' aim was to smuggle explosives on to aeroplanes in hand luggage and to detonate these in flight. We also believe that the intended targets were flights from the United Kingdom to the United States of America."

According to BBC sources the "principal characters" suspected of being involved in the plot were British-born. There are also understood to be links to Pakistan.

Then back to the question I asked Bill earlier: How do you determine who is a Muslim? Are you going to ask everyone their religion before allowing them to board flights? Doubtful since even if you were willing to do this, people could just lie. You are going to have to define some characteristics of Muslims. What do you think that is going to look like?

Quote:

A plot to blow up planes in flight from the UK to the US and commit "mass murder on an unimaginable scale" has been disrupted, Scotland Yard has said.

Quote:

"We believe that the terrorists' aim was to smuggle explosives on to aeroplanes in hand luggage and to detonate these in flight. We also believe that the intended targets were flights from the United Kingdom to the United States of America."

Quote:

According to BBC sources the "principal characters" suspected of being involved in the plot were British-born. There are also understood to be links to Pakistan.

This was in 2006.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4778575.stm

I'll admit that I don't know how to implement it, but I do know that there is a greater chance that a young man from a middle Eastern country is Muslim than there is that an elderly lady from Japan is.

You totally missed the point.

Brandon9000 wrote:

I'll admit that I don't know how to implement it, but I do know that there is a greater chance that a young man from a middle Eastern country is Muslim than there is that an elderly lady from Japan is.

I agree that a young man from a middle Eastern country is more likely Muslim than an elderly lady from Japan. I also agree that our current threat is Muslim based. My arguments are that 1) screening predominately young men from Muslim countries means that in a resource restricted environment you reduce screening on other groups. This means that it opens a hole in your security net that can be exploited. 2) The vast majority of young Muslim seeming men who travel through the US are not a threat but treating them as they are will engender resentment and less cooperation. In the underwear bomber's case, he was turned in by his father. Would that have happened if the US had a history of poor treatment of Muslims? 3) The identification of Muslims would involve a costly and likely illegal violation of privacy with a high degree of error.

I'm in favor of extra vigilance in airports where there is a high likelihood of a threat, I just favor that vigilance be applied to everyone. A system without a known bias is one that is harder to attack.

So by your very strange logic if we spend more time and resources on looking at young Muslims men instead of a mid-west grandmother traveling with her grandkids we are opening up some form of a security hole!!!???!!!!!

C ome on let be honest here you are willing to take added risks of deaths for planes loads of citizens in order to be PC and you and I both know the current screening does not made any sense at all from a security point of view.

The real experts IE the Israels agree with me not you on screening and as a result they are one hell of a lot safer to fly on then a US carrier.

I am also fairly sure that if we end up lossing a few planes from US born Muslims men that a list of all Muslims in the country will be either produce or come out of hidding in a matter of weeks.

And Muslims like all of us are aware that their group is at higher risk of producing terrorists and therefore I see no reason why most of them would not undersand the need for added screening.

You cannot win this, because you're wrong. I am not advocating poor treatment of young, Muslim men. I am advocating screening everyone, but beng generally more alert with young, men from predominantly Muslim countries.

Brandon9000 wrote:

You cannot win this, because you're wrong. I am not advocating poor treatment of young, Muslim men. I am advocating screening everyone, but beng generally more alert with young, men from predominantly Muslim countries.

I've long ago discovered that you can never "win" the argument with your antagonist here, you can only influence the silent group without a strong pre-existing opinion that is reading along without commenting. I am advocating screening everyone and being alert all the time, or if that is too expensive, using a random screening system. If an audit of the screening area shows that people are stopped in a consistent and uniform manner and screened to an equal level of inconvenience, then we don't have a disagreement. My reading of Bill's posts is that he favors a more focused system than what you suggest.