This story of how three Americans were yanked off a plane, taken into custody, strip-searched and humiliated, all for the crime of flying while brown on 9/11 is a must read.
And people want to argue that bin Laden didn’t win.
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taylormattd
Link appears to be dead.
J
Link no worky.
cleek
if OBL had won, there wouldn’t be any commercial flights for people to be kicked off of.
Special Patrol Group
Here comes a flood of “I suppose you’d be fine with brown people blowing up a plane!” retorts from the usual Real Americans. Fuckers.
Loneoak
Try this link.
Peeing While Brown is a serious threat to this country.
joes527
If OBL had won we would have removed our bases from Saudi Arabi….. never mind.
joeyess
OBL indeed won……. the link is broken.
Comrade Javamanphil
@taylormattd: Great. Now who will save Zelda?
arguingwithsignposts
It’s all part of John Galt Ayn Rand Cole’s master plan … oh, fuck it. I can’t do Derp right.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
If you can meet with
Triumphwinning andDisasterlosingAnd treat those two impostors just the same;
Poopyman
@arguingwithsignposts: Be thankful.
MaximusNYC
Link to the original blog entry by one of the people who was taken off the plane at gunpoint, interrogated, and strip-searched:
http://shebshi.wordpress.com/2011/09/12/some-real-shock-and-awe-racially-profiled-and-cuffed-in-detroit/
Mattminus
What I don’t get is, why do you yank them off the plane and interrogate them WHEN THE FUCKING PLANE HAS ALREADY LANDED AND THEY DIDN’T DO ANY TERROR?
Comrade Dread
I thought the fact that we’ve been in Afghanistan for ten years now, escalated the troop levels to secure the country, and we’re still getting attacked in the heart of our strongholds by terrorists while we’re bleeding money and debating if we should change SS into a private program where seniors get preferred spaces next to freeway off-ramps was a pretty good indicator that the bastard had won.
AxelFoley
bin Laden’s fish food somewhere in the Indian Ocean. I’d say that qualifies as a loss.
superluminar
sorry to be a pain in the ass here, but this isn’t really right:
“people want to argue that Bin Laden didn’t really win”
well – he didn’t. His actions were not ultimately motivated by a desire to introduce annoying security measures on US flights. His loftier aims were about remaking the middle east into some kind of Islamic superstate, a goal in which he miserably failed.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Comrade Javamanphil: I told my oldest I want one of the titles to be “Legend of Zelda: Still having to save my sister”.
Gretchen
http://www.theatlantic.com/james-fallows/
story at the atlantic/james fallows.
Wow. Just wow. Suburban mom flies from Denver to Detroit, minding her own business, gets hauled off the plane in handcuffs, put in a cell, strip-searched, interrogated, all with no explanation, because she was sitting between two Indian guys, whom she didn’t know, and who didn’t know each other, because both went to the bathroom, which somebod on the plane thought was suspcious. So one can get handcuffed, detained, and strip-searched, for absolutely nothing at all, if somebody, any anonymous person, thinks you look “suspicious”. Welcome to the land of liberty, home of the free. By the way, she’s an American citizen, for all the protection that offers.
debit
I have a Somali born client that recently traveled home to see his father. He was gone for a month and just came back Labor Day. He was questioned by the FBI for 3 hours on Friday the 9th. No reason that he could see, other than traveling while Somali. And yes, he’s a US citizen.
aimai
Somewhere this hellishly long weekend I read the story of a guy who was on an international flight on 9/11. Some harmless white guy in line ahead of him tried to bring a non functioning antique gun through security, got caught, given the business and was just about to be let on the plane when the airport got word about 9/11. The security guards then begin shrieking at the guy–they’ve already established that the gun is non functioning, they’ve already heard him apologize, they’ve already had him check it through in checked luggage,and they are about to start the boarding procedures. So they know, or believe they know, that this guy is who he says he is, that the weapon was harmless, that he didn’t object at all to checking it through checked baggage, but they still carry on as though he’s a mass murderer and they more or less say directly “you picked a bad day to freak us out” even though he’s white.
I’m not saying that racism and ethnic profiling aren’t absolutely horrendous but I think we are seriously underestimating the amount of sheer, unadulterated, petty, panic and hysteria of small time authorities when faced with the overwhelming task of handling “security” with the tools and information at their disposal. And I think we are also underestimating the pressure on people in low level authority positions to make someone, anyone, miserable in order to demonstrate that A GOOD JOB IS BEING DONE. Even though, obviously, its not.
aimai
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Comrade Javamanphil:
These days, Zelda is plenty capable of saving herself. She turns into a ninja, don’t you know. Or a pirate. Or whatever. She just delegates to Link because ‘that’s what princesses do’, don’t you know.
In any case, it’s still amazing just how piss scared we are of swarthy brown people. Or scared of swarthy brown people pissing. Either way, it’s apparent that 9/11 never really ever ended.
Han's Big Snark Solo
Most Republican politicians these days look like they are likely to pull a Timothy McVeigh at any moment, but nobody fucks with them when they park near government buildings…
Xenophobia, thy name is GOP.
Let us see, the last election the GOP used the “Ground Zero Terror Mosque” that wasn’t at ground zero and wasn’t a mosque. They also used “Terrorist Anchor Babies” and the “New Black Panther Party”. What will they use this time?
The GOP knows how to use the “Southern Strategy” and has used it in most every election since Lee Atwater came up with it. They most certainly will use it again this time around; the only question is how and when.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@aimai:
Those guards were excused, of course, by the fact that no one knew who was doing 9/11 yet when it happened. Now that we know that white people can never be terrorists, that kind of mishap will never happen again, thank god. Just if you’re a brown person with a water bottle or small bladder.
@Han’s Big Snark Solo:
Used? They’re still using all that. Hell, NY-9 seems to have flipped precisely from the Not-Ground Zero Not-Mosque fearmongering the GOP putz is putting to use in his ads.
wrb
I imagine most everyone here read this, but in case not.
Yes AQ won, because we followed their script, Which They Published. Still the most maddening article I’ve read on the whole sad episode.
http://www.lawrencewright.com/WrightNewJihadis.pdf
Culture of Truth
“We always react as if it’s the end of the world”
Silver Owl
Flying with crazy is still dangerous these days.
kdaug
@aimai: Agreed. It ain’t all “shiny badge/small peni$”. There’s a lot of optics and “imperative” involved, both for the audience and the performers.
Carnacki
The shame isn’t the racial profiling for flying while brown. The real shame is pointing out that it happens. /Rumsfeld
MariedeGournay
Every time I hear the words “home of the brave” now, I want to scream.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@aimai: Harmless white guy with a non-functioning antique gun”
Are you fucking serious. You thinks he should have just been waved through? God, amazing.
kdaug
@aimai: Agreed. It ain’t all “shiny badge/small peni$”. There’s a lot of optics and “imperative” involved, both for the audience and the performers.
Carnacki
@joes527: Yep
Kola Noscopy
What happened to these three people sucks. However…
There are more than 28,000 commercial airline flights per day in the united states. The percentage of people of any color who are yanked off a plane and humiliated is infinitesimal.
The enforcement people in this situation overreacted, as did Cole in putting up this post. They and their procedures should be given a thorough going over.
OBL “WON” because hysterical idiots like John Cole and the Democrats in office reacted to 9/11 by blindly enabling the Bush boy to start two insane wars, cripple our civil liberties, torture and imprison with wild abandon, and generally fuck the country over with a rusty pipe bomb.
THAT is how and why OBL won. And no, this lame post doesn’t make up for it.
Carnacki
@Mattminus: Clearly they were especially devious and diabolical and a threat to the baggage pickup
Kola Noscopy
@AxelFoley:
Independent evidence? I mean, other than the word of the U.S. government which never lies…
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
What pisses me off with all of this is just what it puts under the microscope. Jerkoffs try to explain that it’s a religious thing and not a racial thing, both as justification why it’s okay to be bigoted toward Islam (because THEY CAN CHANGE!!) as well as why it’s ok to profile (We’re not profiling on race, we’re profiling on behavior!!).
If there wasn’t a goddamned racial aspect to it, we wouldn’t be strip searching Indian folks because we can’t tell the goddamn difference between one brown folk and another. We wouldn’t be casting suspicious eyes toward anyone who dares like this side of Middle Eastern (even if they’re anything from South Asian to Pacific Islander to simply even Hispanic for the real ‘colorblind’ folks) because all Arab-looking folks must be Muslim, and therefore must be a sleeper cell.
agrippa
This behavior is our behavior. We own it.
Bin Laden did not plan it, nor make us do it.
We took the decision to do this sort of thing.
agrippa
@Kola Noscopy:
When Bin Laden has not been seen or heard from for 30 years, we may safely conclude that he is dead.
El Cid
@cleek:
That wasn’t among the goals OBL repeated throughout his career as a terrorist leader.
Chief among them was overthrowing the Saudi monarchy (not accomplished), removing Western non-Muslim troops from Saudi Arabia as the Holy Land (mostly accomplished), luring the US into a long and expensive land war in Muslim lands (accomplished), by doing so extending irreparable harm to the US governing system and economy (largely accomplished)…
…The most effective long-term destruction of Al Qa’ida’s power is, of course, the overthrow of the tyrant regimes by a non-terrorist, non-Islamic civil and at least purportedly democratic movements by the local populations.
I have no idea why one would think that OBL would consider no commercial flights to have been a key component of his strategy or tactics.
El Tiburon
@AxelFoley:
Yeah, cause it is all about OBL.
So fucking stupid. That ten years later we still obsess over 9-11 and that we have wasted trillions in stupid wars and have become a bunch of paranoid twats may not prove he won, but it sure proves we lost.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@El Tiburon:
That’s just the whole thing about the ‘War on Terror’ that so many never quite comprehend. ‘They’ don’t have to win for us to lose.
kindness
I don’t wonder what would have happened had the tables been turned. Had the hijackers been white & Christian. I mean, Timothy McVey brought down a building in Oaklahoma City and no one started to detain white people afterwards.
But get a bunch of darker skinned folk to hijack planes & kill folk and well, now….your fellow passengers will report you because you are suspicious to them. You are darker than they are. You are now one of them regardless.
Same thing, bigotry, with the idiots in Queens who seem to be voting in a Teabagger because Obama hates the Jews. Fucking idiots in this world. They test my karma. Ego would just as soon off the idiots. My zen fights the urge. Fucking assholes.
The Dangerman
While not condoning the actions, I think you need to amend the statement…
…isn’t exactly accurate. Yes, they were flying while brown, but (reportedly) there was some suspicious behavior involved. I didn’t read the article enough to evaluate that suspicious behavior…
…and there was reportedly another plane that identified suspicious behavior that turned out to be two or three people wanting to join the mile high club. I’m sorry, but trying to join that unique club on 9/11 is fucking stupid…
…so, back to the Detroit plane. I don’t fault the cops. I fault the rest of the passengers on the plane or the flight crew or whoever freaked about this “suspicious” behavior.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@aimai:
For the most part a comment I agree with, but it isn’t just the small time authorities that are guilty of gorging on a gluttonous diet of fear. The general population has been equally guilty, IMHO, and that keeps the authorities going.
Which leads me to ask: how and why have we collectively as a people become so filled with fear? And it isn’t just the racists and warmongers either; every left-leaning finance/econ blog and political blog that I’m familiar with is filled with doomer talk 24×7. I don’t get it. Yes the country faces some big problems, the worst of which we haven’t even started to grapple with, but somehow “When in danger when in doubt run in circles, scream and shout” doesn’t seem to be helping the problem. It makes me wonder if our culture has been infected with some sort of apocalyptic millenium madness like what happened in Europe as 1000 AD came and went.
henry
In a just world, the false accuser is now on the watch list and banned from air travel for life.
daveNYC
Not only did OBL manage to knock down some buildings and kill a bunch of people, he also managed to steal the entire country’s balls as well.
It’d be interesting to see just what sort of people keep wigging out so hard over the brown people on an airplane that they cause these incidents to happen.
cleek
@El Cid:
i too am puzzled, because i never said such a thing.
this exaggeration is where you miss the point. our economy is down, but not even close to irreparably harmed. it’s not even close to the reparable, though far worse, state it was in during the 1930’s. but if it was irreparably harmed, we wouldn’t, among other things, have an airline industry.
aimai
@Raven (formerly stuckinred):
No, I don’t think he should have been waved through. I thought that given the information in the article a determination–a realistic one–had been made at the time that the guy was just a moronic asshole who was no threat to anyone. The point of my observation was that in the article the TSA/guard types absolutely didn’t think that the guy was a terrorist threat they just told him directly that they were going to act out on him because they could, and because they were scared. I’m probably more anti gun and anti gun nut than other people on the board and I’m sure not pro entitled white guy. Its just that the TSA people actually seem to have spent more time hysterically impounding this guy than it was worth because he was present while they were scared. This is the same thing that happened to lots of the more egregious gitmo cases: the government acknolwedged that there was no reason to believe they had ever done anything wrong at all but there was no impetus to release them or to treat them differently than an actual criminal. A little authority is a dangerous thing and most people in low level authority (and in high) simply can’t handle the responsibility of choosing between threats and realistically assessing a threat. They would always rather err on the side of waving their badges and hasselling people. I absolutely think that if a white guy with a gun and a black guy with nothign were standing side by side they would have attacked and hasselled the black guy preferentially. But low level authoritarians will hassel someone.
aimai
joes527
@The Dangerman: This is the danger of getting your news from twitter.
In this case, the suspicious behaviour was that 2 brown men sitting in the same row with a brown woman went to the bathroom. THAT’s ALL. Nothing further has even been alleged.
The whole mile high club thing on the other flight that you refer to was made up whole cloth.
Elie
@Kola Noscopy:
Well geez, do you WANT him to be alive? And if so, what is YOUR evidence?
Oh, that’s right — he’ll be like Elvis… never really dead. Symbolically he is just too handy…
Larv
@Kola Noscopy:
Would the government lie? Sure, no argument there. Would the government lie about something so easily disproved, and which would be a gigantic, administration- and multiple career-ending scandal when said lie was revealed? I find that extremely unlikely. But you seem to enjoy your various conspiracy theories, so please keep on believin’.
agorabum
I wouldn’t say he won. Everyone lost.
Let’s look back at an earlier era of terror: End of the 19th Century, with anarchists in the fore. Killing czars and kings, assassinating a president; they were notching up some wins. An anarchist bullet started WWI.
But did anarchism win out? No. The war mobilization created massive state bureaucracy, regulation, and repression. Anarchists round the world jailed, imprisoned, and killed. The USSR and a system where the state was everything, rose up to replace the petty tyranny of the nobles.
Did society win? No. Did anarchists? No. Did things change for the worse? Yes.
On September 10, 2001, Islamic militants at least had a state, in Afghanistan, and actually a lot more support in the Islamic World. They are now at a low point. So they lost.
And our brave leaders choose to piss themselves and lead the nation on a collective freak out about smoking guns, mushroom clouds, and the brown menace, and the echos of the freakout continue to reverberate today (no call to just keep calm and carry on, stiff upper lip, etc.). But the diminishment of our society is not their win, it is our loss.
Punchy
“OBL” is suspiciously close to “ABL”, so I’m declaring this post to be offensive and racist. Shame on you, John.
taylormattd
@Comrade Javamanphil: omg, now I have that zelda music stuck in my head.
Paul in KY
@superluminar: He also wanted to weaken us. I think he has suceeded beyond his wildest dreams in that.
It may be that he never forsaw the Bush/Cheney admin taking 9/11 as their chance to browbeat everyone into their conservotopia & make the world safe for Israel, but that’s what happened & the impetus was 9/11.
Citizen Alan
@AxelFoley:
If Bin Laden was in any sense a true believer, he died happy — secure in the knowledge that he had already mortally wounded the United States of America, once the greatest nation on Earth but now on its way to becoming a third world fascist hell-hole.
Elie
I agree with those upstring who say that the guards were probably really scared and probably also not that well trained on what to do in every scenario.
I make two points.
1. OBL did NOT win. We are talking about this horrendous incident openly and there is no evidence that it continues to happen regularly. Mistakes can still be made, of course.
2. The “logic” of any police work and some military actions as well, is to make people unwilling to wade into a situation by showing a lot of force and aggression. It “freezes” the non involved onlookers and makes it unlikely that they will want to get involved. Its why soldiers scream and ATM agents break in doors violently. Its meant to be scary. This is of course, a separate issue from the topic of this thread which is about fear and the apprehension of innocent folks who are minding their own business but end up in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The Dangerman
@joes527:
As I read it (and I’m only a couple of cups of Joe in), that link referred to the same Detroit plane; there was another incident at another airport. Of course it, too, could be BS, I just don’t think that link shows it.
Goes back to my point; wasn’t the cops fault, it was the flight crew and/or passengers. The crew should be trained enough, so I blame them principally (I suspect passengers were freaked about 9/11 and the report of a threat this past weekend).
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@aimai: He’s lucky they didn’t shoot his stupid ass.
peach flavored shampoo
So all it takes is one passanger, out of hundreds, to point his paranoid finger at some melatonin-enhanced humans and that’s enough to warrant this response? 1 person unable to grasp reality can initiate this much bullshit, that apparently has no off-switch (or at least a really long one) and forces the involvement of cops, FBI agents, jailers, Homeland Security, TSA, and everything else? Not a single law enforcement official can kill this response when it becomes clear in the first 2 minutes that it’s all a misunderstanding?
I feel bad for the passangers AND the FBI.
cmorenc
What’s vastly more egregious and troubling than the actions of the TSA agents who conducted the detention and interrogation in this incident is the stupidly shallow, fearful bigotry of whomever it was that reported the three swarthy passengers were somehow acting “suspicious”. What’s missing from Shoshanna’s account is any articulate description from her interrogators of what the tipster allegedly observed that prompted the call to authorities, other than that the tipster saw three swarthy-skinned people conducting “suspicious activities”. This tipster put the TSA folks in a difficult spot where if they ignored the tip as simply being the paranoid fear of a bigoted person and anything bad did happen, the dangerous failure would be all over the national news 24/7 and heads would roll within TSA.
Should a tip like this which turns out to be baseless other than the tipster’s bigoted paranoia result in some sort of repercussions for the tipster? My gut reaction is that yes, it should, but my head tells me that TSA is understandably reluctant to intimidate people from reporting bona fide suspicious activity out of fear of suffering severe criminal or civil sanctions.
Shallow bigotry is harder to punish or uproot than we wish it was, sometimes for reasons that frustratingly trump hard pragmatism over the moral principles of our better nature.
catclub
@wrb: “Islamists will promote the idea of using gold as the international medium of exchange, leading to the collapse of the dollar.”
Glenn Beck rides!
Carolinus
This is worth watching:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/09/11/60minutes/main20104378.shtml
It’s Lara Logan interviewing Ali Soufan about how effective the FBI interrogators were, just building a report and asking questions, up until the amateur torturers showed up and turned everything to s#!%.
wrb
@cleek:
Burkina Faso has an airline.
We had a lotta distance to fall from where we were in 2001
Will we ever get back to where we could have been?
If not, “irreparable damage” doesn’t seem inaccurate.
burnspbesq
@AxelFoley:
That would make you wrong. We voluntarily trashed nearly everything that made us admirable as a country and a society because of bin Laden. Bin Laden succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, and I have no doubt that he went to the afterlife feeling awfully good about what he accomplished.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Carolinus:
But, but, but, Dick Cheney said that we got phenomenal results from waterboarding and we should be doing it all the time! Why would he ever lie?!
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@peach flavored shampoo: You mean like the obvious warning signs of the 9/11 hijackers that were ignored?
El Cid
@cleek: You did in fact say that very clearly — that having ‘no commercial flights’ would have fulfilled OBL’s goals. This wasn’t among OBL’s goals.
And by what standard would “irreparable harm” — even if it’s in a shorter to medium term perspective — represent
What kind of blunt stupidity is that?
Who on Earth would interpret “harm” as meaning that the economy would destroy the existence of an airline industry? That is what you just stated.
What, is your assumption that the phrase “irreparable harm” implies the return of a Stone Age economy? That OBL would only have considered it a worthwhile goal to return the US to the English failed colonies digging corpses up and eating them to survive another winter?
Would OBL have preferred a Soviet-style collapse? Sure. Did the lack of such prompt OBL to view this as a failure? No.
Yours was a stupid comment, an impulsive and dismissive one, showing a complete disregard for any empirical evidence of OBL’s goals, and then to back up its obvious weakness, a stubborn insistence on a maximalist interpretation of any stated goals actually presented.
[I can also note that the collapse of the USSR didn’t bring about the end of the formerly Soviet airline system, whether the parts now within Russia nor the former Soviet Central Asian states.]
Loneoak
@The Dangerman:
You might want to actually read the article before passing judgment. You look pretty ignorant here. The whole point is that some idiot, racist flight attendants or passengers thought three brown people in one row getting up to pee a few times is ‘suspicious behavior’, which was sufficient for pulling three people off a plane at the business end of assault rifles and detaining them for hours after a strip search. You’re taking the mere muttering of the word ‘suspicious’ at face value, which is exactly how this shit continues to happen.
Kola Noscopy
@agrippa:
I’m assuming they killed him a few years ago, or he died of his health issues, the illusion of his being alive afterward having been maintained as a propaganda tool.
FlipYrWhig
@Citizen Alan:
I’m not sure it’s ever been possible to call the USA “the greatest nation on earth” from a left perspective. Not after the slave trade and the extermination of the indigenous population, to name a few minor flies in the ointment. And I doubt that bin Laden had much to do with the truth or falsity of that assessment.
Morzer
@AxelFoley:
I think it just shows that Obama hates the environment.
j/k
Kola Noscopy
@Larv:
Please see my comment at #69.
burnspbesq
@Kola Noscopy:
Which is the same as saying you don’t know anything. Which has been apparent from the first word you posted here.
kdaug
@cmorenc:
Especially on the 10-year anniversary of 9/11…
Kola Noscopy
@burnspbesq:
In other words: STFU, comrade!
As opposed to geniuses like you who accept U.S. government propaganda as fact. You have no independent KNOWLEDGE (ie., to KNOW) of OBL’s death or much of anything else, which doesn’t of course stop you from viciously denouncing anyone who dares to question the government line.
I don’t have to KNOW the unknowable to KNOW that I should not accept self serving propaganda, with no verifiable evidence, as fact. Why do you do that?
Grow up.
John Weiss
@Kola Noscopy: So it’s the fault of JC and Democrats for “enabling” the Bushies? Are you insane?
Did I just feed a troll?
Culture of Truth
Yes, but ordinary citizens have too, being told “if you see something, say something.” Law enforcement agents from your local police to the FBI get tips all the time – it’s their job to use their judgment and not overreact to every citizen tip. Otherwise we might as well pass out the pistols, as Archie Bunker used to say.
Morzer
@Kola Noscopy:
Is this the point in the program where you go on about known knowns and unknown unknowns before writing Cole a vitriolic email cancelling your Balloon-Juice subscription?
pete
@John Weiss: No. Yes. Yes.
SASQ
Jenny
Cole,
Are you saying the Japanese won WWII because Roosevelt put Japaneses American citizens into concentration camps? Okay.
kdaug
@John Weiss: Yep. Please stop.
Larv
@Kola Noscopy:
So we just crashed that chopper in Abbotabad for what, verisimilitude?
Oh, sorry, am I viciously denouncing you again? Seriously, you’re either a troll or a moron (if it makes you feel better, I lean toward troll), and unless you have anything to say beyond puerile ranting about propaganda I see no reason to engage with you.
Yeah, like the fact that the moon isn’t made of cheese! I mean, do you have any independent KNOWLEDGE that it isn’t?
Cat Lady
Teh Awesome Charlie Pierce wonders what the NFL did with Pat Tillman last weekend. Good question.
FTW.
AxelFoley
@Kola Noscopy:
You see any video tapes from bin Laden around 9/11 this year?
Oh, and add to the fact that even Al Qaida acknowledged bin Laden’s dead as fuck.
He’s dim, Jed.
AxelFoley
@burnspbesq:
LOL, ok. America has always been this fucked up. Only thing the aftermath of 9/11 did was expose it for everyone to see.
bin Laden’s not enjoying 72 virgins–he’s begging for ice water in hell now.
Nom de Plume
@agrippa:
No, we could safely conclude that he was dead the moment his death was announced. Do you seriously believe that the U.S. government would announce his death to the world if there was even an infinitesimal chance that he would pop up in a video or audio tape and embarrass the fuck out of them?
He may, as some have alleged, died years ago from natural causes, though I still think the most likely explanation is that he was killed by Navy Seals a few months ago. But he’s deader than dead, of that you can be assured.
Svensker
@Culture of Truth:
This. Police and TSA should be trained enough that, most of the time, they can quickly suss out whether there is an actual threat or just a good citizen being panicky.
Keep calm and carry on doesn’t seem to be a big motto in the land of the brave and home of the free too much these days.
Calouste
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
I was thinking that the other day. The end times attitude permeates quite a few parts of the US public discourse, specially at the fringes. What happened to “we have nothing to fear but fear itself”?
AxelFoley
@El Tiburon:
Whatever, bitch.
Kola Noscopy
@John Weiss:
From 2000-2008, hell yes. What? Are you blind AND stupid?
Kola Noscopy
@AxelFoley:
You are, quite simply, a tool.
Loneoak
@Larv:
Look, if you haven’t personally witnessed the raid on OBL’s compound and inspected his body, IT MUST BE A CONSPIRACY. But of course, even if you had firsthand knowledge of OBL’s death, it MIGHT HAVE BEEN FAKED. So unless you have firsthand knowledge that it wasn’t faked, IT MUST BE A CONSPIRACY. But of course, the firsthand evidence that the not fake death wasn’t faked, it MIGHT HAVE BEEN FAKED. So unless you have firsthand knowledge that the not faked death wasn’t faked, IT MUST BE A CONSPIRACY.
Ad nauseum.
Kola Noscopy
@Loneoak:
Ad nauseum.
Yes, your credulous acceptance of unverifiable information from the government is nauseating, this is true.
OBL may be dead, or he may be in a prison somewhere, or he may have died six years ago, or he may have been killed by Navy Seals, his body/evidence disposed of in the absurd way we have been told…my point is that none of this can be believed simply because the fucking lying government of the united states of america says it’s so. The government has no credibility after the last ten years…if ever, and you know it.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Calouste:
I think it mutated into “we have nothing to eat for lunch but fear itself”, or perhaps even better: “Fear: it’s what’s for dinner!”.
(certainly this describes our news media and their motivations to a T, but leaves the question open as to why anybody is watching them except as a form of self-abuse)
I do wonder how much of our apocalyptic fears are actually sublimated economic insecurity bubbling up through channels in our national psyche which are more socially acceptable to talk about in public than admiting that the US is headed on a downward socioeconomic path relative to the rest of the world, and that given the highly artificial nature of our immediate post-WW2 domination of the global economy (50+% of total manufacturing) even with the best policy choices in the world there wasn’t much of anything that you or I or God could do to stop it from happening.
joes527
I didn’t personally verify the moon landing either, but I tend not to cast doubts on it because that Buzz Aldrin … he’ll take a pop at you if you do.
Jenny
@Cat Lady: This.
James
@Kola Noscopy:
You’re leaving out the fact that everyone who supposedly saw the body was smoked several weeks later by an illiterate teenager rocking a $70 rpg7
If you’re gonna go all in, go all in.
Amir Khalid
@Kola Noscopy: I have to agree with AxelFoley: if Osama were alive, there’d be no better way for him to stick it to the US than by showing up like Borat in a very special 9/11 video. “Hello! You are missing me?”
The disposal of Osama’s body was much argued over, but from the reports it was arguably the prudent thing to do, and was done in a way that was respectful and consistent with Islamic law. You could argue that proof of his death is not rock-solid; but as AxelFoley points out, al-Qaida has acknowledged that he is dead. And it seems less than plausible that they, of all people, would conspire with the Obama administration to fake his death.
If you want to assert that the US Navy Seals got the wrong guy and al-Qaida decided not to point out the error, you’d need to prove that.
Arclite
Wow, WTF. That’s pretty unbelievable. I hope she sues the shit out of them.
Amir Khalid
@Kola Noscopy:
Another thing. If you want to assert that Osama is alive in US custody, then you’d need to prove that; and in that case, why has al-Qaida not said he is in the clutches of te great Satan?
catclub
@Nom de Plume: “He may, as some have alleged, died years ago from natural causes, though I still think the most likely explanation is that he was killed by Navy Seals a few months ago. But he’s deader than dead, of that you can be assured.”
If we assume he was already dead from natural causes, how do we suddenly know that (with the absolute certainty that is needed in order to announce a raid by us killed him)?
Can anyone imagine the Bush admin keeping this secret so Obama can use it? I guess Kola can.
What is the motivation for announcing a raid, that was nearly a disaster, (but could have all been faked in a soundstage!) in order to announce he is dead. Why not pick a better time to announce it? Like October 2012? maybe because there are shards of helicopter in Abbotabad?
wrb
@Larv:
The astronauts RETURNED to the moon. Do you really think they would have if there was no cheese?
catclub
@Arclite: “I hope she sues the shit out of them.”
Rotsa ruck suing the US government
for excessive zeal in protecting the American people.
Almost as much fun as suing a District attorney for malicious prosecution.
Morzer
@Kola Noscopy:
Oddly enough, I saw him smoking a stogie and chatting to Bill Belichick down in Miami during the half-time show.
Of course, I was asleep at the time.
Morzer
@wrb:
But was it government cheese? That’s the crucial question, surely.
Arclite
Well, that taught her not to sit next to other brown people on a plane. Next time she’ll know better: request a seat change next to a nice, well-behaved white person.
Ash Can
@catclub et al.: The aptly-named Colonoscopy came out as a truther in another thread, so I’m sure there’s no conspiracy theory too fantastic for him/her to believe. (S/he probably posts here because, unlike places like DKos, truthers don’t get banned here, just laughed at.)
Svensker
@Morzer:
You and the Miami defense.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
They need to find the people who instigated this situation- passengers? flight crew?- and stick them on the “No Fly” list.
And Another Thing...
@Nom de Plume: If Bin Laden had died years ago regardless of cause, does anybody really believe that Republicans, including both Bush & Cheney, would have given Obama credit for Bin Laden’s death?
Mr/Mrs/Ms colonoscopy definitely picked a descriptive nom de plume.
MattR
@Arclite: I think it would actually be hilarious if this started happening. Anytime two remotely Middle Eastern looking people get randomly seated next to each other they should demand that they be moved next to white folks so nobody will think they are suspicious and working together. (Of course asking to be moved will be called suspicious behavior)
@Svensker: Damn straight. If the government is going to tell everyone to be hyper-vigilant and report anything suspicious, then the authorities have a responsibility to vet those tips before they detain people for hours based on tips from the public.
@And Another Thing…: Except that Obama is really a secret Republican (and Osama was actually a CIA agent and there is no such thing as Al-Qaeda which is why they confirmed OBL’s non-existant death)
/truther
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Kola Noscopy:
@Kola Noscopy:
At least you paranoia runs both ways.
Morzer
@Svensker:
I blame Obama. If he’d only shot Steve Ross in the face in Kabul, none of this would have happened.
Nutella
The sad thing is that it was the airline that seated these three people together. They were, according to the blog post, three passengers each traveling alone who all happen to be not of European descent. So if they had suspiciously asked to be seated together the airline would have known. Apparently the airline didn’t check their own records, just passed on a ‘tip’ that three brown people were … what? Nearby?
I wonder if the tipster was also interrogated since the tip itself caused serious delay and danger. A malicious person could do this deliberately both to screw up air traffic and to harass brown people.
And I wonder why the hell anyone on the damn plane which landed peacefully at its planned destination needed to be strip-searched.
And Another Thing...
@MattR: Well, silly me…I’m definitely losing the plot. You mean all those emails I get about the soci a1ist/fascist/muslim/commie/ etc etc are wrong and Obama’s a Manchurian Republican?
Facepalm.
Does Glen Beck know this? Or has he been fooled too?
Where’s some medicinal greens when you really need ’em.
wrb
@Morzer: @Morzer:
Sold it for pennies a pound to the big Wisconsin money, no doubt. Kraft unquestionably got a share too.
They’ll embargo it until our cheese supply here has almost run out then sell it back to us for a fortune.
Once in America we ate fresh cheese, made from All-American Holstein and Guernsey milk. It glowed with creamy goodness. In the future we’ll be reduced to eating crumbly, green 6000-year old moon cheese.
MattR
@Nutella:
Or even to remove suspicion from themselves (or others).
Felanius Kootea
@Nutella:
This. There was no terrorism for fuck’s sake, why drag them off the plane and strip-search them *after* it had landed safely with no incident?
If going to the bathroom while brown is now enough to get one detained and strip-searched I don’t know what the US is coming to. No more drinking liquids before flying or during a flight for many, apparently.
Cris (without an H)
Shoshana Hebshi’s twitter account (which she refers to in her blog post) appears to have been deleted.
eta: Never mind. The sidebar on her blog has a failed feed from @orionblu1, but her active account is @ShoshanaHebshi. Happily, the only tweets she appears to have received since Sunday have been supportive.
Catsy
@The Dangerman:
BULLSHIT.
Did you read the article closely? The only thing these people did was go to the bathroom, tweet on a cellphone, and have the misfortune to be three brown people–complete strangers to one another–seated next to each other by chance.
Just because some racist jackass gets unnerved when they see brown people on their flight does not mean what those people are doing is actually suspicious and justification for getting dragged off an airplane in handcuffs and detained for hours without even the most cursory attempt at validating the basis for doing so.
Also, this:
Unless he can come up with something concrete that could be mistaken in good faith for the actions of a terrorist, this motherfucker should be prosecuted for filing a false police report. People should be encouraged to speak up if they see something genuinely wrong, but they should also be aggressively discouraged from treating a person’s perceived religion or nationality as a basis for suspicion.
And this woman should sue the pants off the tipster.
Kola Noscopy
@Ash Can:
Please define “truther.” (For the hundredth time.) Would that include anyone who questions the official government story in any respect? Or just anyone who declines to accept the government story at face value? Or just any non-credulous person with a functional brain who wisely refuses to accept the U.S. government’s word as good enough…as do you?
Do you object to the idea of seeking “truth?”
Is it your mission to tell anyone who questions the government on anything to STFU? Why?
Let’s talk about YOUR motivations…
Ash Can
@MattR:
I’d love it if a Mid-Eastern-looking person seated next to a clean-shaven young white male demanded to be moved on account of the white guy looking too Timothy-McVeigh-like.
MattR
@Felanius Kootea: And god forbid if you have a stomach bug or eat something that disagrees with you.
@Catsy:
To be fair, we don’t really know what the tipster said. He (or she) may very well have cautioned that it was probably nothing and he was being overly paranoid but since it is 9/11 he figured he should at least mention it. If that is the case, then the blame should lie with those who escalated it.
Kola Noscopy
@And Another Thing…:
Do you believe Cheney would come out now and say, “yes, we killed him six years ago, but lied about it for propaganda purposes?”
Not a deep thinker, are you?
It’s true: I like to direct the scope of truth thru the colon of bullshit. Why don’t you?
Cris (without an H)
holy html fail. apparently the FYWP plugin treats @ as some kind of “code” trigger.
MattR
@Ash Can: Chris Rock did a bit after a rash of school shooting a few years ago about being on an elevator and having a couple teenage white boys get on it. His reaction was to jump out.
I know what you are saying. Both ways of doing it would be effective protest.
Catsy
@MattR: Fair enough. But one thing is for certain: someone, somewhere in this whole debacle, pulled the trigger on some really bad shit by drastically exaggerating the facts–and in the process caused three innocent Americans a whole lot of emotional trauma.
And that someone needs to be nailed to the wall and made an example of to discourage this from happening again.
Cris (without an H)
Hebshi says in her account that one of the guards told her the rest of the passengers had been brought in for questioning.
Morzer
@Kola Noscopy:
Ah, the good old head up one’s own ass technique.
The Dangerman
@Loneoak:
It would appear to me that we have now posted basically the exact same thing; the flight crew and passengers were to blame for this mess…
Which is what happens when the step above is triggered; it’s sad that it took a few hours to clear, but (I’ll assume) luggage had to be cleared, etc.
Wouldn’t be the first time…
…but the original comment was “crime of flying while brown”, which implied there was a structural problem in our airport security; that wasn’t the case at all. As you agree with me above, the flight crew and passengers are to blame, not the security people.
MattR
@Catsy: Absolutely.
@Cris (without an H): I read that and dismissed it as likely propoganda from the guard. It could be true, but I have not seen that detail in any of the press reports.
Semi-related, but I was just glancing through those press reports and it is sad to see how they characterize this incident by simply saying the passengers were detained, questioned and released. That actually sounds pretty reasonable if the time frame was about 30 minutes in an “interrogation” room at the airport instead of multiple hours in prison like conditions including a strip search.
JPL
@Loneoak: Did they find OBL’s birth certificate?
Unless you have blonde hair and blue eyes, you need to be careful when you fly. I mean don’t these folks know better.
BTW, I’m reading In The Garden of Beasts and want to thank whoever it was that mentioned it. (Daniel, maybe)
MattR
@The Dangerman:
Given the power and authority that they have, I would argue that the flight crew currently qualifies as part of the security apparatus.
The Dangerman
@MattR:
Yes and no; someplace in the crew, someone should have had the training to call “bullshit” on this matter. I don’t know if it would be the level of Attendant or Captain (he or she should have ultimate authority, but I’m unsure it should have reached even that level)…
…but are they part of the “security apparatus”? One could make a good argument both ways (I’d guess the Unions for the Pilots and Attendants would argue in the negative).
Kola Noscopy
@Morzer:
While I deeply hate you, it’s true, I must take a moment to acknowledge the awesomeness of this insult. Well done.
Morzer
@Kola Noscopy:
I remain concerned about the deep location from which your hatred comes. Wouldn’t you rather smell the roses?
CarolDuhart
@Larv: Good point. If Osama was alive, how hard would it be to produce a tape? And it wouldn’t matter in what condition he was in: even if he was in a coma, his people could still film him and show proof that he was alive-for at least now.
He would be a folk hero if he could show that he outwitted the Navy Seals who came to get him. Would Al Queda have resisted this temptation? Even if they didn’t do video for reasons of hiding his location, they could issue an audio tape or a still photo. That would create enough of a world-wide storm and discredit those who came after him. They haven’t done anything, so they know he’s dead.
AhabTRuler
@The Dangerman: Since at this point you can be jailed for failing to obey the orders of a crew-member, I would have to agree that they unequivocally are part of the security apparatus. “Security” in this country is more about power and authority than badges and background checks.
Kola Noscopy
@Morzer:
Yes, I’m sure you are very concerned about me. My comment was in jest, as it’s not seemingly possible to hate someone I have never met.
However, I do hate what people who accept bullshit from the government on face value enable. Whether during the endless Bush years, or now.
Morzer
@Kola Noscopy:
You haven’t shown us that there is any bullshit from the government in this case. Try not to confuse your personal paranoia about government with reality.
pajaro
seriously, only in America could you have a Shoshanna Hebshi to begin with, let alone one who was treated as shabbily as she was. What a country.
grandpajohn
@Svensker: can you imagine what would have been the results if in 1940 the English people especially the Londoners had run around chicken little style wearing their fears on their faces and in their behavior like so many americans did after 911 and are still doing? They would probably all be speaking German now.
Kola Noscopy
@Morzer:
For someone who accepts U.S. government propaganda as gospel, you’re awfully above it all.
U.S. government lies: WMD in Iraq. Pat Tillman. Gulf of Tonkin. Jessica what’s her face being rescued. Torture. on and on and on…
You: Rrat fucker? Paid shill? Dumbshit?
It’s hard to know.
sherparick
And in part, this was the point of Paul Krugman 9/11 post, that we have now become a country where innocent people are detained without reasonable cause on the mere suspicion of their skin color. It was also a reminder of how are joke of a media has covered our wars, as Bob Somerby documents. http://dailyhowler.blogspot.com/2011/09/deaths-of-others-challenging-op-ed.html
Digby and Crooks and Liars go into how liberal self-abasement just encourages the right. I went and looked and the Lexis transcript of O’Reilly’s program. Beside the stupid (Paul Krugman reveres Obama???? Apparently, he doesn’t read Krugman), what I notice about O’Reilly is tribalism he celebrates and reinforces. Those guys bad, we our good, and anything we do is thereby good. And of course it works so well because our minds are so hard wired to be tribal, as millions of years of evolution are hard wired in our brain. And I guess with grifters like O’Reilly, it starts becoming hard for them to tell the difference between what they believe and don’t believe.
slippy
@Kola Noscopy:
No, he did not. This kind of behavior is unacceptable. Full stop.