Venusberg | That's not your heart, it's a piece of helicopter casing

Thursday, July 29, 2004

So, when is a hysterical bigot not a hysterical bigot?

When she's a hysterical bigot.

It's not very funny, is it?

Now, never let it be said that I am politically correct. I love nothing better than to make suggestive comments to my busty secretary, while hiring a man with half her qualifications at twice her wages, and generally doing all that really fun stuff people used to get up to before the lesbians ruined it for everyone. Losing your shit completely in the face of a group of peple not like you is a perfectly normal and natural response, and one no doubt experienced, in a spirit of international brotherhood, by any number of Iraqis as groups of American helicopters appear to be about to act suspiciously the fuck out of their viscera and soft tissue. So far, so good. Tell me you've never felt just that tiny bit concerned about your fellow passengers, be they on plane, train or night bus.

However, the helicopters fly on to win peace and democracy elsewhere. The Syrians disembark, and turn out to be a band of musicians. At this point a grown-up shrugs, feels a little chastened and chalks it up to experience, remembering that of a global population of about a billion, statistically few Arabs have so far blown up US planes in mid-flight. Not our girl, though. Despite being very obviously alive, and despite the FBI finding a startling lack of instruments of destruction in the Syrians' personal effects, our girl can't quite bring herself to admit that she freaked out like a great big chicken. Oh no. If they made her feel terror, they must be terrorists. Stands to reason.

So, we begin with:

But I wonder, if 19 terrorists can learn to fly aircraft into buildings, couldn’t 14 terrorists learn to play instruments?

Certainly, terrorists are a versatile and multi-skilled lot. Nothing, as we know, focuses the mind like terror, which is why terrorists score so highly in SATs and other standardised tests. However, other people can learn to play instruments as well. People who are not terrorists. People whom the FBI could examine and find not to be terrorists. Like musicians.

However, this is not the only problem here. Why would these terrorists have learned to play their instruments? To the best of my knowledge, it is rare for a law enforcement agent to demand that an individual demonstrate that they are able to play an instrument in order to prove a lack of criminal intent. In fact, the only substantiated episode I can think of is the episode of Fame where Leroy recovers a stolen cello from a pawn shop, but is stopped by a policeman on his way to return it to its owner and ordered to play "Happy Birthday".

Is anyone else seeing the potential for a movie here? A group of terrorists train as a band in order to infiltrate airport security (nobody ever checks Arabs carrying instrument bags, after all, whereas Arabs with laptop bags or satchels can expect as a matter of course the full four-finger treatment), but discover that they actually love music far more than terror in the skies. Kind of like School of Rock meets Air Force One.

Anyway, these considerations are of no import. After all, they may not even have played their instruments. We are further asked, in the follow-up article, "As a dog to its vomit, so a fool returneth to her folly".

Where exactly did this band of 14 musicians play? What was the name of the band? Who booked the band and what kind of music did they play? Did anyone follow up and actually witness these 14 men performing at their desert casino gig?

Right here, arsewit.

So, this group of terrorists seems so far to have done far more on the music than on the terrorism. This may explain why they are not on the FBI's terrorist watch list. But as a dog to its vomit...

And I now have another important question... Is there a link between my experience on flight #327 and the arrest of Ali Mohamed Almosaleh by customs agents at the Minneapolis Airport on July 7 (approximately one week after my flight)? Almosaleh was traveling from Damascus, Syria, to Minneapolis on KLM/Northwest Airlines. According to CNN.com, "Agents found Almosaleh to be carrying what they described as a suicide note and DVDs containing anti-American material."

It was initially reported by CNN.com that the man "is not known to the intelligence community, and that his name was not on any terrorist watch list." The following day, on TwinCities.com, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported that Almosaleh "had something with him indicating a connection with at least one known terrorist." So, did a more thorough check of the man reveal this critical new information? Remember, according to Adams, FAM checked the 14 Syrian men on my flight against the terrorist watch lists. They found no match, so they let them go. I wonder what might have happened if the 14 Syrians on my flight had been looked into more thoroughly?

Let's pause for a moment to reflect. She is saying that the fact that the musicians did not appear on the terrorist watch list is incontrovertible proof that they are terrorists. After all, the nice man with the suicide note and the anti-American DVDs was not on the watch list, and he was a Syrian too. He knew a terrorist, and thus, since all Syrians who travel on Northwest Airlines congregate in the Syrian Terrorists Lounge before boarding, so did they. Stands to reason. The failure was in the FBI, for not subjecting these men, who had no previous and no suggestion of any terrorist inclinaton, or any means of making real that inclination, to sustained interrogation until the inevitable terrorist connection was established.

Incidentally, if you want to make people consider terrorism, the sort of state-sponsored monstering apparently advocated here is a great start.

Personally, given that any young Arab male travelling in a group must know that possession of an argument that comes to a point, much less a metal object that does the same, will lead to a long stay in the hoosegow, I would be surprised if a group of non-terrorist musicians would be so foolish to wander around an airport with the ingredients of a bomb. Which, of course, they didn't. Fortunately, the ever-resourceful paranoiac has an explanation for this. It was, apparently, a "dry run".

Yes, kids, you heard it here first. The forces of terror, in order to test our defences, send musicians onto planes wthout bomb-making equipment and have them go to the toilet, to see whether they will subsequently succeed in sending terrorists onto planes with bomb-making equipment and have them go to the toilet. Devilish. By getting onto a plane without bomb-making equipment and with a colon, I too have unwittingly contributed to the terrorist threat. I have to say that, if this is true, the war on terror has just been won. I am never going to be frightened again.

You see, blowing up a plane is kind of a one-shot deal. Let me explain. You try to blow up a plane, then generally, albeit not inevitably, either the plane blows up or you are killed or captured. You practise blowing up a plane without any explosives... well, you get arrested at the other end at best, by the looks of it, with a concommitant risk that you will expose your superiors and fellow travellers to risk. Not exactly ideal. That's assuming an air marshall doesn't blow you away to be on the safe side.

So, on the balance of probabilities, it seems to me remarkaby unlikely that this women's screaming tizzy prevented the destruction of a plane, and more likely that she is trying to justify her knee-jerk squeamishness by claiming that, somehow, they were terrorists, honest. This could have made a light but thought-provoking piece on the climate of fear that leads us to jump to conclusions - juxtaposed neatly by the point that the air marshalls - professional identifiers of terror - were concerned that she, for all her pearly-toothed Americanity, might have been a terrorist ruse to draw them out. Food for thought there. She has turned it into an increasingly ludicrous set of insinuations, non sequiturs and delusions. This is not good journalism, good civics or a good use of time.