Month: July 2004

Another law enforcement official proves that technology is only as good as the user:

A San Francisco police officer faces internal charges that he abandoned his traffic control duties at the airport so he could fiddle with surveillance cameras and ogle women as they walked through the terminal.

Officer William Rossi, a 25-year veteran assigned to the traffic company at San Francisco International Airport, is accused in departmental charges of using the closed-circuit surveillance system at Terminal One substation three different times Feb. 29 to “focus on women’s breasts and buttocks.”

Yessir, for every argument that cameras will prevent crime or keep us safer (as opposed to merely documenting our demises for posterity), there’s an argument that, given human nature, cameras merely allow security officials to engage their inner Porky’s.

Sir Reginald Dwight:

“There’s an atmosphere of fear in America right now that is deadly. Everyone is too career-conscious,” he told New York magazine, Interview.

…

“There was a moment about a year ago when you couldn’t say a word about anything in this country for fear of your career being shot down by people saying you are un-American,” he told the magazine.

The singer said things were different in the 1960s.

“People like Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, The Beatles and Pete Seeger were constantly writing and talking about what was going on.

“That’s not happening now. As of this spring, there have been virtually no anti-war concerts – or anti-war songs that catch on, for that matter,” he said.

…

“On the one hand, you have someone like Toby Keith, who has come out and been very supportive of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq – which is OK because America is a democracy and Toby Keith is entitled to say what he thinks and feels.

“But, on the other hand, the Dixie Chicks got shot down in flames last year for criticising the president. They were treated like they were being un-American, when in fact they have every right to say whatever they want about him because he’s freely elected, and therefore accountable.”

Elton John seems a little confused about the difference between the right to free speech, which exists, and the right to be loved, lauded, and underwritten by government grants when speaking in ways that people don’t approve, which exists only in his fevered flashbacks of 1960s utopian dreams.

Unintentionally ironically, undoubtedly, he voiced these concerns in New York City and was not immediately shot by government speech code enforcement officials.

All the cool bloggers are, about an account in Women’s Wall Street that apparently details a dry-run of some sort of terror attack in a flight from Detroit to LA:

When I returned to my seat I was unable to assure my husband that all was well. My husband immediately walked to the first class section to talk with the flight attendant. I might be overreacting, but I’ve been watching some really suspicious things… Before he could finish his statement, the flight attendant pulled him into the galley. In a quiet voice she explained that they were all concerned about what was going on. The captain was aware. The flight attendants were passing notes to each other. She said that there were people on board higher up than you and me watching the men. My husband returned to his seat and relayed this information to me. He was feeling slightly better. I was feeling much worse. We were now two hours into a four-in-a-half hour flight.

Approximately 10 minutes later, that same flight attendant came by with the drinks cart. She leaned over and quietly told my husband there were federal air marshals sitting all around us. She asked him not to tell anyone and explained that she could be in trouble for giving out that information. She then continued serving drinks.

About 20 minutes later the same flight attendant returned. Leaning over and whispering, she asked my husband to write a description of the yellow-shirted man sitting across from us. She explained it would look too suspicious if she wrote the information. She asked my husband to slip the note to her when he was done.

After seeing 14 Middle Eastern men board separately (six together, eight individually) and then act as a group, watching their unusual glances, observing their bizarre bathroom activities, watching them congregate in small groups, knowing that the flight attendants and the pilots were seriously concerned, and now knowing that federal air marshals were on board, I was officially terrified..

The author of the piece followed up with the proper authorities and the airlines:

Through a series of events, The Washington Post heard about my story. I talked briefly about my experience with a representative from the newspaper. Within a few hours I received a call from Dave Adams, the Federal Air Marshal Services (FAM) Head of Public Affairs. Adams told me what he knew:

There were 14 Syrians on NWA flight #327. They were questioned at length by FAM, the FBI and the TSA upon landing in Los Angeles. The 14 Syrians had been hired as musicians to play at a casino in the desert. Adams said they were scrubbed. None had arrest records (in America, I presume), none showed up on the FBI’s no fly list or the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists List. The men checked out and they were let go. According to Adams, the 14 men traveled on Northwest Airlines flight #327 using one-way tickets. Two days later they were scheduled to fly back on jetBlue from Long Beach, California to New York — also using one-way tickets.

I asked Adams why, based on the FBI’s credible information that terrorists may try to assemble bombs on planes, the air marshals or the flight attendants didn’t do anything about the bizarre behavior and frequent trips to the lavatory. Our FAM agents have to have an event to arrest somebody. Our agents aren’t going to deploy until there is an actual event, Adams explained. He said he could not speak for the policies of Northwest Airlines.

Here’s what Hugh Hewitt had to say:

If this account is true, the plane should have been obliged to land upon the first indication of concern among the flight attendants and passengers. Calling the Homeland Security Department: Is this a true account, and if so, are you happy with the actions of the pilot/marshalls etc?

How easily the simple solution eludes us, Hugh.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you are on a plane, witness suspicious activity, communicate with the authorities in the air, and although they’re afraid and suspect something might be amiss but cannot act because protocol indicates they cannot until an event occurs, make an event.

Stand up in your seat and say, “There is a bomb on board this plane.”

They will land the plane, my friends, and they will take you into custody. You’ll face a felony charge or more if they actually find a bomb or bomb-making components on the plane, but if the people around you are crying into their husbands’ shoulders and you’re facing death, you are not impotent.

You just have to work the impotent system to survive and achieve your goals. Why shouldn’t you? They will.

Bear in mind this tactic is something to use only if you are honestly afraid for your life and the lives of those around you. It carries a high penalty, regardless of if you’re crying wolf when there’s a wolf around or not.

UPDATE: More good ideas here.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the latest felony that has come to my attention courtesy of a news spot on the radio and confirmed by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

The suspect, Dennis A. Hobson, 43, was charged with first-degree murder and armed criminal action in the death of Maxine Cheeks, 55. Police say Hobson led them to her badly beaten body on a vacant lot off South 14th Street near Soulard Street.

Hobson’s son, Antoine M. Ward, 26, of the 3000 block of Walton Place, was arrested Wednesday. He was charged with abandonment of a corpse, a felony.

Abandoning a corpse is apparently a felony. Because sometimes accessory after the fact just won’t do it. My goodness, why aren’t all murderers charged with this secondary crime that often succeeds the first?

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which by the way does not include me as a columnist, has former television critic Eric Mink dissing the Bush Administration in a serious column. I guess Mink grew up and turned off the television and started reading the Post-Dispatch for news insights:

Late last week, yet another august body – this time the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence – issued yet another massive report again confirming that the U.S. intelligence establishment got just about everything wrong when it came to Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.

But buried deep in the Senate report – little noticed and even less remarked upon – is something important that the committee credits the intelligence community for getting right. And it puts the torch to whatever flimsy tissue of credibility the Bush administration had left:

With respect to contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida during the 1990s, the committee found that the CIA “reasonably assessed . . . that these contacts did not add up to an established formal relationship.”

Got that? Without a mutual protection pact treaty, it didn’t exist, and Eric Mink is there to analyze it.

Wait a minute, Eric Mink, former television critic, is now the commentary editor for the Post-Dispatch editorial page? Muhahhahahaha! You cannot make this stuff up.

Of course, my chances of being a paid columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch will greatly diminish the next time Mink googles himself. To a slightly lower nil than they were before the search.

The best columnist in St. Louis is David Nicklaus, business columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Check out the wisdom from his latest column taking on light rail groupies:

With what’s spent on the trains, Castelazo and Garrett figure that taxpayers could buy a Toyota Prius for each needy MetroLink rider and have $49 million a year left over.

It’s good to see someone in the Post-Dispatch examining the actual return on the copious public wealth redistribution the paper favors as a matter-of-course.