How would you have felt on that flight?Follow

Unfounded fear or prudent concern?

I found this on another site I frequent, where various poster debated whether the writer was being racially hysterical or worried with good reason. Interesting read nonetheless. Personally, I think the air marshals should have preemptively double tapped those savages, ala Dubya Foreign Policy and be done with it.

Totem

And in other breaking news... The earth is round.

Lol, touche', Yan-yan, touche'.

Totem

Hard to say what to do. On the one hand you don't want to give up your rights, on the other we want to be safe.

Giving up personal freedoms for safety is a scary thought in itself.

I have no solution to offer, but I know one thing, if I had seen the same thing, I would have been pretty scared, and would have began unscrewing my tray table for doing battle.

I'm going to go with hysterical overreaction.

The men were questioned at length. No device or materials were found. OH MY GOD they were speaking to each other in their own language.

I don't believe the flight attendant said anything to passengers about the presence of air marshalls. That's just nuts.

I'd tend to believe that the band had eaten dinner together and had something that disagreed with them. But hey, if you want to see terrorists in every row of every plane you board, feel free.

"He who would forfeit liberty for safety deserves neither."

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.


Then she patted my husband on the head and gave him a "Secret Delta Airlines Decoder Ring" and a toy airplane! She then told him that he did a great thing for his country and that he'd be recieving his "Junior G Man" badge in the mail in a few short weeks.

That's funny. =)

Smash has a good point. Someone else said it too but I doubt the flight attendant would say "I'm giving you secret info for no reason, even though I could get in trouble"


Oh, I think the flight attendednt probbaly did say it. She saw a terrified white couple in fear of brown skinned people and needed a way to calm them down so she gave them something to do to make them feel better.

How can they be wrong to profile in this scenario. As most of you have mentioned the suspicious behavior and the fact they all boarded at seperate times would cause me a bit of intrepidation. The funny thing is the whole story seems very contrived, although it is quite appearent it is true. I don't know, getting up simultaneusly to go to the bathroom, taking objects into the restroom?

Lets see...

1. The two groups boarded seperately. Perhaps their government or their university recommends to their citizens that when flying internationaly to not travel in groups smaller than 6 for their safety.

2. Since there is a strong probability that the majority of the non Arabs on the flight understand their culture they have no idea what was actually going on. I have been on long flights many times with groups of people and we would congregate at the back of the plane to play cards, ******** etc... to pass the time.

3. The bathroom thing, well that could be explained like some one did above. Bad food. I was on a flight back from Korea about ten years ago and after a lay over in Japan a group of people from an indonesian country got on, half way over the Pacific, the toilets where backed up and overstuffed with toilet paper. The people from that group did not understand the concept of flushing toilets and was amazed by them. What we as Americans take for granted other cultures consider them a luxury. Who knows how many flushing toilets these guys had seen before arriving in the US.

4. The McDonalds bag? WHo knows maybe one of them ordered a McRib Sandwich not knowing it was pork and had to flush the thing before his other party members new what it was?

I mean the variables are endless.

Have any of you seen Joan of Arc? When all the different ways the sword could have ended up in the field was given to her? WHy did she choose to believe the Sword was Divinely provided? Much goes to the fear and perception of the woman who wrote the article.

Not by me.

Yeah no kidding Smash. This coming from a journalist, the 12 guys were probably Swedish and they weren't guys at all they were swimsuit models that drew attention to themsleves because of their g string batingsuits that they wore. The FBI? NO WAY, just some groupies there to meet them as they got off the plane.

Guess I got caught up in the story too much, as I usually take what the media has to say with a grain of salt.

I do like how all you cool cucumbers would casually nod your head at these guys on your way to the bathroom as they furtively assemble their bombs under their trays. Undoutedly as they shouted, "Allah akbar!" and wielded box cutters you'd think, "Hmmm, what hygienically conscious passengers these swarthy fellow travelers are! Why, I do believe they are all excited about trimming their beards."

You guys are in the wrong profession. Y'all shoulda been air marshals for your overwhelmingly calm and superior powers of observation and deduction.

The thing is, I know the truth. Half of you'd be jamming your thumb so hard onto the Call Stewardess button you could hear tendons pop and the other half'd be sobbing uncontrollably while mumbling, "We're all gonna DIE!"

Totem