From the op-ed page of today's Wall St. Journal.... Straighten Up and Fly Right By HEATHER MAC DONALD http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110194850394688792,00.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries Some excerpts. The government antidiscrimination hammer has hit the airline industry most severely. Department of Transportation lawyers have extracted millions in settlements from four major carriers for alleged discrimination after 9/11, and they have undermined one of the most crucial elements of air safety: a pilot's responsibility for his flight. Transportation's action against American Airlines was typical. In the last four months of 2001, American carried 23 million passengers and asked 10 of them not to board because they raised security concerns that could not be resolved in time for departure. For those 10 interventions (and an 11th in 2002), DOT declared American Airlines a civil-rights pariah, whose discriminatory conduct would "result in irreparable harm to the public" if not stopped. . . . . Somehow, DOT lawyers failed to include in their complaint one further passenger whom American asked not to board in 2001. On Dec. 22, airline personnel in Paris kept Richard Reid off a flight to Miami. The next day, French authorities insisted that he be cleared to board. During the flight, Reid tried to set off a bomb in his shoe, but a stewardess and passengers foiled him. Had he been kept from flying on both days, he too might have ended up on the government's roster of discrimination victims. ...Jehad Alshrafi is typical of those who were included in the suit against American. On Nov. 3, 2001, this Jordanian-American was scheduled to fly out of Boston's Logan Airport (from which two of the hijacked planes -- including American Flight 11 -- departed on 9/11). A federal air marshal told the pilot that Alshrafi's name resembled one on a terror-watch list -- and that he had been acting suspiciously, had created a disturbance at the gate, and posed unresolved security issues. The pilot denied him boarding. Alshrafi was later cleared and given first-class passage on another flight.... ...American contested DOT's action, but fighting the government civil-rights complex is futile. In February 2004, the airline, while denying guilt, settled the action for $1.5 million, to be spent on yet more "sensitivity training." American's pilots were outraged. "Pilots felt: 'How dare they second-guess our decision?'" says Denis Breslin, a pilots' union official. Not satisfied with just one scalp, DOT lawyers brought identical suits against United, Delta and Continental. Those carriers also settled, pledging more millions for "sensitivity training" -- money much better spent on security training than on indoctrinating pilots to distrust their own security judgments.
Has the WSJ retracted its claims that Vince Foster was murdered? Remind me of the flight that Jehad Alshrafi hijacked. I couldn't find a reference to it in the liberal media.
So XXXxin typical. Rather than look at the facts of THIS particular turn of events, you and others of the leftist spin like you would rather slander, slur, and demagogue -- and condemn those you disagree with by engaging in supercilious loathing. Don't you know that this is why you LOSE elections? Tell you what...next time YOU'RE wrong, I'll consign YOU to the ashbin, just like you are so willing to consign others. By the way, how's it smelling down there? Oh, did you ask Alsharafi how his first class flight was after he was allowed back on board?? Oh, that's right, he was racially profiled. Exsqueeze me.
I thought it was because I advocated the pre-emptive nuclear assault on Saudi Arabia. And that I didn't file in any state. How is my flipping off WSJ, Weekly Standard and Drudge different from the right flipping off CBS, the Washington Post and the New York Times? Well, apart from the right flipping off sources that report biased stories in favor of the right. And that CBS actually ran a retraction of the story that was not in favor of the right. I have no idea whether he was racially profiled or not. Why is the WSJ editorial goblin bringing him up otherwise, though?
There's a distinct difference, though, between "flipping off" and implying an incredibility to THIS particular item because it comes from an media outlet whose views you may not subscribe to, or who had questionable stories in the past. I may give the rhetorical finger every once in a while to the NYT (suggested other motto: "All the news that fit to make up"), but I still buy it, still read it, and, generally, still think it is a damn good paper (certain columnists and editorialists not withstanding). Bottom line...this story is compelling about how political correctness has run amuck.
I'm pretty sure I read in the newspapers somewhere that there's a Republican administration in charge. If an agency run by conservatives still brings discrimination lawsuits, is there any possibility that there might be something behind those cases? I find it laughable that the Wall Street Journal considers the "government civil-rights complex" to be some marauding juggernaut of litigiousness. Would that it were so.
I just want to express my heart-fealt appreciation of the fact that I no longer experiense a warp of the space-time continuum as a result of seeng "BigSoccer Yellow Card" underneath "Dan Loney". Welcome back to active duty, Dan. Oh, and I hope the prick still wears your cleat marks, whoever he was.
This is a two-page advert an Iranian attorney placed in the Washington Post yesterday- interesting read.
Hmmm....whaddya think the odds are that this guy gets of ton of information for free -- never paying a nickel because none of it is, ahem, "meritorious" -- and then he come around and starts suing like crazy?? Nah, that couldn't happen....
So all the civil libertarians aboard are "OK" with zero tolerance for racial profiling on airline flights? When you sit and await takeoff, you refrain from the normal 'look-around' to ascertain fellow passenger nationalities and heavens... the thought never ever enters your head that perhaps that guy in the third row looks a tad bit Saudi or that dark guy behind you with a beard looks like a closet jihadi? Fess up!
Actually, the guy had a strong case (he filed suit against the FAA) in federal court prior to 9/11. The case he makes is that the reason it was eventually dismissed (without legal explanation) is because "spineless" federal judges feel an obligation to cater to vague US foreign policy cues as outlined by the current administration (in lieu of 9/11 and attached sensitivites), as opposed to catering to the written word of the law and their "informed" interpretations. His point is that there is no respect for the word of law when it comes to a specific block of foreign nationals [and issues pertaining to said individuals], at the federal court level. His historical arguments are fairly common sense. Not a single Iranian has ever been charged (let alone convicted) of carrying out a terrorist operation in a foreign nation. I'm not bluffing when I say that there's no such thing as an Iranian suicide bomber- in fact, I challenge you to find a single name in this regard. Vague rhetoric and a slow associative conditioning process accounts for much of what has seeped into the psyche of the American populace (not barring its respective judiciary) that accounts for certain people turning a blind eye to injustice.
I don't support racial profiling in any way, shape or form, but you are completely wrong in this statement. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/uk/2000/iranian_embassy_siege/703016.stm
The group is comprised of Arabs, and Arabs form 2% of Iran's total populace). The key here is that they're separatists, meaning, they believe the stretch of land they live on (just inside the southern tip of Iran) is being occupied by Iran. In other words, they don't consider themselves Iranian in any sense of the word. In the US, you can somewhat easily renounce your citizenship, in Iran the procedure is long and tedious- otherwise, this group of bandits wouldn't even be "technically" Iranian.
Apparently, Iran just subcontracts their terrorism out... http://www.infoplease.com/spot/terrorism4.html
Of course, and as a young "opposition" member of the current clerical regime, I think it's pretty sickening. Yet the question must be asked: what exactly does that have to do with the ethnic profiling of Iranians in the US? The whole concept of ethnic profiling is based on a single ethnic group being over-represented in a statistical count. Because that's not the case for Iranian nationals [in terms of constituting threats to national security], it's pretty irrelevant what the Iranian government does in a funding capacity. None of the 9/11 hijackers were of Iranian extraction, yet after 9/11, newly spawned security measures most harshly affected people of Iranian extraction (as opposed to Saudis who accounted for 15 of the 19 hijackers). I'm not advocating for the ethnic profiling of Arabs, just pointing out the nonsensical hypocrisy that afflicts (or, paradoxically, enables) the current administration's policies.