'Suspicious comment' provokes LAX terminal evacuation The FBI yesterday detained an unnamed passenger who provoked a two-hour closure of a terminal at Los Angeles International Airport by making a "suspicious comment". Details are sketchy, but the unnamed man was on Southwest Airlines flight 1182 from El Paso, Texas, when he apparently joked to another passenger that he had …
All the fear mongering probably does you a favour when it comes to tourism. I wonder how many would-be-tourists are scared away because of all the bother ?
Come to London, be harassed by police and be fearful of being blown up!
Goes doubly for yankland.
I'm off down the pub to experiment with mixing Ethanol and Dihydrogen Monoxide.
-Antony
2000: Travelling back to Blighty from New York with three mates. I'd already made several suggestive comments on the way to the airport about how I'd like to get very intimate with some good looking American girls. Especially ones in uniform and how there would be a massive explosion of love... You know the sort of stuff. Think David Coverdale and Whitesnake lyrics and you're on the right track.
Get to the airport, check in bags, answer all the questions properly and politely. Get through security and on the way to the gate when a small uniformed Hobbit like creature approached me and asked if she (I think) could please check my backpack. She proceeds to open a sachet and wipes it over the bag.
My three mates are stood off some distance. I try to make conversation with the creature and ask what she (I think) is checking for. Deadpan comes the response:
"I'm looking for traces of explosives, sir"
That's it, my mates are on the floor wetting themselves. They're taking bets on whether I've got the gall/cojones/stupidity repeat my comment from earlier. I saw a small diamond shaped scar where the operation to remove the sense of humour had been carried out on the uniformed creature facing me.
A night in a New York prison did not appeal to me, so I said "Oh." and kept my peace.
One mate had to change his underwear he had been laughing so hard.
If I can turn down a chance to make a lewd, suggestive joke because there's at least one night in prison facing me if I do then surely even the meanest intellect can figure out you don't make jokes about bombs at or around airports.
Even at my local hick airport (East Midlands) there are plenty of signs up that say things like "do not joke about dangerous / illegal substances in your luggage as these will be taken seriously"
Now, what fuckwit, in any day and age let alone today's absolute age of paranoia jokes about having explosives in his luggage at an airport and expects the authorities to not do the following:
(1) point guns at him
(2) shout a lot
(3) examine every little item he has in his possession
(4) examine every orifice where anything can be hidden
(5) pull him from the flight
(6) prosecute him
(7) deport / travel ban him
(9) place him on the "no flight" list
Should have just assumed it was a bomb jacket and shot him. SO19 would have shown you how to do it.
"Maybe security do need to take everything seriously but there's a point where some common sense should come into the equation!"
If they had common sense, they'd be holding down a real, productive job instead of making strangers take of their shoes.
The US Administration has profited greatly from inculcating the gullible with the "War on Terror" and the UK government has seen that and enviously tried to outdo Bush & Co.
Only the stupid and the deliberately ignorant can fail to see that the "War on Terror" is in fact a war on the free citizens of both nations, and a bald-faced attempt to abrogate the freedoms guaranteed by the blood of the generations that have gone before, as far back as the Magna Carta.
There's nothing remotely funny about the modern Schutzstaffel.
"I have just read an explosive story that will blow the entire corrupt Bush regime apart" at which point some looney inbred George Bush fanatic to stupid to get any jobs better than airport security guard decided the guy was clearly a threat not only to the US but the entire universe, After all, isn't the US the centre of everything?
Seriously though, the guy is a complete lackwit. Anyone that does that deserves to have a full cavity search done by someone with hands the size a xmas ham. But did they need to close the entire airport for 2 hours?
with the court's permission, i'll copy and paste an excerpt from an article i posted on my blog a while back, featuring one of my own brief encounters with intellectually challenged airport security:
mid 1990s - manchester airport
i am waiting to pass through airport security, on my way to malaga airport in spain, for a college trip to córdoba. when it’s my turn to go through the metal detector, i take off my leather jacket and my bullet belt and hand them to the customs official to check by hand, as i know they’ll set the detector off.
“what’s this?” she asks, holding up the belt [for lo’ t’was a she this time, proving - if nothing else that fuckwitted stupiditiy is not an entirely male preserve].
“it’s a belt” i say
“you can’t take ammunition on an aeroplane!” she almost squeaks in her astonishment
[at this point i should point - out for those unfamiliar with what a bullet belt is, and who may be tempted to side with the customs officer and chide me for a fool and a knave - that a bullet belt is a belt made by clipping together spent cartridge cases, which the MOD sells on to army surplus shops and the like. they are widely available in such shops [at a considerable markup] and - polished up or chrome plated - from from various punk and alternative clothing ’boutiques’. they are “ammunition” in the same way that an empty beer can is an “alcoholic drink”
anyway, back to the fun:
i lift up the belt and show the customs woman that the belt is made from spent cartrdges
“it’s not ammunition” i say patiently “they’re spent cartridges”
“yes, well they could be made back into ammunition!” she states firmly
“on a fucking aeroplane!” this time i’m the one whose voice has gone up an octave in disbelief - my mind filled with the vision of myself sat in my aeroplane seat with a pestle and mortar filled with sulphur and saltpetre on one side of the fold-down table in front of me and a crucible full of molten lead on the other - trying to convert my bullet belt back into some kind of lethal weapon. god knows what i was supposed to be going to fire the fuckers out of tho’. presumably she thought i looked capable of whipping up an automatic rifle from a couple of plastic forks and a complementary hot towel, too!
“don’t you think someone might notice?” i continue, incredulously
“you can’t take ammunition on board the aeroplane” repeats the customs woman blankly. falling back, at this point on another of the unwritten rules of the job; “no matter how idiotic and illogical your knee-jerk reaction to a given situation is, you must never, under any circumstances, deviate from that position, no matter what. you are wearing a cap and badge - ergo you are *always* in the right”
in the end i have to go and find a luggage storage kiosk at the airport, where i hand my belt over, for keeping until i return from my holidays. so i board the plane beltless, but in the company of several people carrying large bottles of duty free vodka, many of whom are no doubt also carrying cigarette lighters or matches. presumably taking your own molotov cocktail components onboard being seen as posing significantly less threat to the aeroplane than a dented brass belt made of old bullet casings!
-----
paris, because aiport security staff make even her feel intellectual by comparison
... in Birmingham Airport once (The only airport in the UK, AFAIK, where security still carry firearms; H&K MP5's for the buffs) at check in. He was asked if he had anything in his baggage he shouldn't, and he replied "Oh, just a bomb!".
He was promptly greeted by shouts of "On the ground!" while several security staff extended the stocks and hit the safety catches on their guns, and the guy almost pissed himself.
This isn't about America being thought police, but about aircraft being blown up by morons and the idiots who joke about it INSIDE AN AIRPORT.
Think you'd say you had a backpack full of explosives on the Tube nowerdays?
Sure protection is good. But they've got to lighten up. By reacting like this they are giving the terrorists what they want (apart form our deaths) loss of freedom. I doubt a terrorist with explosives would say a thing since they have made it clear they want to kill as well as scare. If they had explosives they would opt for the deaths not the scare. The scare is for when they don't have explosives. See the pattern? I ask, how many terrorist attacks have been prevented by this kind of reaction to spoken word? And how many attacks have been successful where someone has said they have explosives? I doubt there are any...
Lighten up or others will do the same just to make a point.
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