[Population: One] <A HREF="http://popone.innocence.com/ar

[bryant]

From last night’s press conference:

“The report itself, I’ve characterized it as mainly history. And I think when you look at it you’ll see that it was talking about a ‘97 and ‘98 and ‘99. It was also an indication as you mentioned that that bin Laden might want to hijack an airplane, but as you said, not to fly into a building but perhaps to release a person in jail. In other words, serving as a blackmail. And of course that concerns me. All those reports concern me.”

I gotta wonder. What steps do you take to prevent a hijacking carried out in order to fly a plane into a building, and what steps do you take to prevent a hijacking carried out in order to free someone from jail? And how are they different? I can’t help thinking that the purpose of a hijacking doesn’t have so very much to do with how you prevent it.

Comments

[jadasc.livejournal.com]

I think they're quite different -- in particular, I think that a hijacking to free someone from jail would *not* have been prevented, because it's easy to use that to make political hay. "We do not negotiate with terrorists," after all. Best case? You get a dramatic in-air confrontation that makes the US response team look strong. Worst case? You lose the passengers on the plane. A tragedy, but within the realm of acceptable losses. Americans have endured that sort of thing before, and it makes a decent rationale to pursue that Middle East policy you've got in the drawer.