Air Marshal shoots and kills suspect

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I think for the most part, the Patriot act itself isnt the issue here, I think the preception that we, as amercians, have of the laws that it effects is. We do expect and desierve a level of privacy. the patriot act, assumiong you arent a known criminal, shouldnt shouldnt mess with that. I think we all have the "i dont trust government" mentality and that is why we are so unsure about the laws that make it easier to "spy" on people. It doesnt give me warm fuzzies either. Im just saying that the alternitives arent that nice either.

As far as teh airmarshals on the subways... I hadnt heard about htat. I remmember hearing the Cities with those subways fussing because they needed better security and couldnt afford it....

That's right. We need our privacy, and by the ideals that America was built on, there are a lot of misdemeanours that we should be allowed to carry on with in the privacy of our own homes. Those who would attack that are criminal minds in themselves.

even if the gov't knows about this or that, that is a misdemeaner they can't do anything wit hit unless you are attempting to conspire with terrorists. And they arent supposed to be listening unless you are a conspirotor any now... Then they can use that information aginst you. Im not saying that I agree with that, im just saying that is how its supposed to work. The paranoia that we ourselves apply to this law and others like it only feeds the post 9-11 histeria that you reference.... The media has been playing up all of the events that have happened since then as well, thus further feeding the public with all of the "big brother is watching" and so on.... The fact of the matter is, that no phone or radio is secure. The NSA has been able to listen to cell phone conversations for years. Some key phrases alert toe computers and then that is looked into, sometimes more so than others. Im not saying that its right, im just saying that it always has been there...we are only just seeing it go main stream.....


* if i dont make any sense, forgive, the antihisimene Im taking makes me go really really slow...

Lady, "Big Brother" IS watching, and our rights are going down the tubes. Not that they were ever that steady, but the disparagement and removal of our rights are proceeding apace, becoming a career choice for many people.

The Luftwaffen who are going to be in place at mass transit terminals are there to stop dissidents from leaving the country. No danger of me running into such barricades, I don't have any money because of Reagan's economic reforms. Some of us are going to think that it's just good clean fun when someone gets mad because he is on a "no-fly" list that won't let him board a train and then finds himself with a machine gun to his temple when he gets upset. All these things that you seem to believe are little things are the things they do to put in a regime of total oppression piece by piece. You understand the concept of doing things piece by piece, don't you? Some people take alarm because they see the same pieces going into place that went into place in Germany in the 1930s. Then others keep calling for complacency, just relax, because it isn't Germany, it isn't the 1930s, and it's such little pieces at any given time.

You have no idea how much bullying goes on, and how much people are in denial about it. I have always been incensed by statement like "they're just protecting the populace" or "they're just following the law" because I know very well how many of these goons break the law because they think they can get away with it. I know that authority plays favorites, because when I was a kid they were always busting me for small stuff like looking at the teacher wrong and letting bullies get away with what would be felony battery if they were adults. I also know that they did it on purpose. The same spirit lives in all the things that government is doing to us right now.

I truly do not think that there will be total governmental control out of these events. Big Brother has always been watching, thats a fact. And as tecghnology gets better and better, they will be watching more... That is also a fact. What would you have us do? Stop technological advances in order to prevent further peeps into our lives? Explain how you'd "stop" the peeps into our lives? Imean as easy as it is now, the law truly wont stop them. It hasnt before.

Stop the peeping by making it easier to catch, removing the power of the President to decide when to cross Constitutional boundaries, getting rid of the ongoing states of emergency that have overlapped for the last 75 years, stop looking for excuses to be complacent about it, and give serious jail time to the people who do it. Treat it as the misconduct it is. Also give serious jail time for raids like the one at the rave in Utah, which was a licensed legal event. There was no excuse for assaulting people with deadly weapons (pointing guns at them) because a few of the people who went to the concert had drugs on them.

In other words, make government accountable for its actions and stop letting them use terrorism as an excuse. We've already had anti-terrorism squads assaulting groups of teenagers who were at a concert. How much further does it have to go? How about we stop arguing that they will never go down the slippery slope and stop them from trying to go partway down it?

I'm sorry if there might be incidents that could have been avoided if the government had those "powers." Do you forget that the same government has killed tens of thousands of people allegedly in defense of the same freedoms? If we just set them aside all those people were killed entirely in vain. There was no point at all in killing them. "It was war"? I don't care if it was war. What changes because it was war? They're still dead. Their landscape and lives are messed up. It was done in the name of protecting our freedoms. Come on, how does that make it right just to set all that aside? Some wierd thing happens in someone's mind, and then a whole lot of minds, just like some kind of alien mind control, and we've still just got to do it, just to keep them from doing something to us, no matter what the rational reasons are to not do it. That's all it is, something wierd, not the result of real necessity or rational decisions. It's just paranoia. We're fighting shadows, shooting ourselves in the feet trying to chase down phantoms.

the people that hold others accountable are government. then what?

The point of there being three branches of government was?

True, but if one is in the others pocket, as is the case in any corrupt form of the system, then what?


Two of the branches of gov't choose the court.

The popular vote really doesnt matter its the elect. college that chooses the Pres.... Again another branch of govt.....

so who's in who's pocket? I feel that popular vote alone should elect presidents.....
but I digress.....

The only way known to keep a government from destroying its people is to limit its power to do mischief. One of the powers that it should never have is what started this thread, the power of an Air Marshal to gun someone down in cold blood because they think he might be a terrorist. All of the freedoms that we enjoy, even what is left of them, are worth the risk that once every few years someone is going to blow up a building. It's bad enough that the kind of attack they claim to have performed is braindead. Someone who intended to do damage would already have been a cloud of bloody bits before the air marshal got to him.

Yes we bleeding well can take the risk over having armed psychopaths on airplanes and train platforms all prepped to blow people's brains out on their own authority. They very well are psychopaths, whether born with it or trained into it, but only a psychopath would do what those luftwaffen did on that flight. I'm not too sure of anyone who would support their actions either.

I don't know if any of you were aware but this victim of a trigger-happy gun-toting thicko airhead marshal was suffering from Schizophrenia. If you believe a terrorist would scream and shout about his intentions to draw attention to himself - congratulations! - you're as thick as a plank of wood. Now, I'm sure everyone would agree, it's time we cut some dead wood.

This is an amazingly good thread! Interesting topic, interesting insights.

Its been civil so lets try to keep it that way...no name calling or personal attacks.

BeeBee

had you read the previous posts thourorly, you'd have seen that we addressed that, as well as the fact that in law enforcement, especally in a situation where the person poses a threat, you dont have time to ask "hey dude! are you schizophrenic?!" the end result was unfortunate none the less. But if the man was unstable, he should not have been on an airplane with out his meds. Airlines have a policy in regaurds to misbehavior and unstable behavior, they generally have to divert, which will result in one of two options: arrest or hospitalization. the guy posed a threat, made a gesture as if to "detonate" or attempt to detonate the bomb he said he had, the air marshals had to make that split second decision. Had he had a bomb (which at that exact moment they had no way of knowing) he would have killed perhaps hundreds of people and injured more. Hind-sight is always 20/20, we all know that looking back we can see things that were not aparant at the time. But in my opinion, it was a justified shoot.

This kind of "split second decision making" that you are talking about I would characterize as a form of deadly psychopathy. Better to be safe than sorry, blow holes through someone, come up with glib explanations that set aside all rationality and common sense all for the sake of being safe rather than sorry, and just wave away, dismiss, disparage, and call crazy anyone who feels that if the man had a bomb he would have set it off on the airplane.

Screw this. I do not think we need law enforcement that acts like heroes this way, when it is not at all plain that a threat exists. When a threat "might" exist and law enforcement uses deadly force, this is just sick.

No "justified shoot" here. No "we didn't have time to think it through" or "split second decision making." If we are to be American heroes here, we do not have people trained to snatch and kill travellers on the very small chance that they might have a bomb. This is not an effing "post-911 world", this is the same world. We do not go around killing everyone who looks funny at us or we become more of a danger than the terrorists. This kind of thing can snowball really quickly. All this making of excuses sounds like the rhetoric that was used to excuse the murders at Waco Texas.