What's a terrorist to do?

[miked]

quote: At one point during the ordeal, passengers were told that the man who helped subdue the alleged attacker was exiting the plane. A female passenger who was seated 13 rows behind the suspect recalled the scene clearly. The woman, a nurse from Dayton, Ohio, described a blonde man with his fingers individually bandaged, and another bandage around his palm. A few people, she said, began to clap as he walked by.

Reflecting the new, more proactive security role that has emerged for passengers in the wake of the 9-11 terrorist attacks in the U.S., Rep. Peter King (R., N.Y.) told Fox News, "they were the first responders in this attack; they got the job done."

Bill wrote:
"Bastard was lucky I wasn't on the flight. Sheet happens when you're subduing an a$$hole on fire you know... Twisted Evil

Parts of me hate what I become when others are in harm's way - which is why I avoid such situations when I can. "

--------------------------------------------------------

Bill, I personally know from a first hand source that was on the plane in the middle of the action (but not the 'hero') that the radicalized terrorist had the s***t beat out of him by passengers and crew that were on the plane. Reason being that he continued to frantically resist even after the 'hero' subdued him. This man was insistent on redirecting everyone's flight to a meeting with Allah and the passengers/crew had no choice but to take this action.

I seriously doubt that any charges will be brought against the passengers and crew who participated in the action as it was literally a life and death situation.

Due to confidentiality issues, I am not at liberty to reveal my source for this first hand information.

I am speculating that the reason that you do not see pics. or video of this man immediately after the incident is that the media and the government does not the rest of us to see how badly the terrorist was beaten. Multiple injuries and serious trauma would be visible and this is why he was taken off by gurney from the plane.

Regards,

Mike DeDonato

[Bill Glasheen]

Mike

Mum's the word!

I imagine at least part of the reason he was taken off by gurney is because of the birthday candle he lit in his crotch. It's my understanding that they had to "pants" him to stop him from burning.



What a day at the gym that would be. Better than Thursday night sparring, eh?

- Bill

[Bill Glasheen]

I don't quite know what to make of this yet. But I find it very interesting.

Flight 253 passenger Kurt Haskell: 'I was visited by the FBI'

- Bill

[AAAhmed46]

1) He campaigned on being a kinder, gentler leader. If only I say we are sorry... If only I extend an olive branch... If only I promise everyone we will be gone... If only the leader isn't George W Bush... Initially everyone bought the message - including and especially Major Hassan.

Politicians make promises all the time. Somehow everyone espected he would be different. Then they are shocked to find out no difference. Well he isnt.
Major Hassan would have still probably freaked out.

2) He sincerely believes that his charm campaign will make others (Iran, al-qaeda, etc.) play nicer with the United States.

I doubt he really believes that, he just convinced people that thats all he needed to do.

3) It's been about a year now and he hasn't changed any policies with respect to boots on the soil of "Muslim" countries (if there is such a thing). Rather he just announced more troops for Afghanistan. And now we have regular drone attacks in Pakistan.

Exactly. Instead of finishing what was started(yeah i know that includes Afganistan) he started new tensions with pakistan? Finish iraq, finish Afghanistan Obama.

Somehow when YOU are the commander in chief, it's much more difficult to change the course of that ocean liner. Icebergs here we come!

Whether you agree with medicare or not, even the left has been pulling their hair noticing hypocrisy, and even Cenk of Young turks(very leftist) pulled evidence showing obama had no intention of instituting health care reform, as well as putting pressure on corporations.

Actually a lot. And almost all of them were stopped well before they happened. Spain's attack is the only one I can think of that was of any consequence. Some successes were publicized more than others.

Emphasis on BEFORE they even happened or were attempted. The evidence gathered was also strong. Now suddenly cat Stevens(pre-obama, his views may be controversial on hamas, but many university professors and others have similar views) and Sami al-arian are on a no fly list, with guys like Arar who was an innocent man deported by american authorities to Syria when coming from canada to the states, where he was tortured. Turned out he was innocent.
But then such obvious threats come sooo close. What kind of criteria is used for profiling?

Fort Hood was the first of what may be many for quite some time. And now we have al Qaeda operations in Yemen. That country is the new Afghanistan.

Yep, Yemen has always been nuts, always decentralized. Though Al-qaeda seems to have many faces. The Iraqi al-qaeda seen in Mathhtew Alexanders book seem to be highly politically focussed rather then religiously, yet Mutalib, Hassan, and almost every incident of home grown terrorism is religious extremism.
I wonder....what is the face of Yemens extremism? I think it may be far more ideologically focussed then the Iraqi version, but thats just my guess.

This kind of stuff has to be stopped well before it gets to the airport terminal. If Obama doesn't stay on the offensive (like the previous administration) we're in for some ugly weather.
- Bill

Totally true.

[IJ]

Two quick comments:

"Instead of finishing what was started(yeah i know that includes Afganistan) he started new tensions with pakistan? Finish iraq, finish Afghanistan Obama."

Diplomacy will always be an issue with the drone attacks. However, we can't just say "finish Afghanistan" and then he can deal with Taliban in pakistan. They're the same or closely related people and even if you could scour Afghanistan and clean out every valley or cave, they'd just be waiting in pakistan for us to move on. It's an area with artificial and not very well designed borders and we're dealing with an enemy that doesn't identify with a state and is not confined by lines on the map. Pakistan is another front in the same war, as evidenced by the deadly car bombing reported today in retaliation for anti-militant efforts among the people there.

"If Obama doesn't stay on the offensive (like the previous administration) we're in for some ugly weather."

Terrorist attacks are rare events we have some control over. Looking at a large trend of activity may be useful, but a periodic attack or car bombing isn't going to be a reliable measure of policy. Analogy: sometimes patients have heart attacks on the best regimens around, and others don't despite chain smoking and terrible cholesterols and diabetes. The climate changes, and the fluctuations could easily obscure anything man is doing with CO2 etc or be unrelated; a warm summer doesn't meant the sky is falling; a cold one doesn't mean we don't have global warming; a jump for 15 years or longer could be all random and unrelated to our cars.

Instead of calling out Clinton, Bush, or Obama when there is an attack, we need to think about the specific policy and be concrete about what could have been done better. And even then, hindsight is 20/20. It's really only valid if someone says we should make a specific change, we don't, and something bad happens and it appears the policy change would have helped based on the specifics. But we're going to be attacked until the USA has no interest in the middle east or its oil OR we make nice with wacko fundamentalists who've been taught all their lives to hate us. Good luck with both.

[Bill Glasheen]

we can't just say "finish Afghanistan" and then he can deal with Taliban in pakistan. They're the same or closely related people and even if you could scour Afghanistan and clean out every valley or cave, they'd just be waiting in pakistan for us to move on. It's an area with artificial and not very well designed borders and we're dealing with an enemy that doesn't identify with a state and is not confined by lines on the map.

It is true that we're dealing with one set of enemies (al Qaeda and the Taliban) that operates without regard for borders in the region. In the case of Pakistan, their ISI is funding terrorists attacks both in India and in Afghanistan. And they're operating inside the Pakistani border. Furthermore... they're using U.S. aid money to do it.

Pakistan brings on the added issue of a country with nuclear capabilities, and a blood enemy with even better nuclear capabilities to their north.

Most of the staging grounds for attacks against NATO forces in Afghanistan are in Pakistan these days. So it makes sense to increase the ambient pressure on the entire region. Otherwise you just demonstrate the balloon effect.

- Bill

[AAAhmed46]

we can't just say "finish Afghanistan" and then he can deal with Taliban in pakistan. They're the same or closely related people and even if you could scour Afghanistan and clean out every valley or cave, they'd just be waiting in pakistan for us to move on. It's an area with artificial and not very well designed borders and we're dealing with an enemy that doesn't identify with a state and is not confined by lines on the map.

It is true that we're dealing with one set of enemies (al Qaeda and the Taliban) that operates without regard for borders in the region. In the case of Pakistan, their ISI is funding terrorists attacks both in India and in Afghanistan. And they're operating inside the Pakistani border. Furthermore... they're using U.S. aid money to do it.

Pakistan brings on the added issue of a country with nuclear capabilities, and a blood enemy with even better nuclear capabilities to their north.

Most of the staging grounds for attacks against NATO forces in Afghanistan are in Pakistan these days. So it makes sense to increase the ambient pressure on the entire region. Otherwise you just demonstrate the balloon effect.

- Bill

Pakistan originally helped create the Taliban(Bhutto, she isn't so great) but it quickly became a problem.

Besides, almost every terrorist attack that had been successful was home grown in the west. These guys are only a threat to each other in the region. They have always had ethnic problems, but now the Taliban has jumped on board it all.

The man in power right now is not helping. Musharaff may have been a dictator, but he kept these guys under control.

[Bill Glasheen]

Oh Justin!!! THIS is what I was looking for.

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama declared Thursday "the buck stops with me" for the nation's security, taking responsibility for failures that led to the near-disastrous Christmas attack on a Detroit-bound airliner and vowing the problems would be corrected. He said the lapses were widespread but suggested no officials would be fired.

Obama didn't tell intelligence officials to dramatically change what they're doing. Instead, he told them to do it better, and faster. He left it to them to figure out how.

Clearly aware of the potential political fallout, Obama struck a tough tone toward the anti-terror fight, taking the rare step – for him – of calling it a "war."

In one concrete change, the administration is adding more air marshals to flights. Hundreds of law enforcement officers from Homeland Security Department agencies are being trained and deployed to the federal Air Marshal Service, said a government official familiar with the strategy.

There are more than 4,000 federal air marshals, while about 29,000 domestic and international flights take place in the U.S. each day.

In the president's bleak assessment and a White House-released report about what went wrong, the country got an alarming picture of a post-Sept. 11 debacle: an intelligence community that failed to understand what it had. U.S. intelligence officials had enough information to identify the suspect as an al-Qaida terrorist operative and keep him off a plane but still could not identify and disrupt the plot, and security measures didn't catch him, either.

Obama announced about a dozen changes designed to fix that, including new terror watch list guidelines, wider and quicker distribution of intelligence reports, stronger analysis of those reports, international partnerships and an interagency effort to develop next-generation airport screening technologies.

More inquiries are on the way.

It's about effing time! It took two (2) weeks for his speechwriter to come up with that line. Maybe he read my scorching review of his administration's handling of the affair.

- Bill

[Valkenar]

It's about effing time!

I hope that's the real joke in your post. Shall we delve into the history of presidential failures and see how 2 weeks compares to the average for responsibility taking?

Maybe he read my scorching review of his administration's handling of the affair.

That's my guess. He probably couldn't staunch the flow of tears your evisceration of his standing as a human being occasioned long enough to appear in public for those two weeks.

[Bill Glasheen]

Shall we delve into the history of presidential failures...

Obama is president, Justin. Repeat it over and over. You don't get to blame it on "the other guy" any more. You can do it if you wish, but it's an obvious attempt to change the subject.

for those two weeks

... he blamed an intelligence community that he bashed, demoralized, and almost defanged over the entire 2009 calendar year. It's no longer those bad guys; it's now his own intelligence processes on his watch. He trashed them and then wondered why workers in the community couldn't do their jobs.

Then he went on playing golf while he let Napolitano make a fool of herself (e.g. "Doesn't pass the laugh test.") on Sunday morning talk shows.

He finally came around to my point of view - articulated earlier. Please re-read all my posts. I did see all of this independently, Justin. But low and behold, editorials mirroring my point of view popped up everywhere. As they say, great minds thing alike. Warped ones as well...

Someone who read Goleman and any basic book on Six Sigma told him what a fool he was making of himself. He did a complete 180.

Read his speech, Justin. It's quite revealing. (You might miss some important points if you haven't read up on the two subjects I mentioned above.)

- Bill

[Glenn]

I know I would hate for them to take the time to get the facts first. The only reason 2 weeks seems like a long time is because the media has long since moved on to other news by then.

Frankly I don't see jumping out and taking the blame for such events as being a function of the presidency anyway. I would rather they spend that time focusing on the situation and leave the blame game to the media.

[Bill Glasheen]

I know I would hate for them to take the time to get the facts first.

Someone should have told that to Obama when he made his first speech.

Frankly I don't see jumping out and taking the blame for such events as being a function of the presidency anyway.

Tell that to Harry Truman. Tell that to any CEO who stays for any length of time.

The problem with Obama is that he doesn't have any executive experience. His knee-jerk response was that of a Congressional politician and not one of a leader. Methinks his speechwriters and advisers were on vacation that day. It shows.

Leaders don't need to have all the answers off the cuff. But they do need to know how to inspire, how to communicate, and - most importantly - how to take responsibility. Those under you will model responsible behavior if you walk the talk. If it's all about pointing fingers and finding scapegoats, then process will fail - just as it did on Christmas.

- Bill

[Glenn]

He trashed them and then wondered why workers in the community couldn't do their jobs.

So they couldn't handle some criticism from the boss? Good luck finding a job where that doesn't happen.

Someone who read Goleman and any basic book on Six Sigma told him what a fool he was making of himself. He did a complete 180.

Ah yes, the corporate fad called "Six Sigma", developed by Motorola to improve manufacturing processes. I was scheduled to work toward becoming a Six Sigma Black Belt at my previous job, but before I got very far through the training courses the company cancelled any further training of anyone after determining that they weren't realizing a benefit that justified the cost. Apparently services have not had the success with it that manufacturing has.

[Glenn]

Leaders don't need to have all the answers off the cuff. But they do need to know how to inspire, how to communicate

A sentiment I have always liked from Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series of novels (I forget which book specifically) is that a Captain does not have to always be right but he does have to always be decisive. I tell that to my wife everytime I'm wrong about something...to which she usually replies that she is always right, decisive, and the Captain!

[Bill Glasheen]

So they couldn't handle some criticism from the boss? Good luck finding a job where that doesn't happen.

It's one thing to criticize. It's another thing to reveal intelligence sources and methods, and allow the ninnies to threaten Nuremburg-style show trials. Yea thanks a lot, boss, for putting our country, our operatives, and our future capabilities at risk.

Good thing everyone loves us in the world and wants to do us no harm. Oh wait...

Ah yes, the corporate fad called "Six Sigma"

That "fad" keeps airplanes from falling out of the sky. It keeps pieces of hospital equipment from failing and killing people. Such events are now so rare that it's a major news story when it happens. And guess what? THAT'S THE WAY WE WANT IT WITH TERRORIST ATTACKS!!!

Back when Jack Welch ran GE, you couldn't be a manager if you didn't get a six sigma black belt in short order. And when he was manager, GE was king. They haven't been the same since then.

The Japanese are kicking our butts in the auto industry because they applied such concepts where the American automobile industry didn't.

An inability to develop a quantitative assessment of variability in process is no reason to trash something so fundamental. That's like saying engineering, statistics, and mathematical modeling are fads.

The basic premise of a six-sigma-based approach is that failure usually comes from bad process and not bad workers. Bad processes create the conditions for humans to fail. Fire the scapegoats or belittle your employees if it makes you feel better, but it doesn't make you a better manager, CEO, or leader. It's much smarter to address processes which invite human error.

Trust me... there were some emotional intelligence and six sigma people advising him on this one. The proposed solutions reek of the approaches.

• Nobody was fired and nobody was made to be a scapegoat.
• Obama correctly observed that the various agencies had gathered everything they needed to stop the bad guy, but the system failed. (Failure of process, and not people.)

Hmm... Maybe it was John McCain - a former POW - who convinced the prez that there was such a thing as torturing your own military and intelligence institutions. It's not like they hire stupid or undedicated people.

- Bill