Morality and the Law

MORALITY AND THE LAW XLVI

THE MORALITY OF AIRLINER BOMBINGS

The recent headlines concerning the combined British and Pakistani police work that stopped several attempts to blow up airliners as they crossed the ocean, points out something I have said in previous BLOGS: There is no way you can stop someone determined to perform an act of terror. If someone is determined to find a way to bring an airliner and all its passengers down, he or she will find a way.

Actually that statement is slightly misleading. There are ways to minimize terrorism, but they are long, complex, tedious and sometimes unpleasant. Yet it is the way the British and Pakistani police were able to succeed in preventing this planned series of bombings. More about what has to be done later in the BLOG.

When a terrorist brings down an airliner, who does he kill? The proposed bombers had no way of knowing if the passengers on the proposed target airliners were Americans, Britons, Pakistanis, Christians, Jews, Muslims…or maybe even Islamic Ayatollahs. There certainly would have been a fair number of women, children and babies of all religious and/or ethnic backgrounds, from a variety of nationalities. The simple truth is that a terrorist doesn’t care.

So who are these heinous monsters? Who are these aberrations that simply don’t care about who they kill? Some were businessmen, some were university students, some were Cricket players. Most were poor, but many had successful jobs or businesses. Many had wives and children of their own. Almost all were British citizens of Pakistani background. One even worked at Heathrow airport where the bombers were to board planes.

In fact, there was only one thing these otherwise normal appearing people all had in common: They were all Islamic religious fanatics! In fact, this commonality is consistent with the 9/11 murderers, the planned "shoe bomber" and another attempted airliner bombing several years ago. All Islamic religious fanatics!

I’m not suggesting that only Islam has religious fanatics. The Jews have them, the Christians have them, the Hindus have them, etc. There have been times throughout history when Christians believed that the only good non-Christian was a dead non-Christian (witness the seven Christian Crusades where Christians sent armies into more primitive countries to either convert or kill their inhabitants). The Hindus did much the same thing with the Muslims of India and this was one of the main reasons the country of Pakistan was cut out of India…so the Muslims could live without fear of persecution.

We now have one common factor to help us identify the enemy. Religious fanatics!

All religions believe in a God of sorts. So do I. But I find those religions that believe that God can hear six billion prayers a day in over 400 languages and take the time to respond to each of them are not living with reality. I also believe that anyone who bows down to Mecca six times a day or goes to Mass two or three times every day is not a "thinking" person. The beauty and the fallacy of fanatic religious behavior are that it does not require the follower to "think". Their religious leader does that for them. Witness the Branch Davidians and their leader David Koresh. He convinced his followers that he was the only member of his cult who was allowed to engage in acts of sex with his church members…and he did so, even with children as young as seven or eight. Do you believe any parent of a seven or eight year old girl would consent to their daughter having sexual relations with a grown man? Not if they’re a thinking person. As I said, religious fanatics are not thinking people.

There are extremely few religious fanatics of any religion that can be trusted. They can and do some horrible things in the name of God. Other than the Greek God of War (Thor) or the Roman God of War (Mars), I know of no religion that preaches "kill thy neighbor". This is especially true in the beautifully written Koran, the bible of Islam.

Notwithstanding what their bible says, many Islamic leaders openly encourage their followers to kill all non Islamic people…as well as members of other sects of Islam. They are filling the malleable minds of their followers with promises that if they die while killing their enemies, Allah will present them in Heaven with seventeen virgins to care for them, an afterlife of glory and martyrdom, and that their families will be well-taken- care-of here on Earth. To a religious fanatic, that sounds pretty good. Of course no one will ever be able to check on the virgins or the Heavenly aspect of it, but there is a lot of money that comes in to take care of the families of there so-called martyrs. So, if potential suicide-murderers see lots of money coming into the families of martyrs, what their fanatic religious leader said must be true about the virgins and Heaven, too.

Most of that money comes from terrorist groups like the Hezbollah or Hamas who, in turn, are funded from Iran, Syria, and some incredibly wealthy oil sheikdoms in Saudi Arabia. It has been estimated that the annual income from donations to Hezbollah exceeds half a billion dollars. That’ll blow up a lot of airliners. We will never be able to stop that flow of "terrorist" financial support until the world has broken free of its dependence on oil from Islamic lands.

The steps being taken at our airports are helpful, but not nearly adequate to stop the religious fanatics. It’s a smart move for the airlines not to allow carry-on liquids, but how about someone who tapes a plastic pouch filled with liquids to his/her body. That won’t show-up on a metal detector, and we have no machines in use that can detect things like that. What about a woman who places a little pouch or balloon containing an explosive liquid in her vagina and takes it out in a bathroom during the flight? Or a woman with a baby (they don’t care if they kill their own children) who has a few bottles of baby formula with white balloons of an explosive liquid inside the baby bottle hidden by the milk? Or someone who replaces the contents of a prescription medicine with nitroglycerine? Or many other ways to carry explosives aboard a plane.

In other words, it’s as I said initially, if someone wants to bomb a plane, they will find a way.

Now let’s discuss what we can do to prevent it happening:

What the British and Pakistani police did was great! In Pakistan they had undercover operatives infiltrate the known religiously fanatic sects, and they knew "something" was being plotted. When they learned that the plotting was imminently going to become a reality, the Pakistanis notified the British police and raids were made and the action stopped before it got started. That’s good, cooperative, work. Covert or undercover operations are a necessary evil wherever there is religious zealotry.

One thing our government can and should do is hire approximately 100,000 people; pay them $100,000 per year because you want only the best. Train them in "terrorist profiling". The U.S. Secret Service could do an excellent job in training these people. The Secret Service are experts in spotting people who might cause trouble wherever the President appears. They know how to profile "terrorists".

These 100,000 people, once trained should be disbursed to airports, train stations, sporting events…anywhere where large numbers of people congregate…and they should use their training to spot possible terrorists. You can dress a terrorist up in a suit and tie, but there will always be something different: about the way he looks or acts. Perhaps the intensity of his manner, the look in his eyes. Something a terrorist-profiler can spot readily. These people are immediately spotted and security checks them out thoroughly before allowing them to proceed. Yes, it is an inconvenience to innocent people who fit the profile and it might cost them a delay of five minutes, at most. But isn’t the safety of the flight you’re taking worth it?

An interesting aspect is that the people who are "profiled" and double checked usually do not mind because they understand that it is done in the interest of safety. What they do object to is their ethnic or national group being singled-out of a crowd.

It should be understood that I am strongly against profiling as a general rule. Granted that profiling can be and has been abusive. What was done to the Japanese-Americans during World War II is our nation’s shame. But, let’s face fact: the likelihood of a 73 year old grandmother or a child carrying weapons is significantly more minimal than the possibility that someone of Islamic decent is carrying explosives. Yet, in our current efforts to be fair to everyone, everyone is scanned equally causing huge delays in getting onto a plane. With all the security, the scanning systems used now will not stop someone from bringing explosives aboard a plane.

Terrorist profiling is different than most racial profiling: People are not singled-out because you think they are more likely to be carrying drugs or contraband...they are singled-out because they fit the mold of someone who wants to kill hundreds of people at random. O.K. Profiling is not a perfect solution and it will be abused by some…but I’ll bet it would help save a lot of lives.

Eye retina or fingerprint scanning machines would also be helpful. It takes less than five seconds to compare someone’s retina or thumb print with an international database. It could be set to highlight people who have traveled to terrorist countries or who are known as religious zealots.

The cost of $10 billion per year for 100,000 security people is a lot of money, but it’s only a fraction of our National Security Agency budget and it would probably accomplishmore than all the other security devices currently in use, combined.

As of this writing, I know of no perfect solution, but a few of the things mentioned in this BLOG could really help.

.Stephen Ellis