Hey, what has this thread taught us about ethnic stereotypes? ;)

Nonsense, you'll crack any minute. And the TSA will show you. Especially for that purple monkey dishwasher remark.

Mike

I think you may as well close this thread now.

Actually no - these are small subset of all terrorists. The fact that these particular ones were responsible for 9/11 is irrelevant. Plus if you actually look at those photos the real skin color of some of them is hard to determine. If you extrapolate it to a particular shade that's your imagination at work.

Problem is, that correlation is so overwhelmed by false positives as to be useless. Yes, a high % of those who have attempted or committed terrorist acts against the US on US soil in the last 20 years have been men of Middle Eastern extraction. That being said, a TINY percentage of men of Middle Eastern extraction in the US and Western Europe have attempted such things. As a result, it's just not useful as a screening criterion.

No, he is no longer employed as a TSO, according to what was posted here some time back. You would have to look through the archives to find the post that mentions it. I dont care to.

Oh, so now you don’t trust the pilots? Hmmm. Best to take the train.

Interesting. Then large numbers of passengers are getting arrested every week for not intending to bring their gun to the checkpoint. The reality is that each state has their own laws on this, and they all differ from state to state, no two are the same. In some states “intent” might indeed be the deciding factor, and in some states not. I could “what if” you on this, but there would be no point in it. Far too many “what ifs” out there now, and I refuse to play that game.

Yes, SSI.

Perhaps he's not employed as a TSO now ... but he was still employed as a TSO rather shortly after the original event occurred.

How did you reach that conclusion fro what I posted? :confused:

Lots of people are arrested and not convicted. Intent is something that's ultimately to be deterimined by a jury.

Intent ("mens rea") is a basic requirement for almost any act (the exception being "strict liability" crimes) to be a crime. See the Wikipedia discussion on the topic.

If you're really claiming that many states have no requirement of intent for something to be a crime, they why isn't a pat-down a crime in those states? You can't have it both ways!

How can a factual statement of the actions of passengers be SSI? It was observed by everybody on the plane. Why those actions might be considered suspicious can be SSI, but not the factual statement of what they did. So I'm confused.

^

Perhaps there is some secret terrorist signal that is understood only by airline and TSA employees that has yet to make it into the general population.

If there were any legitimate fears here, BB would happily break the veil of SSI to tell us why there was a real danger here.

Mike

FYI, in an increasingly large number of cases, it's NOT all about intent. There was a very good WSJ piece in September highlighting the growing number of federal crimes for which there is no intent requirement. Would link, but behind paywall.

"Overall, more than 40% of nonviolent offenses created or amended during two recent Congresses—the 109th and the 111th, the latter of which ran through last year—had "weak" mens rea requirements at best, according to a study conducted by the conservative Heritage Foundation and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. The study, one of the few to examine mens rea, was extended to include the most recent Congress at the request of The Wall Street Journal."

"As Federal Crime List Grows, Threshold of Guilt Declines." WSJ, 9/27/11.
For example, from the article:

"In one case, Gary Hancock of Flagstaff, Ariz., was found guilty in 1999 of violating a federal law prohibiting people with a misdemeanor domestic violence record from gun ownership. At the time of his domestic-violence convictions in the early 1990s, the statute didn't exist—but later it was applied to him. He hadn't been told of the new law, and he still owned guns. Mr. Hancock was convicted and sentenced to five years' probation.

His lawyer, Jane McClellan, says prosecutors "did not have to prove he knew about the law. They only had to prove that he knew he had guns."

Upholding the conviction, a federal appellate court said that "the requirement of 'knowing' conduct refers to knowledge of possession, rather than knowledge of the legal consequences of possession."

We're getting way off-topic here, but the above is precisely correct. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse". There's no requirement to know that the action you took is a violation of the law, but there is a requirement that you intended to take that action. The difference might seem subtle, but is quite significant.

In other words, if you have a knife in your bag and knew it was there but didn't know it was illegal to bring it past a checkpoint, you're guilty. But if you didn't know the knife was in your bag, you're innocent whether or not you knew that bringing a knife through a checkpoint is illegal.

Yep, not me, not the LEO putting the handcuffs on. In fact no one but the person with the hand gun can determine his intent, and he / she may not decide to tell the truth about it. Even a jury can only guess, based upon the evidence provided. No way to be certain. Either way you don’t get to fly and you get to earn some lawyer somewhere a pretty stiff fee. Certainly not your intent, or is it?

John Q. Public intentionally brings his bag to the checkpoint. Does he know that there is a gun in it? He should know, he’s responsible for everything in it, personally and legally.

I don’t make the laws dude, call your state representative.

Once again, I don’t make the rules, I just have to live with them, just like you. I know, it stinks, but that’s life.

Because the agency has a culture of secrecy. Makes it easier to cover up behaviors that might not be appropriate.

While true, there is also the human factor that people do in fact forget-and that happens to both pax and TSO's alike (tho a TSO gets to keep their job and a pax could be subject to arrest :rolleyes:)

Your right, and it would be my guess that it is the decision of the LEO responding (in most cases, depending on that states laws) weather to arrest or not, to cite or not. Not something TSA gets into honestly. "Stupidity in Public" is not a crime, but bringing a gun to a TSA screening checkpoint is. What happens after that, well we have to write reports, but that is the last involvement of the TSO's.

There have been both TSO’s and LEO’s who have been arrested for bringing their guns to the checkpoint. One case is not the rule, it’s the exception, and every rule has its exceptions. @:-)