- but I WILL mourn for the CIVILIANS killed by the tragedy. I was born and raised in New York and have many family there.

There are more sinister motives going on here and the mere fact that the it's all being over simplified (so we AMERICANS can grasp and absorb what "they" want more easily) by the media prove it.

Hold on everyone.......the best is yet to come.

Would you rather they spent 24 hours detailing the specifics of the balance of every country with each other.

"You can't trust anyone"

There is something big going on. If this "Holy War" takes place it will be the bloodiest we've ever seen.

The media is being spoonfed by the government and that's good. The general population is easily paniced.

You might want to register for a handgun. Just a thought. If this hits American soil it would be good to be ready to defend yourself. I know it was a long time ago so maybe it doesn't apply, but the 2nd Amendment was written for that reason.

Ben

Malaclypse are you sugesting that there is a conspiracy behind this event?

If so, I may have to de-fang that conspiracy theory.

own a gun....come on.....who doesn't?
__________________________________________________ __
"The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods."

Sorry, didn't understand what that ment.

Could you rephraise?

!

<font size="4">Congressional Debate Coming</font size>

In the days and weeks to come, Congress will consider many proposals that seek to ensure America's safety from terrorists, and NRA will stand vigilant to ensure that the Second Amendment does not become yet another victim of the attacks of September 11. Unfortunately, we can expect the anti-gun community to become far more brazen in its efforts to capitalize on a national tragedy and push its gun-ban agenda. Law-abiding gun owners should watch for renewed, aggressive attempts to: pass licensing and registration schemes; shut down gun shows as we know them today; and revive old issues that have already been addressed by Congress, such as adding "taggants" to black and smokeless powders, and playing up the myth of the "plastic gun."

Congress has already mandated a study of "taggants," and in 1998, a committee of scientists issued its report. The committee's recommendations were carefully directed to identify feasible and effective actions that would assist law enforcement to prevent bombings and to conduct investigations in their aftermath. The use of "taggants" in black and smokeless powders was found to be unfeasible and of uncertain value. And as for "plastic guns," although they do not exist, federal law already prohibits the manufacture or possession of any firearm that is not detectable by the types of x-ray machines that are now used at airports. You can find more information on these subjects posted to the Research section of NRAILA.org. For those not on the Internet, please call the Grassroots Division at (800) 392-8683 if you would like material on any or all of these topics. http://206.183.2.55/LegislativeUpdate.asp?FormMode=Detail&ID=137


<font size="4">ID, please</font size>

Idea of national identity card system gains momentum in wake of attacks

By Ross Kerber, Globe Staff, 9/24/2001

Suddenly, a national identity card system doesn't seem so far-fetched.


An idea that had relatively little support before the Sept. 11 terror attacks now may be gaining some momentum. With government agencies looking for new ways to track suspects, and companies responding with new technology, the issue is now on the agenda of a congressional subcommittee.



Privacy objections have been raised against such proposals in the past. But in recent years, state motor-vehicle bureaucrats have quietly laid the technical groundwork to allow authorities to instantly check any driver's license against official databases.


The system encourages states to standardize the bar codes and magnetic stripes on the millions of driver's licenses they issue each year. This means data such as a person's name and address can be quickly scanned in any jurisdiction. A few companies already sell hardware to allow data-scanners to compare the licenses against government records, much like the credit-card readers widely used in retail stores.


All of these steps were initially meant to help police during traffic stops and to deter underage drinking.


But since the destruction of the World Trade Center, the license technologies have also drawn interest from federal authorities looking to pick out suspects moving through checkpoints like airports or border crossings.


One scanning-device maker, Logix Co. of Longmont, Colo., said it received an order from the Secret Service's financial-crimes division last week. The agency plans to use the readers to combat financial fraud by comparing data from credit cards to data encoded on driver's licenses.


Scott Bahneman, a Logix Cos. vice president, said he has held talks with other agencies, including the State Department, in the days after the attacks. Officials hope the scanners might be used to automatically compare identity-card data with electronic watch lists of wanted individuals, Bahneman said.


State Department officials say upgraded driver's licenses could make it harder to obtain passports under false names. Since driver's licenses are the most common form of identification that Americans use to obtain passports, ''anything one could do make that [driver's license] a more secure document, we'd be in support of,'' said a State Department official who asked not to be named.


Whatever driver's license technologies emerge will help illustrate the balance that society strikes between privacy and security. The high-tech upgrades are being discussed partly because authorities suspect some of the Sept. 11 hijackers may have used false identities during the years they lived in the United States. Until more specifics are known about the terrorists' tactics, of course, it won't be clear whether new license formats would have made a difference.


One forum for the discussion will be the House subcommittee on immigration, which is considering new passport technologies in hopes of deterring future attackers from entering the country. Subcommittee chairman George Gekas of Pennsylvania said a national ID card system will also be considered. ''Over the years, that kind of thing has been deemed to be like Big Brother, and therefore objectionable,'' Gekas said in an interview. But while he won't necessarily endorse such a proposal, he believes the terror attacks have changed the political climate toward the idea.


Besides, given all of the advances in driver's licenses, Gekas said, ''for all intents and purposes we're practically at the situation where the identity of every American is readily available.''


He's not far off. Most states have already agreed to design their licenses according to guidelines from the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, in Arlington, Va., known as the ''National Standard for the Driver License/Identification Card.'' The standard would apply to cards issued to nondrivers.


The 90-page document describes a host of ways to make security features more useful to authorities in any state. For instance, the paper suggests exactly how states might format the magnetic stripes that 21 states, including Massachusetts, run across the back of their license cards. These stripes can hold up to 275 bytes of data, enough to encode most of the information printed on the front of the cards, such as a person's name and address.


Magnetic stripes are useful because they can be read by credit-card scanners, already present at millions of retail counters. But the data on the stripes can be altered by counterfeiters as well.


To store more information more securely, states can use a two-dimension bar code, a field of thousands of black-and-white pixels that takes up about a square inch and resembles the cover of a composition notebook. These bar codes can hold about 2,000 bytes of data, or enough to encode a small mugshot of a person. So far, 24 states, also including Massachusetts, have begun to include such a barcode; the US military does as well.


Nine states and the District of Columbia also store some form of biometric information on the bar code, such as a person's fingerprint. A few states, including Delaware and South Carolina, are also considering licenses that would include computer chips, which could store many times as much personal information.


Polaroid Corp.'s identification-card division in Bedford is the largest producer of state driver's licenses. Division president John Munday predicts there will be calls for more security features following the events of Sept. 11. ''There's a long way to go in terms of the opportunity to increase security,'' he said.


The costs will hold back some states, Munday said. New Jersey officials, for instance, estimate they will have to spend $12 million to begin to include bar codes and other security features. But the political issues present more uncertainty, Munday said. ''Personally, I'd rather feel safe on an airplane, than not have my picture displayed'' in electronic data, he said. ''But others might disagree.''


Many privacy advocates have declined to be interviewed about new security technologies since the events of Sept. 11. Asked about the new driver's-license standard and Gekas's comments, a spokeswoman for the American Civil Liberties Union would only note that the organization has opposed plans in the past that it feared would lead to the creation of national identity cards.


For instance, the group opposed a 1998 plan by the Department of Transportation to require states to obtain drivers' Social Security numbers and photos to help enforce immigration rules. The ACLU said the proposal would ''violate the most basic of American liberties: the right to be left alone.''


Others say the attacks call for a reevaluation of how much government tracking might be acceptable. High-tech licenses that are harder to fake might also help protect individuals against crimes like identity theft, said Deborah Hurley, a Harvard counter-terrorism expert.


''There's a big space between the way we lived a few weeks ago and today,'' Hurley said. ''People tend to see it as either a swing into maximum-security mode or none at all.


''But there's a lot of things we could do in between.''


Ross Kerber can be reached by e-mail at kerber@globe.com.


This story ran on page C1 of the Boston Globe on 9/24/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.


<font size="4">Safety at what price?</font size>

http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20010920-5259416.htm

David A. Keene

It's been just over a week since the beginning of what President Bush was quick to describe as "the first war of the 21st century" and time to begin asking a few questions.
The first, of course, is just which institutions failed us on the morning of Sept. 11 or in the days before? Blame is being spread widely by many.
It is said that the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies blew this one as they've blown others in the past either because they're badly organized, incompetently led and hamstrung by restrictions imposed upon them by previous administrations and by Congress.
Others blame not our intelligence gathering, but the failure of law enforcement agencies such as the FBI to heed timely warnings that they should have seen, in hindsight, pointed toward just the sort of attacks that greeted us on the 11th.
And still others are pointing fingers at the airlines, the airports and even aircraft builders and designers because of their inadequacies.
This is all to be expected, and I'm willing to grant that those who suggest we ought to have had better intelligence or should have acted differently based on what we had have a point. I'm even willing to agree with those who say that different security measures might have made a difference.
And like most Americans, I'm more than prepared to live with the inconveniences that will accompany the implementation of reasonable and prudent measures designed to make a hijacker or terrorist's job more difficult in the future.
But I am not willing to grant even for a minute that what happened last week justifies the scrapping of traditional American liberties and constitutional safeguards. In the aftermath of the attacks many were quick to suggest that life, as we've known it in this country will be forever changed and that we must be prepared as a people to sacrifice our privacy and a measure of our civil liberties in the quest for greater security.
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, for example, has already suggested that we can reasonably expect to be asked to carry national identification cards complete with microchips that will allow law enforcement officers to stop us and scan our bios, credit histories, etc. at the drop of a hat. Others, including Attorney General John Ashcroft are suggesting that the government will need greater surveillance and wiretap authority as well as the virtually unfettered right to get a look at our e-mail. The makers of high tech snooping devices and the "face recognition" technology that would allow the government, once it has built a comprehensive data base on all of us, to pick potential miscreants out of a crowd are chortling at the possibilities.
Some of the suggestions are borne of panic and others seem reasonable enough on their face. But before Congress opts to increase our security by trading off the freedoms that make this nation unique, everyone ought to step back and take a very deep breath.
We must be careful lest a few Muslim extremists manage to do what neither Hitler nor Stalin could accomplish by convincing us that we must sacrifice our liberty, privacy and freedom of movement for a greater measure of security. If we do this, we will have lost the struggle just as it is beginning because we will have surrendered the essence of America in the probably vain hope that by so doing we can preserve the trappings of the greatest nation in human history.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned of just this in an interview days after helping other Pentagon workers rescue colleagues from the inferno there. His words are worth thinking about: "The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize. It is to alter behavior. It is to force people who believe in freedom to be less free. That's not the way Americans live and it's not the way we want to live."
He is, of course, exactly right. We can either learn to cope or we can go after those who would force us to do so. The latter course makes more sense.
This is not to say we should be foolhardy. Airport security can and is being tightened as can security at our borders. Suspected terrorists should be targeted for surveillance and the rest, but that doesn't mean we ought to run roughshod over the rights of Americans whose only crime is that they become the targets of future terror attacks.
Sen. Phil Gramm put it best on the Senate floor last week when he told his colleagues that "I'm not interested in changing the way I live. I'm interested in changing the way they live."
Well put.


David A. Keene is chairman of the American Conservative Union.



<font size="4">Airlines, Pilots Differ Over Armed Crews</font size>
By Jeff Johnson
CNSNews.com Congressional Bureau Chief
September 24, 2001
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewNation.asp?Page=\Nation\archive\200109\NAT2001 0924b.html

(CNSNews.com) - A 20 year old Federal Aviation Regulation (FAR) allowing flight crews to be armed for self-defense may offer little protection because some pilots aren't aware of their rights, and most, if not all, airlines prohibit the practice.

FAR 108.11 currently allows flight crews to be armed, "if the person having the weapon is...authorized to have the weapon by the (airline) and the Administrator (of the FAA) and has successfully completed a course of training in the use of firearms acceptable to the Administrator."

However, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is currently on track to repeal the regulation in less than two months.

New rules set to take effect November 14 state that "crew members will no longer be allowed to carry arms," according to an internal memo cited by FAA spokesman Paul Takemoto.

Takemoto stressed, "everything is under review" as a result of the September 11 hijackings of four aircraft, three of which were used to attack New York and Washington, D.C.

Capt. John Cox, executive air safety chairman for the Air Line Pilots Association, which represents 66,000 pilots at 47 airlines in the U.S. and Canada, said he's never heard of the regulation allowing pilots to arm themselves.

"I have been an airline pilot for 22 years, and I have been flying airplanes for 32 years," Cox said, "This is the first time I have been made aware of FAR 108.11."

Cox said he knows of no commercial airline that has utilized the regulation.

"I have not seen anybody carrying firearms. I've certainly never been through any training at the airline that I work for," Cox said. "It may have been one of those little known federal regulations. It has not been one practically in use."

Legislation introduced by Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) last Friday would prevent the federal government from prohibiting aircrews from arming themselves, effectively eliminating the FAA's role in the issue and preempting the planned November repeal of the regulation.

House Resolution 2896 would ensure that, "no department or agency of the Federal Government shall prohibit any pilot, copilot, or navigator of an aircraft, or any law enforcement personnel specifically detailed for the protection of that aircraft, from carrying a firearm," according to the legislation.

If that legislation passes, the decision on whether flight crews could be armed would be left solely to the airlines.

"We have never allowed pilots to carry firearms on board," said Jenna Ludgate, spokeswoman for United Airlines. "Pilots are first and foremost pilots and in any emergency situation, they need to by flying the plane."

But United co-pilot Aaron Benedetti, who has received specialized firearms training for pilots from the Front Sight Firearms Training Institute in Las Vegas, Nevada disagrees with his employer's policy.

"I fully support arming pilots and co-pilots," he said, adding that, if the airline allowed its pilots to carry side arms, "United could once again claim they fly the friendly skies." Benedetti had hoped his employer would be the first airline to arm its cockpit crews following the terrorist attacks.

Asked whether United's policy might change if Paul's legislation passes, Ludgate said "We wouldn't allow it because our pilots need to be flying the plane."

Like Benedetti, Dr. Ignatius Piazza, founder of Front Sight, sees it differently.

"If there is a situation where someone is trying to defeat the cockpit door, you have a pilot who is focused on flying the plane, and landing it as soon as possible," he said. "And you have a co-pilot whose responsibility is to protect that door. And he has a gun to do it."

Neither American nor Delta Airlines would comment on their policies regarding armed crews.

A spokesman for Delta explained that it is the company's policy not to discuss security issues, and the American Airlines spokesman said, "I'm not gonna even go down that road."

But Capt. Paul Nelson, an American Airlines pilot and a reserve duty police officer, thinks his employer is missing an opportunity "to turn this tragedy into triumph and make our domestic skies the safest in the world."

Southwest Airlines pilot, Capt. Mark Donovan, hopes his employer won't follow United's lead.

"What could be better service than to insure our passengers' safety with an armed and trained pilot?" said Donovan.

Capt. Dennis Vied, who retired after 28 years with TWA, said he is "disgusted" with both the FAA and the airlines for not allowing pilots to defend themselves or their passengers.

"I believe it's prudent for pilots to be armed for the safety of themselves and their passengers," Vied said. "Hijackers must know they will face armed opposition."

Cox cautiously accepted the idea of armed cockpit crews, but with a caveat. "It would depend on the training course. If the level of training we put forward for pilots is the same exact standard as is in place today for federal law enforcement officers, I'm not gonna feel particularly bad about it," he said. "Anything short of that, I would be much more skeptical about."

While Paul's legislation would stop the FAA from disarming flight crews, a spokesman said the Texas congressman "would not be comfortable" introducing legislation requiring airlines to let their aviators carry firearms.

Vied hopes public opinion will cause members of Congress to support Paul's bill, and compel airlines to rethink their policies.

"Let your representatives know that pilots need this capability," said Vied. "Make them aware that we will no longer willingly be victims."

<i>"I Will Not Fly The Flag!"</i>

Flying your flag shows unity. I think it important that we band together, for ourselves. On the other hand, true patriotism resides in the heart. Sometimes, maybe, it awakens and rises up when threatened. The American patriot still lives. We should keep it alive.

Riddler, could you be a bit more selective in choising newstories? I mean its fine to post them, but that many at once?

Anyways, I'm pretty sure that the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights will maintained intact from now on as they always have. People think that FBI wire taping and such could be the wave of the future, J Edgar Hoover was the most powerful man in the world, w/bugs in the White House. Why do you think he was Bureau Director into his seventies? He had dirt on every congressman, senitor, and eventuall President. Our civil liberties had been violated during the Cold War, more than people would care to know.

In the end everything will be alright.

Gun control should be alowed in my eyes. Why the hell are people planning to do with 100 million handguns-- go dear hunting? Come on, guns don't stop crime, they encourage it.

Another debate for another time and thread.

Make of it what you will. There are always at least two sides to any debate. I believe that Americans should be wary of possible freedoms lost in the wake of these terrorists attacks. Historically, freedoms and rights are easily lost, while regaining them are very difficult and occasionally impossible.

As far as excessive information, I find in politics that posting supporting documentation and article sources is necessary, as there is so much misinformation by people who are obviously partial to their own sets of truths and ideas. The four articles were posted as examples of what could happen in the presently emotional times. As a nation, we should take care to avoid "shooting ourselves in the foot, in order to kill the snake that is biting us on the big toe."


quote by the curly1: Gun control should be alowed in my eyes. Why the hell are people planning to do with 100 million handguns-- go dear hunting? Come on, guns don't stop crime, they encourage it.

Thank you for making my point, the curly1. Would you like for your readers to blindly accept your statement, or don't you think that you should provide supporting, documented, and impartial evidence that causes you to have this opinion regarding gun control laws?

I am not afraid...let us do what we must!

Thanks Riddler. I'm happy that someone agrees with my view.

Yuo will not fly the flag? What do you mean by this? Im asking this first so I dont mistakenly go off at a ignorant fool whos not.

Hey if a holy war hits America (which i think it will) then didnt that nostrodomy dude predict that a final battle between Christians and Muslims and that it would bring about the end of the world? I read something about it on Artbell.com (http://www.artbell.com) And I do fly the flag and Im proud to be an America because we have chocies to fly it or not and you have chosen not to, well your still an American you just don't fly the flag.

True that is one great thing about being an American, we have the choice to fly it or not.

Thank you at least some people get the point.

I and every other service man and veteran gave you that ability to choose what you would do. I am an American and I am proud to be so. I do not care if you the individual choose to fly the flag or not. That is your choice. I have put my body in harms way that you may have that choice. Some one else does that now for you. Be thankful you who read this that you have the ability to choose and are not ruled by the Taliban who would remove this choice and mandate to you what you would hear for music, what you would have for education and how your appearance would be and what proper dress is. You may not agree with these words, it is you choice and to do so, and I do not care how you view it. But that you can view it is what is important to me.

Originally said by Wet1
"I have put my body in harms way that you may have that choice."

Thanks for fighting for our country wet1.