(Understatement of the year.)

A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day…so check back often….

Sorry but I can’t get the picture out of my mind of a plane full of lawyers being hijacked by Islamic terrorists who threaten to crash it into the German Constitutional Court. I’m finding it hard to see a downside, no matter what.

Buzzy on September 17, 2007 at 8:55 PM

Almost as good as the 10,000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea joke!

(sarcasm off)

Bernhard Gertz, chairman of the German Army Federation, a union representing the interests of military personnel, said pilots would make themselves liable to prosecution if they shot down a passenger jet that was being used as a missile.

If the target is no longer a plane but a missle wouldn’t it lose its “protected” status?

This whole line is mind blowing. Common sense is dead.

The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers

http://www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/hardtruth/forgotten_amendment.htm

‘I did a quick Yahoo search on the “missing 13th amendment” and clicked on the first thing that popped up. I do not agree with everything, or for that matter, anything that appears on this site. This link was provided as fodder for discussion only.’

It’s foolish to split hairs about shooting down airliners based on whether passengers are at risk or its flying at low altitude. We’re not going to know those fine details until the smoke has cleared, if every. The decision makers will only have a coarse and imperfect knowledge of what’s happenning when it’s time to intervene. On the morning of Sep 11, air traffic control didn’t even know how many jets had been hijacked until long after all the known jets had crashed.

The fact is that when we come under attack, our laws are not going to help us much at the moment and we are not going to turn to attorneys to defend us. The critical decisions will have to be made mostly by the military, some by air traffic control, some by the politicians, and will be based on their judgement, experience, and character in lieu of sufficient information.

That said, the Muslims will eventually overplay their hand. They think that the mild Western reaction to their terror indicates weakness, rather than restraint. They may reach a threshhold where restraint is abandoned, where these arguments seem quaint. The Muslims are pulling the tail of the tiger, thinking it’s a a housecat.

Lawyers,,, they were the one, or one of the few professions that were not allowed in the early American settlements. They are a curse. The vast majority of the time, you only need a lawyer to protect yourself from other lawyers.

JellyToast on September 17, 2007 at 8:07 PM

The distrust was so great, a constitutional amendment was ratified to prohibit a citizen from accepting a “title of nobility” from a foreign government or organization.

http://www.the7thfire.com/Politics%20and%20History/13th-Amendment.html

Interesting reading.

Sorry but I can’t get the picture out of my mind of a plane full of lawyers being hijacked by Islamic terrorists who threaten to crash it into the German Constitutional Court. I’m finding it hard to see a downside, no matter what.

Buzzy on September 17, 2007 at 8:55 PM

I doubt it would happen….Islamic terrorists would refuse to fly with pigs.

I’m casting this in my head already.

They’re still weighing life against life:

Not really. The only way the Defense Minister is authorizing this is if the plane is “being used in a terrorist attack”, not just hijacked. That means the people on the plane are already dead. At that point you’re not “weighing life against life”, you’re just counting how many dead bodies there will be. To allow the body count to increase due to inaction is unacceptable to me -and I’d say the same if I were on the plane in question.

Being Jewish with Holocaust survivors in my extended family, I have little love for Germany. As I get older, I grudgingly respect the current day German military. I met a Korvettenkapitän, LCDR equivalent for U.S. Navy, about ten years ago. He was a Tornado pilot. Nice guy and competent as hell. He recognized my last name as being Jewish and apologized to me. That was very strange to me.

The German government has got to realize their Constitution is not a suicide pact. If a plane is being used as a missile to kill innocent civilians, the fighter pilot must be allowed to shoot the plane down without fear of prosecution.

If airliner cockpits are not accessible and the pilots refuse hijackers access–even if the bad guys are killing passengers–then the scenario only happens if the pilots are complicit or if the bad guys smuggle weapons on board and destroy the plane over a populated area. However, only in the former case would there be a need for the airliner to be shot down. I’d say concentrate on preventing bad guys from flying the planes first and avoid the entire problem. It’s not as if the 9/11 attackers took over the plane through their magical powers.

Niko on September 17, 2007 at 8:34 PM

The parties must be receiving more publicity than they were a few years ago..good to see they still could happen.

If judges were to decide military tactics, they’d have to approve the curricula and lesson plans of all military courses (or teach the classes themselves), review and approve all defense contracts to ensure that the weapons available to the military were lawful, and write some sort of code to define lawful warfare. Furthermore, judges would be required to review every military order to ensure it is lawful.

Fortunately, the U.S. Constitution leaves the waging of war to the Executive and says nothing about the Courts having a role.

The logical conclusion of the German model is that all any foriegn power would be required to do is come into that country and take a hostage. After that, the government would be powerless to stop them from doing anything.

What in your opinion would be the German Governmental response if – if – the US military in Germany concluded the hijacked aircraft was targeting a US installation in Germany and destroyed the aircraft?

News2Use on September 17, 2007 at 8:27 PM

The same as they always do in Germany/France: deplore the “unresponsible act” in public – and then have a dinner party with the US officers where they privately congratulate them.

I apologize if you are stating case law and not your opinion
JadeNYU on September 17, 2007 at 8:20 PM

Indeed I’m just stating law and not my personal opinion.

If imminent is defined as the trigger is pulled and the bullet is flying or the plane is descending into the building, you’ve committed yourself to responding to attacks and you’ve forgone any real chance of preventing attacks

You’re absolutely right. The schizophrenic thing about Germany is that on one hand authorities rather wait for the crater than act to prevent it, on the other hand as of right now more than a handful laws are being prepared that extend pre-emptive investigation and surveillance beyond anything that MoveOn and the ACLU every imagined. Mandatory backdoors at German ISPs are already in place for law enforcement, German financial institutions are giving out transaction information to low-level policemen, and soon the federal government will pass a law that allows them to remotely install trojan programs on suspect computers.

The point is that where it concerns high-profile actions the German government is fighting “a softer, gentler war” on terror while at the same time stepping up profiling and surveillance to unprecedented levels.

What in your opinion would be the German Governmental response if – if – the US military in Germany concluded the hijacked aircraft was targeting a US installation in Germany and destroyed the aircraft?