"C Kingsbury" wrote in message
ink.net...
Well, I guess I made the list of suspected terrorists, this weekend.

Guess I get to be the lone voice of dissent here.

In case you haven't noticed, there's at least a couple ten thousand
loonies
out there who want to kill us in large numbers. Maybe that's GWB's fault,
maybe it isn't, but that doesn't change the situation on the ground *right
now.* You're hanging around off the edge of a runway next near an ANG
base.
Sorry, but I can see where the guys are going to get a little edgy.

So what? Why should we care if he's edgy? Personally, I'd rather my law
enforcement (military or civilian) be a little less jumpy, but if they are,
the solution is not for me (or the original poster) to comply with their
illegitimate requests. Rather, the solution is to fire the jumpy law
enforcement officers and hire ones that have more common sense.

Sounds
like the soldier was a little gruffer with you than he needed to be, but
that's not his first order of business.

The soldier had no business running the original poster off, unless he was
on military property (it's not clear whether he was or not). Off military
property, the soldier has no authority whatsoever to force someone to leave.
For that matter, even civilian law enforcement would not have that
authority.

A military or civilian law enforcement officer certainly is within their
rights to approach a person they find suspicious and talk to them. If they
ascertain that there is genuine cause for concern, they have legitimate
steps they can take. But that would not have been the case here, and the
officer's only legitimate action at that point would have been to wish the
"suspect" a nice day and get on to doing his job elsewhere.

And yes, I do know that of which I speak. I was grounded for three months
after 9/11 because of the massive BOS-NYC-DC TFRs that no one cared to
explain.

TFRs that were not reasonable, that were not justified, and should have been
criticized loudly. Inasmuch as you sit around claiming that they *were*
reasonable, you deserved to be grounded.

If we get hit again at home, and with the election right around the corner
there's plenty of reason to be on guard, we might lose everything.

Everything? That seems a little extreme. How, exactly, do you suggest that
we'd lose literally everything? Near as I can tell, we'd lose very little.
Our government is reasonably well protected from problems even when the "top
brass" is killed. Frankly, while I can't stand to think of anyone being
killed, sometimes I think we could benefit from losing the entire top
echelon of government so we could start over. I certainly don't believe
we'd lose everything, or even close to everything.

How about
a DC-style ADIZ over every single Class B? Mandatory flight plans for
everything? FAA can't handle it, tough ****, they'll just have a lottery
for
VFR departure slots on weekends. What makes you think your non-pilot
neighbors won't surrender your freedom to fly without a second thought?

Of course they will. That's why it's so atrocious that the non-pilot
military guard is illegally harassing a perfectly innocent person. It's
just one more step in the wrong direction.

Don't get me wrong- I think the TSA is a mess and the current airline
security system, which is still the tagrte we need to worry the most
about,
is a sickening morass of bureaucratic incompetence. So at best you've got
a
marginal case to make that the ANG guy who harassed you should have been
at
BDL searching peoples' carry-ons instead, or at the container terminal in
Boston. That's about it.

That's about what? The case is excellent for arguing that the military
guard should have let him stay where he was, watching the planes for as long
as he wanted to.

Pete