Yea, I guess I did miss the point, and I still do. In my opinion somebody calling the airline claiming to be psychic and saying they have a premonition there is a bomb on board is a crackpot. A crackpot is a person who could put a bomb on board. If the airline knew the identity and thought it needed checking out, it is my guess they are aware what a crackpot is and this person fit the description of one.

AA, I understand that it is making you nuts that just any idiot can call the airline and say "bomb" and flights get halted.

I can't speak for others but, I would rather be safe than sorry.

As Patrick stated, if anyone is nutty enough to do this, they are nutty enough to plant a bomb.

As for the airline listening to a psychic, I don't know if you realize it or not but psychics are used by the government in various ways. One is to help identify missing persons.

Remember when Nancy Reagan would consult psychic's about the budget. And didnt' Hillary Clinton consult a psychic for some reason. So now the TSA is consulting psychics too? I think this has to do with whom we consider our best sources to help keep terrorism under control -- and I personally hope we aren't taking the National Enquirer approach. Do we listen to psychics and divert our attention from the obvious task of searching passengers? I don't think there's too many proven truth-tellers out there -- who was this psychic anyway?

I think time could have been better spent elsewise -- like searching luggage and people.

By the way, my dog is a psychic. And she just told me that there is an asteriod heading our way. All those aboard planet earth please get into your extraterrestrial planes and go to Roswell, please. The end is near.

razzledazzle: LOL!

Not to be nitpicking, or rather, to nitpick a bit: Tandoori_girl said that people consider Floridians "a bunch of kooks".

I always understood people thought of Californians as a box of cereal. When you shake out all the nuts and fruits, what do you have left? The flakes.

Do we have "kooks" too? Is Marin County in California? \:D/

My neighbor's dog just telepathically told me that she has a vision of AAFF pulling his hair out.

I feel your plane...

Well if they search the airplane after a psychic says there's a bomb, then the damn airline industry doesn't have much faith in its own security precautions! Why the heck do I have to take my shoes off, let them search through my panties in front of everyone and leave my nail clippers at home if the airline doesn't even have faith in the security checks? All the more reason to believe that this is all just 'for show', to make people THINK they're safer and to get them flying....when in actuality we are no safer than we ever were.

My sister brought a six pack of glass ginger ale bottles in her carry-on the other day. Do you know how much damage 6 terrorists could do on a plane if they all had six broken bottles at their disposal?

I'm with you, Patrick. And won't even get into what I think about people like Tracy's sister. Like: when her plane hits turbulence and the carry on with a six pak of bottles falls out of the overhead and conks someone on the head...? Or - why the heck is she carrying on such a thing anyway? I just love those folks who think the rules aren't for them.

Of course, this airline security thing is getting ridiculous.

But, when you have the CIA admitting that they did not have "enough people on the ground", i.e., people speaking the local language, AND we then have all these vague warnings coming from the authorities claiming they have been monitoring the "chatter" - the obvious question becomes, who's monitoring the "chatter"? Obviously the terrorists are not "chatting" in English!

If we can't pinpoint the next source of terrorism and the object of its next attack, whom should we believe?

Let's admit it, we're still at sea about the whole terrorism thing - it's still so new. So, while we're still confused about what we are supposed to do, while we are taking our shoes off at the airport (BTW, I, for one, am not ashamed of my ugly toes), and while we are desperately trying to change the bureaucratic structure to "better" meet the challenges, while we're doing all this, ANY information is valid - whether that information comes from a kook in Florida, a nut in California, or "just an idiot". Unfortunately.

Meanwhile, while we are beefing up our security at airports, the terrorists attack trains. :(

I really don't believe there's a simple answer to this whole problem. If the authorities don't do enough, they get blasted. If they do too much, they get blasted.

easytraveler, the NSA keeps track of the quantity of communication. For example, they intercept/collect phone calls but can't listen in to all of them. But they do count them and when they see a sudden increase in the number of calls they start thinking that something is up.

If you were at a big party in a ballroom, you would hear conversations from around the room. Not eavesdrop, but hear the conversations in the background of yours. If there is an increase in the volume and/or number of conversations in one corner of the room, you will likely be distracted and wonder what's up over there.

The other thing that could be happening is that the "chatter" thing is cover for some real intelligence. They might actually have good info about a specific threat, but they can't actually come out and say that they heard Terrorist A talking to Terrorist B about putting a bomb on BA 213.

The NSA problem is that they don't have enough people who speak the languages to actually listen in to the conversations they collect. That is another reason why they talk about chatter, i.e. the volume of communication.

The CIA "on the ground" problem is different.

The thing about the psychic is like Patrick described. They heard a nutjob talking about a bomb on a plane and had to do something about it because it was unusual. No arrests? I don't KNOW why, but maybe after they searched the plane and tracked down the person who made the "statement that had to be perceived as a threat" they found that it was a harmless person. I don't know, I just think that it is wrong to jump to conclusions.

The first reference to "kooks" was not about Florida. It was about a "national image" that the poster believed was due to the Fla vote counting debacle.

Arjay that's just my point, there IS no rule about bringing glass onto a plane. We're not SECURE, they're just trying to make it LOOK like we're secure.

And why are we favoring air passengers over bus, train and car passengers? Are our bridges being secured? Our rails? Big hotels?

The govt is just hyping air security to make it look like they're doing something. Meanwhile 90percent of the world wants us gone!

"Meanwhile 90 percent of the world want us gone".

Well, not quite. Most of Europe is still making a distinction between Bush and Americans in general. They are against Bush but not against Americans - right now.

90 percent of the Muslim world is against us for invading Iraq, which is interpreted, rightly or wrongly, as being anti-Muslim, regardless of what kind of spin this administration puts on it.

However, I just heard an interesting statement, which I'm passing along. This is not my personal opinion, so don't blast me. The opinion was that if we vote Bush in for another term, then the "rest of the world" will be anti-American and not just anti-Bush, because we, the people, would have ratified Bush's policies.

Hey, I voted for Ralph Nader. So, people like me get blasted from both sides, even though I'm pretty apolitcal most of the time. My attitude is: I voted, I discharged my civil duty, so leave me alone!

Certainly, I feel less safe now and much more vulnerable, so how the next president is going to fight terrorism is going to count for many brownie points with me when I cast my hefty one person's vote in November!

BTW, back on topic, don't the police use psychics once in a while, like in murder cases? At least that's what my television screen tells me - and television screens don't lie, do they?

90% of the Muslim world is NOT against us for invading Iraq. In fact Saddam Hussein was, by far, the most secular leader that country ever had, and his worst enemies *were* fundy Islamics.

The invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Hussein had nothing to do with WMD, it was to allow us to withdraw our troops stationed in Saudi Arabia (per bin Laden's demand). The one and only reason these troops were there in the first place was because of Iraq's army. This withdrawal took place within two weeks of our invasion and went virtually unreported in our mass media.

So at least some of the "heat" is off the U.S. now, and once bin Laden is found, the rest of it will evaporate. But the important thing to realize is that the number of people who're staging these attacks is absolutely microscopic compared to the total number of Islamics around the world, who value peace and non-violence more than anything else. Bush managed to make the sitation much worse with his "you're either with us, or with the terrorists" rhetoric. It was the first time in human history where 5.8 billion people all rolled their eyes in disgust at the same time.

"90% of the world wants us gone"??

There goes most all of the world aid.