Who should the 9/11 victims be suing, the airlines or ...

TruthIsAll

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Sun Dec-28-03 05:56 PM
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Who should the 9/11 victims be suing, the airlines or ...

http://www.mises.org/fullarticle.asp?control=1387&id=63

Sunday, December 28, 2003
Who is to Blame for 9-11?

by William L. Anderson

Given the toxic legal climate in the United States for business in general, it should have surprised no one that a federal judge has ruled that families who lost loved ones in the September 11 attacks can sue United Airlines, American Airlines, Boeing and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. That the plaintiffs and their lawyers are not suing the worst offender of the tragedy—the U.S. Government—says volumes about the surreal nature of American jurisprudence today.

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While the attorneys and their hand-picked judge actually are clouding the issue here (as I will explain later), their lawsuit—and their public comments—do not tell us what really happened on that fateful day, and why this tragic event occurred. Suffice it to say that 9/11 had the imprint of the U.S. Government from the planning of the attacks, the truncated pre-attack investigation that permitted the terrorists to move about unmolested, to the boarding of the plane, and to the conduct of the crew and passengers before the planes were turned into flying bombs. In this case, the airlines and Boeing have a legitimate defense when they proclaim they were simply following orders.

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The lawsuit claims that United and American should have kept the perpetrators off the planes, but even here, they were following the law. For example, at the time box cutters—the apparent weapons of choice for the hijackers—were FAA approved, so it would have been illegal for the airline security agents to have confiscated them. Second, suppose that the screeners had found not only the box cutters, but also the Islamic death shrouds that the hijackers were carrying. To have kept them off the planes almost certainly would have meant that the airlines were violating U.S. anti-discrimination laws, and no doubt anyone who might have intervened would also have found himself on the receiving end of a federal discrimination lawsuit.

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That Hellerstein has permitted the lawsuits to go forward is further proof that it does no good in the USA for private citizens to follow the law. Instead, federal authorities tend to make up the "law" as they go. Moreover, the government at all levels is doing its level best to keep airlines from preventing another such hijacking. From dragging its feet in permitting pilots to be armed, to turning air screeners into government employees (the creation of the Transportation Security Administration), to the inane methods used by the TSA to screen "potential" hijackers (like 90-year-old grandmothers in wheelchairs, who are regularly searched by screeners through "random" selections), the government is using massive amounts of resources to create an illusion that it is "doing something" about preventing airline hijackings.

(My assessment of the government's role in the 9/11 atrocities does not include a critical look at U.S. foreign policy, not to mention its relationship to Saudi Arabia, which produced 15 of the 19 hijackers. The irresponsibility of U.S. foreign policy is in itself worthy of an examination that would dwarf any of the absurdities committed by transportation regulators, which is why I do not write about it in this article.)

One can be assured that should airline hijackers once again engage in a 9/11-type attack, the only entities that will receive official blame will be those private firms that were following the law. Yes, in hindsight, by following U.S. Government policies from beginning to end, United and American airlines inadvertently aided those individuals who snuffed out nearly 3,000 lives through their vicious actions. Yet, in hindsight, we also know that to have thwarted those attacks would have turned some employees of United and American into felons. Perhaps Mary Schiavo should be suing herself for her own role in creating this mess when she worked for the Department of Transportation, but instead she stands to become a wealthier person because of the twisted state of U.S. law.