Dec 23, 04:34 AM
Miami shooting
Hey, remember earlier this month when federal Air Marshals shot that guy on a plane in Miami? The marshals said the man was running down the aisle with a backpack and he was shouting that he had a bomb, so they shot him dead. It turned out he didn’t have a bomb and was just mentally ill, but what could they do, right? He was shouting that he had a bomb.
Next news story, please. (We’d prefer one involving the disappearance of a pretty white woman.)
But wait a minute. It turns out no one who was on the plane that day in Miami remembers Rigoberto Alpizar shouting or saying anything about a bomb. No one agrees with the marshals’ version of events, and now they are trying to backtrack.
You probably didn’t hear about that little wrinkle, though, because the whole story was only in the news for about 15 minutes, and then only marginally. James Bovard points out that during the short time our media and fellow citizens could rouse themselves to give a crap that federal agents had gunned down a man who had committed no crime —the first use of lethal force by the Air Marshalls since Sept. 11, 2001—most coverage was devoted to patting ourselves on the back for having such a good system in place.
Bovard points to a Washington Times editorial that called the death a “tragedy,” but then went on to say (with that please-sir-my-I-have-another enthusiasm for authority that one finds in conservatives like those at the WashTimes) that the shooting could have positive effects: “Mr. Alpizar’s death is a reminder of how seriously the marshals treat airline security,” the Times editors wrote. “We should all take due notice.”
That’s typical of the perfunctory analysis that Bovard found in editorials from news sources around the country, all of which ignored accounts that were available the day after the shooting that the marshals’ story didn’t stand up. They repeated as documented fact the highly questionable, if not flat out false, claim that Alpizar shouted he had a bomb. There’s been next to nothing in the news about it since.
This incident demonstrates what is doubly scary to me about the way in which our country is going about granting steadily more authority to officials to violate our civil rights. As with the revelations of secret detention camps and illegal wiretapping, we’re witnessing our government trampel on the constitution and it doesn’t even sustain our attention.
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