Patrick Smith, writing for Salon on The laser-wielding terrorists are coming! Not since the Dread Syrian Wedding Musicians went to the bathroom has such idiotic hysteria gripped America.
Back in mid-December, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security passed along a memo stating that terrorists had explored the viability of deploying high-intensity lasers as weapons. The alert came after several earlier incidents of rogue beams penetrating flight deck windows. In the most serious case, last September, the first officer of a Delta Air Lines jet suffered a burned retina after being struck in the face during approach into Salt Lake City.
While these events are perplexing, and at least potentially dangerous, a presumed link to terrorist activity is, even if impossible to discount, still premature and wrongheaded. Alas that's a bit like whispering into a hurricane here in 2005 America, where the T-word has been spliced into the very DNA of our collective societal psyche. Thanks to one day's events more than three years ago, we've come to exist in a full-on reversion mode in which every anomaly that's at once potentially harmful and not instantly solvable takes automatic cover beneath the dark cloak of "terrorism" — a paranoid pathology that shows no sign of relenting. We've concocted an upside-down religion, choosing to invest our faith in the cunning of an invisible adversary while disparaging our own voices of reason and good sense. At heart it's an old story, fear of the unknown, taken to new and self-destructive heights in a politically charged climate.
Should we be concerned about lasers pointed at aircraft? Of course – pilot vision can be impaired and, as mentioned above, people can be injured. However, not every mysterious or dangerous act is evidence of terrorism. Unfortunately, some folks are prone to adding 2 + 2 and getting Osama bin Laden. The correct answer is 4. Read the rest here.
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