
The 1975 LaGuardia Airport Bombing - monort
http://observer.com/2016/01/why-hasnt-washington-explained-the-1975-laguardia-airport-bombing/
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golergka
Why do people classify this as terrorism? "Terrorism" is usually understood as
violence where intended targets are not those killed, but mainly those who
watch the news and shiver in fear. And to drive point home, terrorists usually
explicitly explain, why do they want people to be afraid of them, and what do
they want. Nothing like this happened in this case; so — why "terrorism" label
in the first place?

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readymade
Here's another "fun" example. Some of our early uses of the term were to
describe the KKK, which was and remains a terrorist organization par
excellence. Except that the clandestine nature of the group, and thus the need
for its members to lead superficially normal lives within the community, does
not lend itself to claiming responsibility for attacks in the sense we
associate with jihadist organizations. A classic example is the 16th Street
Baptist Church bombing in 1963, which was perpetrated. The communities
targeted by Klan members don't need to know exactly who was responsible for
the violence to have its intended effect.

~~~
golergka
> The communities targeted by Klan members don't need to know exactly who was
> responsible for the violence to have its intended effect.

Hm, you're right. So — the point is not to claim the responsibility, but to
make sure that everyone knows what political message is there behind the
violence. Which is still not something that applies in LaGuardia case.

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kw71
It sure seems like the FBI has protected criminals in the past when they had
the potential to give the Bureau information about other criminals. These
suspicions were also raised in the Whitey Bulger case. I believe that this
kind of behavior, from persons who are sworn to enforce the laws, is
malfeasant and unacceptable.

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Wingman4l7
The prosecution of the many outweighs the justice for the few?

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zeveb
> OTPOR did nothing to end Communism in Yugoslavia, but did succeed in tarring
> the Croatian cause with fanaticism, terrorism and murder.

I've always that that the Ustaše[1] did a pretty good job of tarring the
Croatian cause.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usta%C5%A1e](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usta%C5%A1e)

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petethomas
You can hear the relevant CBS Evening News radio update at the beginning of
this mp3, and again at the end (~1h:00m:41s in):

[http://cbsrmt.thelongtrek.com/pp/CBSRMT%20-%20751229%200404%...](http://cbsrmt.thelongtrek.com/pp/CBSRMT%20-%20751229%200404%20The%20Memory%20Killers_pp.mp3)

Edit:spelling

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Grishnakh
They need to just shut down the LaGuardia airport and sell the land off for
development. It's silly to have 3 airports that close together, creating the
busiest airspace in the US, especially when LGA is such a small (and old and
crappy) airport anyway. Shut it down, expand service at Newark and JFK, and
then improve the mass-transit service to both of those so people don't need to
spend a bunch of money on stupid cabs just to get in or out of NYC by air.

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krschultz
I'm with you that LGA is crappy, but it's not that small. It's the 20th
busiest airport in the United States, and handles 23% of the total NYC air
traffic. Neither EWR nor JFK have enough spare capacity to pickup that slack.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_busiest_airports_i...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_busiest_airports_in_the_United_States)

~~~
Grishnakh
Well in that case, they should expand the other two. Things would probably be
a lot more efficient in that airspace too after downsizing to only two
airports.

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mikeash
If you end up with the same amount of traffic as before, just at two airports
instead of three, how does it make the airspace more efficient?

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Grishnakh
Better centralization. Having three control towers having to coordinate
traffic between them is more chaotic than two or one. And it's more orderly to
have planes coming in to fewer sets of runways.

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mikeash
Having TRACON work with three towers instead of two doesn't sound any more
difficult. I thought that the towers mostly just took already-sequenced
traffic from TRACON and landed them, and handed departing traffic off to
TRACON once they left the runway. As for fewer sets of runways, that sounds
harder to me, not easier, since you have more traffic coming into the airport
and that traffic has to be sequenced and deconflicted with all the other
traffic coming into that particular airport.

I could be wrong on this, my interactions with ATC are limited to occasionally
listening to DCA tower while watching the planes land, and every so often
being the point of contact to call the local TRACON to notify them of our
glider operations.

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Grishnakh
Fewer sets of runways seems like it should be easier, because the runways can
be set up to be parallel to each other, so planes can all come in on the same
approach and land in parallel. That's how they do it in Phoenix, with three
parallel runways.

With more airports, you have planes all going different directions instead.

Besides, it seems like it'd be better to push some of that air traffic away
from the city center, and free up some extremely valuable real estate. If
they'd put in some better public transit to those two airports, people would
be able to get in and out of the city a lot faster. Why can't they build
actual subway lines to them anyway, instead of having to make slow and crappy,
special trains to them which aren't on the main lines and then require time-
consuming transfers?

