Bomb Scares and Fighter Escorts

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As we all know, flight attendants found a camera on a United flight to Geneva yesterday, and after diverting the flight to Boston and offloading all the passengers, it turned out that the camera was….a camera. All of which suggests to me that if al-Qaeda were smart, they’d recruit lots of sympathizers who weren’t really ready for the whole suicide bomber thing and just have them leave cameras on board airplanes. It would tie up international air travel nicely.

But I have one question about this incident that I haven’t been able to find an answer to. It’s this:

Procopio said the North American Aerospace Defense Command deployed fighter jets to escort the United plane, but the aircraft landed before the jets reached it.

What exactly are these kinds of fighter escorts for? There was no question about the pilot crash landing the plane, was there? Nor could a fighter escort do anything if the camera had turned out to be a bomb. They had radio contact with the cockpit the entire time, so what’s the point of this?

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We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

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Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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