MISSILE DEFENSE FOR COMMERCIAL PLANES?

Not needed, says this guy.

But that may not be the biggest surprise of this story.

Newly released photos of the DHL cargo jet hit by Iraqi insurgents last month show for the first time the damage inflicted by a surface-to-air-missile fired near the Baghdad airport.

But they also show that some quarters in Washington are overreacting with calls to equip U.S. commercial planes with missile-defence systems, says Andrew R. Thomas, an aviation security expert and author.

"These guys (who fired the missiles) did pretty well everything they wanted to do here," said Thomas, author of Aviation Insecurity: The New Challenges of Air Travel. "They hit the wing and the engine and they still couldn't bring this plane down."

Thomas said surface-to-air-missiles (SAMs) can bring down a plane, but the DHL shooting is more typical and shows the resiliency of modern large aircraft...

The DHL hit sparked calls in Washington for new missile-defence systems to be placed on commercial aircraft in the U.S. because of the perceived vulnerability to SAM attacks by terrorists.

Also embedded in this story is this:

A video of the missile attack on the DHL plane has aired on television after it was passed to French journalists and Newsweek. This week the magazine published photos by French photographer Jerome Sessini who was with the insurgents when they summoned him for a "demonstration" of their firepower.

His photos show the Airbus A-300 cargo jet, its wing aflame, returning to Baghdad International Airport.

Now, from my reading of this we have a French photographer practicing al Arabiya and al Jazeera type "journalsm" by being at the location of an attack which if not explicitly foretold to him was certainly foreshadowed. And we have Newsweek profiting from such.

And I am disgusted.

Because, Mr. French Photographer...what if your wife were a DHL pilot and you knew she would be flying into Baghdad sometime about the time of your responding to the call of this "demonstration". Would you have done the same thing or perhaps would you have alerted someone because you might actually have a stake in the outcome?

That is my point, Mr. French Photographer, Mr. Newsweek Editor, and those who still don't get it. This is a war that they started and it is against us...all of us. This time it happened to be the crew of the DHL aircraft. Next time it might be the photographer's wife, the editor's son.

If you would have reacted differently if your own wife might have been at risk (and lets not be coy here, because certainly you would have), then you justify all of this as being "OK" so long as it happens to "someone else".

You disgust me.