Rigoberto, Requiesce in Pace

by Becky Akers
by Becky Akers

So now we add murder to the sexual assault and robbery that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) commits against us.

Turns out Leviathan is a stereotypical murderer, as addicted to lying as the killers it incarcerates. It has yet to come clean about its slaughter of Rigoberto Alpizar, the American Airlines passenger gunned down by air marshals on Wednesday. Then again, why should it? Leviathan has lied for millennia and gotten away with it.

Not this time, though. The state's sloppy whoppers began unravelling as soon as they were spun. The government tried to paint Mr. Alpizar as aggressive, the sort anyone might reasonably mistake for a terrorist; his neighbors and family slashed that portrait. "Rigo Alpizar was a loving, gentle and caring husband, uncle, brother, son and friend," his sister-in-law told CNN, while a neighbor described him to Florida's Sun Sentinel: "He was a nice guy, always smiling, always talkative. Everybody is talking about a guy I know nothing about." A second neighbor echoed that: he was "very friendly and helpful to people around the neighborhood ... a very pleasant person, he and his wife both." As if this weren't enough, the couple was returning from a missionary trip to Ecuador, during which they assisted Mrs. Alpizar's uncle, a volunteer dentist. It seems that Rigo was about as far as he could get from the Al Qaeda terrorist the air marshals want us to think they perceived.

The Alpizars had arrived in Miami's airport from South America, endured the rude, hostile welcome of US Customs, and were catching a connecting flight home to Orlando – a flight which tragically included two air marshals among its passengers. Rigo suffered from a bipolar disorder. He was already agitated when he boarded the plane, but in the final moments before the jet pulled away from the gate, his anxiety became so acute he bolted from his seat and ran for the door. And why not? Everything connected with American aviation anymore traumatizes those in perfect emotional health, let alone anyone struggling with bipolarism.

The government's most shameless lie concerns what happened next. It alleges that Rigo was shouting "I have a bomb!" as he fled. Right. Terrorists often sneak explosives past those enthusiastic gropers at the TSA checkpoints only to scream their intentions once they board a plane full of unsuspecting passengers.

It’s also surprising those passengers so calmly accepted Rigo’s announcement. There was no stampede as folks fought to leave an aircraft supposedly about to blow, nor did panicked parents push their children into the aisle with instructions to run. Indeed, no passenger even remembers Alpizar’s uttering the "B-word," though everyone agrees the air marshals and the FBI have. Copiously. CNN reported that "Dave Adams, a spokesman for the Federal Air Marshal Service, said Alpizar had run up and down the plane's aisle yelling, 'I have a bomb in my bag.'"

That contrasts with a passenger who "recalled Alpizar saying, 'I've got to get off, I've got to get off.'" Another remembered that "he wasn't saying anything; he was just running." Nor did this witness immediately think, "Terrorism!" Being a rational person instead of a hyped-up air marshal, he settled for a likelier explanation: "I said to myself, 'It is probably a person who took the wrong plane.'" A second man of similar rationality assumed Alpizar was nauseated and heading for the men’s room. Furthermore, Mrs. Alpizar chased her husband, trying to help and inadvertently explaining the situation to everyone, including the trigger-happy sky-cops. A passenger told CNN, "She was just saying her husband was sick, her husband was sick."

Also chasing poor Rigo were the marshals. Intriguingly, they were the only witnesses to Alpizar’s distress who concluded he posed a threat; no one else described Rigo as dangerous. Rather, they used words like "crazy" and "frantic": "He was running like a crazy man," one passenger told AP. Said another, "He was frantic, his arms flailing in the air."

But he didn’t fool our crack team of Robocops. They followed him onto the jetway and shot him because, they claimed, he had hollered about a bomb and was reaching into his backpack to detonate it. No explosives were found on Rigo’s body or in his baggage.

"Based on their training [the air marshals] had to take the appropriate action to defuse the situation to prevent a danger to themselves and also passengers in the terminal," spokes-stooge Adams told CNN. Yo, Dave: icing a man in cold blood does not "defuse the situation." And only government dweebs consider homicide an "appropriate action."

Trying to justify the murder of this innocent man, Leviathan has changed its story, as liars do. The Feds originally had Rigo declaiming about a bomb while running "up and down" the plane's aisle. But at least seven passengers deny that Rigo mentioned anything about a bomb, and several insist he did not speak at all. "I can tell you, he never said a thing in that airplane. He never called out he had a bomb," an architect named Jorge Borrelli told the Orlando Sentinel. "He never said a word from the point he passed me at Row 9. . . . He did not say a word to anybody." So Leviathan now alleges that Rigo shouted about the bomb in the jetway, where his killers were the only witnesses.

Sometimes Our Masters are just too stupid for words. Sound waves travel, guys, OK? Even if the passengers couldn't see the jetway, they could hear what was going on out there: "I heard very clearly, 'Stop!' and about four to six gunshots," Borrelli of Row 9 told the Orlando Sentinel. "At that point the flight attendants started screaming, 'Get down! Get down!'"

We come now to the state’s only truthful moment in this whole anti-Constitutional mess. "It appears that [the air marshals] followed the protocols and did what they were trained to do," White House Press Patsy Scott McClellan told CNN. "...these marshals appear to have acted in a way that is consistent with the extensive training that they have received."

We'll leave aside the question of whether we can call "extensive" seven weeks of training followed by the odd day here and there. Then again, we’d be better off under untrained marshals, given the slogan pounded into recruits: "Dominate. Intimidate. Control."

This chillingly fascist motto prompts agreement with Rep. John Mica (R-Fla), chairman of the House aviation subcommittee, who crowed to USA Today, "The system worked exactly as designed."

Shooting unarmed, obviously distraught Americans who are hurrying to disembark without having asked permission before their plane pushes away from the gate... Clearly, the system worked exactly as designed. And here Mica unwittingly pulls the veil from Leviathan's snout to reveal the beast’s evil smirk. Neither the perverts groping us at the TSA's checkpoints nor the bullies whose pathology finds an outlet in "air marshalling" have anything to do with protecting us. They are there to dominate, intimidate and control us. And to shoot those they can't.

Further proof that the TSA exists to dominate, intimidate and control passengers comes from the abuse of Flight 924's surviving ones. As always when the government alleges a threat, everyone in the vicinity is considered not a victim of said threat but an agent of it. That sent a variety of brutes, from SWAT teams to local police, swarming aboard the plane. They ordered passengers who had committed no crime nor broken any law to put their hands on their heads. "It was quite scary," one woman told the Sun Sentinel. "They wouldn't let you move. They wouldn't let you get anything out of your bag..."

Another passenger told Time Magazine, "I was on the phone with my brother. Somebody came down the aisle and put a shotgun to the back of my head and said put your hands on the seat in front of you. I got my cell phone karate chopped out of my hand. Then I realized it was an official... They were pointing the guns directly at us instead of pointing them to the ground. One little girl was crying. There was a lady crying all the way to the hotel."

The bags of these passengers who had committed no crime nor broken any law were strewn outside the aircraft, where bomb-sniffing dogs set to work on them. Cops frisked the passengers before marching them off the plane for more domination, intimidation, and interrogation. No news account I've seen mentions a search warrant. I wonder whether any brave soul asked to see one or refused to be felt up in its absence.

The death of Rigoberto Alpizar is not an "unfortunate incident," as Rep[rehensible] Mica so callously called it. It is instead the logical result of a people eagerly trading its freedom for security, of cowards who see terrorists crouched behind every tray table, of adults childishly scaring themselves with ghost stories of phantasmagorical bombers. Tragically, these babies look to their Congressional nannies for a protection they shouldn’t want and don’t need. And Congress happily rushes to oblige. Rep. Mica boasted to USA Today, "We've got a small army out there ready to protect and defend the flying public."

Yep. And like any army, it shoots to kill.

December 12, 2005

Becky Akers [send her mail] writes primarily about the American Revolution.

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