Amtrak officials say they removed a passenger who was behaving suspiciously from a train in North Carolina on Monday.
The Silver Star was headed to Miami from New York when it stopped in Garysburg, N.C., near N.C. 64. That happened just before 7 p.m. about 30 miles east of Rocky Mount.
Am I the only one who is getting a little weary – and a bit suspicious – of the “officials declined to say” routine? It’s getting to be pretty common place these days. I don’t have to know all the gory details of some deviant’s sexual perversion, etc. but when a citizen is removed from public transportation, I think the public has a right to know why.
If it’s possible terrorism, then the public has a right to know that the threat existed, and has been handled. If it wasn’t terrorism-related, the public has a right to that reassurance, as well.
But this whole “declined to say” thing bothers me. It means that any one of us can be forcibly removed from a public conveyance – or anywhere else for that matter! – without just cause, at the whim of whatever “officials” happen to be around at the time – and THAT smacks of Police State tactics a la Nazi Germany, or Communist Russia, where average citizens quite often just “disappeared”.
We ARE threatened by terrorism, and we do have to deal with it. But the “authorities” need to be more forth-coming with information about what THEY are doing and why. I don’t want to be “protected” from the truth – frankly, I’ll panic more over what I’m NOT told than I will over the facts, however scary they might be.
So it’s time for law enforcement to start telling us what’s going on – good or bad.