[Svettie]

I don't disagree with you. Yes, one is worse than the other.

The point that I'm making is that the distinction is dwarfed by the baseness of the paradigm itself: politically motivated interference with airliners in flight, to force a landing and arrest people in transit who are currently not within your jurisdiction. Anyway you want to look at it this happened in both cases, and we shouldn't be celebrating "ooh, but technically, we just withdrew permissions so it's not that bad is it?"

[lazide]

But that is my point - the morales flight incident wasn't an airliner. Near as I can dig up, there is no evidence anyone but Morales was on it and staff. It's more equivalent to stopping an officials car (via roadblock) than the hijacking of a civil airliner at gunpoint (or fighter jet point).

It's not a distinction without a difference, these are big differences with many non-subtle distinctions.