While there is no shortage of discussion about the pleasures of being a supporting actor in the TSA’s airport security theatre, it pales in comparison to the lawlessness of airplanes, as Shoshona Hebshi found out. Via Ken at Popehat :
. . . a perfectly innocent woman being hauled off a flight, handcuffed, jailed, strip-searched, and grilled for hours — because some fucking ninny on the plane thought she and the two dark-skinned people sitting next to her were “suspicious”, and because “better safe than sorry” has become a higher value to law enforcement than probable cause or reasonable suspicion or due process or common freaking sense, and because we’re too cowed as a people to say anything about it.
At her blog, Stories from the Heartland, the tone of utter confusion is clear. As her plane landed, was moved to a “secure” location and boarded by machine gun wielding police, there was bizarre curiosity and trepidation, reflected as she twitted what was happening around her. And then things took a turn into the Twilight Zone:
After being held incommunicado, strip searched just to make sure she wasn’t wearing a bomb and subsequently questioned by the FBI, What had she done to give rise to being the target of such federal attention?My last tweet:
Majorly armed cops coming aboard
Someone shouted for us to place our hands on the seats in front of us, heads down. The cops ran down the aisle, stopped at my row and yelled at the three of us to get up. “Can I bring my phone?” I asked, of course. What a cliffhanger for my Twitter followers! No, one of the cops said, grabbing my arm a little harder than I would have liked. He slapped metal cuffs on my wrists and pushed me off the plane. The three of us, two Indian men living in the Detroit metro area, and me, a half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife living in suburban Ohio, were being detained.
The cops brought us to a parked squad car next to the plane, had us spread our legs and arms. Mine asked me if I was wearing any explosives. “No,” I said, holding my tongue to not let out a snarky response. I wasn’t sure what I could and could not say, and all that came out was “What’s going on?”
They asked if I knew the two men sitting next to me, and if I noticed them getting up during the flight or doing anything I would consider suspicious.I told them no, and couldn’t remember how many times the men had gotten up, though I was sure they had both gone to the bathroom in succession at some point during the flight.
Again, I asked what was going on, and the man said judging from their line of questioning that I could probably guess, but that someone on the plane had reported that the three of us in row 12 were conducting suspicious activity.
To put it more bluntly, someone on the plane, carefully watching other passengers for conduct that violated heartland sensibilities, decided that the passengers in row 12 were up to something because they went to the bathroom. Two were Indian, and Shoshona was, well, a bit darker than most in Des Moines.
What is the likelihood that two Indian men who didn’t know each other and a dark-skinned woman of Arab/Jewish heritage would be on the same flight from Denver to Detroit? Was that suspicion enough?
People are strange, seeing the possibility of bad things by bad people with different color skin. Is it normal or not. Is it coincidence or part of a scheme to take over a plane by going to the bathroom. Who knows? But someone on that plane wasn’t about to let these odd-looking people go unchecked.
And the American government, despite the likelihood of having someone, somewhere, fully capable of realizing that some overly sensitive nutjob who saw potential evil in the skin tone and bathroom habits of the passengers of row 12 was completely off the wall, was nonetheless happy to provide the muscle, just to be sure. This could go down in the books as another potential terrorist act thwarted by the brilliance and dedication of our government. A government spokesman explains:
FBI Detroit spokeswoman Sandra Berchtold said ultimately authorities determined there was no real threat.
“Due to the anniversary of Sept. 11, all precautions were taken, and any slight inconsistency was taken seriously,” Berchtold said. “The public would rather us err on the side of caution than not.”
Maybe. Or maybe the public would rather you not seize, strip and interrogate people because they went to the bathroom in a fashion that troubled someone from Des Moines. Or maybe they expect the forces of law enforcement to demonstrate some modicum of intelligence, and not leap at every nutjob’s suspicions.
Or maybe it’s just because the three passengers in row 12 had darker skin than others.
And so Shoshona Hebshi, a believer in law and order and public safety, was sacrificed on the altar of better safe than sorry because someone on a plane thought it odd.
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So this is what we’ve come to as a society. We now get suspicious when somebody gets diarrhea on a plane.
Also, people from Des Moines apparently can’t distinguish Indians from Arabs.
“So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
We’ve retreated so far I don’t think we can even see the line anymore.
There are more minorities in Des Moines than you think but they tend to be concentrated in a few neighborhoods. However there a lots of folks in Iowa who are unable to tell the difference between an Asian and an American Indian.
And there are lots of people who have accepted the government’s implied warning that they should be scared of anyone (make that everyone) who doesn’t look and sound like them – and of many people who do look and sound like them (because they’re sneaky that way).
And, sadly, not just in Des Moines.
I like Des Moines. Decent barbecue and nice folks. But even people who look more like Arabs than cornfed Des Moinians (?) or anywhere else in the heartland aren’t inherently suspicious and subject to strip searches and interrogation. Even if some local thinks they’re suspicious because they’re not like “us.”
What happened to this lady was wrong, and we should all be ashamed that we allow this kind of thing to happen again and again.
It bothers me that police are (supposedly) not allowed to detain and interrogate people without articulable, reasonable suspicion yet have no problem using some random person’s unreasonable suspicions as an excuse to do so. They excuse themselves by claiming that they didn’t create the situation and are just (over)reacting to it. Though that does not explain why they often don’t make the slightest effort to figure out what is going on before coming down with their heavy hand.
As in this case, where the fact that the aircraft had already landed safely would seem to indicate that nobody aboard was trying to destroy it in flight.
Having said that, Ms. Hebshi would deserve even more sympathy had she been able to relate her horrific tale without injecting her own hateful comments about “country music”, “short hair”, “fat bellies”, “rednecks” etc.
Why does it have to be the Iowa guy that’s so white?
In addition to being an idiotic overreaction, this was poor police work. After the plane landed, there should not have been any reason to believe that there was an imminent security threat. If any attack was attempted, it was a unsuccessful.
Thus, storming a plane as if it had been taken over by violent attackers was unnecessary. If there had been terrorists on board, the storming might have caused a firefight and resulted in civilian casualties. The terrorist suspects should have been apprehended quietly and with minimum of fuss after leaving the plane:
“Please, Sir, could you please come here? We have a problem with your credit card.” Then, the arrest could take place in the back office, out of sight.
The storming of the plane is the most public way possible to apprehend terrorist suspects. If the good innocent people mistreated here had been real terrorists, their comrades would have been immediately aware that they are compromised. This is simply idiotic. If you want to foil a conspiracy, you don’t begin by arresting a few suspects ipublicly. Instead, you track them and their contacts down, taking your time.