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I Cut
My Hair, But I'm Not A Terrorist: TSA In Philly Must Stand
For Truly Stupid A******s
18 February 2010 By Dave Lindorff
I guess I may as well get out front of things here.
I’m about to fly to Switzerland to lead a panel on how
to change pro-capital punishment attitudes in a
country at the Fourth Congress Against the Death
Penalty, being sponsored by the United Nations in
Geneva. And judging from the stories I’ve been reading
about the Transportation Security Administration, or
at least its Philadelphia International Airport
operation, and the Philadelphia Police who backstop
the TSA here, I’m afraid I’m liable to be hauled away
as a suspected terrorist before I can get on my
flight.
Why? Because I will be carrying copies of one of my
books, which has the title “Killing Time” (It’s an
investigation into the death penalty case of
Philadelphia journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, and was
published in 2003 by Common Courage Press), and more
importantly, because I just got a haircut.
A haircut, you may well ask? Well you see, we just
learned today from an article in the Philadelphia
Inquirer that the TSA last fall handcuffed, arrested
and held for five hours young Nick George, a
21-year-old Pomona College student (shown above) on
his way back to campus in California, because they
found 200 Arab/English language flashcards on his
person, and despite his protestation that he is a
Middle Eastern Studies major, they decided that he
must be a terrorist. The reason they stopped him in
the first place, though, according to Philadelphia
Police, who were called in to take him into detention,
is that the TSA and police were suspicious that
George’s hair was shorter than it appeared in the
photo on his Pennsylvania driver’s license. “That,” as
Polict Lt. Louis Liberati told the Inquirer, is “an
indication sometimes that someone may have gone
through a radicalization.”
Damn. Just last week, I decided that my shaggy grey
locks and Santa-like beard were becoming too unruly,
so I got out the old electric hair-clipper and gave
myself a very short buzzcut. It hasn’t changed my
politics, but I sure look radically different--and I
must say that my hair and beard are shorter than they
appear on either my driver’s license or my passport.
Now, if the bright bulbs on the TSA at Philly’s
airport security checkpoint decide that my haircut
means I look "radicalized" and need closer inspection,
and if they then decide to check through my carry-on
luggage, they will inevitably stumble upon the copies
of my second book, which I’m bring to Geneva to sell
to interested participants at the Congress. As soon as
they see the title, “Killing Time,” I figure they’ll
freak. And if they read the subtitle, which says, “An
investigation into the death row case of Mumia
Abu-Jamal,” they will see that name and immediately
flash “Arab! Arab! Arab!” although of course Mumia,
aka Wesley Cook, is an African American native of
Philadelphia. That won’t help me, though, if the TSA
cuffs me and turns me over to the tender mercies of
Philly’s Finest, because Mumia Abu-Jamal is public
enemy number one for the police union, the Fraternal
Order of Police, whose members are dedicated to
ensuring this man’s execution. They will not be kindly
disposed to a writer whose book argues that
Abu-Jamal’s trial was a kangaroo court sham rife with
racism, prosecutorial misconduct and perjured
testimony, that his appeals were subverted by blatant
judicial prejudice, and that he may not even have been
guilty at all of the crime of killing a white police
officer.
Of course, it could get worse for me. Early last
month, another local student flying home from the
holidays to college, 22-year-old Rebecca Solomon, had
a Philadelphia Airport TSA worker, “as a joke,” slip a
plastic bag of some unidentified white powder into her
carry-on bag, which he was inspecting after pulling
her, allegedly at random, from the security line for a
special inspection. “Where did you get it?” he asked
her, causing the young woman to totally freak out. At
that point, after letting her sweat and telling her
things would be all right if she just answered
“honestly,” the TSA goon reportedly smiled and said,
“just kidding.”
Holy crap! Bad enough that someone in that kind of
position of authority would think of that as a joke,
but what if it hadn’t been? What if it had been coke,
and he’d decided to claim he actually found something
that he had really planted in the bag himself? How
easy it would be in this mad, terror-crazed America,
to get a jury to send someone like Solomon up for 10
years on a faked drug charge (the Philly Police were
caught doing just this on a wide scale in a 1990s
scandal prosecuted by the US Attorney’s Office)? Or,
had the bag contained some explosive powder, how easy
to send her packing to Guantanamo on a faked terrorism
charge?
Luckily, the jerk who pulled that last stunt was fired
by the TSA, but not, apparently, the guy who cuffed a
young Middle Eastern Studies scholar and kept him from
making his flight.
And then there’s Nadine Peligrino, a 57-year-old
Baton-Rouge businesswoman and Philadelphia native, who
was at the Philly airport preparing to fly home with
her husband from a visit to family and friends. Back
in July 2006, she was, for some unknown reason,
selected for special attention by the alert agents of
the TSA. As they started picking through her bag, the
fastidious woman, who used to teach public speaking
and semantics at Penn State and Trenton College, asked
that the the TSA inspectors put on new surgical
gloves. The over-enthusiastic TSA inspectors were at
the time pawing through her make-up, sniffing at her
lipstick and fingering her undergarments (ahead of the
game there apparently, they were already looking for
explosive underpants!), and she didn’t want any
unwanted germs. She claims the agents got irritated at
her, especially when she asked them to put her things
back in the bag the way they found them. They
didn’t--tossing everything together in a pile. When
she stormed out of the private room where the
screening had been conducted, the agents claim she hit
them with her purse. She was charged with assault, was
arrested by Philly police, and spent 17 hours in the
can. Her case was recently tossed by a Philadelphia
court because even though her attorneys had requested
the security tapes of the incident from the TSA, the
TSA destroyed them. The judge, Municipal Judge Thomas
Gehret, didn’t take kindly to the TSA lawyer’s
explanation that they allowed the routine destruction
of the recording after 30 days “because most of the
incident took place outside of the camera’s view” and
because the city of Philadelphia “couldn’t afford” the
cost of storing such records. As the judge said, "With
all the stuff that is happening, I would think you'd
want to keep it - you could keep that forever." He
scoffed at the TSA’s lame expense excuse, noting
correctly that such digital records can fit on one
DVD.
So there you have it. Cut your hair in Philadelphia
and to the alert agents of the TSA and the equally
alert Philadelphia Police you are a potentially
radicalized terrorist. (Geez, and I already went
through that garbage back in the ‘60s, when my long
hair used to routinely get me harassed by police. So I
guess it's "long hair and beard = Commie" and "short
hair and beard = Jihadi"). Carry language flash cards,
or perhaps a book with an incindiary title, and you’re
a potential terrorist. Get the wrong TSA agent, and
you may even end up having some terribly incriminating
substance planted in your bag. And try to prove
misbehavior or worse by the TSA and they’ll casually
destroy the evidence.
Ahead of this flight, I have memorized the number of
the Philadelphia ACLU.
Wish me luck!
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