Dave Davies: Student air passenger handcuffed to echoes of 9/11 fears

Let me know if Zappa predicted this in his interview above...

By Dave Davies
Philadelphia Daily News

EIGHT YEARS after 9/11, we're used to changes in our routines. We show ID to get into office buildings, and take off our shoes at airports.

But should a college student flying back to school be handcuffed and held for five hours because he has Arabic flash cards in his backpack?

That's the way Nick George, a senior at Pomona College, in California, sees what happened to him at the Philadelphia airport two Saturdays ago.

George, of Wyncote, Montgomery County, was about to catch a Southwest flight back to school when stereo speakers in his backpack caught the eye of screeners at the metal detector.

When they looked though his bag, George said, they found his Arabic/English flash cards, and escorted him to a side screening area.

He figures it didn't help that his passport had stamps from Jordan, where he'd studied a semester, and Egypt and Sudan, where he'd gone backpacking.

And among his 200 flash cards were words like "terrorist" and "explosion." He was learning to translate the Arabic-language news network Al Jazeera.

"I understand I might warrant a second look," George told me. "They should have taken me aside, seen I had a legitimate explanation and a student ID and that I was carrying nothing illegal, and waved me on."

They didn't.

George said that Transportation Security Administration officers kept him in the screening area for what seemed like 45 minutes. Eventually a woman from the TSA arrived and began asking more questions, like how he felt about 9/11.

"Do you know who did 9/11?" he said that the woman asked.

George said that he told her that it was Osama bin Laden, and that she responded smugly, "Do you know what language Osama bin Laden spoke?"

Soon after that a Philadelphia police officer arrived and told George to put his hands behind his back. Without explanation, he slapped handcuffs on him and led him away.

George was taken to the airport police station, where he was locked in a holding cell with the cuffs still on. I guess that's what you do with a high-value physics major.

George said that he tried to be a model prisoner, and after about two hours a police supervisor removed the handcuffs. After a couple of more hours two FBI agents appeared and took him to another room for questioning.

They were polite, George said, and asked why he studied Arabic, why he'd been in the Middle East, whether anyone had ever asked him to join a terrorist group, whether he was "Islamic," whether he'd joined any Islamic or Communist (yes, Communist) groups on campus.

"They told me their job is more an art than a science," George said. "They come in and decide whether there's a legitimate threat, and in my case, they decided I was not a threat."

So, many hours after his backpack entered the metal detector, George was released with a ticket to fly the next day, but without an apology or explanation.

If there's one thing we know that the government needs in the post-9/11 era, it's more college students interested in learning Arabic.

George feels that he was treated like a criminal because somebody didn't like the flash cards. He wasn't injured or psychologically scarred, just ticked off.

"I didn't have a weapon or anything seditious, just words on paper," George said. "As an American citizen, I think I'm allowed to learn a foreign language and have flash cards."

TSA spokeswoman Ann Davis tracked down a report on George's encounter, and said that it wasn't the flash cards that got him flagged.

Davis said that George had been selected for screening before he even reached the metal detector by TSA behavioral-detection officers, personnel trained to screen passengers for "involuntary physical and physiological reactions that people exhibit in response to a fear of being discovered."

Davis said that the report indicates that in the screening area, George's "behavior escalated to a point where our officers deemed it necessary to contact the Philadelphia Police Department."

Davis couldn't say what behavior had caught the officers' eye or what escalating behavior he exhibited. She said the report did note that George had Arabic flash cards, but "that's not why we would call law enforcement."

The police story is a little different.

Lt. Louis Liberati said, just as Davis did, that TSA personnel initially selected George because of something in his behavior.

But Liberati said that it was the stuff that the TSA found in George's backpack and wallet that really aroused their suspicion: the Arabic flash cards with troubling words, a card that had George's name and Arabic script, and the longer hair in George's driver's license and passport photos than his current clean-cut appearance.

That's "an indicator sometimes that somebody may have gone through a radicalization," Liberati explained.

Liberati said nothing about "escalating behavior." Liberati said police checked with the FBI, and the feds decided that they wanted to come and interview George.

I reached George, now back in school, and told him the authorities' version of the events.

He said that it's "crazy" to think that he was acting suspiciously in line or that he had exhibited "escalating behavior" while being questioned.

He insists that he patiently explained everything, including the card with Arabic writing - his student ID from Jordan - which he keeps as a souvenir.

"I never raised my voice," George said, "but I did ask once or twice how much longer this was going to take because my flight was about to leave."

Liberati also said that he's certain that George had not been left handcuffed in his cell.

George is equally certain that he was. His wallet was taken, and he remembers an officer coming into his cell to give him the $30 they'd found inside. The officer stuffed the money in his pocket, George said, and left with the cuffs still locked tight.

Our lives have changed since 9/11, and mistakes will happen. But when government personnel put an innocent person through something like this, it would be nice if someone offered an explanation, or showed just a touch of humanity.

Until then, check your flash cards with your luggage.

Clear-eyed conservative realism -- translated into English.

Why the Uniter Divided Us

by E.J. Dionne, Jr. , Washington Post, January 19, 2009

There are many reasons why most Americans are not mourning President Bush's departure. But our new president would do well to concentrate on the deeper causes of the public's disaffection with the man headed to Texas.

From the very beginning of his presidency, won courtesy of a divisive Supreme Court decision that abruptly ended his contest with Al Gore, Bush misunderstood the nature of his lease on power, the temper of the country and the proper role of partisanship in our political life. His win-at-all-costs strategy in Florida became a template for much of his presidency, reflected especially in the way the Justice Department was politicized.

Bush did not respect the obligation of a leader in a free society to forge a durable consensus. He was better at announcing policies than explaining them. He dismissed legitimate opposition and plausible doubts about the courses he wished to pursue. It is partly because of these failures that Americans reacted by selecting a successor with such a profoundly different political personality.

Barack Obama's first response to a political problem is to offer a detailed analysis and put the challenge into some larger context. He loves sparring with his intellectual adversaries. And his "if you have a better idea, I'll take it" approach is the antithesis of the my-way-or-the-highway politics of the past eight years.

Bush was capable of considerable charm, but he never really engaged his opponents. He rolled over them. He did not try to win expansive electoral majorities. Instead, he sought to build a compact, ideologically pure coalition that he could use on behalf of dramatic conservative departures. He claimed mandates he did not have.

Maintaining long-term support for the Iraq war would have required him to do more than just push a resolution through Congress on the eve of a midterm election using political threats and campaign-trail rhetoric. "It's better to fight them there than here" was not an argument that took the average citizen's intelligence seriously. Cutting taxes rather than asking us to pay for the war suggested that while the president might ask others to sacrifice their priorities, he would never sacrifice his own.

Ironically, the clearest evidence of Bush's larger failure can be found in the areas where he can claim genuine success.

Bush's Medicare prescription drug plan and his No Child Left Behind education program were far from perfect. But they reflected broadly shared goals -- expanding health coverage, promoting accountability in education -- and involved actual bipartisan wrangling and negotiation. Aspects of both programs will endure.

Bush's dedication to the victims of AIDS in Africa and his dramatic increases in foreign aid were admirable, and they surprised his fiercest critics. In the final days, his supporters were touting these least typical of his achievements.

For a few months after Sept. 11, 2001, the president governed as a truly national leader. At that moment, we saw the consensus-builder he promised to be in 2000. He might have built a durable majority for his party on the basis of more moderate, consensual policies. Instead, he moved to ridiculing those who doubted the wisdom of his Iraq adventure and used the war on terrorism for electoral advantage.

A hyper-partisan domestic politics of us vs. them followed naturally from Bush's instinct to confuse moral certainty with moral clarity. In his farewell address, he declared yet again that "good and evil are present in this world, and between the two, there can be no compromise."

Yes, but the hardest moral decisions are usually not between good and evil but between competing goods (security vs. liberty) or lesser evils (a draining war in Iraq vs. a messy, long-term strategy to contain Saddam Hussein).

Our new president will make his own characteristic mistakes. He risks overestimating his capacity to persuade his most implacable foes. He may forget that a two-party system inevitably creates its own dynamic of loyalty and opposition.

But he is decidedly not an us-vs.-them guy. He gets both the uses and the limits of partisanship. He has been known to quote the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr on the dangers of moral arrogance. He could make nuance and complexity cool again. Of course it will take more than that to be successful. But it's a start.

President Bush... Vice President Cheney... Open Your Books.. and start again!

Epitaph for the Bush Presidency

"Open your book up to Lesson 60 on page 153."

This is what the teacher of the elementary class said just before George Bush started to read his story, "The Pet Goat", as the planes flew into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on 9/11.It defines Bush's Presidency.

He hid in reading to school children rather than get up and deal with the greatest crisis in our nation's recent history as events continued to unfold with his head buried in a childrens' story.

He has maintained that head-in-the-sand manner through every other crisis created under his administration as those disasters flew into other national landmarks... Katrina into New Orleans, torture (along with Abu Ghraib) into our armed forces heretofore good reputation, lack of oversight in our financial institutions as they came crashing down, spying on individual citizens not involved in terrorism (with agents laughing at the private conversations). It would be tedious and frightening to continue to list similar situations under his watch.

Yes, this quote sums it up again for another reason. This is where President Bush and Vice President Cheney should start over... in the grade where he was reading "The Pet Goat", rather than dealing with responsibility. They can go back and learn what responsibility and honor mean, starting in second grade.

So please...President Bush... Vice President Cheney..."Open your book up to Lesson 60 on page 153.".... and start again.

Wassup???? Change

The White House Mole

From Greetings: an intriguing column from Dan Froomkin of Washingtonpost.com and Niemanwatchdog.org. So the reason there was no one in the White House "called on" being warned about the pre-9/11 disinterest in Al Qaeda warnings was because "their guy" was the head of the 9/11 Commission? These are not pleasant revelations.

By Dan Froomkin , washingtonpost.com
Monday, February 4, 2008; 1:41 PM

Less than four months before the 2004 election, it looked like President Bush might face a perilous accountability moment.

An independent, bipartisan commission was set to report on the "circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, including preparedness for and the immediate response to the attacks."

The White House had a lot to lose from an unfettered, authoritative examination of those issues. The last thing Bush needed during a hotly contested reelection campaign was a reminder of his inattention to the threat of terrorism before 9/11, or of his initial paralysis when he heard the news, or of his misbegotten attempts to pin the blame on Iraq.

Bush originally fought the establishment of such a commission. Even after he bowed to congressional pressure, he still only went along grudgingly. For instance, he famously refused to face the panel alone or in public, insisting instead on a private, unrecorded interview with Vice President Cheney at his side.

But when the report finally came out, it was clear Bush had dodged another bullet. The commission spread the blame for 9/11 far and wide and emphasized needed structural changes over accountability.

Now, it seems the White House may not have needed to be too apprehensive about the commission's report. It had an inside man. And he was one of the guys in charge.

Hope Yen writes for the Associated Press: "The Sept. 11 commission's executive director had closer ties with the White House than publicly disclosed and tried to influence the final report in ways that the staff often perceived as limiting the Bush administration's responsibility, a new book says.

"Philip Zelikow, a friend of then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, spoke with her several times during the 20-month investigation that closely examined her role in assessing the al-Qaida threat. He also exchanged frequent calls with the White House, including at least four from Bush's chief political adviser at the time, Karl Rove.

"Zelikow once tried to push through wording in a draft report that suggested a greater tie between al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and Iraq, in line with White House claims but not with the commission staff's viewpoint, according to Philip Shenon's 'The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation.' . . .

"Reached by the AP, Zelikow provided a 131-page statement with information he said was provided for the book. In it, Zelikow acknowledges talking to Rove and Rice during the course of the commission's work despite a general pledge he made not to. But he said the conversations never dealt with politics.

"The White House had no immediate comment Sunday."

Michael Isikoff writes in Newsweek: "In the summer of 2003, Warren Bass, an investigator for the 9/11 Commission, was digging through highly classified National Security Council documents when he came across a trove of material that startled him. Buried in the files of former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, the documents seemed to confirm charges that the Bush White House had ignored repeated warnings about the threat posed by Osama bin Laden. Clarke, it turned out, had bombarded national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice in the summer of 2001 with impassioned e-mails and memos warning of an Al Qaeda attack--and urging a more forceful U.S. government response. One e-mail jumped out: it pleaded with officials to imagine how they would feel after a tragedy where 'hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the U.S.,' adding that 'that future day could happen at any time.' The memo was written on Tuesday, Sept. 4, 2001 -- just one week before the attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

"But when Bass tried to impress the significance of what he had discovered upon the panel, he ran into what he thought was a roadblock -- his boss. Philip Zelikow, a respected University of Virginia historian hired to be the 9/11 Commission's executive director, had long been friendly with Rice. The two had coauthored a book. Rice had later placed him on a Bush transition team that reorganized the NSC (and ended up diminishing Clarke's role). At Rice's request, Zelikow had also anonymously drafted a new Bush national-security paper in September 2002 that laid out the case for preventive war.

"In commission staff meetings, Zelikow disparaged Clarke as an egomaniac and braggart who was unjustly slandering his friend Rice, according to [Shenon's] new book. . . .

"Rove himself, according to Shenon, always feared that a report which laid the blame for 9/11 at the president's doorstep was the one development that could most jeopardize Bush's 2004 re-election. That's one reason why White House lawyers tried to stonewall the commission from the outset. When Clarke finally did testify about his warnings to Rice, Shenon reports, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and his aides feverishly drafted tough questions and phoned them in to GOP commissioners to undermine Clarke's credibility. Later, when Attorney General John Ashcroft unveiled a memo that seemed to cast the antiterror record of the Clinton Justice Department in an unflattering light, Gonzales and his aides high-fived each other."