Plane authoritarians
by digby
I haven’t written about this awful “flying while brown” incident from last week-end, but James Fallows has covered it in depth and I highly recommend you read about it. It reminded me of an incident the last time I flew a couple of months ago.
I was standing on the boarding line, long after all of us had passed through security, when a group of four TSA agents in uniform walked up and began examining the line of about 30 people, walking up and down, looking at us and our luggage. They pulled this young kid (looked about 17) in front of me out of the line and marched him over to the desk where they talked to him at length and looked all through his luggage. When he came back he was pretty shaken. His girlfriend asked what it was about and he said, “I don’t know, but it’s all pretty weird considering I’m Jewish.” The guy standing right in front of him, who hadn’t gotten any attention at all turned around and said, “and I’m Muslim.” We all shared a nervous laugh and boarded the plane.
I only relate this to show how crude profiling is. In the case Fallows writes about, the plane had already landed and the only thing the people involved had done to raise suspicion was be seated together to precipitate a SWAT team style boarding of the plane and the suspected passengers being hustled off in handcuffs. It’s the kind of thing I used to think of as an authoritarian scare tactic designed to make the populace paranoid and anxious. That couldn’t happen here, right?
Just in case, I won’t be laughing with my fellow suspected passengers anymore, though. This stuff works like a charm.
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