Watch What You Say

This is the kind of thing that makes me wonder if Bush, Ashcroft and Company haven’t already screwed this country up so badly that it will never recover:

“How are you?” asked the airport security person who popped up beside me on my way to baggage claim.

“Uh, fine — thanks,” I replied, wondering, why are you asking?

As if she’d read my thoughts, she told me there had been complaints about me on the airplane. Then she asked to see the crossword puzzle I’d been working on during the flight. Huh? I thought. Talk about being puzzled! Still, my grin was smug as I handed it over. I’d just completed the Friday New York Times puzzle, for the first time ever.

But the agent ignored the crossword, turning the paper sideways to read a line I’d scribbled in the margin: “I know this is kind of a bomb.”

She pointed to the sentence, her finger resting on the word “bomb.” “What does this mean?” she demanded.

Suddenly a light went on in my head. I remembered the passenger on my left leaning forward in his seat as I scribbled while we waited for takeoff. Seconds later, he’d clambered hastily over me without apology to make his way to the front of the plane. I’d assumed intestinal complications, but now that I thought about it, he hadn’t used the bathroom. He’d spoken briefly with the flight attendants and returned to his seat. As the security woman looked at me, I now realized the passenger had been about as interested in my puzzling prowess as she was.

“I know this is kind of a bomb” is what I imagine Bucky, my main character, would say to Julie, his love interest, in the critical scene of my novel. I explained to the security woman that this is what happens when a 42-year-old man who is to literature what a karaoke singer is to opera tries to put words in the mouth of a fictional 19-year-old.

I opened my laptop and showed her shining example after shining example of similarly awful dialogue. She understood that that word, b-o-m-b, was no reference to ordnance or terrorist weapons of any kind.

But my explanation wasn’t good enough for the three Dallas police officers who meanwhile had surrounded me — summoned, I supposed, for backup in case the dangerous character tried to write something even worse.

One took my driver’s license to run a fruitless background check (the closest I ever came to being in trouble with the law was accepting a beer at age 17 from the teen-age daughter of the Nantucket Island police chief). A particularly hostile cop asked me a strangely menacing question: “So, how many books have you gotten made?” I started my usual backpedaling answer to that query, honed to perfection in the Dallas bar scene, but he cut me off: “That’s not what I asked.” I told him I must have misunderstood. He responded, “You’re a writer and you don’t understand my words?”

[…]

…the honcho gravely warned me that while I hadn’t crossed the line, I had walked right up to it. And for that I would be on Homeland Security’s watch list.

Have we all just gotten used to the idea of a “Homeland Security Watchlist?” Do we have even the vaguest clue about who might be on it and what criteria are used? Is this one of those times when sage law and order conservatives tell you that if you’re innocent you don’t have anything to worry about?

Here we have a situation in which some nosy asshole sitting in the seat next to you sees that you wrote the word “bomb,” and reports it. And some person in authority says that you’ve walked right up to a “line” you had no idea even existed and are now on a list which means that if anything ever happens again — you are overheard saying “jihad” or perhaps “fuck Bush” — and you are “questioned” again, you are already in the database as someone who is being watched.

Perhaps this doesn’t happen often. But there are other stories of little things happening that make me begin to have doubts about our ability to withstand this threat of terrorism. For instance, there was this story last month about a British journalist’s dealings with American authorities:

Somewhere in central Los Angeles, about 20 miles from LAX airport, there is a nondescript building housing a detention facility for foreigners who have violated US immigration and customs laws. I was driven there around 11pm on May 3, my hands painfully handcuffed behind my back as I sat crammed in one of several small, locked cages inside a security van. I saw glimpses of night-time urban LA through the metal bars as we drove, and shadowy figures of armed security officers when we arrived, two of whom took me inside. The handcuffs came off just before I was locked in a cell behind a thick glass wall and a heavy door. No bed, no chair, only two steel benches about a foot wide. There was a toilet in full view of anyone passing by, and of the video camera watching my every move. No pillow or blanket. A permanent fluorescent light and a television in one corner of the ceiling. It stayed on all night, tuned into a shopping channel.

After 10 minutes in the hot, barely breathable air, I panicked. I don’t suffer from claustrophobia, but this enclosure triggered it. There was no guard in sight and no way of calling for help. I banged on the door and the glass wall. A male security officer finally approached and gave the newly arrived detainee a disinterested look. Our shouting voices were barely audible through the thick door. “What do you want?” he yelled. I said I didn’t feel well. He walked away. I forced myself to calm down. I forced myself to use that toilet. I figured out a way of sleeping on the bench, on my side, for five minutes at a time, until the pain became unbearable, then resting in a sitting position and sleeping for another five minutes. I told myself it was for only one night.

As it turned out, I was to spend 26 hours in detention. My crime: I had flown in earlier that day to research an innocuous freelance assignment for the Guardian, but did not have a journalist’s visa.

[…]

Finally, after much scurrying around by officers, I was invited into an office and asked if I needed anything before we began. I requested a glass of water, which the interrogating officer brought me himself. He was a gentle, intelligent interrogator: the interview lasted several hours and consisted of a complete appraisal of my life, past and present, personal and professional. He needed information as diverse as my parents’ names, the fee I would be paid for the article I was working on, what it was about, exactly, and, again, the names of people I was coming to interview. My biography was a confusing issue – I was born in one country, had lived in many others: who was I, exactly? For US immigration, my British passport was not enough of an identity. The officer said, pointedly, “You are Russian, yet you claim to be British”, an accusation based on the fact that I was born in Moscow (though I never lived there). Your governor, went my mental reply, is Austrian, yet he claims to be American. After about three hours, during which I tried hard to fight jetlag and stay alert, we had produced several pages that were supposed to provide the invisible person in charge with enough material to say yes or no to my request to be allowed entry. My interrogator asked one last obligatory question, “Do you understand?”

“Yes, I understand,” I sighed, and signed the form. The instant faxed response was an official, final refusal to enter the US for not having the appropriate visa. I’d have to go back to London to apply for it.

At this moment, the absurd but almost friendly banter between these men and myself underwent a sudden transformation. Their tone hardened as they said that their “rules” demanded that they now search my luggage. Before I could approach to observe them doing this, the officer who had originally referred me to his supervisor was unzipping my suitcase and rummaging inside. For the first time, I raised my voice: “How dare you touch my private things?”

“How dare you treat an American officer with disrespect?” he shouted back, indignantly. “Believe me, we have treated you with much more respect than other people. You should go to places like Iran, you’d see a big difference.” The irony is that it is only “countries like Iran” (for example, Cuba, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe) that have a visa requirement for journalists. It is unheard of in open societies, and, in spite of now being enforced in the US, is still so obscure that most journalists are not familiar with it. Thirteen foreign journalists were detained and deported from the US last year, 12 of them from LAX.

After my luggage search, the officer took some mugshots of me, then proceeded to fingerprint me.

Keep in mind, this was last month, not November 2001.

OK, maybe it’s silly for me to get so white hot, angry when I read these stories. It’s just one female journalist and she was in technical violation. It was only a misunderstanding about the word “bomb” written on a newspaper. Perhaps these are isolated cases. That petty bureaucrats use language that is remarkably similar to that used by our president and his political allies in comparing the wonderful treatment under our police state as compared with that under really awful police states is surely just a rhetorical coincidence.

But, after seeing the Justice Department issue opinions that the president has unlimited powers in wartime and that anything, including torture, is justified to “defend the homeland” it doesn’t really seem so silly after all. The stories begin to accumulate, each one a random intrusion by dumb, underqualified government authorities who seem to have watched too much television and have very little common sense.

If this keeps up, sooner or later we will all end up, in one way or another, on the “Homeland Security Watchlist” where anyone from a professional rival to a vengeful neighbor can be the instrument of terror in a way that bin Laden and gang can only envy. In fact, these little people with too much power scare me a hundred times more than the Islamic terrorists. The threat that lives among us is ourselves.