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September 14, 2011 at 1:32 pm 
Ed Brayton On 9/11, one of my reporters emailed me and said that he had just heard a report that the police were responding at Detroit Metro airport to a plane that had suspicious activity on it. He said he was going to monitor the situation to see if there was anything worth reporting on. I immediately thought not about a potential terrorist incident but about my last flight to Vegas, when some idiot went into the bathroom and smoked a cigarette. As a result, we all had to sit on the plane for 45 minutes after we landed, waiting for the police to come and arrest the guy.
Suspicious activity leading the police to meet the plane? Yeah, I’m gonna need a lot more information than that before I assume it has anything to do with terrorism, even on the 10th anniversary. As it turns out, my skepticism was dead on. There was no threat on the plane at all, only three entirely innocent people who didn’t know each other blatantly flying while having brown skin.
One of them was Shoshana Shebshi, an American citizen born to a Saudi father and a Jewish mother who now lives in Ohio. She was flying home from Denver to Detroit and then driving home. By sheer coincidence she was sitting next to two Indian men, neither of whom knew each other. None of them even spoke to one another during the flight until they landed, when they wondered what on earth was going on as they waited endlessly on the tarmac and saw heavily armed police officers approaching the plan and climbing the portable stairs. I’ll let her pick up the story from there as she tweeted as the plane sat there.
Just as I hung up the phone, the captain came over the loudspeaker and announced that the airport authorities wanted to move the airplane to a different part of the airport. Must be a blocked gate or something, I thought. But then he said: Everyone remain in your seats or there will be consequences. Sounded serious. I looked out the window and saw a squadron of police cars following the plane, lights flashing. I turned to my neighbor, who happened to be an Indian man, in wonderment. What is going on? Others on the plane were remarking at the police as well. Getting a little uneasy, I decided the best thing for me to do was to tweet about the experience. If the plane was going to blow up, at least there’d be some record on my part.
Stuck on a plane at Detroit airport…cops everywhere
Soon the plane was stopping in some remote part of the airport, far from any buildings, and out the window I see more police cars coming to surround the plane. Maybe there’s a fugitive on the plane, I say to my neighbor, who is also texting and now shooting some photos of the scene outside. He asks me to take a few, as I have a better angle from my window seat. A few dozen uniformed and plainclothes officers are huddled off the side of the plane. I don’t see any guns, and it isn’t clear what’s going on.
So I continued to tweet:
A little concerned about this situation. Plane moved away from terminal surrounded by cops. Crew is mum. Passengers can’t get up.
Then what looked like the bomb squad pulled up. Two police vans and a police communication center bus parked off the road. I started to get nervous and rethink my decision to fly on 9/11.
Cops in uniform and plainclothes in a huddle in rear of plane.
We had been waiting on the plane for a half hour. I had to pee. I wanted to get home and see my family. And I wanted someone to tell us what was going on. In the distance, a van with stairs came closer. I sighed with relief, thinking we were going to get off the plane and get shuttled back to the terminal. I would still be able to make it home for dinner. Others on the plane also seemed happy to see those stairs coming our way.
I see stairs coming our way…yay!
Before I knew it, about 10 cops, some in what looked like military fatigues, were running toward the plane carrying the biggest machine guns I have ever seen–bigger than what the guards carry at French train stations.
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.
It gets worse from there. Detained for hours, strip searched and finally released with apologies along with the Indian men, none of whom had done anything remotely wrong on the plane. It was apparently the sheer coincidence of three Middle Eastern or Far Eastern-looking people sitting in a row, and the fact that the two men had gone to the bathroom consecutively during the flight, that caused those brave Americans on board to think they were “suspicious.” And that’s all it took to get them humiliated and strip searched.
Shebsi’s final thoughts on the incident couldn’t be more accurate:
In the aftermath of my events on Sept. 11, 2011, I feel violated, humiliated and sure that I was taken from the plane simply because of my appearance. Though I never left my seat, spoke to anyone on the flight or tinkered with any “suspicious” device, I was forced into a situation where I was stripped of my freedom and liberty that so many of my fellow Americans purport are the foundations of this country and should be protected at any cost.
I believe in national security, but I also believe in peace and justice. I believe in tolerance, acceptance and trying–as hard as it sometimes may be–not to judge a person by the color of their skin or the way they dress. I admit to have fallen to the traps of convention and have made judgments about people that are unfounded. We live in a complicated world that, to me, seems to have reached a breaking point. The real test will be if we decide to break free from our fears and hatred and truly try to be good people who practice compassion–even toward those who hate.
I feel fortunate to have friends and family members who are sick over what happened to me. I share their disgust. But there was someone on that plane who felt threatened enough to alert the authorities. This country has operated for the last 10 years through fear. We’ve been a country at war and going bankrupt for much of this time. What is the next step?
We don’t need a next step. It’s already gotten bad enough. Last week in his weekly radio address President Obama talked about the anniversary of 9/11 and said this:
They wanted to terrorize us, but, as Americans, we refuse to live in fear.
That’s wishful thinking at best and downright delusional at worst. Americans don’t refuse to live in fear, we positively wallow in it. We have sacrificed the Bill of Rights and the dignity of far too many innocent people on the altar of fear for the past 10 years. We’ve watched as the government has committed crimes against the constitution and against the most basic human rights and we’ve done nothing about it. Hell, most of us have cheered it on — anything to feel just a bit more safe. It’s sick and it’s twisted. It makes me ashamed of my government and even more ashamed of my fellow citizens for accepting it and clamoring for it.
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Was this the same case where the police went on to bill the woman $1,200 for the “service” of their body cavity search? I vaguely remember hearing about that. Or was that another case? This story is horrible, either way.
Different circumstances, eric, but, like you said, horrible either way.
Here’s the body cavity story: http://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches/2011/09/13/woman-charged-for-involuntary-body-cavity-search/
I had no idea two people from the same row using a plane’s lavatory consecutively constituted suspicious activity. Now that I know what to look for I’ll be reporting it every time I see it. Every. Time. I hope every traveler reading this will also be as vigilant in protecting our safety.
Solution seems obvious: If a passenger is detained and strip-searched for looking brown, EVERY passenger on that plane gets detained and strip-searched.
Can’t be too careful, you never know when one of the brown types has passed something suspicious to a confederate with light-enough features that make him look like a human being worthy of human rights.
Strip ‘em all and nobody goes home until they’ve all been processed.
Solution seems obvious: If a passenger is detained and strip-searched for looking brown, EVERY passenger on that plane gets detained and strip-searched.
That isn’t a strong enough precaution, as strip-searching isn’t foolproof. All airline passengers should instead be blindfolded, handcuffed, and muzzled before boarding. It would be best to put them in isolation cells for the duration of the flight so as to prevent conspiring with rowmates, but I doubt the planes could physically accommodate that.
Of course, now everyone on that plane saw the three “brown” people led off the plane in handcuffs. Then there were all the people who just heard that three people “of Middle-Eastern descent*” were detained after a terror scare in Detroit. How many of them will ever learn the detention was groundless? What we have here is a prime example of the evils of racial profiling but I fear that in the public mind it will be taken as a vindication of the same.
*I know that India is not generally regarded as part of the Middle East. This is a phrase that was actually used by ABC News.
@Randomfactor:
Even better. Everyone flies naked. I have no qualms about it. I’m proud of my body – though I wish it were a woman’s body rather than a man’s, that’ll come in time.
#4 Randomfactor et al
Yup! All nudie, all drugged to the eyeballs flights are in your future.
If it isn’t too light hearted in the context, I predicted it ages ago
http://howlandbolton.com/essays/read_more.php?sid=308
Penn Jillette has an amusing idea for how to weed out any Muslim terrorists, regardless of color or ethnicity — every person getting on the plane has to eat a piece of bacon and kiss someone of the same sex before boarding.
Sounds plausible, except for one thing: Twitter didn’t start until 2006. Was she communicating by text with someone?
What do you mean, naturalcynic ? This happened a couple days ago. Not 2006.
I believe naturalcynic has failed to take into account the fact that every year contains a 9/11.
9/11/11, naturalcynic. Not ’01.
This story is beyond infuriating…..
That’s easy to say for someone who will, for the rest of his life, have a bodyguard with him 24/7 and won’t ever have to go through TSA security.
I wonder how he’ll feel, though, when after leaving office his daughters get a routine cavity search?
Wallowing in fear is exactly how to describe the scenario, and pretty much everything that involves alleged terrorists. Fear is exactly what caused her to think the bathroom trips were “suspicious.”
I can’t remember the last time there was any genuine case for suspecting an airplane passenger of being a terrorist, but I do remember plenty of racially-motivated false alarms. With all the homegrown nationalist/racist loonies spreading panic all the time, what’s left for the terrorists to do?
We need to get congress to pass a national law that anyone who gets falsely arrested gets $1,000 for every hour they are in custody. This applies to any crime that goes to trial and the defendant is found not guilty as well.
There needs to be some serious drawbacks to the police state fucking with people’s lives like this. There also needs to be citizen oversight committees in every state that has some kind of regulatory authority over police/FBI.
Of course, none of this will ever happen.
Every time I hear one of these stories, I wonder why there haven’t been massive boycotts.
@ 17. Good question. I think it’s because for a lot of people, flying is pretty much mandatory. Work demands it, and/or they have family and friends spread out all over the country. My dad, for much of his working life, had to fly at least a couple of times a week. I average much less, a few times a year, but if I want to see certain family members I have to fly, too.
Also, it’s mostly “them” who get inconvenienced (although not exclusively).
One clear conclusion from this is that the security screening of these people prior to boarding must have been deemed to have failed.
You Americans are fucked! Your fundy politicians are leading you into another Dark Age, and 50% of the population is saying, “Thank God for that.”
Has a lawsuit been filed yet?
Eh… us vegetarians wouldn’t be too keen on the bacon part. (Animals are our friends. We don’t eat our friends.) Not to mention that Penn’s mandatory-bacon rule would also exclude Jews and observant-but-moderate Muslims from flying, which would be rather obviously unfair.
I’m all for kissing someone of the same sex, though. As long as he hasn’t got bad breath. (They’d have to make it mandatory for TSA agents to brush their teeth after eating.)
First: never fly into Detroit. The airlines that fly into Detroit are run by crazies who combine their bigotry with stupidity (Tea Party).
Second: in the South, DWB, Driving While Black/Brown is a felony.
Now we can add FWB, Flying While Brown.
It’s even worse. Last week, the local networks were abuzz with talk of a potential threat at Detroit airport for the then-upcoming weekend. So people will have heard that there was an immanent threat, then hear that three people “of Middle-Eastern descent” were detained after a terror scare, and conclude that the heightened alert caught actual terrorists. And then they’ll conclude that this works and demand more.
I keep rereading this and wondering if the first reaction to being taken off the plane should be to ask for a lawyer. Would they file some trumped up charges? Would this let what is happening see the light of a court room where TSA, DHS and the FBI would have to explain that three people with brown skin sitting together is cause for detention and strip searches or would they lie?
The pro-security state response to this appears to break down as “We’re at war, we were attacked, and what if it hadn’t been a false alarm, huh? You’d be blaming the airline for NOT being diligent!”
But really, it boils down to a belief that because ten years ago, 20 or so brown-skinned zealots perpetrated an atrocity, anyone who shares their complexion must make sure they do nothing to arouse suspicion. If they need to use the bathroom, they should be especially quick about it. If they would like to read, they should be sure it’s not something in a language with a non-Latin alphabet. They should not wear suspicious attire like skullcaps or turbans, or fly while being bearded, even if their religion commands it. And they should be absolutely damn sure that they’re fully aware of the location and activities of every other similarly-complexioned people on the plane to avoid doing anything at all which could be perceived as collusive, like going to the bathroom at the same time.
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