- I figure 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 on his way back to campus in California, because
they found 200 Arab/English flashcards on his blond, blue-eyed 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 put him in 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...
-
- For the rest of this story, please go to:
- http://www.thiscantbehappening.net
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