PhotoDude.com

Thu. Sep 19, 2002

Flight of Terror

Flight of Terror – No, it’s not what you think, it’s the result of your government’s attempts to provide security in the air, and it’s an ugly story with some details that were new to me: "The incident on Delta Flight 442 was scary enough last month: U.S. marshals seized an unruly passenger, then one aimed a pistol at other passengers for a half hour and shouted at them to stay seated. The event, however, didn’t end there. Unknown to most passengers on the Atlanta-to-Philadelphia flight, the marshals upon landing also seized an Indian passenger from first class and silently whisked him away in handcuffs."

When I first heard of this incident, and the ”pointed gun,” I admit I didn’t look into the details, and assumed maybe a drawn gun had been media-sized into a ”pointed gun.” But that was not the case, at all. This incident started because some unnamed and mostly undescribed person (at least, in this article) started pawing through other people’s carry-ons. The two air marshalls rather roughly rounded the guy up and handcuffed him in a first class seat.

Then the terror began.

"Then, in coach class, a woman rose to switch seats with her child, who was sitting in an aisle seat, according to Rajcoomar’s wife, Dorothy, who was sitting in coach class because the couple could not get seats together. ’That’s when they started hollering,’ Dorothy Rajcoomar said of the marshals. One of them rushed to the divider between the first-class and coach sections and leveled his pistol at the coach-class passengers. ’He took control as if he was a terrorist himself,’ said Bob Rajcoomar, who was then sitting in a first-class aisle seat directly in front of the marshal. ’He says, ’Nobody move, nobody look down the aisle, nobody take pictures or you will go to jail, nobody do anything.’ He basically hijacked everybody.’ "

So, in order to protect the passengers, he had to point a gun at them? It’s my understanding that land based law enforcement officers have fairly strict protocols about when they can draw their weapon and aim it at someone. I’m pretty sure pointing a gun at innocents who’ve done nothing (other than a mother swapping seats with a child) would get you cited in most land based police departments.

And, ”nobody take pictures or you will go to jail”?!? Oh, my, it’s a very good thing I didn’t have to go to Pittsburgh that day. My immediate response to irrational behavior by an air marshall would have been to surreptitiously photograph it. Between having a gun pointed at me, and being told not to take pictures, I would most assuredly have been arrested.

As if that isn’t bad enough (and don’t you think it should be?), these two air marshalls weren’t done yet. When the plane landed, and police came to take the detained man away …. " ’Then out of nowhere, hell broke loose,’ Rajcoomar said. ’One of these marshals came down to me and said, ’Head down, hands over your head!’ They pushed my head down, told me to bend down…. I just couldn’t believe it. I was speechless, in shock.’ "

Mr. Rajcoomar was not interrogated as a terrorist would be, he was held for three hours (while no one told his wife a word) and then released. "He asked why he was being held. ’One of the marshals said something like, ’We didn’t like the way you looked,’ ” Rajcoomar recalled. ”They also said something like, ’We didn’t like the way you looked at us.’ "

David Steigman, a spokesmen for the Transportation Safety Administration claims Mr. Rajcoomar "had been observing too closely." So, now one can be detained for observing? Or rather, for exceeding some subjective level of observing, which when crossed can result in immediate arrest without explanation? I mean, it’s not like he was in Manhattan, where he could ”move it along, theres nothin’ more to see here.” He was 30,000 feet up in a first class seat. Furthermore, if some raving bozo was waving a gun around and yelling at people, you can be damn sure that I would be observing very closely. It’s called survival.

Of course, Mr. Rajcoomar is ethnically Indian. He’s also "a former U.S. Army major and military doctor from Lake Worth, Fla., where he has had a family practice for two decades." And now, he is quite rightfully considering legal action.

So, these two air marshalls, "identified by police as Shawn B. McCullers and Samuel Mumma," who’ve taken an oath to defend innocent passengers from threats, ended up terrorizing the entire coach cabin, and falsely detaining a military veteran apparently as a form of harassment, in order to deal with one ”waiflike and disturbed” individual who seemed to be more ”altered” than a threat.

Guys, next time I have to fly, you can sit that one out, as far as I’m concerned. I’d feel a lot safer without you. And maybe you can spend the time reading the latest from the FBI, which talks about the possibility of Al Qaeda ”hijacking a commercial airliner using Muslim extremists of non-Arabic appearance.”

Of course, that would assume that there is some shred of competence, or even a desire to achieve it, somewhere within our air security system, when the evidence seems to point to the opposite. There are people in our government, high and low, who deserve to be haunted by those they desecrate with their ”lick and a promise” policies, the innocents who lost their lives on Flights 93, 11, 175, and 77.