Diplomats and Court Jesters
By Becky Akers
Published 04/21/10
It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke: a Qatari diplomat flying from DC to Denver grabbed a smoke in the lav. Nor was the punchline any funnier when Qatar's Minister of State for Foreign Affairs announced on Thursday that 27-year-old Mohammed al Modadi, now recalled, "will be disciplined." I daresay none of us will lose any sleep over a diplomat's troubles, but in fairness we should admit that Mohammed wasn't at fault. The US government created each of the circumstances leading to the brouhaha aboard United Airlines Flight 663.
Let's first ask what Mohammed is doing in the U.S., anyway. Don't the Feds guard our borders? Indeed, they vigilantly protect us from less influential immigrants whose governments persecute, torture, or otherwise prey on rather than employ them. Precisely because they don't collect a paycheck from their nation's rulers, these folks actually own skills American employers covet. Yet Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) plot to punish said employers and the immigrants they hire instead of well-connected jokers like Mohammed. What, we've got too many agricultural workers but not enough useless diplomats?
Then there's the reason for Mohammed's flight. He was on official diplomatic business, such as it is: his monthly visit with Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a fellow Qatari and a legal US resident whom the Feds imprison in Denver.
Our rulers have incarcerated and tortured Ali since 2001 as a "sleeper agent" for al Qaeda. Or so they alleged until after his arrest, when even they seem to have realized how flimsy their proof was. They switched to charges of credit-card fraud instead. Ali steadfastly denied all guilt. "But, in June 2003, shortly before his trial was scheduled to commence, and on the eve of a hearing to suppress illegally seized evidence, President Bush signed a one-page order declaring Ali an 'enemy combatant' and directing his transfer to a Navy Brig in South Carolina. . ." There "he was held incommunicado . . . in solitary confinement" until 2009, habeas corpus being merely a quaint option at this point in the American Empire. He did not see "his family during these six years, and [spoke] to them only a couple of times."
The Supreme Court finally intervened, remanding Ali's case to a lower bench in Peoria, Ill. By returning "the accused" to "the State and district wherein the crime [was] committed," the Feds at last obeyed one Constitutional command: when they arrested Ali in 2001, he was a graduate student at Peoria's Bradley University. The years of torture and isolation from his family took their toll, however, and the man who had insisted on his innocence agreed last year to "cut a plea agreement. . ., which involved jail time" of fifteen years, with credit for those served.
The Feds aren't content to torment only Ali. They also "detained" his brother for seven years at Gitmo without charging him. The injustice and tyranny these men suffered ought to enrage us as much as the evisceration of the Constitution. Otherwise, our smokin' diplomat might never have taken to the skies that wacky Wednesday.
Once aboard, however, he craved a smoke mid-flight and snuck one in the john.
Grown adults skulk like Billy Joe Jr. with his first Marlboro under a government that lusts to see us naked at airports yet shudders with a horrified Puritanism at tobacco (and at alcohol, foods that taste good, or drugs it bars Big Pharma from manufacturing). Politicians save us from ourselves by stripping us of our property rights so that they, rather than the owner of the aircraft, restaurant, theater, shop, or office, can decide whether we'll smoke. Then they pervert that pleasure into a crime.
And so Mohammed emerged from the can to confront a flight attendant. Who naturally snitched to an air marshal (note to Mohammed: next time, choose a plane with an Underwear Bomber. Those tend to lack marshals). So did the passenger next in line for the washroom, who found therein Mohammed's bag of tobacco.
The marshal "then approached Mr. Madadi at his seat in the first-class section. . ." Mohammed, being a diplomat, lied. He denied smoking, though he "acknowledged that the bag contained tobacco for his pipe." Apparently believing himself to be in a country that honors the inalienable right to speak freely, he joked about setting his shoes on fire.
Given the lunacy of the TSA in general and its air marshals in particular, that was dumb. But far dumber — and stunningly malicious -- was the marshal's deliberately confusing tobacco smoke's distinctive aroma for that of a fuse burning towards a shoe-bomb. "Within a few minutes," the New York Times reports, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) had taken aim at Mohammed, the 162 innocents aboard his plane, and indeed, the other 4900 flights airborne at that time via an "alert": "Attention all aircraft, this is an advisory. Be advised, a U.S. air carrier has reported a passenger has attempted to ignite his shoes on fire. . . .All pilots are to maintain extra vigilance and report any anomalies immediately..."
A couple of F-16s materialized to "safely escort the jet to the airport," as the credulous FOX News put it. That seems a bit of overkill, so to speak and to say the least, since fighter jets are ready to blow planes out of the skies on which suicide bombers are supposedly scheming to do exactly that.
Once the flight with its terroristic smoker landed, cops swarmed from the usual agencies to manhandle and insult those inside. "Passengers say they were kept on the plane for nearly an hour after it landed and then were questioned at a fire station at the airport. Mei Turcotte, 26, of Kalispell, Mont., . . .was angry about having to stay at the airport to be questioned over something so minor. . . .'They made this into something that was ridiculous.'"
And why not? The TSA isn't wasting its own money when it sounds the alarm for F-16's at $10,000-$15,000 per hour, let alone the expenses the airlines incur. Such irresponsibility will continue as long as bureaucracies control aviation. They have every incentive to exaggerate "emergencies"; how else can they convince us we "need" them?
Contrast that with airlines liberated from government's stranglehold: they would resolve actual emergencies as efficiently and conveniently for their customers as possible. Just as a supermarket doesn't portray a broken bottle of ketchup in Aisle 3 as a bloodbath and call the SWAT team, so no airline would a twist a guy's enjoying his pipe into a threat against the "Homeland."
It takes government for a farce that monumental.
Copyright © 2010 Campaign for Liberty
