Having tagged my bag and scanned my driver’s license, the ticket agent at O’Hare International Airport paused, looked up and wandered off without saying a word.
I glanced down at my watch, impatient, surprised. What a time to run out of tickets, smack in the middle of the morning rush.
After chatting with other airline workers, the man returned, set aside my bag, marked it with a “hold” tag and mumbled something.
“Go with her,” he said. I also heard the word, “search.”
“What search?” I asked the woman dressed in dark security garb and thin plastic gloves as she led me away.
“Didn’t he tell you?” she replied. “You fit the profile.”
I was dumbstruck.
Ever since a terrible day in 1982 during a terrible war in Beirut when a short angry man with a machine gun nearly killed me simply because I am an American, I always had thought I fit the other profile: terror victim.
Indeed, in my career I have never complained about being searched by security officials at prisons, airports and embassies. I often wished at numerous airports here and overseas that the precautions had been more thorough. I have stared terrorists in the face. I have seen the horror they leave behind.
But recently, as I was being led off moments before boarding a United Airlines flight at O’Hare for a routine business trip to Washington, D.C., I felt angry, embarrassed, and above all, ambivalent.
I recalled the stories of friends who had been stopped at airports mostly because their skin was different, their names seemed strange or their pronunciation was imprecise.
One friend, a Turkish-born professor at a notable U.S. university, goes into a snit almost every time he gets singled out at an airport and asked about his name and national origin. “Take it in stride,” I have always counseled him.
After the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, an Arab-American resident, who had taken off from there en route to Jordan, was removed from his plane and handcuffed when he reached London. He fit the terrorist profile, he was told.
When the news flashed back to Oklahoma City where I was covering the federal building bombing, the man’s neighbors lost no time telling reporters they had always held deep suspicions about the stranger in their midst.
I don’t recall any interviews with them after he was let go with apologies.
An unshakable sense of security enjoyed by many Americans evaporated last July when TWA Flight 800 blew up shortly after leaving New York City. Americans suddenly felt vulnerable, suddenly realized that they too could suffer from the murky hatreds and intrigues that terrorists have inflicted on the rest of the world.
Despite no conclusive proof that the fatal TWA flight and its 230 occupants were victims of terrorism, the common wisdom seems to be that they were, and that the time has come to guard against repeats.
That clearly was the force behind the government’s decision after the TWA explosion to set up a commission on airport security, led by Vice President Al Gore. In February, the commission made a number of recommendations, including the selective inspections of suspicious passengers based on computerized profiling.
For some years, the airlines have relied loosely on passenger profiles, some of the criteria being based on experience and shared intelligence about the behavior of terrorists, and some, it has always seemed, being based on instant judgments and stereotypes.
Aware of the problem, the Federal Aviation Administration agreed to permit the Justice Department to review its procedures. But the FAA has yet to sit down with the Justice Department to go over the best way to use the new, more advanced computerized system.
A difference exists between a computer’s mathematical logic, and the once-over given by harried airport employees to the 1.6 million passengers who fly every day.
Personnel who must shovel long lines of passengers onto planes on a tight schedule walk a thin line between caution and paranoia, between spotting the potential wrongdoer and singling out the outsider–the one who looks different or speaks differently.
Who is the terrorist? Neither the FAA nor the airlines will say what their profiles reveal.
Take me, for instance. I was using a one-way ticket bought just the day before and trying to check my bag. The line was long. I was sleepy.
I am short. I mumble sometimes, and probably did so when the agent asked to see my driver’s license. I was wearing worn jeans and a scruffy down jacket, my dress clothes packed in my bag. Everyone else in the line seemed to be wearing their 9-to-5 business uniforms.
My mustache hangs down. My graying hair curls down to my shirt collar. In most of the places across the globe where they drink dark coffee in small cups, I am usually not picked out as a stranger.
By the time my bag was being searched, my ambivalence had turned to anger. I began wondering out loud why I had been chosen. United Airlines officials said that was something they would not explain.
I identified myself as a reporter. From then on, the more I complained about the curt way I was treated, the more they apologized. I suspect if I had spoken with an accent–or was in some other line of work–the apologies may not have been as forthcoming.
At the airport in Washington, I was met by a United official offering profuse apologies and suggesting why I may have been stopped, but not saying for sure. The last-minute one-way ticket seemed relevant.
If they had chosen to check, their own computer showed that I had built up thousands of frequent flier miles, something that real terrorists might seem unlikely to do. But that didn’t matter.
A few days later, a letter appeared from the airline offering more apologies and a free first-class upgrade on my next United trip. It sits in my desk. I am not sure I will use it.
I am glad that airport security in the U.S. is being taken so seriously, although I think it still has a lot further to go. Most of all, I brood about powerful fears and how they divide us.
ON THE COVER
Who’s the reporter?
1. Mahmud Abouhalima, was convicted in connection with the World Trade Center bombing.
2. Iyad Mahmud Ismail Najem, was accused of driving the van that carried the bomb to the center.
3. Adel Anonn, believed to be part of an international terrorist ring, is the brother of the Trade Center bombing’s alleged leader.
4. Stephen Franklin is a Tribune reporter and former foreign correspondent.
