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Who's teaching the teachers?
DETROIT (AP) -- Six men of Iraqi descent who were heading home from doing [conducting] training for the U.S. military have sued American Airlines, saying employees detained and publicly humiliated them after another passenger voiced suspicions.
The men, who sued in U.S. District Court in Detroit alleging racial discrimination, say airline employees grounded their Aug. 28 flight from San Diego to Chicago and detained them, believing they were security risks.
The men, some of whom are U.S. citizens, were returning to the Detroit area after training Marines at California's Camp Pendleton on Iraqi culture when another passenger expressed concerns to guards partly because she heard the men speaking Arabic.
After taxiing from the gate, pilots returned the plane to the terminal. The six men were segregated and detained while the airline helped more than 100 passengers find hotel rooms, according to a prepared statement from the men.
... The men worked for Defense Training Systems, a unit of International Logistics Services Corp. of Anchorage, Alaska. Their work involved teaching Marines about Iraqi culture, customs and etiquette, said their lawyer, Lawrence T. Garcia.
"These are some of the most pro-American people around," Garcia said. "There's no reason to suspect that these people were a threat on this airline. ... This is the face of prejudice and racism that happens today."
Aside to counselor Garcia: bull shit!
If these six guys are considered expert enough to be teaching marines about Iraqi culture, customs and etiquette, they should also have the common sense to know that airline passengers are going to be upset by a handful of swarthy men conversing in Arabic. It's a little matter of US culture, customs and etiquette, and rembrance of those few thousand innocent Americans who got creamed on September 11th.
It's not enough to conduct hands-on body searches of elderly jewish women and infants to "even out the score" and appear "fair." Now the airlines are expected to patently ignore what indeed must have looked like suspicious behavior. So if these six had indeed turned out to be terrorists and the airline had done nothing, in the pursuit of fairness, where would that leave things?
Six years ago, right after the attacks, OBL taunted the USA in a video, saying that Americans lack the stomach for the conflict that would follow. Daily, we are proving him right.