<p>WASHINGTON (AFP) Federal agents handcuffed, detained and “abusively” interrogated a US student at Philadelphia International Airport because he was carrying Arabic flashcards, a lawsuit claimed Wednesday.</p>
<p>[Student</a> detained over Arabic flashcards, lawsuit says - Yahoo! News](<a href=“http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100211/ts_alt_afp/usattacksrightsarabic]Student”>http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100211/ts_alt_afp/usattacksrightsarabic)</p>
<p>:eek: </p>
<p>I think I know this boy’s mom. That must have been quite a scary experience.</p>
<p>I’m really not all that surprised, after what I was told by my roommate from last year. She, her brother, and her father all have Arabic names (though her first name is also a common American name) and they as a family have been given big issues at airports for absolutely no discernible reason other than ethnicity and travel to an Arabic country in Africa where they have relatives. My former roommate has been selected for “random” searches multiple times among groups of white peers, and also forced to dump the contents of her water bottle while the rest of the sports team she was traveling with was allowed on the plane with them.</p>
<p>Her father, who still has an accent, was detained for a long time at the airport while they searched all of his personal belongings, including going through his wallet. Weeks later, he was sent back one of his credit cards (one he did not use often so he didn’t realize it was missing) because he had “dropped” it in the room.</p>
<p>To make the leap to detaining over merely studying the language doesn’t surprise me in the slightest, and it’s really, really sad that it doesn’t.</p>
<p>it’s ironic that Homeland Security has a summer program for college kids to improve their Arabic - you must already have some Arabic and pass a language test to get into th program!</p>
<p>if you want smarter people working the terminals, you need to pay more than $28,000/year.</p>
<p>Gosh! If only the kid had tried to blow up the plane, he would have been Mirandized and assigned a lawyer in less than half the time he had to sit there in handcuffs…</p>
<p>I have no trouble singling out people who are more likely to be terror related, but it is just plain dumb to not recognize Arabic flash cards. To be clear, a sensible system looks at where you’re going, where you’ve been and who you are to evaluate you as a security threat, but if a federal agent can’t recognize flashcards that are “widely available” then that’s stupidity.</p>
<p>A better article on the same issue:</p>
<p>[Arabic-language</a> flashcards don’t fly with TSA - latimes.com](<a href=“http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-arabic12-2010feb12,0,3442233.story]Arabic-language”>Arabic-language flashcards don't fly with TSA)</p>
<p>The funny thing is I’ve heard that people who can translate Arabic fluently are in high demand in the armed forces right now.</p>
<p>Good thing the kid wasn’t practicing his vocabulary words out loud, I suppose they would have had to escalate the situation and shoot him.</p>
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<p>The TSA: so stupid they still haven’t figured this out.</p>