Nick George, a senior at my sister college, Pomona College, was detained by TSA earlier this year. On February 10, he filed a federal lawsuit with the ACLU against TSA, the FBI, and the Philly police. (His father is an attorney and former public defender in the Philadelphia-area.) The lawsuit claims that he was detained for his Arabic flash cards. I think it’s because he was suspicious all throughout.
George is known as being very far to the left on the campuses, which is saying something for Pomona College. After a Pomona Student Union event discussing the state of the media, George tussled with Ross Douthat for over an hour, saying that the right — by which he meant Glenn Beck and Fox News — was effectively nuts and dishonest — much to the chagrin of those of us who wanted to talk to Douthat about something a bit more substantive.
And rather unsurprisingly, his political views on his Facebook profile are listed as “Communist Party of Bulgaria.” (He was asked by TSA agents whether or not he was a Communist; Facebookers of the world might think twice about what they put up in that section from now on.)
So George is not Mr. C.I.A. wannabe, as the mainstream media is trying to spin it. Take, for instance the opening lines of Daniel Rubin’s column for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
A federal agent sizing up Nick George might peg him as Most Likely to be Recruited by the CIA. He’s a physics major at a top college, is minoring in Middle Eastern studies, speaks Arabic, has lived in Jordan, and is adventurous enough to have backpacked through Sudan and Egypt.
Or rather, here’s what the federal agent could have thought instead.
- Physics major? Possibly knows how to make a bomb.
- Went to Sudan? One of the world’s most vibrant terrorist training camps are located there. (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad once called Sudan called the second home of the “dear, pious and revolutionary brothers.”)
- Middle Eastern studies? Right, because Columbia’s Middle Eastern studies department isn’t a hotbed of radicalism. Oh wait? It is?
On these grounds alone, I’m glad that the TSA agent erred on the side of arresting George, which is pretty much what Deb Saunders wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle. (It has since come out that George also visited Malaysia, home of Muslim extremism, and Indonesia, home of the largest Muslim population on the planet. Neither of these things should disqualify him from flying, but he shouldn’t be surprised about being screened a bit more.)
George wasn’t planning on suing, but the ACLU persuaded him, according to Pomona College’s The Student Life. The ACLU also seems to have turned him into something of a constitutionalist. (The ACLU apparently learned of it from Philadelphia Daily News columnist Dave Davies’s 9-11 article. You can watch the video where George talks with the ACLU here.)
Looking at the suit now, “The point is to make it very clear that there are rules, that you have to follow the rules, and that when you don’t follow the rules there are repercussions,” said George. “The point is to make it clear the TSA cannot do whatever they want.”
The TSA didn’t do whatever it wanted. It followed protocol.
And maybe, just maybe you were more suspicious than you have been letting on.
Again from The Philadelphia Inquirer:
According to a federal suit filed yesterday on his behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union, a TSA supervisor asked him, “How do you feel about 9/11?”George said he had hemmed and hawed a bit. “It’s a complicated question,” he told me by phone. “But I ended up saying, ‘It was bad. I am against it.’ “
Rubin should have done his homework. In Pomona’s newspaper, The Student Life, George was quoted as saying:
“She looked at the book I was reading and said, ‘You obviously read… how do you feel about 9/11?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know, I’m against it…’ And she said, ‘Yeah, well do you know who did 9/11?’… and I said, ‘Osama Bin Laden.’ And she said, ‘Do you know what language Osama Bin Laden spoke?’ and I think I just said, ‘Arabic.'”
“A complicated question”? “You don’t know”? Are you kidding me?
Every time I fly from my hometown of Boston, MA I see two flags draped over the terminals of the two planes that slaughtered nearly 3000 people. Ninety-two of my fellow Bay Staters didn’t come home that day, the third highest casualty figure after New York and New Jersey. Oddly enough, it doesn’t seem such a complicated question to me, but hey, I’m not a Middle East studies major.
Oh, and that photo that The Philadelphia Inquirer used where he looks like Mr. American? (See the one right here, which was provided by Nick George to The Philadelphia Inquirer.)
Photo provided by Nick George to the Philadelphia Inquirer
Here’s another photo where he looks like he doesn’t ever shave. He came back from the Middle East shaved, with shorter hair. Where have I seen that before?
The reaction to George’s arrest and lawsuit have been predictable in its silliness. The most foolish response has been Matt Yglesias’s post titled, “A Missed Torture Opportunity.”
Of course in a world where the TSA didn’t have a “law-enforcement approach” to terrorism or a “pre-9/11 mindset” they could have easily resolved this problem. All they would have to do is strap the kid to a board, tilted so that his head is below his feet. The straps would be uncomfortable, though they wouldn’t have any particular skin-lacerating properties thus making the process totally humane. Then the face is covered with cloth, and water could have been poured over George’s face. This process institutes an apparently unbearable physical sensation of imminent drowning. Initially, George would simply loudly protest that he didn’t know anything, but soon enough sufficiently application of torture (or as Marc Thiessen and the Gestapo call it, “enhanced interrogation techniques”) would have the guy singing.
Seeing as the United States has waterboarded only three terorrists, I don’t think George would have made the cut, but thanks for spreading total lies about our interrogation practices, Matt! I’m sure that’ll go over well with the international community.
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