[lg policy] Arabic flashcards bump student from plane

[Dennis Baron]

There's a new post on the Web of Language:

Arabic flashcards bump student from plane

In August, 2009, a 22-year-old Pomona College senior was questioned,  
handcuffed, and placed in a cell at the Philadelphia International  
Airport police station for five hours for carrying Arabic flash cards  
in his pocket as he tried to board his flight back to school in  
California.

Now the ACLU is suing the TSA, the Philadelphia police, and the FBI,  
charging that their treatment of Nicholas George violated his  
constitutional rights to free speech and to protection against  
unreasonable search and seizure.

Although the security services won't comment on the pending lawsuit,  
an anonymous source told CNN that George was singled out for a  
"random" search because he exhibited "erratic" and "anomalous"  
behavior. The nature of that behavior was not specified, but some of  
the flash cards he carried had words like "bomb," "explosion," and  
"terrorist." George was also carrying a copy of Rogue Nation, a book  
critical of U.S. policy that was written by a conservative former  
Reagan administration official and endorsed by such experts from  
across the aisle as Zbigniew Brzezinski and Gen. Wesley Clark. And he  
had studied abroad in Jordan in connection with his major in Middle  
Eastern Studies (his second major is physics).

read the rest of this post on the Web of Language: http://bit.ly/weblan

____________________
Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics
Department of English
University of Illinois
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801

office: 217-244-0568
fax: 217-333-4321

http://www.illinois.edu/goto/debaron

read the Web of Language:
http://www.illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage








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