Security Obssessions Undermine Constitutional Rights
PHILADELPHIA: Federal agents detained and interrogated a US college student at the Philadelphia airport simply because we was carrying a set of English-Arabic flashcards, a lawsuit alleged on Wednesday. The American Civil Liberties Union said it filed the suit on behalf Nicholas George, 22, a language student at Pomona College in California who was held at Philadelphia International Airport for nearly five hours in August 2009. George, a US citizen from the Philadelphia suburb of Wyncote, was on his way back to college when airport security officers found him carrying the flashcards, each of which had an English word on one side and its Arabic equivalent on the other, the ACLU said. The US Transportation Security Administration questioned him, and a TSA supervisor asked him how he felt about the Sept. 11 attacks, whether he knew “who did 9/11,” and whether he knew what language Osama bin Laden spoke, the ACLU said. He was handcuffed and left in a locked cell for two hours before being