Did The TSA and JetBlue Deny Travel For Looking Muslim During Ramadan? No

Overall, bombs and shoot-outs not related to planes at all has been responsible for the vast majority of the most lethal terrorist attacks in the US apart from 9/11, both if you look at muslim terrorists separately, and other attacks in recent history.

When I took the course I mentioned in my post above, the explanation was along these lines: when you want to check someone who carries a bag, you need to remember that he has certain expectations about the safety of his belongings. If you're in a public place, it's reasonable that you never remove the belongings without assuring the owner that they are safe and well-guarded. So when you stop a gang of half-drunk teenagers on the street, you don't ask them to drop their backpacks on the sidewalk and then go ten yards further to search them. You ask them to leave the backpacks in a single place, right near them, and while your colleague searches the backpacks, you keep an eye on the dudes.

That's the common-sense thing to do: no one would let their bags two meters away from them in an airport, even if they kept a constant eye on them. You can't just expect someone to be okay with leaving them god knows where.

If you ask people to put their belongings away in a designated area, the correct thing to do is to have that area placed well away from any passers by and a guard near it. That way, you can tell the owner something along the lines of "Please put your bag in that bin over there; don't worry about it, it won't be stolen -- that man staying guard there isn't leaving, he's there to make sure you get it back just as you left it. We need to ask you a few questions, and then we may have to search your bag. we'll search it in front of you to make sure no one steals or breaks anything, and if all checks out okay, you're free to go. Any questions before we start?"

As our instructor mentioned it, it's really important -- especially in places like airports, concert arenas and whatever -- where you might expect one terrorist every two years and ten thousand disoriented folks with a scare of flight who triggered the bomb detector with their cheap after-shave every day -- to treat people without hostility, with an attitude of collaboration, not suspicion. Very few travelers are at fault for the US' foreign policy (and those that are probably don't go through the whole TSA hell), so it's not their fault that some guys from the Middle East want to blow up their planes. In places like these, you want to treat people so that they can say "yeah, I know this is inconvenient, but the guy is only doing his job", and because they are already under a lot of stress, you want to make sure you don't heighten their fear.

The sad truth is that the terrorists here are us. The primary reason nobody has blown up a plane recently in the US is that nobody is TRYING to blow up a plane in the US. If somebody were seriously trying, they'd have done it already.

My take is that this is a facile analysis that harms the credibility of its source; I am less likely to take this person seriously in the future after reading this.

I appreciate that they took the time to do actual "reporting" by contacting officials involved with the story.

However, a couple things worth keeping in mind as you read it:

* We can reasonably be convinced that Mukerjee wasn't hiding anything. The concern evinced by TSA, NY PAPD, and JetBlue was that Mukerjee was a danger to the flight he was trying to board. We know he wasn't! This article routinely supplies innuendo about Mukerjee's evasiveness during screening. But we know he had nothing to be evasive about, and thus that the signals TSA picked up on were false; the article's framing puts the onus for that on Mukerjee, incorrectly.

* TSA's rationale for detaining Mukerjee doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt. The reasoning supplied by this article could be applied just as effectively to an 85 year old grandmother or a 10 year old boy. It's not falsifiable and not relevant to what happened.

* The analysis glosses over the pivotal moment in the story. The problem wasn't that Mukerjee was denied water or questioned by people that don't know anything about the world's third largest religion. The problem happened when TSA refused to escort Mukerjee, with his carryon, out of the airport, as they are required to do when a passenger refuses screening. Mukerjee's own account has him trying to leave, but put in a position where doing so would cost him his bag and computer. That's the problem here.

There's a worthwhile case to be made for skepticism about some elements of Mukerjee's story. I agree with the article that it seems unlikely for PAPD to have searched his house. It's interesting that Mukerjee claims he was interviewed by an FBI agent when no record seems to have existed of that. I buy the analysis that says that a coherent rebuttal to Mukerjee's story could not easily have self-assembled from 3 different security agencies in the span of a couple days.

Unfortunately, it's hard to take skepticism seriously when it's framed in an article that seems hellbent on taking TSA's claims at face value.