On: I Was Arrested for Learning a Foreign Language. To...

[DanBC]

Can you honestly not see the difference between having a book that has the word bomb in it and having a set of 80 hand-written cards with the words "bomb", “terrorist,” “explosion,” “attack,” “battle,” “kill,” “to target,” “to kidnap,” and “to wound" (among others) on them, and handing those cards to security agents?

Any reasonable person knows that those words will cause alarm in security agents. Why chose to handwrite those cards and then hand them over to those agents?

The ACLU articles all make it sound like Arabic language is the problem. But if he had French language flashcards with those words on he'd have got a similar result.

The ACLU does not mention the content of the flashcards in their articles. The ACLU has an illustration with words like "sun" and "dog". This is borderline deceptive. Arabic flashcards without words like "bomb" would have been fine. Any language flashcards with words like "bomb" would not have been fine.

> Question nothing, blame the victim. Superb critical thinking.

Interesting that you accept the ACLU story without question -it obviously appeals to your biases- and are affronted when someone presents the court case. Critical thinking indeed.

[neilcrj → DanBC]

He didn't "choose" to hand them to security agents, he was asked to empty his pockets, which contained the flash cards.

[DanBC → neilcrj]

Whenever I've been through TSA screening I empty my pockets to a tray.

This report says "I took the set of flashcards from my pocket and handed them to the officers."

[msandford → DanBC]

> This report says "I took the set of flashcards from my pocket and handed them to the officers."

That was done in response to "empty your pockets", a command from a TSA agent.

Paper doesn't trigger metal detectors so there's no real need to put it all into the tray the first time.

[mod → msandford]

The detectors detect more than metal.

Perhaps you missed the great scandal of the 'body scanners.'