Mer om samme sak.
Trond Andresen
_________________
http://www.counterpunch.org/oden2.html
November 3, 2001
BARRED AT THE GATE
Interview of Nancy Oden
by Declan McCullagh
(Ed. Note: Nancy Oden is a top U.S. Green Party official and a member of the
party's coordinating committee. An organic farmer, peace activist, and
all-around firebrand, she lives in Jonesboro, Maine.)
"Just a few weeks ago I had a piece in the Bangor paper. It's on our
website... I submitted it under my name alone. It's a fairly radical piece;
that's what I do. I'm a political and environmental activist.
"I walked into the Bangor airport. What I saw was National Guard folks all
over carrying machine guns... The atmosphere was very tense... This was
Thursday... I went over to the American Airlines ticket counter way down at
the end. Nobody else was there, except the clerk. I gave him my name. He
didn't even ask for photo ID. It was almost like they were expecting me. He
put it into the computer. He stayed on the computer a long time, like 10
minutes.
"He put an S on the boarding pass, for search. He said, 'You've been picked
for having your bag searched.' ... I said to him, 'This wasn't random, was
it?' He said, 'No you were in there to be searched, no matter what.' I went
over to baggage to put my bags through the X-ray and then went into the
boarding area.
"There was this National Guard guy there. He yells over at me, so everyone
can hear, 'Bring your bags over here.' You know how they are when they're
all puffed up with themselves. He said, 'Hurry up,' so I slowed down some more.
"I put my bags on the table. The two women employees were standing there. [I
tried to help them with a stuck zipper.] He grabbed my left arm, he started
yelling in my face, 'Don't you know what happened? Sep. 11, don't you know
thousands of people died?' I said, 'You can't do that.' He went to grab my
arm, and I said, 'Don't touch me.' I saw an older airline guy shake his
head, 'No,' and he backed off.
"That insulted his little manhood. He could not force me to listen to his
idiot ideas on Sep. 11, whatever it was he wanted to say. So he was angry. I
hadn't done anything except pull away from him... I think he was trying to
provoke me. They did the wand thing, they were done, and I heard him say
real soft, 'Don't let her on the plane,' like he was talking to himself.
"Then I go to get on the plane since we're all done and everything, and the
American Airlines ticket guy says,' You can't get on the plane.' I say, 'Why
not?' ... He says, 'Because this guy says you didn't cooperate with the
search.' ... I said, 'Didn't you see him grab my arm?' He said, 'No, your
back was to me.'
"He said, 'Maybe we can get you on the 4:00 plane, it's the last one today.'
I felt, okay, let's put up with this aggravation now and I'll go to Chicago
and we'll see what we can do... Then this little guard guy, it wasn't enough
to stop me, wasn't done with me. He said, 'Come with me.' I followed very
slowly, I sat down for a while. I said I'm carrying these bags; I need a
rest... It's called passive resistance.
"He went and found the airport police to come and talk with me. He went and
got six other National Guard guys and they all approached me. Here are these
six untrained, ignorant, don't-know-how-to-deal-with-the-public,
machine-gun-armed young guys in their camouflage suits with their military
gear hanging off of it.
"I looked up and started laughing, 'Is all this for me, guys? What is this
about?' There was this big burly guy, he was in front. He said, 'You didn't
cooperate with the search.' ... I said what he did was grabbed my arm, and I
backed away... He said he only hit your arm. I said even if that's all he
did, he's not allowed to do that. He can't hit my arm and demand I listen to
him.
"They had the airport policeman tell me, 'You're not flying out of this
airport today.' ... Of course I had cooperated; why do I care if they search
my bags? ... What I didn't like was being singled out because of my
political views. They couldn't arrest me because there was no reason for
that. They had people who saw there was nothing to arrest me for. They
wanted to get back at me somehow because I was not a subservient female,
because I questioned their manhood.
"I went to the American Airlines guy and said, 'Is this just today?' He
said, 'I don't know.' One clerk said, 'You could drive to Boston [five hours
away] and see if you can get out of there.'
"I never made it out of Bangor. I had to turn around and drive 100 miles
back home... The fact that they gave the other airlines my name... They told
me they did that... That's incredible."
**********************
Declan McCullagh is the politics editor for Wired. He also runs Politech,
the excellent and informative politics and technology mailing list. Declan
McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to
Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html
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