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CounterPunch
September
17, 2002
The Shoney's Incident
Determine
the Truth Behind False Alarm
by Hussein Ibish
When I arrived in San Francisco last Friday morning,
I was whisked off to the local studios of a network news channel
for a scheduled debate on Iraq. That debate never took place
since I found myself transfixed by and commenting on a dramatic
roadside search of suspected terrorists on a Florida highway.
That incident, as it turns out, has profound
implications for the new systems and norms of public security
based on citizen vigilance that have arisen in the post Sept.
11 environment. But just what lessons can be learned from the
event remains troublingly opaque.
For almost an hour I was on the air with
Eunice Stone of Cartersville, the woman who had alerted authorities
to the three Muslim men who were stopped and detained on the
roadside for 17 hours during the exhaustive search and interrogation.
She provided a gripping account of the conversation she claimed
to have overheard the men having in a Georgia restaurant, which
was in turns obnoxious, disturbing and downright frightening.
She seemed credible and consistent, and, like millions of Americans,
my inclination at the time was to be deeply grateful for her
intervention.
However, police later released and completely
exonerated the men from all suspicions of terrorism. In interviews
with the press, they indignantly denied every aspect of Stone's
story and suggested that her concerns were in fact prompted
not by their conversation, but by their Middle Eastern appearance
and Islamic dress. They also appeared credible and reasonable.
Simply put, one of these two parties
is lying through their teeth, and much depends on who it is.
Given the distance between their stories, there is almost no
possibility of a mixup. Either the men were laughing about the
Sept. 11 attacks or they were not. Either they were discussing
"bringing it down" and "if they mourned Sept.
11th, how will they react to Sept. 13th" or something along
those lines, or they weren't.
It comes down to this: If Stone heard
the conversation she reported, her actions were commendable,
and this case would tend to suggest that citizen vigilance can
be a useful aid to law enforcement without degenerating into
unwarranted abuse. Although the men were cleared of any suspicions
of terrorism, some have speculated that they were "joking"
or performing a "hoax" on Stone. Young men have been
known to engage in such reckless mischief, and testimonials
from their relatives that they would not be capable of such
irresponsible conduct frankly cuts little ice.
On the other hand, if the conversation
did not take place as Stone described it and her concerns were
based on perceived identity and not conduct, this incident would
serve as an important confirmation of the worst fears regarding
"citizen vigilance" systems. It would mean that the
authorities and the public had been grotesquely misled by raw
prejudice.
The result would be the serious abuse
of three innocent medical students, who continue to suffer negative
consequences as the hospital they were to intern at has now
turned them away. American history clearly shows that apparently
nice, respectable ladies are capable of racism as ugly as that
practiced by white-hooded hoodlums.
So was this racism run amok, or did three
foolish young men bring a world of trouble onto their own heads?
As it stands, there is no way for the public to tell, especially
as both parties seem so sympathetic and believable.
Federal and Georgia state authorities
can and must conduct a thorough investigation to determine the
truth of the matter, and make those facts public. That millions
of taxpayer dollars were wasted on a wild goose chase is a secondary
issue -- what is important is what this false alarm indicates
we can expect from citizen vigilance programs in coming months
and years.
This case will not be the final word
on them, no matter what the facts turn out to be. But they will
be an important early indication of the extent to which public
perceptions of what is and is not suspicious are useful aids
to law enforcement, or are new vehicles for the worst forms
of bigotry.
Hussein Ibish
is communications director for the American-Arab
Anti- Discrimination Committee.
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