Passengers Sue Airlines for Post-911 Racist Discrimination Via NY Transfer News Collective - All the News that Doesn't Fit PASSENGERS SUE AIRLINES FOR POST 9/11 RACIST DISCRIMINATION By Jon Hillson LOS ANGELES, June 17 (NY Transfer)--Five airline passengers removed from flights because of their "suspicious" appearance sued American, Continental, Northwest, and United Airlines in court actions announced June 4 by the American Civil Liberties Union. The lawsuits were announced at news conferences in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Maryland and New Jersey. Four of the five plaintiffs are U.S. citizens. The fifth is a legal resident. The five include Arshad Chowdhury, 25, a U.S.-born former World Trade Center investment banker of Bengali origin; Assem Bayaa, 40, a Lebanese-American audit manager for Arthur Andersen; Michael Dasrath, 32, a Guyana-born analyst for JP Morgan Chase; Hassan Sader, 36, a U.S. citizen originally from Morocco and former tennis coach; and Edgardo Crueg, 32, a legal resident of Filipino descent, who is a doctoral student in mathematics. Their removal from U.S. domestic flights took place between mid-October and December of last year. On June 4, the Texas Civil Rights Project filed a similar suit in behalf of Mohammed Ali Ahmed, 41, a financial planner for Motorola, who was removed from a flight late last September. "While details of the incidents vary, the cases share certain key elements," an ACLU news release on the suits stated. "The men are all of Middle Eastern or Asian appearance; they all had passed rigorous security checks and were cleared to board; they all were ejected after passengers or flight crews said that they 'felt uncomfortable' with them on board." The five were all subsequently offered seats on later flights. "In ejecting our clients from their flights, the airlines were indulging in discrimination, not enforcing security, and that is both shameful and unlawful," stated Reginal Shufod, an ACLU national staff attorney handling three of the cases. Michael Dasrath, who was flying from Newark to Tampa, had already settled into his first class seat on a Continental flight when he heard a passenger tell the captain, "Those brown-skinned men are behaving suspiciously." The other man was Edgardo Cureg, whom he had met at the gate. The two were ejected. "I will never again feel free to travel in the future," Crueg said, "because my basic right to travel, free from discrimination, has been grossly violated." The ACLU action is joined by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), which is also a co-plaintiff in Bayaa's, Crueg's, and Sader's cases. "Illegal airline discrimination is only a part of the serious problems with which the Arab-American community has been grappling in recent months," the ADC stated in a news release June 4. "However, illegal airline discrimination must be of concern to all Americans, as it is reminiscent of the discrimination in public buses which led to the Montgomery bus boycott and initiated the civil rights movement. The pattern of illegal airline discrimination which we are talking about today is one of the most serious challenges to those rights in many years." The ADC has received 60 complaints from 100 passengers removed from flights in the post-September 11 period, some as recently as early June of this year. The U.S. Department of Transportation has documented 84 complaints of discrimination by airlines in the January-March 2002 reporting period, the first for which such statistics are available. This, however, represents only a fraction of "profiled" passengers who are subject to additional "dump searches" and identity checks as part pf now-routine airline "security measures." Many airline workers have been witness to such occurrences, including the removal of "suspect" passengers, many of whom make no formal complaint. This is the intended consequence and real aim of the administration's intensifying campaign against constitutional rights and democratic freedoms under the banner of "homeland security" and its "war against terrorism." By enlisting airline employees in the culture of suspicion and repression, the employers and the government lay a deadly trap for transportation workers, both unionized and an unorganized. They will need more than ever to exercise endangered rights to defend themselves against airline restructuring -- further cutbacks, layoffs, and employer giveback demands. Airline workers will only be able to effectively do so by rejecting policies and practices of racist discrimination and by extending the hand of solidarity to those who fight them -- like the plaintiffs in the ACLU and Texas Civil Rights Project suits. In announcing its "strong support" for the ACLU legal actions, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights linked its decision to the history of the fight against anti-Black discrimination. "Treating people differently only because of their perceived race, ethnicity, or religion is wrong," stated Conference executive director Wade Henderson. "It was wrong on the buses of Alabama in the 1950s and it is wrong on the airlines in the 21st century. The battle for equality in commercial transportation is as old as the civil rights movement. This is Civil Rights 101." The legal action also received public backing from Karen Narasaki, Executive Director of the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium. "This is not about security," stated Raúl Yzaguirre of the National Council of La Raza, echoing a central political theme of the ACLU initiative. "It is about unequal treatment." The ACLU, while filing these cases, identified wholeheartedly with "the legitimate need to combat terrorism." "There is nothing patriotic about discrimination, nor is there any honor in suffering it in silence," ACLU National Staff Attorney Shufford stated in a news release. "To the contrary, allowing it go on unchallenged seriously undermines fundamental American values that we fought so hard to achieve." Recently, the ACLU hailed as "heroic" Minneapolis FBI agent Colleen Rowley, termed a "whistle-blower" by the media. Rowley has called for strengthening and enhancing FBI domestic spying capacities. This served Attorney General John Ashcroft's recent proclamation that limitations imposed on the political police as a result of abuses during the Black and anti-Vietnam war struggles in the 1960s would be lifted -- to protect fundamental American values, the nation's top cop assured the people of the United States. The ACLU clients in the passenger lawsuits also included patriotic caveats in statements to the media describing their claims against the carriers. "In 1994, I was so proud to become an American citizen," Hassan Sader stated, "because I always believed in American justice and democracy and how many opportunities this land has to offer. What happened to me on October 31 makes me question those beliefs." On that day, he was escorted off an American Airlines flight after a passenger complained about his presence to a flight attendant. "I'm bringing this lawsuit because I was treated like a second-class citizen," Sader stated. "I want to restore my confidence and faith in this country because this is where I want to be." The four defendant airlines denied any wrongdoing in the alleged incidents. United Airlines spokesman Joe Hopkins stated that discrimination runs contrary to company policy. He told the Los Angeles Times, however, that "if somebody is staring intently at the cockpit, for example, perhaps a person could be deplaned." This, he said, would fall under the category of "behavior." In the past three weeks, raids conducted by the Immigration and Naturalization Service at several terminals at Los Angeles International Airport have swept up more than 80 undocumented workers attempting to board flights to U.S. cities where they believed jobs awaited them. All were Mexican, with the exception of one worker from Honduras and another from Poland. Little more is known about the dragnets, which were reported anonymously to La Opinión -- the Los Angeles Spanish-language daily -- by LAX employees. Just what kind of "behavior" the targeted immigrant workers exhibited enabling la migra to arrest them was not announced either by the immigration police, or airline officials who collaborated with them in executing the raids. Copyright (c) 2002 by Jon Hillson, NY Transfer News. Non-profit redistribution, in full and without alteration, is permitted and encouraged. ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytmid-06.17.02-13:58:59-1795