Did you miss the fact that he triggered the explosive residue detector several times?

As the article itself describes... when he skipped the pat-down (and therefore skipped the ERD), no one batted an eye at his race.

Correction: they claimed he triggered the detector.

It's not a wise course to take government employees at their word.

'They' also claim the contrails from airliners aren't spreading mind control agents...

I have proof and past experience with dishonest government employees. Please take your arguments for chemtrails elsewhere.

Sure, but what you're talking about is widespread conspiracy to allow ERDs to be 'triggered' manually.

I think that theory warrants about as much consideration as chemtrails.

He never said they manually triggered an alarm. He said they could very well be lying that a detector was ever used let alone registered explosives.

That would be extremely gutsy on the part of the TSA employee... I go through the pat-down dance at least once a month, and that test is always done while I'm standing there, and the pass/fail reports are quite obvious (big green/red boxes with text).

Is that dependent on the airport? I've flown as recently as two months ago, and I went through four pat-downs over the course of the trip. I never saw any green/red indicator when they tested the pat-down gloves.

Regardles, I wouldn't exactly put it past the TSA to make up a positive hit. It's not like we haven't ever had a police officer claim someone committed a traffic violation on someone based on appearance and ultimately find drugs or some other criminal behavior.

Perhaps.

In the past two months, I've had pat-downs in DCA, BWI, and PHI (my home airport, SYR, doesn't have scanners, so there's nothing to opt out of).

They all use machines similar to this one:

http://www.tsa.gov/sites/default/files/images/edt_closeup.jp...

I've never seen a failure myself (the green bar you see pops up after a few seconds), but according to a friend who has, a red bar pops up instead.

Even if the chemical detector did trigger an alarm: These devices are not faultproof, and if you can't find an explosive, can't find surgical scars, can't find anything in the baggage, you could safely assume the passenger does not have any explosives on or in himself.

The only explanation that makes more sense if the TSA, NSA or FBI had warnings about very cleverly implanted explosive devices and want to keep that knowledge hidden. That would explain why the pat-downs didn't convince them (maybe they tried to evoke a pain response), why they didn't give him anything to eat or drink, and why the JetBlue representative didn't want him to fly on this day, but was fine with the next day...

So it's OK to be racist if you have another reason to be suspicious?

I don't think that's what I said...

I think it's more than a little hyperbolic to describe their actions as 'rabid racism'

They had a legitimate reason for suspicion. That reason wasn't the color of his skin, it was the color of a computer screen (a screen that flashes green hundreds of times a day flashed red in this case).

It's quite obvious that much ignorance and xenophobia followed, but I don't think it crossed (laughably subjective) line of 'rabid.'

A friend of mine who is about as 'all American' looking as you can get (white, tall, former marine...) tripped the same alarms after he had been firing a gun at a range the day before. He had an obvious and clear explanation for the alarm, so his experience wasn't as invasive, but they certainly gave him a hard time about it.

>It's quite obvious that much ignorance and xenophobia followed, but I don't think it crossed (laughably subjective) line of 'rabid.'

I suppose we could get into definitions of racism here. We're likely talking about "institutional racism", for which "prejudice plus power" is a pretty good definition, but I think perhaps "prejudice multiplied by power" might be even more apt. The prejudice was clearly considerable, but the power, and how it interacted with that prejudice, is what raises it to the level that I think could be called "rabid".

Seriously, you cannot support that level of incompetency. How many people pass airport gates everyday? How many people are caught with explosives everyday? The second pat-down should have been enough to decide that the machine was triggered by some chemical not directly related to explosives, as they were enable to find any bomb anywhere. Worse, it is very clear in the story that they know it can happen.