http://www.newsreview.com/issues/sacto/2001-10-25/cover.asp
Homeland Insecurity A Sacramento journalist is taken into custody by police and forced to destroy photos by an over-zealous National Guardsman. Apparently, the terrorists are indeed causing instability.
By R.V. Scheide
Photo by Larry Dalton
Does this man frighten you? The "suspicious" journalist shows his ticket and ID at Sacramento International Airport. The photos of LAX were ordered destroyed.
The Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 sighed as its wheels kissed the Los Angeles International Airport tarmac. Flight 1206 out of Sacramento taxied to the gate, and my fellow passengers and I released our white-knuckle grips on the foam-covered armrests of our seats. No one's throat had been slit. We hadn't flown into a skyscraper. We'd made it, safely, much to our collective relief.
It was 5:05 p.m. on Friday, October 12, and we had call to be apprehensive. The previous day, the FBI had placed the entire nation on high alert, based on "credible" information that Al Qaeda, the terrorist organization headed by Osama bin Laden, was planning reprisal attacks on U.S. soil for the coming weekend. The bureau urged Americans to report any suspicious activity. Friday morning, armed troops from the California National Guard were deployed at Sacramento International Airport.
America, as we've been told over and over since September 11, is forever changed. Nowhere is this change more evident than in our approach to national security. Practically overnight, major metropolitan airports across the country have been turned into militarized zones crawling with armed soldiers and police. Their presence is designed to deter terrorists and provide us with a sense of security, but as I was about to discover, that security has come at a high price.
I'd purchased a roundtrip ticket from Sacramento International to LAX to observe firsthand the unprecedented measures being taken to combat terrorism. There'd been more than a little fear and paranoia in Sacramento and I expected to find more of the same in Los Angeles.
I didn't expect to be ordered to destroy photographs by an irate National Guardsman. I didn't expect the Los Angeles Police Department to confiscate and read the notes I'd taken on my trip. I didn't expect to be questioned by the FBI and detained for nearly three hours for no probable cause.
I didn't expect any of these things, but that's what happened. As I followed my fellow passengers up the jetway and into the LAX terminal, I had no idea I was stepping onto the War on Terrorism's first domestic battlefield, where, as in all wars, truth was about to become the first casualty.
Terminal 1 at LAX is usually jam-packed with people, but there were no friends or relatives waiting to greet loved ones at the gate. As part of the heightened security precautions, only ticketed passengers are permitted to pass through the metal detectors and into the boarding areas. That's why the area between the security checkpoint and the aircraft is called the "sterile zone." Everyone who has been allowed to enter the sterile zone has been checked out. Everyone is "clean."
I checked the time of my return flight on the monitor at the gate and discovered that because of a ticketing error, I only had a 15-minute layover--barely enough time to walk down to the security checkpoint and back--to catch my return flight. In Sacramento, I'd taken photographs of Guard members, armed with M-16s and pistols, taking positions behind the personnel operating the metal detectors at the security checkpoints. I'd seen other passengers take photos. I figured I'd snap a few pictures of the LAX security checkpoint and board my return flight. I figured wrong.
As I reached the checkpoint, I saw that the four guardsmen were deployed in exactly the same fashion as in Sacramento, behind the metal detectors. I removed the small digital camera from the right breast pocket of my leather jacket and took several photographs of the armed citizen-soldiers. I had just turned to head back to the gate when a loud voice boomed at me from the direction of the checkpoint.
"Hey you! What are you doing?"
A California National Guardsman, a big guy with a buzz-cut dressed head-to-toe in camouflage army fatigues, was moving rapidly toward me. I froze as he approached. He came so close it seemed impossible he wasn't touching me.
"Did you take my picture?" he asked angrily. "Did you take my picture?"
"I'm a journalist, working on a story about airport security," I told him.
"You can't take pictures here," he said.
"Says who?" I asked.
"Says me!" he barked.
He moved next to me, shoulder-to-shoulder, so he could view the camera's display screen. "You are going to show me the pictures you took, you are going to delete the pictures you took, and you are going to show me that they are deleted!" he breathed down my neck.
"This is a public space, I have every right to be here," I said. "There are no signs that say you can't take pictures here."
"Either you delete the photos, or I'm taking you to a room, and you can talk to my superiors. You can talk to the FBI."
Normally, I would have stood my ground. I would have talked to his superiors, the FBI. I was 99 percent certain that I had every right to take photographs of the California National Guard at the LAX checkpoint. Nothing I had read about the new security precautions, no one I had talked to, including other Guard members, had advised me otherwise.
But these are anything but normal times, and the slight shadow of doubt that had entered my mind, weighted by the intimidating behavior of the guardsman, caused me to make a questionable decision, at least from a journalistic viewpoint. I showed him the photos I had taken of the checkpoint, he objected to every one of them, and he ordered me to delete them. So I deleted them. I looked at the guardsman's I.D. badge and wrote his name down.
"What are you doing!?" he screamed. By now, his face had visibly reddened. "Don't you write my name down!!"
What strange universe had I entered? What was I supposed to do, cross his name out? Force myself to forget it? The guardsman's anger seemed totally out of proportion to the situation. To put it bluntly, he scared the living hell out of me. Only the timely intervention of a female Los Angeles Police Officer smoothed the scene over. She asked to see my I.D., ascertained that my California Driver's License was valid, and allowed me to proceed back into the terminal to catch my flight.
"Hey!" the guardsman yelled as I was departing. "Where's your ticket?"
I pulled it out of my left breast pocket, where it had been in plain view during the entire encounter, and showed it to him from 10 feet away.
"Right here," I said.
He didn't ask to look at it more closely, to see if it was actually a valid ticket, so I left, beaten (I'd been forced to delete my photographs) but not broken--I was still going to catch my flight home.
Or so I thought. <...>
Read the rest at: http://www.newsreview.com/issues/sacto/2001-10-25/cover.asp