Lawmaker Calls for Congressional Hearing After AirTran Denies Muslim Passengers on Plane

In the wake of a New Year’s Day incident in which nine Muslim passengers were removed from an AirTran flight after others allegedly heard them make suspicious remarks, a Washington, D.C. politician has called for a Congressional hearing into the matter.

In a statement on her Web site, D.C. Congressional delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton said that AirTran officials were “ignorantly off the mark” in their assessment of the danger the passengers in question supposedly presented, and that this incident and others like it indicate that airline personnel are unable to accurately judge and respond to security risks.

Last Thursday a group of nine Muslim passengers were escorted off an AirTran jet bound for Orlando, Florida shortly before it took off from Reagan National airport in Washington D.C. Airline personnel removed the group after two teenage passengers reported hearing them discuss matters related to the safety of airline seats.

After federal marshals and the FBI questioned the group, the matter was deemed to be a misunderstanding and they were cleared of any wrongdoing. In subsequent interviews with the news media, several of the passengers explained that they had simply been discussing which seat was safest in the event of a crash or other emergency.

However, AirTran did not allow them to re-board the plane and they were forced to find alternate flights to Orlando. AirTran eventually issued an apology and a refund to the passengers, after the incident received national and international media attention. The airline also defended its handling of the incident, saying that the crew followed TSA guidelines.

Several members of the group said that they felt like victims of racial profiling. All but one were American citizens, and many were dressed in conservative traditional Muslim dress. They were reportedly headed to a religious retreat in Florida.

Norton, who is a member of the Homeland Security Committee and the Aviation Subcommittee in the House of Representatives, said that this was a simple case of undisguised discrimination that highlights the lack of a coherent TSA policy.

“This is a clear mistreatment of people in the course of normal business,” Norton said in an interview with PeterGreenberg.com. “If the airlines are looking at people in religious garb as a security risk, my concern it that they would not know a security risk if they saw it and would easily fooled by a clever person seeking to do real harm.”

“Part of the problem is that there is no procedure for making a determination of who is a real risk,” she added. “We seem to be dealing with untrained amateurs who don’t seem to know what to do. If you have the slightest concern, you should not go directly to the atom bomb remedy.”

Norton added that a hearing would spur the government to design security policies that would better shape airline personnel’s decision-making abilities.

“I’m trying to find out what can be done, so airlines don’t have wholesale discretion,” she said. “There should be a common understanding, not an airline-by-airline policy on how to detect suspicious individuals. I think we can do better. We have to take responsibility in Congress.”

Norton said that she was surprised that more than seven years after 9/11, this type of incident was still occurring. But she was hopeful that with a new administration, things would start changing.

“A hearing would be a prerequisite to doing something about this persistent problem that refuses to go away,” she said. “Muslims are the most high-profile group to face discrimination today, but Democrats have historically been sensitive to discrimination so perhaps now we can start turning this around.”

By Karen Elowitt for PeterGreenberg.com.

Related Links: MSNBC, Eleanor Norton official statement, USA Today

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