Word: shoes
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Everyone now has his nail-clipper, tweezers or X-rayed-shoe story. Can-you-top-this tales of luggage and body searches have become a staple of cocktail chatter. Yet citizens would willingly subject themselves to delay, inconvenience and even indignity if they felt what they were undergoing was actually improving airport security. Since Sept. 11, subjecting oneself to security indignities has been a civic duty. But this has become a parody of civic duty. Random searches are being done purely to defend against the charge of racial profiling...
...True, shoe bomber Richard Reid, while young and Islamic and male, was not Arab. No system will catch everyone. But our current system is designed to catch no one because we are spending 90% of our time scrutinizing people everyone knows are no threat. Jesse Jackson once famously lamented how he felt when he would "walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery--then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved." Jackson is no racist. He was not passing judgment on his own ethnicity. He was simply reacting to probabilities. He would rather...
...Saga of the Shoe Bomber...
...your article on shoe bomber Richard Reid [WORLD, Feb. 25]: The passengers of American Airlines Flight 63, on which Reid tried to set off a bomb, are lucky to be alive. If he had gone to the toilet to light the fuse protruding from his shoe, the world may never have discovered the cause of the explosion. Thanks to the heroics of the plane's crew and passengers, we learned of a previously unknown weapon the terrorists have and can now prevent similar plots. RAM PUTHRAN Walnut, Calif...
...subscribe to the theory that the shoe bomber was a confused loner and did not belong to a group. If Reid were part of a well-organized terrorist setup, wouldn't he have used a sophisticated detonator instead of a match? And even if he had to use a match, a trained terrorist would have had the sense to light it in the plane's toilet, rather than in full sight of a bunch of passengers. RAMJI R. ABINASHI Amersham, England...