The Washington Times reports this morning:
A group of Iraqi Pentagon contractors is suing American Airlines claiming racial discrimination for delaying its flight, but a police report shows that some of the men might have been intoxicated, behaved in a frightening and belligerent manner and scared one family off the plane. The captain of American Airlines Flight 590 from San Diego to Chicago delayed the late-night Aug. 28 takeoff after crew members reported that they “did not feel safe,” according to the report obtained by The Washington Times.
The Iraqi men filed the lawsuit last week in the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of Michigan, where they live, saying they were falsely identified as “posing a risk to security by reliance on racial profiling and through discrimination based on race and national origin.”
The captain did not alert the passengers to any danger and instead said the plane had to return to the gate because of an 11:30 p.m. airport curfew.
The men left the plane with the other passengers, but the lawsuit says they were singled out and removed from the flight because they spoke to one another in Arabic.
Once inside the gate area, the lawsuit states, the men “were pulled aside from a crowd of roughly 120 passengers as ‘persons of suspicion” inappropriately thought to pose a threat to security.”
However, a Port of San Diego police officer reported that he was first approached by one of the men, Dave Al-Watan, “who asked me what the problem was.” The officer said in his report that Mr. Al-Watan had “red, watery eyes and had the odor of an alcoholic beverage on his breath.” Another officer who approached the group said he smelled alcohol but could not pinpoint who might have been drinking.
Mr. Al-Watan raised his voice to the officers and asked whether the flight had been delayed “because we are from Iraq? Is that why we were removed from the plane?” Turning to the passengers, Mr. Al-Watan continued in a loud voice: “I am an American citizen, and I work for the Marines. Just leave us off the plane, tell the other people they can fly without us if that’s what they want.”
“I want a report. This is America. You can’t treat people like this. I am going to sue the airlines,” Mr. Al-Watan said.
Tim Smith, a spokesman for American Airlines, said the company stands by the flight crew’s actions and that the plane returned to the gate “because of potential security issues.”
Perhaps this frightened parent had nothing to apologize for:
She was simply “protecting my tiny little family,” she insisted, adding that “all I could think of was 9/11.” But yesterday, Leigh Robbins offered an apology to seven Iraqi men who were passengers on a plane scheduled to fly from San Diego to Chicago on Tuesday night. Robbins was also on the plane but was so terrified the men might be terrorists that she demanded to get off, causing a delay that prompted the airline to postpone the flight until the next morning.
The Iraqis, as it turned out, were consultants working with Marines at Camp Pendleton. They say they were humiliated when airport security, reacting to Robbins’ concerns, took them aside and questioned them. They have hired a lawyer.
“I know they’re upset, and they have every right to be,” said Robbins, 35, a Richmond, Va., homemaker. She said she was traveling with her two young sons that night and decided to err on the side of caution.
“How can you overreact when it’s your children?” she said.
American Airlines Flight 590, with 126 passengers on board, had been scheduled to depart Lindbergh Field at 11 p.m. Tuesday. In an interview yesterday, Robbins said she was sitting in the back of the plane with her children, awaiting the departure from the gate, when one of the Iraqis walked by to use the restroom.
She heard him “clunking around” inside the bathroom. When he came out, he had a suspicious look on his face, she said.
“He looked so mean, the way he was looking at everyone,” Robbins said. “It was very frightening, like something out of a movie.”
Robbins gathered up her sons, ages 9 and 4, and demanded to be let off the plane. The crew complied with her request, but the resulting delay meant the plane couldn’t take off by Lindbergh Field’s 11:30 p.m. curfew. The airline was forced to postpone the departure until 10:15 a.m. the next day.