- While you were sleeping in the wee hours yesterday, a
crack team of federal screeners at Philadelphia International Airport was
hard at work doing its best impressions of the racially profiling New Jersey
State Police and the fumbling, bumbling Keystone Kops.
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- I speak of the stink over the sweet-smelling Saudi.
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- It was around midnight when a 22-year-old foreign student
tried to catch a connecting flight to Beirut, Lebanon.
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- Officials won't release his name, but they might as well
have called him Osama.
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- The student had a laptop and carry-on bag when he approached
a trio of security screeners manning an X-ray machine in Terminal A.
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- When they noticed a bottle in the bag, the student told
them it was cologne.
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- To prove it, he sprayed a bit on himself.
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- And a bit into the air in what FBI Special Agent Linda
Vizi carefully characterized as a "noncombative, nonthreatening way."
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- Something about the perfume-spraying Saudi scared the
screeners, for the next thing the student knew, he was in police custody.
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- Soon, the FBI was on the case.
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- And the screeners were rushed to Methodist Hospital,
where they were quarantined - along with everyone else in the ER at 1:30
a.m.
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- Get a whiff of this
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- In addition, two Philly cops who had been exposed to
the stuff in the airport were tracked down at a Rite Aid and a Dunkin'
Donuts (no joke). Both stores, and all who were in them, also were quarantined.
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- Meanwhile, a hazardous-materials team examined the egregious
elixir.
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- As the student said all along, the sweet stuff turned
out to be men's cologne.
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- Diesel Green, according to the police. (To be fair, it
does have an odd, industrial-looking spray bottle.)
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- The student's story checked out, too, as did his immigration
papers.
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- No charges were filed, and he was released about 5 a.m.
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- Through it all, Vizi said, the student was a "gentleman."
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- She dubbed the nearly four-hour ordeal a "nonevent"
and "no big deal."
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- And a spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration,
which oversees the airport's 900 screeners, praised them for following
protocol.
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- Sure, these are spooky times.
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- We're at Code Orange.
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- But try as I might, I can't find green cologne on the
list of substances banned from air travel.
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- (I've carried on Coco Chanel several times in the last
year, raising no eyebrows.)
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- Suppose the mystery bottle did, indeed, contain a lethal
substance.
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- If so, why in the world did the screeners allow the student
to pick it up and spray it? Not just once, but twice?
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- "I don't know," the TSA spokesman said.
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- Safe from whom?
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- And if folks were so worried about the substance that
a big-city ER, a drugstore, and a doughnut shop were quarantined in the
middle of the night, why wasn't Terminal A - where said substance was sprayed
- shut down as well?
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- "That's a legitimate question," the spokesman
said. (He called back to say the little security checkpoint area was closed
for a few hours. Big whoop.)
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- Thankfully, Stefan Presser of the American Civil Liberties
Union cut to the chase.
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- "I think what happened here," he said, "is
that they saw a foreigner and assumed he was a terrorist."
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- Add those assumptions to the hasty hiring and training
of thousands of federal screeners, and you've got a recipe for disaster
- and lawsuits.
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- "We've been led to a false sense of security,"
Presser said.
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- "Well, let's say there had been anthrax in that
bottle. They didn't make anyone safe."
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- In the end, the screeners had no symptoms and needed
no treatment.
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- Methodist Hospital's spokeswoman, Nan Myers, said they
had been "cleaned" and released.
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- Cleaned?
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- "I guess," she said, "they had schmutz
on them."
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- Schmutz, indeed.
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-
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- Monica Yant Kinney writes Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday.
Contact her at 856-779-3914 or <mailto:myant@phillynews.com>myant@phillynews.com.
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- http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/columnists/5218841.htm
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