Posted on 09/14/2002 4:31:48 PM PDT by vannrox
Edited on 04/29/2004 2:01:16 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
I just saw the med students on FOX and although they state that they were NOT at any point speaking or joking about 9-11, they went on to say that they felt Mrs Stone had overheard and misconstued certain key words or phrases and acted on that. Well, if there was nothing about 9-11 what were these "key words or phrases" that would lead a reasonably patriotic citizen to pull the law enforcement trigger on some total strangers. Had I heard what she says she heard and I have no reson to dispute her (I think the students were pulling a joke on her) I'd have done the same thing.
Here are some of the things we do know. They seem somewhat trivial, but the police spokesman mentioned it in just about every trip to the microphones as he briefed reporters at the scene on Friday.
1) That one of the cars ran didn't pay the toll. This claim was made all day long and into the evening.
2) That, on one of the cars, the tags were inconsistent with the vehicle ID number. They stuck with that story for most of the day.
3) The bomb-sniffing dog, indicated that it had sensed the odor of explosives in both cars.
It turns out the dog didn't detect explosives. So how often do dogs indicate false positive for explosives?
In the case of "uncooperative" suspects who don't roll initially roll over and volunteer to have their car searched, what's to stop a dog handler from saying,
"Oh look. Fido smells explosives. Guess that gives us cause to search the vehicle. Hope you're not hungry, Achmed, because it looks like we'll be doing a controlled explosion on your lunch today."
The tags- Turns out they weren't switched or tampered with at all. It was a temporary tag which lead to some interagency confusion.
OK, but did it really take all day long for the detaining agencies to figure that out?
and most notably,
1) The toll booth- Ayman Gheith said that when he got to the toll booth he noticed the toll taker seemed very nervous. He asked her what the problem was and hadn't his friend (Butt) in the first car paid the toll?
Gheith said she didn't speak English very well, so he asked again, hadn't his friend pay the toll? She nervously indicated that no, he hadn't.
Even though Gheith claims he saw that she was still holding Butt's $1.50 in her hand because she had not yet put it in the till, he paid Butt's toll -again- along with his own and proceeded.
It seems pretty clear from the number of cars that gave chase that the authorities knew the men were coming and were waiting at the toll booth for them.
I'm not sure why the cops couldn't simply pull Butts, Gheith, and Choudhary over without having to bolster the case for stopping them with the toll booth running story, but it appears that the police planned ahead to apprehend them at the toll booth.
Police probably gave the toll taker a head's up regarding the terror suspects (which explains why she was so nervous to begin with), possibly even told her something like, "You know, when they come through, don't put the money in the till we'll just go after them like they ran the toll."
Again, I don't know why, under the circumstances, the police would want to say the first car ran the toll when it didn't, but I'm guessing there may be lawyers on board here who can tell you that the cops have a better case to act with fewer immediate constraints if suspects display unusual or suspicious behavior, such as running the toll, switching tags, being "uncooperative", etc.
The toll running flap, although not needed to pull over the suspects in this incident, probably made the plan to apprehend and search them easier so the apprehending agencies just bent the facts about it. Just a tad.
Just a little fudge. No harm, no foul, right? Except now it appears that three upstanding citizens have had their lives severely disrupted, have lost their residencies, and are likely to be looked upon as suspicious for a long time because of it. It seems this could have been handled better and I think the detaining agencies have a some clarifying to do about the entire thing. If they're loathe to give the men an apology, at least they should honestly explain the public and to their prospective employers at the hospital just whether or not the three did anything wrong, instead of trying to gloss it over by saying it was a hoax, a prank, a misunderstanding or nothing at all.
I don't think the police needed a pretext to question the suspects. They had grounds for pulling them over -- the licence plate, and they had the dogs.
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