HOMELAND INSECURITY

A Sacramento Journalist Is Taken Into Custody By Police And Forced To
Destroy Photos By An Over-Zealous National Guardsman.

Apparently, the terrorists are indeed causing instability.

The Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 sighed as its wheels kissed the Los
Angeles International Airport tarmac. Flight 1206 out of Sacramento
taxied to the gate, and my fellow passengers and I released our
white-knuckle grips on the foam-covered armrests of our seats. No
one's throat had been slit. We hadn't flown into a skyscraper. We'd
made it, safely, much to our collective relief.

It was 5:05 p.m. on Friday, October 12, and we had call to be
apprehensive. The previous day, the FBI had placed the entire nation
on high alert, based on "credible" information that Al Qaeda, the
terrorist organization headed by Osama bin Laden, was planning
reprisal attacks on U.S. soil for the coming weekend. The bureau urged
Americans to report any suspicious activity. Friday morning, armed
troops from the California National Guard were deployed at Sacramento
International Airport.

America, as we've been told over and over since September 11, is
forever changed. Nowhere is this change more evident than in our
approach to national security. Practically overnight, major
metropolitan airports across the country have been turned into
militarized zones crawling with armed soldiers and police. Their
presence is designed to deter terrorists and provide us with a sense
of security, but as I was about to discover, that security has come at
a high price.

I'd purchased a roundtrip ticket from Sacramento International to LAX
to observe firsthand the unprecedented measures being taken to combat
terrorism. There'd been more than a little fear and paranoia in
Sacramento and I expected to find more of the same in Los Angeles.

I didn't expect to be ordered to destroy photographs by an irate
National Guardsman. I didn't expect the Los Angeles Police Department
to confiscate and read the notes I'd taken on my trip. I didn't expect
to be questioned by the FBI and detained for nearly three hours for no
probable cause.

I didn't expect any of these things, but that's what happened. As I
followed my fellow passengers up the jetway and into the LAX terminal,
I had no idea I was stepping onto the War on Terrorism's first
domestic battlefield, where, as in all wars, truth was about to become
the first casualty.

Terminal 1 at LAX is usually jam-packed with people, but there were no
friends or relatives waiting to greet loved ones at the gate. As part
of the heightened security precautions, only ticketed passengers are
permitted to pass through the metal detectors and into the boarding
areas. That's why the area between the security checkpoint and the
aircraft is called the "sterile zone." Everyone who has been allowed
to enter the sterile zone has been checked out. Everyone is "clean."

I checked the time of my return flight on the monitor at the gate and
discovered that because of a ticketing error, I only had a 15-minute
layover--barely enough time to walk down to the security checkpoint
and back--to catch my return flight. In Sacramento, I'd taken
photographs of Guard members, armed with M-16s and pistols, taking
positions behind the personnel operating the metal detectors at the
security checkpoints. I'd seen other passengers take photos. I figured
I'd snap a few pictures of the LAX security checkpoint and board my
return flight. I figured wrong.

As I reached the checkpoint, I saw that the four guardsmen were
deployed in exactly the same fashion as in Sacramento, behind the
metal detectors. I removed the small digital camera from the right
breast pocket of my leather jacket and took several photographs of the
armed citizen-soldiers. I had just turned to head back to the gate
when a loud voice boomed at me from the direction of the checkpoint.

"Hey you! What are you doing?"

A California National Guardsman, a big guy with a buzz-cut dressed
head-to-toe in camouflage army fatigues, was moving rapidly toward me.
I froze as he approached. He came so close it seemed impossible he
wasn't touching me.

"Did you take my picture?" he asked angrily. "Did you take my
picture?"

"I'm a journalist, working on a story about airport security," I told
him.

"You can't take pictures here," he said.

"Says who?" I asked.

"Says me!" he barked.

He moved next to me, shoulder-to-shoulder, so he could view the
camera's display screen. "You are going to show me the pictures you
took, you are going to delete the pictures you took, and you are going
to show me that they are deleted!" he breathed down my neck.

"This is a public space, I have every right to be here," I said.
"There are no signs that say you can't take pictures here."

"Either you delete the photos, or I'm taking you to a room, and you
can talk to my superiors. You can talk to the FBI."

Normally, I would have stood my ground. I would have talked to his
superiors, the FBI. I was 99 percent certain that I had every right to
take photographs of the California National Guard at the LAX
checkpoint. Nothing I had read about the new security precautions, no
one I had talked to, including other Guard members, had advised me
otherwise.

But these are anything but normal times, and the slight shadow of
doubt that had entered my mind, weighted by the intimidating behavior
of the guardsman, caused me to make a questionable decision, at least
from a journalistic viewpoint. I showed him the photos I had taken of
the checkpoint, he objected to every one of them, and he ordered me to
delete them. So I deleted them. I looked at the guardsman's I.D. badge
and wrote his name down.

"What are you doing!?" he screamed. By now, his face had visibly
reddened. "Don't you write my name down!!"

What strange universe had I entered? What was I supposed to do, cross
his name out? Force myself to forget it? The guardsman's anger seemed
totally out of proportion to the situation. To put it bluntly, he
scared the living hell out of me. Only the timely intervention of a
female Los Angeles Police Officer smoothed the scene over. She asked
to see my I.D., ascertained that my California Driver's License was
valid, and allowed me to proceed back into the terminal to catch my
flight.

"Hey!" the guardsman yelled as I was departing. "Where's your
ticket?"

I pulled it out of my left breast pocket, where it had been in plain
view during the entire encounter, and showed it to him from 10 feet
away.

"Right here," I said.

He didn't ask to look at it more closely, to see if it was actually a
valid ticket, so I left, beaten (I'd been forced to delete my
photographs) but not broken--I was still going to catch my flight home.

Or so I thought. I reached the gate at the absolute last second and
was permitted to board the plane. The flight was nearly full, and I
took one of only two empty seats in the back. Several passengers
chuckled at my hurried, flustered appearance. I began to furiously
scribble in my reporter's notebook, trying to capture all the details
of what had just transpired before they faded from memory. The plane
was on the verge of pulling out of the gate when an LAX Southwest
Airlines employee--not a member of the plane's crew--materialized in
front of me.

"Sir, I'm going to have to ask you to exit the aircraft," he
said.

I'd been on board no longer than three minutes. As I limply followed
the Southwest employee out of the plane and up the jetway, I knew who
would be waiting on the other side of the door.

Two LAPD police officers greeted me at the gate. The California
National Guardsman was standing behind them. Officer Brennan, the same
policewoman who had just checked my I.D., now informed me that
passengers from both of my flights, the one into LAX and the one I had
just been removed from, had complained about my "suspicious behavior."

"Who complained?" I asked her.

"I can't tell you that, sir," she said.

"What suspicious behavior?" I asked.

"They said you were going through overhead compartments and writing
things down."

"I have one carry-on bag," I said, indicating my backpack. "I placed
it under the seat in front of me on both flights. I didn't even touch
an overhead compartment. And since when is writing in a notebook
considered suspicious activity?"

"We're going to have to detain you, sir."

The guardsman smirked behind her.

"Yeah, you said you were working on a story about airport security,"
the guardsman said. "What do you want to do, give away our security
positions to the enemy?" I stared at him incredulously as the second
LAPD officer, Ramirez, confiscated my notebook.

"Do you have press credentials?" he asked.

Uh-oh. I'm a freelance writer. I don't even carry a business card,
just my California Driver's License, my Social Security card, and a
bunch of credit cards. For all they knew, I was Joe Q. Ticketed
Passenger walking around the terminal taking notes and photographs,
which, I was still 99 percent certain, was completely within my
rights. "I don't need press credentials to be in an airport," I
declared. "Give me back my notebook."

Instead, Ramirez passed the notebook to Brennan, who leafed through it
with the guardsman while Ramirez sternly advised me to "shut up" and
"stop asking questions." My handwriting is worse than a doctor's, and
Brennan thought I'd misspelled her name. She guffawed and elbowed the
guardsman. He got an even bigger kick out of my initial description of
him as "unarmed." I hadn't noted his gun until later.

"You got that wrong," he said, smugly patting the pistol strapped to
his side.

"Turn the page," I said curtly.

My acquiescence was giving way to anger. I had followed the
guardsman's direct order to delete the photographs, against my better
judgment. That should have placated him, in my opinion. I couldn't
help feeling that the guardsman and the LAPD were now harassing me for
daring to put up any verbal resistance at all. Brennan's explanation
that I had been detained because unnamed persons had observed me
acting suspiciously on both flights didn't wash. "Who are these
witnesses?" I kept asking. "What did I do?" She didn't have to answer
my questions, she said, because of "operational security," and "new
FAA regulations." Then she took my ballpoint pen, "because it could be
used as a weapon."

She wasn't being ironic. In fact, the idea that a pen could literally
be used as a weapon had occurred to me before boarding Flight 1206. A
month ago, such thoughts would have been considered unusual. Now, they
constitute the mindset of the average American air traveler. I'd
discovered as much earlier that day at Sacramento International.

I arrived at the airport at 11 a.m., just as several local TV crews
were setting up their remote units in front of Terminal A. The
California National Guard had deployed earlier in the morning, and it
was big news. Reporters, photographers and TV camera operators were
gathered on the terminal's second level, observing ticketed passengers
as they moved through the metal detectors. Occasionally, a guardsman
shouldering an M-16 could be glimpsed behind the checkpoint, but
otherwise, it was a dull photo opportunity. The only way to pass
through the checkpoint and into the sterile zone, where the Guard was
actually posted, was to buy a ticket.

It took 25 minutes to pass through the line at the Southwest Airlines
counter. The customers waiting in line were clearly more jittery than
usual; eye contact and conversations between strangers were rare;
furtive, nervous glances were the norm. A healthcare executive from
Kansas City who said he'd flown seven times since September 11 told me
about two women he'd seen detained for periods of time in two separate
airports. They'd been very upset, he said, but "we're just going to
have to get used to it."

After purchasing the ticket, I waited in line at the security
checkpoint, removing the laptop computer out of my backpack as
instructed by a makeshift sign in the staging area. I also removed my
camera and my tape recorder, just in case. The line ahead of me
stalled for several minutes; passengers grumbled. When it was my turn,
I placed my devices, along with the backpack, on the conveyor belt and
passed through the checkpoint without setting off any alarms. I was in
the sterile zone.

I proceeded to photograph the half-dozen or so guardsmen at the
Sacramento checkpoint from approximately 30 feet away. I took several
shots, then interviewed California Air National Guard Captain Jeff
Wurm, the officer in charge of the detail. In civilian life, Wurm is a
computer programmer and analyst. Now he's commanding a squad on the
frontlines of the War on Terror. Like all National Guardsmen currently
patrolling the nation's airports, he and the members of his unit had
received two days FAA airport security training before being deployed.

"What we're here for is security and deterrence," Wurm said. Translation:
The Guard were there to be seen , and the citizen-soldiers at Sacramento
didn't flinch when an occasional passerby snapped a photograph of the newly
militarized checkpoint. Although a few people gaped at the camouflaged men
carrying automatic weaponry in the airport, most thanked the Guard for
being there.

During the half-hour I observed the checkpoint, I saw no obvious
profiling of passengers going through. The California National Guard
is supervising the process; all the screening at the checkpoints is
still conducted by security personnel subcontracted by the airlines. A
few passengers complained about being subjected to extra searching,
usually because metal objects they didn't know they had been carrying
had set off the metal detector. "It's like down at the jail," said one
man whose steel-shanked boots had set off the buzzer. He was allowed
to continue after removing his boots and being thoroughly "wanded"
with a hand-held metal detector. I was interviewing a man who had
forgotten he was carrying a Buck knife when two Sacramento sheriff's
deputies, J. Coe and Doug Diamond, approached me. A passenger had
reported a suspicious-looking man in a leather jacket hanging around
the checkpoint. I explained that I was on assignment for the
Sacramento News & Review.

"Oh, I like that paper," said Deputy Coe.

I had showed them my driver's license, and they had allowed me to
continue doing what I was doing.

Fast-forward to LAX three hours later. As up to 10 LAPD officers
guarded me near the Southwest Airlines Gate 12, I wondered what had
gone wrong. No one could tell me what I'd done, and no one seemed to
know what to do with me. They were waiting for some other authority,
the FAA or the FBI, they weren't sure, to show up. I'd been standing
since the ordeal had begun; I took off my backpack and sat down on the
floor behind the check-in counter in a yoga position as the police
continued to stand around. I closed my eyes and began taking deep
breaths. When I opened my eyes, a male passenger in the boarding area
was staring at me like I was the dog-faced boy at the circus.

"I'm a journalist!" I yelled. His brow furrowed in concern, then he
moved away. Other people in the boarding area were regarding me
nervously. An LAPD sergeant, a burly Hispanic man, arrived. I stood
up.

"You understand sir, this is a national security measure, and we're
going to have to check with the FAA to clear it," he said. "You know
they might not let you back on the airplane. You make people nervous."

"How do I make people nervous?" I asked.

"By doing whatever you're doing."

"What am I doing?"

"I don't know, but whatever it is, you're going to stop doing
it!"

"OK," I said. "But what am I doing?" I wasn't getting it. He began
poking his index finger at me to emphasize the point.

"I don't know what you're doing, but you're going to stop doing
it!"

I re-assumed my yoga position. Higher-ranking LAPD officers began
arriving. Eventually, someone figured out that holding me prisoner
right next to the entrance of the jetway was really making some of the
passengers nervous. I was moved to an empty row of seats facing the
window. My return flight was long-gone; the boarding area was
beginning to fill up for the next flight. A couple of Arab-looking men
in their 20s attempted to sit in the seats next to me.

"Can we sit here?" one of them asked a police officer. The cop looked
at me. He looked at them. He looked back at me. A dim light flickered
in his eyes, then went out. "No, you can't," he said, and they moved
off.

I had been detained for more than an hour by the time Lieutenant
Joseph Peyton, the LAPD duty incident commander, arrived. I complained
that my notebook had been taken, and Peyton and another officer
immediately returned it to me.

"Can I take notes now?" I asked Ramirez.

He didn't say yes, but the rueful look on his face didn't say no. I
grabbed another pen out of my backpack. I was a journalist again.

Peyton explained that the officers at the scene were part of an
additional detail that had been assigned to boost security at the
LAPD's airport substation after September 11. He apologized for my
detainment, and said I would be free to go--as soon as I was cleared
by the FBI. He admitted that the War on Terror was making everybody a
little nervous. A few days previously, he'd watched two F-16 fighters
escort a Canadian jumbo jet all the way into LAX. A passenger had set
off a smoke detector in the jet's restroom and become irate after a
stewardess had reported him. Peyton, who normally works LAPD's West
Traffic division, was soft-spoken and reassuring, and the tension in
the air dissipated somewhat. Then Angela Karp arrived on the scene.

Karp, the Southwest Airlines station manager for LAX, held what
appeared to be a plane ticket. Instead, it was a credit receipt
refunding my return fare to Sacramento. She said several passengers
had complained that my behavior had made them nervous and because of
that, Southwest Airlines was barring me from all flights out of LAX
for the remainder of the evening.

"Can you tell me who said I made them nervous?" I asked.

"No sir, I cannot do that."

"Can you tell me what my alleged behavior was?"

"No sir, I cannot do that."

It was an issue of national security and the safety of the airline's
passengers. As a private business, Southwest had the right to refuse
service to anyone, she said, and they were giving me the boot. She
turned on her heel and was gone.

"What is it?" I asked Peyton. "My black leather jacket?"

"I hope not," he said. "I have a black leather jacket."

By the time the two plainclothes FBI agents arrived, I had been
detained by the LAPD for nearly two hours. One agent was a husky guy
in a khaki green Hawaiian shirt. The other agent, Anthony Gordon, had
the grizzled, wizened demeanor of character actor Harry Dean Stanton.
It didn't take him long to evaluate the situation. Neither the
guardsman nor the LAPD had the name of the passenger(s) who had
complained about me, so no one could say if I had actually done
anything suspicious. After questioning the guardsman and the LAPD,
Gordon sat down beside me and quietly explained that the entire nation
was on high alert. Everyone's nerves were frayed. Taking the
photographs of the checkpoint was completely legal. But the guardsman
had served on the California National Guard's Counter-Drug Task Force,
and was worried that somehow drug dealers might recognize his
photograph if it appeared in the paper.

"He does counter-drug work, that's why he freaked on you," Gordon
said.

If the explanation was supposed to soothe, it didn't. I'd been ordered
to delete photographs, had my notebook confiscated and read by the
police, and detained for three hours with no probable cause--all
because the California National Guard had assigned a camera-shy
counter-drug person to security duty at the airport? What the hell was
he doing there? Gordon just shrugged. Case closed. I was free to go
home.

But how? I had been banned from Southwest and the other airline in the
terminal didn't have any Sacramento flights. I wondered if I had been
blackballed off all of the airlines as I trudged the quarter-mile to
Terminal 7, where United Airlines, the only other carrier with a
flight to Sacramento that night, was located. I booked a flight on the
10:05 shuttle, waited an hour in line at the security checkpoint and
returned to Sacramento without further incident.

The following days were filled with conflicting thoughts and emotions.
I'd gone to the domestic frontlines of the War on Terrorism to observe
the new security apparatus in action, and the new security apparatus
had terminated my observation without cause. In my opinion, "truth" is
a word that journalists bandy about too loosely, but there was no
denying that my ability to get at the truth in this case had been
severely injured. It seemed surreal, unbelievable, and possibly
illegal. I also felt violated.

At the same time, when a half-dozen different cops tell you you've
done something wrong for two hours straight, there's a tendency to
start believing them, even if you haven't done anything. That shadow
of a doubt regarding my rights as a citizen and a journalist in the
so-called sterile zone kept telling me that considering the "war" was
on, I should have known better, that I deserved to have my photographs
erased, my notebook confiscated. The enormous pressure to "stand
united" with the country in the War on Terrorism added to my feelings
of guilt. But how could I stand united when the very freedoms we were
supposedly defending from the terrorists were being stripped away
before my eyes--not by terrorists, but by fellow Americans?

The answer was, I couldn't. So I tried to find out what had really
gone wrong at LAX. Lieutenant Colonel Terry Knight, public information
officer for the California National Guard, was stunned when I informed
him a guardsman had ordered me to erase photographs. "That doesn't
make sense," Knight said via telephone from Washington, D.C. "That's
wrong." But when told that the guardsman worked in counter-drug
operations, Knight had an epiphany. "It's understandable why he didn't
want his picture taken."

"Should someone who doesn't want their picture taken be working guard
duty in such a public area?" I asked.

"They're fine for that duty ..." he began. Then he stopped and
referred me to Sergeant Joe Barker, acting public information officer
for the Counter-Drug Task Force, for further comment.

"I know this is real X-Files -sounding stuff, but you can't print that
gentleman's name," Barker said when reached at his Sacramento office.
When asked what law prevented the SN&R from doing so, he backed off.
"There's nothing I can do to stop you from publishing his name and
what he does, but it would definitely endanger his life."

The Guard provides ancillary support to federal, state and local drug
enforcement agencies working in California, particularly near the
Mexican border area and in marijuana eradication programs. Because of
"operational security," Barker wouldn't explain what the guardsman's
counter-drug duties were or how publishing his name or photograph
might endanger his life, but the guardsman probably wasn't making
undercover buys. Barker was a little more specific when asked where
the guardsman had gotten the idea he could force me to erase my film.

"He was following his FAA training," Barker said, adding that details
of the two-day FAA training course were classified because of
"operational security."

The training may be classified, but according to the FAA, the classes
don't instruct guardsmen to confiscate the film or notebooks of
anyone, including journalists.

"No, he's totally wrong," said FAA spokesman Mike Ferguson. "You
didn't do anything illegal there." The only photography restrictions
in the sterile zone concern the privacy of passengers, not security
personnel. Close-up photos of the X-ray monitors and of people having
their luggage searched by hand are not permitted. Otherwise, Ferguson
said, "You can shoot whatever you damn want." By "you," he meant
anyone--journalist or private citizen.

Several days later, Barker reversed course. "It's perfectly crystal
clear that you can't force someone to erase pictures that have already
been taken," he said, adding that he'd passed this information on to
guardsmen at a recent FAA training session in San Francisco. "I can
personally say that the people I gave the briefing to have been
instructed to not erase photographs," he said.

There's a reason members of the Guard's Counter-Drug Task Force were
assigned to LAX, according to Nancy Castle, the airport's director of
public relations. The task force has some of the Guard's "more
seasoned members, the ones used to dealing with the public." When told
that the guardsman was afraid his cover might be blown, she pointed
out that more than 100 local media outlets had recently been invited
to interview, photograph and film the Guard during a visit by Governor
Gray Davis, who was touting LAX's new security precautions. No
guardsman that she was aware of had asked that his picture not be taken.

Castle said there are no signs prohibiting photography posted in the
sterile areas of LAX and that she has never heard of anyone having
their film confiscated at the airport.

According to Terry Francke, legal counsel for the California First
Amendment Coalition, no government agency has such authority. "There's
no law that permits anyone to summarily confiscate a camera or film or
order the destruction of that film," Francke said.

While Barker acknowledged that the guardsman was wrong to force the
deletion of the photographs, he knew of no pending disciplinary action
in the case. "If there was, I'm not sure we would release it," he said.

Francke also said that the Guard and the LAPD may have violated a
California statute designed to protect the "unpublished information"
of journalists. The law, California Penal Code # 1524, prohibits
judges from issuing search warrants for "notes, outtakes, photographs,
tapes and other data of whatever sort not itself disseminated to the
public through a medium of communication."

"Clearly, they had no right to do what they did," Francke said. "Under
California Law, journalists are free from search and seizure directed
at unpublished information." He added that the guardsman and the LAPD
officers also failed to comply with federal law, which states that the
U.S. Attorney must exhaust all other means (such as issuing a
subpoena) to obtain unpublished material before allowing a law
enforcement agency to seize it without a warrant.

While now might not seem like the ideal time to pursue such a case,
Francke said that in the long haul, it might be in the public's best
interest. "People caught up in war fervor and the opportunity to
express solidarity with national security are probably going to see
this story as a sign of reassurance--until they get caught with a
camera in their bag or staring at a plainclothes policeman too long,"
Francke said.

"If, as we all hope, this particular hijacking threat recedes and
nerves return closer to normal, I do think people will maybe turn
their minds back on and acquire some common sense."