'Posing a Threat to Civil Aviation'by
Vin Suprynowicz
Dawn Hansen is Nevada chairman of Mothers Against the Draft. Her husband, Christopher Hansen, is the paralegal and retired contractor who served as chairman of last year's failed "Axe the Tax" tax-rollback petition drive. The couple are active in the Independent American Party; they're no wallflowers when it comes to voicing their political views. But Dawn says
she does not set out to cause problems at the airport – just the
opposite. She does wear a couple of political buttons, though. When I met with Dawn last weekend she told me she was wearing exactly what she'd been wearing as she entered the security checkpoint at Oakland International Airport Aug. 27 – a navy blue jacket with two small American flag pins and two political buttons with writing on them. The larger one reads "Dissent is Patriotic." The smaller, red one bears a smiling portrait of President Bush, labeled "Daddy's Little War Criminal." She's convinced that's what started the trouble. "I went to show my ID, and the guy said, 'Oh, I don't need that.' But when I went to show my boarding pass she looked at me, yanked it out of my hand, undid the rope, and said, 'Come over here!' No 'Please,' no ID check. Then she said, 'Give me your jacket!' They made me go through the metal detector twice even though I didn't set it off either time. Then this second woman said, 'You go sit down over there!' They wanded me, they made me put my legs out, they went up inside my back and around my boobs. "They passed my jacket from person to person, each security person in turn was looking at the buttons. They asked me, 'Why are you traveling with so much reading material?' " Dawn says she was carrying seven or eight general circulation magazines, a biography of Ben Franklin and Bob Woodward's latest book. "I did have one subversive publication; I was carrying a copy of The New York Times. ... They asked me why I was carrying so many legal documents. I'd been in California helping my brother do some legal research on a case. "When I got home I found out they'd taken the lids off all my creams and just left them like that so they got all over everything." They finally let Dawn Hansen fly home. She called Southwest Airlines on Monday morning and was referred to the Transportation Security Administration. When she called the TSA, "I was informed I'd been put on the watch list. I was not on any watch list before I went to Oakland. ... "TSA told me I would be under that kind of security every time I fly. TSA said I could fill out this big form that you can download from their Web site, it asks for your Social Security number and three separate forms of ID and all this information. ... I said, "You can forget that. You're just data mining. You have no right to all that information.' And they said, 'Well then you're going to have to go through it every time.' " I called Nico Melendez, TSA spokesman for the western region, at his office in Los Angeles, to ask if Dawn Hansen is on the watch list and why she was placed there. "We don't confirm the presence of any persons on any list," he said. "The people on any of our watch lists are people that are suspected of posing a threat to civil aviation." Do people on the list have any due process right to a hearing to get off these lists? "Yes, and all the information is on our Web site at TSA.gov." Mr. Melendez called back a short time later. "We don't have an agenda," he said. "I don't have any idea what the politics of our screeners are. Maybe it was just a cool jacket and they liked the buttons and they wanted to read them. Frankly we don't check photo IDs, that's not our job, that's the responsibility of the airline," which is responsible for checking passenger names against the watch lists. • Updating my recent column on the BATF withdrawing the Brady background check exemption from holders of Nevada concealed carry permits, The Associated Press reported Nov. 8: "Nevada sheriffs and police chiefs, reversing an earlier decision, are pushing to exempt gun owners with concealed weapons permits from federally required background checks and $25-per-transaction fees when buying new guns. "The move by the Nevada Sheriff's and Chief's Association, announced Monday, reverses an earlier decision to not press for the exemption that until recently had been allowed by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives."
Vin Suprynowicz [send him mail] is assistant editorial page editor of the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal and author of The Black Arrow. Copyright © 2005 Vin Suprynowicz |
