Posted on 04/25/2003 5:34:40 PM PDT by sarcasm
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The government charged American Airlines on Friday with discriminating against passengers perceived to be Middle Eastern, Southeast Asian or Muslim in its first racial bias complaint against an airline.
The Transportation Department alleged that 10 people, mostly U.S. citizens, were removed from their flights or denied boarding even though they had tickets and passed security checks.
Most of the incidents cited in the administrative complaint occurred within three months of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the department said.
American said it would fight the charges and denied that passengers were discriminated against by its crew or the crew of American Eagle, its commuter airline. The case will be heard by an administrative law judge.
``All of the airlines, as well as the nation, were under heightened security during this time and American (and American Eagle) employees were following the directives of the president and the attorney general to be vigilant in the face of terrorist threats,'' the airline said in a statement.
``It is this type of vigilance, in fact, that prevented a terrible tragedy when AA crew members stopped Richard Reid from igniting a shoe bomb on an AA flight in December of 2001.''
Reid, a scruffy-looking 29-year-old British citizen and convert to Islam, pleaded guilty in Boston last October to attempting to blow up the Paris-to-Miami flight. He said he was a follower of Osama bin Laden and member of al-Qaida and declared his hatred for the United States. He was sentenced to life in prison.
Transportation officials said some passengers were rebooked on American or another airline without any additional screening, though they'd been removed from their American flight as security risks.
Hussein Ibish, spokesman for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said he was very pleased the complaint was filed.
``This is excellent,'' he said. ``Yes, we had these incidents, but the government is responding in the way we would hope it would,'' he said.
The committee sued three airlines last spring for violating passengers' civil rights after receiving a flood of complaints about discrimination, he said. After the lawsuit was filed, the number of complaints declined, he said.
Typically, people were removed from flights before takeoff because a fellow passenger or crew member didn't like the way they looked, or the way their name read on a flight manifest, he said.
Among those not allowed to fly were Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican, and a Secret Service agent on President Bush's security detail, Ibish said.
There have been many complaints filed by the government against airlines for discriminating against disabled people, but never before about race, color or national origin, said Chet Lunner, Transportation Department spokesman.
``This is the first time on racial grounds,'' Lunner said.
Negotiations to settle the complaint failed, the government said. American could be fined as much as $65,000 plus penalties for any other violations that might be discovered during an administrative hearing.
The charges come at a bad time for American, which is struggling to avoid bankruptcy after its chairman was ousted because he didn't disclose executive perks granted while he was seeking wage concessions from the airline's unions.
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