The "Flying imams" drama ends not with a bang but a whimper. All charges against the U.S. Airways "John Does" were dropped this week when a federal court accepted the imams' request to absolve the unnamed tipsters. The case has not even entered discovery.
This is good news for ordinary passengers. We're still in some shock that these folks ever risked legal sanction, for the offense of making good-faith tips to airline authorities. Could the country really be so far from the September 11 terrorist attacks that it would ever consider discouraging suspicious-activity reports on an airplane? No, mercifully. From the beginning, this suit had all the trappings of a political stunt by a small number of activists.
For readers who missed this story, six Muslim imams were removed from a plane and questioned in Minneapolis in November when passengers observed and reported what they thought was suspicious behavior by the imams. The suspicious behavior included disobeying seating assignments, pairing in the front, middle and rear of the plane in manner frequently attributed to some of the September 11 attackers, and requesting but not using metal-tipped seatbelt extenders, which the imams placed on the floor beneath them. For these actions they were taken off the plane, detained and questioned. The imams subsequently sued U.S. Airways, the Minneapolis-St. Paul Metropolitan Airports Commission and the passengers who reported them, citing "fear, depression, mental pain and financial injury" suffered.
The inclusion of the "John Doe" tipsters was what riled most people, since the law rightly encourages such citizen reports. This was one sign how far from the mainstream the plaintiffs were - as was a subsequent attack on this newspaper's reporter, and on the Associated Press, for spurious accusations of unfair treatment. "I'm asking the media to be a little bit more responsible in reporting the facts of the case," the imams' lawyer said in June. "That actually would prevent a lot of issues." By "responsible" he must have meant writing Council on American-Islamic Relations press releases. The imams also tried to bar the media from hearings.
We invite these imams to continue learning the ways of the American political process. No one likes a phony lawsuit - much less a phony lawsuit that preys on ordinary people.
