Eric Zorn has some follow up on the recent penis pump story which made the email/blog/news rounds. Everyone could have laugh at the guy who is too embarrassed to explain the function of a penis pump in front of his mother. Turns out there is a lot less to the story. Seems like a jittery TSA security guard (or her supervisors) don't want to admit to a mistake, and instead are subjecting an innocent guy (who happens to have a heavy accent) to legal action.
Chicago Tribune | Eric ZornMardin Azad Amin: The 29-year-old native of Iraq has become the subject of worldwide ridicule for an incident earlier this month in which authorities allege that he blurted out a bomb threat while passing through a security checkpoint at O'Hare International Airport in an ill-advised attempt to hide from his mother that he was carrying a marital aid in his knapsack.
...“He told them it was a pump, a pump,” O'Neill-Burke [his attorney] said. “But he has a very thick accent. It's so thick that I had to meet with him face to face before I could understand him.”
Even still, she said, Amin's “pump” sounded to her a lot like “bomb.”
“There is no `p' in Arabic, so `pump' would come out more like `bumb,'” said Ahmed Rehab, executive director of the Chicago chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
The additional facts that any fool could see that the device itself wasn't a bomb and wasn't contraband and that any fool would know that an Arab man in his 20s with a clean record is the last person in the world who'd think that talking about bombs to airport security personnel is a good way to quietly and discreetly pass through the checkpoint did not dissuade our plucky authorities.
They are not just any fools. They questioned him for several hours, arrested and charged him, and then threw him upon the mercy of the rim-shot media, which couldn't resist mocking him first for his supposed stupidity and second for having a use for this particular device.
It just wouldn't have been as much fun to mock law enforcement for its absurd and continuing overreaction to an unfortunate misunderstanding, an overreaction that continued last week when Judge Gerald Winiecki allowed the case to go forward and set the next court date for Sept. 13.
The tale of a skittish guard who confuses “bumb” for “bomb” when she hears a man describe a penis pump isn't nearly as amusing as the tale of a man who panics when a guard discovers his penis pump and tells the guard it's a bomb.
Like we've asked so many times before, do you feel safer with the Dauphin in charge? It's gotten so bad we hate to travel now.
Tags: terrorism
