At 10:06 PM 8/16/2004 +0100, you wrote:
On 29 July 2004, state troopers in
Iowa, USA, arrested an American Muslim
on suspicion of terrorist activity. Among the incriminating evidence
found
in his possession, according to them, were "numerous pages of
literature
and documents with Arabic printing". He is now being held without
bail.
(Source: online version of The Advocate, a local newspaper in
Ohio.)
If you are travelling in America, be careful what literature you
are
carrying.
Geoffrey Roper
Bibliographical & information consultant
Cambridge
Please, Geoffrey, give us a bit more credit over here. Granted,
most Iowa state policemen are probably not competent to figure out what
the "numerous pages of literature and documents with Arabic
printing" may have been, but then again neither have any of my
supervisors and library directors during my more than thirty years in
research libraries. However, it wasn't the "literature and
documents with Arabic printing" that got Michael Wagner in
trouble. You gloss over as "among the incriminating
evidence" the following, listed in a web page aptly headed "Odd
terror arrest incident": "flight-training manuals,
flight-training software, three bulletproof vests, night-vision goggles,
a night-vision scope for a rifle, a telescope, a 9mm semiautomatic
pistol, a bag of ammunition and marijuana residue in the
ashtray." Forget the marijuana; but given what happened here,
the combination of flight-training manuals and software, weaponry,
ammunition, and armor, along with a suspect who allegedly offered up
knowledge of al-Qa'idah terrorist plots rang some bells. Sources
other than the Newark Advocate would have told you that, rather
than being arrested for the materials bearing Arabic printing, Michael
Wagner was in fact charged with being a convicted felon in possession of
a firearm (which, according to web accounts, was in a secret compartment
along with other of the incriminating material). As for the
allegedly suspicious nature of the Arabic materials and their equivalence
to evidence of terrorism, you would have read in the Cleveland Plain
Dealer of 29 July, for example, that "Cleveland FBI agent Robert
Hawk said authorities here and in Iowa found nothing that points to
terrorism. "We looked at him from every angle, and we can't
find any relationship between him and terrorists," Hawk said.
"We took a real hard look at him, and we came up with
nothing."" Presumably, the materials printed in Arabic
were not evidence of terrorism. So please don't jump to conclusions
unnecessarily. If you ever can, enjoy central Ohio and northeast
Ohio's Amish country as my wife and I did earlier this month (the Ohio
Light Opera season is over, however, until next summer). Please
come to California for MESA and MELA in the fall and be among
friends. We can sit and talk of other times of war and anxiety that
have seen strange things happen. Liberty Cabbage was once a better
dish to eat than Sauerkraut. In the later war, Japanese-Americans
here were rounded up and held in concentration camps because of suspected
disloyalty, yet their draftee and volunteer sons formed what became the
most-decorated unit in the US Army. Who can forget that in the
nervous and phobic years of the Great War, on your side of the water,
even the Battenbergs decided it would be more politic to become known as
the Mountbattens?
Ed Jajko
