The Saudi Marathon Man
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
According to Wikipedia:
> Despite never being charged, he underwent a "trial by media" with great toll on his personal and professional life. Eventually he was completely exonerated; Eric Robert Rudolph was later found to have been the bomber.
It could possibly help to ease the disagreements over these issues.
If we're going to have debates on these stories, I prefer the meta-debate about which stories are relevant to HN over the fight over who hates racism more punctuated by the person complaining about the unfairness of it all.
The site has guidelines. The belief you have about the importance of votes is simply not true. Votes are one of the mechanism by which stories are selected for the sites, but not the only one.
From the guidelines: Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.
But since my comment mostly related facts, I'd assume people would want to listen so they can collect additional facts about how the site works, independent of what they thought about me.
The reason I use it is because of the first paragraph on their about page http://hckrnews.com/about.html
I don't see anything wrong, my skin color is similar to him and I wouldn't mind them checking me out first, I would gladly cooperate so that they can move on and find the real bad guy.
Setting aside all ethical issues, using ethnicity alone to determine probable cause is a violation of the law. If you would like to see it be acceptable to use skin color as the sole determinant for probable cause, that's fine. Just change the law. But until then, it is not allowed.
While you could say that there is an elevated chance that the terrorist is of Arabic descent (and frankly, the odds there are not that strong. Maybe better than 50%, but I wouldn't put my money even on that...) that is only a small part of the picture. You must also consider the possibility that any given person of Arabic descent is a terrorist (an absurdly small probability). When you combine these two factors then you can decide how probable it is that he is the terrorist, given his descent.
If you actually work out the numbers here, you will undoubtedly discover that the probability he is responsible falls well below any rational standard for harassing the man.
Edit: To get a grip on what sort of standard you would usually demand: consider a murder in a small isolated town. With no clues at all, lets say the murderer could be anyone. In a town with 3 people, each person could be said to have a 50/50 chance of being the murderer. Is that enough for search warrants for both (not under our legal system, but just ethically/morally)? Sure, I'd accept that. If there were a hundred people in that town? No way. So, does "terrorist, given arabic descent" go over 1%? I HIGHLY doubt it.
The only thing that man has over the likely thousands of others that in some way participated in the event is his skin color. Everyone else there had those same properties. So if we are considering the population of people in the general area at the time, then no. They used only his descent. They, and djanogo[edited], used P(arabic|terrorist) to justify a search. In order to justify a search you need a reasonable P(terrorist|arabic).
Assign some reasonable numbers to each factor off the top of your head, work it out on a napkin, and come back to me with whatever figures work out to be over whatever a reasonable threshold might be.
If the bombs were really placed in backpacks that were left sitting on the ground, I would further suspect that the bomber placed them much later an hour before. Wouldn't want someone to steal your bomb...
Furthermore, maybe the sick fuck wanted to watch so he stuck around at a short distance instead of booking it.
Who knows.
It's not a "'politically correct' statement", it's part of the law. If you think that it's OK to search someone's apartment based on their ethnicity alone, I can only assume that you have no respect for the rule of law.
And from TFA, I could not see any other distinguishing factors that were used to determine probable cause to search this guy's apartment, instead of any of the other people at the scene. The only factor was his ethnicity.
Don't need probable cause if the roommate consented to a search. "you have nothing to hide, do you?" 2nd oldest trick in the book.
And like I said, this is speaking purely legally. Even if they didn't have a search warrant, the fact that they targeted this guy for his ethnicity alone was unethical.
I am sure that legally there are no problems there, but ethically? There is unstated element of coercion there.
This person is now labelled across the United States as a potential terrorist. Even if he is exonerated, the damage would have been done.
It will likely have a great impact on his future. We also don't know at this point how he has been treated.
You state that the "likelihood of him being suspect were greater than others". Who decides this? If there were 1000 runners with a heavy middle eastern accent, would they all have been arrested? Do you put all middle eastern people in camps (as was done to the Japanese in US and Canada during WW2)?
I don't have answer to these questions, I do object to your notion that there is nothing wrong with this.
Because if there isn't than this is plain old racism.
After all, that's just co-operation so that they can move on and find the bad guy.
As Ben Franklin said: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
I'm pretty sure the two said very different things... possibly even totally opposite things.
Spree shooter/sniper = white male, Bomber = arab male, Drive-by = african american male, Poisoning = kgb?
None of these are true all of the time, but my point is they are stereotypes. If it were purely racism, people would jump to the conclusion of non-whites for spree shootings and snipings.
(Okay let's scan the crowd... Found 7 _______ looking men/women. Hmmm... eeny, meeny, miny, moe. There you go get that ____ fella with ______ looking face.)
(EDIT: Improved grammer)