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Elena Lappin, a Brit -- you know, the allies -- got off her plane from London and made the mistake of telling U.S. officials she would be mixing a little freelance journalism with her sight-seeing. Her story, told on the L.A. Times op-ed page today, includes being cuffed, searched, perp-walked, held overnight in a downtown cell and ignored when she complained about feeling sick.
What sort of country is afraid of the foreign press? I had plenty of time to ponder this during my disturbing, humiliating and deeply disappointing encounter with a United States that seems to have become a travesty of the country I love. (Only countries like Cuba, Syria, Iran and North Korea demand that journalists apply for special visas.)...I was to spend the night in a "detention tank" behind a thick glass wall, without a chair or bed. It contained only two steel benches, about 15 inches wide, a steel toilet and sink (all in full view of anyone passing by and of the camera observing all), a glaring neon light and a Big Brother-controlled television playing a shopping (!) channel all night. I found it hard to breathe in this human fish tank, yet knocking on the glass, repeatedly, brought no help. When a security officer finally walked by and I shouted through the door that I felt unwell, he wasn't interested.
In the morning, I was transferred (again in handcuffs) back to a security room, where I spent the rest of the day awaiting my evening flight back to London. I and two other detainees, whom I was not permitted to talk to, were supervised the entire time by eight sleepy, TV-watching security officers. While they ate their breakfasts, I had to ask four times for food and was shouted at before something edible was brought to me, paid for with my own money.
This happened at least 12 times last year at LAX alone, according to the group Reporters Without Borders. And who can forget Sue Smethurst (left), the behatted Aussie strip-searched, handcuffed and interrogated -- then deported -- last year after showing up at LAX to write about Olivia Newton John. True, they all could have avoided the terrorist treatment by applying for the proper visa back home. Or when they got to LAX they could have just declared themselves to be slave traders, pornographers or off-duty nuke smugglers -- anything except journalists.