Big news out of Florida. Three men were pulled over, their car was extensively searched, 20 miles of Alligator Alley, the major east-west connector in south Florida, was shut down. Nothing was found. No terrorist literature, no explosives, no weapons, no nothing. It seems like the three were just kids heading down to Miami for medical school.
The CNN story has some few facinating nuggets, including: "Government sources said the men are U.S. citizens, two of whom are naturalized, and are of Middle Eastern heritage." Implied, one has to assume (because why else would it be mentioned?), that for CNN, there are now two classes of American citizenship, native-born and naturalized.
Second, the CNN reporter writes that according Eunice Stone, the woman who called the tip on the three in, "the men appeared to be in their mid-20s and spoke English without accents. She said one of the men had a long beard and wore the type of cap she said she had seen Muslims wear."
I wonder what kind of hat she's talking about? A New York Mets hat? I, for one, have seen lots of Muslims wear those. Maybe it was a Dodgers hat? Or a Royals? It's a shame the CNN reporter does not elaborate or give evidence that he or she asked Stone to expand these remarks.
(And, just wondering out loud here... lots of people advocate racial profiling when it comes the war on terrorism. We're told, don't search the old white grandma, instead double the searches of those who we are more likely to cause trouble. Does this now include brown men who speak English without an accent, were born in the USA, and appear to be in the mid-20s? I hope, for my sake, this isn't true.)