Florida, can't you get

Florida, can't you get anything right? First you botch the 2000 elections, then you repeat the mistake last week, and now you're patting yourself on the back for having detained three Middle-Eastern and South-Asian medical students for 17 hours? No wonder your SAT scores are the lowest in the nation.

"It appears that there isn't any kind of detonation device but it is important to show this system works," said Florida Governor Jeb Bush of the day's events.

Right. We can all sleep better now. I'm sure Butt, Chaudhary, and Gheith feel better, too, knowing that their participation in this drill proves that our country's response to uncorroborated claims is top notch.

What I'd like to know is: How is this an example of a system that works? Although Jeb Bush said the information came from "credible witnesses," a Georgian who enjoys a good breakfast at Shoney's is hardly a credible witness. (Ah, but she claims to have "very good hearing"!)

As for the length of the investigation, the police said it was extended because of confusion over the men's licenses. But the licenses turned out to be just fine.

And the bomb-sniffing dogs apparently reacted to both vehicles involved. But after searching the cars, analyzing their surfaces, and blowing up one of the student's backpacks, the police noted that there were no explosives in the cars, nor were there even traces of explosives.

Nothing about the system "worked." Every one of the early-warning tests returned a false positive.

Now the students and their families are saying that Mrs. Stone was likely prejudiced in her assessment of the three men. For the most part, this is a "he said, she said" scenario, and I generally reserve caution in such cases. Yet, there's a very subtle but frightening clue about Stone's state of mind in her comments to the press. According to The New York Times, Stone said she was "surprised to hear the three speaking in perfect American accents."

Why would that be surprising? It shouldn't be, unless you have certain preconceived notions about any group of people that looks like it's made up of Middle-Easterners.

Stone also told reporters, "My son said, 'Oh Momma, they're just messing with you.' Then I thought about it, and I said, 'Well, you know, they shouldn't be messing around like that.'"

This is not a woman who is doing her country a service by alerting police to a potential terrorist cell. This is a woman who was upset that a group of foreigners had gotten the best of her, and she was determined to teach them a lesson about how they should feel about September 11th.

Is it possible that the students were talking about events in their own lives when referring to Sep 11 and Sep 13? Is it possible that "bring it down" was in reference to personal items that one of the students needed brought down to Miami?

I do concede that the students most likely weren't just talking about personal events--if they said these things at all--because then they would have explained that to the police and the press. But the point is: When you overhear bits of a conversation, you don't quite get the full story. Bad sitcoms have been playing off this theme for years. Kids call this game "operator."

Essentially, what this entire situation proves is that anyone can have the police detain you on a whim. It says quite clearly that foreign-looking people, especially, need to watch what they say or don't say in public, lest they be suspected by their neighbors, harassed by police, hounded by the press--all the while having their personal belongings destroyed by the bomb squad.

Oh god bless this new, patriotically paranoid America. If anyone needs me, I'll be at the IHOP spying on the people in the next booth. Or maybe I'll be detained myself. I am a brown guy who speaks English and likes to take cracks at the government, after all.