Upon arriving in Minneapolis they were pulled aside and interrogated by the cops, without probable cause other than their skin color and national origin. They were again cleared to fly. However Northwest barred them from the flight, saying that some passengers felt "uncomfortable" flying with them. They eventually got out on another airline.

This racist action sparked protests including from an elected official of East Indian origin who asked if Northwest was adopting a "whites only" policy. One person, in a letter to the local media, asked if Northwest would respond the same way to his discomfort sitting next to a Republican.

Despite the protests, Northwest unabashedly defended the decision to refuse service to these passengers, until a week or so later when the Utah Attorney General told Northwest that they would be sued unless an apology was issued. Northwest's "apology" said that decision was made because the airline was "trying to avoid a delay."

Bill Scheer
Minneapolis, Minnesota
 
 
National ID card
I'm glad the Militant ran the article by Brian Williams in the October 15 issue on the various proposals on imposing national identity cards on working people. The article notes Oracle CEO Lawrence Ellison's public call for fingerprinting millions of people in the United States for use on national "digitized" ID cards, and his offer to donate free software to the federal government to do this.

Oracle, based near San Jose, is the world's leading maker of database software, and has had a long-standing relationship with the federal government. In fact, the Central Intelligence Agency was Oracle's first customer. (The company's name comes from a CIA-funded project in the mid-1970s to find better ways of storing and retrieving spy files being kept on people).

Ellison, who is worth about $15 billion, explained in an interview on a San Francisco TV news program, "Well, this privacy you're concerned about is largely an illusion. All you have to give up is your illusions, not any of your privacy." Ellison's proposal would build on what the U.S. ruling class already has done. For instance, the FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, which went into operation in 1999, keeps an electronic database of 41 million fingerprints. Fingerprint processing time has been reduced from 45 days to less than two hours.

Bill Kalman
Albany, California

The letters column is an open forum for all viewpoints on subjects of interest to working people.

Please keep your letters brief. Where necessary they will be abridged. Please indicate if you prefer that your initials be used rather than your full name.  
 
 
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