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Cancer Patient Held At Airport For Missing Fingerprints
A 62-year-old man visiting his relatives in the US was held for four hours by immigration officials after they could not detect his fingerprints because of a cancer drug he was taking. The man was prescribed capecitabine, a drug used to treat cancers in the head, neck, breast, and stomach. Some of the drug's side-effects include chronic inflammation of the palms or soles of the feet, which can cause the skin to peel or bleed. "This can give rise to eradication of fingerprints with time," explained Tan Eng Huat, senior consultant in the medical oncology department at Singapore's National Cancer Center. "Theoretically, if you stop the drug, it will grow back, but details are scanty. No one knows the frequency of this occurrence among patients taking this drug and nobody knows how long a person must be on this drug before the loss of fingerprints," he added.
We're from the government, and we're here to help you!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Why think when you can follow protocol?
mmmm...forbidden donut
How does someone with their extremities amputated get through an airport?
It's similar to the situation with breathalyzers where if the machine beeps or not can be the difference between you going to jail or driving home. Our judges have been replaced by robotic imposters, and I imagine it will get worse in the future.
Once I saw this movie, and some policemen caught Santa Claus, and he had snowflake fingerprints. Seriously. You should see it.
Qxe4
Terrible New Terrorism Drug Helps Terrorists Evade Identification And Cause More Terrible Terror.
My wife had to get a special exemption to sit for the bar exam because the state police couldn't take her fingerprints, which were necessary for conducting the required criminal background check. She has no idea why her fingerprints are virtually nonexistent.
-= alphaFlight =-
We must ban anti-cancer drugs. The terrorists might use them. Terrorists could hurt children. Think of the children!
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Actually, yes:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/pacificnw/2001/1125/cover.html
An alert border guard caught a guy trying to get across the border with a bunch of bomb stuff. This case with the finger prints doesn't sound like a case of anybody being "alert" - but for my money, training people to detect and investigate is far better than the ridiculous security theater we usually see - taking off shoes and having jars of plum jam confiscated.
In an episode of the original Adam West "Batman" series, the caped crusader was performing a high-tech fingerprint scan on all the citizens leaving some sort of event. Along comes a long-nosed fellow -- obviously The Penguin, since his disguise was about as effective as Superman's "Clark Kent" cover. Batman attempts the fingerprint scan, but the man has no fingerprints.
"Holy Nonsequitur, Batman!" the intrepid Robin exclaims, "it's plastic!"
"Yes, I believe that's what the surgeon used," replies the ersatz innocent civilian.
Batman lets him go, but confides to Robin that he knows it's the Penguin -- but now that the dastardly enemy thinks he's slipped the trap, he will now lead them to the bad guys' secret lair.
Obviously, the TSA should have done the same with this guy. Then, they could have found the entire Al Qaida leadership, probably meeting in a rakishly tilted room, behind the one-way mirror in a seedy magic shop.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Sure, they were dumb. Most criminals are. Most terrorists aren't exactly the sharpest marbles in the sack, either. How dumb do you have to be for someone to convince you that blowing yourself up or flying an airplane into a building is a good idea and will help you achieve your goals?
However, they only failed because the supplier they found was an undercover Fed rather than someone who would supply actual weapons. As for reality, the rocket was real; it was just disarmed. As for the C-4, it's probably possible to supply fake C-4 that behaves just like the real thing except it won't actually explode. It's not surprising that they didn't test the stuff; they had no reason to, believing it to be authentic, and testing C-4 is likely to attract a lot of attention.
The bottom line is, they *are* terrorists. They did have a concrete plan to carry out attacks. They attempted to carry out that plan. They were caught by good undercover police work. To try and say they aren't terrorists because they were arrested before they could blow anything up is like trying to say somebody isn't a drug dealer because he gets arrested after selling to a narc.
I was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2005, and after surgery I did the chemotherapy thing. One of my drugs was Xeloda, which is the marketing name for capecitabine, the drug this guy is taking.
The problem mentioned in TFA is Hand-Foot Syndrome (HFS) or palmer-palmer erythrodysesthesia. Capecitabine causes redness, swelling, a rash, and burning pain in the hands and feet - and sometimes elsewhere such as joints and genitals. In bad cases the skin peels and you get blisters, ulcers and sores in the affected areas. This is because some of the drug leaks out of the capillaries and damages the surrounding tissues, and you have a lot of capillaries close to the surface in the hands and feet.
There are drugs (Vitamin B6, corticosteroids, dimethyl sulfoxide) that can help sometimes - but they didn't for me. Walking became extremely painful, and my hands were constantly hot and painful, although I didn't lose my fingerprints as far as I know. Everything returned to normal some months after chemotherapy completed.
I really sympathize with this guy. Dealing with immigration headaches while having bad hand-foot syndrome would have been a total hassle for me. Even standing up for a few minutes was torture.
What choice do they have? It could take 4hrs to verify someone is on such a drug. It ended well so this is hardly a controversy.
How many flights have you arrived for where a 4-hour delay wouldn't have caused huge problems for you?
Most airlines I know, you lose your flight if you don't get through security on time, and if you can't pay for a much more expensive ticket on the next flight then you might lose your entire holiday
My sister has Nethertons Syndrome. It's relevant implication for this case is that her skin is replaced faster than normal. This causes her to have weak if any fingerprints.
When visiting Florida for christmas last year my entire family was held back for about half an hour. Only after the "security person" had consulted his superior, and that superior had consulted yet another superior, were this 16 year old obvious thread to national security allowed to pass into America. They also tried to wipe her fingertips with alcohol. Very pleasant on what you can compare to a first to second degree burn.
Fingerprint and photograph, yes -- with a few exceptions. The big one is that (most) Canadian citizens are exempt. As well, individuals younger than 14 or older than 79 can skip the ten card and mugshot.
You get the invasion of privacy even if you're just passing through a U.S. airport to make a connection to another country.
~Idarubicin
"The guy was screened routinely. "
THAT'S the problem.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Based on a true story and submitted for your critical evaluation, dear reader, I present "America: A Dialogue".
Alice: I can't believe people want to bring the 9/11 terrorists into the US.
Bob: Well, it's the right thing to do. We need to stop torturing them and give them fair trials.
Alice: But not here. They're too dangerous to bring into the country.
Bob:: If our prisons can hold Timothy McVeigh, they can hold anyone. And they're being tortured over there.
Alice: McVeigh is one thing, but if we hold Al Qaeda terrorists, their supporters will come down through Canada and bail them out of Fort Leavenworth. I think they're just too dangerous to keep here, and an island is much more secure anyway.
Bob: But our soldiers are behaving like monsters and torturing these people.
Alice: They deserve it anyway. They attacked us on 9/11. And the real monsters are on top*. Don't criticize our troops who are just trying to do their job. It must hard dealing with those people.
Bob: We don't know they've done anything. They've never been tried. And our troops are responsible for what they do. Didn't we decide that at Nuremberg?
Alice: We know they attacked us. These things happen during war. They happen all the time. My friend's father told me of some nasty stuff that happened in Korea. This is no big deal.
Bob: [dramatic facepalm, exit stage left]
[Curtain drops, Alice appears from behind it]
Alice: I'm so glad we elected someone who can rehabilitate our image in the world.
[House lights]
* Note the slight improvement over the past few years
Secondly, he didn't just walk up to them, open his trench coat and say "Pssst, wanna buy some C4 and a Stinger?" They were looking for stuff, so the FBI put forward a supplier.
Actually, the informant, Shahed Hussain, did go around saying things like that, in this case and another one, and federal agents have set up other people like that.
Hussain was a Pakistani immigrant who went undercover for the feds seven years ago to avoid deportation after being convicted of fraud. He was going around to mosques offering people money. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/23/nyregion/23informant.html And by being a government informant, (1) Hussain was getting paid a lot of money (hundreds of thousands of dollars, as I recall) (2) He got out of prosecution and possibly prison for his own crimes (3) Instead of being deported, he was allowed to stay in the country, which for a lot of immigrants is most important of all.
Hussain was responsible for a conviction in another case http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/nyregion/11plot.html in which he entrapped two men who never had anything to do with terrorism before, and who never could have gotten such weapons before, by loaning them $50,000.
One of the plotters in the current case needed money because his brother was sick. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2009/05/25/2009-05-25_terror_plotter_did_it_for_me_brother.html
Finally, if an FBI agent *had* walked up and said "Pssst, wanna buy some C4 and a Stinger?" and they said yes, then got busted, that'd stand up in court. Offering an illegal item for sale is not legal entrapment.
Well, depending on the circumstances it can be entrapment. If the person had no predisposition to commit a crime, and the FBI agent entices him by using an unreasonable amount of pressure, such as offering a huge amount of money, it can be entrapment. It's a jury question.
Cf. John Delorean's coke bust.
DeLorean was acquitted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_De_Lorean That's a good example of entrapment, because DeLorean was offered an unreasonable amount of money, in desperate circumstances, to do something he would not otherwise do.
Or anybody who gets busted for soliciting prostitution when the prostitute turns out to be a police officer.
If someone solicits a prostitute, that would show predisposition to commit a crime.
In contrast, a person who has never committed an act of terrorism, and has nothing to do with terrorists, who is enticed to take a large amount of money and then informed that it is for terrorist purposes, is entrapped, under the law.
Unfortunately, it's easy to manipulate juries with prejudicial issues, such as the defendant's race and religion. Right now, many jurors will be prejudiced against Muslim Arabs, and it's relatively easy for a prosecutor to get a conviction against them by using scare tactics.
A good example was Hemant Lakhani, whose case was the subject of a good program on This American LIfe. http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1088 One of the jurors agreed that he was entrapped, but she felt pressured by the other jurors to go along. Most people who listen to that broadcast would come to the same conclusion. But Lakhani is in jail for the rest of his life.
Next time around, the time will come for them to be prejudiced against another ethnic group or religion.
What was your race and religion again?