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Comic Artist Detained For Script Containing 9/11 Type Scenarios

Posted by samzenpus on from the free-from-free-speech dept.

Comics writer Mark Sable was detained by security at Los Angeles International Airport because he was carrying a script for a new issue of his comic miniseries, Unthinkable. Unthinkable follows members of a government think tank that was tasked with coming up with 9/11-type "unthinkable" terrorist scenarios that now are coming true. Sable wrote about his experience saying, "...I was flagged at the gate for 'extra screening.' I was subjected to not one, but two invasive searches of my person and belongings. TSA agents then 'discovered' the script for Unthinkable #3. They sat and read the script while I stood there, without any personal items, identification or ticket, which had all been confiscated. The minute I saw the faces of the agents, I knew I was in trouble. The first page of the Unthinkable script mentioned 9/11, terror plots, and the fact that the (fictional) world had become a police state. The TSA agents then proceeded to interrogate me, having a hard time understanding that a comic book could be about anything other than superheroes, let alone that anyone actually wrote scripts for comics. I cooperated politely and tried to explain to them the irony of the situation. While Unthinkable blurs the line between fiction and reality, the story is based on a real-life government think tank where a writer was tasked to design worst-case terror scenarios. The fictional story of Unthinkable unfolds when the writer's scenarios come true, and he becomes a suspect in the terrorist attacks." It's too bad that the TSA can't protect us from summer blockbuster movies and not just graphic novels.

10 of 441 comments (clear)

  1. Proof please. by suso · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Any proof that he was detained and that this happened? Otherwise I'm tempted to believe that it is a stunt to advertise his comic.

    1. Re:Proof please. by suso · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Any proof that he was detained and that this happened? Otherwise I'm tempted to believe that it is a stunt to advertise his comic.

      I'm tempted to believe that you believe that the President wasn't actually born in Hawaii.

      Ok, I'll bite. The answer is no in the case of Obama's citizenship, because they presented reasonable evidence that they had looked into it and presented valid documents. If I wanted to be a conspiracy theorist I might start saying things like "But those documents might have been fake, false testimony" blah blah blah. But because I'm not willing to investigate the matter myself, I have to take what is presented at face value and its a waste of ones time to think about it any more if you're not going to look into it yourself.

      This article however has no investigative journalism to it. No visible attempt was made to contact the TSA for their comment on the matter and it only appears that they listened to what Mark Sable had to say about it and wrote an article based on only that. This is why good journalism is important and why blogs can be bad at times. After reading the article Slashdot linked too, I did a search on news.google.com for Mark Sable and couldn't find much else about it other than the same story. This makes me skeptical about whether it actually happened and thus my initial inquiry.

      And since things like this have happened many times before (PR stunts), proof needs to be asked for.

    2. Re:Proof please. by Gulthek · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Hi. I'm not a historian, but I studied to be one.

      Things like Guantanamo Bay, the Iraq War, this TSA bullshit and countless others simply do not happen in other countries.

      You are wrong, mind-numbingly, disturbingly, incomprehensibly wrong. It's as though you just commented in all seriousness that the sun and the moon are the same thing. Not only are you wrong now, but you are wrong in the past and almost certainly the future. You are wrong on so throughly, so completely, that whenever I try to write a cohesive rebuttal my mind falls dizzyingly lurches into a dark chasm where the word "What?" echoes endlessly into the void.

      The fact that you have been modded +5 insightful is a thought too painful to bear. I think I need to go lie down.

    3. Re:Proof please. by nomadic · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I can't think of any other country where reactions and measures taken are so extreme, and so disproportionate and above all so quick to occur.

      I think you are completely and utterly wrong. Just about every other country has this sort of thing happening, some are better than the US but some are worse.

      The Brits has to fight an uphill battle when they tried to curtail freedoms. In America, the population was crying out for more oppression.

      That is so incorrect as to be offensive. The Brits are notorious for rolling over and taking the most ludicrous government interference in their daily lives. Look at the absurd surveillance they've built up over there, or the DNA database, or the ID cards. The British are far more likely collectively to let their elected officials do whatever the hell they want.

      In America, the population was crying out for more oppression.

      Wrong. From the beginning a huge chunk of Americans have been fighting against civil rights abuses. You are insulting the millions of people who demonstrated against the last government, the hundreds of lawyers who have fought against the Guantanamo detentions unpaid as well as the Patriot Act, the people who were willingly thrown in jail (even some elected officials) during protests. You're forgetting the fact that the current American president was elected on a platform of restoring civil liberties.

      But typical British smug superiority; maybe you should look around your own culture before you start pontificating, shouldn't be too hard considering all the cameras.

      Hell, the UK is the only place I ever heard of where those wrongfully imprisoned are then forced to reimburse the government for the cost of their imprisonment.

    4. Re:Proof please. by rock_climbing_guy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Has anyone else noticed that there has not been a peep from the Democratic party about the PATRIOT Act since the Democratic party took control of both the executive and legislative branches of our government in the recent election?
      During both terms President Bush's ( a Republican ) Presidency, the Democrats loudly demanded that the PATRIOT Act be scaled back or repealed.

      --
      Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
  2. Re:it is sad.. by czarangelus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Submitting to authority does not protect you from them.

    --
    When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
  3. Re:it is sad.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That is bullshit. Why shouldn't he be allowed to carry his script with him into the airplane? Maybe he was going to a meeting about it or something. The TSA are nothing more than airport bullies, all part of the security theatre. They won't actually make you safer, they'll just make your lives a living hell, and worst of all, we let them. Your response is typical and just shows how passive the American people have become. We let these people take away our liberties, and we keep giving them more power, and eventually the USA will be a Police State. You're well on your way to helping make that happen.

  4. Re:it is sad.. by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When doing something you have a perfect right to do is "asking for it" something is very wrong.

    Describing something that somebody has a perfect right to do as "asking for it" makes you a sniveling authoritarian bootlicker and a complicit bystander to abuse of authority.

  5. Re:That the guy's an idiot? by Duradin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Unless there's a way to blow up the aircraft with said papers their content shouldn't matter.

    Now if you were packing C4 and detonators you should probably be checked out. But plain old information? Without acting on it, information is basically harmless.

  6. Re:ignorance of your own rights by Dryth · · Score: 5, Insightful

    He was detained by the TSA, not the police.

    The worst the TSA will ever do to you is call the actual police. The second worst is attempt to confiscate your belongings. The third - and the one most innocent travelers are most wary of - is they'll prevent you from boarding your flight.

    For people falling into that third scenario you aren't arguing just against being detained. You don't want to wait for a lawyer, and you don't want to escalate the issue to them calling the police over. You're trying to get through TSA screening as quickly as possible so you can make your flight.

    I've flown on average once a month for the past six years, and have been detained in a back room half a dozen times myself. The first time it happened I treated it like a police encounter ("No sir, I'm not aware," "am I being detained, or am I free to go?" "I don't have anything to say without my lawyer present."). I ended up missing my flight, missing a job interview, wasting a few hours in a security checkpoint waiting room, and getting nothing back in return - even with my lawyer's involvement.

    Since then I've just played nice. I'm more interested in getting to my destination than being a martyr. It's one of those "You'd be right, but you'd still lose" scenarios.