I've been silent for days on this, but my tolerance for this whiny baby, hyperbolic, overblown reaction to someone--not just someone, but some non-journalist who was couriering secret documents internationally--being questioned for 9 hours. Ya think?
Let's talk detention, whiny folks. Detention is like when the FDR administration decides that because you are of Japanese ancestry you need to be sent away for several years to a camp because you might be a threat. Your family might be separated. You lose your home. You lose your job. You work in some distant camp. That's detention to whine about.
I was detained for four hours once in the Toronto airport. I was 10 (maybe 11) years old. So that was 1961 or 1962. They kept me in a smoke-filled room with five or six interrogators giving me (a little ten-year-old girl) the third degree. I was traveling to go to summer school at the National Ballet of Canada. They wanted to see my "letter of acceptance." I showed them other letters, telling me where my lodgings would be and what my schedule was. But they needed four hours and lots of cigar smoke to ask about the formal acceptance letter.
I was ten years old and did not whine or cry. I was scared, but then I was a little girl.
I was detained for several hours coming back into the US from Canada once, during the Vietnam War. Frisked and searched, questioned, separated from my friend, who was being searched and frisked separately.
Stop acting like this is something new, or something that horrific. Someone stole government records, and someone who was ferrying them across international borders got stopped. No surprise there. Also, no harm done to the person, except 9 hours lost.
ON EDIT: And some day, when I ask my Mother or partner or whomever to sneak a bunch of top secret documents I've stolen from government computers, I'll expect they might get stopped and questioned.
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