Have we come to the place that if a parent needs to discipline their child in a public place they may now be arrested for being a terrorist? It just might be if this public place happens to be an airplane. According to a story out of Oklahoma City a woman by the name of Tamera Jo Freeman:
”...was on a Frontier Airlines flight to Denver in 2007 when her two children began to quarrel over the window shade and then spilled a Bloody Mary into her lap.
She spanked each on the thigh three times. A flight attendant confronted Freeman, who responded by hurling a few profanities and throwing what remained of a can of tomato juice on the floor.
The incident ultimately led to Freeman’s arrest and conviction for a federal felony defined as an act of terrorism under the Patriot Act, the controversial federal law enacted after the 2001 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
“I had no idea I was breaking the law,” said Freeman, 40, who spent three months in jail before pleading guilty.
Freeman is one of at least 200 passengers convicted under the amended law. In most cases, there was no evidence the passengers had attempted to hijack an airplane or physically attack flight crew members. Many involved raised voices, foul language and drunken behavior.
Some security experts say the use of the law by airlines has run amok, criminalizing incidents that did not start out as threats to public safety, much less acts of terrorism...
“We have gone completely berserk on this issue,” said Charles Slepian, a New York security consultant. “These are not threats to national security or threats to aircraft, but we use that as an excuse.”
Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd defended the prosecutions, saying they helped improve airline security. He said the department pursued prosecution only “when the facts and circumstances of a particular case warrant such action.”
The law has given airlines new flexibility to clamp down on unruly behavior. But the intent of the Patriot Act provisions was to catch terrorists in violation of the law before they could execute an actual takeover, said Nathan Sales, a law professor at George Mason University who helped write the Patriot Act when he served in the Justice Department.
Click here to read the rest of this outrageous report.