Here’s a terrific piece by Debra Burlingame, whose brother Charles was the pilot of American Airlines Flight 77 on September 11, about the grievance theater of those six imams in Minneapolis: On a Wing and a Prayer.

Here’s what the flying public needs to know about airplanes and civil rights: Once your foot traverses the entranceway of a commercial airliner, you are no longer in a democracy in which everyone gets a vote and minority rights are affirmatively protected in furtherance of fuzzy, ever-shifting social policy. Ultimately, the responsibility for your personal safety and security rests on the shoulders of one person, the pilot in command. His primary job is to safely transport you and your belongings from one place to another. Period.

This is the doctrine of “captain’s authority.” It has a longstanding history and a statutory mandate, further strengthened after 9/11, which recognizes that flight crews are our last line of defense between the kernel of a terrorist plot and its lethal execution. The day we tell the captain of a commercial airliner that he cannot remove a problem passenger unless he divines beyond question what is in that passenger’s head and heart is the day our commercial aviation system begins to crumble. When a passenger’s conduct is so disturbing and disruptive that reasonable, ordinary people fear for their lives, the captain must have the discretionary authority to respond without having to consider equal protection or First Amendment standards about which even trained lawyers with the clarity of hindsight might strongly disagree. The pilot in command can’t get it wrong. At 35,000 feet, when multiple events are rapidly unfolding in real time, there is no room for error.

We have a new, inviolate aviation standard after 9/11, which requires that the captain cannot take that airplane up so long as there are any unresolved issues with respect to the security of his airplane. At altitude, the cockpit door is barred and crews are instructed not to open them no matter what is happening in the cabin behind them. This is an extremely challenging situation for the men and women who fly those planes, one that those who write federal aviation regulations and the people who agitate for more restrictions on a captain’s authority will never have to face themselves.

Likewise, flight attendants are confined in the back of the plane with upwards of 200 people; they must be the eyes and ears, not just for the pilot but for us all. They are not combat specialists, however, and to compel them to ignore all but the most unambiguous cases of suspicious behavior is to further enable terrorists who act in ways meant to defy easy categorization. As the American Airlines flight attendants who literally jumped on “shoe bomber” Richard Reid demonstrated, cabin crews are sharply attuned to unusual or abnormal behavior and they must not be second-guessed, or hamstrung by misguided notions of political correctness.

Ultimately, the most despicable aspect about the imams’ behavior is that when they pierced the normally quiet hum of a passenger waiting area with shouts of “Allahu Akbar”and deliberately engaged in terrorist-associated behavior that was sure to trigger suspicion, they exploited the fear that began with the Sept. 11 attacks. The imams, experienced travelers all, counted on the security system established after 9/11 to kick in, and now they plan not only to benefit financially from the proper operation of that system but to substantially weaken it—with help from the Saudi-endowed attorneys at CAIR.

US Airways is right to stand by its flight crew. It will be both dangerous and disgraceful if the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Transportation and, ultimately, our federal courts allow aviation security measures put in place after 9/11 to be cynically manipulated in the name of civil rights.

UPDATE at 12/6/06 8:40:17 am:

And we offer our deepest sympathy to Ms Burlingame on the tragic death of her niece: Daughter of 9/11 Flight Pilot Is Found Dead After a Fire.

UPDATE at 12/6/06 8:49:27 am:

And now, let’s hear from the useful idiot side of this debate: Dangers of flying while Muslim. (Hat tip: WriterMom.)

Come to find out the imams were not terrorist at all. It is understandable that in today’s reality of high-risk threats emanating from the potential actions of a few faceless terrorists, it’s always better to be safe than sorry. But the fact of the matter is that there was no legitimate justification to even believe that these imams might have been terrorist. The most plausible explanation for their detention is plain and simple: They were victims of Islamophobia.