This is where we came in, 13 years ago – Portland airport in Maine at five in the morning on a Tuesday morning in September, as Mohammed Atta checks in for his flight:
Atta’s demeanor and the pair’s first-class, one-way tickets to Los Angeles made [US Airways ticket agent Michael] Tuohey think twice about them.
“I said to myself, ‘If this guy doesn’t look like an Arab terrorist, then nothing does.’ Then I gave myself a mental slap, because in this day and age, it’s not nice to say things like this,” Tuohey told the Maine Sunday Telegram. “You’ve checked in hundreds of Arabs and Hindus and Sikhs, and you’ve never done that. I felt kind of embarrassed.”
So he let Mr Atta board the plane. And, if he felt “kind of embarrassed” after thousands of people died in New York a couple of hours later, on balance it’s probably less embarrassing than if he’d stopped him and been consigned to sensitive-training hell by US Airways for six months.