[Infowarrior] - More 'PATRIOT' Act nuttiness

[Richard Forno]

http://www.politico.com/click/stories/0910/bass_disrupts_flight.html
David Bass – the Washington P.R. executive charged with a federal  
felony for alleged drunken behavior on a flight into Washington Reagan  
National Airport – says he was “out of it” on allergy medication and  
did nothing more than demand a glass of wine.

“They refused to serve me wine because they said I appeared drunk,”  
Bass told POLITICO Thursday morning as news that he’d been charged  
under the U.S. Patriot Act rolled through Washington.

  Bass said he wasn’t drunk on the flight, but rather had been taking  
Benadryl for an allergic reaction.


“I didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t get a glass of wine,” he said.  
“I was extremely sleep deprived. I have a bad history of traveling  
south.”


“The last thing I would ever be is a threat to anyone on a plane,”  
Bass said.


Police met Bass’s flight when it landed at Reagan. In a sworn  
affidavit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of  
Virginia, FBI Agent David Wiegand said that Bass had appeared drunk  
and abusive on the flight, demanding alcohol and refusing flight  
attendants’ orders to sit down.


According to Wiegand, a flight attended “stated that Bass refused to  
obey the instructions issued by the flight attendants and ‘disrupted  
everyone’ in as much as he entered the aircraft's galley several times  
and crawled over the person seated next to him in order to access the  
overhead storage compartments and the aircraft's lavatory. [The flight  
attendant] said that Bass’s behavior was so disruptive that [she]  
moved the passenger seated next to Bass to a different seat.”


Among other things, the affidavit stated that Bass made “mean faces”  
at flight attendants.


“I don’t know what a ‘mean face’ is,” Bass told POLITICO. “I make mean  
faces to my five-year-old all the time.”


Bass was questioned at the airport and subsequently charged with a  
provision of the Patriot Act that equates interfering with flight  
crews with a terrorist act – a felony punishable by as much as 20  
years in federal prison.


Bass appeared in court Tuesday and was allowed to remain free pending  
further proceedings. His next court date is Oct. 27.


In a telephone interview with POLITICO, Bass said he had been in  
Honduras on a business trip and hadn’t slept for three days before  
boarding a Continental Airlines flight from Houston to Washington on  
Friday.


“I was groggy . . . have you ever been sleep-deprived? It makes you  
kind of wacky,” Bass said.


While the FBI agent’s affidavit said that Bass had assumed an  
“aggressive posture” with police at the airport, Bass said the  
incident was not confrontational at all.


“The officers were actually very nice. I had been joking a little bit,  
talking to them,” he said. “It didn’t seem like reality to me.”


Bass said he offered to take a blood-alcohol test when he got off the  
plane, but he said officers declined.


In a statement attached to the FBI agent’s affidavit, one of the  
flight attendants said that Bass “stared at me the whole flight . . .  
didn’t listen to anyone and argued everything and appeared unsteady on  
his feet, upsetting everyone in first class, including me.”


Another flight attendant said the crew agreed that Bass should not be  
served alcohol on the flight.


“I told Mr. Bass to take his seat as he was interrupting the [flight  
attendants] from their duties by [repeatedly] getting up, standing in  
the aisle . . . asking for drinks, staring at [the other flight  
attendant], making mean faces. Even on landing, he was staring at her.  
I could see she was intimidated by his stares.”


Bass, whose criminal case was first reported in the Washington  
Examiner, appears frequently as a political commentator on television  
and recently founded Raptor Strategies, a public relations firm with  
energy, media and insurance clients. The firm’s slogan: “New Times  
Demand New Strategies.”


“My clients know me better than this,” Bass said. “[My friends] would  
probably say ‘Bass was joking a little more than he should have been.’”


Bass provided some consulting services for POLITICO’s parent company,  
Allbritton Communications, during the publication’s start-up phase.