The John Doe Lawsuits

It looks like Congress is going to move swiftly to protect airline passengers who see something suspicious and report it to authorities. It is acting in the wake of a lawsuit brought by a group of imams who were removed from a U.S. Airways flight in Minneapolis after passengers complained the imams were behaving in a suspicious manner. The lawsuit, backed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, was brought not only against the airline and the airport authorities but also against un-named “John Doe” defendants who had alerted authorities to the imams’ behavior. The lawsuit, an astonishing assault on Americans’ ability to protect themselves in a time of war (though it would be just as illogical in a time of peace), was spotted immediately by the editors of powerlineblog.com, Michelle Malkin, and other sentinels of the World Wide Web, and legislation began immediately. These columns discussed it in “Flyer Beware.”