Attorney General John Ashcroft is reviewing American security procedures urgently today after the revelation that a man was allowed to board an American Airlines flight in Boston while wearing a beard. Shocked passengers leaving the Boston to Orlando, FL flight vented their fury at lax security procedures. Eileen Hamill of Daytona Beach, FL was one of the upset passengers interviewed by our reporter at Orlando airport.
"When we got on the plane and saw a guy with a beard just behind us, we obviously were a little worried", she said. He looked kind of like a Muslim, and we all know what those people are like, don't we? And he had a foreign accent," she added. She went on to say she would consider joining a class action against the airline for recklessly endangering the mental and physical welfare of passengers.
The airline issued a statement as follows: "We naturally spotted the potential terrorist suspect from his beard during check-in. Our ever-alert security staff took him to one side and questioned why a man with a beard and funny accent would be boarding a plane. He turned out to be a British computer specialist with no ties to Islamic terrorism."
However, Ashcroft has criticized the airline for not calling in the FBI as soon as the strange beardy man was spotted, pointing out that the country is at Orange Alert. "It kinda makes you worried when a bearded individual can board a plane just like that," he was reported as saying. "We may be a free country, but freedom doesn't just mean that hippies, freaks, terrorists and weirdos can go where they like without expecting the security services to check up on them."
The national security alert level was raised to red for seven minutes on hearing the news before being dropped to yellow for a couple of minutes by accident and then being raised back to orange.
The bearded man was detained in Florida and flown to Guantanamo Bay for interrogation before being deported to the United Kingdom. The British government has registered a formal protest at the action, but has been dismissed as a bunch of commie, terrorist-loving heathens by the Attorney General's office.