Arshad Chowdrey still gets upset talking about what happened to him at San Francisco Airport one morning in October. On the one hand, he tells the story precisely, calmly, with all the authority expected of a Carnegie Mellon MBA student with a Weslayan undergraduate degree. Yet as he talks, it becomes clear that this Connecticut-born son of a cardiologist and teacher is bewildered, angry and more than a little shaken. "I believe in the integrity of the system," he says, "or at least I want to. But this stunned me."

Military tribunals, secret evidence, taping of attorney-client conversations: Such measures promoted by John Ashcroft's Justice Department have dominated public debate in recent weeks. Yet their very extremity has to a large extent obscured the far more widespread impact of the post-September 11 climate on Muslim-Americans going about their routine business. For that, listen to voices like Arshad Chowdrey. He did not end up in handcuffs. Instead, he was victim of the lingering airport-security debacle. Yet for that very reason his story is emblematic.

For Chowdrey, October 23 began as a routine day of air travel. It was a Tuesday. At the beginning of the weekend, Chowdrey had left Carnegie Mellon to visit a friend in San Francisco. Now he was headed home to Pittsburgh and, mindful of post-9/11 security, had arrived at San Francisco International Airport with plenty of time to spare.

His flight on Continental, he recalls, was supposed to leave at 12:25 PM. He cleared security and arrived at the gate. Then at noon, someone called his name over the public address system, asking him to come to the desk. There the airline's agent and supervisor asked him to produce his identification. What they said startled him: "They said the pilot saw a 'phonetic similarity' between my name and someone on a terrorist list."

Phonetic similarity? Under other circumstances, Chowdrey might have laughed. His last name is the South Asian equivalent of Smith, common among Muslims and Hindus alike. But this was no occasion for laughter. For one thing, the events of September 11 had struck Chowdrey hard: For two years after graduating from college he had worked at Bankers Trust in the World Trade Center, and he knew people who died. Plus, as he absorbed the notion of being singled out by a pilot for his phonetic profile, he found himself surrounded by two armed National Guardsmen and no fewer than four police officers. A crowd had gathered and was starting to point at a 5 feet 4 inches South Asian-looking young man surrounded by armed cops and soldiers.

Chowdrey would not be allowed to board, he was told, "until the FBI checked me out." He was worried about missing his flight, and asked the Continental agent what would happen. The terse answer: "If we find something, you're not going anywhere." (Continental's public-affairs office declines comment on Chowdrey's account.) Finally two FBI agents arrived on the scene. Over the next half-hour, Chowdrey was taken aside, searched, had his bags tossed. The FBI and police took his ID, ran their background check, and handed it back to him assuring him there was no problem.

A relieved Arshad Chowdrey headed back to the gate, where the final passengers for Pittsburgh were still boarding. Up until that moment, Chowdrey was annoyed and inconvenienced, but was willing to shrug it off.

It was on his return to the gate that Chowdrey suddenly found himself reeling. "The last passenger was through the door, and I was next. Instead, a flight attendent came out, closed the door and said, 'I'm sorry, you can't fly with us today.'"

"I'm sorry, you can't fly with us today." The Continental supervisor affirmed the flight attendent's words: Because of the pilot's lingering prejudice about "a security issue," he would not fly. At this point, Chowdrey was trying hard to maintain his aplomb. "I'm still surrounded by all the police and soldiers and FBI. So I ask the FBI agent, Am I a security issue? No. The police? No, but 'it's a private company.'" Evidently, the pilot's "phonetic profiling" of Chowdrey would be allowed to rule the day. "It was just naked," he says. "The FBI and police had cleared me--and it didn't matter. I wasn't flying, all because some pilot didn't like my name." And the story didn't end there. Continental's agent found Chowdrey a flight to Pittsburgh on US Airways. But when he arrived at the US Airways gate, Chowdrey learned there was a "security block" on his name--automatically flagged because of his earlier encounter with the police. He was nearly denied a flight once again when a senior US Airways supervisor grasped what had happened and got him on board. "By the time I got on board," says Chowdrey, "I just wanted to disappear."

As wrongful profiling goes, it could have been a lot worse. Chowdrey's cool temperament kept him from overreacting and being arrested at the airport, perhaps even ending up for a while as one of those unaccounted-for September 11 detainees. Nor was he beaten or shot, like so many African-American victims of "profiled" highway stops.

Yet the impact on him was profound--particularly, he finds on reflection, the collusion of all those police and FBI agents and airline officials with a pilot's groundless judgement. "People are blaming me, and others like me, for a crime that I've actually lost people to," he says. "I can't begin to tell you how helpless this makes me feel." He has found himself scanning his bookshelf, wondering if there is anything that could get him in trouble. He has noticed his parents in Connecticut, both Bangladeshi refugees who arrived here thirty years ago, suddenly staying home. "They have always felt the United States was a safe place. Now it hurts them that they find themselves second-guessing their decision to stay." He has started to hear similar stories from the South Asian community in Pittsburgh.

Chowdrey is certainly not alone in falling victim to airport profiling or in feeling a profound impact afterward. Civil rights attorneys report a flood of discrimination complaints. Vahid Zohrevandi, an Indian Muslim, was kept off an American Airlines flight in late September under similar circumstances. "Shortly afterward, my boss said I didn't look well, that I should go to the company doctor. He told me I was having anxiety attacks." He often worries, now, "that people are talking about me." He's advised his sons to cut their hair so they look less "Middle Eastern," has switched jobs at his company to avoid travel and has canceled his family's holiday plans "because I can't bear getting on a plane." Zohrevandi even changed his telephone number after a newspaper picked up his story and he was flooded with angry and threatening calls.

If what Chowdrey and Zohrevandi both describe involves the small change of day-to-day life, it is important to remember that an accumulation of such small-change disruptions can add up to lives lived in considerable fear. In that sense the stories now emerging from Muslim-American communities bear remarkable similarities to the experiences of families with a left-wing background during the McCarthy period: not the high-profile blacklisting or subversion cases, but the first-generation Jewish army engineers and scientists who were "profiled" and harassed at work because of the similarity in their backgrounds to Julius Rosenberg; and the teachers whose reading lists were suddenly subjected to legislative scrunity.

At the same time, Chowdrey's and Zohrevandi's cases reveal an airline security system that--despite weeks of high-profile attention--remains haphazard and bias-ridden. While individual bigotry comes into play, in large part incidents such as Chowdrey's profiling are the predictable downstream consequences of on-the-cheap security run for the benefit of airlines, with pilots and flight attendants understandably convinced that the system does not protect them. In the days after September 11--with legislators focused on corporate bailouts rather than quick passage of airline-security legislation--flight crews saw no greater cause for confidence. "Those of us who steeled ourselves enough to return to work were jumpy and shaky," says Rodney Ward, a US Airways flight attendent and union steward now laid off. "With the FAA and our corporate management offering no suggestions of what to do, we began developing our own strategies." He finds it unsurprising--if deplorable--that the vacuum has led some pilots or attendants to give free rein to bigotry.

The flight crews' fears, it turns out, are backed up by hard data. In early December, USA Today analyzed more than 1,500 unruly-passenger reports to the FAA between 1990 and 2000, and found that the agency took no action in 90 percent of the cases. In hundreds of cases they didn't even bother to open an investigation. Among them were physical assaults on passengers and crew, grotesque sexual harassment and knife-wielding threats.

In this sense, civil rights advocates and air crews share common ground. Cases such as Chowdrey's, says Washington, DC, attorney Christine Lopez, a 10-year veteran of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, are indicative of "a security system based on the wrong criteria." As she points out, ethnic profiling makes all passengers less safe by diverting attention from more meaningful screening and reforms.

More than anything else, Arshad Chowdrey's day at the airport demonstrates how ill prepared the system is to protect Muslim-Americans, and the breadth of official tolerance for senseless ethnic profiling. As Chowdrey himself points out, his status as a native-born, educated, middle-class citizen gives his complaint an authority not available to more vulnerable immigrants. "What I keep hearing in the South Asian community in Pittsburgh are a lot of stories about people having experiences like this who just decide to keep their heads down. They just don't want to draw attention." With the entire Muslim immigrant population in effect "profiled" by Attorney General John Ashcroft's order for 5,000 interviews nationwide, that tolerance appears to be growing even as September 11 recedes.

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