Kansas City Strip

Thug life: We were smiling like virgins on a BOTAR runway Friday afternoon, after John Ashcroft‘s antiterrorism bill became law. Did this mean he’d crack down on the GOP intimidators who halted the Miami-Dade election board’s vote count last year? We asked local ACLU director Dick Kurtenbach whether that’s the type of “coercion” defined as terrorism under the USA PATRIOT law.

“There are some definitional problems” in the new law, Kurtenbach says. Not only does it define some forms of protest as terrorism; it also allows the FBI and CIA to spy on many of us — protestors or not — without proving to a judge that we’re a threat. “What they’ve done,” Kurtenbach says, “is sort of set up judges as impediments to security.”

But federal Magistrate Robert E. Larsen seemed anything but a security impediment on October 24, when he locked up without bail a pal of Saudi Prince Bandar. Adel F. Badri was bound over to a Kansas City grand jury for allegedly kiting checks worth $10,000 after federal agents busted him in their post-September 11 crackdown on suspicious characters. Badri’s original crime? The Central Missouri State dropout had majored in aviation management. “At that time we merely had him on charges of being a student when he wasn’t supposed to be,” testified INS special agent Douglas Beemiss. Badri had a tourist visa, not a student visa.

Was the ensuing bank fraud an attempt to get deported to a free country? No, this detour through jail and a grand jury looks more like adventure travel, complete with souvenir shopping. Watching a courtroom artist sketch his orange-clad son, Badri’s father, Fareed Badri, asked, “Can we buy that?”

Book report: Chicagoans read To Kill a Mockingbird for their “community-wide reading project,” and Kansas City may read Whitney Terrell‘s The Huntsman. Terrell disguises his exposé of the city’s racial Cold War as a murder mystery, and librarian Susan Burton confirms that the book is on a list of 28 candidates for the local reading project. Ultimately, the public will choose a book from three finalists, and the project will buy 10,000 copies to make available to high schools and libraries for a massive read-along. One criteria: The author must have a pulse. “That gets rid of [William] Faulkner and [Mark] Twain,” Terrell says, “and all those other people who might knock you right off the list.”