Joe Sharkey At Large

There are probably several good reasons to explain why the U.S. bid for the 2016 Olympics was so resoundingly dissed by the International Olympic Committee.

The best explanation, I would guess, is money: The IOC — which has struggled to overcome its scandal-ridden recent past — sees a vast and untapped market in Latin America for Olympic broadcasting and merchandising rights during the 2016 summer games, and for future growth in Olympic merchandising. So crime-ridden Rio de Janeiro, which also by all accounts presented an attractive bid, won the games, even though President Obama traveled to Copenhagen to try to close the sale for Chicago.

But there is another reason, as yet not well-explored, and that is international revulsion to the hassles of simply entering the United States as a visitor.  Every foreign business traveler I know tells me that they brace themselves for the routinely unpleasant experiences at U.S. Customs and Immigration upon arrival at an American airport.

This is no secret to the U.S. tourism industry, which has been working for years to try to change the poor reputation the United States has among many foreign travelers — a problem partly due to the experience of simply arriving at our shores, where many international visitors claim they are confronted with a surly bureaucracy and other excessive arrival hassles.

Once past the border, the U.S. is, as it always has been, an extremely pleasant visiting experience for foreign travelers.

The IOC’s brusque elimination of Chicago from contention for the 2016 summer Olympics on the first round of balloting demonstrates the need to change impressions of what the experience of travel to the U.S. is like for international visitors, the head of the U.S. Travel Association said today.

Said Roger Dow, U.S. Travel’s CEO: “It’s clear the United States still has a lot of work to do to restore its place as a premier travel destination.”

Dow will discuss what he calls the “unwelcoming message” the U.S. sends to international travelers, as well as the overall state of the U.S. travel industry next Wednesday in New Orleans at the TEAMS Conference & Expo. Presented by SportsTravel magazine, TEAMS is the world’s largest gathering of event organizers and travel planners from the sports-event industry.

“When IOC members are commenting to our president that foreign visitors find traveling to the United States a ‘pretty harrowing experience,’ we need to take seriously the challenge of reforming our entry process to ensure there is a welcome mat to our friends around the world, even as we ensure a secure system,” Dow said.
The group is promoting legislation called the Travel Promotion Act, which was passed in the U.S. Senate last month, and which the House passed on Wednesday with strong bipartisan support. The bill, which needs to go back to the Senate on a procedural matter in the next few days, would create the first-ever U.S. promotion and communications program aimed at international travelers. Nearly every other industrialized nation spends heavily promoting itself with advertising and marketing aimed at foreign visitors.

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Does the United States Constitution protect the freedom of speech of American citizens, or does it not? In this era of globalization, the answer is becoming increasingly muddled, says Robert Spencer in FrontPage Magazine.

Travel writers, bloggers, academics, corporate travel managers, even business travelers who might feel the impulse to write something critical about a foreign country (say, one whose atrocious air-traffic control system creates a horrible mid-air collision) — this means us.

p.s. — Please, the name is not “Joseph.”

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Let’s forget Brazil for a while (all right, I want the name of that person who just yelled out “It’s about time!”), and turn to other developments:

Two flight attendants, a male and a female, slugged it out with the pilot and co-pilot in the galley and cockpit of an Air India A-320 as the aircraft flew over Pakistan en route to Delhi, via Lucknow from Sharjah. Here is the Times of London account.

That’s just terrible — but hey, there’s a new idea in this. Desperate for revenue, airlines could stage in-flight fights among the crew, and allow passenger betting. (The airline gets 25 percent of the handle). A new and inexpensive form of in-flight entertainment! And make it interesting: Bitch-slapping, sucker-punching, invective-hurling and kick-boxing, all allowed!

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This letter was issued by the Business Travel Coalition today to its 35,000 worldwide members, as well as members of Congress, by Kevin Mitchell, the chairman of the organization:

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“BTC Urges Passage of Free Speech Protection Act of 2009

Journalists, business travelers, organizations that fund travel activities at risk

Business Travel Coalition writes to urge swift action in passing the Free Speech Protection Act of 2009 (S.449) out of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The bill provides protections for Americans sued for libel in foreign countries whose laws are inconsistent with the freedom of speech granted by the U.S. Constitution. In addition to journalists, corporate travelers, university researchers, analysts and organizations that issue travel warnings, including corporate travel departments, are at increasing risk.

As you are well aware, S.449, introduced in February 2009, was in response to cases like the one involving Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, an academic who writes on terrorism and lectures all over the world. Her 2003 book, Funding Evil, triggered a lawsuit in the UK by a wealthy Saudi businessman who claimed he was libeled in the book. The differences in American and British libel laws are substantial. For example, UK defendants have to prove allegations are true; in contrast, in the U.S. plaintiffs must prove allegations are false. The Saudi won a judgment of $250,000 against Ehrenfeld; sales of her book were banned in the UK; and she can no longer travel there.

The Ehrenfeld suit has been just the most prominent of cases known under the general rubric “libel tourism” in which foreign nationals, claiming to be offended by something written in the U.S. by journalists, researchers or scientists, travel to pliant courts in third countries and obtain libel judgments against American defendants, even though the allegedly offensive speech would be fully protected under the U.S. Constitution. These suits can have a chilling effect on research and publishing, and on U.S. national security. The objective of S.449 is to ensure that libel judgments issued by foreign courts cannot be enforced in the U.S. unless our legal standards for libel are met.

An Ominous New Twist

U.S. journalist and business travel contributor for The New York Times Joe Sharkey covered a plane crash in Brazil, in which he was involved. On Sept. 29, 2006 there was a midair collision at 37,000 feet over the Amazon between a Brazilian 737 and a business jet, on which Sharkey was a passenger. All 154 on the 737 died; the seven crew and passengers on the badly damaged business jet made an emergency landing in the jungle. Sharkey wrote about it once he returned home in the Times and on his blog and conducted interviews in which he was critical of Brazil’s air traffic control system. He vigorously defended the American business-jet pilots who Brazil had been quick to charge with criminal negligence.

On September 16, 2009 Sharkey was served with a complaint seeking US$279,850 in damages. The plaintiff in the lawsuit is identified as Brazilian Rosane Gutjhar who asserts, in a novel claim, that Sharkey offended her country’s dignity in his writings and interviews. Although Gutjhar’s husband died in the crash, Sharkey did not know her, or mention her name at any time. In other words, the plaintiff doesn’t have to claim she was personally libeled, only that her country was insulted. The suit is based on a Brazilian law that any citizen can claim damages for any alleged insult to the dignity or honor of Brazil in any case involving a crime — the pilots, Joseph Lepore and Jan Paladino remain on criminal trial in Brazil, in absentia.

The basis of Gutjhar’s suit is that as a Brazilian citizen she “feels discriminated against” by Sharkey’s forceful reporting and commentary in the U.S. about Brazil’s alleged cover-up of the causes of the crash. The accuracy of Sharkey’s writings and comments has never been challenged. Sharkey claims that nothing he said or was alleged to have said would constitute libel in the U.S., or even come close. The Free Speech Protection Act would cover libel judgments in foreign countries where the alleged offense would not meet U.S. standards for libel. With Sharkey’s case, it’s clear the scope of what constitutes libel has been broadened to include insulting the dignity of a foreign country.

If Brazil, host of the 2016 Olympics, that will no doubt be attended by many U.S. corporate executives for the purpose of entertaining clients, can claim a ruinous judgment in the U.S. against an American citizen who has “offended” that nation, what is to stop any other country — Iran, Libya, North Korea — from pursuing the same course of action? And it could be directed not just against journalists or bloggers, but corporate and university travelers and their travel departments.

The near-perfect reach of the Internet has placed Americans, their free speech and their finances in harm’s way. At risk are travel managers issuing country-specific travel warnings, business travelers posting unfavorable trip reviews on social media sites (or the sites themselves), flight crews posting comments on industry bulletin boards or university researchers publishing negative reports. The Free Speech Protection Act of 2009 needs to be passed into law as soon as possible.

Sincerely,
Kevin Mitchell
Chairman”

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News item: The International Olympics committee, looking for extra cash from the lucrative television market in Latin America, has chosen Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as the site for the 2016 Olympic games.

Here is some background advice for anyone considering visiting Brazil:

“Crime throughout Brazil has reached very high levels. The Brazilian police and the Brazilian press report that the rate of crime continues to rise, especially in the major urban centers – though it is also spreading in rural areas. Brazil’s murder rate is more than four times higher than that of the U.S. Rates for other crimes are similarly high. The majority of crimes are not solved. There were rapes reported by American citizens in 2008.

“Street crime remains a problem for visitors and local residents alike, especially in the evenings and late at night. Foreign tourists are often targets of crime, and Americans are not exempt. This targeting occurs in all tourist areas but is especially problematic in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and Recife.”

In Rio, “tourists are particularly vulnerable to street thefts and robberies in areas adjacent to major tourist attractions and on the main beaches in the city. In 2008 there were attacks along trails leading to the famous Corcovado Mountain, on the road linking the airport and the South Zone and on the beaches of Copacabana. Travelers are advised not to take possessions of value to the beach. Robbers and rapists sometimes slip incapacitating drugs into their drinks at bars, hotel rooms, or street parties. While crime occurs throughout the year, it is more frequent during Carnaval and the weeks prior. In the weeks before Carnaval 2009, robbers ransacked two tourist hostels. Travelers should be aware of their surroundings and victims are advised to relinquish personal belongings rather than resist or fight back. Tourists should choose lodging carefully, considering security and availability of a safe to store valuables, as well as location. Over the past year, attacks against motorists increased. In Rio de Janeiro City, motorists are allowed to treat stoplights as stop signs between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. to protect against holdups at intersections. …”

***

The Brazilians won’t like reading that, so they can sue me.

Oh, wait, they already have sued me for “insulting” Brazil.

So if they’re insulted by the above, they’ll need to instead sue the authors of the above, which would be the U.S. State Department in its routine guidance about visiting various countries.

There’s an important point at work here in excerpting the current State Department travel advisory on Brazil.

As I have previously reported at some length, I was recently served with a lawsuit from Brazil, accusing me of libel in reporting and commentary I did in the United States after surviving a horrible mid-air collision over the Amazon three years ago.

The lawsuit is most notable for its novel legal argument that an alleged insult to Brazil is by definition an insult to every single citizen of Brazil. The plaintiff in the suit against me is a widow of one of the 154 people killed in the mid-air collision — a person I had never heard of and certainly never wrote or spoke a word about until after the suit was filed. My sympathy toward her and the other relatives and loved ones of those killed in the crash is profound, and I have always expressed that feeling.

Three weeks ago, a process-server arrived at the front door of my house in New Jersey to serve me the legal papers on behalf of a New York law firm — Grant, Herrmann, Schwartz & Klinger — retained by the Brazilians to serve me the papers in a case that seeks enforcement in the U.S. of an anticipated $300,000 judgment against me after it is forthcoming in Brazil.

When friends of mine in the U.S., including lawyers and journalists, hear about this suit they smack their heads. Wait a minute, they say. You are being sued IN BRAZIL for comments made IN THE UNITED STATES — and the Brazilians think they’ll be able to cross the U.S. border to enforce a judgment against you?

Yep.

But it gets even better. The complaint in the suit against me contains a series of preposterous allegations. For example, it cites a “rumor” that as a passenger riding on a business jet returning from a routine magazine assignment in Brazil, I “made the ill-fated journey with the intent of writing an article about the Amazon, intending to demonstrate that the air space belongs to no one,” and as part of that dastardly plan, I “asked the pilots to turn off the device that would allow them to be detected in that space…”

The complaint also charges that, in a blog I started (and discontinued 20 months ago) to report on the aftermath of the Brazil crash and to expose the coverup and the move to scapegoat the American pilots, I referred to Brazil as “the most idiot of idiots” and “land of Tupiniquins and bananas.”

I don’t know what was more insulting, the absurd charge or the insinuation that my grammatical skills were that lacking. Furthermore, the word “Tupiniquin” was absent from my vocabulary till Richard Pedicini, my correspondent in Sao Paulo, explained that it refers to an extinct Amazon tribe.

Actually, the drafters of that legal document appear to have picked up the insulting comments about Brazil not from anything I said or wrote, but from comments that strangers posted to a Brazilian blog that linked to my blog, and possibly also from out of that thin air I am rumored to have been plotting to lay an imperialist claim to.

Not that I wasn’t hard on Brazilian authorities for the unwise way they rushed to criminalize the mid-air collision and blame the American pilots, and for their defiant insistence, against mounting and now-indisputable evidence to the contrary, that Brazil’s air-traffic control system was not centrally at fault in the accident.

My main goal in taking on Brazil’s air force (which runs air-traffic control) and its federal police (who worked with the air force to criminalize the case and prosecute the American pilots) was to argue on behalf of international aviation safety. Criminalizing an aviation accident is famously a grave mistake, because those involved go silent and investigators are stymied. Screaming about your injured “dignity” when your air-traffic control system is full of serious flaws is not something a nation worthy of world respect does — and yes, I pointed that out again and again.

Those were my offenses in the eyes of Brazilian authorities, who maintained their defiance even after the world’s most trusted aviation-safety agency, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, concluded last December that evidence “strongly suggests that this accident was caused by N600XL [the American business jet] and Gol 1907 [the Brazilian airliner] following ATC [Brazilian air-traffic control] clearances which directed them to operate in opposite directions on the same airway at the same altitude, resulting in a mid-air collision.”

There is a growing furor in the U.S. over the Brazilian lawsuit, and it has nothing to do with me personally. No serious reporter wants to be part of the story, and I fervently wish I were not.

Instead, the furor is over the frontal assault this lawsuit represents against free speech in the United States. In this suit, Brazil maintains that it has the right to prosecute comment made by an American citizen in the U.S. — comment that is utterly within the boundaries of U.S. First Amendment and other free-speech protections. Even if I had referred to a country as “the most idiot of idiots,” that would not come even close to constituting libel in any court in the United States or even in the rest of the first world.

At its essence, the Brazil suit maintains that an American citizen who utters speech IN THE U.S. that Brazil considers offensive to its “dignity” is subject to a Brazilian libel judgment that can be enforced in the U.S.

Which brings me back to the Rio Olympics.

Though the 2016 games are seven years off, there will be a lot of reason for reporters, bloggers, researchers, sports analysts, planners and others in the U.S. to begin evaluating Rio as a setting for the Olympics, and to report on the preparations to get the sites and the city up to spec for such a major world event.

Do you all have to watch what we say about Brazil, and take great care not to offend its “dignity?” That lawsuit against me says yes, yes you do — unless action is taken in the United States to put a stop to this alien attack on free speech in the U.S.

There have been precedents for this kind of action, though none quite as broad. For years, litigants have traveled to pliant British courts to accuse American writers, researchers and academics of libel in cases where the evidence would not stand up in a U.S. court.

The most prominent of these cases involves Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, a New York author and academic who was successfully sued for libel in a British court by a rich Saudi businessman (recently deceased) who she named in “Funding Evil,” her 2003 book about Saudi funding sources for Al Qaeda terrorism. Her book was withdrawn from sale in the UK, and she cannot travel there (crimping her academic research) because of the judgment against her.

Dr. Ehrenfeld has protection from the judgment being enforced here, as a resident of New York State, which used her case to enact a law specifically banning enforcement in New York of foreign judgments in libel cases that would not stand up in a U.S. court.

Earlier this year, wide-sweeping legislation, the Free Speech Protection Act of 2009, was introduced in Congress. It would extend such protection against alien libel judgments to all American citizens. (Here’s Sen. Specter’s eloquent speech introducing the bill). The bill, introduced in the Senate by Sens. Specter, Lieberman and Schumer (later joined by Sen. Wyden) is currently in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

It needs to become law, before some other country joins Brazil in trying to shut down free speech in the United States.

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This much-appreciated post is from Joe Brancatelli’s “Tactical Traveler” feature at Joesentme.com

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By Joe Brancatelli

Brazil’s War on the Truth, Free Speech–and Joe Sharkey

Three years ago this week, a Boeing 737 collided with a corporate jet in the skies over the Amazon. All 154 souls aboard the Gol jet perished. Among the survivors on the corporate jet was Joe Sharkey, the business-travel columnist of The New York Times who was on the flight working on a magazine assignment. As any journalist would, Sharkey immediately wrote about the mid-air tragedy for The Times and even began a separate blog about the crash’s bizarre aftermath. The result? A torrent of abuse from the Brazilian authorities and the thin-skinned Brazilian media. Sharkey dished it out as good as he got, especially on his blog, but his reporting, commentary and sarcasm was almost always on point: Brazil’s air-traffic control system, especially over the Amazon, is inferior and dangerous, a conclusion reached by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and every other neutral observer. But now the Brazilians are mounting a startling new attack on Sharkey, the truth and free speech. Sharkey has been hit with a lawsuit in Brazil that claims he insulted the “dignity” of the country. The suit would be laughable–it says he wrote things that he never wrote and even claims there’s a “rumor” about his supposed real purpose for being on the corporate jet–except for one small point: A U.S. law firm arranged for Sharkey to be served at his New Jersey home and there is the slightest possibility that a Brazilian judgment against him could be enforced in the United States. You can read about the attack on Sharkey in the latest issue of Editor & Publisher magazine, in a post on his High Anxiety blog and at the Committee to Protect Journalists. As a matter of full disclosure, I consider Sharkey a friend. I link to his blog right off the JoeSentMe home page. I was the guy who convinced him to blog about business travel in the first place. And I’m proud of all of those things.

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Congress, which so thoroughly screwed up the so-called Registered Traveler program to begin with, is now toying with the idea of dragging this dead horse back to the street.

As originally, though vaguely, conceived, Registered Traveler was to be a program in which frequent travelers would submit to a government security clearance that would enable them to be “registered” as airline passengers who were deemed more trustworthy than the average citizen who had not been cleared.

Once registered, that traveler would then be eligible for special handling at airport security. The program never quite got its act together enough to specify just how this would work as a practical matter.

Pretty soon, Congress, along with officials from Homeland Security and representatives from industries looking to make a buck off Registered Traveler came up with the bright idea to make this a public-private initiative. (The TSA, while gamely particpating, made it clear that it was not enamoured of the idea from the start).

So investors came in. By far, the major player in the game was Steve Brill’s Verified Identity Pass Inc., which installed the first “expedited security” lanes under its brand name “Clear,” and which ultimately built special lanes at 18 airports before the company shut down abruptly in June.

In various partnerships with technology companies, Verified Identity spent a small fortune developing high-tech equipment — most importantly a GE-designed “shoe-scanner” that was supposed to provide members with a major benefit by allowing them to pass through security without having to remove their shoes.

Here the TSA, under its most recent director Kip Hawley, really dug in its heels. While maintaining that it supported the idea (as Congress insisted it must), the TSA kept giving failing grades to Brill’s shoe scanner, saying that while the machine was promising, it didn’t adequately meet security standards.

So there was no shoe scanner. Nor were any of the other promised security benefits ever delivered.

Two years ago, the TSA — in an act of what I regarded as contempt for the private element of Registered Traveler — even removed itself from its cursory participation in the enrollment process. Till then, the federal “security clearance” part of the operation had consisted of the TSA merely checking the names of prospective members of Clear against the standard FBI terrorist watch list. Hawley stopped this entirely, leaving Clear as an entirely private operation that had spent a lot of money to build enrollment centers and intake lanes at 18 airports.

Clear — which cost about $130 a year — was built around the idea that members, once “cleared,” were issued biometric ID cards on which a member’s irises and fingerprints had been electronically embedded.

Without doubt, that ID was far superior in any security sense to the easily counterfeitable photo-IDs required by the TSA. Still, the TSA refused to accept the biometric IDs, insisting that Clear members show their government-issue photo IDs just like everyone else.

The main reason for the TSA’s refusal to accept the biometric IDs was that there was an insecure physical space built into the process, as members wandered from the Clear station to the actual TSA security checkpoint. The TSA considered it out of the question to install Clear biometric readers at the checkpoints themselves.

But Hawley wasn’t just being an obstructionist in his resistance to allowing Clear and similar programs started by two tiny competitors into the security apparatus. Rather, he was resisting the idea of outsourcing any element of security — which was, after all, at the heart of Congress’s Registered Traveler initiative.

While Clear struggled, meanwhile, the TSA managed to improve its own customer-service operations. All across the country, TSA security lines became manageable and much of the unpredictability was eliminated or greatly reduced. (The few airports in which security-line waits were still a big problem — Orlando, especially — were precisely those airports that had the highest number of Clear members.)

At the end, Clear was nothing more than a greatly overstaffed, limited front-of-line pass. Members entered Clear’s distinctive blue lanes with their ID cards, and were subject to a scan of their irises and fingerprints. If your eyeballs and fingerprints matched those on your card, you were cleared. But for what?  Actually, the  procedure did nothing more than verify the identity (and enrollment status) of the member presenting the card.  There was absolutely no element of security involved in it.

Once their Clear membership  checked out, members  were sent on their way to the regular TSA security station where they went through the exact same procedures as everyone else.

Given that Clear had about 160,000 members (most of them with cards paid for by their companies), there was obviously some time-saving value seen in membership.

About two years ago, my wife and I impetuously enrolled in Clear at the Newark airport. about two years ago. After a year, I had used my card once, and considered the Clear station an delaying irritant. She never used hers. Obviously, we didn’t re-up.

There’s a hearing in Congress this afternoon on the issue of reviving the Registered Traveler program.

We’ll see what they come up with.

But this is a Congress that, like its predecessor … well, never mind. Just mark me down as voting skeptical.

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The Committee to Protect Journalists issued a worldwide alert today on the defamation lawsuit filed against me for reporting on the 2006 Amazon mid-air collision in Brazil.

Here’s the alert.

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[Photo: Damaged Legacy 600 after emergency landing in Amazon]

{Updated, with hyperlink to complaint filed against me in Brazil}:

Today is the third anniversary of the horrific mid-air collision at 37,000 feet over the Amazon between a Brazilian Gol 737 commercial airliner and a U.S.-owned large-cabin Legacy 600 business jet, in which 154 people died when the 737, a third of its wing shorn off, plunged into the jungle.

I was one of seven people on the business jet who survived.

I thought I had said all I needed to say — and I have certainly said all I want to say — about this horrible incident that so tragically ended the lives of 154 innocent people, while seven others unaccountably survived.

My separate blog on the crash and its aftermath went inactive a long time ago, early in January of 2007.

But as the anniversary arrives, an update is necessary. I hope to do it without adding any more comment than is necessary. I am also posting links here to various key documents in the case.

The American pilots, Joe Lepore and Jan Paladino, remain on criminal trial, in absentia, in Brazil.

They are being criminally prosecuted (on charges carrying prison sentences) despite conclusive evidence that the collision was put in place as a result of systemic errors and operational mistakes in Brazilian air traffic control that had the planes on a collision course, when controllers on duty failed to notice that the business jet was out of communications over the Amazon for over 50 minutes.

Here is the investigative report on the crash last year by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, which was part of the investigation because one of the planes was American-owned. The NTSB is the world’s most respected aviation safety agency — one that never pulls punches and certainly has never been accused of favoritism toward U.S. aviation.

The NTSB’s conclusion is that evidence “strongly suggests that this accident was caused by N600XL [the Legacy] and Gol 1907 [the Brazilian airliner] following ATC [air traffic control] clearance which directed them to operate in opposite directions on the same airway at the same altitude, resulting in a midair collision.”

As in most aviation disasters, a series of other events transpired. Chief among them was the apparent malfunction of the Legacy’s transponder, a piece of avionics equipment that has an alarm called ACAS (for airborne collision avoidance system), the purpose of which is to shriek a last-minute alert about an impending collision.

The malfunctioning transponder issue is the lever that the Brazilian air force and the federal police used to indict the American pilots on criminal charges.

Anyone interested in this subject should carefully read the NTSB report, and then compare it with this voluminous report issued by Cenipa, the investigative body of the Brazilian military (which is responsible for air traffic control in that country, and therefore was investigating itself). The Cenipa report goes to great lengths to interpret the evidence in a way that lays most of the blame on the American pilots.

Other than as a passenger on an ill-fated trip, my own role in this horrible mess began the day after I got back from Brazil, when my straightforward account of the crash ran on the front page of the New York Times.

To my astonishment, that account unleashed a fury of anti-American vitriol in the Brazilian media, and among some of the public, where I was accused of insulting the honor of Brazil and trying to make “heroes” out of the American pilots. I was flabbergasted by these charges.

At the same time, I was being interviewed on most major TV and radio news outlets, and on several occasions I mentioned that I had been talking to international pilots who all said that Amazon air space is notorious for having radio and radar “dead zones.”

Again, all hell broke loose in Brazil, where imperialist conspiracy theories started making the rounds in the media. (One said that the Legacy was ferrying drugs for the CIA and flying recklessly to avoid detection.)

The Brazilian defense minister, Waldir Pires, in charge of air-traffic control, even publicly stated that the Legacy had been performing reckless “aerial maneuvers” over the Amazon to impress the “American journalist,” (me), when it hit the Gol 737. And that my comments were part of an attempt to cover this up. Pires was later fired.

As the story died out in the U.S., it was just getting started in Brazil. So I began writing a separate blog (www.sharkeyonbrazil.blogspot.com) to deal with the fury in Brazil, and to argue that it was a terrible mistake for the Brazilians to rush to criminalize an aviation accident before any evidence had been established as to its cause. Criminalizing an accident, as all aviation safety experts know, creates huge impediments to investigating it, because those involved go silent.

As it became more clear to everyone that the conspiracy theories were crazy and that air-traffic control blunders and systems failures did in fact play the major role in the accident, Brazil’s everyday air-traffic system suddenly descended into chaos. Air traffic controllers — mostly underpaid, overworked military personnel — staged nationwide protests as a warning that they were not going to accept blame for the accident.

Ultimately, a handful of air traffic controllers were also indicted months after the crash. And just last week, the Brazilian military prosecutor charged 89 air traffic controllers with “mutiny” for taking part in the protests.

At any rate, the goal of my blog was to argue forcefully (and, yes, sometimes provocatively) that aviation safety is profoundly imperiled by the hysterics of blame. I took on the defense minister, some of the outrageous police prosecutors and other Brazilian authorities for not focusing on obvious flaws in air-traffic safety in Brazilian skies, while trying to scapegoat the American pilots in an atmosphere of intense anti-Americanism.

[On July 17, 2007, a few months after the air-traffic controllers protests, there was another horrific accident in Brazil when a TAM airlines A320 crashed at Congonhas-Sao Paulo International Airport, killing 200.]

In startling proof that no good deed goes unpunished, ten days ago, a process server hired by a New York law firm retained by the Brazilians showed up at my front door in New Jersey to present me with a lawsuit against me for allegedly defaming the honor of Brazil in my blog.

That suit, full of patently and demonstrably false charges, false charges, seeks about $250,000 in damages and demands apologies in every news outlet I wrote for or spoke with. Here is the link to the .pdf copy of the English translation of the complaint so you can read it for yourself.

And here is my personal account of that lawsuit, which was posted last week by the news-business magazine Editor & Publisher.

Note, incidentally, that the complaint makes the argument (unknown in first-world jurisprudence) that in causing alleged insult to the “dignity” of Brazil, I caused injury to every single citizen of that country, including the plaintiff, a person I had never heard of till the lawsuit came up, and certainly never wrote or spoke a word about.

Today, the prosecutors and lawyers for relatives of the victims are holding a congressional hearing and press conference on this awful situation in Brasilia. They are expected to demand that criminal proceedings against the American pilots be expedited.

And the lies continue unabated. In a sure indication of the expected tenor of that event, I note that news accounts in Brazil today report that I “attempted to evade” service of the suit at my home by the “U.S. Courts.”

Absolutely untrue. Actually, the process server, a delivery boy hired by the New York law firm working for the Brazilians, first showed up unannounced at my house when I was out of town in late August or early September. Later, a lawyer from the New York law firm — Grant, Herrmann, Schwartz & Klinger — phoned me and I told him I was home and available to receive their papers. Days later, I had a call from a man who claimed that he was an officer of the “New Jersey State Constable Office.” There is no such entity. He was actually just a delivery boy with a really crummy job, and I invited him to come right over and give me the papers, which he did. He looked so miserable delivering that pile of crap that I had to resist the urge to tip him.

Anyway, I don’t expect that you’ll be hearing much about aviation safety from Brazil today, and that’s a damn shame. Because the victims of that horrible crash, the relatives and friends of those victims, deserve more than recriminations against the American pilots and me.

In honor of the dead, the relatives deserve to know when serious measures will be put in place in Brazilian aviation to ensure that this will never happen again.

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Challenging all conventional wisdom, British Airways is starting all-business-class service between London City Airport and Kennedy on Tuesday.

B.A. is using Airbus A318 aircraft on the route. The cabins have a mere eight rows, with 32 full-flat-bed Club World business class seats. Food and other services are top-shelf.

Because London City airport has a short runway and various weight restrictions, the A318 will take off light on fuel on the westbound trip, and stop at Shannon airport in Ireland to gas up. That should take about 45 minutes, says B.A.

Passengers will clear U.S. Customs and Immigration at Shannon, which should make for a low-hassle arrival at Kennedy.

The New York-London City trip is nonstop.

British Airways has insisted that there is enough demand for a top-priced business class product (about $9,800 round-trip according to the B.A. Web site) on this route, given the convenience London City Airport offers to Canary Wharf (15 minutes away) and the financial district.

Do the numbers — only 32 high-yield passengers each way — and the move doesn’t seem too far-fetched. The long-haul business-jet market is in a severe slump, and this arguably is a niche with appeal to the G5 bereft.

We’ll see. At any rate, it’s nice to see someone doing something optimistic in the airline business. B.A. has even taken the grand old Concorde flight code out of retirement and slapped it on the London City service: BA001.

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