Now if I may. Richard Reed was offloaded the previous day, how on earth wasn't the Captain told about this ?? He is the last one responsible to make the decison wether this good Gent is going to travel or not and I think you Yanks should get out of your flight decks from time to time to take the power entrusted to you by Air Law and not rely on some sort of clueless ground staff who will not have her /his ass at stake.
Wallabie,
Around 10 days prior to this the FAA alerted the airlines to the possibility of shoe weapons. The airline in question did not pass this information to its flightcrews. The chief pilot in charge said it was confidential "need to know" information. The FAA has said BS, it was an alert for all. Someone is a gutless lying weasel here, it is the chief.
I have also flown with the Captain in question. Out of about 7000 Captains, this guy would be in the top 100 in the category of "taking charge" of any situation.
You also have the problem of a certain ethnic/religous group crying like little babies for slights against them. After things have calmed down now here in the states, calm, careful analysis of any situation should be a given. The problem is we have a case like a immigrant crying about his travel problem on 9/19/01, whiling ignoring the chaos and fears of crews untrained for many situations that their companies were/are ignoring. Also in the equation is middle/upper managers who are hell bent at taking the authority from the Captains, while transferring the authority to no one. This is done by the slow but sure excretion of mindless, simple memos from headquarters that attempt to micromanage every situation, while leaving no one on the scene to be a leader.