Prosecutor: Marine license plate offensive - Marine Corps News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Marine Corps Times

Prosecutor: Marine license plate offensive

If you ask Abbe Rifkin, former Sgt. Stewart Tabares has way too much on his plate. Rifkin, a prosecutor in Miami-Dade County, filed a complaint with the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles objecting to the four-letter word on Tabares’ vanity license plate.

The plate features the Marine Corps’ eagle, globe and anchor and four letters that begin and end with “T” and are commonly known as vulgar slang for female genitalia. But it’s also jokingly used by Marines as an acronym for “Tactical Wire Assault Team” or “The War Against Terrorism.”

Rifkin, 51, who has prosecuted everyone from O.J. Simpson to drug cartels, is offended.

“To put it on a Marine Corps license plate, when he had to know that it was offensive to women, dishonors the plate and dishonors the Corps,” Rifkin said.

She saw the plate while stuck behind Tabares’ Mitsubishi Raider in traffic. Shocked, she snapped a photo with her cell phone camera and called the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles to lodge a complaint.

“It’s not even a question of, ‘If you don’t like it, don’t look,’” she said. “I had no choice.” She wants the motor vehicles department to revoke the plate.

According to the Miami Herald, state records show that Tabares, of Pembroke Pines, Fla., told a court clerk the acronym stood for a “tactical group in the Marine Corps he was in.” The plates were requested last June and approved in November, according to state officials.

The term shows up in numerous places in pop culture, with comedian George Carlin calling it on his Web site an “auxiliary” dirty word to his famous “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.”

Wikipedia — the popular online encyclopedia, created by users for users — adds that “a common colloquialism for and amongst field telecommunications personnel in the United States Marine Corps, is Tactical Wire Assault Team, abbreviated as T.W.A.T.”

Ann Nucatola, a motor vehicle department spokeswoman, said the plate will be reviewed at the next meeting of a five-member review board that takes up complaints with vanity plates. From there, a two-member board authority approves or rejects the recommendation.

“We want to do the background work to make sure that the plates that are out there are appropriate,” Nucatola said. “We will investigate this from all angles.”

Messages sent to Tabares through his MySpace page seeking comment were not returned.

Tabares did communicate in another way, though: The main photograph on his MySpace page was a photograph of his back bumper, license plate front-and-center.