http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33899.htm
US Air Force Veteran, Finally Allowed to Fly Into US, is Now banned
from Flying Back Home
Secret, unaccountable no-fly lists are one of many weapons the US
government uses to extra-judicially punish American Muslims
By Glenn Greenwald
February 10, 2013 "The Guardian" - -In early November, I wrote about
the infuriating story of Saadiq Long, the 43-year-old
African-American
Muslim who - despite having never been charged with any crime - was
secretly placed on a no-fly list and thus barred from flying to the
US
to visit his seriously ill mother. When I met with Long in early
November in Doha, Qatar, where he has lived for several years with
his
wife and her two children while teaching English, he was in the
middle
of his futile months-long battle just to find out why he was placed
on
this list, let alone how he could be removed.
Two weeks after that article was published, Long - without
explanation - was finally removed from the no-fly list and he flew
from Doha to Oklahoma City to visit his mother and other family
members. He took several flights to make the 20-hour journey, all
without incident. He has remained in Oklahoma for the last ten weeks,
visiting his family in the US for the first time in over a decade.
But now Long - unbeknownst to him - has once again apparently been
secretly placed by some unknown National Security State bureaucrat on
the no-fly list. On Wednesday night, as Associated Press first
reported, he went to the Will Rogers Airport in Oklahoma City to fly
back home to Qatar. In order to ensure there were no problems, his
lawyer sent the FBI a letter ahead of time notifying them that Long
would be flying home on that date (see the embedded letter below).
But without explanation, Long was denied a boarding pass at the
airport by a Delta Airlines agent. Three local police officers then
arrived on the scene, followed by a US Transportation Security
Administration agent who "told Long he couldn't board a plane but did
not give him a specific reason".
Long's lawyer, Adam Soltani of the Oklahoma chapter of the Council on
American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), was with him at the airport and
repeatedly asked agents why this was happening and who they should
contact. He got no answers, except was told to contact the FBI. But
both the FBI and Delta refused to comment to AP, while TSA spokesman
David Castelveter would only say this:
"It's my understanding this individual was denied a boarding pass by
the airline because he was on a no-fly list. The TSA does not confirm
whether someone is or is not on the no-fly list, as that list is
maintained by the FBI."
Long and his CAIR lawyers have thus far been told nothing about why
he is barred once again from flying.
The personal cost to this injustice is obvious and substantial. Long
has a job he needs to return to in Doha from which he has been away
for more than two months, and his family needs that income for its
sustenance. "I was extremely disappointed when I was unable to board
the flight this past Wednesday," Long told me through his lawyer. "My
family in Qatar feels crushed that I will not be returning home as
expected."
The sense of humiliation and outrage should not be hard to fathom.
Just imagine being a US citizen, denied the right to travel home -
first to your own country, then back to your family - by a government
that has never charged you with any crime or indicated you have
engaged in wrongdoing of any sort. Imagine going to the airport and
having local and federal agents arrive to prevent you from boarding a
plane, treating you like a criminal - a Terrorist - without any
tangible accusations. "I don't understand how the government can take
away my right to travel without even telling me," he told me back in
November. "If the US government wanted me to question or arrest or
prosecute me, they could have had me in a minute. But there are no
charges, no accusations, nothing."
But what's particularly infuriating here is that, if they had
evidence that Long has done anything wrong, they easily could have
arrested him at any point over the last ten weeks when he was in the
US. The reality is that they could have arrested him at any time over
the last decade because he has lived in three countries with highly
US-loyal autocracies: Egypt, the UAE and Qatar. But he was never
arrested, never charged with anything - just denied the basic right
to
travel.
Here is what CAIR's Gadeir Abbas told me about all of this on
Thursday:
"It is not as if the FBI actually thinks Saadiq is a threat. If it
did - and it had actual evidence - the FBI would simply arrest him.
As
they surely recall, they let him fly just a few months ago. It turns
out, though, the only reason for doing so is because it is, in the
FBI's view, slightly more indefensible to prevent an American citizen
from flying home than it is to prevent him from flying abroad.
"And because we told the FBI ahead of time when Saadiq would be
flying, hardly the behavior of a criminal, they could have stuck an
air marshal right next to him. They could have subjected his person
and luggage to extra scrutiny. But the FBI does not do these things
because the No Fly List is not used to protect aircraft. This
watchlist - and the many others like it - is a means by which the FBI
metes out extra-judicial punishment."
How can anyone argue with that? Even leaving aside that he just flew
into and around the US less than three months ago without incident,
the very idea that he poses a threat to this flight is patently
ludicrous given their advance knowledge that he was flying and the
multiple precautions they could take if they really were concerned.
Plainly, air travel safety is not what any of this is about. It is
about inventing ways to punish US Muslims and deprive them of the
most
basic rights without so much as providing any notice, let alone any
due process that would enable the secret, unknown accusations to be
discovered and rebutted. And it is a very common weapon.
Use of this repressive tactic has worsened significantly under the
Obama administration. Last February, Associated Press learned that
"the Obama administration has more than doubled, to about 21,000
names, its secret list of suspected terrorists who are banned from
flying to or within the United States, including about 500
Americans."
Moreover, as I detailed last November based on that AP report:
"Worse, the Obama administration 'lowered the bar for being added to
the list'. As a result, reported AP, 'now a person doesn't have to be
considered only a threat to aviation to be placed on the no-fly list'
but can be included if they 'are considered a broader threat to
domestic or international security', a vague status determined in the
sole and unchecked discretion of unseen DHS bureaucrats."
There should be no doubt of the FBI's desire to harass Long. Although
they never charged him with any crime or arrested him while he was in
Oklahoma, he was, along with his sister, Ava Anderson, handcuffed and
put on the ground the day after Thanksgiving after they drove to
their
local police department in fear when they noticed they were being
followed. It turns out that the FBI had falsely told local police
that
Long and his sister were "fleeing felons", but when the local police
learned that was false, they never arrested Long or his sister. They
were simply told to leave without explanation. Here's a video report
on those incidents from a local Oklahoma television station back in
December:
As Abbas told me after that incident occurred: "Our sense is that a
particular FBI agent, or perhaps a small group of them, in Oklahoma
City are looking to inflict some pain on Saadiq and his family -
maybe
in retaliation for the embarrassment he caused them or the thousands
of emails that ended up getting sent to their field office there."
The worst part of all of this is the complete lack of remedy
available to Long. Abbas told me: "unfortunately, because of arcane
jurisdictional complications, we don't think seeking a preliminary
injunction is necessarily an expeditious option for getting Saadiq on
a plane." Even worse:
"We'll likely try again in a couple of weeks, but if there isn't some
change by then, this puts Saadiq in the position of rolling the dice
and trying to get to a country by land or sea that will actually let
him fly. Even in these situations, however, we've seen detentions and
interrogations by foreign authorities, such as here and here."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/12/michael-migliore-us-citiz_n_958992.html
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/09/michael-migliore-fbi-interrogations
So now he's just in a no-man's land. He can't contest the accusations
against him because there are none. After being blocked for months
from visiting his own country and his terminally ill mother, he's now
barred from returning to his home, his job, and his own family. All
of
this is done by his own government without a shred of due process,
transparency or accountability.
When I wrote on Tuesday about the Obama DOJ's "white paper"
justifying due-process-free presidential assassinations, I wrote that
"the core distortion of the War on Terror under both Bush and Obama
is
the Orwellian practice of equating government accusations of
terrorism
with proof of guilt" and that "if the US government simply asserts
without evidence or trial that someone is a terrorist, then they are
assumed to be, and they can then be punished as such." This is
exactly
what I was talking about: I'm sure there will be no shortage of
people
justifying this by insisting that he must have done something wrong:
even though the government has never said what that is, offered
evidence for it, or provided any opportunity for the accusations to
be
independently examined.
This is also a perfect example of what New York Times editorial page
editor Andrew Rosenthal meant when he wrote last March that the US
now
has "what's essentially a separate justice system for Muslims". State
punishment without charges and trials is now perfectly normal - for
Muslims.
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