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US anti-terror 'No-Fly" blacklists target Green Party & Christian pacifists

saibo | 08.01.2003 13:13

'Blacklist Grounds American Passengers' Under the rubric of airline security, the US government has established a No-Fly List to harass, frustrate, delay, and forbid the travel of more than 1,000 citizens. Will you be added to the List? By Frederick Sweet

from the Konformist mailing-list

'Blacklist Grounds American Passengers' Under the rubric of airline security, the US government has established a No-Fly List to harass, frustrate, delay, and forbid the travel of more than 1,000 citizens. Will you be added to the List? By Frederick Sweet

While planning an upcoming trip with my wife to Eastern Europe, I've become concerned. Writing for Intervention Magazine just might get us harassed and delayed if not grounded. Using the Homeland Security Provision, the government has established a new "no-fly" list of people and organizations deemed a risk to U.S. aviation and who are being investigated.

According to a recent article in Salon by Dave Lindorff, significant numbers of American citizens have been stopped from boarding airplanes throughout the United States under the new "no-fly" policy. Those detained and then grounded were members of organizations such as the Center for Constitutional Rights, Peace Action, a San Francisco-based antiwar magazine called War Times, and Ralph Nader's Green Party presidential campaign.

Not all "no-fly" citizens are left wingers. A top official for the Eagle Forum, an old-line conservative group led by anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly, said several of their group's members have been delayed at security checkpoints for so long that they missed their flights.

Replying to questions from Salon magazine, David Steigman, a spokesman for the new Transportation Security Administration (TSA) said, "We have a list of about 1,000 people." The agency was created a year ago by the U.S. Congress to handle transportation safety during the war on terror. "This list is composed of names that are provided to us by various government organizations like the FBI, CIA and INS . We don't ask how they decide who to list. Each agency decides on its own who is a 'threat to aviation.'"
The agency has no guidelines to determine who gets on the list, Steigman said, and no procedures for getting off the list if someone is wrongfully on it. Until TSA's Steigman confirmed the no-fly list, government agencies denied its existence.

Although FBI spokesman Paul Bresson confirmed the existence of the list, officials at the CIA and INS refused to comment about it, referring questions back to the TSA. Details of how the list was assembled and how it is being used by the government, airports and airlines are largely secret.

Flying Nun Grounded

Sister Virgine Lawinger is a nun in Milwaukee and an activist with Peace Action, a Catholic advocacy group. She had been stopped from boarding a flight to Washington last spring, where she and 20 young students were planning to lobby the Wisconsin congressional delegation against U.S. military aid to the Colombian government. "We were all prevented from boarding, and some of us were taken to another room and questioned by airport security personnel and local sheriff's deputies," said Sister Lawinger.

Steigman was asked why the TSA would bar a 74-year-old nun, Sister Lawinger, from flying. "I don't know. You could get on the list if you were arrested for a federal felony," he told Salon's Lindorff.

Sister Lawinger says she was arrested only once, back in the 1980s, for sitting down and refusing to leave the district office of a local congressman. But she was never officially charged or fined. However, another grounded person in Lawinger's Peace Action delegation, Judith Williams, says she had been arrested in 1991 and spent three days in jail for a protest at the White House.

In their 1991 protest, Williams and other Catholic peace activists had scaled the White House perimeter fence and scattered baby dolls around the lawn to protest the bombing of Iraq. She says that the charge from that incident was a misdemeanor. Such an infraction would not seem enough to establish her as a threat to U.S. aviation.

Green Party Official Grounded and Labeled "Terrorist" in Living Nightmare

Writing about his no-fly nightmare in the Fairfield County Weekly, art dealer Doug Stuber, who had run Ralph Nader's Green Party presidential campaign in North Carolina in 2000, was pulled out of a boarding line and grounded. He was about to make an important trip to Prague to gather artists for Henry James Art in Raleigh, N.C., when he was told (with ticket in hand) that he was not allowed to fly out that day.

Asking "why not?" he was told at Raleigh-Durham airport that because of the sniper attacks, no Greens were allowed to fly overseas on that day. The next morning he returned, and instead of paying $670 round trip, was forced into a $2,600 "same day" air fare. But what happened to Stuber during the next 24 hours is mind-boggling.

Stuber arrived at the airport at 6 a.m. and his first flight wasn't due out until nearly six hours later. He had plenty of time. At exactly 10:52 a.m., just before boarding was to begin, he was approached by police officer Stanley (the same policeman who ushered him out of the airport the day before), who said that he "wanted to talk" to him. Stuber went with the police officer, but reminded him that no one had said he couldn't fly, and that his flight was about to leave.

Officer Stanley took Stuber into a room and questioned him for an hour. Around noon, Stanley had introduced him to two Secret Service agents. The agents took full eye-open pictures of Stuber with a digital camera. Then they asked him details about his family, where he lived, who he ever knew, what the Greens are up to, etc.

At one point during his interrogation, Stuber asked if they really believed the Greens were equal to al Qaeda. Then they showed him a Justice Department document that actually shows the Greens as likely terrorists -- just as likely as al Qaeda members. Stuber was released just before 1 PM, so he still had time to catch the later flight.

The agents walked Stuber to the Delta counter and asked that he be given tickets for the flight so that he could make his connections. The airline official promptly printed tickets, which relieved Stuber, who assumed that the Secret Service hadn't stopped him from flying. Wrong! By the time Stuber was about to board, officer Stanley once again ushered him out the door and told him: "Just go to Greensboro, where they don't know you, and be totally quiet about politics, and you can make it to Europe that way."

In Greensboro, after Stuber showed his passport he was told that he could not fly overseas or domestically. Undeterred, he next traveled an hour-and-a-half to Charlotte. Of course, at Charlotte the same thing happened: "Get this terrorist out of here" was the mode the cops were in. Then Stuber drove three hours to his home after 43 hours of trying to catch a flight.

Stuber concluded that the Greens, whose values include nonviolence, social justice, etc., are now labeled terrorists by the Ashcroft-led Justice Department.

Blacklist Catch-22

Questions about how one gets on a no-fly list creates questions about how to get off it. This is a classic Catch-22 situation. The TSA says it compiles the list from names provided by other agencies, but it has no procedure for correcting a problem. Aggrieved parties would have to go to the agency that first reported their names. But for security reasons, the TSA won't disclose which agency put someone on the no-fly list.

The FBI spokesperson Bresson would not explain the criteria for classifying someone as a threat to aviation, but suggests that fliers who believe they're on the list improperly should "report to airport security and they should be able to contact the TSA or us and get it cleared up." He concedes that might mean missed flights or other inconveniences and explained, "Airline security has gotten very complicated."

The Law

The TSA operates under the hastily conceived and written Aviation and Transportation Security Act. Among the provisions of this law is the requirement that the new TSA:

. "establish procedures for notifying the Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, appropriate State and local law enforcement officials, and airport or airline security officers of the identity of individuals known to pose, or suspected of posing, a risk of air piracy or terrorism or a threat to airline or passenger safety;

. "in consultation with other appropriate Federal agencies and air carriers, establish policies and procedures requiring air carriers:

. "to use information from government agencies to identify individuals on passenger lists who may be a threat to civil aviation or national security; and

. "if such an individual is identified, notify appropriate law enforcement agencies, prevent the individual from boarding an aircraft, or take other appropriate action with respect to that individual . "

These provisions sound rather straightforward -- and even sensible. The apparent intention of the law is to identify any future suicide airplane hijackers and forbid them from boarding airplanes.

But, in an atmosphere of confusion and secrecy, who decides if an individual is "known to pose, or suspected of posing, a risk of air piracy or terrorism or a threat to airline or passenger safety"? What criteria are being used to make this determination?

When the Progressive magazine reported on the problems suffered by Wisconsin's Sister Virgine Lawinger, it quoted a TSA spokesman to the effect, "as to how you get on it, or how it's maintained, or who maintains it, I can't help you with that."

According to the Associated Press, "Dave Steigman, spokesman for the TSA, said revealing any of the reasons a name may end up on the list could jeopardize national security." And the San Francisco Chronicle just reported that "while several federal agencies acknowledge that they contribute names to the congressionally mandated list, none of them, when contacted by The Chronicle, could or would say which agency is responsible for managing the list."

Secret security procedures that single out political activists and others with vague connections to unpopular ethnic groups are clearly putting some American citizens at greater risk now than they had been before the TSA started "protecting" us. The right to freely travel is being abridged, free-speech rights are threatened and the liberty of people vaguely tagged as "suspected of posing a risk" is curtailed.

A main difference between the nightmare of McCarthy's blacklists of communist suspects in the 1950s and the Bush Administration's blacklist of risk to aviation suspects today is that at least those labeled "pinko" by McCarthy were freely permitted to travel. So far, however, dubiously labeled suspects are not losing their jobs.

Frederick Sweet is Professor of Reproductive Biology in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Post Sunday, December 29, 2002

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saibo