[blind-democracy] A Muslim American Veteran Was Widely Smeared With a Fabricated Story About ISIS Charges

  • From: Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 15 Dec 2015 20:46:16 -0500


Excerpt: "A RIGHT-WING BLOG called 'Pajamas Media' published an article on
November 24 claiming that Saadiq Long, a Muslim American veteran of the U.S.
Air Force, was arrested in Turkey for being an ISIS operative."

Saadiq Long. (photo: unknown)


A Muslim American Veteran Was Widely Smeared With a Fabricated Story About
ISIS Charges
By Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain, The Intercept
15 December 15

A right-wing blog called “Pajamas Media” published an article on November 24
claiming that Saadiq Long, a Muslim American veteran of the U.S. Air Force,
was arrested in Turkey for being an ISIS operative. Written by Patrick
Poole, a professional anti-Muslim activist and close associate of Frank
Gaffney, the article asserted that Long “finds himself and several family
members sitting in a Turkish prison — arrested earlier this month near the
Turkey-Syria border as members of an ISIS cell.” Its only claimed sources
were anonymous: “U.S. and Turkish officials confirmed Long’s arrest to PJ
Media, saying that he was arrested along with eight others operating along
the Turkish-Syrian border. So far, no U.S. media outlet has reported on his
arrest.”
Long’s purported arrest as an ISIS operative was then widely cited across
the internet by Fox News as well as right-wing and even non-ideological news
sites. Predictably, the story was uncritically hailed by the most virulent
anti-Muslim polemicists: Pam Geller, Robert Spencer, Ann Coulter, and Sam
Harris. Worst of all, it was blasted as a major news story by network TV
affiliates and other local media outlets in Oklahoma, where Long is from and
where his family — including his sister and ailing mother — still reside.
But the story is entirely false: a fabrication. Neither Long nor his wife or
daughter have been arrested on charges that he joined ISIS. He faces no
criminal charges of any kind in Turkey.
Instead, he and his family are being detained at the Geri Gonderme Merkezi
deportation center in Erzurum, Turkey, evidently because he was placed years
ago by the U.S. on its no-fly list. And the U.S. Embassy in Ankara has been
working continually with Long’s family to secure his release, and, if he
chooses, his return to the U.S.
A press officer with the Bureau of Consular Affairs, who asked to be
identified only as “a State Department official,” contradicted the Pajamas
Media claim. “We are aware of Mr. Long’s case and are providing consular
assistance. At this time, we are not aware that he has been formally charged
with a crime,” the official told The Intercept.
The Turkish government would not comment on the record, but a Turkish source
with substantial connections to law enforcement agencies in Gaziantep also
told The Intercept that Long has not been arrested, but is merely being held
for deportation.
Long received substantial media attention in late 2012, when he was told he
would not be permitted to board a flight from Qatar, where he lived, to
travel to the U.S. to visit his ailing mother. When he arrived at the
airport in Doha, he was told by an airlines representative he had been
secretly placed on the U.S. government’s no-fly list (The Intercept’s Glenn
Greenwald, then with The Guardian, was the first to report on that story,
writing an article about Long’s situation after interviewing him in Doha;
Long was then interviewed on Chris Hayes’ MSNBC show, along with his
attorney from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR).
Two weeks after that wave of media stories in 2012, the U.S. government
issued a waiver from the no-fly list and permitted him to fly to the U.S.
But he was once again denied boarding rights 10 weeks later when he
attempted to fly from the U.S. back to Qatar, forcing him to take a bus to
Mexico in order to get home. His situation became a case study in the
injustices of the secret, due process-free no-fly list aimed overwhelmingly
at Muslims. The Pajamas Media report trumpeted this angle in its headline:

Pajamas Media headline. (photo: The Intercept)
In mid-November, Long attempted to enter Turkey along with his wife and
daughter to explore the possibility of relocating there from Qatar, where
Long has lived and worked for many years teaching English. Long had
previously been stationed in Turkey as part of his 10-year Air Force service
and thus knows the country well. The three of them were detained (presumably
because he’s on the U.S. government’s no-fly list and other watchlists),
told they would be deported, and were then moved to Turkey’s deportation
center, where they have remained ever since.
From the start, U.S. officials repeatedly informed the family members of
Long and his wife that they were being detained for deportation, not
arrested or charged. On November 24, the day the Pajamas Media report was
published, a security official with the U.S. Embassy emailed Long’s
brother-in-law to say that the family “is being detained at the deportation
center (Geri Gonderme Merkezi) in Erzurum, Turkey.”
Emails obtained by The Intercept between American consulate officials in
Ankara and Long’s family members reflect efforts by a consular officer to
facilitate the voluntary return of Long and his family from Turkey to the
U.S. on commercial flights. On November 30, the consulate official wrote:
“We are working with the Turkish government regarding your sister’s and her
family’s departure from Turkey. We will contact you when tickets can be
purchased.”
On December 2, the U.S. consular official wrote to Long’s brother-in-law:
“We spoke to your sister’s husband today and are working with one of his
friends to obtain tickets back to the United States for all of them. We hope
to have them depart Turkey next week. We received a congressional inquiry
today regarding your sister’s situation.” The consular official provided
several flight itineraries on United Airlines from which they could choose
and wrote, “We are waiting to hear from Mr. Long’s friend this morning to
finalize the tickets.”
All of Long’s relatives have also been repeatedly told by Long’s Turkish
lawyer, Harun Ozal, and by U.S. Embassy officials in Ankara that Long and
his family were simply detained as part of the immigration process. “There
are no local charges and they are being detained for immigration
violations,” Long’s brother-in-law told The Intercept.
Long’s American attorney, Gadeir Abbas, similarly explained:
Saadiq and his family were detained by Turkey because they are all on the
no-fly list, which means all of their names are in the Terrorist Screening
Database — a database that the U.S. exports to governments across the world
with the hope that doing so will make it as difficult as possible for the
hundreds of thousands blacklisted to move about the world. This is what
accounts for the family’s detention in Turkey, not the uncorroborated and
unprofessionally reported smear that their predicament is somehow
ISIS-related.
Abbas added, “Both the Turkish and U.S. officials have communicated to
Saadiq’s family and their Turkish attorney that there are no charges against
them in Turkey.”
Notably, when the right-wing site the Daily Caller published its own
follow-up report on the Pajamas Media story, it refrained from claiming that
Long had been arrested on charges relating to ISIS or even that he had been
arrested at all. Rather, it was willing and able only to report: “The Daily
Caller was able to confirm that Long, his wife, and their daughter were
detained in Turkey.” That’s because Long was not arrested or charged with
anything.
It is, of course, possible that Long may be arrested or charged in the
future: by Turkey, the U.S., or some other state. But to date, he has not
been. The article claiming he has been, resulting in the widespread smearing
of Long as having joined an ISIS cell, is completely false.
From the start, there were all sorts of glaring red flags with this Pajamas
Media report that warranted great skepticism.
To begin with, it’s irresponsible in the extreme to spread claims that
someone has been arrested for joining ISIS without a very substantial basis
for believing that’s true. That’s a claim that will be permanently attached
to the person’s name. The people who uncritically spread this “report” had
nothing approaching a sufficient basis for doing so, and worse, most of them
simply repeated the assertion that he was an ISIS operative as though it
were verified fact.
Beyond that, the only outlet to have “reported” this claim about Long and
his family is Pajamas Media. Does anyone find that to be a credible news
source, let alone one credible enough to permanently vilify someone as an
ISIS member? The specific author of the report, Poole, swims exclusively in
the most toxic, discredited, anti-Muslim far-right swamps — he’s a favorite
of Frank Gaffney, last seen as the prime mover of Donald Trump’s “ban
Muslims” proposal — and it is nothing short of shameful that so many people
vested this anonymous smear with credibility.
But let’s assume that this fabricated report had been accurate. What would
it have meant? Even the Pajamas Media story did not claim that Long had been
convicted of being an ISIS member. It claimed that he had been charged with
that: by the government of Turkey, which notoriously exploits terrorism
accusations to imprison people ranging from Vice journalists to critics of
the prime minister.
In general, only the most irresponsible people treat unproven government
accusations as proof of guilt. That’s the lesson we were all supposed to
have learned from the Guantánamo travesty, where large numbers of people
were and still are imprisoned with no trial or due process of any kind, and
many proved to be completely innocent. In this case, the government alleged
to have accused Long of joining ISIS is particularly worthy of skepticism.
Who treats unproven terrorism accusations by the Turkish government as
gospel?
It is repellent to blithely assume that someone is an ISIS operative because
they have been alleged by a government — with no proof or even a trial — to
be one. But just review the links provided above of those citing this
Pajamas Media story: that’s exactly what they did, including supposed
journalists. “Hey CAIR, any comment on your good friend Saadiq Long being
caught in an ISIS cell in Turkey?” the Toronto Sun’s right-wing columnist
Tarek Fatah crowed. Note that there’s no indication this is merely an
unproven charge; his guilt is just assumed. They all owe Saadiq Long and his
family an apology.
The reason so many people were eager to mindlessly endorse this ISIS
accusation is obvious. For his no-fly list challenge in 2012, Long was
represented by CAIR. His story was first reported by The Guardian. And he
was featured by a clearly sympathetic Chris Hayes in an MSNBC interview. So
this entire episode started by this anonymous Pajamas Media claim became a
means of attacking people who have defended Muslim Americans from the
relentless assault on their civil liberties, as well as generally trying to
discredit claims that Muslims are the victims of civil liberties abuses.
Smearing Long as an ISIS operative was just a tool to accomplish that end.
He, his family, and their reputations were just collateral damage.
Beyond all that, even if Long had, after 2012, broken some law that
justified his current detention or arrest, it would not remotely undermine
or even affect the argument made three years ago about his situation. No
matter who ends up being placed on it, the no-fly list is a travesty of
justice because it entails citizens being denied rights in secret, by
unknown authorities, without any evidence or explanation, and lacking any
transparency or real recourse to challenge it (just as due process-free
imprisonment at Guantánamo is a travesty even if some of the people held
there are actually guilty).
In fact, from the start, Long’s primary grievance was that the U.S.
government had punished him but never charged him with anything, thus
depriving him of the right to confront the evidence and challenge the
accusations. As he told The Guardian back in 2012: “I don’t understand how
the government can take away my right to travel without even telling me. If
the U.S. 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.”
Abbas, Long’s lawyer, made a similar point back then: “It is as if the U.S.
has created a system of secret law whereby certain behaviors — being Muslim
seems to be one of them — trigger one’s placement on government watchlists
that separate people from their families, end careers, and poison personal
relationships. All of this done without any due process.”
The point of the 2012 media coverage was not that Long was innocent: One can
never prove a negative. The point was that it is unjust in the extreme for
the U.S. government to deprive citizens of basic rights, such as the right
to travel, without due process of any kind. As the original Guardian article
stated: “Secret deprivation of core rights, no recourse, no due process, no
right even to learn what has been done to you despite zero evidence of
wrongdoing: that is the life of many American Muslims in the post-9/11
world.”
Ironically, the monumental injustice of the no-fly list has become a
standard position within the GOP since President Obama began advocating its
use to deny gun purchases. On CNN last Sunday, Sen. Marco Rubio sounded
exactly like the ACLU, or CAIR, saying, “These are everyday Americans that
have nothing to do with terrorism, they wind up on the no-fly list, there’s
no due process or any way to get your name removed from it in a timely
fashion.” Ben Carson made the same point on ABC News:
Well, as you, I’m sure, know, there are a lot of people on that watchlist
and they have no idea why they’re on that list and they’ve been trying to
get their names off of it and no one will give them information. … It’s
really unfair that people can’t get a real hearing. And they get put on a
list and nobody can tell them why they’re there, and they go through for
years and years and they have to be tormented. It just doesn’t make any
sense.
That was, and is, the point of the 2012 coverage of Long’s story: that the
no-fly list is inherently unjust because it deprives citizens of rights
based purely on government suspicion and without any due process. If Long
ends up subsequently being charged with a crime, that does not alter that
point at all. Indeed, Long has long been hoping for an opportunity to clear
his name.
In many ways, what just happened to Long is a microcosm of the abuses of the
14-year-old war on terror. First he was denied basic travel rights based
solely on secret government suspicions. Now, an anonymous government
official smeared him as an ISIS terrorist. A right-wing website “reported”
the smear. And from there, a wide range of media outlets and individuals
with prominent platforms and all kinds of axes to grind explicitly declared
him to be a Terrorist: no evidence, no trial, no due process, not even any
charges. The fact that he’s Muslim and under suspicion is enough for huge
numbers of people to declare him to be a Terrorist, and he will now live his
entire life under that cloud.
That’s life as an American Muslim in the war on terror. But even more
importantly, it’s reflective of the rotting media and political climate that
now festers, in which unproven, due process-free accusations against
Muslims, unaccompanied by any evidence, are instantly equated with proven
guilt.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.

Saadiq Long. (photo: unknown)
https://theintercept.com/2015/12/10/a-muslim-american-air-force-veteran-was-
widely-smeared-with-a-fabricated-story-about-isis-charges/https://theinterce
pt.com/2015/12/10/a-muslim-american-air-force-veteran-was-widely-smeared-wit
h-a-fabricated-story-about-isis-charges/
A Muslim American Veteran Was Widely Smeared With a Fabricated Story About
ISIS Charges
By Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain, The Intercept
15 December 15
right-wing blog called “Pajamas Media” published an article on November 24
claiming that Saadiq Long, a Muslim American veteran of the U.S. Air Force,
was arrested in Turkey for being an ISIS operative. Written by Patrick
Poole, a professional anti-Muslim activist and close associate of Frank
Gaffney, the article asserted that Long “finds himself and several family
members sitting in a Turkish prison — arrested earlier this month near the
Turkey-Syria border as members of an ISIS cell.” Its only claimed sources
were anonymous: “U.S. and Turkish officials confirmed Long’s arrest to PJ
Media, saying that he was arrested along with eight others operating along
the Turkish-Syrian border. So far, no U.S. media outlet has reported on his
arrest.”
Long’s purported arrest as an ISIS operative was then widely cited across
the internet by Fox News as well as right-wing and even non-ideological news
sites. Predictably, the story was uncritically hailed by the most virulent
anti-Muslim polemicists: Pam Geller, Robert Spencer, Ann Coulter, and Sam
Harris. Worst of all, it was blasted as a major news story by network TV
affiliates and other local media outlets in Oklahoma, where Long is from and
where his family — including his sister and ailing mother — still reside.
But the story is entirely false: a fabrication. Neither Long nor his wife or
daughter have been arrested on charges that he joined ISIS. He faces no
criminal charges of any kind in Turkey.
Instead, he and his family are being detained at the Geri Gonderme Merkezi
deportation center in Erzurum, Turkey, evidently because he was placed years
ago by the U.S. on its no-fly list. And the U.S. Embassy in Ankara has been
working continually with Long’s family to secure his release, and, if he
chooses, his return to the U.S.
A press officer with the Bureau of Consular Affairs, who asked to be
identified only as “a State Department official,” contradicted the Pajamas
Media claim. “We are aware of Mr. Long’s case and are providing consular
assistance. At this time, we are not aware that he has been formally charged
with a crime,” the official told The Intercept.
The Turkish government would not comment on the record, but a Turkish source
with substantial connections to law enforcement agencies in Gaziantep also
told The Intercept that Long has not been arrested, but is merely being held
for deportation.
Long received substantial media attention in late 2012, when he was told he
would not be permitted to board a flight from Qatar, where he lived, to
travel to the U.S. to visit his ailing mother. When he arrived at the
airport in Doha, he was told by an airlines representative he had been
secretly placed on the U.S. government’s no-fly list (The Intercept’s Glenn
Greenwald, then with The Guardian, was the first to report on that story,
writing an article about Long’s situation after interviewing him in Doha;
Long was then interviewed on Chris Hayes’ MSNBC show, along with his
attorney from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR).
Two weeks after that wave of media stories in 2012, the U.S. government
issued a waiver from the no-fly list and permitted him to fly to the U.S.
But he was once again denied boarding rights 10 weeks later when he
attempted to fly from the U.S. back to Qatar, forcing him to take a bus to
Mexico in order to get home. His situation became a case study in the
injustices of the secret, due process-free no-fly list aimed overwhelmingly
at Muslims. The Pajamas Media report trumpeted this angle in its headline:

Pajamas Media headline. (photo: The Intercept)
In mid-November, Long attempted to enter Turkey along with his wife and
daughter to explore the possibility of relocating there from Qatar, where
Long has lived and worked for many years teaching English. Long had
previously been stationed in Turkey as part of his 10-year Air Force service
and thus knows the country well. The three of them were detained (presumably
because he’s on the U.S. government’s no-fly list and other watchlists),
told they would be deported, and were then moved to Turkey’s deportation
center, where they have remained ever since.
From the start, U.S. officials repeatedly informed the family members of
Long and his wife that they were being detained for deportation, not
arrested or charged. On November 24, the day the Pajamas Media report was
published, a security official with the U.S. Embassy emailed Long’s
brother-in-law to say that the family “is being detained at the deportation
center (Geri Gonderme Merkezi) in Erzurum, Turkey.”
Emails obtained by The Intercept between American consulate officials in
Ankara and Long’s family members reflect efforts by a consular officer to
facilitate the voluntary return of Long and his family from Turkey to the
U.S. on commercial flights. On November 30, the consulate official wrote:
“We are working with the Turkish government regarding your sister’s and her
family’s departure from Turkey. We will contact you when tickets can be
purchased.”
On December 2, the U.S. consular official wrote to Long’s brother-in-law:
“We spoke to your sister’s husband today and are working with one of his
friends to obtain tickets back to the United States for all of them. We hope
to have them depart Turkey next week. We received a congressional inquiry
today regarding your sister’s situation.” The consular official provided
several flight itineraries on United Airlines from which they could choose
and wrote, “We are waiting to hear from Mr. Long’s friend this morning to
finalize the tickets.”
All of Long’s relatives have also been repeatedly told by Long’s Turkish
lawyer, Harun Ozal, and by U.S. Embassy officials in Ankara that Long and
his family were simply detained as part of the immigration process. “There
are no local charges and they are being detained for immigration
violations,” Long’s brother-in-law told The Intercept.
Long’s American attorney, Gadeir Abbas, similarly explained:
Saadiq and his family were detained by Turkey because they are all on the
no-fly list, which means all of their names are in the Terrorist Screening
Database — a database that the U.S. exports to governments across the world
with the hope that doing so will make it as difficult as possible for the
hundreds of thousands blacklisted to move about the world. This is what
accounts for the family’s detention in Turkey, not the uncorroborated and
unprofessionally reported smear that their predicament is somehow
ISIS-related.
Abbas added, “Both the Turkish and U.S. officials have communicated to
Saadiq’s family and their Turkish attorney that there are no charges against
them in Turkey.”
Notably, when the right-wing site the Daily Caller published its own
follow-up report on the Pajamas Media story, it refrained from claiming that
Long had been arrested on charges relating to ISIS or even that he had been
arrested at all. Rather, it was willing and able only to report: “The Daily
Caller was able to confirm that Long, his wife, and their daughter were
detained in Turkey.” That’s because Long was not arrested or charged with
anything.
It is, of course, possible that Long may be arrested or charged in the
future: by Turkey, the U.S., or some other state. But to date, he has not
been. The article claiming he has been, resulting in the widespread smearing
of Long as having joined an ISIS cell, is completely false.
From the start, there were all sorts of glaring red flags with this Pajamas
Media report that warranted great skepticism.
To begin with, it’s irresponsible in the extreme to spread claims that
someone has been arrested for joining ISIS without a very substantial basis
for believing that’s true. That’s a claim that will be permanently attached
to the person’s name. The people who uncritically spread this “report” had
nothing approaching a sufficient basis for doing so, and worse, most of them
simply repeated the assertion that he was an ISIS operative as though it
were verified fact.
Beyond that, the only outlet to have “reported” this claim about Long and
his family is Pajamas Media. Does anyone find that to be a credible news
source, let alone one credible enough to permanently vilify someone as an
ISIS member? The specific author of the report, Poole, swims exclusively in
the most toxic, discredited, anti-Muslim far-right swamps — he’s a favorite
of Frank Gaffney, last seen as the prime mover of Donald Trump’s “ban
Muslims” proposal — and it is nothing short of shameful that so many people
vested this anonymous smear with credibility.
But let’s assume that this fabricated report had been accurate. What would
it have meant? Even the Pajamas Media story did not claim that Long had been
convicted of being an ISIS member. It claimed that he had been charged with
that: by the government of Turkey, which notoriously exploits terrorism
accusations to imprison people ranging from Vice journalists to critics of
the prime minister.
In general, only the most irresponsible people treat unproven government
accusations as proof of guilt. That’s the lesson we were all supposed to
have learned from the Guantánamo travesty, where large numbers of people
were and still are imprisoned with no trial or due process of any kind, and
many proved to be completely innocent. In this case, the government alleged
to have accused Long of joining ISIS is particularly worthy of skepticism.
Who treats unproven terrorism accusations by the Turkish government as
gospel?
It is repellent to blithely assume that someone is an ISIS operative because
they have been alleged by a government — with no proof or even a trial — to
be one. But just review the links provided above of those citing this
Pajamas Media story: that’s exactly what they did, including supposed
journalists. “Hey CAIR, any comment on your good friend Saadiq Long being
caught in an ISIS cell in Turkey?” the Toronto Sun’s right-wing columnist
Tarek Fatah crowed. Note that there’s no indication this is merely an
unproven charge; his guilt is just assumed. They all owe Saadiq Long and his
family an apology.
The reason so many people were eager to mindlessly endorse this ISIS
accusation is obvious. For his no-fly list challenge in 2012, Long was
represented by CAIR. His story was first reported by The Guardian. And he
was featured by a clearly sympathetic Chris Hayes in an MSNBC interview. So
this entire episode started by this anonymous Pajamas Media claim became a
means of attacking people who have defended Muslim Americans from the
relentless assault on their civil liberties, as well as generally trying to
discredit claims that Muslims are the victims of civil liberties abuses.
Smearing Long as an ISIS operative was just a tool to accomplish that end.
He, his family, and their reputations were just collateral damage.
Beyond all that, even if Long had, after 2012, broken some law that
justified his current detention or arrest, it would not remotely undermine
or even affect the argument made three years ago about his situation. No
matter who ends up being placed on it, the no-fly list is a travesty of
justice because it entails citizens being denied rights in secret, by
unknown authorities, without any evidence or explanation, and lacking any
transparency or real recourse to challenge it (just as due process-free
imprisonment at Guantánamo is a travesty even if some of the people held
there are actually guilty).
In fact, from the start, Long’s primary grievance was that the U.S.
government had punished him but never charged him with anything, thus
depriving him of the right to confront the evidence and challenge the
accusations. As he told The Guardian back in 2012: “I don’t understand how
the government can take away my right to travel without even telling me. If
the U.S. 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.”
Abbas, Long’s lawyer, made a similar point back then: “It is as if the U.S.
has created a system of secret law whereby certain behaviors — being Muslim
seems to be one of them — trigger one’s placement on government watchlists
that separate people from their families, end careers, and poison personal
relationships. All of this done without any due process.”
The point of the 2012 media coverage was not that Long was innocent: One can
never prove a negative. The point was that it is unjust in the extreme for
the U.S. government to deprive citizens of basic rights, such as the right
to travel, without due process of any kind. As the original Guardian article
stated: “Secret deprivation of core rights, no recourse, no due process, no
right even to learn what has been done to you despite zero evidence of
wrongdoing: that is the life of many American Muslims in the post-9/11
world.”
Ironically, the monumental injustice of the no-fly list has become a
standard position within the GOP since President Obama began advocating its
use to deny gun purchases. On CNN last Sunday, Sen. Marco Rubio sounded
exactly like the ACLU, or CAIR, saying, “These are everyday Americans that
have nothing to do with terrorism, they wind up on the no-fly list, there’s
no due process or any way to get your name removed from it in a timely
fashion.” Ben Carson made the same point on ABC News:
Well, as you, I’m sure, know, there are a lot of people on that watchlist
and they have no idea why they’re on that list and they’ve been trying to
get their names off of it and no one will give them information. … It’s
really unfair that people can’t get a real hearing. And they get put on a
list and nobody can tell them why they’re there, and they go through for
years and years and they have to be tormented. It just doesn’t make any
sense.
That was, and is, the point of the 2012 coverage of Long’s story: that the
no-fly list is inherently unjust because it deprives citizens of rights
based purely on government suspicion and without any due process. If Long
ends up subsequently being charged with a crime, that does not alter that
point at all. Indeed, Long has long been hoping for an opportunity to clear
his name.
In many ways, what just happened to Long is a microcosm of the abuses of the
14-year-old war on terror. First he was denied basic travel rights based
solely on secret government suspicions. Now, an anonymous government
official smeared him as an ISIS terrorist. A right-wing website “reported”
the smear. And from there, a wide range of media outlets and individuals
with prominent platforms and all kinds of axes to grind explicitly declared
him to be a Terrorist: no evidence, no trial, no due process, not even any
charges. The fact that he’s Muslim and under suspicion is enough for huge
numbers of people to declare him to be a Terrorist, and he will now live his
entire life under that cloud.
That’s life as an American Muslim in the war on terror. But even more
importantly, it’s reflective of the rotting media and political climate that
now festers, in which unproven, due process-free accusations against
Muslims, unaccompanied by any evidence, are instantly equated with proven
guilt.
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  • » [blind-democracy] A Muslim American Veteran Was Widely Smeared With a Fabricated Story About ISIS Charges - Miriam Vieni