I will not say that I'll never fly again, but suffice it to say, we
are planning to ride Amtrak to New Jersey next year, and our annual
swing down through California and over to my sister's in Arizona is
best done in our little old Ford Sport Trak.
My brain tells me that sitting crunched up for four or five hours,
sandwiched between a big tub and a fidgety ten year old with a snotty
nose, is far better than spending days crammed in steerage on an old
tramp steamer. But it doesn't help the cramping in my legs and feet.
Still, the seats are becoming the lesser of insults. The real pros
are the folk waiting to get their hands on me and all my possessions
prior to boarding. And the real gasser is that I get to pay big bucks
for the privilege of being insulted and man handled.
But then, I do live in Paradise, so why go through all the humiliation
and hassle just to go see someplace almost as wonderful as home?
It's misting this morning, on its way to a pleasant 66 degrees, with
some sun pushing past the fluffy white clouds. The first thing a
person notices around here is the total quiet. The last of the Alder
leaves rustle among the branches, the raspy croak of the Tree Toads
calling love messages to one another. Suddenly a great commotion in
the distance. A Gaggle of Geese come circling the Beaver Pond,
warning all the ducks that they are now taking command. And today the
four silent graceful white swans look on from the far edge of the
pond, gliding to and fro, dipping their long graceful necks into the
water.
And as the day comes full, the Jay birds squabble and the Morning
Doves call softly and mournfully, and the fat Ring Neck Doves cover
the deck as they peck up all the seed and then whip into the air with
a loud rushing sound as a lone hawk cruises past looking for breakfast
of another sort. Even as the squirrels and chip monks scoot at neck
breaking speed among the scatter of seeds, a distant woodpecker taps
out his own unknown message. And in all of this, not a single sound
of Man's intrusion. I lean against the open mud room door and think
of what we have given up in the name of Civilization.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/20/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Flying the Unfriendly Skies of America
By Rebecca Gordon
Posted on September 20, 2015, Printed on September 20, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176046/
Rebecca Gordon's piece today triggered a little repressed memory of mine of
a trip I took in 2003. Arriving at the airport, I turned my suitcase over
to
the ticket agent, only to be told that it had been singled out for special
inspection. I was already running TomDispatch and I couldn't help
wondering,
somewhat nervously, if my activities had preceded me to the airport. I was
directed to another spot in the terminal where I lifted the suitcase onto a
table in front of a Transportation Security Administration agent. She
promptly unzipped the bag, flipped it open, and front and center, face up
atop my folded clothes, was a book that had "Unabomber" in big letters in
its title. It felt as if a jolt of electricity had shot through my body and
my eyes were bugging out of my head at my obvious stupidity. As if to
confirm that feeling, the agent looked stunned, too. We were both silent
for
a too-long moment, contemplating the reckless passenger who had a book
about
the Unabomber conspicuously displayed in his bag. Then she said, "How is
it?"
It was the last question I expected to hear and I stumbled far too quickly
to respond with something like: "I don't know. I haven't read it yet. A
newspaper asked me to review it." (All true, but in translation it clearly
meant: "Hey, I know this looks terrible, but I'm a reputable book reviewer,
not your basic terror-lovin' sorta guy.") Not much else was said, but
believe me, my bag and backpack were inspected with a thoroughness that had
to be seen to be believed. A second agent was even called in to lend a
hand.
In the end, the bag was cleared for departure and, chastened, I headed for
the security line, already unfastening my belt.
And there's a little p.s. to this episode. Not so long after, I set out on
another trip, this time carrying Tariq Ali's book, Clash of
Fundamentalisms:
Crusades, Jihads, and Modernity, with me. As I was packing, I noticed that
its cover featured George Bush's face superimposed on Osama bin Laden's. It
was a striking image and in a split second I was slipping the jacket off
the
book to leave at home. If I got singled out again, I had no intention of
letting an agent find a cloned bin Laden-Bush image among my possessions.
In this way, microscopic act by microscopic act, whoever we are, whatever
we
think we think, we can't help but absorb the limits, the directives, the
intentions that our ascendant national security state wants to impose on
us.
In all sorts of devious ways, without serious thought, in acts that hardly
register, we make their agendas, their surveillance, their searches our
own;
we turn their taste in reading and thinking and expressing themselves into
ours. Someday, there's a great book to be written on all the hidden
triumphs
of that ever-more powerful shadow state that has embedded its version of
the
American way of life inside our own. In the meantime, check out TomDispatch
regular Rebecca Gordon's account of how we create our own no-fly lists and
become our own no-fliers in the unfriendly skies of twenty-first-century
America. Tom
The No-Fly Follies
How to Censor Yourself Before the Government Even Has the Chance
By Rebecca Gordon
It was August 2002. My partner Jan Adams and I were just beginning our
annual pilgrimage to Massachusetts to visit my father and stepmother. At
the
check-in line at San Francisco International Airport, we handed over our
driver's licenses and waited for the airline ticket agent to find our
flight
and reservation. Suddenly, she got a funny look on her face. "There's
something wrong with the computer," she said. "I need to talk to my
supervisor."
So began a day of confusion and fear, followed by several years of
indignation, frustration, and litigation, as we struggled to find out why
--
as the agent's supervisor soon informed us with a similarly strange look on
her face -- we'd both "turned up on the FBI's no-fly list." Her eyes grew
wide as she looked us over. "I don't understand it," she said. "You don't
fit the profile."
She was right, of course. A pair of middle-aged, middle-class, white
lesbians did not fit the profile of the "Arab terrorists" she expected the
no-fly list to contain. What she didn't know was that our suitcases held
hundreds of copies of War Times/Tiempo de guerras, a free, bilingual
antiwar
tabloid we'd helped start. Could aging pacifists have fit the
danger-to-America profile?
You might think that the no-fly list is old news, a relic of the panicked
early days following the 9/11 attacks. In fact, as recently as 2012, there
were still more than 21,000 names on the list, and it seems unlikely to
have
gotten any shorter since then, though we do know of at least four names
that, with some legal prodding from the Center for Constitutional Rights
(CCR), were recently removed from it: Muhammad Tanvir, Jameel Algibhah,
Naveed Shinwari, and Awais Sajjad. All four men were American citizens or
permanent residents who ended up on the list as retaliation for refusing to
become FBI informers and tell tales on their neighbors and others in Muslim
communities in this country. For years, they could not visit wives,
children, or ailing relatives in countries like Pakistan and Yemen.
According to a suit filed by the CCR in 2014, as reported by Conor
Friedersdorf in the Atlantic, Jameel Algibhah's troubles began in 2009,
when
he refused the FBI's request to infiltrate a mosque in Queens, New York.
The
legal complaint continues:
"When Mr. Algibhah declined to do so, the agents then asked Mr. Algibhah to
participate in certain online Islamic forums and 'act like an extremist.'
When Mr. Algibhah again declined, the agents asked Mr. Algibhah to inform
on
his community in his neighborhood. The FBI agents offered Mr. Algibhah
money
and told him that they could bring his family from Yemen to the United
States very quickly if he became an informant. Mr. Algibhah again told the
FBI agents that he would not become an informant."
So the FBI retaliated. Since 2010, Jameel Algibhah has been unable to visit
his wife and three daughters in Yemen. Not content with preventing Algibhah
and the other three from flying, the FBI began interviewing their friends,
family, acquaintances, and employers, generating suspicion about them.
"They
lost jobs, were stigmatized within their communities, and suffered severe
financial and emotional distress," reports the CCR.
In June 2015, just before their case was to go to court, the men received
letters from the government officially informing them that their names had
been removed from the list. The CCR believes that "the letters are a de
facto acknowledgment that the men never posed a security threat of any kind
and that the FBI only listed them to coerce them into spying on their faith
community."
The letters restored the men's right to fly, but they didn't make up for
years of stigma and distress. So the four continued their litigation, but
on
September 3rd, a federal judge dismissed their suit, which means that they
will not get any recompense for the damage done to their lives. In June
2015, the Associated Press reported that Assistant U.S. Attorney Ellen
Blain
argued the case should not continue, in part for reasons of "national
security" and because "neither the law nor the evidence supported finding
the agents personally liable for violating the plaintiffs' constitutional
rights." In fact, the government's original motion to dismiss the suit
argued that "there is no constitutional right not to become an informant."
That's right. Your government says that if it wants to make you a snitch,
you have no right to refuse.
Given that these four men without criminal records or any other obvious
reason for government suspicion were, like my partner and me, put on the
no-fly list leads me to wonder about the other 21,000 people on that list,
including at least 500 Americans. (In fact the overall number could turn
out
to be as high as 44,000, according to "60 Minutes," or even 48,000,
according to the Associated Press. We just don't know because, like so
much
else in our new post-9/11 world, information about the list remains
classified.)
What did all those other people on the list do or refuse to do? How have
their lives been damaged? And how dangerous are they really? My partner and
I certainly had no intention of turning our airplane into a terrorist
weapon. What are the odds that any of the other 21,000 or 44,000 or 48,000
people did? And if potential airplane bombers or hijackers do exist, what
are the odds that any of them are actually on the FBI's list? After all,
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the "underwear bomber," wasn't. Neither was the
infamous "shoe bomber" Richard Reid. All this list-making has been marked
by
an odd -- and dangerous -- combination of intrusion and incompetence.
The National Insecurity State
In our case, even though we didn't fit "the profile," the agent, a little
shakily, followed her protocol. She called the San Francisco Police, who
have an airport substation. Three armed members of the city's finest
arrived
a few minutes later to stand guard over us and our luggage in the middle of
the lobby, while they waited to hear from headquarters about whether we
were
on what they called the "master list." No one ever told us what this
"master
list" was, or how it was different from the list the airline's computer was
consulting. As I pondered the master list, and our chances of appearing on
it, my mind kept wandering to those copies of War Times sitting a yard away
from the officers' feet. Suppose they asked to open our luggage? How would
they react when they saw those papers?
To be honest, both of us figured that two white U.S. citizens with plenty
of
class privilege were not going to suffer anything much worse than a missed
flight, and it turned out that we didn't even miss our flight. After about
20 minutes, however, I was getting antsy -- and thirsty.
"Would one of you officers walk over there with me, so I can get a drink?"
I
asked, pointing to a water fountain across the way.
"No. We're going to stay right here until we hear from headquarters," came
the reply.
The initial sense of fear was slowly draining away as the minutes ticked by
and passengers boarded the flight we now feared they were never going to
let
us get on. I knew it was time to draw on my dramatic chops. (Sometimes it
helps to have an actor for a father.) Putting on my best Frightened Little
Woman voice, I asked, "Suppose we are on this master list? Then what? Are
you going to arrest us?"
"We wouldn't arrest you, but we'll have to detain you until the FBI gets
here and decides what they want to do with you," came the answer.
We were probably all relieved when, a few minutes later, the lead officer's
walkie-talkie crackled to life with news from headquarters. We weren't, it
seemed, on the "master list." So the officers marked our boarding passes
with a big red "S" -- which we learned years later stands for "selectee" --
put our luggage through a special X-ray machine (but never opened it), and
escorted us past security to our gate, with the airline agent in tow.
There,
they saw us onto our flight.
I turned to the agent. "Is this going to happen every time we fly?"
"I don't know," she replied, "but if I were you, I'd get to the airport
early."
To our surprise, more police met us at our stopover in Chicago, where we
changed planes, perhaps in case we decided to blow up the airport. They
then escorted us to the next gate, waiting with us until we boarded.
Once in Boston, we continued our journey unhassled by bus and boat to
Martha's Vineyard. However, on either that trip or a later one -- my memory
fails me -- our ferry to the island was escorted out of Woods Hole harbor
by
two 50-foot Coast Guard Zodiac boats, each sporting a 50mm machine gun on
the bow -- as if we might be attacked in the coastal waters of
Massachusetts, and by an enemy capable of being defeated by a machine gun.
Once we got to deep water, where such an attack would be more likely,
however, our escorts turned around and left us defenseless. I promptly
burst
out laughing.
"Well, I don't know about you," growled a well-dressed guy standing beside
me on the deck, "but it makes me feel more secure."
A lot of unlikely things made many Americans feel more secure in those days
and still do. Maybe it was because we were then -- and remain today --
frightened in a way that bears no relation to any actual threat we face.
That fear, however, feeds the desire of the national security state to
maintain its centrality in our lives. Among the curious things that added
to
our sense of "security" in those years: the rounding up of 600 Muslims
living in this country in the days following 9/11, who were then tortured
and held incommunicado in a Brooklyn detention center for six months; the
suggestion from a liberal columnist in Newsweek that it was "time to think
about torture"; or to mention just a couple of no-fly follies -- putting
Senator Teddy Kennedy on the list, along with at least one nun, and until
2008, Nelson Mandela. (That was also the year he was finally taken off the
U.S. terrorism watch list.) Oh yes, and don't forget a couple of no-name
peace activists.
As it happens, at the time we had our experience at San Francisco airport,
my stepmother's brother was a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, the
guy the Chron had assigned to the Unabomber story some years before. When
he
got her email about our run-in with the national security state, he was on
the phone to her immediately. Did she think we would be willing to talk to
a
reporter? Oh, yes, my stepmom assured him, we definitely would. And thus
began perhaps the longest-running "story" I've ever been part of. Three
years later, we were still getting requests from German and Dutch
television
stations to reenact the event at the airport. While we in this country
settled into the new normal, it turned out that Europeans remained shocked
by U.S. government doings.
As it happened -- the FBI really had done a lousy job of vetting us -- my
partner was then consulting for the Northern California ACLU. When she told
them about our experience, they wondered: Would we be willing to let them
file a Freedom of Information Act request on our behalf to try to figure
out
how this had happened? We agreed in hopes that the documentation we got our
hands on would help us understand how we'd gotten on the no-fly list in the
first place and -- far more important to us at that moment -- whether or
not
we'd been removed. We also shared the ACLU's more general concern that this
list was fast becoming a tool of government fear mongering and coercion.
That concern turned out to be well founded.
But we were, of course, living in the post-9/11 United States, in an era in
which the government seems to have given up pretending that it has to obey
the law when it comes to anything that falls under the category of
"national
security." So we didn't even get a reply to our FOIA request (although in
theory the government was obligated to respond to it) -- at least not until
the ACLU sued. By this time I'm sure you won't be shocked to discover that
the pro bono attorney working on the case for them also found himself on
the
no-fly list.
Eventually, the ACLU's suit did bring us about 300 pages of paper from the
feds. But most of what was written on those 300 pages had been redacted --
completely blacked out. U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer (brother of
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer) was not amused. He made the feds show
him privately every document they wouldn't allow us to see and required
them
to explain the rationale for each redaction. But we never saw the
unredacted
material ourselves. Who knows what those 300 pages contained, and how much
of it was about us personally? Judge Breyer did at least award the ACLU
$200,000 in court costs for their efforts. But we never found out why we
were on the list in the first place. That was a secret he allowed the feds
to keep, presumably to prevent prospective terrorists from figuring out how
to avoid getting listed. Here's a hint: don't publish an antiwar newspaper.
The only time we've had trouble flying since then was when my partner took
the same airline to Chicago for a United for Peace and Justice conference.
Apparently, some people are only dangerous on some airlines.
Winners and Losers
When I told our no-fly story to an ethics class of mine recently, one of my
students asked, "So who won, you or the government?" I had to stop and
think
about that. After all, while the ACLU got their expenses back, which was a
moral win, but we never found out why we were on the list, or even whether
we'd been removed.
Then I remembered something else: just how afraid I was that day simply
because we were carrying multiple copies of a perfectly legal antiwar paper
in a perfectly legal manner. I remembered as well how frightened I later
became after one of the pages that the ACLU shook loose from the government
suggested that our names might have been sent as potential terrorists to
U.S. embassies and agencies all over the world. (This may have been as part
of another example of what seems to be endless post-9/11 government list
gathering: the State Department's Consular Lookout and Support System,
known
as "CLASS.")
And I thought about those four Muslim Americans on the no-fly list because
they refused to become FBI informants, and about Rahinah Ibrahim, a
Malaysian student studying at Stanford University who ended up on the list
because an FBI agent checked the wrong box on a form. Nine years later, she
finally won her suit to get off the list, only to find that the U.S.
embassy
in Malaysia had revoked her student visa -- because she'd ended up on the
CLASS list, as a result of the same original error. I thought about all the
nuns, babies, and people with the misfortune to be named Mohammed who ended
up on the list in error. And I was struck by the fact that, for 14 years,
the national security state has been serving up a uniquely pernicious stew
of incompetence and intransigence.
Finally, I thought about the times I've quietly chosen not to carry a
particular book, or wear a particular T-shirt or button, when travelling by
air. No reason to give the Transportation Security Administration any more
excuses to pay me special attention. It's easier, safer, just to conform.
So
did my partner and I win our suit? When so many of us become frightened
enough of our own government to do its censoring for it, I'd say that we've
all lost.
Rebecca Gordon teaches in the Philosophy department at the University of
San
Francisco. She is the author of Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches
in
the Post-9/11 United States and the forthcoming American Nuremberg: The
Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post 9/11 War Crimes (Hot Books,
2016).
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 Rebecca Gordon
C 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176046
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Flying the Unfriendly Skies of America
By Rebecca Gordon
Posted on September 20, 2015, Printed on September 20, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176046/
Rebecca Gordon's piece today triggered a little repressed memory of mine of
a trip I took in 2003. Arriving at the airport, I turned my suitcase over
to
the ticket agent, only to be told that it had been singled out for special
inspection. I was already running TomDispatch and I couldn't help
wondering,
somewhat nervously, if my activities had preceded me to the airport. I was
directed to another spot in the terminal where I lifted the suitcase onto a
table in front of a Transportation Security Administration agent. She
promptly unzipped the bag, flipped it open, and front and center, face up
atop my folded clothes, was a book that had "Unabomber" in big letters in
its title. It felt as if a jolt of electricity had shot through my body and
my eyes were bugging out of my head at my obvious stupidity. As if to
confirm that feeling, the agent looked stunned, too. We were both silent
for
a too-long moment, contemplating the reckless passenger who had a book
about
the Unabomber conspicuously displayed in his bag. Then she said, "How is
it?"
It was the last question I expected to hear and I stumbled far too quickly
to respond with something like: "I don't know. I haven't read it yet. A
newspaper asked me to review it." (All true, but in translation it clearly
meant: "Hey, I know this looks terrible, but I'm a reputable book reviewer,
not your basic terror-lovin' sorta guy.") Not much else was said, but
believe me, my bag and backpack were inspected with a thoroughness that had
to be seen to be believed. A second agent was even called in to lend a
hand.
In the end, the bag was cleared for departure and, chastened, I headed for
the security line, already unfastening my belt.
And there's a little p.s. to this episode. Not so long after, I set out on
another trip, this time carrying Tariq Ali's book, Clash of
Fundamentalisms:
Crusades, Jihads, and Modernity, with me. As I was packing, I noticed that
its cover featured George Bush's face superimposed on Osama bin Laden's. It
was a striking image and in a split second I was slipping the jacket off
the
book to leave at home. If I got singled out again, I had no intention of
letting an agent find a cloned bin Laden-Bush image among my possessions.
In this way, microscopic act by microscopic act, whoever we are, whatever
we
think we think, we can't help but absorb the limits, the directives, the
intentions that our ascendant national security state wants to impose on
us.
In all sorts of devious ways, without serious thought, in acts that hardly
register, we make their agendas, their surveillance, their searches our
own;
we turn their taste in reading and thinking and expressing themselves into
ours. Someday, there's a great book to be written on all the hidden
triumphs
of that ever-more powerful shadow state that has embedded its version of
the
American way of life inside our own. In the meantime, check out TomDispatch
regular Rebecca Gordon's account of how we create our own no-fly lists and
become our own no-fliers in the unfriendly skies of twenty-first-century
America. Tom
The No-Fly Follies
How to Censor Yourself Before the Government Even Has the Chance
By Rebecca Gordon
It was August 2002. My partner Jan Adams and I were just beginning our
annual pilgrimage to Massachusetts to visit my father and stepmother. At
the
check-in line at San Francisco International Airport, we handed over our
driver's licenses and waited for the airline ticket agent to find our
flight
and reservation. Suddenly, she got a funny look on her face. "There's
something wrong with the computer," she said. "I need to talk to my
supervisor."
So began a day of confusion and fear, followed by several years of
indignation, frustration, and litigation, as we struggled to find out why
--
as the agent's supervisor soon informed us with a similarly strange look on
her face -- we'd both "turned up on the FBI's no-fly list." Her eyes grew
wide as she looked us over. "I don't understand it," she said. "You don't
fit the profile."
She was right, of course. A pair of middle-aged, middle-class, white
lesbians did not fit the profile of the "Arab terrorists" she expected the
no-fly list to contain. What she didn't know was that our suitcases held
hundreds of copies of War Times/Tiempo de guerras, a free, bilingual
antiwar
tabloid we'd helped start. Could aging pacifists have fit the
danger-to-America profile?
You might think that the no-fly list is old news, a relic of the panicked
early days following the 9/11 attacks. In fact, as recently as 2012, there
were still more than 21,000 names on the list, and it seems unlikely to
have
gotten any shorter since then, though we do know of at least four names
that, with some legal prodding from the Center for Constitutional Rights
(CCR), were recently removed from it: Muhammad Tanvir, Jameel Algibhah,
Naveed Shinwari, and Awais Sajjad. All four men were American citizens or
permanent residents who ended up on the list as retaliation for refusing to
become FBI informers and tell tales on their neighbors and others in Muslim
communities in this country. For years, they could not visit wives,
children, or ailing relatives in countries like Pakistan and Yemen.
According to a suit filed by the CCR in 2014, as reported by Conor
Friedersdorf in the Atlantic, Jameel Algibhah's troubles began in 2009,
when
he refused the FBI's request to infiltrate a mosque in Queens, New York.
The
legal complaint continues:
"When Mr. Algibhah declined to do so, the agents then asked Mr. Algibhah to
participate in certain online Islamic forums and 'act like an extremist.'
When Mr. Algibhah again declined, the agents asked Mr. Algibhah to inform
on
his community in his neighborhood. The FBI agents offered Mr. Algibhah
money
and told him that they could bring his family from Yemen to the United
States very quickly if he became an informant. Mr. Algibhah again told the
FBI agents that he would not become an informant."
So the FBI retaliated. Since 2010, Jameel Algibhah has been unable to visit
his wife and three daughters in Yemen. Not content with preventing Algibhah
and the other three from flying, the FBI began interviewing their friends,
family, acquaintances, and employers, generating suspicion about them.
"They
lost jobs, were stigmatized within their communities, and suffered severe
financial and emotional distress," reports the CCR.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0199336431/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0199336431/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20In June
2015, just before their case was to go to court, the men received letters
from the government officially informing them that their names had been
removed from the list. The CCR believes that "the letters are a de facto
acknowledgment that the men never posed a security threat of any kind and
that the FBI only listed them to coerce them into spying on their faith
community."
The letters restored the men's right to fly, but they didn't make up for
years of stigma and distress. So the four continued their litigation, but
on
September 3rd, a federal judge dismissed their suit, which means that they
will not get any recompense for the damage done to their lives. In June
2015, the Associated Press reported that Assistant U.S. Attorney Ellen
Blain
argued the case should not continue, in part for reasons of "national
security" and because "neither the law nor the evidence supported finding
the agents personally liable for violating the plaintiffs' constitutional
rights." In fact, the government's original motion to dismiss the suit
argued that "there is no constitutional right not to become an informant."
That's right. Your government says that if it wants to make you a snitch,
you have no right to refuse.
Given that these four men without criminal records or any other obvious
reason for government suspicion were, like my partner and me, put on the
no-fly list leads me to wonder about the other 21,000 people on that list,
including at least 500 Americans. (In fact the overall number could turn
out
to be as high as 44,000, according to "60 Minutes," or even 48,000,
according to the Associated Press. We just don't know because, like so much
else in our new post-9/11 world, information about the list remains
classified.)
What did all those other people on the list do or refuse to do? How have
their lives been damaged? And how dangerous are they really? My partner and
I certainly had no intention of turning our airplane into a terrorist
weapon. What are the odds that any of the other 21,000 or 44,000 or 48,000
people did? And if potential airplane bombers or hijackers do exist, what
are the odds that any of them are actually on the FBI's list? After all,
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the "underwear bomber," wasn't. Neither was the
infamous "shoe bomber" Richard Reid. All this list-making has been marked
by
an odd -- and dangerous -- combination of intrusion and incompetence.
The National Insecurity State
In our case, even though we didn't fit "the profile," the agent, a little
shakily, followed her protocol. She called the San Francisco Police, who
have an airport substation. Three armed members of the city's finest
arrived
a few minutes later to stand guard over us and our luggage in the middle of
the lobby, while they waited to hear from headquarters about whether we
were
on what they called the "master list." No one ever told us what this
"master
list" was, or how it was different from the list the airline's computer was
consulting. As I pondered the master list, and our chances of appearing on
it, my mind kept wandering to those copies of War Times sitting a yard away
from the officers' feet. Suppose they asked to open our luggage? How would
they react when they saw those papers?
To be honest, both of us figured that two white U.S. citizens with plenty
of
class privilege were not going to suffer anything much worse than a missed
flight, and it turned out that we didn't even miss our flight. After about
20 minutes, however, I was getting antsy -- and thirsty.
"Would one of you officers walk over there with me, so I can get a drink?"
I
asked, pointing to a water fountain across the way.
"No. We're going to stay right here until we hear from headquarters," came
the reply.
The initial sense of fear was slowly draining away as the minutes ticked by
and passengers boarded the flight we now feared they were never going to
let
us get on. I knew it was time to draw on my dramatic chops. (Sometimes it
helps to have an actor for a father.) Putting on my best Frightened Little
Woman voice, I asked, "Suppose we are on this master list? Then what? Are
you going to arrest us?"
"We wouldn't arrest you, but we'll have to detain you until the FBI gets
here and decides what they want to do with you," came the answer.
We were probably all relieved when, a few minutes later, the lead officer's
walkie-talkie crackled to life with news from headquarters. We weren't, it
seemed, on the "master list." So the officers marked our boarding passes
with a big red "S" -- which we learned years later stands for "selectee" --
put our luggage through a special X-ray machine (but never opened it), and
escorted us past security to our gate, with the airline agent in tow.
There,
they saw us onto our flight.
I turned to the agent. "Is this going to happen every time we fly?"
"I don't know," she replied, "but if I were you, I'd get to the airport
early."
To our surprise, more police met us at our stopover in Chicago, where we
changed planes, perhaps in case we decided to blow up the airport. They
then
escorted us to the next gate, waiting with us until we boarded.
Once in Boston, we continued our journey unhassled by bus and boat to
Martha's Vineyard. However, on either that trip or a later one -- my memory
fails me -- our ferry to the island was escorted out of Woods Hole harbor
by
two 50-foot Coast Guard Zodiac boats, each sporting a 50mm machine gun on
the bow -- as if we might be attacked in the coastal waters of
Massachusetts, and by an enemy capable of being defeated by a machine gun.
Once we got to deep water, where such an attack would be more likely,
however, our escorts turned around and left us defenseless. I promptly
burst
out laughing.
"Well, I don't know about you," growled a well-dressed guy standing beside
me on the deck, "but it makes me feel more secure."
A lot of unlikely things made many Americans feel more secure in those days
and still do. Maybe it was because we were then -- and remain today --
frightened in a way that bears no relation to any actual threat we face.
That fear, however, feeds the desire of the national security state to
maintain its centrality in our lives. Among the curious things that added
to
our sense of "security" in those years: the rounding up of 600 Muslims
living in this country in the days following 9/11, who were then tortured
and held incommunicado in a Brooklyn detention center for six months; the
suggestion from a liberal columnist in Newsweek that it was "time to think
about torture"; or to mention just a couple of no-fly follies -- putting
Senator Teddy Kennedy on the list, along with at least one nun, and until
2008, Nelson Mandela. (That was also the year he was finally taken off the
U.S. terrorism watch list.) Oh yes, and don't forget a couple of no-name
peace activists.
As it happens, at the time we had our experience at San Francisco airport,
my stepmother's brother was a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, the
guy the Chron had assigned to the Unabomber story some years before. When
he
got her email about our run-in with the national security state, he was on
the phone to her immediately. Did she think we would be willing to talk to
a
reporter? Oh, yes, my stepmom assured him, we definitely would. And thus
began perhaps the longest-running "story" I've ever been part of. Three
years later, we were still getting requests from German and Dutch
television
stations to reenact the event at the airport. While we in this country
settled into the new normal, it turned out that Europeans remained shocked
by U.S. government doings.
As it happened -- the FBI really had done a lousy job of vetting us -- my
partner was then consulting for the Northern California ACLU. When she told
them about our experience, they wondered: Would we be willing to let them
file a Freedom of Information Act request on our behalf to try to figure
out
how this had happened? We agreed in hopes that the documentation we got our
hands on would help us understand how we'd gotten on the no-fly list in the
first place and -- far more important to us at that moment -- whether or
not
we'd been removed. We also shared the ACLU's more general concern that this
list was fast becoming a tool of government fear mongering and coercion.
That concern turned out to be well founded.
But we were, of course, living in the post-9/11 United States, in an era in
which the government seems to have given up pretending that it has to obey
the law when it comes to anything that falls under the category of
"national
security." So we didn't even get a reply to our FOIA request (although in
theory the government was obligated to respond to it) -- at least not until
the ACLU sued. By this time I'm sure you won't be shocked to discover that
the pro bono attorney working on the case for them also found himself on
the
no-fly list.
Eventually, the ACLU's suit did bring us about 300 pages of paper from the
feds. But most of what was written on those 300 pages had been redacted --
completely blacked out. U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer (brother of
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer) was not amused. He made the feds show
him privately every document they wouldn't allow us to see and required
them
to explain the rationale for each redaction. But we never saw the
unredacted
material ourselves. Who knows what those 300 pages contained, and how much
of it was about us personally? Judge Breyer did at least award the ACLU
$200,000 in court costs for their efforts. But we never found out why we
were on the list in the first place. That was a secret he allowed the feds
to keep, presumably to prevent prospective terrorists from figuring out how
to avoid getting listed. Here's a hint: don't publish an antiwar newspaper.
The only time we've had trouble flying since then was when my partner took
the same airline to Chicago for a United for Peace and Justice conference.
Apparently, some people are only dangerous on some airlines.
Winners and Losers
When I told our no-fly story to an ethics class of mine recently, one of my
students asked, "So who won, you or the government?" I had to stop and
think
about that. After all, while the ACLU got their expenses back, which was a
moral win, but we never found out why we were on the list, or even whether
we'd been removed.
Then I remembered something else: just how afraid I was that day simply
because we were carrying multiple copies of a perfectly legal antiwar paper
in a perfectly legal manner. I remembered as well how frightened I later
became after one of the pages that the ACLU shook loose from the government
suggested that our names might have been sent as potential terrorists to
U.S. embassies and agencies all over the world. (This may have been as part
of another example of what seems to be endless post-9/11 government list
gathering: the State Department's Consular Lookout and Support System,
known
as "CLASS.")
And I thought about those four Muslim Americans on the no-fly list because
they refused to become FBI informants, and about Rahinah Ibrahim, a
Malaysian student studying at Stanford University who ended up on the list
because an FBI agent checked the wrong box on a form. Nine years later, she
finally won her suit to get off the list, only to find that the U.S.
embassy
in Malaysia had revoked her student visa -- because she'd ended up on the
CLASS list, as a result of the same original error. I thought about all the
nuns, babies, and people with the misfortune to be named Mohammed who ended
up on the list in error. And I was struck by the fact that, for 14 years,
the national security state has been serving up a uniquely pernicious stew
of incompetence and intransigence.
Finally, I thought about the times I've quietly chosen not to carry a
particular book, or wear a particular T-shirt or button, when travelling by
air. No reason to give the Transportation Security Administration any more
excuses to pay me special attention. It's easier, safer, just to conform.
So
did my partner and I win our suit? When so many of us become frightened
enough of our own government to do its censoring for it, I'd say that we've
all lost.
Rebecca Gordon teaches in the Philosophy department at the University of
San
Francisco. She is the author of Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches
in
the Post-9/11 United States and the forthcoming American Nuremberg: The
Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post 9/11 War Crimes (Hot Books,
2016).
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
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Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 Rebecca Gordon
C 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176046
