It's true that this is the Promised Land, but we do know folks who are
forced to live in mundane places, like New Jersey. Years ago a young
blind college student attending law school at the University of
Washington, became the advocate for clients requesting Administrative
Reviews. As assistant director, one of my duties was to review such
requests, and meet with the client and their representative to see if
we could resolve differences. The young man was named Daniel Frye.
Dan was such a strong, fair minded, honest advocate that I took to him
as if he were my son.
We have been fast friends ever since. In fact, Dan married one of my
OTC students, Renee West. After 3 years working for the New Zealand
Blind, Dan returned home to do a brief stint as Editor of the Braille
Monitor. He went on to work for RSA prior to becoming Director of the
New Jersey Agency For the Blind.
So that is the long version of the story. We are not going to visit
New Jersey, we are going to head East to visit our dear friends.
But that trip my be on hold, depending on the outcome of several tests
I'm undergoing. I see the cardiologist tomorrow to try to get a
better fix on the situation. My pulse suddenly jumped from around 60
to 125. I'm told that I have a flutter in the upper chamber and the
lower chamber is going nuts trying to keep up. The doctor offered
several opinions, unnerving me a bit by suggesting I might have had a
heart attack.
They would have tucked me into the hospital after I went to emergency
last Wednesday, except I show none of the symptoms. No pains, no
shortness of breath, no high fever, just a rapid fluttering pulse of
about 125.
So after telling me that they almost decided to put me in the
hospital, the doctor told me I could go about doing my regular routine
until I see the Cardiologist.
It's frustrating. Sometimes I think my body is too healthy to allow
anyone to see what's going on. I'll be dead two years before they
ever notice it.
But for now, New Jersey is on the planning table.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/21/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Sounds gorgeous. New Jersey next year? Why would anyone travel to New
Jersey?
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, September 21, 2015 11:38 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Flying the
Unfriendly Skies of America
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:
extremist.'
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
When Mr. Algibhah again declined, the agents asked Mr. Algibhah togenerating suspicion about them.
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,
"Theywith the airline agent in tow.
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,
There,we face.
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
That fear, however, feeds the desire of the national security state toconference.
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
Apparently, some people are only dangerous on some airlines.safer, just to conform.
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,
SoGovernment:
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
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in aextremist.'
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
When Mr. Algibhah again declined, the agents asked Mr. Algibhah togenerating suspicion about them.
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,
"Theywith the airline agent in tow.
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,
There,we face.
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
That fear, however, feeds the desire of the national security state toconference.
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
Apparently, some people are only dangerous on some airlines.safer, just to conform.
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,
SoGovernment:
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).
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Copyright 2015 Rebecca Gordon
C 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176046
