Forever Grounded?

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Kim Brooks Wei <kimi () kimbwei com>
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2004 03:10:01 
To:Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Forever Grounded?


http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2002/11/15/no_fly

Grounded
A federal agency confirms that it maintains an air-travel blacklist 
of 1,000 people. Peace activists and civil libertarians fear they're 
on it.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Dave Lindorff

Nov. 15, 2002  |  Barbara Olshansky was at a Newark International 
Airport departure gate last May when an airline agent at the counter 
checking her boarding pass called airport security. Olshansky was 
subjected to a close search and then, though she was in view of other 
travelers, was ordered to pull her pants down. The Sept. 11 terrorist 
attacks may have created a new era in airport security, but even so, 
she was embarrassed and annoyed.

Perhaps one such incident might've been forgotten, but Olshansky, the 
assistant legal director for the left-leaning Center for 
Constitutional Rights, was pulled out of line for special attention 
the next time she flew. And the next time. And the next time. On one 
flight this past September from Newark to Washington, six members of 
the center's staff, including Olshansky, were stopped and subjected 
to intense scrutiny, even though they had purchased their tickets 
independently and had not checked in as a group. On that occasion, 
Olshansky got angry and demanded to know why she had been singled out.

"The computer spit you out," she recalls the agent saying. "I don't 
know why, and I don't have time to talk to you about it."

Olshansky and her colleagues are, apparently, not alone. For months, 
rumors and anecdotes have circulated among left-wing and other 
activist groups about people who have been barred from flying or 
delayed at security gates because they are "on a list."

But now, a spokesman for the new Transportation Security 
Administration has acknowledged for the first time that the 
government has a list of about 1,000 people who are deemed "threats 
to aviation" and not allowed on airplanes under any circumstances. 
And in an interview with Salon, the official suggested that Olshansky 
and other political activists may be on a separate list that subjects 
them to strict scrutiny but allows them to fly.

"We have a list of about 1,000 people," said David Steigman, the TSA 
spokesman. The agency was created a year ago by Congress to handle 
transportation safety during the war on terror. "This list is 
composed of names that are provided to us by various government 
organizations like the FBI, CIA and INS ... We don't ask how they 
decide who to list. Each agency decides on its own who is a 'threat 
to aviation.'"

The agency has no guidelines to determine who gets on the list, 
Steigman says, and no procedures for getting off the list if someone 
is wrongfully on it.

Meanwhile, airport security personnel, citing lists that are provided 
by the agency and that appear to be on airline ticketing and check-in 
computers, seem to be netting mostly priests, elderly nuns, Green 
Party campaign operatives, left-wing journalists, right-wing 
activists and people affiliated with Arab or Arab-American groups.

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

In that incident, an airline employee with Midwest Air and a local 
sheriff's deputy who had been called in during the incident to help 
airport security personnel detain and question the group, told some 
of them that their names were "on a list," and that they were being 
kept off their plane on instructions from the Transportation Security 
Administration in Washington. Lawinger has filed a 
freedom-of-information request with the Transportation Security 
Administration seeking to learn if she is on a "threat to aviation" 
list.

*Last month, Rebecca Gordon and Jan Adams, two journalists with a San 
Francisco-based antiwar magazine called War Times were stopped at the 
check-in counter of ATA Airlines, where an airline clerk told them 
that her computer showed they were on "the FBI No Fly list." The 
airline called the FBI, and local police held them for a while before 
telling them there had been a mistake and that they were free to go. 
The two made their plane, but not before the counter attendant placed 
a large S for "search" on their baggage, assuring that they got more 
close scrutiny at the boarding gate.

*Art dealer Doug Stuber, who ran Ralph Nader's Green Party 
presidential campaign in North Carolina in 2000, was barred last 
month from getting on a flight to Hamburg, Germany, where he was 
going on business, after he got engaged in a loud, though friendly, 
discussion with two other passengers in a security line. During the 
course of the debate, he shouted that "George Bush is as dumb as a 
rock," an unfortunate comment that provoked the Raleigh-Durham 
Airport security staff to call the local Secret Service bureau, which 
sent out two agents to interrogate Stuber.


"They took me into a room and questioned me all about my politics," 
Stuber recalls. "They were very up on Green Party politics, too." 
They fingerprinted him and took a digital eye scan. Particularly 
ominous, he says, was a loose-leaf binder held by the Secret Service 
agents. "It was open, and while they were questioning me, I 
discreetly looked at it," he says. "It had a long list of 
organizations, and I was able to recognize the Green Party, 
Greenpeace, EarthFirst and Amnesty International." Stuber was 
eventually released, but because he missed his flight, he had to pay 
almost $2,000 more for a full-fare ticket to Hamburg so that he would 
not miss his business engagement. In the end, however, after trying 
several airports in the North Carolina area, he found he was barred 
from boarding any flights, and had to turn in his ticket and cancel 
his business trip.

A Secret Service agent at the agency's Washington headquarters 
confirmed that his agency had been called in to question Stuber. 
"We're not normally a part of the airport security operation," Agent 
Mark Connelly told Salon. "That's the FBI's job. But when one of our 
protection subjects gets threatened, we check it out." Asked about 
the list of organizations observed by Stuber, the Secret Service 
source speculated that those organizations might be on a list of 
organizations that the service, which is assigned the task of 
protecting the president, might need to monitor as part of its 
security responsibility.

Additional evidence suggests that Olshansky, Stuber and other 
left-leaning activists are also seen as a threat to aviation, though 
perhaps of a different grade. A top official for the Eagle Forum, an 
old-line conservative group led by anti-feminist icon Phyllis 
Schlafly, said several of the group's members have been delayed at 
security checkpoints for so long that they missed their flights. 
According to Pax Christi, a Catholic peace organization, an American 
member of the Falun Gong Chinese religious group was barred from 
getting back on a plane that had stopped in Iceland, reportedly based 
on information supplied to Icelandic customs by U.S. authorities. The 
person was reportedly permitted to fly onward on a later flight.

Hussein Ibish, communications director of the American Arab 
Anti-Discrimination Committee, says his group has documented over 80 
cases -- involving 200 people -- in which fliers with Arabic names 
have been delayed at the airport, or barred altogether from flying. 
Some, he says, appear to involve people who have no political 
involvement at all, and he speculated that they suffered the 
misfortune of having the same name as someone "on the list" for 
legitimate security reasons.

Until Steigman's confirmation of the no-fly list, the government had 
never admitted its existence. While FBI spokesman Paul Bresson 
confirmed existence of the list, officials at the CIA and U.S. 
Immigration and Naturalization Service declined to comment and 
referred inquiries back to the TSA. Details of how it was assembled 
and how it is being used by the government, airports and airlines are 
largely kept secret.

A security officer at United Airlines, speaking on condition of 
anonymity, confirmed that the airlines receive no-fly lists from the 
Transportation Security Administration but declined further comment, 
saying it was a security matter. A USAir spokeswoman, however, 
declined to comment, saying that the airline's security relationship 
with the federal transit agency was a security matter and that 
discussing it could "jeopardize passenger safety."

Steigman declined to say who was on the no-fly list, but he conceded 
that people like Lawinger, Stuber, Gordon, Adams and Olshansky were 
not "threats to aviation," because they were being allowed to fly 
after being interrogated and searched. But then, in a Byzantine 
twist, he raised the possibility that the security agency might have 
more than one list. "I checked with our security people," he said, 
"and they said there is no [second] list," he said. "Of course, that 
could mean one of two things: Either there is no second list, or 
there is a list and they're not going to talk about it for security 
reasons."

In fact, most of those who have been stopped from boarding flights 
(like Lawinger, Stuber, Gordon and Adams) were able to fly later. 
Obviously, if the TSA thought someone was a genuine "threat to 
aviation" -- like those on the 1,000-name no-fly list, they would 
simply be barred from flying. So does the agency have more than one 
list perhaps -- one for people who are totally barred from flying and 
another for people who are simply harassed and delayed?

Asked why the TSA would be barring a 74-year-old nun from flying, 
Steigman said: "I don't know. You could get on the list if you were 
arrested for a federal felony."

Sister Lawinger says she was arrested only once, back in the 1980s, 
for sitting down and refusing to leave the district office of a local 
congressman. And even then, she says, she was never officially 
charged or fined. But another person who was in the Peace Action 
delegation that day, Judith Williams, says she was arrested and spent 
three days in jail for a protest at the White House back in 1991. In 
that protest, Williams and other Catholic peace activists had scaled 
the White House perimeter fence and scattered baby dolls around the 
lawn to protest the bombing of Iraq. She says that the charge from 
that incident was a misdemeanor, an infraction that would not seem 
enough to establish her as a threat to aviation.

Inevitably, such questions about how one gets on a federal transit 
list creates questions about how to get off it. It is a classic -- 
and unnerving -- Catch-22: Because the Transportation Security 
Administration says it compiles the list from names provided by other 
agencies, it has no procedure for correcting a problem. Aggrieved 
parties would have to go to the agency that first reported their 
names, but for security reasons, the TSA won't disclose which agency 
put someone on the list.

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

Many critics of the security agency's methods accept the need for 
heightened air security, but remain troubled by the more Kafka-esque 
traits of the system. Waters, at the Eagle Forum, worries that the 
government has offered no explanation for how a "threat to aviation" 
is determined. "Maybe the people being stopped are already being 
profiled," she says. "If they're profiling people, what kind of 
things are they looking for? Whether you fit in in your neighborhood?"

"I agree that the government should be keeping known 'threats to 
aviation' off of planes," Ibish says. "I certainly don't want those 
people on my plane! But there has to be a procedure for appealing 
this, and there isn't. There are no safeguards and there is no 
recourse."

Meanwhile, nobody in the federal government has explained why so many 
law-abiding but mostly left-leaning political activists and antiwar 
activists are being harassed at check-in time at airports. "This all 
raises serious concerns about whether the government has made a 
decision to target Americans based on their political beliefs," says 
Katie Corrigan, an ACLU official. The ACLU has set up a No Fly List 
Complaint Form on its Web site.

One particular concern about the government's threat to aviation list 
and any other possible lists of people to be subjected to extra 
security investigation at airports is that names are being made 
available to private companies -- the airlines and airport 
authorities -- charged with alerting security personnel. Unlike most 
other law-enforcement watch lists, these lists are not being closely 
held within the national security or law-enforcement files and 
computers, but are apparently being widely dispersed.

"It's bad enough when the federal government has lists like this with 
no guidelines on how they're compiled or how to use them," says 
Olshansky at the Center for Constitutional Rights. "But when these 
lists are then given to the private sector, there are even less 
controls over how they are used or misused." Noting that airlines 
have "a free hand" to decide whether someone can board a plane or 
not, she says the result is a "tremendous chilling of the First 
Amendment right to travel and speak freely."

But Olshansky, alarmed by her own experience and the number of others 
reporting apparent political harassment, is fighting back. She says 
now that the government has confirmed the existence of a blacklist, 
her center is planning a First Amendment lawsuit against the federal 
government. CCR has already signed up Lawinger, Stuber, and several 
others from Milwaukee's Peace Action group.

Editor's Note: This story has been corrected.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
Philadelphia-based journalist Dave Lindorff writes regularly for Salon.

-- 
Kim Brooks Wei
New Jersey State Coordinator,
Kucinich for President Campaign

V 201.475.1854
mailto:kimbrooks.wei () njforkucinich us
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www.kimbwei.com

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