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ACLU brings lawsuit against federal “no fly list”

Rice’s testimony tries to
shift blame away from
Bush adminstration

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ACLU brings lawsuit against federal
“no fly list”

Compiled by Josh Ferguson

Apr. 14 (AGR) -- The controversial federal “no fly list” came under attack recently as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed the first nationwide challenge to the policy, in the form of a class action lawsuit.

The lawsuit was filed against the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the Department of Homeland Security(DHS), and their respective directors. It was delivered to a federal district court in Seattle on Apr. 6.

The lawsuit was filed by the ACLU on behalf of seven plaintiffs who have been unfairly harassed as a result of the list. Those seven include John Shaw, a 74-year-old Presbyterian minister, Mohamed Ibrahim, a 51-year-old coordinator for the Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia, and Michelle Green, a 36-year-old Master Sergeant in the United States Air Force.

“I am joining this lawsuit today because I have been publicly humiliated and ostracized due to the government’s mistake about my identity,” said Green in an ACLU press release. “As someone who serves her country and obeys the laws of the land, I was shocked to learn I was on the no-fly list. I was even more disturbed to find that there is no way to get off the list.”

The lawsuit states that “innocent passengers” are detained, interrogated, searched, and humiliated publicly without cause. In the context of the suit, “innocent passengers” are defined as those who pose no security risk, have no terrorist ties, and are stopped because their names are similar or identical to other names on the list.

The lawsuit claims that this violates victims’ fourth and fifth ammendment rights, those being the rights to be free from unreasonable search and seizure and the right to due process, respectively.

The no fly list, formally established by the TSA some time after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks of 2001, contains the names of American citizens who are considered to be potential security risks aboard commercial airlines. If an individual whose name is on the list attempts to fly, they are faced with extra searches and interrogation, if not prohibited outright from boarding the plane. The issue is complicated by the fact that there is no way for a person to tell if they are on the list until they are stopped at the airport -– and once on the list, there is no way to be taken off.

Since the list’s inception, it has been surrounded by controversy. Individuals have been prohibited from boarding planes because their name is similar to that of a name on the list, and then told to address their complaints to the TSA, the FBI, their congressional representative, or to a lawyer, depending on which airport official spoke with the passenger at the time. Many individuals have found themselves at the mercy of the list as a result of thirty-year-old civil disobedience charges, or involvement in pacifist anti-war groups, or membership in other religious or social organizations that have no terrorist ties. Many allege that they have been targeted by their ethnicity, or even the ethnic nature of their name.

The TSA refused to acknowledge the existence of the list until November 2002, and it was not until December 2002 when the ACLU filed a lawsuit requesting information on it under the Freedom of Information Act that some information was made public. However, the reports released as a result of this lawsuit were heavily edited and deleted, and the information gave no insight as to the method used for placing names on the list, or how one could be removed from the list after being added.

The TSA currently admits there are two lists that they administer, a selectee list and a no-fly list. The no-fly list is composed of individuals not allowed on a plane; the selectee list is a list of targets for interrogation and extensive screening. Both lists are circulated among airlines and law enforcement groups.

Sources: ACLU, AP

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Rice’s testimony tries to shift blame away
from Bush adminstration

Compiled by Bob Strott

Apr. 14 (AGR) -- National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice testified Apr.8 under oath and in public before the independent National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States investigating the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The White House initially refused to allow Rice’s public testimony but reversed its position after pressure from relatives of Sept. 11 victims, commission members, and politicians.

Her testimony before the commission had a strategy and a structure, to use terms that she favors. The obvious strategy was to swathe every answer to a challenging question from the commissioners in “context” that did more to obfuscate than clarify. The underlying structure of her statements shifted responsibility away from the Bush White House, in any direction possible: toward previous administrations, the FBI, the CIA and, as subtly as possible, toward former counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke.

On no less than seven different occasions in her long-awaited testimony before the September 11th Commission, Rice insisted that there was no specific advance knowledge as to the time, place, and method of the attacks, and that there was no warning of a domestic internal threat from al-Qaida throughout the spring and summer of 2001.

But President Bush was told more than a month before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that supporters of Osama bin Laden planned an attack within the United States with explosives and wanted to hijack airplanes, a government official said on Apr. 9.

The warning came in a secret briefing that Bush received at his ranch in Crawford, TX, on Aug. 6, 2001.

The next day had found Bush in an expansive mood when he ran into reporters while playing golf at the Ridgewood Country Club in Waco, TX.

He seemed carefree as he spoke about the books he was reading, the work he was doing on his nearby ranch, his love of hot-weather jogging, his golf game, and his 55th birthday.

“No mulligans, except on the first tee,” he said to laughter.

However, until Rice answered a sharp question from commissioner Richard Ben Veniste, most Americans probably didn’t know that weeks before Sept. 11, the president had been given a CIA memorandum with the ominous title “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.” The national security advisor insisted that this “historical analysis” of al-Qaida did not provide “new threat information.” But her dismissal of the controversial document undermined her own argument for keeping it classified.

In the context of what former counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke and others have said about the “threat spike” during the prior two months, that warning seems stark enough to have provoked serious action. According to Rice, she and the president assumed that the FBI, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the rest of the federal bureaucracy had done whatever they could — given the “structural impediments” in a dysfunctional Washington bureaucracy.

“The president of the United States had us at battle stations during this period of time,” she testified.

But Commissioner Jamie Gorelick challenged Rice’s assertion that federal agencies and their field offices had been put on alert status during the threat spike. Citing previous commission interviews with the FAA administrator, FBI officials from around the country, and Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta, among others, Gorelick said that none of them had ever heard the warnings of a potential attack.

Sources: CNN, From the Wilderness, Salon.com., Washington Post

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