Kudos are in order for ProPublica for writing and for the Daily Beast in syndicating a story about how problematic the federal no-fly list is.
ProPublica's Raymond Bonner explains it all to readers in his December 15 story, "One Woman’s Case Proves: It’s Basically Impossible to Get Off the 'No-Fly List.'" Here's an excerpt:
As the Senate debated a proposal this month that would have barred gun sales to people on the government’s terrorism watch lists, Republicans decried the lists as unfair, unreliable and un-American. “There’s no due process or any way to get your name removed from it in a timely fashion,” Sen. Marco Rubio told CNN. “This is not a list you can be certain of,” Jeb Bush said. Mike Huckabee asserted that some people end up on the no-fly list due to “suspicion, not necessarily even so much as probable cause.”
Rahinah Ibrahim, a Malaysian architect with a doctorate from Stanford, knows from personal experience that they have a compelling point. Ibrahim is the only person since the 9/11 attacks to file a court challenge that ultimately removed her name from the watch lists. It took her almost a decade to prevail in court and even that victory has proved pyrrhic for her. While a federal judge agreed that her inclusion on the no-fly list was groundless, she remains unable to obtain a visa that would allow her to visit the United States even to attend academic conferences. A close look at her case by ProPublica provides dramatic evidence of what was argued this month in Washington: It is indeed remarkably easy to get on the list and nearly impossible to get off.
[...]
Ibrahim’s saga began on Jan. 2, 2005. A devout Muslim, she got up before dawn and said her morning prayers. A friend drove her up Highway 101 from San Jose to the San Francisco International Airport. She was booked on United Airlines Flight 41. Ibrahim planned a stopover in Hawaii, where she would deliver a paper at a prestigious conference, before continuing to Malaysia.
The 44-year-old mother of four felt good about her forthcoming trip although she was still in pain from an emergency hysterectomy months earlier. She had just completed four years of demanding course work while also working as a volunteer at the Stanford hospital. She had just passed her oral exams, a considerable accomplishment for someone who had grown up in rural Malaysia and not been out of the country until she was 18.
When Ibrahim, wearing a hijab that allowed not a strand of her brown hair to show, reached the counter, the ticket agent looked at her reservation and summoned a supervisor. Soon, Ibrahim saw two San Francisco police officers striding purposefully through the terminal. After speaking with the supervisor, the officers told Ibrahim that she was under arrest, handcuffed her and marched her through the crowded terminal to a police car that drove her to the airport police station. Inside, as she would later recall, she found herself in a deeply uncomfortable setting, “a handcuffed Muslim woman surrounded by three male policemen.” The officers locked Ibrahim in a cell where she sat on a cold, stainless steel bench and cried, the scar across her abdomen aching.
[...]
The no-fly list is part of the post 9/11 security apparatus, which is a labyrinth of euphemisms and acronyms. The effort is coordinated by the Terrorism Screening Center (TSC), a multi-agency group of officials managed by the FBI in coordination with the CIA. All federal departments and agencies are responsible “for collecting information about potential terrorists or attacks” and sharing that information with the FBI or the CIA, either of which can “nominate” individuals for inclusion in the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB).
From that database, names are passed “downstream” (in bureaucratic jargon) to the so-called “frontline” agencies—for example, to the Transportation Security Agency (TSA), which administers the no-fly list, and to the State Department, where the names are put into the Consular Lookout and Support System (CLASS), which American consular officers around the world call up when a foreigner applies for a visa.
State and local law enforcement officials have access to the database, which now has some 700,000 records. A police officer pulling over a driver for speeding can check the name on the driver’s license against the TSDB. In addition, the lists are shared with more than 20 foreign governments.
An FBI agent need only have a “reasonable suspicion” to “nominate” someone, the FBI guidelines say. It is supposed to be more than “a mere guess or hunches.” But, as Huckabee noted, the standard is well short of the probable cause the police need to arrest a person.
Kudos to ProPublica for releasing this on, of all days, Bill of Rights Day. It's an interesting perspective and given Ms. Ibrahim's plight, a sympathetic case – a law-abiding, scholarly Muslim woman – that doesn't easily fit the mainstream media's preferred narrative of mindlessly parroting liberal Democratic gun-control talking points.
