The crazy continues

Last February, after years of litigation, the U.S government was ordered by a federal judge to remove all references to Malaysian architecture professor Rahinah Ibrahim from its mushrooming "terrorist" databases. He concluded that secret testimony showed that back in 2005 an FBI agent had "checked the wrong box" on a form.

But, as reported by Robert Egelko in the San Francisco Chronicle, our secret spook masters won't let go. On Monday, they denied her a visa to visit the U.S. for "terrorist activities."

The case of a former Stanford graduate student barred from returning to the United States since 2005 has taken another twist with a U.S. consulate's decision this week to deny her a visa because of "terrorist activities" - after the government told a federal judge that she posed no threat to national security.

... [U.S. District Judge William Alsup] ordered the government to purge all references of the listing from its records and to allow Ibrahim to reapply for a visa. But he said he could not order officials to issue the travel documents, because that decision was up to the government.

On Tuesday, Justice Department lawyers submitted declarations from the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies attesting that they had deleted Ibrahim's watch-list placement from their files.

However, they also submitted a State Department declaration disclosing that she had been denied a visa Monday in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur under a law that bars those involved in "terrorist activities" from traveling to the United States.

The tenacity of this woman who has fought their Kafkaesque system for nearly a decade must scare the spooks badly.

The judge's decision can be read here. Too bad it apparently has no force.