The MAGA wish list is BS

They want us to be afraid as the dreaded MAGA inauguration comes. "Us" here means newcomers to the USofA, Brown people, and their friends who can be confident about our citizenship status; we're all in this together. They will give us plenty of reasons to fear, some of those reasons genuine. They can do bad things.

But not all that is threatened is possible. But they can't do everything they want without friction. Our job is to enhance that friction.

Perhaps most people shouldn't focus on the cruel possibilities the Trump immigration threats make possible. After all, inciting the fears is part of their playbook of forced deportations. But those of us who can bear knowing the possibilities can recognize the gamut these threats run.

David J. Bier [@davidjbier.bsky.social], Director of Immigration Studies at the pro-immigration, libertarian Cato Institute summarizes what Trump's immigration agenda might look like in the approximate order we might see it. In addition to what Trump has been saying about his plans, this list largely derives from Project 2025.

1) cancel the 2023 Biden-initiated Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela (CHNV) parole processes for refugees which have channeled 30,000 people/month into legal channels 

2) ban scheduling appointments for lawful entry from Mexico using the 2023 Biden-initiated CBP One app

3) suspend the refugee program for 100+ days & cut cap from 125K to 20K 

4) impose a visa/travel ban on a dozen countries 

5) impose new "extreme vetting" requirements on all countries 

6) possibly suspend all visas globally for 30 days

7) declare a national emergency at the border 

8) deploy the national guard to the border

9) redirect military funds to build detention camps

10) restart border wall construction 

11) invoke Title 42 health authority to expel migrants [legal ruse used during COVID]

12) restart family detention

13) declare an invasion 

14) invoke the Alien Enemies Act to deport without due process 

15) use the military to enforce Alien Enemies Act 

16) revoke prioritization of criminals & security threats for deportation

17) let state/local police conduct immigration arrests & deportation

18) restrict federal funding for sanctuary cities 

19) conduct public raid in a sanctuary city 

20) instruct review of birthright citizenship 

21) review of public charge rule reinstatement 

22) review of TPS and DACA

For all MAGA's anti-migrant hysteria, this list of cruelty and stupidity is not going to happen in a day. In fact, most of it will never happen at all, because it is either illegal, impossible to implement, or they are too inept to mobilize a whole country around their hateful plans.

For all Donald's posturing, as recently as last July, Gallup found that most Americans appreciate the contributions of newcomers to the country.

Click to enlarge

Yet hard-pressed individuals and families who are very much part of our lives at going to be at risk under the Trump regime. Republicans have made promises of prosperity and stability they cannot and will not keep, especially while implementing an anti-immigrant panic. Who is going to harvest our food and wash the pans in the local fast food chain? For that matter, who is going to write computer code for the Musks and Zucks?

The first six months will be the worst; I still believe our fellow citizens will recoil as excesses pile up. Most of us like our neighbors and appreciate them. The job for those of us not currently at risk is to support vulnerable people and throw whatever sand we can conjure up into the gears of the deportation machine. Let's support the lawyers who care for the people. We know how to do this.

A national directory of non-profit, low cost immigration legal services.

Immigration law is rat's next of mysterious byways and dead ends. Several articles which communicate some of the horror which our politicians have made of immigration:

Dara Lind explains What ‘Mass Deportation’ Actually Means

Aaron Reichin-Melnick interviewed at Radly Balko's The Watch

Adrian Carrasquillo writes a column called Huddled Masses at The Bulwark. He has wide sources.

On adding more trouble to existing trouble

I can't resist commenting on this news item: Delta Air Lines wants to make disruptive customers eligible for an FBI watch list that keeps suspected terrorists off flights.

Really?? The "no fly" list and the "terrorist watch" lists have been an impenetrable, arbitrary, biased morass since they were expanded in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The government won't reveal who is on these lists, how a person might get off them -- essentially anything that might uphold a personal "right to travel."

Adding airline customers who act out on flights would only make a dubious instrument that even less creditable and equitable.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg knows a questionable idea when he encounters one:

“Obviously, there are enormous implications in terms of civil liberties, in terms of how you administer something like that. I mean even when it was over terrorism, it was not a simple thing to set up.”

I understand an airline might want to toss this hot potato off to the feds, but I doubt they'll pick it up. Unless perhaps one of these traveling idiots assaults a powerful Senator. Bashing a flight attendant is one thing; messing with a pol, another thing.

Perhaps Buttigieg's department can work through the Federal Aviation Administration to make it easier for airlines to bring criminal charges against unruly passengers. It's not only good business to keep flights peaceful -- it should also be enforceable law.

Full disclosure: This issue is personal for me. Erudite Partner and I were told at the San Francisco airport in 2002 that we were on the no fly list. Through the ACLU, we sought disclosure about this secret list in a federal suit that dragged on through 2006. The government never revealed why we'd been stopped but neither of us subsequently had additional trouble and the ACLU was awarded court costs in the lawsuit.

We have a long history of struggle over what government is for

It's annoying and dispiriting to watch Republican opposition to President Biden's effort to improve U.S. hard infrastructure. Pretty much everyone agrees roads, bridges, and airports need help, but GOP legislators have received death threats for voting for the Biden plan.

Because the inescapable dividing line in U.S. politics in the mid-19th century was the continued existence and expansion of slavery, it's easy to overlook that support for federally financed "internal improvements" was some of the glue that held together the emerging Republican Party coalition 160 years ago.

The small white master class which ruled states which became the Union-breaking Confederacy wasn't interested in anything that would advance prosperity broadly among small farmers, laborers, and working immigrants. They were doing just fine extracting value from forced slave labor on their plantations. Republicans found a majority constituency by promising to use the federal government to encourage infrastructure building for everyone. There was something from Republicans for the many, even if voters weren't interested in national politics.

The leading planks of the 1860 Republican platform on which Abraham Lincoln ran began by confronting the crisis created by slavery.

That the history of the nation during the last four years, has fully established the propriety and necessity of the organization and perpetuation of the Republican party, and that the causes which called it into existence are permanent in their nature, and now, more than ever before, demand its peaceful and constitutional triumph....

That the maintenance of the principles promulgated in the Declaration of Independence and embodied in the Federal Constitution, “That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” is essential to the preservation of our Republican institutions...

That the new dogma that the Constitution, of its own force, carries slavery into any or all of the territories of the United States, is a dangerous political heresy...

That the normal condition of all the territory of the United States is that of freedom ... 

But that document went on to promise, against the dogmas of the slavocracy, to use government to improve the lives of the people in ways that should seem familiar today:

That appropriations by Congress for river and harbor improvements of a national character, required for the accommodation and security of an existing commerce, are authorized by the Constitution, and justified by the obligation of Government to protect the lives and property of its citizens.

That a railroad to the Pacific Ocean is imperatively demanded by the interests of the whole country; that the federal government ought to render immediate and efficient aid in its construction; and that, as preliminary thereto, a daily overland mail should be promptly established.

And Republican-led Congresses during the bloody Civil War that followed Lincoln's election proceeded to enact a broad wish list of "improvements" that had been blocked by the slave states, including support for railroads, higher education, and owner-occupied small farms. 

How far today's Republican legislators have fallen from this broad vision of national well-being -- in thrall to financiers, corporate bosses, and conman Donald!

Government rebuked over no fly list lawsuit

Rahinah Ibrahim, then a Stanford grad student, now a professor of architecture in her native Malaysia, was placed on a no fly/terrorist watch list in 2004. She was prevented from returning to her studies or even visiting the U.S. Her U.S. citizen daughter was also caught up in the ban. Federal lawyers fought tooth and nail against her lawsuit to challenge her designation.

Until 2014. At that point, an FBI agent told a judge in closed testimony that Ibrahim's exclusion was just a mistake. TechDirt shared some of the heavily redacted transcript:

Agent Kelley misunderstood the directions on the form and erroneously nominated Dr. Ibrahim to the TSA's no-fly list [redacted]. He did not intend to do so. This was a mistake, he admitted at trial. He intended to nominate her to the [very long redaction]. He checked the wrong boxes, filling out the form exactly the opposite way from the instructions on the form. He made this mistake even though the form stated, "It is recommended the subject NOT be entered into the following selected terrorist screening databases."

Oops.

Though the government gave up its defense of its no fly list mistake, Ibrahim remained excluded from the U.S. (possibly because of unproved allegations about her husband) and her attorneys were only partially compensated for the $3.6 million they'd spent preparing this complicated international case. Last Wednesday an appeals court said the government should be ordered to pay up.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in an 8-3 ruling, found that federal lawyers engaged in “scorched earth litigation” for nearly a decade against the former Stanford University graduate student, even though they knew she posed no threat.

“Once the government discovers that its litigation position is baseless, it may not continue to defend it,” Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw, a Clinton appointee, wrote for the majority.

...Let's hope this brings us near the completion of this particular panicked government response to the 9/11 terrorists attacks. In the early '00s both politicians and federal spooks were scared stupid that additional horrors might be immanent and defended themselves from responsibility by trampling over vulnerable individuals. I wonder if federal judges confronted with an outright racist president, his thuggish Heimat Security Department, and a neo-Confederate Attorney General (now cast aside), are more alert to abuses that they tolerated for a decade under weak "national security" claims? Perhaps....Full disclosure: Erudite Partner and I were told at the San Francisco airport that we were on the no fly list in 2002. Through the ACLU, we sought disclosure about this secret list in a federal case that dragged on through 2006.

Photo via Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM)

On freedom from unwarranted search and seizure while traveling

Back in the dim, distant days when I started this blog (2005!) I wrote a lot about the TSA and government watch lists. (After all, the E.P. and I were told we were on the no fly list for awhile, enough to offer a chance for the ACLU to try to find out what the government was up to.) This topic has been less a priority lately, but given everything else, it is not too surprising that it seems once again current.

We've all learned a lot since those days; there's an excellent, thorough, book on the history of the U.S. government using our desire to travel to constrain and control citizens they take to be troublemakers. (The picture is of Mrs. Ruth Shipley who did the dirty work for Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and FBI chief J.Edgar Hoover in the 1950s.)

Once again, the ACLU has taken up a "freedom to travel" case, this one of what seems a novel sort because it involves involuntary (short) detention of people who have not only passed through all the security theater that dominates our airports, but also have already completed their journey.

On February 22, 2017, Delta Airlines Flight 1583 departed San Francisco and headed for John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. As the plane was landing, passengers heard a strange announcement.

Speaking over the intercom, a flight attendant announced that everyone would have to show their documents in order to get off the plane. After passengers expressed their consternation, the flight attendant repeated her announcement, stating that officers would be meeting the plane and every passenger would have to show government-issued ID to deplane.

... the government does not have this authority. The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires government agents to have individualized suspicion to conduct even a brief investigatory stop. Despite this, two Customs and Border Protection agents met Flight 1583 and stood immediately outside the aircraft door, blocking the exit into the jetway. The officers wore uniforms emblazoned with the words, “POLICE/CUSTOMS AND BORDER PROTECTION,” and carried guns visible in their holsters.

Passengers were naturally intimidated; some interactions with these apparent Homeland Security spooks seemed racially tinged to some passengers.

The ACLU's filing contains other notable details:

Despite the focus on the identification documents, DOE 1 and DOE 2 [officers] carried no clipboard, photograph, or list of names and did not appear to check the passengers’ identification against any list.

.... Plaintiffs did not consent to any search or seizure as they were attempting to deplane Flight 1583. Instead, they understood from the circumstances, as set forth above, that the stop and search was mandatory and that they were not free to deplane without submitting to the officers. The coercive circumstances included the announcements made by the flight crew at CBP’s direction, the presence of two large armed CBP officers obstructing the only means of egress from the plane, and the words and actions of those officers, as described above.

I recognize that last condition. When we were stopped at the San Francisco airport in 2002, we were surrounded by three urgently summoned police officers who told us that, "no" -- we might not go get a drink of water until they figured out what to do with us.

Liberty survives when people speak up against government infringements on our freedoms. It will likely be a long haul, but props to these plaintiffs for stepping up to the fight.

Media consumption diet

Today a friend offered this:

I'm doing my best to boycott / not listen to any Chump speeches / press conferences for as long as I can. It's a self-preservation thing (gotta watch the blood pressure and anxiety levels) but also a strategic thing. He lies half the time (or more), retracts the other half, and almost all of it is nonsense, not to mention white supremacist, sexist, anti-immigrant, anti-poor people and anti-planet. ... We have to get smart, people, and play the long game. The stakes are too high to do anything else.

To this I respond a loud AMEN. Part of keeping our sanity is controlling how much bullshit we have to sort through.

An article from Politico describes the perils of the Trumpian information environment. The orange con-man is working hard to get into our brains.

What happens when a lie hits your brain? The now-standard model was first proposed by Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert more than 20 years ago. Gilbert argues that people see the world in two steps. First, even just briefly, we hold the lie as true: We must accept something in order to understand it. For instance, if someone were to tell us—hypothetically, of course—that there had been serious voter fraud in Virginia during the presidential election, we must for a fraction of a second accept that fraud did, in fact, take place. Only then do we take the second step, either completing the mental certification process (yes, fraud!) or rejecting it (what? no way).

Unfortunately, while the first step is a natural part of thinking—it happens automatically and effortlessly—the second step can be easily disrupted. It takes work: We must actively choose to accept or reject each statement we hear. In certain circumstances, that verification simply fails to take place. As Gilbert writes, human minds, “when faced with shortages of time, energy, or conclusive evidence, may fail to unaccept the ideas that they involuntarily accept during comprehension.”

Our brains are particularly ill-equipped to deal with lies when they come not singly but in a constant stream, and Trump, we know, lies constantly ...But Trump goes a step further. If he has a particular untruth he wants to propagate—not just an undifferentiated barrage—he simply states it, over and over. As it turns out, sheer repetition of the same lie can eventually mark it as true in our heads.

Ah, yes, today he's selling voter fraud snake oil.

We do have a defense mechanism: we can make thoughtful choices about what information we consume and how we consume it.

I have a confession to make. As yesterday's post showed, I'm a news consumer formed by the Vietnam-era. By that I mean that I have almost never in a long life trusted government statements, especially about our foreign military adventures, but even about most anything. I've worked a long life in politics of various kinds. I've seen a fair number of politicians in action. By and large, I don't consume anything they say either, at least not by way of TV or video. I might listen to some audio or scan the text of a pronouncement, but infrequently. In general, I try to wait a little until the dust has settled before consuming complicated stories. For one ancient example, although I was surrounded by headlines and shouting TVs, I intentionally didn't attempt to understand the ins and outs of Watergate/the Nixon impeachment until after that crook resigned; I waited til All the President's Men came out. Far more recently, I didn't really try to understand the ins and outs of Obamacare until Dems finally managed to write the law.

Yet I've never felt seriously under-informed. As I've written here before, I scan the New York Times for a general picture of what the talkers of the world are talking about. On most topics, the headlines are plenty. Most of my input comes from other sources; these days I'm liking Talking Points Memo, Slate, and Vox. On this blog, I'll usually find a mainstream source for anything contemporary I want to discuss, but my reflections have often been spurred by something I encountered elsewhere, including from the sites on the blog list at the right.

I ignore Twitter. Half a decade ago I assembled a list of interesting reporters to follow. It worked for awhile, pointing me to journalism I might want to read. But then most Twitter users, including the journalists, turned the platform into a playpen for clever self-display, so I've stopped caring.

I do consume podcasts, particularly those from the same sources I also read online. That's because podcasts work well with my running habit.

And I still read widely in that obsolete source: books! Historical experience both alarms and reassures. It can help us survive Trump; after all, we're writing our own saga of defending democracy and decency in a mature capitalist, multi-ethnic, over-burdened society and planet. Let's make it a good story!***UPDATE on how I read news: this morning, the Washington Post has a headline that reads "Trump signs executive orders clearing way for oil pipelines to move forward." That's a story there is no point in reading. We knew he'd do that. Soon enough, in other venues, I'll be able to read how Native nations, water protectors, and friends are responding. That's worth reading.

Graphic stolen from Slate.

Heroes who took on the big babies

As we watch Trump (and the Republican Party) implode since the release of the tape of him gloating over sexual assault, how about a shout-out to some of the millions of women (and some men) who've put themselves in the line of fire to make powerful men's entitlement to women's bodies an unacceptable claim?

In no particular order:

• Planned Parenthood workers: who literally put themselves in the line of fire to ensure women receive basic health services.

• Nafissatou Diallo: New York City hotel maid who dared charge the head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, with rape. Sure, she turned out to want to make what cash she could out to the encounter, but hey, she needed the money and Strauss-Kahn, being smarter than Trump, was willing to pay up to avoid having his sexual exploits dragged out in court.

• Brock Turner's accuser who blew out the injustice system's circuits by demanding that a Stanford swimmer should suffer for "20 minutes of action" for humping a passed out female stranger. Let's also remember the two male Swedish student passersby who interrupted Mr. Turner's little party.

• Feminist bloggers who struggled to make a place for women's perspectives in a tech environment full of entitled creeps; and, like Jessica Valenti, Lindy West, Jamia Wilson and many more have been worn down by the hate spewed at them.

• Then there's Gamergate, a Twitter and social media kerfuffle in 2014, during which the deplorables on the alt-right web tried to drive women such as video game developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu out of their cozy electronic man cave. Sexual shaming was their means; solidarity was the only defense.

• Hey, remember the crap my friend Renee Bracey Sherman takes every day for campaigning for women to be able to have safe, affordable abortions without guilt.

• For that matter, remember the crap Anita Hill took for calling out her boss, that would be silent Justice Thomas, for "sexual harassment". Her courage gave us language with which we talk about this stuff. Before her, sexual harassment was just what men in power did.

This list is just what I came up with in a random half hour. Millions of people, mostly but not all women, have got us to where Trump's behavior is no longer just normal. Please leave additional names of women who changed our standards about what big baby men can do to us in the comments.

Mysterious exclusion unraveled: she's married!

In a couple of days, it will be eleven years since Stanford PhD and distinguished Malaysian affordable housing architect Rahinah Ibrahim was arrested at SFO, told she was on the TSA no-fly list, and then excluded from visiting the United States. Since 2008, she's won a court order for disclosure of why she's barred, experienced lengthy government stalling, been forced by her visa denial to testify from abroad on videotape, been the beneficiary of a secret ruling, finally been told that her listing came because an FBI agent checked the wrong box, and then, once more, denied a visa because of "terrorist activities.

The determined investigative journalist Raymond Bonner has tried to untangle the complete, shameful, saga for ProPublica. Bonner is the reporter who first uncovered the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador in 1982. He's used to getting to the bottom of cover-ups. For this article, he wrangled the first extensive interview with Ibrahim about her long case.

And it turns out, this story is also about the inability of U.S. authorities to separate the activities of an accomplished woman who follows her faith by wearing the hijab from their doubts about her husband!

[Judge William] Alsup provided a hint to the answer in three sentences, easy to overlook in his 38-page opinion, and carefully crafted so as not to reveal any classified information. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, there are nine grounds for denying a person a visa. “Some of them go beyond whether the applicant herself poses a national security threat,” Alsup wrote. The judge did not list the nine grounds. But the immigration law is a public document. Eight of the categories apply to the applicant. One does not. The ninth basis for turning down a visa application is if the person “is the spouse” of a foreigner who has engaged in any terrorist-related activity in the preceding five years.

Thus, the basis for Ibrahim’s place on the watch lists would appear to be something the law purportedly abhors — guilt by association, or in this case, by marriage.

The U.S. government's suspicions of Ibrahim's husband Mustafa Kamal seem flimsy indeed.

While his wife was at Stanford, Kamal undertook several humanitarian missions to Mindanao, the predominately Muslim province in the Philippines. A civil war had been simmering there for nearly two decades, waged by Muslims seeking independence from, or at least greater autonomy in, the overwhelmingly Catholic country. The war had created more than 200,000 refugees. When Kamal visited for five days in 2003, providing food for widows and orphans, building wells and schools, restoring mosques, the province had become a front in the Bush Administration’s war on terrorism; CIA and FBI agents were all over the place. ...

Former FBI and CIA agents who were working in that area at the time told me that Kamal, by his mere presence in Mindanao doing humanitarian work, would have come to the attention of American intelligence.

There may be another reason Ibrahim ended up on the no-fly list. “Maybe they got the wrong wife,” said an American official who has followed the case closely.

As allowed in Islam, Kamal has two additional wives. It is not something Ibrahim or her husband try to hide. He lists his wives, and posts photos of the families on Facebook. Altogether, Kamal has 13 children. They often gather at Ibrahim’s house on holidays. “We are one big family,” she told me.

Kamal’s third wife, Kurais Abdullah Karim, a Filipina, could also be a cause of Ibrahim’s problems. A lecturer at the International University of Malaysia, Karim, is from Mindanao and is, as Kamal put it, a “humanitarian activist.” In addition to having her own blog, about fashion, and posting regularly on Instagram, she is an unabashed supporter of the Muslim liberation movement in Mindanao. ... (In 2014, the Philippine Government and the secessionist Muslims signed a peace treaty ending more than four decades of civil war.)

Kamal said he has never had any involvement with Jemaah Islamiyah, or any other terrorist organization. Malaysian intelligence and security agencies keep close tabs on Malaysians who go to Mindanao, American and European intelligence officials told me, but they do not have a file on Kamal or Ibrahim. If they did, she would not be allowed to be a professor, let alone dean, at the government university, current and former Malaysian officials said, a conclusion shared by American officials who have worked in Malaysia.

... The State Department still considers her ineligible under the terrorism category, and she will have to apply again for a waiver should she seek to come to the United States.

I find Ibrahim's persistence in seeking truth and redress through all this quite inspiring. Perhaps that sort of grit is what it takes for a girl from a rural village to become an internationally recognized architect.

Guns and the no-fly list

On Sunday night the Prez suggested that

"Congress should act to make sure no one on a no-fly list is able to buy a gun. What could possibly be the argument for allowing a terrorist suspect to buy a semi-automatic weapon? This is a matter of national security."

I have to admit that I momentarily enjoyed the politics behind the suggestion. When Republicans are pissing in their pants at the idea of admitting desperate escapees from the Syrian war and ISIS, they refuse to vote to prevent people designated as dangerous from acquiring guns? That's low.

But hey, I was once told I was on the no fly list which was always a crock. Certainly I was never any danger to aviation or much of anything else. And much as the spooks like to tout their "success" at preventing terrorism, people who actually know something about security have long thought watch lists were mere "theater."

So I don't mind that that Jamelle Bouie has reminded anyone inclined to enjoy the Prez's thrust against gun lovers' hypocrisy that we're putting ourselves on the wrong side of rights we normally care about.

... civil libertarians—and liberals, at least during the Bush administration—think [the terrorist watch list] is constitutionally dubious. They’re right. “The list contains the names of people who the government thinks are a threat to civil aviation—terrorists,” writes University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner for Slate. “These people are denied passage. … Yet the government does not have proof that these people have committed crimes nor, since it can’t see into the future, that they will commit crimes.” If you’re on these lists, you’re presumed guilty until proven innocent, with no due process and little recourse.

The list is conceptually flawed, and using it to deny gun ownership is wrong on its face. Add racial and religious profiling to the mix—the people on the list, including Americans, are disproportionately Arab or from Muslim countries—and you have an anti-gun measure with deep disparate impact.

He's right; my politically convenient pleasure is wrong. Schadenfreude at Republican discomfiture is no excuse.

No Fly list sputters along

For awhile, because we'd been told we were on it, I wrote a lot about the U.S. government's No Fly list -- and the various other watch lists that popped up after 9/11. Last year I wrote up a good book on the history of terrorist watch lists. It seems governments instinctively restrict travel when they can get away with it.

These days, I fly unimpeded.

But lots of people -- mostly Muslim people it seems -- remain stuck in No Fly hell, not entirely predictably or rationally.

The latest case I've run across is that of Mourad Benchellali. Benchellali was released from Guantanamo in 2004. A French citizen, he was sold to the U.S. by Pakistanis after he escaped Afghanistan in the wake of the U.S. invasion in 2001. By his own account, as related by the British human rights activist Andy Worthington, he was a dumb 19 year who blundered into a mess.

His father was a radical imam who had tried (and failed) to fight in Bosnia, his brother Menad had tried (and failed) to fight in Chechnya, and his brother, his father and even his mother had all spent time in French prisons, but he insisted that he went to Afghanistan for “an adventure” and as a way of enhancing his status, hoping that he would be “viewed differently” in his neighbourhood, and that his reputation might “match” that of his brother. He admitted that his sense of adventure was “misguided and mistimed,” and blamed his brother for encouraging him to go, and for arranging for him to attend a training camp. “For two months, I was there,” he wrote after his release, “trapped in the middle of the desert by fear and my own stupidity.”

The U.S released him to his home country in 2004, where he was tried, convicted of associating with terrorists, and given credit for time served in Guantanamo. A complex appeal process actually got the charges dropped, and re-raised, and dropped again. In 2008 Worthington reports that he explained further in an interview to McClatchy Newspapers:

It was June 2001, and I thought I’d take a vacation, be back in time for classes in September. Later, the papers would say I was a desperate outsider [in France], trapped looking in on an uncaring nation. But that’s not true. I was happy. I was getting an education. I had a job. I had a fiancee. I just thought I wanted a bit of adventure.

So what has he been doing since he returned to France beside writing a book alleging he was tortured by the U.S. in Kandahar and Guantanamo? He's been traveling about, using his own experience as an example to discourage young people tempted by the Islamic State's recruitment pitches. He's a counter-jihadi recruiter! He has flown in Europe with no trouble.

But when invited to speak at a conference on peace and radicalization in Montreal, he was prevented from attending by the U.S. No Fly list.

No, he wasn't coming to this country. But the U.S. makes any airline passing through U.S. airspace submit a passenger list. He was refused boarding in Lyon. At least he was told the U.S. list prevented him from keeping his appointment; too often people are just kept in the dark about what prevents them from flying.

I can't help wondering -- is Benchellali's continued inclusion on the list inefficiency on the part of list keepers who never remove anyone? Or do they really think this speaker against terrorist recruitment is a danger? Or is it because his story puts the U.S. in a bad light? We are not allowed to know, of course. National security theater in action ...

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.

All because an FBI agent checked the wrong box ...

… an innocent Malaysian professor was placed on the U.S. no-fly list, had her visa revoked and, when she reapplied to enter the U.S., received a denial with the word "terrorist" scribbled on the form. Dr Rahinah Ibrahim was a graduate student at Stanford in 2004 when she first found herself enmeshed in this Kafkaesque nightmare. She is now dean of architecture at Universiti Putra Malaysia.

Federal Judge William Alsup revealed the details that led to her listing in a heavily redacted opinion ordering U.S. authorities to remove all references to Ibrahim in their various terrorist databases. He apparently also ordered the U.S. to stop impeding travel by Dr. Ibrahim's U.S. citizen daughter, but the entirety of that part of his opinion is blacked out.

Dr. Ibrahim's is the first lawsuit that has successfully penetrated the mysteries of a post 9/11 government watch listing program and won a verdict requiring removal. Her result suggests that the government's insistence on concealing the process by which it assembles its lists may be as much about avoiding revelations of overreach or incompetence as about protecting us from people they believe are terrorists.

Uncovering and leashing the watchers, then and now

In Mrs. Shipley's Ghost: The Right to Travel and Terrorist Watchlists, Jeffrey Kahn, a law professor at SMU, tackles three tasks: narrating the history of US government controls on the people's travel, explicating the post 9/11 maze of "no fly" controls, and suggesting a more freedom-friendly legal regime than what frightened politicians and ever aggrandizing spook bureaucracies have wrought.

Looking back at US government watch lists, he has brought to light the regime of Mrs. Shipley. Her obscure office in the State Department decided which US citizens might be issued passports largely without any outside scrutiny from the 1930s through the 50s. Passports in that era were a novelty that only became essential for travel after World War I era controls somehow leached into the ensuing uneasy European "peace." Once the very idea of regulating individual's travel had emerged amid wartime fears, a government office took upon itself to decide which citizens might harm US interests by going abroad freely. Remembered victims include playwright Arthur Miller and the Communist singer Paul Robeson who were both denied passports, but there were thousands who found themselves so restricted, mostly anonymously.

Ruth Shipley was not a politician or even a political appointee. She was a civil servant who rose from the ranks of World War I era file clerks to become a force in Washington whom presidents praised and to whom senators paid obeisance. Franklin Delano Roosevelt called her "a wonderful ogre," which he intended as a great compliment. …Mrs. Shipley controlled travel by issuing, or not, what became a license for their travel: a passport. It was her job to decide who could go where, for how long, and under what conditions. On the day she retired, Mrs. Shipley's office had amassed files on twelve million people. …

As the anti-Communist paranoia of the 1950s receded, a series of legal decisions curtailed the arbitrary power of Mrs. Shipley's office; several of these were written by Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who

in 1959, was obliged to write to Deputy Undersecretary of State Robert Murphy seeking his "personal consideration and if necessary to discuss with Secretary [of State] Herter and President Eisenhower" the Department's decision not to validate his passport for travel to China.

Kahn describes the contemporary watch list system -- the Terrorist Screening Center, the Terrorist Screening Database, and their offshoots -- as less personal and even less penetrable than Mrs. Shipley's regime. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, officials charged with "security," felt exposed as failures and were determined never to let any danger slip past them again. All their incentives encouraged them to expand controls like a cancer.

After the information-sharing mistakes revealed by 9/11, there was considerable zeal to err on the side of overinclusion. Even as late as 2005, Justice Department auditors reported that the then-director of the TSC, Donna Bucella, told them that "to err on the side of caution, individuals with any degree of a terrorism nexus were included" on the consolidated watch list so long as minimum identifying data were available. … in late 2009, the Terrorist Screening Database contained the names of approximately 400,000 people.

The mushrooming lists quickly left the narrow regime of preventing threats to commercial flights and became an instrument of more general coercion. The various security agencies have taken advantage of their ability to prevent travel in order to bring pressure on, mostly Muslim, citizens they wished to investigate or recruit as spies among their communities. (I've chronicled the case of Air Force vet Saadiq Long and his is by no means the only such instance.)

Kahn concludes:

[The] shift from corporeal form to digital avatar accomplished a neat trick, even if those who created the new system did not realize just who they had regenerated. There is no single Mrs. Shipley anymore. Her power was certainly not transferred to the singular discretion of the Director of the Terrorist Screening Center. But Mrs. Shipley's spirit did not entirely disappear. It has been diffused into the databases and computers of scores of analysts working in a systematic, multilevel process.

This makes decision making appear scientific, rigorous, and technologically sophisticated. Data points are parsed and assessed at different stages according to set criteria by dedicated professionals in the "watchlistiing community." The involvement of multiple agencIes with a stake in the results would seem to prevent any single person from amassing the power Mrs. Shipley did. What could be more objective and dispassionate?

… The new system makes it much harder to identify just who is responsible for the final decision to ground a citizen. …Officials in both eras have emphasized the careful vetting and professional judgment used in their departments. But the answer boils down to the same two words: trust us.

Ah yes: "trust us" -- there's President Obama's mantra in response to Edward Snowden's documentation of the NSA's vacuuming collection of our lives; we'll give you cosmetic reforms, we'll study it, but trust us. If the history is to believed, trust in authorities is a mistake unless those authorities are also forced to explain and verify, even when they don't want to.

Kahn goes on to propose that an unrestricted right to travel without government permission should be considered a basic entitlement of citizenship in a democratic state, subject to the strictest scrutiny before officials can use their power to infringe on it. I don't know whether his legal arguments have any future. The Ibrahim case is the latest instance in a string of court decisions that seem to point to a judicial willingness to put some limits on the spooks -- and to the courts' inability to get much more of a grip on the bureaucracy than individuals enjoy.

Her "day in court" (she's barred) is Kafkaesque

Lately I've been writing rather cavalierly about the abusive treatment our post 9/11 Heimat Security regime inflicts on people in the process of trying to fly.

But thanks to Nell writing in the comments, I'm now following more closely Dr. Rahinah Ibrahim's ongoing challenge to her no-fly list status through the excellent series of accounts at Papers Please! (Should you follow this link and find that Dr. Ibrahim's story is no longer the lead item, just enter "Ibrahim" in the search box in the right column.)

Ibrahim is not some no-count, anonymous foreign Muslim. According to the Associated Press' trial coverage, she's

... 48, lives in Malaysia with her husband and four children and is dean of the architecture and engineering school at the University of Malaysia.

She was apparently added to the no-fly list when a graduate student at Stanford over ten years ago

The current trial is beyond Kafkaeque. Ibrahim can only testify on videotape. The U.S. government barred Ibrahim's U.S. citizen daughter from flying in from Malaysia to testify by putting the daughter on a no-fly list. This intervention was revealed by the Malaysian airline, then the U.S. spooks implausibly denied their actions. More here. Lawyers for Ibrahim were subjected to a clearance process under an order from the trial judge and thus allowed to learn what the government says is Ibrahim's watch list status -- but they are barred from telling their client.

The theory about what caused Ibrahim to be barred from flying that is presented in her legal briefs is that 1) linguistically-challenged Feds confused the similar names of a Malaysian academic association with an Islamic terrorist outfit and 2) the FBI wanted to recruit her to spy on Muslim mosques while she was grad student in California, but she stiffed them, so they stuck her on a barring list and still refuse to admit they screwed up.

The AP summarizes

"Once you're in the system it's almost impossible to get out," Ibrahim's lawyer Elizabeth Pipkin told the judge Monday during opening statements at the trial. Pipkin said Ibrahim landed on the no-fly list through inadequate training of list administrators and their bias regarding religious and national origin.

I find that totally plausible. We always refused to speculate on why the government once apparently briefly listed a couple of San Francisco peace activists. But it always seemed likely that our awkward detention was the product of a "round up the usual suspects" impulse after 9/11. Having made the initial mistake, the government was willing to devote huge resources to avoiding any kind of scrutiny, as much to avoid embarrassing itself as to maintain any legitimate "state secrets."

The judge in Dr. Ibrahim's case seems frustrated and appalled by the government's evasions of ordinary legal procedures. (Our judge, Charles Breyer, the brother of the Supreme Court judge, acted equally critical of the Feds. Experienced federal court judges don't like to be handed lies and gobbledegook.) Let's hope he forces this story into the open. He'll take a lot of shit if he does, but under our current surveillance state regime, only occasional courage on the part of fortuitously placed individuals seems to impede the rush to pervasive tyranny.

Meanwhile, testimony in this trial taught me that I better get hold of a copy of Jeffrey Kahn's book,Mrs. Shipley's Ghost: The Right to Travel and Terrorist Watchlists, to keep up on these issues. More to come.

After 8 years, government still won't say why she can't fly

Here's an update I never expect to write. I first reported about the "no fly" list case of Stanford grad student Rahinah Ibrahim in 2008. The precipitating incident occurred in January 2005. And her effort to find out why she was listed continues to this day:


The clip is a interview with a Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) attorney, Munia Jabbar, in which the lawyer shares a careful explanation of the U.S. government's Kafkaesque "terrorist" watch lists.

Back when we were pressing our no fly list lawsuit, we used to jokingly refer to it as "the case that wouldn't die." Ibrahim seems to have the real undead case -- and the government still refuses to tell the people it lists why they've been included (Hint: being Muslim-surnamed seems to count) or what they could do to get clear of the lists.

Gay openess is creeping up on the NFL

I never thought I'd see this. The hyper-gendered world of the National Football League has tied itself in knots trying to navigate the legal maze that is the employment rights (if any) of gay athletes.

Colorado tight end Nick Kasa, unintentionally, started one part of the fuss by telling a radio interviewer that some team had asked him: "Do you like girls?" According to sportswriter Judy Batista:

Kasa said the question came as part of a series of queries about whether he was married or had a girlfriend. On Wednesday, he said in another radio appearance that he did not think the question was serious, although he said it was asked after he said he was not married and did not have a girlfriend.

Questions about family relationships are not unusual during the scouting process, but the N.F.L. has had to deal with inappropriate questions before, as teams try to uncover anything they can about players before the draft. During a predraft visit in 2010, Dolphins General Manager Jeff Ireland asked receiver Dez Bryant if his mother was a prostitute. Ireland later apologized.

Oops. These guys may be treated as high priced beef, but they do have some rights. How many is a little bit unclear.

"Yahoo!Expert" Martin Rogers thinks what may be asked depends on the location of the team asking, hence the interesting list at the left.

Meanwhile, it's not only Kasa whose intimate connections (or lack of them) have led to questions. The much more well-known subject of sexual orientation speculation before next month's draft is Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o. The celebrated Mormon Samoan was caught up in a bizarre hoax involving a non-existent internet "girl friend." This one left fans -- and teams -- not knowing what to think. And the teams who might pick up the rights to his services want to know. But, according to Colorlines, they've discovered there is an obstacle.

... the NFL does have safeguards against this kind of scrutiny, it just appears that teams aren’t following them. Buried deep within the NFL’s most recent collective bargaining agreement is a non-discrimination clause that reads: “There will be no discrimination in any form against any player by the NFL, the Management Council, any Club or by the [National Football League Player’s Association] because of the race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, or activity or lack of activity on behalf of the NFLPA.”

For this spectator and football fan, it's kind of a hoot to learn that what is probably just unconsidered boilerplate from hundreds of union contracts slipped into this one. Nobody really thought the issue would come up. Not in the NFL! But the world is learning gays might be anywhere.

Meanwhile, one of the NFL's loudest champions of gay rights, Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo has predicted we'll see an openly gay football player by 2015. But he wouldn't encourage any prospect to come out before the draft:

He said if an NFL prospect doesn't like girls, the best thing for that player to do when asked about it is lie to improve their draft stock.

"Selfishly, I think players need to say that they're straight right now," Ayanbadejo said. "You need to get drafted as high as you can get drafted, get the money while you can, your career's only going to last 3.5 years."

I'm not sure what this says about the trust between labor and teams in the football league. Not something good I think. Interesting to watch the issue of a gay player become one of the many tension points in the employee/employer relationship. I enjoy watching football but between the growing awareness of the health risks and the ongoing sense of exploitation among the beef, I suspect the game has trouble ahead.

Security pipedreams

Can I just point out that U.S. gun laws are nuts?

The AP reports:

More than 200 people suspected of ties to terrorism bought guns in the U.S. last year legally, FBI figures show.

The 247 people who were allowed to buy weapons did so after going through required background checks as required by federal law. ...About the same number of people suspected of ties to terrorism also successfully purchased guns in the U.S. in 2009.

The government can only prevent people from buying guns for any of 11 reasons. Convicted felons and illegal immigrants, for example, cannot buy weapons. But the terrorist watch list is different. People become convicted felons only after a court process and an opportunity to defend themselves.

The watch list is secret and generated at the government's discretion. It is not a list of people convicted of terrorism crimes. The list of about 450,000 people includes suspected members of al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations, terror financiers, terror recruiters and people who attended training camps. People's names are added to and removed from the watch list every day, and most people never know whether they're on it.

***I've pretty much stopped writing about no fly lists and watch lists because everyone who cares has noticed that they make no sense and constitute an ongoing abuse of arbitrary power in the name of "security." (Click the "no fly list" label in the right column for more than you want to know about this madness.)

Patrick Smith who writes "Ask the Pilot" for Salon recently described an experience that illustrates the utter absurdity of security theater, not to mention the bullying behavior of some TSA workers. Since he's often flying the plane, therefore uniquely well placed to accomplish any nasty plot he might be planning, his repeated brushes with this nonsense clarify how insane the security obsession has become. He concludes:

In the United States alone, more than 2 million people fly every day, subject to all manner of tedium and humiliation, yet there is virtually no protest either from citizens or their leaders. Certainly there is no political will to get things changed. People grumble, shake their heads, and move along in a woozy capitulation to a security apparatus that is both repressive and ineffective.

This will continue, presumably, until disaster strikes, at which point the screams for accountability will be shrill and righteous and entirely too late.

Separately, perhaps, from all of this, we need to acknowledge the reality, however unfortunate, that no amount of airport security is going to stop a terrorist who is clever and resourceful enough. There will always be a way to circumvent whatever measures we put in place, no matter how draconian. ...

A WTF State of the Union

We watched the speech. I wasn't sure I wanted to. President Obama has been a disappointment. I didn't want to watch him double down with his banker buddies, with the Billionaire Boys Club blundering about in education, with the generals and spooks with their boundless wars. I feared he'd repeat his neat trick of negotiating with himself, giving the Republicans their wish list, usually tax breaks for rich people, before getting anything in return.

Well, he did a a little of that latter -- a theoretical spending freeze, malpractice "reform" (that one means keeping injured people from getting their care them paid for). I'd worry about these more if I thought they would happen; even a few sensible or mercenary Dems can probably swat them away.

But he didn't offer to trash Social Security or threaten to invade anyone, so I wasn't horrified by the speech. That's the standard to which my judgment of Obama has fallen these days. If he's not bloody awful, he'll do.

Then I got this from Organizing for America this morning, asking me to sign on to the President's "vision":

We must out-educate, out-compete, and out-innovate the rest of the world. We must deal with our deficit and reform our government -- and it will only happen if we come together.

That work begins right now, with each of us committing to the work necessary to bring it about.

The future is ours to win, but to get there, we can't just stand still.

Join the fight to make the President's vision a reality.

WTF? The dude is pandering to our national addiction to a permanent war posture, a war against countries full of brown people where the populations are finally achieving living standards little dreamed of by their parents. Can't we figure out how to live with a rising China and India? Can't we learn how to be in the world, rather than try to run it?

For that matter, can't we turn our national attention to sensible projects to arrest and mitigate human-induced climate changes?

Naw -- we have to "Win The Future"! Vacuous nonsense from the Obama White House, again. You had me neutralized, but now I'm reminded that any human-serving accomplishments in the next few years will come despite "our leader," not because of him. The real future belongs to people(s), making it together.

Will the NRA fight this proposal?

New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly on Wednesday called on Congress to close the loophole that lets suspected terrorists buy firearms and explosives.

The so-called "terror gap" means that the FBI has no authority to prevent individuals on the terrorist watch list from buying guns from licensed U.S. dealers unless they have a separate criminal record. In the wake of last weekend's attempted bombing in Times Square, Bloomberg and Kelly said it was imperative that Congress act quickly to change that. ...

A recent Government Accountability Office report concluded that between 2004 and February 2010, suspected terrorists tried to purchase weapons 1,228 times. They were successful in 91 percent of those attempts.

The Hill

Or is this country so infatuated with its attachment to an individual right to own an arsenal that we'll fight off this measure?

I admit it. I think the Supreme Court's finding that the Second Amendment applies to individuals rather than the"well armed militias" in its language is sheer pandering hogwash. But if it must be, let folks own as many guns as they want, so long as their firepower is only that of the late 18th muskets the Constitutional framers knew.

More security theater; more stupidity

Here we go again. The sponsors of the underpants bomber must be giggling in their caves. Under pressure from the 'fraidy-cat contingent (right wing Republican sub-set), TSA has decided to subject ALL airline passengers originating from or passing through 14 countries to special search procedures. The list:

Flights from Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria (countries classified by US as state sponsors of terror)

Also, flights from Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen

BBC

The 'fraidy-cat contingent screams DO SOMETHING; we must NOT apply common sense to keeping ourselves safe.

Nihad Awad of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has some sensible thoughts on the measures we really need.

Attacks such as the failed plot to bomb the airliner on Christmas Day cannot possibly have a real impact on our nation in military terms. These attacks are a form of psychological warfare designed to impact public opinion -- the very definition of terrorism -- and make us do things we would normally reject, such as profiling.

Profiling sends the message to millions of Muslim travelers that it is their faith, not terrorism, that is the problem. This is precisely the talking point put forward by the religious extremists of Al-Qaeda who say the West is at war with Islam and all Muslims, and that everyone had better choose sides.

Religious profiling is a recruiting and public relations tool for terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda. Let’s not do Al-Qaeda’s work for them.

If not profiling, what action can we take to boost airline safety and security?

First look at behavior, not at faith or skin color. Then spend what it takes to obtain more bomb-sniffing dogs, to install more sophisticated bomb-detection equipment and to train security personnel in identifying the behavior of real terror suspects.

Along with boosting training and detection equipment, clean up the inaccurate terror watch lists that have ballooned in the post-9/11 era and work the kinks out of an intelligence system that would let a person get on a plane to America even after his own father had notified security services about his disturbing behavior.

Emphasis is mine.

Such thoughtful responses are not allowed. We must have more theater and massive over-reaction. The national character seems to be lurching closer to timid and feeble-minded by the day.

Photo by way of Atul's Blog.