The government won't say ...

They are still at it. The government is still placing some set of persons on a "no-fly list" and refusing to say why or provide any public review. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, these cases attracted some notice. Now, not so much so.

The Los Angeles Times reports a current story:

[Ahmad] Chebli is an American citizen, born in Chicago, who tried to board a plane in Beirut in November 2018 to return to his home in the United States but was barred from the flight on orders of the American government. No one would explain why. For a month, he says, he was not allowed to return with his family to Michigan, where he works as an engineer in the auto industry. 

Eventually he was told that his name had appeared on the U.S. government’s no-fly list of known or suspected terrorists. He was granted a one-time waiver to return home, but he remained on the list. And when he asked — repeatedly — why he was there and how he could be removed, he received no answer. He wrote to the Department of Homeland Security to no avail. He wrote to the FBI but was told their records were exempt from disclosure.

Chebli believes the FBI put him on the list in order to punish him for refusing to be an informant in his religious community. After enlisting the ACLU in a lawsuit against the government, the feds took him off the list -- but still refuse to explain why he was ever listed.

“It’s infuriating that they can jerk someone around like this for two years,” said Hina Shamsi, the director of the ACLU’s National Security Project. “And what they stubbornly refuse to do in case after case and situation after situation is to overhaul their system so it doesn’t violate due process.”

The struggle for a right for citizens to travel has long history. Nearly always, the government stonewalls and obfuscates rather than stating its case (if there is one.) 

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.