Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
Activists on the left and right -- including a 71-year-old Milwaukee nun and an art dealer who told other passengers that President Bush "is dumb as a rock" -- have long complained they were being hassled by airport security. After months of silence, the federal government says: It's true.
Jul 25, 2003 | Ever since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, reports have circulated that the U.S. airline security apparatus is targeting political activists for strict scrutiny and special searches, sometimes forcing them to miss flights. Despite the accounts of peace activists, civil liberties lawyers and left-wing journalists, federal agencies wouldn't confirm the policy and airline officials wouldn't discuss it, and so the stories had the feel of urban legend.
But in documents released this week in a federal court case in San Francisco, the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) confirmed for the first time that it keeps not just a list of potential terrorists barred from the air, but also a list of "selectees" who are subject to strict security checks before they're allowed to board commercial aircraft. The agency has revealed almost nothing else about the selectee list, and is fighting in court to keep secret the names of people who are on it and the standards for putting them there.
It appears, however, that the list may contain thousands of names. Officials at the ACLU of Northern California, which is pressing the Freedom of Information Act case filed by two leftist newspaper editors, says it learned from authorities at Oakland Airport that there is an 88-page typed list of names. Between Sept. 11, 2001, and April 8, 2003, the ACLU says, more than 363 passengers were stopped at San Francisco and Oakland airports, either because their names appeared on that list or because their names were similar to names on a separate "no-fly" list made up of criminals and people with suspected terrorist ties.
Evidence compiled in a series of interviews suggests that activists on the left and right have been affected, as have many Arab Americans. That has civil liberties experts warning that the airport security checks have a chilling effect on routine political activity that is unprecedented in recent times.
"All the secrecy surrounding these lists, and the very fact that the TSA refuses to say how it compiles them, is outrageous," says Barbara Olshansky, an attorney with the left-leaning Center for Constitutional Rights. "It shows that this administration has no respect at all for the Bill of Rights, which guarantees the right of free speech and association and the right to travel freely. They're not balancing security and freedom. They don't care about freedom and civil liberties at all."
Olshansky has firsthand knowledge of the government policy: She says that she's been subjected to strip- and full-body searches every time she's flown since 9/11, even though she has no criminal record. Last November, she told Salon that she had been strip-searched on four flights she'd made on business; this week, she reported that she was specially targeted again for a search in February while trying to board a plane with her husband for a vacation trip to Puerto Rico.
"We had chosen Puerto Rico in part because my husband was afraid of what they'd do to me if we tried to return from a foreign trip," she says. Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, is a domestic flight that doesn't require going through immigration or customs.
Salon first reported last November that the Transportation Security Administration keeps a list of about 1,000 people who are deemed "threats to aviation" -- many with links to terrorism -- and who are barred from flying under any circumstance. But that didn't seem to explain the unusual security standards applied to political activists and others with no visible link to terrorism or criminal activity. They were generally allowed to board planes after being searched.
A 71-year-old Milwaukee nun and peace activist was stopped from boarding a flight to Washington, where she and a group of students planned to lobby the Wisconsin congressional delegation against U.S. military aid to Colombia. An art dealer who'd been a high-ranking staffer in Ralph Nader's 2000 presidential campaign had been barred from a flight to Germany after telling other passengers in the check-in line that President George W. Bush "is dumb as a rock." And two journalists, Rebecca Gordon and Jan Adams of the antiwar magazine War Times, were told by an airline clerk that the were on "the FBI no-fly list." Even executives at the Eagle Forum, Phyllis Schlafly's old-school conservative group, expressed concern that several of their members had missed flights because they were delayed and questioned at airport security checkpoints.
At the time, a spokesman for the TSA told Salon that in all likelihood, most such passengers were not on the no-fly list for terrorists and criminals. Instead, he hinted, there might be a second list, but he declined to be more specific and the agency officially denied it.
Efforts by the Wall Street Journal to solve the mystery resulted in an April 22 story concluding that most of the problems innocent fliers experienced resulted from computer systems that were "flagging numerous travelers whose names are merely similar to one of those on the [no-fly] list" for terrorists and criminals. For example, the story said, Sister Virgine Lawinger, the Milwaukee nun, had been stopped not because of her politics but because one of the students in her group had the surname of Laden -- a name the TSA flagged apparently because it is shared by a notorious Islamic terrorist.
Certainly that explains some of the stops. In one case, the Journal suggested, retired Coast Guard Cmdr. Larry Musarra has been stopped several times by Alaska Airlines check-in clerks because his name pops up on the list thanks to the M-U-S that begins his name; airline computers apparently flag that as a possible Middle Eastern name. But all too often, people being stopped have anti-establishment protest backgrounds, like Olshansky, whose name doesn't seem to resemble that of any terror suspects, and who has never been offered an explanation for the repeated security delays at check-in.
The Journal article made no reference to a second list.
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