Anonymous Comrade writes:

"In November 2001 Nancy Oden of the Greens /Green Party USA was denied
boarding on a plane leaving Bangor, Maine for Chicago. Across the US there
were even some GREENS who sided with the police and accused Nancy and
the
G/GPUSA of frabricating the whole story and blowing it out of
proportion.
They even accused Ms. Oden of escalating her encounter with the
authorities
at the airport. Well, the following appears in an article in today's
edition of Salon. I am reproducing it here in
its entirety because the whole text is available only to premium
subscribers and I think it's important this information gets out to as
wide
an audience as possible."

- Mary Jo ["Recycle This" listmeister, via Mitchel Cohen]

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2002/11/15/no_fl y/print.html

Grounded

By Dave Lindorff, Nov. 15, 2002

A federal agency confirms that it maintains an air-travel blacklist
of 1,000 people. Peace activists and civil libertarians fear they're
on it.

Barbara Olshansky was in Newark International
Airport at the JetBlue departure gate last March when an airline
agent at the counter checking her boarding pass called airport
security. Olshansky was subjected to a close search and then, though
she was in view of other travelers, was ordered to pull her pants
down. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks may have created a new era in
airport security, but even so, she was embarrassed and annoyed.

Perhaps one such incident might've been forgotten, but Olshansky, the
assistant legal director for the left-leaning Center for
Constitutional Rights, was pulled out of line for special attention
the next time she flew. And the next time. And the next time. On one
flight this past September from Newark to Washington, six members of
the center's staff, including Olshansky, were stopped and subjected
to intense scrutiny, even though they had purchased their tickets
independently and had not checked in as a group. On that occasion,
Olshansky got angry and demanded to know why she had been singled
out.

"The computer spit you out," she recalls the agent saying. "I don't
know why, and I don't have time to talk to you about it."

Olshansky and her colleagues are, apparently, not alone. For months,
rumors and anecdotes have circulated among left-wing and other
activist groups about people who have been barred from flying or
delayed at security gates because they are "on a list."

But now, a spokesman for the new Transportation Security
Administration has acknowledged for the first time that the
government has a list of about 1,000 people who are deemed "threats
to aviation" and not allowed on airplanes under any circumstances.
And in an interview with Salon, the official suggested that Olshansky
and other political activists may be on a separate list that subjects
them to strict scrutiny but allows them to fly.

"We have a list of about 1,000 people," said David Steigman, the TSA
spokesman. The agency was created a year ago by Congress to handle
transportation safety during the war on terror. "This list is
composed of names that are provided to us by various government
organizations like the FBI, CIA and INS … We don't ask how they
decide who to list. Each agency decides on its own who is a 'threat
to aviation.'"

The agency has no guidelines to determine who gets on the list,
Steigman says, and no procedures for getting off the list if someone
is wrongfully on it.

Meanwhile, airport security personnel, citing lists that are provided
by the agency and that appear to be on airline ticketing and check-in
computers, seem to be netting mostly priests, elderly nuns, Green
Party campaign operatives, left-wing journalists, right-wing
activists and people affiliated with Arab or Arab-American groups.

Virgine Lawinger, a nun in Milwaukee and an activist with Peace
Action, a Catholic advocacy group, was stopped from boarding a flight
last spring to Washington, where she and 20 young students were
planning to lobby the Wisconsin congressional delegation against U.S.
military aid to the Colombian government. "We were all prevented from
boarding, and some of us were taken to another room and questioned by
airport security personnel and local sheriff's deputies," says
Lawinger.

In that incident, an airline employee with Midwest Air and a local
sheriff's deputy who had been called in during the incident to help
airport security personnel detain and question the group, told some
of them that their names were "on a list," and that they were being
kept off their plane on instructions from the Transportation Security
Administration in Washington. Lawinger has filed a freedom-of-
information request with the Transportation Security Administration
seeking to learn if she is on a "threat to aviation" list.

Last month, Rebecca Gordon and Jan Adams, two journalists with a San
Francisco-based antiwar magazine called War Times were stopped at the
check-in counter of ATA Airlines, where an airline clerk told them
that her computer showed they were on "the FBI No Fly list." The
airline called the FBI, and local police held them for a while before
telling them there had been a mistake and that they were free to go.
The two made their plane, but not before the counter attendant placed
a large S for "search" on their baggage, assuring that they got more
close scrutiny at the boarding gate.

Art dealer Doug Stuber, who ran Ralph Nader's Green Party
presidential campaign in North Carolina in 2000, was barred last
month from getting on a flight to Hamburg, Germany, where he was
going on business, after he got engaged in a loud, though friendly,
discussion with two other passengers in a security line. During the
course of the debate, he shouted that "George Bush is as dumb as a
rock," an unfortunate comment that provoked the Raleigh-Durham
Airport security staff to call the local Secret Service bureau, which
sent out two agents to interrogate Stuber.

"They took me into a room and questioned me all about my politics,"
Stuber recalls. "They were very up on Green Party politics, too."
They fingerprinted him and took a digital eye scan. Particularly
ominous, he says, was a loose-leaf binder held by the Secret Service
agents. "It was open, and while they were questioning me, I
discreetly looked at it," he says. "It had a long list of
organizations, and I was able to recognize the Green Party,
Greenpeace, EarthFirst and Amnesty International." Stuber was
eventually released, but because he missed his flight, he had to pay
almost $2,000 for a full-fare ticket to Hamburg so that he did not
miss his business engagement.

A Secret Service agent at the agency's Washington headquarters
confirmed that his agency had been called in to question
Stuber. "We're not normally a part of the airport security
operation," Agent Mark Connelly told Salon. "That's the FBI's job.
But when one of our protection subjects gets threatened, we check it
out." Asked about the list of organizations observed by Stuber, the
Secret Service source speculated that those organizations might be on
a list of organizations that the service, which is assigned the task
of protecting the president, might need to monitor as part of its
security responsibility.

Additional evidence suggests that Olshansky, Stuber and other left-
leaning activists are also seen as a threat to aviation, though
perhaps of a different grade. A top official for the Eagle Forum, an
old-line conservative group led by anti-feminist icon Phyllis
Schlafly, said several of the group's members have been delayed at
security checkpoints for so long that they missed their flights.
According to Pax Christi, a Catholic peace organization, an American
member of the Falun Gong Chinese religious group was barred from
getting back on a plane that had stopped in Iceland, reportedly based
on information supplied to Icelandic customs by U.S. authorities. The
person was reportedly permitted to fly onward on a later flight.

Hussein Ibish, communications director of the American Arab Anti-
Discrimination Committee, says his group has documented over 80
cases -- involving 200 people -- in which fliers with Arabic names
have been delayed at the airport, or barred altogether from flying.
Some, he says, appear to involve people who have no political
involvement at all, and he speculated that they suffered the
misfortune of having the same name as someone "on the list" for
legitimate security reasons.

Until Steigman's confirmation of the no-fly list, the government had
never admitted its existence. While FBI spokesman Paul Bresson
confirmed existence of the list, officials at the CIA and U.S.
Immigration and Naturalization Service declined to comment and
referred inquiries back to the TSA. Details of how it was assembled
and how it is being used by the government, airports and airlines are
largely kept secret.

A security officer at United Airlines, speaking on condition of
anonymity, confirmed that the airlines receive no-fly lists from the
Transportation Security Administration but declined further comment,
saying it was a security matter. A USAir spokeswoman, however,
declined to comment, saying that the airline's security relationship
with the federal transit agency was a security matter and that
discussing it could "jeopardize passenger safety."

Steigman declined to say who was on the no-fly list, but he conceded
that people like Lawinger, Stuber, Gordon, Adams and Olshansky were
not "threats to aviation," because they were being allowed to fly
after being interrogated and searched. But then, in a Byzantine
twist, he raised the possibility that the security agency might have
more than one list. "I checked with our security people," he
said, "and they said there is no [second] list," he said. "Of course,
that could mean one of two things: Either there is no second list, or
there is a list and they're not going to talk about it for security
reasons."

In fact, most of those who have been stopped from boarding flights
(like Lawinger, Stuber, Gordon and Adams) were able to fly later.
Obviously, if the TSA thought someone was a genuine "threat to
aviation" -- like those on the 1,000-name no-fly list, they would
simply be barred from flying. So does the agency have more than one
list perhaps -- one for people who are totally barred from flying and
another for people who are simply harassed and delayed?

Asked why the TSA would be barring a 74-year-old nun from flying,
Steigman said: "I don't know. You could get on the list if you were
arrested for a federal felony."

Sister Lawinger says she was arrested only once, back in the 1980s,
for sitting down and refusing to leave the district office of a local
congressman. And even then, she says, she was never officially
charged or fined. But another person who was in the Peace Action
delegation that day, Judith Williams, says she was arrested and spent
three days in jail for a protest at the White House back in 1991. In
that protest, Williams and other Catholic peace activists had scaled
the White House perimeter fence and scattered baby dolls around the
lawn to protest the bombing of Iraq. She says that the charge from
that incident was a misdemeanor, an infraction that would not seem
enough to establish her as a threat to aviation.

Inevitably, such questions about how one gets on a federal transit
list creates questions about how to get off it. It is a classic --
and unnerving -- catch-22: Because the Transportation Security
Administration says it compiles the list from names provided by other
agencies, it has no procedure for correcting a problem. Aggrieved
parties would have to go to the agency that first reported their
names, but for security reasons, the TSA won't disclose which agency
put someone on the list.

Bresson, the FBI spokesperson, would not explain the criteria for
classifying someone as a threat to aviation, but suggests that fliers
who believe they're on the list improperly should "report to airport
security and they should be able to contact the TSA or us and get it
cleared up." He concedes that might mean missed flights or other
inconveniences. His explanation: "Airline security has gotten very
complicated."

Many critics of the security agency's methods accept the need for
heightened air security, but remain troubled the more Kafka-esque
traits of the system. Waters, at the Eagle Forum, worries that the
government has offered no explanation for how a "threat to aviation"
is determined. "Maybe the people being stopped are already being
profiled," she says. "If they're profiling people, what kind of
things are they looking for? Whether you fit in in your
neighborhood?"

"I agree that the government should be keeping known 'threats to
aviation' off of planes," Ibish says. "I certainly don't want those
people on my plane! But there has to be a procedure for appealing
this, and there isn't. There are no safeguards and there is no
recourse."

Meanwhile, nobody in the federal government has explained why so many
law-abiding but mostly left-leaning political activists and antiwar
activists are being harassed at check-in time at airports. "This all
raises serious concerns about whether the government has made a
decision to target Americans based on their political beliefs," says
Katie Corrigan, an ACLU official. The ACLU has set up a No Fly List
Complaint Form on its Web site.

One particular concern about the government's threat to aviation list
and any other possible lists of people to be subjected to extra
security investigation at airports is that names are being made
available to private companies -- the airlines and airport
authorities -- charged with alerting security personnel. Unlike most
other law-enforcement watch lists, these lists are not being closely
held within the national security or law-enforcement files and
computers, but are apparently being widely dispersed.

"It's bad enough when the federal government has lists like this with
no guidelines on how they're compiled or how to use them," says
Olshansky at the Center for Constitutional Rights. "But when these
lists are then given to the private sector, there are even less
controls over how they are used or misused." Noting that airlines
have "a free hand" to decide whether someone can board a plane or
not, she says the result is a "tremendous chilling of the First
Amendment right to travel and speak freely."

But Olshansky, alarmed by her own experience and the number of others
reporting apparent political harassment, is fighting back. She says
now that the government has confirmed the existence of a blacklist,
her center is planning a First Amendment lawsuit against the federal
government. CCR and has already signed up Lawinger, Stuber, and
several others from Milwaukee's Peace Action group.

About the writer

Philadelphia-based journalist Dave Lindorff writes regularly for
Salon.