(MintPress) – In early 2011, Virginia resident Gulet Mohamed, then 19, travelled to the Middle East to study his ancestry and family roots. He stayed in Yemen for a few weeks in 2009 before settling in with relatives in a peaceful region of Somalia, where he studied Islam and the local culture. Later in 2009 he met with another relative in Kuwait to continue his studies.
When December 2010 came around, Mohamed was at a Kuwait airport renewing his visa when he was detained, blindfolded and put in the backseat of a car by two men and taken to jail, where he was interrogated about his knowledge of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda affiliate Anwar al-Aulaqi.
Over the span of several days, Mohamed was subjected to 12-hour interrogations that included him being slapped, beaten with sticks and threatened with electrocution. He was forced to give up his e-mail and Facebook passwords and access to his iPhone.
Why Mohamed? And how was he thrust into the ordeal?
“I felt like I was getting kidnapped,” Mohamed recalled.
Mohamed’s experience was the result of his placement on the United States’ no-fly list, a collection of names created and maintained by the US’ Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) that discloses people who are not permitted to board commercial aircraft for travel in or out of the U.S.
At the time of Mohamed’s detainment, the State Department said it had nothing to do with his initial treatment by authorities in Kuwait. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) told Mohamed that he was placed on the no-fly list because they had suspicion of him joining terrorist camps in Somalia and Yemen. When the claims proved to be false, Mohamed was permitted to return back home to Virginia.
Conflicts with the no-fly list are growing at the same rate people’s names are added or subtracted. An estimated 20,000 names compile the list, with 500 of the names belonging to Americans. Every day, 800 names are added or subtracted from the list, and because the list is deemed classified information, there is no way of someone knowing whether they are on the list or not. The list was created in 2001 after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to keep suspected terrorists off commercial airliners.
A legal challenge
Recently, three California residents joined 13 others as plaintiffs to challenge the legalities of the no-fly list. The group says they have been humiliated in front of others at airports and forced to make cross-country trips by train and car, oftentimes separated from family members they were travelling with.
One plaintiff, Nagib Ali Ghaleb, a native of Yemen who was recently naturalized as a US citizen, discovered he was on the no-fly list in 2010 while returning from Yemen. The San Francisco janitor was stopped by agents and interrogated about what mosques he had attended in the Bay Area before labeling him as a spy for the Yemeni community within the U.S., according to the lawsuit.
Legalities of no-fly list practices abound, from how to get off the list to whether the U.S. has a right to detain and interrogate potential passengers on the grounds of suspicion. Rahinah Ibrahim, a Stanford University Ph.D. graduate, had her name cleared as a potential threat after learning it was placed on the no-fly list in 2005. Her name, however, still remains on the list despite passing interrogation.
In 2005, Ibrahim was travelling to Malaysia to present research at an event sponsored by Stanford. She was allowed to board the plane, but not before first being placed in handcuffs. In her attempts to return from Malaysia, Ibrahim was denied access to her flight. She is currently still in Malaysia where she is continuing to challenge the no-fly list.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a civil rights group, has joined forces with the plaintiffs to challenge the no-fly list as illegal.
“They have no real chance of clearing their names,” said Nusrat Choudhury, a staff attorney for the ACLU. “All they can do is try again and have the same thing happen – going to the airport, spending money on tickets, and in a very humiliating and public way being turned away from boarding a plane, (while) never getting a chance before a neutral decision maker to just explain why they don’t pose whatever kind of a threat the government may perceive them as posing.”
In an October filing, the government said that the Department of Homeland Security had created a way for people who believed they were wrongfully placed on the no-fly list to seek redress. The process includes nominations from the FBI and National Counterterrorism Center. But the government even admits that name removal is not guaranteed, only a potential investigation into the case.
“Even if plaintiffs were to eventually succeed on the merits of their claims the proper relief would not be removal of their names that are allegedly on the no-fly list, but an order concluding that (the process for redress) is inadequate and requiring the formulation of new policies and procedures to provide redress,” the government wrote in the filing.
With the lawsuit, the ACLU is also claiming the list withholds due process rights and the fact that there is no way to dispute inclusion on the list and figure out if a mistake has been made via misleading intelligence from the TSC.
False positives
Using only names to identify those on the no-fly list, there has been a battery of instances where flyers have been mistaken for someone on the list. In the case of Asif Iqbal, the mistake was more than a minor inconvenience that could be laughed about later on. Iqbal shared a name with a former Guantanamo Bay detainee. As a legal resident of the US from Pakistan, Iqbal was regularly and repeatedly detained while travelling for his job as a management consultant.
The list of instances like Iqbal’s is vast, and exposes a system that has little in terms of checks and balances and oversight. Those within the airline industry are even questioning the list, as was the case of a pilot with a common Pakistani last name who wrote a letter to Rep. Jack Quinn (R-N.Y.) denouncing the no-fly list.
“Could you imagine if you were stopped, questioned for over an hour and almost missing a plane because the name ‘Quinn’ was in the computer?” the pilot asked.
Last names have frequently been used to justify enough evidence against a person flying. Lawyers for Syracuse Research took up the case where a colleague that flies regularly to the Pentagon is stopped and detained because he has the same last name and birth year as someone on the no-fly list. The company sent letters to congressmen and representatives saying each time the man flies, he is detained and an FBI agent has to verify his identity.
“These personal stories underscore the fact that there is no due process in this system and that there is no established mechanism for people to clear their names,” said Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) attorney David Sobel.