[Seattle-editorial] story idea: Government Blacklisting & Barbara Olshansky

[Sheri Herndon]

hey
story idea.
xox

>Delivered-To: sheri at speakeasy.org
>X-Sender: greg at mail.sevenstories.com
>Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2002 12:51:46 -0500
>To: nyfreemedia at tao.ca
>From: Greg Ruggiero <greg at sevenstories.com>
>Subject: Government Blacklisting & Barbara Olshansky
>
>Friends-
>
>Among a million other things, Barbara Olshansky (along with Robert 
>Perry) has been a leading free speech lawyer who has fought against 
>government restrictions on LPFM and community access to our airwaves.
>
>Barbara has recently written a book called "Secret Trials and 
>Executions" in which she criticizes the Bush administration's 
>enactment of a Military Order that now enables the government to 
>arrest, try and execute non-citizens without informing the public.
>
>Greg
>
>
>
>Grounded: The Government's Air Passenger Blacklist
>
>By Dave Lindorff,
>Salon
><http://www.salon.com>
>November 17, 2002
>
>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.
>
>####
>
>Center For Constitutional Rights
>http://www.ccr-ny.org/
>
>
>--
>
>
>
>Greg Ruggiero | Editor | Seven Stories Press | www.sevenstories.com