Are You on the No Fly List?

World Citizens,

Of Critical Interest.
School of the Americas protesters banned from public
travel in the US.
Freedoms gone.
Freedom to travel now gone.
Paper's Please Police State is now the US.
Federal Government the Enemy of Freedom.
The Enemy of the People.
Who will be next?
How far will this go?
Assert your rights.
Revolt!!!

- j

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PROTESTERS DETAINED IN MILWAUKEE:
ARE YOU ON THE NO FLY LIST?
By Matthew Rothschild
The Progressive
April 27, 2002

http://www.progressive.org/webex/wxmc042702.html

Alia Kate, 16, a high school student in Milwaukee,
wanted to go to Washington, D.C., for the protests
Saturday, April 20. She was looking forward to
demonstrating against the School of the Americas and
learning how to lobby against U.S. aid for Colombia.

She had an airplane ticket for a 6:55 p.m. flight out
of Milwaukee on Friday the 19th, and she got to the
airport two hours ahead of time.

But she didn't make it onto the Midwest Express flight.

Neither did many other Wisconsin activists who were
supposed to be on board. Twenty of the 37 members of
the Peace Action Milwaukee group -- including a priest
and a nun -- were pulled aside and questioned by
Milwaukee County sheriff's deputies. They were not
cleared in time for takeoff and had to leave the next
morning, missing many of the events.

What tripped them up was a computerized "No Fly Watch
List" that the federal government now supplies to all
the airlines. The airlines are required to check their
passenger lists against that computerized "No Fly"
list.

"The name or names of people in that group came up in a
watch list that is provided through the federal
government and is provided for everyone who flies,"
says Sergeant Chuck Coughlin of the Milwaukee sheriff's
department. "The computer checks for exact matches,
similar spellings, and aliases. In this particular
case, there were similar spellings. About five or six
individuals came up on the watch list. Although it was
time-consuming, and although they were flight-delayed,
the system actually worked."

Don't tell Dianne Henke that.

A volunteer with Peace Action, Henke is the person who
organized the whole trip. "We were very upset," she
says. "Here we were, going out to lobby, to use our
democratic rights, to talk to our legislators, to use
our freedom of speech and dissent, and then we're being
detained and not told why. We were taking young people
and telling them if you use means that are nonviolent
and peaceful, your message will be heard. But the fact
that we were hampered, that we were detained, was just
a totally different message."

Henke doesn't blame the sheriff's deputies. "They were
very sympathetic to us, but they just weren't getting
the answers they wanted from the other end of the
telephone," she says.

It was never made clear to her exactly why they were
being detained.

"We were getting all these different stories from the
deputies. One possibility was that a UWM [University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee] student had a name, Jacob Laden,
that was similar to a terrorist's name [Osama bin
Laden]. Then another story was that someone had a
foreign name that was changed to make it sound more
American, Alia Kate, who used to be Alia Torabian. Her
father was Persian or Iranian. I've known her all my
life," says Henke, who looks up Kate's number in an old
Montessori phone book.

"I was one of the first people in our group to try to
check in," says Kate. "When I went up to get my
boarding pass, the lady said there were some problems.
She said her computer locked up and she had to wait for
someone else. And I found out that the someone else was
one of the sheriff's deputies on duty. And the
sheriff's deputy came and told me I had to grab my bags
and follow her for further questioning.

"I was a little scared. I was a little confused. I
didn't know what it was about. I was alone and was
taken to a building nearby. They sat me down in a
chair, and I just waited for 15 or 20 minutes. They had
my driver's license. They asked me what my phone number
was and address was. I heard them making phone calls,
reading off some stuff on my license. Then they asked
me what my nationality was.

"I said I'm half Persian and Italian and German.

"They asked who was Persian, my mother or my father.

"I said, my father, my biological father. I don't even
know him.

"They also asked me if I was a U.S. citizen.

"I told them I was.

"They asked me if I was from around here.

"I said yes."

Though one of the sheriff's deputies said "it was just
a routine procedure," they gave Alia several different
explanations for what was happening, she says. "They
said it might have to do with increased security in the
Washington, D.C., area, or it might have to do with
Indonesian terrorists."

She says there may have been an element of racial
profiling involved, too. "I guess we're looking for
Hispanic names," one of the deputies said, according to
Kate. She suspects they thought her first name was
Hispanic, and she says that two others detained early
on, Manuel Sanchez and Isabella Horning, may have been
selected for their names.

Finally, they walked Kate back to the ticket counter,
but the computer froze up again, so Kate and Sanchez
and Horning were told to go sit down and wait for the
deputies to deliver their boarding passes.

"They gave us our boarding passes, which had a
bold-faced S with little asterisks on both sides,
circled with an ink marker," Kate says. "This meant
that when we went to the gate our carry-on bags would
have to be hand-searched and they'd have to wand us."

But the deputies took so much time going through the
whole group that not everyone was ready to go by 6:55.

Midwest Express held the flight for as long as it could
but then left, almost empty, without most of the
activists.

"I was shocked," Kate says. "I couldn't believe what
was happening, that they could detain us long enough
for us to miss our flight in an apparent attempt to
keep us in Milwaukee. It was sort of McCarthy-style the
way they have the names appearing on a list and
targeting certain people, dissenters especially. I felt
my rights had been violated."

Sister Virgine Lawinger also was detained. "When I went
through the line, the lady at the ticket counter said,
'I'm sorry, you have to wait a minute,' and then the
sheriff's deputy came and took me and some others to an
office," she says. "All they asked us at that point was
our birthplace and said these were just routine checks.
They said our names were flagged. That's the real
strange thing: What caused the computer to flag those
names? I did feel it was profiling a particular group
without a basis -- a peace group. The abuse of power
was so obvious."

Sister Virgine says she's upset about "losing an entire
day of intense education on the issue of Colombia." And
she says her "right to dissent" was infringed upon.

Father Bill Brennan of St. Patrick's Church in
Milwaukee also missed his flight because of the
questioning. "No one was charged with a crime or threat
of a crime," he says. "No one was advised of his or her
civil rights. My personal reaction is fear of the
arbitrary use of power this incident reveals. Someone
in Washington has the power to inspect a passenger list
drawn up in Wisconsin, discover the motive of our
flight (namely, a peace protest against what goes on at
Fort Benning, Georgia, particularly as it affects
Colombia), decide who might possibly be subversives,
and stop our takeoff."

Sarah Backus, a coordinator for SOA [School of the
Americas] Watch Wisconsin, says she was told by one of
the sheriff's deputies: "You're probably being stopped
because you are a peace group and you're protesting
against your country."

Backus later asked the sheriff, David Clarke, about
this, and he denied this was the reason for the
detentions, she says.

Backus also went to the Midwest Express ticket desk to
find out what was going on. "The names are in the
computer, and the names came up," she says she was
told.

Lisa Bailey, a spokesperson for Midwest Express, says,
"As the group checked in, one of the passengers showed
up on this list. At that point, the airline got the TSA
[Transportation Security Administration] rep and
Milwaukee County sheriffs. The TSA made the decision
that since this was a group, we should rescreen all of
them." Midwest Express either found hotels for those
who missed their flights or provided transportation
home.

Bailey says that screening the names against the list
is standard operating procedure. "Everyone who travels
is now cleared through this list."

Where did this list come from?

One U.S. Marshal said the FBI compiles the list, and an
FBI agent said it "comes out of headquarters." But a
spokesperson for the FBI in Washington, Steve Berry,
would not comment at all on the issue of the "No Fly"
list, and referred all questions to the TSA, a new wing
of the Department of Transportation.

The TSA was established by the Aviation and
Transportation Security Act, which President Bush
signed into law on November 19. This law puts the Under
Secretary of Transportation for Security in charge of
airline security. Today, the Under Secretary of
Transportation for Security is John W. Magaw, a former
Secret Service agent.

The law empowers Magaw to "establish policies and
procedures requiring air carriers to use information
from government agencies to identify individuals on
passenger lists who may be a threat to civil aviation
and, if such an individual is identified, to notify
appropriate law enforcement agencies and prohibit the
individual from boarding an aircraft."

The TSA has taken that power and run with it.

"The list is a compilation from intelligence agencies
and is shared with the airlines," says Paul Turk, a
spokesperson for the TSA. "But as to how you get on it,
or how it's maintained, or who maintains it, I can't
help you with that."

Turk adds that he doesn't know how large the list is,
"and if I did, I couldn't tell you."