After more than a year of complaints by some US anti-war activists that they were being unfairly targeted by airport security, Washington has admitted the existence of a list, possibly hundreds or even thousands of names long, of people it deems worthy of special scrutiny at airports.
... Rebecca Gordon and Jan Adams, work for a small pacifist magazine called War Times and say they have never been arrested, let alone have criminal records. Others who have filed complaints with the ACLU include a left-wing constitutional lawyer who has been strip-searched repeatedly when travelling through US airports, and a 71-year-old nun from Milwaukee who was prevented from flying to Washington to join an anti-government protest...
... The ACLU's senior lawyer on the case, Jayashri Srikantiah, said she is troubled by several answers that the TSA gave to her questions. The agency, she said, had no way of making sure that people did not end up on the list simply because of things they had said or organisations they belonged to. Once people were on the list, there was no procedure for trying to get off it. The TSA did not even think it was important to keep track of people singled out in error for a security grilling. According to documents the agency released, it saw "no pressing need to do so"...
... The complaints by the ACLU form part of a pattern of protest since the 11 September attacks, with the Bush administration repeatedly under fire for detaining people on the flimsiest of grounds in the name of the "war on terror". Many Muslims have had a hard time, especially if they have a surname such as Hussein. Of course, if your name's "
bin laden" you and your whole family are allowed to get on board a Saudi airliner on September 13th 2001, and leave the country ahead of any potentially embarrassing FBI questioning.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=430073
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