No-fly lists....

I may be one of the last to know about this. My sweetie and I were talking on the phone last night about an anti-war activist we know who was hassled at an airport recently when trying to board his flight. The guy was still fuming days later, talking about lists of names of activists who can be kept from leaving the country at the whim of “Homeland Security.”

I decided to follow up and I found this story from The Oregonian. (The url links to a non-Oregonian page: the original article seems inaccessible on the newspaper’s site. I did confirm the authenticity of the piece on Lexus-Nexus.)

"There is a 'no-fly' list," [Nico Melendez, federal Transportation Security Administration spokesperson] says. "That's people who cannot fly, period," because they've been determined to be or are suspected of being "a threat to civil aviation or to national security."

Details about the list are "considered sensitive security information and cannot be released to the public," Nico says, but the Wall Street Journal suggests there are about 300 names on the "no-fly" list.

There's another list that Nico calls the "selectees list." Might as well call them "suspectees." This is a much larger list of names, accumulated, Nico says, from information obtained from intelligence agencies and the airlines. These folks may be allowed to fly but only after they're intensely scrutinized by airline, law enforcement and security personnel.

So the activist was not really exaggerating.

This feeds into my greatest paranoia. Which is that when the next terrorist strike occurs on U.S. soil (I say when because most “anti-terrorist” measures are ineffectual and Bush’s “war on terrorism” is akin to throwing petrol on a raging fire), Bush will declare martial law and suspend civil liberties and the freedom to travel. Then Ashcroft will begin rounding up leftists, anti-war activists, non-born-again Christians, and others.

We’ve already done those things to non-U.S. citizens. I don't know about you, but my citizenship seems a rather thin shield to stand between me and this out-of-control fascist government.