Life during Wartime

By Camille T. Taiara

AS AIRLINE PASSENGERS bemoan the long lines and inevitable delays of holiday travel, Jan Adams and Rebecca Gordon continue to face more pressing concerns. When the women – both lifelong nonviolent human rights activists and copublishers of War Times newspaper – tried to board a flight from San Francisco International Airport to Boston to visit relatives Aug. 7, 2002, airline personnel told them they were on a federal terrorist watch list and held them for police questioning.

Although they were eventually allowed to board their plane, the threat haunts them to this day – and raises questions about whether the government may be treating civilians as potential terrorists simply for engaging in First Amendment-protected activities like speaking out against war.

"As with all these government watchlists, the concern is that they will be distributed and built without any constraints to ensure that innocent Americans are not wrongly flagged," Jayashri Srikantiah, associate legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of northern California, said in a Dec. 4 press release.

While Adams and Gordon's plight, and that of others like them, garnered press attention a year ago, the issue has received scant notice from the mainstream media since then.

But the couple and their attorneys at the ACLU continue to press the Department of Homeland Security for details on why the women, now 56 and 51 years old, respectively, were selected for special scrutiny in the first place – and what they need to do to get off a watch list that, as it turns out, the government won't even confirm they're on.

"We'd be jeopardizing national security if we began identifying names," Transportation Security Administration spokesperson Nico Melendez told the Bay Guardian.

The ACLU eventually filed suit against the feds April 22. Documents it received from the TSA and, more recently, the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a result of the suit reveal a few clues but leave their basic questions unanswered. In the meantime analysts worry that people who are on the watch list but shouldn't be could soon face greater troubles when the list is fed to the FBI's newly created Terrorist Screening Center.

Created by executive order and operational as of Dec. 1, the center consolidates a dozen watch lists from numerous agencies – including the TSA, FBI, Central Intelligence Agency, and the State Department – into one master list accessible to local, state, and federal authorities. The FBI expects the final list to include upward of 100,000 names.

According to the documents released to the ACLU, the TSA list contains data submitted by "federal intelligence or law enforcement agencies" and includes two classifications: "no-fly" and "selectee." As the name implies, those categorized as no-fly are barred from boarding any airplane and referred to the authorities. Those deemed selectees are subject to additional screening.

The feds won't say how many people are on the list and blacked out all information on how it assesses individuals' threat levels and who can authorize removing names from the list.

Melendez told us the watch list system is being incorporated into Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System II, which will soon replace the computer system being used by airport personnel. CAPPS II should help stop people whose names resemble those of suspected terrorists from being caught up in its net by providing additional identifying information.

Anyone who believes he or she may be on the TSA list but shouldn't be can contact the TSA directly, Melendez said.

"That's the first thing we did!" retorted Gordon, who said she and Adams wrote the TSA, then filed Freedom of Information Act applications with both the TSA and the FBI – both times to no avail – before taking their case to the courts.

We called the FBI's Public Affairs Office in Washington, D.C., to find out what kinds of steps its Terrorist Screening Center is taking to make sure its master list doesn't aggravate the problem.

"As they're consolidating the list, part of the job is to ensure no one is in there incorrectly," said a spokesperson, who told us we could quote her but not use her name. Paradoxically, the source then added that the center "does not administer" the lists it receives and "cannot mess with the criteria of why these people might wind up on a list."

Such statements do little to reassure civil liberties advocates.

For her part, Gordon now fears that being named on such a list could cause all kinds of unforeseen difficulties for her and her partner at anything from a simple traffic stop to a U.S. embassy abroad.

"It makes us very, very nervous, considering how badly these lists are managed and that no one will tell us the criteria for getting on or off these lists," she said.