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Government Secrecy Spurs $4 Million Lawsuit Over Simple 'No Fly' List Error
An anonymous reader writes "After a seven-year lawsuit costing nearly $4 million, a judge has concluded that Rahinah Ibrahim's student visa was revoked because an FBI agent checked the wrong box on a form. That simple human error resulted in the detention of Rahinah Ibrahim, the revocation of her student visa years later and interruption of her PhD studies. The Bush and later Obama administrations obstructed the lawsuit repeatedly, invoking classified evidence, sensitive national security information and the state secrets privilege to prevent disclosure of how suspects are placed on the 'no-fly' list. The dispute eventually involved statements of support from James Clapper, Eric Holder and several other DOJ and TSA officials in favor of the government's case. The defendant was not allowed to enter the United States even to attend her own lawsuit trial and in a separate incident, her daughter, a U.S. citizen, was denied entry to witness the trial as well. The case exemplifies how government secrecy can unintentionally transform otherwise easily corrected errors into a multi-year legal and bureaucratic nightmare and waste millions of taxpayer dollars in doing so."
Who said it was unintentional?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"Ah but that will never happen to me" - The Mainstream American Mentality. Source - American, living in U.S. of America.
Now imagine how many people get to enjoy this sort of thing on a daily basis, and either don't want to go through the trouble of challenging it or can't afford to.
Sometimes I think the biggest weapon against humankind is our inability to admit when we are wrong. An obscene amount of money and time is fucking wasted everyday because we can't man up and admit to being wrong. I understand the need for operational secrecy, but sometimes just saying: "Yeah, I fucked up." Would be a much better approach.
Regards,
MBC1977,
to Rahinah Ibrahim, not only for the financial loss that this has caused her but the inconvenience, emotional anguish, etc, etc. This should be paid by the individuals who acted to cover this up - not the organisations that they worked for, where the fine would just be added to the national tax bill. The fine must be high enough so that it really hurts all the individuals who contribute to the fine.
The fine should not be paid by the FBI agent who made the original error, he screwed up (we all do occasionally) and I doubt that he made the mistake maliciously. The fine should be paid by the individuals who were asked to review the case and who conspired to pervert the law of the USA, those who thought it more important to protect a decision by a government department than to see the right thing done. If these individuals are allowed to get away with it then expect this sort of thing to continue.
I know. The willful obstruction of justice isn't important. And even if it was, we don't have to worry because they'd never do that to a citizen. I know the summary and article note how a US citizen was also denied travel, but I'm sure there was a good reason for that too, that we don't need to understand.
I'm not sure why we're even talking about this -- it's not like Canadians are human beings in the first place
It seems to me we have become the very thing we used to criticize about the rest of the world.
We have become the terrorist, the religious intolerant, the torturer, the nation that spies on its own citizens, the nation with secret courts, the suppressor of voters, and the nation that uses government to quell protesters. When fear is our motivation, the most irrational statements begin to sound reasonable and take on a life of their own and strange combinations of bedfellows develop.
I imagine that even Bin Laden would be surprised the extent to which a single organized attack could inject its backward thinking into a nation that claimed to be so different than the rest.
It's called confirmation bias. Once Ibrahim was branded a "bad guy", mere lack of evidence was not enough to get her un-branded.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Just imagine how many people are on the "let's kill them with drones" list by mistake.
That includes the "let's kill the American citizen" list.
"Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence."
- someone or another.
I have light skin and a very anglo-sounding name. One day I go to check in for my flight and discover that I can't print my boarding pass. So I go to the ticket counter and after some hushed tone conversations they give me my boarding pass. This happens three weeks in a row and finally I ask someone why I can't print the darn pass at home. It was then I discovered that I'm on the no-fly list.
Eventually I was able to get something called a "Redress number" and was then able to board planes like everyone else.
But what pissed me off was that a) I was never told that I was on the no-fly list b) Nobody was able to tell me why I ended up on it in the first place c) I had to clear my name to get off the list.
In effect I was tried and convicted without even knowing that I was charged with anything. The late Senator Ted Kennedy was famously put on this list as well. Yet another example of blatant government stupidity and waste.
More and more bright foreign students will choose a country with a friendlier climate to study. Let the US continue like this and remember how THEY got their leadership position in research: all those scientists who fled from Europe before, during and just after WW2. If the US becomes a country people don't want to travel to they can do the same for themselves when Germany did when it threw all Jewish scientists out.
The worst tyrants are the formerly oppressed.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Bush, and Obama* where correct in there assertions. Why? becasue their decisions where based on bad data created by someone at the FBI.
*Some one under them, probably. Remember no president run the day to day affairs of the DoJ. It just isn't possible.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The persecution of the person harmed by the accident wasn't an accident.
Learn to love Alaska
The issue isn't the blocking of her coming in. It was the lies and coverup after, and blocking her daughter, a US citizen, from entering. Mistakes aren't a big deal. Spending $4,000,000 to blame the victim is. Why spend that much monry to harm her? Lying, breaking the law, denying a US citizen entry.
Oh, and yes, it is "illegal" to deny a non-citizen entry. She had the appropriate papers, and there was no legitimate reason to exclude her. The laws *require* that she be allowed in. If not, then "residency" and "visa" mean nothing.
Learn to love Alaska
What puzzles me is the fervor with which the article repeats the word "Obama", even where they have to rather stretch grammatical rules to work it in ("high-ranking President Barack Obama administration officials spent years covering it up." Nice to know which President Obama: the high-ranking one, not the low-ranking President Obama.).
This started in 2004, five years before Obama took office in 2009. So I'd say that they ought to give Bush a bit of the blame; at least, say, for the first five years spent covering it up.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Someone at the FBI didn't create and expand that lawless national "security" state nor did that someone repeatedly try to quash the lawsuit by invoking "state secrets". That would be the responsibility of one George Walker Bush and one Barack Hussein Obama. The buck stops at just one place, and that place isn't the desk of some flunky at the FBI.
"Checked the wrong box on a form" screams cop-out to me.
Agree
At one point before the ordeal began, she was questioned in her home by two agents, about her affiliation to a Malaysian association of expatriates. The association had a name that began with the a word that means "association" in Malay. So did another Malaysian organization that the agents were suspicious about.
There is no substitute for common sense. Especially, no body of rules will do.