Slashdot Mirror
Citizenfour Director Sues To Find Out Why She Was Detained Every Time She Flew
An anonymous reader writes: Since the 2006 release of My Country, My Country, Laura Poitras has left and re-entered the U.S. roughly 40 times. Virtually every time during that six-year-period that she has returned to the U.S., her plane has been met by DHS agents who stand at the airplane door or tarmac and inspect the passports of every de-planing passenger until they find her (on the handful of occasions where they did not meet her at the plane, agents were called when she arrived at immigration). Each time, they detain her, and then interrogate her at length about where she went and with whom she met or spoke. They have exhibited a particular interest in finding out for whom she works.
Laura Poitras is known as the Oscar-winning director of the Ed Snowden documentary CITIZENFOUR, and with it, one of the reporters who helped break Snowden's story in the first place. Pre-Snowden, she was a not-as-widely-known-but-still-celebrated documentary filmmaker, who also got some attention after her future colleague Glenn Greenwald wrote an article about how she was detained at the border every time she flew into the country (which was frequently, as she had made a documentary, My Country, My Country, concerning the Iraq War, along with The Oath, which reported on two Yemenis who had worked with Osama bin Laden).
You rub elbows with enemies of the state, you live in Berlin and you're wondering why you're detained? Get a fucking grip!
You should also count yourself lucky that you're not getting a full body cavity search with that treatment by DHS and Customs. I'm not a lover of the DHS but in this case sorry lady you can be detained or you can just stay the hell out of the US.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Easy.
On group is a bunch of whinging cheapskate libertarian tax dodgers who want all the benefits of tax revenue without paying their part.
The other has legitimate concerns.
Riyadh al-Adhadh is not some random raghead insurgent whom Laura suddenly decided to fund. He was the primary focus of her film 'My Country, My Country', so little surprise that she was in contact with him and supported him. He was jailed for months on false terrorism charges, and apparently still served as Baghdad Provincial Council Chairman last year.
Evidently she knew him better than the whole bunch of all-seing, all-scanning, all-collecting, "we need to listen to your granny or we can't catch the terrorists" three letter agencies together. We should all sit down and weep in despair, if this wire transfer is still the reason for the ongoing harassment Laura on every single flight.