[I]t is an essential part of the justice dispensed
here that you should be condemned not only in innocence but also in ignorance.
― Franz Kafka, The Trial
― Franz Kafka, The Trial
A recent segment on Chris
Hayes’s show Up (embedded below),
following on a column by Glenn Greenwald, recounts the outrageous
story of Saadiq Long, a 43-year-old African-American Muslim and ten-year US Air
Force veteran, and his Kafkaesque journey through the no-fly wringer. Last year,
Long, who lives with his wife and children in Qatar, where he teaches
English, bought a ticket on KLM to visit his mother in Oklahoma, who was
suffering from worsening congestive heart failure. He was surprised when KLM
refused to allow him to board his flight back to his own country because the US
government had placed him on its “no-fly list.” Never convicted or even charged with
any crime, Long spent over six months trying to figure out why his name was on
the list and what he could do to have it removed.
(The answers, of course, are
that he will never know why, nor will his name (since it may not be his name) likely ever be taken off the
list. As this AP story by Eileen Sullivan points out:
“The
government will not disclose who is on its list or why someone might have been
placed on it.”)
After
a months-long campaign by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and (according
to this local news article)
“several legislators,” and two weeks after Greenwald published a column on Long’s
plight in The Guardian November, 2012,
Long was finally allowed to fly home to see his ailing mother. Problem solved, right?
