I’ve written before, here and here, about the U.S. Government’s scandalous behavior in the case of a woman, Rahinah Ibrahim, placed on the no-fly list. The government did everything they could to make the case disappear, including refusing to grant Ibrahim a visa so that she could testify, placing her daughter, a U.S. citizen, on the no-fly list so that she could not return home to testify, and then lying to the court claiming that they hadn’t done any of those things. They also claimed that publicly available information was a state secret that couldn’t be introduced at trial.
In those previous posts, I wrote that I was objecting to the government’s heavy handed and bad faith actions and that I didn’t know whether placing Ibrahim on the no-fly list was justified or not. Now we know the answer. It turns out that she was placed on the list by mistake. FBI agent Kevin Kelley mistakenly checked the wrong box1 on a form that resulted in her placement on the list. The evidence also suggests that he was filling out the form because he confused Jemaah Islah Malaysia, a Malaysian professional organization composed primarily of those who had studied in the U.S. with Jemaah Islamiyah, an organization on the government’s designated foreign terrorists list.
As I wrote in my second post, the judge initially released only a summary of his findings giving the government a chance to appeal the full decision’s release. Now the (slightly redacted) decision is available. The judge is remarkably even tempered in his remarks. He doesn’t call out the government for their duplicity although he does describe the government’s treatment of Ibrahim as “Kafkaesque” and ordered that the she be removed from all the watch lists she may have been put on and that the government produce sworn depositions that they have complied.
Footnotes:
Actually, this is understandable. The form’s instructions call for checking the boxes next to lists on which the subject should NOT be placed. Kelley found no reason for her to be put on the no-fly list so he didn’t check that box, resulting in her being placed on the list. The clumsy wording aside, haven’t these people ever heard of human factors engineering? It would be interesting to discover how often this mistake has been made.