Democratic leaders came out in force on
Wednesday in favor of a proposal to prohibit Americans who are on
federal government terrorist watchlists from purchasing firearms.
By: Alex Emmons and Zaid Jilani
WASHINGTON (TheIntercept)
- A group of Democratic senators waged a fillibuster on the Senate
floor. And after presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump
announced that he intends to meet with the powerful National Rifle
Association to discuss a similar restriction, presumptive Democratic
nominee Hillary Clinton welcomed him to the cause.
For Democrats,
however, the move amounts to a strong endorsement of a system that
civil liberties advocates have called a “Kafkaesque bureaucracy,” and
which some Democrats have previously criticized for being secretive,
unaccountable, and discriminatory.
Getting your name on a
watchlist is much easier than getting it off. According to interagency
watchlisting guidelines The Intercept published in 2013, it takes
neither “concrete facts” nor “irrefutable evidence” to add someone’s
name as a terror suspect. The guidelines allow the administration to
name individuals as representatives of terrorist groups they have no
demonstrable connection to, or to name entire “categories” of people on
to the no-fly list.
There was no way for anyone to know ahead of
time if they were on the no-fly list until 2014, when a federal court
ruled that the government had to inform citizens when they were place on
it. But the Department of Homeland Security still refuses to tell
people why, or offer a form of judicial redress.
Before the
September 11 attacks, the U.S. government only banned 16 people from
flying on planes for their connections to terror groups. During the
George W. Bush administration, that number swelled dramatically, leading
to some high-profile embarrassments.
In 2004, Sen. Ted Kennedy
told a congressional committee that he had been stopped and questioned
at airport security five times because his name appeared on the
watchlist. A Bush administration official told the Washington Post
anonymously that “T. Kennedy” was a common terrorist alias.
On
the same day, former civil rights activist Rep. John Lewis, D.-Ga.,
announced that he had been “held up” more than 35 times that year while
trying to fly.
But placement on a terror watchlist can have far
worse consequences than harassment at airport security. Lyman Latin — a
disabled U.S. marine veteran who was wrongly placed on the list and
later joined an ACLU lawsuit in response — was unable to get a Veterans
Administration disability evaluation completed because he was blocked
from flying from Egypt to the United States. As a result, his disability
payments were reduced, and he had to move into lower-cost housing,
exacerbating the impact of his disability. Another Army veteran
represented by the ACLU was stuck in Colombia for years due to his
inability to fly home.
Individuals who have been placed on the
government’s watchlists have even been subject to extra scrutiny in
court for cases completely unrelated to terrorism — as their designation
on the watchlist can end up on their rap sheets for judges to see.
“The
federal watchlists that the compilers of rap sheets draw on for these
notations are notoriously arbitrary and inaccurate. People are placed on
these lists without ever being told why or given an opportunity to
contest their listing. And the lists appear to focus disproportionately
on individuals with Muslim-sounding names,” Ramzi Kassem, an associate
professor at CUNY School of Law, told The Intercept in March.
In
2014, the Associated Press reported that more than 1.5 million names
have been added to various watchlists in the five years after Umar
Farouk Abdulmutallab, colloquially known as “the underwear bomber,”
failed to blow up an airplane over Detroit in 2009.
Documents
published by The Intercept in 2014 showed that nearly half of the people
on the government’s shared list of terror suspects are marked as having
“no recognized terrorist group affiliation.”
In April, the
Council of American-Islamic Relations in Michigan filed a class action
lawsuit alleging that the sweeping watchlist system is arbitrary and
discriminatory against Muslims. One of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit was
a 7-month old infant whose mother was stopped at airport security while
he was patted down, subjected to “chemical testing,” and had his
diapers searched – all because the baby’s boarding pass labeled him a
“known or suspected terrorist.”
In the past, some Democrats
recognized these problems. Rep Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Tex., chaired a
hearing on the watchlist in 2008, saying that she was “not very happy”
with a list that misidentifies individuals “who innocently come to use
the airlines and to visit Grandma, to go on a family vacation, to try to
make deadlines to a funeral, and whatever else the airlines are used
for.” By December of last year, she was pushing the list’s use to bar
gun purchases. “We’re just asking for terrorists not to be able to walk
into a gun shop and buy a gun,” she said.
“Over the years, this
list has grown to have over 1.1 million entries. With so many different
names on the list, it is not surprising that every single day countless
Americans are misidentified as terrorists,” Rep. Yvette Clark, D-N.Y.,
said in February 2009. But after the San Bernardino massacre, and when
House Republicans blocked action on a bill to bar gun purchases from
those on the list this past December, she tweeted out an article about
House Democrats excoriating the move.
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