"WE DO NOT WANT..."

"...an American Society where everyone is treated as a terrorist, money launderer, drug trafficker, or criminal." -------->Defending Liberty in a Time of Crisis


Althought the Eagle Forum and the ACLU are frequently at odds with each other on many issues, they did join forces in 2002 in a non-monetary-award lawsuit concerning the federal government's no-fly watch list . It appears that members of the Eagle Forum have been lumped together with liberal or progressive activists in being delayed, searched, questioned, detained at airports in the fight against terrorism .


[Here are all of the links referenced in the above paragraph:
http://www.eagleforum.org/alert/alerts/2001/privacy.shtml
http://old.valleyadvocate.com/articles/grounded.html * if link does not work, then try http://old.valleyadvocate.com/valarchive.phtml and then hit the article from 11/28/02 about being grounded and the government's no-fly list.
http://www.opednews.com/cassell_they_have_a_list.htm
http://aclusonoma.org/profile.html
http://epic.org/privacy/airtravel/profiling.html ]


The Eagle Forum is a christian conservative newswatch group founded by [the now deceased] anti-era amendment activist Phyllis Schafly. Although Mrs. Schafly and I did not see eye-to-eye, I have read at least one of her books and found her to be a writer of merit despite our fundamental disagreements on fundamentals.

Here is what author [and George W. Bush critic] James Moore, author of Bush's Brain, said about the no-fly watch list as quoted at http://www.cruel.com/weblog/17978/securing-homeland-one-writer-time : "I have been on the No fly Watch List for a year. I will never be told the official reason. No one ever is. You cannot sue to get the information. Nothing I have done has moved me any closer to getting off the list. There were 35,000 Americans in that database last year. According to a European government that screens hundreds of thousands of American travelers every year, the list they have been given to work from has since grown to 80,000."

I have not found any info in my limited search on the internet to support those numbers. I have found that there is no way to get off the list once a person is on it--unless one is a politician. [It has been reported that some folks have added their middle initials to their names, successfully avoiding delays and searches at airports.]

~sapphoq

p.s. Complacency is the friend of terrorists and of anti-privacy governments.