Consider that face down in the lower-right.

Could someone like that ever hurt a fly? Clearly a Muslim female; actually, she’s Prof. Rahinah Ibrahim, 48 years old, an Engineering Ph.D. and no less than Dean of Faculty at her university in Malaysia. As this article from Die Zeit puts it, “[s]he travels to congresses in Rabat, Eindhoven, Beijing, Bangkok, Milan and Kassel. It is only within the USA that she has not been able to fly for years.”

That’s because she has been on the US No-Fly List for years, and that for no good reason. She is supposed to be finally off of it, but there are still lingering doubts about that (see below). This extended Die Zeit piece is all about how she – maybe, probably – managed to be one of the few who finally got themselves off of it. And as Die Zeit writer Wolf Wiedmann-Schmidt puts it:

It is an example of the extent to which the USA after September 11, 2001 got carried away in its War on Terror – and how a security apparatus based on secrecy attempts to hide its mistakes, with their serious consequences, from the Public.

This is, after all, a blogpost, so I’ll get right to the essential point: Prof. Ibrahim was guilty of nothing, she was the victim of a Homeland Security bureaucrat checking the wrong box. The momentous result of that was not only a Christmastime visit from FBI officials while she was still studying at Stanford; being placed on the No-Fly List while she was still studying there so that she was briefly placed in detention while trying to fly back home out of San Francisco International Airport; once back in Malaysia, finding herself unable to return to the US to continue her studies; but also a nine-year campaign (costing $4 million in legal expenses) to clear her name and get her off that list.

It’s all scandalous, that someone could be treated this way – she was allowed to look at her rejected visa application at the US embassy in Kuala Lumpur, only to see it stamped “TERRORIST” – but probably Weidmann-Schmidt’s most painful bit of text is where he describes how:

The [American] government did everything it could to block Rahinah Ibrahim’s process, with claims about state secrets and national security. For years it seemed as if they would succeed.

But they did not. She did get her trial, and after five years, last 15 April a federal judge ruled in Rahinah Ibrahim v. Department of Homeland Security that “Dr. Ibrahim is no threat to the national security of the USA” and that she should be removed from the No-Fly List.

That trial, by the way, was held in secret. Naturally, Prof. Ibrahim was not invited to testify at it personally – she could not enter the US! Rather, when it came time, her deposition (and cross-examination) was taken by video camera from a studio in London. What is more remarkable, though, is how obscure it still remains as an historical phenomenon: searching Google News for “Rahinah Ibrahim” right now yields only a reference to this Die Zeit piece about which I am writing and two others, in English, one from something called the Courthouse News Service, and the other from Al-Jazeera.

Weidmann-Schmidt’s piece does mention that Prof. Ibrahim does not like to speak with the press and was not particularly cooperative with Die Zeit’s inquiries. While perhaps understandable, that is surely not the way to help this case redound to the greater good – only by letting the outrage spread, one feels, will anything ever be done about this. For now, and for the question of why she felt it was worth nine years and $4 million to fight this, we have this from her video testimony:

I don’t want my children to hate America because of what has happened to me, without getting to know the America I have respected.

Well, I had to translate that last passage from the German – meaning that when it comes to that last verb in particular, it is ambiguous whether Prof. Ibrahim meant “the America I have respected [still]” or “the America I respected [but no more].” I’ll let you make your own guess as to her meaning.

(Oh, and Prof. Ibrahim still has not been granted a visa to return to the US. The reason is classified.)

Why haven’t we heard more about this?

Obama signe un décret controversé sur le contrôle d’Internet en cas de catastrophe http://t.co/k77uRyZy

July 11, 2012 11:59 am via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@lemondefr

Le Monde

French words often are in similar form to their English counterparts, so you probably can make out the meaning here: this has to do with retaining control of the Internet in the event of some “catastrophe.” Specifically, President Obama signed a new Executive Order on the subject, back on July 10.

The Order is labeled “controversial” in that tweet, but I became aware of it in the first place only from that source and have not been able to find much additional discussion elsewhere. The President basically reshuffled the responsibilities assigned to various federal agencies should either some natural disaster or national security menace arise that threatens US communications. Such criticism as there is has focused on the Order’s section 5.2, which seems to give the Secretary of Homeland Security the power to seize and control private communications networks, e.g. the Internet.

This Le Monde article does provide a link to the tech-site The Verge, which was one media source that did mention this new Executive Order and critique it; you can go there for further explanation in English.

Here’s another interesting tidbit for those interested in US border control, and the effect that has on perceptions of the country by foreigners. Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung reports today (Astonishing USA entrance-ban) that Karl Dietrich Wolff (66 years old) was supposed to attend a human-rights conference at Vassar College, co-sponsored by the German Historical Institute of Washington, DC, but was detained last Friday as he tried to enter the country at JFK airport in New York, kept there for several hours as officials questioned him, and finally packed on a flight to take him back to Germany. Now, he thought he was in good shape with a 10-year visa to enter the US valid until next year, and had indeed traveled there without incident invoking it on three previous occasions – except that US authorities had revoked that long-term visa back in 2003. Or at least so he discovered during his extended questioning in the bowels of JFK; Wolff claims no one had bothered to inform him about that before. (The question remains open whether during one or more of those previous trips he had managed to enter the country despite relying upon that “revoked” ten-year visa – how much does anyone want to bet that that did not happen at least once?)

Just who is this enemy of the (American) people, Karl Dietrich Wolff? That brief Süddeutsche Zeitung piece – credited to news agencies – makes a game attempt to figure out what the problem could possibly be. Back in his mid-20s, it seems, he was chairman of the Socialist German Student Federation (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentbund, or SDS) and further founded the “Black Panther Solidarity Committee” in Frankfurt in 1969. Since then, though, he has been a publisher. It’s true that his first publishing-house was called “Red Star,” but that one went bankrupt in 1993 and he went on to found others, while winning a few German literary prizes along the way.

Ah yes, a publisher – just the sort of figure you want in any foreign land to become disenchanted with the way he is treated by uniformed officials from another country! Then again, we can strongly assume that Wolff has a better grasp of American border-control policies and procedures than most of the rest of us: he is known particularly in his career for bringing out critical editions of the works of Kafka, among others.