All right, y'all, welcome to the show.
Back to it, I should say.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And our first guest on the show today is Edward Hasbrook.
And he's a travel expert.
He's the author of the Practical Nomad travel book series.
He's a journalist, blogger, consumer advocate, and travel expert, consultant to the Identity Project on travel related human rights and civil liberties issues.
And the Identity Project can be found at PapersPlease.org.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Edward?
I'm doing very well, Scott.
Well, thanks very much for joining us today.
Looks like a really great website here.
I haven't had too much time to go through it.
But I see that your very top story is one of the most important stories of the week, and really the most important story of the decade.
Why not?
It should be.
Gulet Mohamed, a Somali-American, who what?
Go ahead.
Tell us.
Well, the short story is that he has been effectively exiled from the US as a US citizen.
As a result of his banning from the US, he is remaining in custody in Kuwait, where he's been held and has reported that he's previously been tortured and remains in fear of that.
Although he's a US citizen, he can't come home because the US Department of Homeland Security has issued a secret extrajudicial no-fly order and is preventing any airline from flying him out of Kuwait to anywhere, apparently, much less to come back to the US.
And needless to say, that is a sort of thing that I think most of us would have thought could not happen to us as American citizens, that home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to let you in.
Isn't that what Americanism is about?
Yeah, I totally agree with that.
And I was trying to think earlier.
This is something that, when I was a kid, it was an important distinction drawn, even in public school.
But I guess my dad taught me, too, that an American is allowed to leave, a Russian is not.
And in fact, we even watched a film in school about some prisoners of East Germany trying to escape to the West and having to make a hot air balloon and all this and getting shot down.
And this was something that was the definition of tyranny, was that the Soviets know that the people would run away if they could.
And so their border guards face in.
Sure.
And I had the same experience.
I was visiting friends in Berlin earlier this year, an American man and his wife who had grown up in East Germany.
And I asked her, of all of the things when you were growing up, what do you think was the thing that people resented most and that most led to the breaking of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany?
And she said, the freedom to travel, the freedom to move around.
Not even the Spassi and the secret police watching everything, but the ability to move around and go where you want.
And this incident, I mean, what's happening to Ghulam Mohammed is really an outrage.
But it's important for you to understand, this is not an isolated incident.
We've reported at least as far back as 2006 incidents where US citizens have been put on the no-fly list while they were overseas and prevented from coming home.
And the ACLU last year did file a lawsuit, which is ongoing, on behalf of a range of such people in several different countries who are trying to come home who are US citizens, as well as some US citizens who are here, but can't go overseas because they're not being allowed to fly.
So this isn't something new.
I think what is particularly extreme about this most recent case is that this is someone, most of these other people, are out on the street, although they may have problems if their visas run out in some other country and they can't come back to the US.
Are they supposed to seek political asylum overseas?
Ghulam Mohammed's case is different in that this, he was put on the no-fly list while he was under detention.
He'd been taken in for questioning by the Kuwaiti monarchist government, apparently because of travel to Yemen.
I've traveled to Yemen, very interesting place to visit.
I'd encourage people who want to get globalized to go there and see for yourself.
But who knows what will now happen?
I wonder how the Yemen or Syrian or any of the other visa stamps in my passport will be looked at on my next trip.
But Ghulam Mohammed was taken in for questioning by the Kuwaiti government, notorious violators of human rights and allies of the US, of course.
And while he was in custody there, the US put him on the no-fly list and told the Kuwaitis they'd done so.
And the Kuwaitis have decided to deport him, but they can't send him back to the US, because the US says, we won't let him get here.
So he's remaining in custody because of his being barred from the US, because of the US attempt to get other countries around the world to enforce the no-fly list, the US no-fly list.
For example, Canada, I just wanted to make one other point, the most obvious thing is, well, why did he fly to Canada and then drive home from there?
Well, Canada actually has ordered airlines to not transport to Canada anybody who's on the US no-fly list.
So we can't do that.
Well, now, so is all this just a regulatory thing?
Or is there, do they change the law?
Because this, tell me this hasn't been the law all the time, are they in violation of the law, or what's your understanding of that?
Well, two questions there.
I mean, because the no-fly list, in this case, what you're saying is the no-fly list is being used sort as a technicality to banish people, which is not the American way.
That's not the American way, but the no-fly list isn't the American way.
I mean, the government can't just put you on an arrest list and have you arrested.
They have to go to a judge and get an arrest warrant.
And an arrest list is a list of people who have been ordered arrested by courts following legal procedures.
The grave error came when they decided, we're just going to make up a no-fly list.
The interesting thing is that there are existing legal procedures.
I mean, if I think that you're going to come kill me, and I have reason to believe that, and you've made threats, I can go to a judge.
I can get a restraining order that says you can't come within so many feet of my house.
But there's a legal process, and you can contest that.
The no-fly list, the government of the US has never gone to a court, so far as we can tell, and actually said, we believe this person is a terrorist threat.
We want a court injunction barring him from flying and traveling by common carrier.
They have never done that.
Even though there are existing legal procedures to do that.
There are even procedures where they could bring in classified evidence to use in the procedure.
They've never done that.
Instead, they decided, we're just going to make up, through this completely secret extrajudicial administrative process within the Department of Homeland Security, a list of people, and we're going to tell the airlines, even though they're common carriers with a legal duty to carry any passenger, that they're not allowed to transport these people.
There is no basis in US law whatsoever for the no-fly list, but because the orders are given to the airlines, and the government directly won't even confirm or deny that you're on that list, nobody thus far has been able to get a court to review it.
The second legal problem, aside from the fact that it's not based on any law or regulation, but simply something that they have done.
The second problem, at an even more fundamental level, is that this violates one of the few international human rights treaties that the US has actually signed and ratified.
Article 12 of the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights says, could not be more explicit, that everyone has the right to leave any country, including their own, and cannot be arbitrarily denied the right to return to their own country.
I have never seen a more flagrant violation by any country of that treaty than what's happening today to Ghoulette Mohamed and people like him, US citizens, on the no-fly list.
Well, treaties are for the US to use against other states, never the other way around.
Sort of like the cop in your neighborhood that can run the red light right in front of you just because he can't.
Well, that's impunity is what it is.
And the problem is that although the US ratified this treaty, they did so with the reservation that it is not self-executing, which means you can't directly invoke it in a US court.
They've never taken any action to implement it.
So in theory, it binds the US, and other countries could complain, or the UN Human Rights Committee, which is charged with enforcing the treaty, but some other country would have to actually choose to take this issue up against the US at the international level.
All right, now hold it right there.
We'll be right back with Edward Hasbrook from PapersPlease.org, Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
We're on chaos in Austin and Liberty Radio Network.
Talking with Edward Hasbrook from PapersPlease.org.
Remember when you were a kid, that was the definition of a tyranny, was you had to prove yourself to probably usually either Soviet or Nazi soldiers to be allowed to go where you wanted, and that was part of what defined us, at least as late as the 1980s anyway, maybe even the 1990s, was that that's what we weren't.
But I guess things are different now, huh, Edward, without the Soviet Union to compare ourselves to anymore.
We just turn ourselves right into the homeland, throw the USA in the garbage can.
Well, what we've seen since 9-11, partly in overreaction to that event, and partly opportunistic exploitation of people's real fear by those who've had a long-time agenda of surveillance and control, is the implementation of a comprehensive system of surveillance and control of people's travels that's based on the pre-existing commercial airline reservation systems.
And the way it works, and I don't think most people really understand this, and maybe some of the listeners have been saying, well, look, I'm not going to go near a place like Yemen or Kuwait, and what danger am I in?
This affects us all.
What happens now is whenever you make an airline reservation, you are required by government regulations to give identifying information that matches up with government-issued ID.
The government has access to those reservations.
And each time you want to fly, this has been the case since 2008 internationally, and as of late last year with the implementation of the Secure Flight Program, forewellianly named, in the US.
This is true for domestic flights as well, that before the airline is allowed to let you on the plane, they have to send your reservations to the government, and they have to wait and get back permission in the form of a clearance message.
And the default is now no.
The government doesn't answer.
They can't let you on the plane.
And along with that, those decisions about whether to let you go on the plane are based both on requiring you to show your papers, your ID, and increasing harassment has been given to people who try to exercise their right to travel without ID.
We've got information on our website about the first person who's actually going on trial for trumped-up criminal charges later this month in Albuquerque for trying, quite legally, to fly without ID.
But also, these decisions are based on your travel history.
And probably the largest post-9-11 system of government surveillance and compilation of individual dossiers about innocent Americans are the dossiers of international travel reservations that have been collected.
We've been mounting a project over the last four years since the government revealed that they've been collecting this stuff.
We don't know exactly how far back the collection goes.
But we've been requesting these, and we've been finding, in some cases, tens or hundreds of pages for anybody who's traveled internationally at least since 9-11 of their complete airline reservations.
And these have in them not just where you went, but who you went with, who you sat next to, whether you asked for a kosher meal or a halal meal.
In your hotel room behind the closed doors of that room with this person you were traveling with, did you ask for one bed or two?
What's your IP address?
What's your credit card number?
All of this, through airline reservations, is now in permanent federal government dossiers, about tens of millions of Americans, that can be consulted every time they fly to decide whether to let them on the next flight.
We've been trying to get more information about these records.
I myself was in federal court in San Francisco yesterday in the first preliminary hearing in the first case we brought under the Privacy Act test case, trying to get them to release their complete records of what they know about my own travels, as well as how the system works and what other agencies or other countries, like the Kuwaitis perhaps, wouldn't be surprised, this information has been shared with.
But they've really been stonewalling.
And I think this ultimately is going to be as big a story in many ways as the discoveries about what was being kept in people's FBI files in an earlier, less technological day, was about that the government probably has files on you.
If you've traveled abroad, you may not even realize it.
Right.
Well, and you know, if all this record keeping comes about in such an arbitrary way, without real limits or rhyme or reason behind it, then we can see also the danger, as in this case, I mean, to read Glenn Greenwald or Mark Mazzetti in the New York Times about this particular case of Ghoulette Mohammed, we can see this power being used against people very arbitrarily as well.
We're abandoning law right at the time that we're empowering law enforcement to do virtually anything it wants to people.
I think people have tended to look at, for example, the TSA in terms of minor, you know, offensive, certainly, but in a minor way.
And they've looked at the visible stuff that happens at the checkpoint and not at the deeper stuff that goes on behind the scenes.
But when you start digging into this, you'll find that really not surprisingly, given that much of the panic about 9-11 was about air travel, that's where they've gone furthest.
And the airport now is the domestic Guantanamo.
It's a law-free zone.
You know, the TSA says you must submit to screening, but there's no law that says what submit means or what screening means.
Does that mean if they say bend over and spread them, thou shalt submit?
And former Secretary of Homeland Security Chertoff was on the public record repeatedly saying that he felt that no-fly decisions should never be subjected to judicial review, which is kind of a remarkable thing for a former federal judge to say.
And the Obama administration has done nothing to repudiate that.
So we still have this area where the policy of the government and the articulated belief of the government is that this is an area where we should cede any rule of law and allow a, as you say, a completely arbitrary process of deciding who can go and who can't.
Yeah, well, and in this case, too, you know, that's the thing too.
This is a great example.
Here's this kid who no matter what they say he must be involved in or where they can just as easy bring him back to America and give him access to a court.
It's not like the federal court system in America is so lenient.
We just have to turn this guy over to the Kuwaitis to be tortured or something.
You know, there's no real excuse for this either.
That's the point I'm getting at.
This guy is 19 years old.
He wants to, you know, come back to the U.S. and get on with his life.
Even the Kuwaitis can't come up with any actual crime to charge him.
That's what they want to torture him for, to get him to admit to something.
Right.
You know, so the U.S. has never suggested that he's committed any crime.
But this is de facto rendering a U.S. citizen over to a foreign government to torture him precisely because there's no legal basis to do any of that sort of thing under U.S. law.
And the only way to make it happen is to banish them to some foreign dictatorship.
Amazing.
Well, I'll be keeping my eye on Papers, Please.
Dot org from now on, everybody.
That's Edward Hasbrook from the Identity Project.
Again, Papers, Please.
Dot org.
And his site is Hasbrook.
Dot org.
H-A-S-B-R-O-U-C-K dot org.
Thanks very much for your time on the show.
Appreciate it.
My pleasure.
We'll be right back.
