Progressives love them some lists. It allows them to section off parts of the population into easy to manage portions for their divide and conquer politics.
However…
Saadiq Long is a 10 year USAF veteran. While stationed in Istambul, Turkey he converted to Islam. A while after he was honorably discharged, he moved to Qatar and opened a business teaching English in Doha.
Back in the US, his mother, a Texas resident, became terminally ill. He was informed and he booked his flight to Texas to see her. The day before his flight, he received a call saying that he would not be allowed on the plane because of his “status”. Most likely because he is on the infamous “No Fly List”. We’ll never know because no one is allowed to know about “The List” or why they got onto it or how to get their name removed from it.
He booked another flight, and after the FBI went to his mother’s home to interview her about her terminal illness and this time was not blocked from flying to Texas. However, he has made two attempts to fly home since the first part of February, one time with a FBI escort to the airport, and has now been blocked from boarding the plane both times by the Department of Homeland Security.
This story prompts MSNBC’s Chris Hayes to talk about the “No Fly List” in regards to Gun Control.
For videos extend the post.
The intro video about Saadiq Long’s story
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In this video, Ben Jealous President & CEO of the NAACP, Gadeir Abbas of CAIR and is also Saadiq Long’s attorney, Jen Daskel former assistant attorney for the Obama NSA now at Georgetown University, and James Poulos from Huffington Post discuss how idiotic the “No Fly List” is without blaming the Bush Administration even once.
James Poulos even goes on a rant about “bureaucracies” that makes me wonder if he still has a job this morning.
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Lastly, the panel starts with Rahm Emanuel’s 2007 attempt to tie firearms background checks to the “No Fly List” (aka: No Fly – No Buy laws) and ends with more “No Fly List” bashing.
It is good stuff.
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It is a pity that they cannot extend that logic to all the other lists they want to create.
It’s time we stopped looking at the No Fly List as a major weapon in the war on terror, questionable at best, and began to look at it as a test case for inventing ways to totally control the population.
It’s just as easy to make the case that each one of these overzealous uses of the NFL is a failure of Constitutional governance, and that is what we need to be doing now.
1 – nobody will watch the videos you posted. NBC puts 30 second commercials in front of them, and nobody wants to watch anything NBC produces.
2- if the guy is still a US citizen, the first amendment should apply – the part about the right to seek redress. Any reasonable interpretation of the whole first amendment would require the government to tell citizens why they are on any list used to restrict or infringe on a civil right.
3 – if the guy is no longer a US citizen, then I have no problem with him being denied entry into the US.