Column: Why did the U.S. put Ahmad Chebli on its no-fly list? He deserves to know, and so do we
In its long battle with Ahmad Chebli, the U.S. government finally caved.
Chebli is an American citizen, born in Chicago, who tried to board a plane in Beirut in November 2018 to return to his home in the United States but was barred from the flight on orders of the American government. No one would explain why. For a month, he says, he was not allowed to return with his family to Michigan, where he works as an engineer in the auto industry.
Eventually he was told that his name had appeared on the U.S. governmentâs no-fly list of known or suspected terrorists. He was granted a one-time waiver to return home, but he remained on the list. And when he asked â repeatedly â why he was there and how he could be removed, he received no answer. He wrote to the Department of Homeland Security to no avail. He wrote to the FBI but was told their records were exempt from disclosure.
Since then, he has been subjected to heightened screenings and delays to the point of missed flights on the occasions when he has tried to fly domestically. Heâs been unable for more than two years to fly to visit friends and relatives in Lebanon or elsewhere overseas.
That is bad enough. But worse yet, Chebli believes he was put on the no-fly list as punishment for refusing to become an informant for the FBI. He says that in August 2018, three months before he was stopped at the airport in Beirut, FBI agents began pressuring him to report to them about people âin his community.â They approached him repeatedly, he says, questioning him about his political and religious beliefs. They accused him of being a member of Hezbollah and having ties to militants, which he vehemently denied. He says he told the FBI agents that he would not spy on his friends and neighbors.
Then he showed up on the list.
Chebli finally sued in federal District Court last month, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, charging that the government had violated his due process rights when it denied him the ability to travel. He said heâd been put on the list based on vague criteria, heâd been stigmatized as a terrorist, his right to know the reason for his placement on the list had been capriciously denied, and he had been offered no meaningful way to challenge the decision.
Spokespeople for the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security declined to comment for this article, saying they donât discuss matters involving pending litigation. But 10 days after the suit was filed, the government responded to Chebli.
Without conceding anything, without explaining anything, without addressing any of the underlying issues, the Department of Homeland Security said Chebli no longer satisfied the criteria for placement on the no-fly list and had been removed from it.
That solved Chebliâs immediate problem. He withdrew his lawsuit Wednesday.
âIâm relieved to be off the no-fly list, but still reeling from the governmentâs abusive use of the list against me and its violations of my constitutional rights,â Chebli said in a prepared statement.
The FBI and Homeland Security, however, shouldnât get off the hook so easily. Simply because they removed his name, we may never know whether he belonged on the list or why he was unable to get a straight answer when he sought one. If they donât think heâs a terrorist, why did they put him on the list â and if they do think heâs a terrorist, why did they take him off?
And if he was indeed included as punishment for refusing to become an informant, thatâs an outrage that goes beyond mere opacity and obfuscation.
âItâs infuriating that they can jerk someone around like this for two years,â said Hina Shamsi, the director of the ACLUâs National Security Project. âAnd what they stubbornly refuse to do in case after case and situation after situation is to overhaul their system so it doesnât violate due process.â
Chebli is not the first person to claim he was put on the list as punishment. Three other Muslim men with either citizenship or legal permanent U.S. residency also sued the government in recent years, saying theyâd been added to the no-fly list for refusing to serve as âgovernment spies in their religious communities.â That case is pending.
There are more than 1 million people on the governmentâs terrorist screening database. Most must undergo heightened screening and security before they can travel by air. But a subset of them â as of June 2016, approximately 81,000, including about 1,000 U.S. citizens â are on the no-fly list, and usually canât fly at all â to, from, within or over American airspace on a U.S. commercial aircraft.
People are put on the no-fly list if there is âreasonable suspicionâ that they pose a threat of carrying out an act of terrorism. The FBI has not explained what constitutes a âthreat.â According to government documents, âconcrete facts are not necessaryâ to create reasonable suspicion.
Homeland Security has a âTraveler Redress Inquiry Program.â Thatâs what Chebli tried to use to get answers, without a substantive response.
Of course the U.S. needs to be able to fight terrorism, and at this point, we have no way of knowing for certain what led the government to blacklist Chebli in the first place. But surely we can achieve security without denying people the meaningful and timely due process they deserve.
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