The Curious Case of Ms. Rahinah Ibrahim
The story around the detention of Rahinah Ibrahim is so astounding a person of normal cognitive capacity might be unable to actually comprehend it. She was stopped, detained, searched, hand-cuffed and then placed on a no-fly list back in 2005. She sued the U.S. government to find out why:
After seven years of litigation, two trips to a federal appeals court and $3.8 million worth of lawyer time, the public has finally learned why a wheelchair-bound Stanford University scholar was cuffed, detained and denied a flight from San Francisco to Hawaii: FBI human error. (link)
The Error: An FBI agent/investigator named Kevin Kelly was investigating Muslims in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2004 when he mistakenly checked the wrong box on a terrorism form, erroneously placing Rahinah Ibrahim on the no-fly list. Kelly simply checked the wrong box on a generic administrative form.
What followed is almost nine years of *EXTREME* governmental denial, by some of the biggest well known names in DOJ, NSA, and Homeland Security. They, on behalf of the U.S. government, used every national security avoidance argument, all of it, all.of.it, simply to cover-up a simple clerical mistake.
The full story is HERE and included are the pdf’s of the court rulings and eventual opinion of the judge:
[…] the judge said he learned the Kafkaesque truth. “I feel that I have been had by the government,” he said in a November pretrial conference.
Last week he laid it out all in his final order in the case, ruling for Ibrahim following a five-day, non-jury trial that was conducted largely behind closed doors in December.
[…] At long last, the government has conceded that plaintiff poses no threat to air safety or national security and should never have been placed on the no-fly list. She got there by human error within the FBI. This too is conceded.
This was no minor human error but an error with palpable impact, leading to the humiliation, cuffing, and incarceration of an innocent and incapacitated air traveler. That it was human error may seem hard to accept — the FBI agent filled out the nomination form in a way exactly opposite from the instructions on the form, a bureaucratic analogy to a surgeon amputating the wrong digit — human error, yes, but of considerable consequence. (.pdf)
If the government including: James Clapper – director of national intelligence, Eric Holder – attorney general, Paul G. Freeborne – DOJ senior trial counsel, Joseph C. Salvator – TSA then-deputy assistant administrator for intelligence and all of their respective resources and departments, will go to this extent to protect discovery of an administrative error…..
……. just imagine what they would do to hide something like an international terror attack in Benghazi, Libya, which took place surrounding major weapons transfers and purchases; and led to the death of a U.S. Ambassador, his staff and two CIA contractors.
Think about it !
