Fenton Johnson

Construction
Komatsu Equipment Co
Mechanic General
CORT
Warehouse Supervisor Health Care
Rio Salado College
PA's/Online Instructors Education
Assessment Technology, Inc
Social Studies Content Writer General
CORT
WAREHOUSE/DRIVER

Several years back, without being informed and along with an untold number of other Americans, I was placed on the Transportation Security Agency's National Watch List of terrorist suspects. I discovered this when I was denied a boarding pass by the airlines' automatic dispensing machines. Instead I am required to flag down clerks who then spend from three to 10 minutes answering questions on their computer screens.

When I tell friends I'm "on The List," their first reaction is disbelief, followed by the obvious question why? Perhaps only Americans could be so naive as to assume that bureaucracies must have reasons and that the reasons must be rational or at least legal.

TSA officials will not disclose why I have been included on The List for the simple reason that they don't know. When I telephoned the agency's press office to learn why I had been placed on The List, I was told that TSA has no role in setting standards for inclusion. The TSA takes names from many agencies, most but not all of them public, and folds them into one Big List, which it then releases to the airlines.

Each of these wildly different agencies has its own standards for deciding whom to report to the TSA. In compiling and reporting these names to the airlines, TSA is only doing its job. There is no publicly vetted standard for being placed on The List and no mechanism for removing one's name, regardless of the presence or, as in my case, absence of any criminal record. For all I know I am on The List because I didn't pay a parking ticket I may or may not have received — or because I write columns like this.

If that sounds ridiculous, consider that former U.S. Rep. and former presidential candidate John Anderson is on The List. In summer 2003 he arranged for congressional hearings to address these same questions. Hearings were held, TSA officials were grilled, no satisfactory answers were received, end of story. Since then little has changed — except the legal landscape.

Congress, then controlled by Republicans, has repeatedly passed legislation to allow the government to suspend habeas corpus — i.e., to arrest and hold suspects without confronting them with charges or evidence as to why they have been arrested. Currently we are holding several hundred such suspects at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. The U.S. Supreme Court has twice rejected this legislation. The most recent suspension, labeled the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and supported by all of Arizona's Republican congressional delegation, passed last September. Though Democrats now control Congress, they have shown little willingness to defend the rights of politically unpopular individuals. Most likely the Supreme Court will again decide the issue.

My friends laugh at my experiences with The List, hoping that it's a joke. From experience I can report that it is a joke, at least as an enforcement tool. Sometimes the airport machines issue me a boarding pass, sometimes they don't. Sometimes clerks print out the pass immediately, sometimes they spend minutes typing. When I point these inconsistencies out — if we're to take The List seriously, shouldn't someone care? — the clerks look annoyed or indifferent or they say, "No, that can't be!" Always they hand me my boarding pass. They're only doing their jobs.

The List is a joke — that is, until it's not. Until the knock comes in the middle of the night and I open the door to be confronted by someone with whom it is pointless to argue because they're only doing their job and I have no legal recourse because my elected representatives have eliminated that right. Ask any Holocaust survivor.