Re: Pilot On Terrorist Watchlist Denied Flight Training

[Martin Hotze]

On Mon, 28 Mar 2005 10:23:26 -0500, Tom Fleischman wrote:

>Still, Mr. Merida said, he became subject to searches and harsh
>interrogations at American airports.

what's his point? he should be lucky that he still can go wherever he
want's to.
other people have been brought to Syria for turture and scrutinity search
by US agents while in transit to Canada, others have been brought to
Guantanamo without trial etc.

but to become ontopic: are there any numbers and statistics out there
showing the increase/decrease of students and foreign students at US flight
schools for the last years?

#m

--
It's not like I'm a terrorist or a hair dresser or anything.
http://www.ensight.org/archives/2005/03/16/issues-with-immigration/trackback/

[John Galban]

Tom Fleischman wrote:
>
> Is he or is he not a terror suspect, linked by circumstance to
Zacarias
> Moussaoui, who is facing trial in the Sept. 11 attacks?
>
<snip>

I was on one of those lists for similar inocuous reasons (possibly
still am)and it was a royal pain to cross a border. Of course, I'm no
Ted Kennedy, so there is little recourse for me or any other "little
people" who get caught in their ridiculously wide net.

John Galban=====>N4BQ (PA28-180)

[Franklin Newton]

He should move to America, where we don't treat folks like that.

"Tom Fleischman" > wrote in message
rthlink.net...
>
> From the New York Times today:
>
> March 28, 2005
>
> With Watch List, Pilot's Career Is Stalled
> By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
>
>
> ORMAN, Okla. - Juan Carlos Merida is up in the air, and not just when
> he is flying the Cessnas of the Airman Flight School here, south of
> Oklahoma City.
>
> Is he or is he not a terror suspect, linked by circumstance to Zacarias
> Moussaoui, who is facing trial in the Sept. 11 attacks?
>
> If he is, says Mr. Merida, a 34-year-old Panamanian aviator who has
> lived in the United States since 1996, why has the Federal Aviation
> Administration licensed him to fly small planes? Why did the United
> States Embassy in Panama vouch for him? And why have prominent local
> businesspeople embraced him?
>
> If he is not, why is he on a watch list that stops him at airports? And
> why has the government blocked him from learning to fly jets and other
> heavy aircraft, stymieing his flying career?
>
> For now the questions outnumber the answers, leaving Mr. Merida in what
> his lawyer calls a Kafkaesque limbo, unable to find out what exactly he
> is suspected of and unable to clear himself.
>
> In the heightened security climate after the attacks of Sept. 11,
> 2001, thousands of people have landed on government watch lists. They
> are scrutinized before they board airplanes, and some are not permitted
> to board at all. The government does not publicize the criteria for
> being placed on a watch list, and hundreds of people have complained of
> being improperly listed, including Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat
> of Massachusetts, who had trouble getting on planes for a few weeks
> last year because his name matched the alias of a terror suspect.
>
> (It has not helped to straighten out Mr. Merida's case that some
> records also list him by his mother's last name, Delgado; many native
> Spanish speakers use both parents' surnames).
>
> Last year, despairing of establishing his innocence, Mr. Merida sued
> John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, and Robert S. Mueller III,
> the F.B.I. director. Mr. Merida sought not money but approval for
> training to fly planes over 12,500 pounds. The lawsuit was dismissed on
> the ground that government officials cannot generally be sued in
> performance of their duties; it is now on appeal.
>
> "It's a nightmare," said Mr. Merida, who is fluent in English,
> Portuguese and Spanish. But, he said, "I'd do it again. I love this
> country."
>
> "It" was almost certainly how the trouble began.
>
> In 1996 Mr. Merida, who had learned to fly at the Uruguayan Air Force
> Academy and served in Panama's post-Noriega air force, came to the
> Airman Flight School here on a student visa to gain American flight
> certification. He stayed on as an unpaid volunteer, he said, adding air
> time by accompanying instructors on their training flights, and paying
> his bills with the help of his father, a dental surgeon in Panama.
>
> In February 2001, Mr. Moussaoui arrived for training at the school. As
> he had done with hundreds of other students, Mr. Merida said, he picked
> up Mr. Moussaoui at the Oklahoma City airport and drove him back to
> Norman in the school's van.
>
> "He was a weird guy," Mr. Merida said. "He was really quiet. I like to
> talk. This guy was not willing to talk. I took him to a hotel; that was
> it."
>
> A few days later, Mr. Merida said, Mr. Moussaoui stopped him in the
> hall and asked for help moving into an apartment. Mr. Merida said he
> drove him to his new home. That was their last contact, he said.
>
> After three months of instruction and little progress in learning to
> fly solo, Mr. Moussaoui was asked to leave the school. By August he had
> enrolled in a flight school in Minneapolis, where his insistence on
> learning to fly a Boeing 747 drew suspicion and his arrest on a visa
> irregularity.
>
> But it was not until after Sept. 11 that his effects and records were
> searched, leading agents at the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the
> Airman Flight School amid suspicions that Mr. Moussaoui had intended to
> be on one of the hijacked jets. Mr. Moussaoui's trial is pending.
>
> Mr. Merida said that as the F. B. I. searched Airman's records, he
> volunteered information about his contacts with Mr. Moussaoui, which
> his lawsuit called "purely incidental and completely unrelated to the
> incidents surrounding the attacks occurring in September." Mr. Merida
> said he also showed an agent the apartment he had taken Mr. Moussaoui
> to. "The F.B.I. didn't know about this apartment," he said.
>
> An F.B.I. spokesman in Washington, Mike Kortan, said the bureau could
> not comment while the matter was before the courts.
>
> In 2002, Mr. Merida, on a visit to Panama to attend an aviation
> seminar, applied for a United States work visa. He was granted the visa
> although the United States Embassy in Panama City, while checking his
> name, reported a "hit" on a national database that the government was
> using to list people of interest after the September attacks. Mr.
> Merida told embassy officials it must have stemmed from his cooperation
> in the Moussaoui case.
>
> A letter from the embassy, signed by Jean Duggan, the vice consul, said
> that it had confirmed Mr. Merida's account of events, that the F.B.I.
> had found Mr. Merida "very cooperative," and that officials had
> considered calling him to testify against Mr. Moussaoui before deciding
> it was not necessary. The embassy assumed, the letter concluded, that
> the bureau had entered Mr. Merida's name in the database in case it
> needed to contact him.
>
> Still, Mr. Merida said, he became subject to searches and harsh
> interrogations at American airports.
>
> In 2003, he said, a businessman in Norman, D. Wayne Trousdale, managing
> partner of Cedar Creek Lumber, offered to send him for jet training so
> he could pilot the company's $1.5 million Citation. As a foreigner, Mr.
> Merida had to fill out a 30-page application for the Flight Training
> Candidate Checks Program.
>
> Mr. Trousdale, a partner of Steve Owens, a football star at the
> University of Oklahoma and winner of the 1969 Heisman Trophy, said he
> had been eager to hire Mr. Merida, whom he called "a fine fellow" and
> "no threat to the U.S." He called the security concerns "totally
> fabricated."
>
> Jerry Carroll, owner of the flight school; Brenda Keene, its
> admissions director; and Joe Davis, its former owner and an aircraft
> broker (whose business card was found among Mr. Moussaoui's
> possessions) also called Mr. Merida beyond reproach.
>
> But after waiting a year and numerous inquiries, Mr. Merida learned he
> had been rejected for the jet training. At first, he said, he thought
> it might have to do with a traffic stop in 1996, when he was accused of
> driving while intoxicated. But the charges were dropped and, according
> to Mr. Merida's lawyer, David J. Batton, would not have been a factor.
>
> In his eagerness to prove his loyalty and win over the F.B.I., Mr.
> Merida said, he readily agreed to agents' requests last year to supply
> confidential information on other flight school students. But that has
> gotten him nowhere, he said.
>
> Mr. Merida appealed for help to Oklahoma lawmakers, including Senator
> James M. Inhofe and Representative Tom Cole. Mark A. Tanner, director
> of the Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force, wrote to Mr. Inhofe
> saying that Mr. Merida had been denied permission to fly heavy planes
> by Mr. Ashcroft under the Aviation and Transportation Security Actof
> 2001, which allowed such denial "if the individual presented a risk to
> aviation or national security."
>
> Mr. Merida's lawyer, Mr. Batton, a former military officer and police
> officer who was the lawyer for the flight school and has since become
> an assistant district attorney for three counties around Norman, said
> his calls to the F.B.I. have been rebuffed. "It's somebody's worst
> nightmare, to be placed on a list," he said. "I'm embarrassed for my
> country."
>
> Mr. Merida said he had only one wish. "I want them to investigate me,"
> he said. "Let me get on with my life. I'm a good person."
>
> Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company