The American public will probably never know why anyone would want a digital eye scan of Doug Stuber on record. The Secret Service agents who detained Stuber at Raleigh-Durham International Airport in October wouldn’t tell him why they refused to allow him to board a flight to Hamburg, Germany, either. But he says they were very interested in his political leanings, in particular his stint as Ralph Nader’s North Carolina Green Party presidential campaign chairman in 2000.
Stuber’s a cantankerous ideologue — and he admits he did bring attention to himself when, in the midst of a debate with two other people standing in the airport security line, he rather loudly pronounced President George W. Bush to be “dumb as a rock.”
Though airport security wouldn’t let him on the plane after that, Stuber was told he could return to the airport the next day and take a flight to France, but he’d have to pay a $2,600 same-day fare rather than the $670 round trip flight he’d booked. The next day, before he could board the plane, he was again escorted away by airline security and this time was interrogated by two Secret Service agents about his politics. Stuber told CL that the agents briefly showed him a Justice Department document that listed members of the Green Party as potential terrorists.
Then he says he was told by airport security personnel that he wouldn’t be allowed to fly but could go to the Greensboro airport, where airline security didn’t know him, and fly out of there. So Stuber drove to Greensboro, where he says airline security told him he wouldn’t be allowed to fly internationally or domestically after he showed them his passport. Once again he hopped in his car and drove to Charlotte Douglas International Airport, where he was told the same thing. Stuber’s story might sound crazy if he was the only left-wing activist to be interrogated or told about the list, but he isn’t.
In a November article in Salon.com, Transportation Security Administration spokesperson David Steigman admitted that the agency has a list of about 1,000 people compiled by the FBI, CIA and INS who are considered a “threat to aviation,” and suggested that political activists may be on other lists that seem to be stored on airline ticketing and check-in computers. According to the article, these computers are flagging priests and nuns, Green Party campaign leaders, people believed to be aligned with Arab or Arab-American groups, left-wing journalists, members of Amnesty International and even some folks with Eagle Forum, a right-wing group led by Phyllis Schlafly.
Since the Salon.com article was published, Stuber say he has once again been allowed to fly. One thing is clear, though. Big brother is watching like never before.
The most disturbing thing about this is that as the government’s power and motivation to spy on law abiding citizens grows, the subjects deemed worthy of surveillance seem to change according to the politics of the current presidential administration. In the Clinton era, it was right-wing nuts whose privacy was invaded, sometimes with deadly consequences. Now it’s largely left-wing nuts who apparently are believed to be a danger to the Republic.
Maybe the Islamic fundamentalists who flew the planes into the twin towers were part of a vast left-wing conspiracy that only the government knows about. Somehow, I doubt it.
Just Print the Budget!
Over the past year, frustrated state legislators battled a billion-dollar budget shortfall without the benefit of knowing what was actually in the state budget because Governor Mike Easley never had one printed after outgoing Governor Jim Hunt’s proposed budget bit the dust. Instead, Easley sent them a summary of his recommendations and adjustments to a budget they had never seen.
“We voted on the budget without knowing what’s in it,” said Mecklenburg state legislator Connie Wilson. And they hiked taxes without knowing for sure how much if any fat was in the budget.
The governor’s office has been stonewalling on this issue for far too long, and would rather attack a pipsqueak columnist like me for telling you about it than to let the public and legislators know what’s really in the state budget.
“Many legislators were concerned about not having a budget document and that did create problems in the review process,” said Jim Johnson, director of the fiscal research division of the North Carolina General Assembly.
In a letter to the editor of Creative Loafing, Easley’s senior fiscal policy advisor Dan Gerlach claimed that the Easley administration neglected to reprint the revised budget because it “would have cost the state more money.”
Of course, printing the budget would have exposed the pork left over from the Hunt administration to the budget ax, and we wouldn’t want that to happen, would we?
As I’ve said in the past, it would be extremely helpful if rather than playing political games, Governor Mike Easley would see to it that a copy of the state budget is actually printed and distributed to legislators in January.
This article appears in Dec 11-17, 2002.
