Working for your safety or something.

July 27, 2011 8:21 AM

Am I on a blacklist? I was astonished when the plane I was travelling in was turned out of US airspace because I was on it.
posted by adamvasco (6 comments total)

Could you imagine if Canada prevented overflight for all Americans involved in torture operations during the last 10 years?
posted by Nelson at 8:33 AM on July 27, 2011 [10 favorites]

This doesn't astonish me at all, because I've been hearing stories like it from activists since 9/11. There are two things going on - the US is substantially closing its borders for ideological reasons and there's an increase in US opposition to left movements in South and Latin America (because those movements show some signs of life. Which should not be read as an apology for Shining Path; this stuff isn't really aimed at Shining Path, it's aimed at Lula, Chavez and their like.) I imagine that this woman isn't being personally targeted, but that's the reasoning behind the structures that cause her to be targeted.

It's gotten so that our local flamenco company can't bring international flamenco artists to Minnesota because the visa process is so complicated and visas have been yanked at the last minute with no appeal.

Honestly, this country is getting like some horrible amalgamation of the Soviet Union and post-war Somalia - chaos and misery everywhere except where there's government brutality and corruption.
posted by Frowner at 8:33 AM on July 27, 2011 [3 favorites]

It's just a way of telling the world "Fuck with us or make us look bad and we will make life hard for you".
posted by dunkadunc at 8:34 AM on July 27, 2011

I would never fly that airline again. Whatever your view on the US politics behind this, this seems like the stupid airline's fault. Aren't they given these blacklists to check? She should have never been put on the plane. Instead, hundreds of people get inconvenienced because of one person's customs issues, regrettable as her issue is.
posted by stroke_count at 8:45 AM on July 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

Come on, people...Obama's only been in office for 918 days. Change takes time.
posted by rocket88 at 8:49 AM on July 27, 2011

America gets uglier and uglier, for sure. Less and less free. More and more of a police state. The recent TSA SWAT-style operations like the bus station raid in Florida (a "drill" where innocent civilians, simply waiting for their bus, were suddenly surrounded by automatic weapons-toting agents, patted down and searched, utterly arbitrarily), the no-fly lists, the absurd and invasive security procedures at airports, the US embassies around the world that are secured like military bases. Bad, bad, bad.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 8:50 AM on July 27, 2011