Terror watch list trips up Marines' homecoming

Terror watch list trips up Marines' homecoming
http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/14320895.htm

Twenty-six reservists returning to Minnesota from Iraq are forced to leave a comrade at the Los Angeles airport because the government had put his name on a list of potential terrorists.

BY BILL GARDNER
Pioneer Press

Marine Staff Sgt. Daniel Brown has just spent the past eight months serving his country in Iraq, only to return to the United States and find out his country had placed him on a watch list as a possible terrorist.

A ceremony was waiting Tuesday at home in the Twin Cities for Brown and 26 other Marine military police reservists returning from the war. There were eager families and bagpipes.

But Northwest Airlines wouldn't let him on the plane in Los Angeles. His name had been flagged on the federal list.

As he worked with airport staff to gain permission to fly, the other 26 Marines arrived back in Minnesota on schedule. But rather than meet up with their families located just minutes from the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, they opted to wait on a bus.

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these people are out of control. There are no standards, no checks or balances and we are definitely under the thumb of a dictator. Viva la revolucion

Paging RICHARD REED

Paging RICHARD REED

Paging RICHARD REED

You can pick up your shoes, cigarettes and lighter at gate 23

That is all

But this still shocks me. I'm kind of glad to know my mind isn't totally numb.

After all, we’ve been assured numerous times by the apologists, the know-nothings, and the 101st Fighting Keyboarders that if you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear from the Bush administration’s domestic spying, or the USA PATRIOT Act, or anything else the GOP has cooked up to terrorize U.S. citizens.

Surely they detained the right guy; after all, how many guys named “Daniel Brown” could there be? SSgt Brown should confess his crimes now, or get sent to Gitmo or be extraordinarily renditioned to one of our allies who will pull out his fingernails until he talks. It will go so much easier for him if he just confesses.

this would explain why he is on the Terrorism Watch List. Remember the Vikings were the terrorists of their day raiding, burning and pillaging the countryside from northern Europe far in to Asia. As Bush does not believe in reading the papers or anything else much, he probably is not aware that the statute of limitations has run out on the Viking's acts of terrorism. Somebody needs to give them an update.

P.S.Semper Fi Sgt.Daniel Brown.:patriot:

x( :P :spank: :)

I grew up a Viking fan in Tennessee (man was I out numbered) in the days of Bud Grant and the Purple People Eaters, I cried when they lost their first Super Bowl to K.C. Of course we have the Titans now and I am rooting for them.:)

The Marine had gunpowder in his boots when he entered the airport to take a flight home some time ago.

I sure miss common sense in the government.

I hope this gets picked up nationally. It was the lead front page cover story in my local daily.

to home from Iraq that got him nailed. :tinfoilhat: I just know he said sumpin bad about our Emperor. That gunpowder is just a coverup, to make the NSA and HS look stupid. But really, he was in kahootz with the insergents. Sgt Brown hates us for out freedom.

What a forked-up system we have when this crap happens.

just think how easy it is to mess with the rest of us. With the new super duper Patriot Act, we're going to find out how bad it can get.

:crazy:

I was in the Honolulu airport in 1971, coming home on convalescent leave (shot) from Vietnam.

When the ticket agent told me they did not have a reservation or a seat for me, I was just devastated.

I was so effed up both mentally and physically, the thought of spending the night on an airport bench (I had NO money and the next flight was the following day) was just too much to bear.

All of a sudden, this angel of a man in line behind me said, "It will be all right", and handed me two tickets and told me one was for me and one was for comfort. Said he and his son could wait for the next day. Then he handed me $100.

I will never forget him.

If this was to occur today, the TSA wouldn't let me on the flight.

It is what any of us should do, but most would not.

:hug:

changed my life.

I had been in heavy s**t for over a year at the time and I pretty much resented (hell, hated) every one and everything that got in my way.

After that, it was mostly peace and calm for me even though I spent another 18 months in heavy action.

To this day, I believe that man was the reason I didn't just go crazy. Sometimes I think that he is the reason I am alive.

That may sound weird, but I really feel that way.

:cry: :hug:

Thanks for reminding us of this gesture of simple humanity.
My eyes are leaking.

Hekate

I swear we all have angels. You met yours face to face! :)

:cry: I am sitting at my desk crying now, thanks a lot, LOL

It is so hard these days to remember how kind people actually are, and how ultimately, in our souls, we are creatures of cooperation, not of competition and hatred. If we weren't our species wouldn't have lasted this long.

We need to get back to a spirit of cooperation - not just one-on-one, like your story - but in the big picture, or we will ruin ourselves.

repub with his frat-boy son.

I was Special Forces (SEAL) with long hair died jet black (so as to not stand out at long range, an attempt to blend in) and I looked like a crazy mofo because of constant terror.
He just had a natural compassion that, to this day, still makes makes me teary at the memory of the time we had and what we have lost.

who opposed the war were not always kind to returning vets. It is the one thing that I am glad we learned. Our support for the troops is from our hearts in this war. SUPPORT OUR TROOPS. BRING THEM HOME.

and you made my day with your story.
My son is a Marine with two tours in Iraq. Another coming up late this year. He's been helped by so many people while traveling.
As his mother, it's very gratifying knowing there are such good-hearted people out there.
He ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere on his way back to Camp Lejuene from Atlanta. He walked up to a house and knocked. An elderly woman came to the door. She lived alone. But she took him in her house and gave him a cold drink of water while she got her gas can and filled it up. She gave him more than enough to get back to base -- wouldn't take money.
My son knew he was in luck when he saw the Kerry/Edwards sign in her yard.

Phil Ochs ref

and life saving for you. Thank you for sharing.

<snip>

"As he worked with airport staff to gain permission to fly, the other 26 Marines arrived back in Minnesota on schedule. But rather than meet up with their families located just minutes from the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, they opted to wait on a bus.

"We don't leave anybody behind," said Marine 1st Sgt. Drew Benson. "We start together, and we finish together."

<snip>

I really think these stories sum up the true American (and Christian, though I'm a strict secularist) spirit.

Thank you for sharing your story.

and Colbert Report.

They might appreciate the irony if no one else does.

These DHS people are top notch and deserve our respect. If DHS and airport security think this guy is dirty, I think we should wait and stop bashing the authorities, because they do a heck of a job. Oh, yeah, :sarcasm:

Double sarcasm.
:sarcasm: :sarcasm:

so he is extra super-secret dangerous :sarcasm:

It's a way of expressing anger and disgust at the system.

Nobody is laughing at what happened. I'm sure everyone here is as appalled as I am that a soldier could be treated this way.

fake terror attack, fake list, real war, no way home.

fighting in Iraq... if this man was ok to fight in Iraq then this is BS... if he was a terrorist fighting among our troops then what the hell is that about!!!

:argh:

this guy would travel anywhere he wanted.

:sarcasm:

Oh yeah. THis is about the NEo-Cons hating anyone who has ideas that don't fall in line with theirs.

When can we get this TSA list abolished. It has solved nothing.

not sure if he's been to the US much at all in fact. Maybe he knows his name is on the list.

courageous Gary Webb spoke of (in addition to details about bush senior's major drug trafficking) was the fact of people peeing in paper cups to get or keep a job and saying our parents would have rebelled at this invasion of privacy. He also spoke about the Prison Industrial System and coming FISA plans for slave labor. Just like Prescott bush made a fortune on the slave labor camp Auschwitz. The survivors and families tried to sue the bush families when official papers proving this were declassified but the bush family could afford the best lawyers and the media was too intimidated or bought off with the BFEE's wealth from human suffering they caused.

But nooooooo....


So not only should he have not been put on the list in the first place, he should have been taken OFF the list in the first place! Is this REALLY the best homeland security we've got?

:headbang:
rocknation

remember good experiences. I was looking up the actor Peter SellErs (Dr. Strangelove :D) and misspelled it and got the director Peter SellArs and found a great and encouraging site:

"Reason may help some to navigate the path to faith. Can art do that as well? For acclaimed theater, opera and television director Peter Sellars the answer is an unambiguous yes. In fact, the two cannot exist without each other, he argues, since art needs to touch the transcendent to be meaningful and theology needs art to unlock its mysteries. Sellars has been on the cutting edge of cultural activism for the past 20 years, using performance art to explore challenging moral issues such as war, poverty, and the international refugee crisis.

An Interview with Peter Sellars
=For me, one of the hardest things to deal with about the 20th century — and I'm very relieved that it's finished — is that it was so absorbed in psychology and the self. Psychology is probably the least interesting thing going on in your life. At the end of the day, reducing your life to your own psychological problems is to devalue your place in history, is to devalue your political commitments, is to devalue what we're all doing here for each other. It is to devalue what overwhelming waves of spiritual energy or insight are breaking upon us, in the midst of these catastrophes, and not to get that life is difficult for a reason. It's not to get that we are actually being pushed, and pulled, and drawn out of ourselves. ==

Start with the fact that Michelangelo is very insistent that there's only one direction you can look, which is up. You've spent your whole life looking at your feet, and now, guess what? Look up. That's very beautiful. That sense of lifting people out of their usual sense of their own cosmos, into a higher vision of what's going on up there, is an artist's strategy. You feel it physically, in the back of your neck, as you stand in the Sistine Chapel. It's exhausting. You can't look that way for a long period of time, and suddenly you realize how out of practice you are, in terms of living in that stratum of experience. It's a strain. What's marvelous is that church teachings are embedded in this experience. But also, the experience itself goes beyond the letter of the law and moves into the realm of the spirit. And, I think, over the course of history, theology has always had to be liberated through poetry, through music, and through images.

So often, theological writings by men are primarily concerned with the mind. C.S. Lewis does it magnificently, but it's an imaginative universe. It's all in the mind. Women's spirituality tends to be quite the opposite. It's in the body. It's in the flesh. You are mother Mary. You are carrying God's child. It's not an idea. It is in your flesh, and bones, and blood. And this incarnated spirituality, this spirituality that is in a woman's body, that is connected to the earth, and connected to the sky, and connected to the miracle of birth, is very different.

For me the 20th century was most profoundly witnessed by Simone Weil in the heart of France, during the Nazi occupation. And in the tradition of the women mystics — whether it's Hildegard of Bingen, or Theresa, right through our own period with Weil, women are the ones asking the question of — What are we really doing? Who is starving? What are the conditions of the workers all over the world? These are the proper questions for theology. These are the proper questions about how we are doing, as humanity.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/questionofgod/voices/sellars.html

=Simone Weil =In this 1943 essay, written during the last year of her life, which she spent working with Gen. de Gaulle in the struggle for French liberation, Weil makes the case for the existence of a transcendent and universal moral law, and describes the social responsibilities that accompany it.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/questionofgod/voices/weil.html
Draft for a Statement of Human Obligation

="At the centre of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world." =Those minds whose attention and love are turned towards that reality are the sole intermediary through which good can descend from there and come among men. = Although it is beyond the reach of any human faculties, man has the power of turning his attention and love towards it.==All human beings are absolutely identical in so far as they can be thought of as consisting of a centre, which is an unquenchable desire for good, surrounded by an accretion of psychical and bodily matter.

==Anyone whose attention and love are really directed towards the reality outside the world recognizes at the same time that he is bound, both in public and private life, by the single and permanent obligation to remedy, according to his responsibilities and to the extent of his power, all the privations of soul and body which are liable to destroy or damage the earthly life of any human being whatsoever. ==The proportions of good and evil in any society depend partly upon the proportion of consent to that of refusal and partly upon the distribution of power between those who consent and those who refuse. =The needs of a human being are sacred. Their satisfaction cannot be subordinated either to reasons of state, or to any consideration of money, nationality, race, or colour, or to the moral or other value attributed to the human being in question, or to any consideration whatsoever.

Dan Brown is a fairly common name, no doubt. But it does make you wonder if the reason he was put on this watch list is because it is the same name as the author of that controversial book.

He said he was detained when deploying to Iraq last September because they detected gunpowder. The powder was picked up during his first tour in Iraq. He was home two months between his first and second tour.

We will probably never know why because it is top secret and only super well-trained (*cough*) Homeland Security staff know when to put someone on the list and are authorized to take someone off.

He was too untrustworthy to allow on a plane, but he was acceptable for fighting in our army, where he would have the opportunity to cause much more harm.

Make any sense?

I heard of other DOD contractors and military personnel getting delayed by TSA because of gunpowder. The one guy that I knew had to pull out all kinds of orders and call people while at the airport. He was a DOD contractor hired by the US government to go out on a range and test fire various weapons. Of course, you will pick up some of the khordite and other residue on your clothes.

When the TSA officer swabs your suitcases with that little brush thing that is what they are looking for.

Of course, the marine shouldn't have been placed on the list. But hey, it was important to kick the guy wrote the Peace Train song off a plane because he changed his name to Islam.

Please, someone out there, refute this statement for me!

(I know it is false hope, but that's all we have)

duping people.

:kick: can't believe the dumb bastards at HS stopped a returning vet. Absolutely unbelievable. I just had a flash. He said that he didn't support this nightmare and they flagged him. Probably on the next plane back to the nightmare.

Good for them!

Marine Staff Sgt. Daniel Brown was flagged accidentally. The real target is The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown, the godless heathen who suggested that Jesus was but a man. Bush personally put him on the list after a call from Pat Robertson.

Yup, it's all true.

will be if they figure out a way to get him off the list. Because for the REST of us, there is NO procedure. You can only get on the list, not off.

If the law remains, there must be a REQUIREMENT that those placed on any list be IMMEDIATELY notified before it becomes official, so that they have the chance to fight it before damage is done, and if someone is put on it and shouldn't be, that there are set proceedures to make sure any records are EXPUNGED from EVERYWHERE!

This is why the "nazi act" (not "patriot" act) is NOT GOOD in any way shape of form!

It goes against the "innocent until PROVEN guilty" baseline of our CONSTITUTION!

and pathetically stupid.
:mad: :crazy: :silly: :scared:

How could anyone not be embarrasssed to stop a soldier IN UNIFORM, coming home, WITH HIS ENTIRE UNIT!!!!!

"Oh but ain’t that america for you and me
Ain’t that america we’re someting to see baby....
ain`t that america home of the free
and little pink houses for you and me"

He missed a flight returning from a deployment because TSA wouldn't let him on the plane for some reason.

Yeah, the government trusts him to drive around the ocean in a billion dollar sub with enough destructive power to level a small country, but he can't get on that airliner. :eyes:

That should be harped on over and over and over until THEY get sick of it!

Maybe fix some of the heinous bullshit in our country! Seems like a job for a few good men and women.

:toast:

of side conversations, all related, and no snarking.

Really feels like a big community. :)

Not exactly a proper welcome home for the poor guy.

:(

co-author of Bush's Brain about Karl Rove was also put on the No Fly Watch List.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-moore/branded_b_13272.html

It all makes me sick and crazy and fearful of our government - and angry about their GROSS INCOMPETENCE!

I agree we need to get rid of that damn thing...also why can't people get their names OFF of it once they are cleared? And why aren't people INFORMED that they are PUT on it in the first place? Makes me angry as can be. The arrogant and incompetent nature of the whole thing...