Pilot On Terrorist Watchlist Denied Flight Training

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...ion/trackback/

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)

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