Yahya Wehelie is an American citizen of Somali descent who was born in Virginia. He is currently trapped in Cairo because the FBI placed him on the terrorist no-fly list because while traveling in Yemen, he met Sharif Mobley, a New Jersey resident who was captured by Yemeni authorities alongside several suspected members of al-Qaeda. Despite having submitted to questioning, and even having offered to travel home in handcuffs, authorities have not taken him off the no-fly list, leaving him stranded in Egypt (via Kevin Drum).
But sometimes the questioning concludes neither with criminal charges nor with permission to fly. The Transportation Security Administration has a procedure allowing people to challenge their watch list status in cases of mistaken identity or name mix-up, but Mr. Wehelie does not fit those categories.
So Wehelie has no proven connections to terrorism or violent extremism, and he is an American citizen. But by virtue of having traveled somewhere and met someone who was later accused of being a terrorist, he is being prevented from returning home. He's also not the only member of his family to receive this type of treatment:
Mr. Awad noted that Yahya Wehelie’s younger brother, Yusuf, 19, who was stopped with him in Cairo, faced a shorter but even more harrowing time in Egypt. Questioned first by the F.B.I., Yusuf was later held for three days by Egyptian security officers, blindfolded, chained to a wall and roughed up before being allowed to travel home May 12, he said in an interview.So not only was Wehelie stranded, but the implication here is that an American law enforcement agency allowed the government of a foreign country to subject his brother, an American citizen, to physical abuse without objection or protest.
Domestic radicalization, and the possibility that Americans could go abroad and receive training to conduct attacks at home, is a real danger. But this is an inexcusable violation of Mr. Wehelie's civil rights. There's no evidence that he's done anything wrong, and if there is, then he should be brought home and charged with a crime. Otherwise his ongoing placement on the no-fly list amounts to the extrajudicial punishment of exile, levied without Wehelie every setting foot in court. I frankly wasn't aware exile remained on the books, apparently we haven't learned anything about due process since ancient Greece.
Here's something frightening to think about: Both Wehelies are in one sense very fortunate. After all during the Bush administration, having interacted with a suspected terrorist was the only evidentiary basis deemed necessary to send Canadian citizen Maher Arar to Syria to be tortured by Syrian authorities. The Supreme Court recently declined to review Arar's case, letting a lower court ruling stand saying that Congress and the President had to divine a remedy for his treatment, and ultimately declining to rule on the legality of sending someone to another country to be tortured. Essentially that allows the practice to continue should the government choose to do so, since a court has yet to rule that it is illegal.
