Great news from the Homeland Security front:
Sister Glenn Anne McPhee is a busy woman.
As the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ secretary for education, Sister McPhee oversees Catholic education in the United States, from nursery school through post-graduate. Her job includes working with the Department of Education, speaking frequently at conferences and scrutinizing religious textbooks to clear them with the teachings of the church.
For nine months in 2003 and 2004, Sister McPhee also took on the task of clearing her name from the government’s no-fly list, an endeavor that proved fruitless until she called on a higher power, the White House.
“I got to the point I could hardly go to the airport, because I couldn’t anticipate what would happen and I couldn’t do anything,” she said in an interview with Wired News. “I missed key addresses I was to give. I finally got to the point where I always checked my bag, because after I got through the police clearance, then they would put me through special security where they wand you from head to foot all over. They would dump out everything in your bag, then roll it into a ball and hand it back to you.”
McPhee is not the first high-profile individual to be caught by the government’s watch lists. Sen. Edward Kennedy and former presidential candidate John Anderson both found that their names matched names on the list, but like McPhee, were able to resolve the problem by contacting powerful officials.
But, thanks to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, her ordeal offers one of the most illuminating illustrations of the failures of the airport screening system that has come to light since 9/11. The Electronic Privacy Information Center plans to release the results of the FOIA request this week, Wired News has learned, handing the latest black eye to a government initiative aimed at preventing terrorists from boarding commercial flights that originate in the United States.
While I have a natural aversion to bureaucracies, I don’t think it is fair to be one of those people who just blindly criticizes the government or government agencies for anecdotal stories such as this one, particularly since I don’t have solutions and I know that in many cases mistakes will be made. I also recognize the difficulty in implementing broad policies such as this one, and I understand that mistakes will be made.
But for the love of everything Holy, it has been four years since 9/11. We STILL don;t have a way to remove people from these lists when it is CRYSTAL CLEAR they do not belong on them?