News Media
TSA targeting investigative journalists
By Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer


Jul 21, 2008, 00:18

(WMR) -- It came as no surprise to this editor that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is actively targeting investigative journalists who attempt to board airplanes.

It turns out that CNN investigative reporter Drew Griffin is now on the TSA�s terrorist watch list and gets �special attention� every time he tries to get on an airplane.

Also on the terror watch list is former Assistant Attorney General and US Attorney for Michigan James K. Robinson. Robinson, who served in the Clinton administration, just so happens to have been one of the officials who worked out a deal with Laborers� International Union of North America (LIUNA) chief Arthur Coia and his union�s attorney Robert Luskin following a criminal investigation of the mob-controlled union. Luskin was named a special counsel for LIUNA oversight. Luskin is now the attorney for former Bush top aide Karl Rove, who now faces possible contempt charges by Congress.

Griffin appears to have ended up on the TSA watch list after he did a number of reports on [drum roll] the TSA�s terrorist watch list and how it unfairly includes law-abiding American citizens. One of �Capo� Chertoff�s paid underlings told CNN that any notion that Griffin�s CNN reports on the TSA list and his winding up on it are �absolutely fabricated.�

On May 12, 2008, WMR reported the following incident:

�Yesterday, this editor and his colleague faced the Chertoffian menace at Washington�s Reagan National Airport while heading to the gate to board a flight to Houston.

It is now clear from a review of the events that unfolded that I was pre-selected for an intensive search and battery of questions even before arriving in line for the security screening. A Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screener was overheard saying, �the guy with the beard.� Since I was the only person in line who also had a beard, it was evident that a red flag had earlier been raised.�

What followed was a search and interrogation that rivaled anything that could have been dreamed up by North Korean, East German, or Nazi German authorities. This editor was contacted by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) about the incident. I likely ended up as just another person in the ACLU�s terrorist watch list number counter, which now constitutes more than a million names with 20,000 being added every month.

As this editor concluded in an interview in the current issue of Paranoia magazine on the menace posed by neocons like Chertoff: �That�s the Trotskyites for you. We call them neocons now. I get back to the fact that they are traitors. They are fifth columnists. They�re not to be trusted. They should be purged. They should be identified. They should not be allowed in politics.�

Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.

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