These Swiss are on the US no-fly list of prisoners in Hawaii after 23 years in prison declared innocent

Just over a week ago, non-binary hacker and anarchist Maia Arson Crimew made headlines: As she wrote in a blog post, the 23-year-old had hacked into an unprotected server of a US airline. There she came across a very sensitive – and controversial – dataset: the so-called no-fly list.

This list was promptly created under the Bush administration in response to the September 11 attacks. Initially, there were 594 people who were no longer allowed to fly in American airspace. There are now more than half a million names on the list, writes the “Republic”.

Among those on the list are not only people who would be assigned to the political milieu of the 9/11 terrorists. The government has been repeatedly accused of listing undesirable politicians, anti-war activists and human rights lawyers.

Several Swiss listed

Swiss names also appear on the list. Mark Rudinradical leftist 1968er who spent a long time in hiding in Palestine. Nicholas Blanchochairman of the Islamic Central Council. Marco Camenischan anarchist who was released in 2017 after serving a long sentence in Switzerland and has nothing to do with the US.

In addition to other radical left members from Switzerland and Italy, the list also includes people belonging to the far-right “South Tyrolean Freedom Movement”. And former RAF members. However, certain names also show that the list is sometimes haphazard and amateurish. For instance Fellix Habsburg-Lorraine, the son of the last emperor of Austria. He’s been dead for twelve years Bruno Breguet, a sidekick of a Venezuelan terrorist. Breguet has been missing since 1995 and presumed dead.

The majority of names on the list submitted to the “Republic” are Arabic in nature. According to the NGO «Identity Projects», 10 percent of all entries contain the name Muhammad. The NGO therefore calls the list the “Muslim Ban List”. Forty of the enrollees were under the age of 12 at the time of writing (2019 version). Even if this was most likely due to the name relationship alone, it doesn’t speak for the authors of the list. (cpf)