Kevin Drum is duly indignant about the case of Yahya Wehelie. As The New York Times reports,
For six weeks, Mr. Wehelie has been in limbo in the Egyptian capital. He and his parents say he has no radical views, despises Al Qaeda and merely wants to get home to complete his education and get a job.
But after many hours of questioning by F.B.I. agents, he remains on the no-fly list. When he offered to fly home handcuffed and flanked by air marshals, Mr. Wehelie said, F.B.I. agents turned him down.
Writes Drum,
This is an abomination, pure and simple. There’s not the slightest question that it would be possible to allow Wehelie to fly home safely even if he were Osama bin Laden’s minister of defense. The government of the United States should be allowed to search him and his luggage with abandon if they have reason to suspect him of illegal activity, and they have every right to question him for the same reason. But the right to keep him from flying home? No. That doesn’t just skirt the line of what the American government should be allowed to do, it blows right by it and makes a mockery of the constitution and every smarmy bureaucrat who pretends to support it while snickering behind their hands about “carefully protecting the civil rights and privacy concerns of all Americans.” How on earth can Barack Obama stand by and continue to allow stuff like this to happen?
Read the entire New York Times article here, and Drum’s Mother Jones post here.