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Editorial

Terror Watch Lists Run Amok

After eight years of confounding litigation and coordinated intransigence, the Justice Department this week grudgingly informed Rahinah Ibrahim, a Malaysian architecture professor, that she was no longer on the federal government’s vastly overbroad no-fly list.

The official admission, made under court order, is one of the few shards of information about Dr. Ibrahim’s erroneous inclusion on the list that she has been allowed to see. Much of the rest — including the specific grounds for repeatedly denying her a visa to return to the United States — has been kept hidden under a claim of protecting state secrets.

Dr. Ibrahim’s saga began in January 2005, when she was a doctoral student at Stanford University on her way to an academic conference in Hawaii. She was arrested at the airline ticket counter, handcuffed and detained for hours. It turned out that an F.B.I. agent had erroneously added her to the no-fly list. The mistake was corrected, and she was taken off the list. She flew to Hawaii, and later to Malaysia, but when she tried to return she learned her student visa had been revoked.

She sued the government, and in 2009 she reapplied for a visa to attend the trial. She was denied, this time with the notation “terrorist” written on the form. The trial went ahead, and in January, Federal District Judge William Alsup ruled for Dr. Ibrahim, ordering the government, among other things, to explain why it continues to deny her a visa.

This week, government lawyers informed her that one reason for the denial is engagement in “terrorist activity,” even though they have conceded that she has never posed a threat to the United States.

How can Dr. Ibrahim be a terrorist and not be a threat at the same time? Welcome to the shadowy, self-contradictory world of American terror watch lists, which operate under a veil of secrecy so thick that it is virtually impossible to pierce it when mistakes are made. A 2007 audit found that more than half of the 71,000 names then on the no-fly list were wrongly included.

In a recently unredacted portion of his January ruling, Judge Alsup noted that in 2009 the government added Dr. Ibrahim back to its central terrorist-screening database under a “secret exception” to its own standard of proof. This would be laughable if it weren’t such a violation of basic rights. A democratic society premised on due process and open courts cannot tolerate such behavior.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 16 of the New York edition with the headline: Terror Watch Lists Run Amok. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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