‘On the watch list!’

WASHINGTON — The other day my wife and I were heading for New Hampshire to spend the weekend with my in-laws. At the Baltimore-Washington International airport, Patricia used her e-ticket to get her boarding pass from a self-help computer. But when she keyed in my e-ticket information, a message flashed on the computer screen telling me to go to the check-in counter.

“How come I got my boarding pass from that machine but could not get my husband’s?” she asked a woman behind a Northwest Airlines desk. The clerk slipped my ticket into her computer drive, looked at me and said, “You’re on the watch list, sir.”

I had suspected that for five years but had never been told about it so explicitly.

Since my immigration to the United States three decades ago I never belonged to any activist groups except those of the U.S. Democratic Party and have never had trouble with the law. The airlines clerk would not tell what I was being watched for but confirmed that the watch list had been provided by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. I believe my views on the Palestinian issue and continual criticism of the branding many freedom fighters around the world as terrorists by the United States and Israel are among the reasons for my being on that list.

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Mustafa Malik is a journalist and researcher based in Washington.

His writings appear in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Philadelphia Inquirer, Atlanta Constitution, Dallas Morning News, St Louis Post-Dispatch, and other U.S. newspapers and journals. They are also published in Turkish, Lebanese, Egyptian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi newspapers and journals.