Shocking: the LA. Times is Editorializing Against Obama's No-Fly List

Dec. 7, 2015 Los Angeles Times:

How certain is it that the people on the two lists are dangerous? Well, we don't really know, because the no-fly-list and the broader watch list are government secrets. People are not notified when they are put on, nor why, and they usually don't discover they have been branded suspected terrorists until they try to travel somewhere.

But serious flaws in the list have been identified. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, which is suing the government over the no-fly list, the two lists include thousands of names that have been added in error, as well as the names of family members of suspected terrorists. The no-fly list has also been used to deny boarding passes to people who only share a name with a suspected terrorist. Former Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) was famously questioned at airports in 2004 because a terror suspect had used the alias "T. Kennedy." It took the senator's office three weeks to get his name cleared.

What's more, it's not clear how much impact Feinstein's law would have. The broader watch list, which is actually a database maintained by the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center, apparently had about 480,000 names on it in 2011, according to the FBI, and it has since swelled to about 1.1 million names, according to the ACLU. Of those, the vast majority are noncitizens living overseas; the number of American citizens on the list is believed to be fewer than 10,000 people.

That's important because federal law already bars gun sales to most people who are not U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents or holders of valid visas, which means the vast majority of the people on the suspected terror list would already be barred from buying a firearm in the U.S. even without Feinstein's law. That leaves us with about 10,000 American citizens (and some legal residents) who, under the proposed law, would be barred from exercising a constitutional right. That gives us pause.

From reading the comments it is clear that many progressives regard Gitmo as sufficient reason to ignore due process along with the vast majority of Democrats who voted for this harebrained scheme of Feinstein's. The more I read of these progrssive comments justifying "unorthodox procedures" in time of war, the more I am glad I have 10,000 rounds stockpiled.