Opiniatrety

Don't their family ties count for anything? I understand your concern, but it seems that you have given a principled difference.

And I will take the hit, personally. Suppose my family is suspected of involvement in terrorism-related activities. And given my last name, there is good reason to think that my family is related in such activity (the Sopranos are paisans), even if not myself personally. They are justified in singling me out. And if it means I am inconvenianced, then so be it. So long as they are consistent across the board--if my loved one boards a plane, I would hope they pull aside anyone who might be a threat--even if they are my paisans.

The problem, though, is that that kind of profiling doesn't actually work very well; there are vastly more innocent Pakistani-Americans than terrorist Pakistani-Americans, and targeting someone without any evidence other than their name doesn't do you any good if they're unconnected to terrorism. So you end up with lots of false positives that waste your time, as well as a lot of angry people who are no longer as willing to help you with your investigations of the people who really do have clear ties to terrorism.

And if it means I am inconvenianced

That's a funny way to spell "made a refugee".

Even supposing, for argument's sake, that family ties should count for something, there is no law saying how so; and even supposing, for argument's sake, that there were such a law, no one has been charged with violating it.

This is tin-pot dictator stuff.

This isn't a plane-safety issue. If they wanted to guarantee these people would not endanger the plane carrying them back to the US, they could do full searches on them, require them to travel with no luggage, sit a air marshal next to them, whatever. It's impossible to make planes 100% safe and even if you wanted to, the TSA security-hysteria of-the-moment system is not the way to do it, but I digress.

This is a way of coercing these people into interrogations. I fail to see a national security rationale for not letting them have lawyers present. Is that an admission that the FBI can't get the information it wants without depriving its subjects of legal advice and/or tricking them into saying things that can be used against them?

Hi, basically I'm agreement with the last three commenters. It's not that it's unjust to question these people; it's quite reasonable to question them if they're related to terrorism suspects. It's that they have rights as American citizens, and there's no justification for refusing them entry to the country if they exercise their rights. (And they're expected to take lie-detector tests? Why not have their palms read?)

And one of the all-important principles behind the U.S. constitution was that people can't be punished without due process, nor can they be punished for what their families did.

I'm also suspicious of the circumstances under which Jaber Ismail became a suspect. Hamid Hayat mentioned him in a "marathon FBI interrogation." To me that smacks of holding him until he gives up some names, any names. Those interrogations often don't yield good evidence.

No new developments I can see on this lately. Daniel Pipes defends it, and seems to suggest that radical Muslims just should have their citizenship. Pipes is almost always wrong about everything so this doesn't surprise me. This guy is appropriately rude about Pipes and about the general move to scotch due process.

and seems to suggest that radical Muslims just should have their citizenship.

"…stripped", yes?

Yup. Black sheep of your family, huh?