At least he can still buy a gun
By 
A RIGHT-WING BLOG called “Pajamas Media” published an article on November 24 claiming that Saadiq Long, a Muslim American veteran of the U.S. Air Force, was arrested in Turkey for being an ISIS operative. Written by Patrick Poole, a professional anti-Muslim activist and close associate of Frank Gaffney, the article asserted that Long “finds himself and several family members sitting in a Turkish prison — arrested earlier this month near the Turkey-Syria border as members of an ISIS cell.” Its only claimed sources were anonymous: “U.S. and Turkish officials confirmed Long’s arrest to PJ Media, saying that he was arrested along with eight others operating along the Turkish-Syrian border. So far, no U.S. media outlet has reported on his arrest.”
Long’s purported arrest as an ISIS operative was then widely cited across the internet by Fox News as well as right-wing and even non-ideological news sites. Predictably, the story was uncritically hailed by the most virulent anti-Muslim polemicists: Pam Geller, Robert Spencer, Ann Coulter, and Sam Harris. Worst of all, it was blasted as a major news story by network TV affiliates and other local media outlets in Oklahoma, where Long is from and where his family — including his sister and ailing mother — still reside.
But the story is entirely false: a fabrication. Neither Long nor his wife or daughter have been arrested on charges that he joined ISIS. He faces no criminal charges of any kind in Turkey.
Instead, he and his family are being detained at the Geri Gonderme Merkezi deportation center in Erzurum, Turkey, evidently because he was placed years ago by the U.S. on its no-fly list. And the U.S. Embassy in Ankara has been working continually with Long’s family to secure his release, and, if he chooses, his return to the U.S.
A press officer with the Bureau of Consular Affairs, who asked to be identified only as “a State Department official,” contradicted the Pajamas Media claim. “We are aware of Mr. Long’s case and are providing consular assistance. At this time, we are not aware that he has been formally charged with a crime,” the official told The Intercept.
The Turkish government would not comment on the record, but a Turkish source with substantial connections to law enforcement agencies in Gaziantep also told The Intercept that Long has not been arrested, but is merely being held for deportation.
Long received substantial media attention in late 2012, when he was told he would not be permitted to board a flight from Qatar, where he lived, to travel to the U.S. to visit his ailing mother. When he arrived at the airport in Doha, he was told by an airlines representative he had been secretly placed on the U.S. government’s no-fly list (The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, then with The Guardian, was the first to report on that story, writing an article about Long’s situation after interviewing him in Doha; Long was then interviewed on Chris Hayes’ MSNBC show, along with his attorney from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR).
Two weeks after that wave of media stories in 2012, the U.S. government issued a waiver from the no-fly list and permitted him to fly to the U.S. But he was once again denied boarding rights 10 weeks later when he attempted to fly from the U.S. back to Qatar, forcing him to take a bus to Mexico in order to get home. His situation became a case study in the injustices of the secret, due process-free no-fly list aimed overwhelmingly at Muslims. The Pajamas Media report trumpeted this angle in its headline:
MSNBC’s “No-Fly List Is Islamophobia” Poster Boy Arrested in Turkey as Part of ISIS Cell
Speaking of Sam Harris, it would be nice if the celebrators of “reason” and “science” against “superstition” and “fanaticism” were a little more reasonable and scientific, or even just bothered to google around a bit before opining on subjects which they actually know nothing about. Here’s Harris on how suicide bombing is supposedly an almost uniquely Islamic phenomenon:
We can also look outside the Muslim world to see that injustice and inequality rarely produces this kind of extraordinarily destructive behavior. Many countries in Latin America have legitimate grievances against the U.S. Where are the Guatemalan suicide bombers? Where are the Cherokee suicide bombers, for that matter? If oppression were enough, the Tibetans should have been practicing suicidal terrorism against the Chinese for decades. Instead, they practice self–immolation, for reasons that are totally understandable within the context of their own religious beliefs. Again, specific beliefs matter, and we deny this at our peril. If the behavior of Muslim suicide bombers should tell us anything, it’s that certain people really do believe in martyrdom. Let me be very clear about this: I’m not talking about all (or even most) Muslims—I’m talking about jihadists. But all jihadists are Muslim. If even 1 percent of the world’s Muslims are potential jihadists, we have a terrible problem on our hands. I’m not sure how we deal with 16 million aspiring martyrs—but lying to ourselves about the nature of the problem doesn’t seem like the best strategy.
Here’s the beginning of a recent interview with Robert Pape, who is probably the world’s leading expert on suicide bombing:
Your 2005 book, Dying to Win, documents a number of remarkable findings about suicide terrorism. Who are suicide terrorists, and what are they after?
Pape: For the most part they’re responding to the military occupation of a community that they care a lot about.
I put together the first complete data set of suicide attacks after 9/11. I did that because, like many people who come into suicide terrorism, I thought I was going to figure out when an Islamic fundamentalist goes from being a devout, observant Muslim to somebody who then is suicidally violent. But there was no data available, so I put together this complete database of suicide attacks around the world from the early 1980s to 2003.
I was really struck that half the suicide attacks were secular. I began to look at the patterns and I noticed that they were tightly clustered, both in where they occurred and the timing, and that 95 percent of the suicide attacks were in response to a military occupation.
And military occupation matters because it represents not exactly how many soldiers are on a piece of soil, but rather control of the local government, the local economic system, and the local social system. . . What you’re seeing with not all, but most, suicide terrorists is a response to loss of self-determination for their local community.