Rahinah Ibrahim’s nine-year journey to clear her name with the U.S. government may be nearing an end.

In 2005, Dr. Ibrahim, then a doctoral student at Stanford, was detained at the San Francisco airport ticket counter while checking in for a flight to a conference in Hawaii. She was handcuffed and held in a cell for several hours. When she was finally released, she was told she’d been mistakenly placed on the no-fly list.

But that was just the beginning of her trouble. After continuing on to her native Malaysia, Dr. Ibrahim tried to return to the U.S., only to find that her student visa had been revoked for unspecified reasons relating to terrorism. (Apparently, Dr. Ibrahim was a member of a professional organization with a name similar to that of a terrorist group.)



In January 2006, she sued the government for erroneously including her on the no-fly list. After years of pre-trial motions, Dr. Ibrahim’s case was heard in December by a federal judge, William H. Alsup, in San Francisco. But because she remains unable to get a new visa, Dr. Ibrahim, now a faculty dean and professor of architecture and design in Malaysia, was not allowed to attend.

Last month, Judge Alsup ruled in Dr. Ibrahim’s favor, but in keeping with the government’s repeated demands of secrecy throughout the case, he initially released only a 3-page summary of his opinion, which ordered the government to remove Dr. Ibrahim’s name from the no-fly list, prove that it has done so, and tell her the reason it revoked her visa.

This week, Judge Alsup released his full 38-page opinion, which contained partial redactions, but which clarified what had happened to Dr. Ibrahim in 2005.

“At long last, the government has conceded that plaintiff poses no threat to air safety or national security and should never have been placed on the no-fly list,” Judge Alsup concluded. “She got there by human error within the FBI.”

The “human error” was committed by an FBI agent who, after interviewing Dr. Ibrahim in late 2004, checked the wrong boxes on a form, accidentally nominating her to the no-fly list. Apparently the agent was unaware of his own error until he was deposed in the case in September.

Judge Alsup described the mistake as “a bureaucratic analogy to a surgeon amputating the wrong digit.”

Regarding Dr. Ibrahim’s visa, the judge wrote that she “is entitled to try to solve one hurdle at a time,” and reiterated that “even the government concludes [Dr. Ibrahim] poses no threat to the United States. Everyone else in this case knows it.”

But the government refused to go down without a fight. In a fitting conclusion to his order, Judge Alsup wrote, “As a matter of remedy, she should be told that [redacted].”