By Matt Taibbi, Substack, 8/7/24
Tuesday night, while self-styled Democratic nominee Kamala Harris pledged to defend “freedom, compassion, and the rule of law” to cheers in Philadelphia, Hawaii’s Tulsi Gabbard described being tracked by teams of government agents in a surveillance regime more reminiscent of East Germany than a free country. Whistleblowing Air Marshals told Uncover DC Gabbard was singled out as a terror threat under the so-called “Quiet Skies” program, and the former presidential candidate says she noticed.
“The whistleblowers’ account matches my experience,” says Gabbard. “Everything lines up to the day.”
This story began two weeks ago, when the former Hawaii congresswoman returned home after a short trip abroad. In airport after airport, she and her husband Abraham Williams encountered obstacles. First on a flight from Rome to Dallas, then a connecting flight to Austin, and later on different flights for both to cities like Nashville, Orlando, and Atlanta, their boarding passes were marked with the “SSSS” designation, which stands for “Secondary Security Screening Selection.” The “Quad-S” marker is often a sign the traveler has been put on a threat list, and Gabbard and Williams were forced into extensive “random” searches lasting as long as 45 minutes.
“It happened every time I boarded,” says Gabbard. The Iraq war veteran and current Army reservist tends to pack light, but no matter.
“I’ve got a couple of blazers in there, and they’re squeezing every inch of the entire collar, every inch of the sleeves, every inch of the edging of the blazers,” she says. “They’re squeezing or padding down underwear, bras, workout clothes, every inch of every piece of clothing.” Agents unzipped the lining inside the roller board of her suitcase, patting down every inch inside the liner. Gabbard was asked to take every piece of electronics out and turn each on, including her military phone and computer.
That was the other strange thing. “I use my military ID to get through security sometimes,” says Gabbard, who among other things traveled to her reservist base in Oklahoma during this period. Once, she was unable to get through security with military ID. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent saw the “SSSS” marker. “The TSA agent said, ‘Why are you Quad-S? You’re in the military,’” explains Gabbard. “And I said, ‘That’s exactly what I’m wondering.’
Gabbard goes on: “Then I said, ‘The only thing I can think of is, I work in politics.’ And he said, oh.”
The agent told her he’d encountered supporters of a certain former president who’d had no issues traveling before, but were now “marked quad-S every time they traveled.” Gabbard shrugged and slogged through, still encountering extra security. At one flight, she says, there were “at least six TSA agents doing additional screening,” along with canine support. “There were dogs in Dallas when we got there, dogs at a couple of the gates.”
She called a colleague, who told her: these things happen, don’t worry. “So I thought, ‘Maybe I’m just being paranoid,’” Gabbard says. Then she saw this past Sunday’s report in Uncover DC, a site edited by the well-known Twitter writer Tracy Beanz. Uncover interviewed Sonya LaBosco, the Executive Director of the Air Marshal National Council (AMNC), an advocacy association for Federal Air Marshals. Disclosing Gabbard had been placed on a domestic terror watch list, the former Marshal LaBosco told a disturbing story:
According to LaBosco… Gabbard is unaware she has two Explosive Detection Canine Teams, one Transportation Security Specialist (explosives), one plainclothes TSA Supervisor, and three Federal Air Marshals on every flight she boards.
Uncover DC said Gabbard was initially placed on the list on July 23rd, and that trios of Air Marshals first began following her on flights on July 25th. As Racket would learn, surveillance was conducted on at least eight flights, with different three-Marshal teams for each flight, part of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) “Quiet Skies” regimen that can literally surround people with human watchers. There are “potentially 15 or more TSA uniformed and plain clothes” at a gate for such assignments, LaBosco told Racket. The story about Gabbard was surfaced by two TSA whistleblowers, including one detailed to follow her. When Gabbard read this, she felt a shock of recognition.
“When I saw that, I thought, ‘Wow, okay. So everything I was experiencing was exactly what I feared was going on,’” she says.
Though clearly outraged, Gabbard stresses the important part of her story isn’t any inconvenience or insult she’s gone through.
“This is not a woe-is-me situation,” she explains. Instead, “it’s bringing to the forefront… how brazen the political retaliation and abuse of power continues to be under the Biden-Harris administration.”
The former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii’s 2nd district is far from the first American to be placed under physical surveillance as a “domestic terrorist” threat in post-9/11 America. Especially since January 6th, 2021, when the Quiet Skies program expanded to accommodate a broad effort to track people who were at the Capitol, Americans following Americans on airplanes is no longer uncommon, though the public largely has no idea of the scale of this activity.
However, Gabbard is by far the highest-profile figure to be caught up in this surveillance web. As a war veteran with no connection to J6 or any other known offense, her appearance on a terror watch list is striking, and symbolic of the way politicians and intelligence officials have turned the machinery of the War on Terror inward in the last decade. This aspect of the story galls Gabbard the most.
“I enlisted because of the terrorist attack on 9/11,” Gabbard says. “I was like a lot of Americans. We enlisted to ensure the safety, security, and freedom of the American people and go after the terrorists who attacked us. And so now to have confirmation — I guarantee there are other men and women in uniform or veterans now being targeted.
“I can’t think of a word that adequately captures how I feel. The closest I can think of is the deepest sense of betrayal.” She pauses. “It cuts to the core.”
Gabbard pointed to this summer’s release of documents from the ill-fated “Homeland Intelligence Experts Group,” an advisory panel led by former CIA chief John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Litigation filed on behalf of former Ambassador to Germany Ric Grenell led to the disbanding of the group, and the production of documents identifying Trump supporters, people “in the military,” or “religious” as “indicators for extremism or terrorism.” Gabbard says this is an indication that the intelligence community is targeting people of “many stripes,” but “especially so those who still wear the uniform or who have worn the uniform.”
Neither Gabbard nor, apparently, the whistleblowing Marshals know why the former congresswoman would be on a terror watch list. Gabbard has been a persistent, pointed critic of politicians in the current administration. The day before her reported placement on the TSA list, Gabbard appeared on the Ingraham Angle and criticized the “proxy war” in Ukraine, saying the administration was selling the public “crap” excuses for expanding its military commitment, with intent to turn Ukraine into “another Afghanistan.” A debate clash in the 2020 primary was also a factor in ending Harris’ run that year, featuring the viral line: “She put over 1500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when asked if she ever smoked.”
Gabbard’s account squares with LaBosco’s description of how Quiet Skies works. Surveillance, LaBosco says, is “every flight, every leg. If she has three legs that day, it’ll be nine Air Marshals. So if she does three flights in a day, she’ll have a set of Air Marshals on every one of her flights.” As for canine teams, “They maneuver over to the gate area. You will have plainclothes TSA officers, you will have uniformed TSA officers and the canine teams will be running in the gate area. They’ll have them floating around to try to pick up a scent of something.” LaBosco says these dogs are only trained for explosives, not narcotics.
What now? Gabbard, who has spoken to at least one of the whistleblowers, is reviewing possible courses of action, contacting former congressional colleagues about a possible Hill investigation. In a seemingly related matter, Empower Oversight — the firm that represented FBI whistleblowers Steve Friend and Marcus Allen as well as IRS special agents Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler in the Hunter Biden case — sent a letter Monday night to Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari demanding an immediate investigation in the Gabbard case. The firm represented an Air Marshal in another ugly Quiet Skies case two years earlier (see below), and though Cuffari’s IG office promised in January 2023 to investigate, there’s no evidence it ever did, making the Gabbard story more troubling.
Worse, Empower today says it’s learned that the TSA has already initiated an investigation to identify the two TSA whistleblowers who leaked “sensitive security information” in Gabbard’s case. The firm sent another letter to the IG this morning asking for help in stopping retaliation before it begins. “A retaliatory investigation that hunts for whistleblowers in order to intimidate them into silence is exactly the wrong step for the agency to take,” the firm wrote, adding that the TSA “should be investigating the abuses on which [Marshals] are blowing the whistle.” The TSA has not commented for this article.
“Quiet Skies” is a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) program for tracking “travelers who may present an elevated risk,” as well as “unknown or partially known terrorists.” It’s a signature initiative for a new vision of the federal enforcement state that, as covered in this space before, moved after 9/11 from an emphasis on making cases and building prosecutions to endless intelligence-gathering as well as “disruption” and “prevention.” In a key moment, the FBI in 2008 put out a new “baseline collection plan,” which urged agents to come with plans to “disrupt” potential “acts of violence” or other “criminal behavior.” Agents began getting credit for an internal metric called “disruptions,” which allowed them to rise without records of prosecutions or even arrests.
Because most investigations under this new system will never lead to court, agents do not have to worry about meeting probable cause standards or justifying surveillance. The behaviors may be technically permitted, even if some would consider them unconstitutional.
“It all comes under the heading of the Department of Pre-Crime,” adds Empower attorney Jason Foster, longtime Chief Investigative Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee. “So it’s ‘We don’t have to prove anything. We’re not going to court. We’re just following people.’”
In the wake of 9/11 programs like the TSA’s “No Fly List” and the multi-agency Terrorist Screening Center regularly made the news as the focus of controversies, with criticism often coming from Democrats. In an incident that sounds similar but in fact underscores the expansion of the scope of such programs, the late Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy was prevented from boarding planes on five occasions in 2004, apparently because a suspected terrorist was using “Anthony Kennedy” as an alias. These programs symbolized the Bush-era reflex for wide-scale screening of mostly Muslim suspects, and came to be frowned upon as racist and anachronistic. When a judge in 2019 finally declared the Terrorist Screening Database unconstitutional, voices across the spectrum cheered, “It’s about time.”
Despite the perception that terrorist watchlists are a thing of the past, they’ve actually expanded, with Clear Skies representing an aggressive new generation of watchlisting, which no longer just targets Muslims but ranges of alleged domestic offenders. Though it’s theoretically possible Gabbard’s case will prove a mistaken-identity caper à la Kennedy’s incident (“I can’t imagine what, but they might have an excuse,” a Republican House aide counseled), LaBosco insists whistleblowers waited to make sure it wasn’t an “anomaly” before coming forward. “We thought, ‘Maybe this was a mistake,’” she says. “But then, second flight, third flight… no, this is no mistake.”
Quiet Skies eats up an astonishing amount of resources: an Inspector General’s report about the program in 2019 “identified $394 million in funds that could be put to better use,” meaning nearly half the Air Marshals’ budget was being wasted. LaBosco says this is no surprise. “Think about the overtime, the vouchers, the overnight travel, the per diems. Think of all the wasted resources that we so desperately need right now… We’re not going to find a terrorist following Tulsi Gabbard. We’re not even looking for the bad guys anymore.”
Air Marshals have complained more than once about being asked to spy on Americans. The existence of the program was first exposed on July 28, 2018, when Boston Globe writer Jana Winter published an exposé: “Welcome to the Quiet Skies.” The Globe report said 30 or more people were followed every day by Air Marshals, some of whom told the paper they worried the program “may be unconstitutional.”
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Z2SVm4AUmMc?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
The Globe story led to a July 30th letter Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey to TSA Administrator David Pekoske, asking about reports that the TSA was “monitoring seemingly innocuous behavior such as whether a person slept on the plane, used the bathroom, or obtained a rental car.” The letter was followed by a remarkable (if mostly unattended) hearing in which Markey questioned Pekoske in September 2018.
When Markey asked if it were true that “innocent” Americans not suspected of crimes were followed under Quiet Skies, Pekoske deflected, then said finally, “I wouldn’t use the term ‘innocent.’” The hearing also disclosed that “thousands” of Americans were in the program. Pekoske later conceded Quiet Skies hadn’t led to a single arrest, nor had it foiled any plots, a fact that is apparently still true:
Three years later in July 2021, in a story out of a Philip K. Dick novel, a Senior Federal Air Marshal with 27 years of experience discovered that his wife had been labeled a “domestic terrorist.” She was reportedly targeted for “Special Mission Coverage” for having attended the January 6th speech by Donald Trump at the Capitol, which she did not enter. When the Marshal told his supervisor, he was advised to “let it play out” as “it was not our investigation.”
Eventually, the Marshal turned to aforementioned whistleblower firm Empower Oversight, which helped him file a protected disclosure with the Office of Special Counsel. The OSC on July 8, 2021 wrote back, declining to refer the matter for investigation to the Inspector General’s office. Empower then wrote directly to the Inspector General’s office, which to date has “provided no public accounting of what it has done.” The Marshal did manage to work with the FBI to have his wife’s name removed from the terror watchlist, though this did not slow the program.
Quite the contrary, according to LaBosco, who says the program has grown “off the charts,” especially since January 6th. “They’re watching 8-year-old children. They’re following 17-year-old cheerleaders that were traveling for cheer competitions, people who lost their legs in combat… TSA is out of control against the American people.”
Gabbard’s recent political career has already been marked by bizarre attacks and harassment. A feature describing her as a favorite of the Putin government was timed to the launch of her 2020 presidential campaign, and Hillary Clinton made waves by denouncing her as a Russian “asset.” After this episode, she intends to fight back. “I’m going to be encouraging former colleagues of mine in Congress who I know are concerned about this to exercise their oversight authorities,” she says.
“These actions are those of a tyrannical dictator. There’s no other way to describe what they’re doing.”